By Staff and wire reports
Published April 12, 2004
All five of the nation's major music companies are working on strategies to increase the price of music downloads, according to the Wall Street Journal.
If successful, the price of single songs from online music stores could rise to as much as $2.49. The current common price for a single track is 99 cents.
In a survey of music services, the Journal found a number of online-delivered albums selling for more than their CDs can be bought in stores. Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store, for instance, has been charging $16.99 for Fly or Die. The download is priced at $13.99 on Napster and $13.49 at Amazon.com.
Options the labels are studying include bundling hits with less-desirable tracks or charging more if the song is released online before it's in stores.
World sales of recorded music fell for a fourth year in a row, according to the International Federation of Phonographic Industries. Sales were off 7.6 percent in 2003, after a 7 percent drop in 2002.
AOL offers online variation on "Apprentice"
It's a lot like The Apprentice, except nobody gets fired.
Hoping to capitalize on the buzz around NBC's hit reality show, AOL is launching an online feature that will follow the travails of four small business owners for their first 12 months.
"The Startup" will be featured on America Online's customized service for small business owners, but it also will be available for any of AOL's 24-million subscribers. The feature is being done in co-operation with Entrepreneur Magazine.
Sarah Bernard, the head of AOL for Small Business, said the feature was not modeled specifically on the hit NBC show and had been in the works for some time. But she said its debut was adjusted to capitalize on the buzz around The Apprentice.
"The Startup" will follow the ups and downs of four businesses: an adventure park in Colorado Springs, Colo.; a spa in New Orleans; a gourmet salsa company in Vermont; and a teenage clothing store in Corpus Christi, Texas.
Bernard said the businesses were chosen for geographical diversity, among other factors. "We wanted businesses our users could relate to, not someone who started with $50-million in seed money," Bernard said.
The site will feature weekly updates on online journals, or "blogs," from the business owners, monthly stories written by staffers from Entrepreneurand weekly video vignettes from the business.
As for not firing people, Bernard said: "It's not a contest, it's not who's going to win. It's real-life experiences."
Sept. 11 hearings available online
Audible Inc. said about 8,000 people have visited its site (www.audible.com/911hearings) to download free audio files of testimony before the Sept. 11 Commission.
The most popular has been that of former counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke. "It's quite, quite riveting," said Don Katz, Audible's founder and chairman.
"If you listen to the part where he turns to the audience and basically apologizes to the victims of 9/11, this is important, dramatic and historical audio, and the kind of thing we should be doing."
A spokesman for the company said there have been 40,000 downloads of the nine Sept. 11 testimony files. "It's been a tremendous hit for us," Katz said.
The Web's best-known seller of spoken word content, including books and radio programming, expects another hit because it plans to make the testimony of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice available.
Online storage company Xdrive evolves
With the cost of data storage down to about $1 a gigabyte for the newest computer hard drives, the idea of paying for data storage in cyberspace might sound like an idea from the dark ages of personal computing. But Xdrive, an online data storage service in Santa Monica, Calif., that started in 1999, has evolved, its officials say, offering space on its servers for secure data backup.
Xdrive recently introduced a service for consumers with digital camcorders. Rather than sending digital video files as e-mail attachments, which tend to be large and slow, a user can upload the files to Xdrive. Then an e-mail can be sent, inviting others to view the video at a password-protected area on the Xdrive Web site (www.xdrive.com)
The service costs $10 a month for 500 megabytes - enough to store about 400 minutes of digital video - or $50 a month for 5 gigabytes.
Joelle Mertzel, a spokeswoman for Xdrive, said the company can accommodate various video formats as well as many photo and music formats.
Beyond being easily available to family and friends, digital video and other data stored on the Xdrive servers are safe from computer crashes, viruses and theft, Mertzel said.
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