Recently folks I have been reading about how a few of the so-called "legal" music offering systems have either drastically tightened their belts or in a case shown below closed down completely.
Lets look at how Napster the company that kick-started the whole p2p industry and was sold on is even now still in decline
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/16835 Napster which, despite endless lamescream media hype and help from the corporate music industry, has gone from one marketing failure to another, is at last pulling out of the University music business altogether.
“Napster’s decision to terminate their nationwide Napster on Campus program effectively ends their 4-year partnership with Vanderbilt,” says a post on Vanderbilt ITS News, going on: “Effective immediately, Napster will no longer offer single-use student promotion codes or new faculty discount codes.
Very recently a smaller UK business had this to say about its total service closure.
http://www.p2p-blog.com/A company spokesperson told the Distorted Loop blog that Wippit "succumbed to tough market conditions" and eventually became a victim of its own vision and optimism.
Wippit originally marketed itself as a legal alternative to file sharing networks like Napster, but always had a far to little catalog to compete.
Add to that the fact that Wippit used anti-P2P sentiment to market its own service, taking cheap shots at companies that advertised on P2P sites, and you begin to understand why not enough people were sharing Wippit's vision and optmism.
So lets look at this analytically, we are seeing an important set of deficiencies here that seem to be trotted out everytime by those citing poor service from such "legal" vendors , lack of Musical choice, DRM infestation and of course overpricing all seem to be the cause of these collapses and lack of consumer take up, if joe soaps like myself are aware of these critical shortcomings then what could have caused these companies to not try to touch these important bases when formulating their business plans ?
