After working away at home on setting up the new office, I get my usual stock portfolio SMS page on my cell and find that MP3.com again flew up a few points. I am thinking to myself, what could have caused this another article about rumors to settle with the labels? So first thing I do when I get connected is check my e-mail and hit up the MP3.com Press Pages and there it is; settlement with WMG and BMG.
After reading several articles looking for details on the terms; I gather that a rough $20 mil per label is paid to close the settlement and they will have to pay royalties for every CD beamed into the system plus about a 1.5 cent royalty per download (NYT: cypherpunks, cypherpunks). Not too bad, but that most likely means that this service is not going to be free to consumers. And don't forget the cost of buying all the different versions of the newly released CDs in the first place, they still need to pay the outrageous $16+ a pop per CD to be added to My.MP3.com.
Now the question is what are MusicBank (started by a former Sonique Founder) plans; who now also has a deal with BMG to do just about the same. Also what is their royalty structure like with BMG. So far MusicBank has no real experience on building back-end server architecture, so who knows how much load their solution can handle and how secure and acurrate its accounting is going to be. Also where does this leave MyPlay.com? Only time will tell. CNET has a follow on update on the story with their own viewpoints.
Anyways back to sorting out the last 4 years of paperwork and wiring the apartment with CAT-5. :)
