Monday, January 01, 2007

My Predictions (or wishlist) for Digital Music in 2007

After reading the predictions from both Rags Gupta and Hypebot on what they think will shakeout in the digital music space in 2007, I thought I'd throw some more of my thoughts out as well - in short, 2007 is going to be the year of the acquistion. In no particular order...



  • eMusic gets acquired - either by Microsoft or Amazon

  • Last.fm gets acquired - smart money is on Google, but if Real was able to dig up enough of their settlement cash from Microsoft, then a Last.fm/Rhapsody combination is an extremely compelling service

  • Pandora gets acquired - gotta think this is Microsoft considering they have already partnered with them for the MSN Radio relaunch

  • Mercora gets sued - the labels will need to make an example of someone that they think is violating DMCA, and Mercora looks like a great target

  • SpiralFrog launches with a thud - the ad supported model may eventually work for downloads, but I don't think SpiralFrog will be the ones to pull it off

  • Zune slowly starts to make inroads - this is the equivalent of Microsoft Windows Mobile (CE) vs. Palm OS battle of last decade.... MS will spend enough time and effort to make this work for them

  • Apple iTV will get lukewarm response - remember the Mac Mini? It was supposed to be perfect for this application as well...






That's a bunch of the top of my head... I'll come back later and add some more.



UPDATE: I checked in on my predictions half way through the year. See how I'm doing.

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