And The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Madonna Dumps Record Industry

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Source for this post is Techcrunch:

Since reporting Monday that Nine Inch Nails had dumped its record label and was to offer future albums direct to the public, Oasis and Jamiroquai have also joined the move away from the record industry, but the biggest announcement of all is news today that Madonna has dumped the record industry.According to reports, Madonna has signed a $120million deal with L.A. based concert promotion firm Live Nation to distribute three studio albums, promote concert tours, sell merchandise and license Madonna’s name.

Whilst the deal differs from Nine Inch Nails in that Madonna is not offering direct-to-public albums, Live Nation isn’t a record company. The deal shows that even for a world famous act, a record company is no longer required in the days of digital downloads and P2P music sharing.

The only real question now is how fast will the music industry model come tumbling down. When Radiohead led the way in offering their music directly to fans many predicted that the move was the beginning of the end; Madonna may well be the tipping point from where we will now see a flood of recording artists dumping record labels and where todays model will shortly become a footnote in Wikipedia.


Update: More over at Techdirt:
Next Up To Ditch Record Label: Madonna
from the quite-a-week dept

It's been quite a bad month for the record labels, huh? Kicked off by Radiohead's ditching record labels in order to embrace the new business models that the record labels insisted were dangerous to the industry. In retrospect, it looks like they were just dangerous to the record labels (gee, who could have predicted that?). The latest huge name to ditch a record label appears to be Madonna, who is apparently siging a huge deal with a concert and merchandise promoter instead for over $100 million. She'll still be putting out albums through the promoter rather than the label. There's no indication if she's going to use this to free up some music, but the point should be pretty clear. The money is in concerts and merchandise -- the stuff that the music makes valuable -- not in the music itself. While EMI's new owners have made some noises that maybe they understand what's going on, there's a good chance that it's way too late for the old labels. They had their chance to embrace fans, new technology and the music itself -- and they spent 8 years suing the fans and the technology instead. It's reached the point that college kids are now organizing to protest the RIAA. It's becoming increasingly clear that the labels weren't helping musicians very much either -- and now it appears to be payback time. This isn't the "fault" of piracy. This is the fault of shortsighted recording industry executives who had every chance to understand the economics at play and instead chose to attack everyone (and there were lots) who pointed out to them where the market was going.

Google just acquired Jaiku

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Google/Jaiku Pre-LogoStraight from the horses mouth:


Google acquires Jaiku


Jaiku is joining Google. While it's too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you'll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now.

But fear not, all our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will be able to invite your friends to Jaiku. We have put together a quick Q&A about the acquisition.

Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen, Jaiku Founders


The rest of their FAQ concerning this event doesn't reveal much.
Wow. I didn't see this coming. I knew Google was rumored to release something that was social networking-esque on November 5th, but I was totally caught off guard. I am a user of this type of app, in that I have Twitter, Jaiku, & Pownce accounts. Out of the three I prefer Pownce but don't use it as much due to lack of mobile support. Jaiku seems a bit too cluttered for me due to the ability to tie all of your personal RSS items into your feed. Twitter, on the other hand, has mobile support & the largest user-base of the three. I think Google would have been better off buying Twitter but the price Twitter named was probably way too high.

Robert Scoble has his reaction here:


I was talking with a Google employee last night at the Graphing Social Media conference.


Aside: why are there more Google employees there than Facebook ones? I think Facebook’s attitude toward the community is saying volumes to all of us.

Anyway, he asked me to guess which Google service had the most page views every day.

Is it search? No.
Blogger? No.
Google Maps? No.
Picasa? No.

So, what is it?

Orkut.

Orkut?

Yeah. Now do you get why they just bought Jaiku?

Now do you get why the world is going to pay attention to what Google releases on November 5?

Yeah!

Facebook has real competition coming. Competition they haven’t yet faced.

It’s going to be an interesting period to watch them go at it.

I have 552 reasons to hate Facebook. I sure wish they would let me add more than 5,000 friends. If Google doesn’t have such a stupid limit that’ll get me to check it out, at minimum (I can’t add any more friends on Facebook).

A few months ago I interviewed the Jaiku founders. I found them to be very smart. This is a good purchase for Google. Add it onto their new social network that’s coming (Orkut 2.0) and Google just made a major move against Facebook.


Update: Michael Arrington has just posted his breaking news post over at TechCrunch. While it doesn't reveal anything than what we already know, he does chime in with:
The terms of the acquisition have not been released.

This is a fascinating move by Google which would have looked at Twitter prior to this acquisition, and Twitter’s recent $5 million series A funding last July.

There will be inevitable comparison’s with Google’s acquisition of Dodgeball, which largely came to nothing, but it would appear that the time for social networking and blogging via mobile has come. Google’s ability to add scale and marketing muscle to Jaiku should be putting Twitter on the back-foot right now.


Update 2: Om Malik over at GigaOM has posted some thoughts as well

Update 3: Leo Laporte has posted over at the Life of Leo.

Update 4: From the official Google Blog:

Posted by Tony Hsieh, Product Manager

Technology has made staying in touch with your friends and family both easier and harder: living a fast-paced, on-the-go lifestyle is easier (and a lot of fun), but it's more difficult to keep track of everyone when they're running around at warp speed. That's why we're excited to announce that we've acquired Jaiku, a company that's been hard at work developing useful and innovative applications for staying in touch with the people you care about most -- regardless of whether you're at a computer or on a mobile phone.

Current Jaiku users can still use the service normally, and new folks can sign up for an invitation to the service when we're ready to expand. We plan to use the ideas and technology behind Jaiku to make compelling and useful products. Although we don't have definite plans to announce at this time, we're excited about helping drive the next round of developments in web and mobile technology.

We wish a hearty Google welcome to Jaiku, and are looking forward to working together on new and innovative ways of keeping people connected.


More blog responses:

The ZDNet blog, Between The Lines by Dan Farber.

ReadWriteWeb by Marshal Kirkpatrick headlined as Google Acquires Microblogging Service Jaiku.

/Message by Stowe Boyd.

& Ross Mayfield at his blog.

Update 5: From Mashable:


Breaking: Google Acquires Jaiku, Why Not Twitter?


Jaiku has announced that it has been acquired by Google. Jaiku is the Twitter-like service for keeping up with your friends via the Web or SMS. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed by the companies.

According to Jaiku:

“Exciting news: Google has bought Jaiku today.

What does that mean? First and foremost, we’re of course continuing to support our existing users. So fear not: your Jaiku phone, the Web site, IM, SMS, and API will continue to work normally.

That said, new user sign-ups have been limited for the time being. The idea here is to enable our team to get right to work with Google’s engineers on delivering a new, better service to you as quickly as we can instead of spending our efforts on optimizing the current back-end. Existing users will still be able to invite their friends, and those who are not yet on Jaiku can send us a request for an invitation to join.”


This is somewhat surprising news considering the perceived dominance of Twitter in the so-called “lifestreaming” space. Additionally, Twitter is co-founded by Evan Williams, who was the creator of Blogger, which was previously acquired by Google. In a world where price is no object for Google, it’s interesting that they would opt for Jaiku and not Twitter.

In addition to continuing its acquisition spree, the move marks yet another development in Google’s mobile ambitions. Earlier this week, reports of the company’s entry into the mobile operating system market went mainstream, while they also recently acquired mobile social network Zingku. Other Google acquisitions this year include DoubleClick, FeedBurner, and GrandCentral.

Jaiku was founded in February, 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen.

iPhone Dev Team Enable 3rd-Party Apps on iPhone, Touch

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jailbreak-apps-1-1-1.jpgThe iPhone 1.1.1 firmware Apple unleashed a bit more than a week ago has wreaked havoc on anyone interested in doing more with the iPhone than its manufacturer wants them to. Unlocked phones were closed down and rendered useless. Third-party applications were deleted and prevented from re-installing. It was back to Square 1.1.1 as soon as the update dropped.


But all is not lost. According to Engadget, the hackers who first broke into the iPhone have done it again — and this time they got into the iPod Touch, too. For the time-being, third-party apps are back on the table, so fire up your NES emulators! No one has installed the Mail application on an iPod Touch that has been reported, nor Weather or the other left-out apps. I’ll let you know if I hear anything. The exploit relies on a security hole using TIFF image files that cause Mobile Safari to freak out and open a back door. This TIFF issue has been fixed elsewhere, however, so this won’t last forever. Any new firmware would probably close the loop again. Cat, mouse. Mouse, cat.

(Via Cult of Mac.)

AAPL: 167.89

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Apple stock is up four percent today. As I type this, Apple’s market cap is $146 billion; compare and contrast: HP ($134 billion), Intel ($149 billion), IBM ($160 billion), Google ($190 billion), Microsoft ($280 billion).

Lately, the correlation between AAPL stock run-ups and actual news regarding Apple is zero. Whereas most of the time there is any actual news — even news that strikes me as unambiguously good news for Apple — the stock goes down.

(Via Daring Fireball.)