Bluegrass musician (and one of my favorite virtuosos ever) Dave Grisman recently sued Warner and Universal Music--as well as their online partners (Apple, Yahoo, etc.)–for distributing Grisman’s music online without his consent. Grisman set up his own label years ago, called Dawg Music, and that entity holds the copyrights to his recorded songs. According to the lawsuit, Warner and Universal do not have the right to distribute those songs online and have been with holding royalty payments from online sales to Grisman. The online partners are guilty by association, and, according to the law suit, are also on the hook for reparations.

My favorite part to all this? The labels are being sued for piracy! Who woulda’ thunk it!

Dearest DMEC friends:

So I arrived at the Cannes Film Festival via New York, Frankfurt, Zurich and Nice (aka: world traveling on a shoe string. God I love being a student. Who needs direct?)

Anyhow, I came to market IndieGoGo.com (the online film financing platform Eric Schell and I are launching that will democratize the independent film financing business) as well as do what business school has prepared me so well to do – network, network and network.

After handing out 500 postcards, and delivering 501 elevator pitches (the extra one to be explained later), I have finally realized the reason I returned to business school — to not only perfect the art of door to door salesmanship, but to embrace it and completely and utterly reject its bad rap. Seriously, there is little better in life than identifiying a need, crafting a solution and selling it to someone who really needs it – whether it be a Nigerian Film Commission Rep or a skater dude filmmaker from Holland.

Forgive me: I a may be a little high on all the sunshine, but Cannes has simply rolled the 1st year core all up into one big 3-day grassroots marketing adventure on the Mediterranean. If only Haas could throw in a few star sightings too – now that would be an MBA to remember.

Door-to-door from Cannes,

Danae

Great news out of Amazon this week, as the online retailer announced the upcoming launch of a new music service that will compete with Apple’s ubiquitous iTunes.  Amazon’s service will offer DRM-free mp3’s from “thousands of labels,” most notably EMI.  At this point there aren’t enough details to determine whether this represents an immediate benefit to consumers, specifically in terms of product and features, but it surely represents a more nebulous benefit: the beginning of a power shift away from the monopoly player in the field, Apple.

Up to now, Apple has been able to put the squeeze on the majors, forcing them into static rather than variable pricing models, and holding individual tracks at $0.99 (this will change when Apple makes certain tracks available DRM-free for $1.29, purportedly later this month).  However, where will the power shift to?  Will the labels be able to negotiate better terms by playing Amazon off Apple and vice versa?  Or will consumers benefit when the Big A’s tighten the screws even further, perhaps to the tune of another major acquiescing to DRM-free tracks?

Further, how will Amazon compete with Apple?  I don’t foresee the masses converging onto a new music store just because it’s there.  Apple has been the monopoly player for a reason:  its product is superior, and let’s be honest here, we’re really talking about the iPod and not the store.  As long as the iPod is the world’s de facto player, people are likely to use iTunes to make it work.  Microsoft, RealNetworks and the like have not been able to dent Apple’s stronghold on the industry with their stores or their recommended players.

Amazon will need to somehow provide consumers with a tangible benefit (usually their advantage is on price and customer service, but how much can Amazon do in an already price-intense landscape?).  I suppose they could leverage their store and bundle music with other items, perhaps to gain traction at first, but will that make a difference in the long run?  Rumors have circulated that Amazon has been working to create its own player, but that hasn’t come to fruition yet.  I’d be loathe to bet against Jeff Bezos, although it’s clear that product design and manufacturing isn’t part of Amazon’s core competency.  A partnership with Microsoft and the Zune might be more likely, but that might be at least a product cycle away.  For now, I’ll be sure to try Amazon’s new service… will you?

I’ve heard of users choosing their email application based on how it handles marking messages as “read.”  For example, I have one friend that uses Thunderbird instead of Apple’s Mail because he couldn’t turn off the Mail function marking messages as read after viewing them for a few seconds.  I wonder, in the context of users performing visual filtering to sift through more email than can be read in a day, are mail applications missing a third state: “glanced at”?  I find myself glancing at my gmail inbox and wondering: “when I last glanced at gmail, did I have 2,073 unread messages and message 2,074 is new or did I have 2,074 unread messages the last time I looked as well?”

I suspect the previously-mentioned friend uses unread to indicate messages yet to be “triaged” whereas read emails are waiting for the day never to come, when we have spare time to catch up on old email.  Maybe the third state I want is “new” – for messages I have yet to glance at.  If I glance at them, they can be labeled as unread until I take some action to indicate I’ve actually read the message.

Thunderbird sort of gets this right in that the new message count disappears from the dock once I’ve looked at one of the new messages.  I’d prefer that the new message indicator clear just by me drawing focus to the window, similar to the behavior of Eudora.

Again, Blizzard is introducing an interesting innovation in the video game business.

The company, in cooperation with The First National Bank of Omaha, is launching a World of Warcraft VISA card. The interest for the WoW player is to earn for each dollar spent some time to play to her/his favorite game. See information here.

I am considering this move very interesting as it is bringing the industry in the same field as a lot of others, and is a mark for the credibility it could have toward financial institution. The fact that a VISA card is branded with one game (and not with a company name, such as an Electronic Arts VISA card) is a clear demonstration of the market behind this product and that more people will be willing to take advantage of it.

And yes, it will once again be good for the treasury chest of Blizzard and Vivendi Games… And no, I won’t apply for it (I don’t play WoW, to time consuming, and applying for a credit card is the US is a nightmare for me!).