Stones Getting Satisfaction from Online Sales
The Rolling Stones, probably the most profitable and enduring musical group of all time, has finally committed to an agressive online marketing campaign for their catalog, according to SiliconValley.com and other major outlets. This is considered a major momentum event in the online music arena, as the absence of their titles was one of the key gaps in available materials. When I was a kid, you'd go to the movie theatres and see ads telling us how "pay TV" was an evil that we should fight: now that cable operators provide highly profitable outlets for TV producers' content, those ads are long gone. This weekend our local theatre was showing pre-show ads on how downloaders are hurting the little guys in movieland. It's probably going to be a fairly short time before content producers realize what the Stones have and start figuring out how to make money with peer publishing technology rather than moaning about it.