Filed under: Press releases, Products and services, Consumer experience, Marketing and advertising, Sony Corp ADR (SNE)

Sony Corporation (NYSE: SNE) has made two deals with Napster and 7digital.com to bundle music with “certain Walkman-branded portable music devices.” Both deals apply to products sold in the United Kingdom, and offer similar vouchers and trials for tracks and the services to consumers.

Sony’s deal with 7digital.com will package vouchers with the “Walkman Wirefree” series that give consumers the chance to download five free music videos. It is the first such deal with a hardware manufacturer for 7digital.com, a British-based digital store. Ben Drury, the company’s CEO, acknowledges that the partnership is intended “to provide more choice for consumers, encourage more competition in the digital music market and ultimately offer a better deal for the consumer.” The same devices will also come “pre-loaded with the Napster service” and those models will offer users “five free downloadable tracks, and a free 14-day trial of the Napster To Go service.” Napster’s VP of sales and marketing for Europe, Thorsten Schliesche, comments that the partnership is designed to “offer music lovers a complete service from the moment they buy the product.”

The goal of offering consumers and listeners a complete service right away indicates that at least hardware makers and digital stores are aware that music fans want the product. Easily available and quick access mean that users of this product will at least have access to a huge range of tracks already available. Other devices have featured similar services, but never bundled with free music. Although the amount offered free of charge comes with limits, the ease of listening to future music should make it desirable.

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Filed under: Products and services, Apple Inc (AAPL), Marketing and advertising, Employees

Two reports indicate that EMI Group’s Capitol Records will lose its president by the end of June, and no new leader will be appointed by the major label’s new management structure. Lee Trink, the president of Capitol Records, may also be followed by the departure of Capitol Music Group, the regional arm of EMI over North America, chairman and CEO Jason Flom. Billboard notes Trink’s “departure would come two weeks after the scheduled June 17 release of the new Coldplay album Viva la Vida,” and many music industry watchers expect that album to be the financial and critical hinge that EMI is basing its summer around.

Fox News reported a similar story, but added that Guy Hands and other Terra Firma leaders — the equity firm that purchased EMI last fall — “don’t believe in label presidents.” The new structure of EMI labels will feature newly created “A&R Presidents” and heads of marketing, but no one person will singly supports and represents the artists that are releasing albums through EMI. Fox News comments as well that no one at EMI had informed the acts or management representing them, emphasizing the acts that have left EMI in recent months and the acts that sell the most CDs for EMI, like The Beatles and its record label/management firm Apple Corps Ltd.

Like the columnist for Fox News, I have to wonder what in the world is the management of Terra Firma thinking with EMI. First of all, the music company is not the no. 1 of the big four companies. Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) sell far more music and appear to be far superior managed than EMI — even before this rearrangement. It’s hard to hope that that new Coldplay album will sell well, at least for the record label. The band and its management are certainly promoting it in superb ways, but with this revelation it seems like EMI is poised to profit from the marketing without any real input or effort. That could be wrong, but when it is an Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) commercial that pushes the album more than any other source, it isn’t the record company I consider. It’s the band and iTunes.

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Filed under: Law, Competitive strategy, Marketing and advertising, Scandals

This post is part of a series on some of the most memorable companies that have disappeared.

“When E.F. Hutton speaks, people listen,” claimed the well-known slogan from the respected broker’s ubiquitous ads in the 1970s and 1980s. Well, it seems people stopped listening when E.F. Hutton & Co. was caught check kiting and money laundering.

The American firm was founded in 1904 by Edward Francis Hutton. It grew to become one of the most respected U.S. financial firms, and for many years was the second-largest brokerage in the United Says. Edward Hutton held the reins at the company until his death in 1962.

But in 1980 some Hutton branches began shifting funds from one account to another, effectively giving itself interest-free loans until the checks cleared. Of course the scheme eventually came to light, and in 1985 Hutton pleaded guilty to 2,000 counts of mail and wire fraud. However, the SEC uncharacteristically granted Hutton to stay in business.

An internal investigation in 1987 uncovered that a Providence, Rhode Island, branch was laundering money for a crime family. Hutton voluntarily brought this matter to the SEC, but all signs suggested Hutton couldn’t count on leniency a second time. However, this happened just before the stock market crash of 1987. With that, along with all the bad press, the firm’s deep debt going back to 1985, and its star performers defecting to other firms, Hutton was on the verge of collapse by the end of the year, and so agreed to be acquired by Shearson Lehman Brothers.

Several mergers later, what remains of the once proud firm is now part of Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C).

I wonder what Edward Hutton would have to say about how things turned out — and would anyone these days listen?

Let us know in the comments what you remember about EF Hutton. And be sure to check out other Companies That Have Vanished.

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Filed under: Products and services, Consumer experience, Apple Inc (AAPL), Marketing and advertising, AT and T (T)

According to a Billboard report on Tuesday, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL)’s newly introduced iPhone won’t feature a new method to download music from iTunes. Instead, users will only be able to “access and download music” from iTunes with the phone’s WiFi connection. Luckily, the new 3G phone will allow a superior connection to access the store and download music, but Billboard speculates that Apple has not improved the method because the company is “less enthusiastic” about sharing profits from iTunes buys with the operator, in this case AT&T Mobility, a part of AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T).

AT&T Mobility apparently expanded and constructed much of the 3G network the iPhone will use over the course of the last year, when the iPhone was first being readied for release. The original iPhone worked on AT&T’s slower EDGE network and utilized WiFi hotspots, but “the upgrade grants for faster Web surfing from any location in At&T’s 3G coverage area.” Ideally, using the upgraded network would also provide users with better access and faster downloads.

It’s no surprise that Apple would keep the music features on the iPhone the same as on the previous model, since the improvements made to the new iPhone make it much better over the previous model. At the same time, it seems unlikely that record companies would object to this similarity either, since it means they have the ability to still seek out new deals and arrangements with the phone carriers outside of Apple (in this case).

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Filed under: Products and services, Time Warner (TWX), Marketing and advertising, Walt Disney (DIS), Viacom (VIA)

I knew Disney (NYSE: DIS) was an awesome licensor of its content. Still, I was pretty happy when I read the following Hollywood Reporter piece about the Mouse and its success at growing retail sales of its merchandise. Disney is looking at revenues of $30 billion at retail channels based on products bearing its logo and characters to be booked by the end of its current fiscal year. That would represent a magical double-digit growth rate of 12% if the figure is reached.

Merchandise sales based on characters and intellectual properties owned by companies such as Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), which licenses heroes such as Batman, and Viacom’s (NYSE: VIA) Nickelodeon, which has had great success with SpongeBob SquarePants, don’t compare.

The article rightfully reminds readers that the total amount generated in retail sales is only an indication of how seemingly popular a company’s brands are in the marketplace. It does not point to the amount of revenues or profit a company books on the sales (Disney will only receive a small percentage of those sales, perhaps between 5% and 15%).

The important thing I take away from this as a shareholder is that Disney is doing a reasonably good job of milking its franchises. As one might expect, the usual suspects were cited as drivers: Hannah Montana, High School Musical, the Jonas Brothers music project, and Disney Princesses are doing the heavy lifting for Disney’s consumer-products division, along with a property that continues to surprise me: Vehicles. Astonishing that the latter remains a popular seller in the boys category.

One thing that has been on my mind is the question of how long can Disney’s two current hot franchises, Hannah Montana and High School Musical, remain in the good graces of the fickle tween audience. That’s a constant worry. Shareholders might wake up one day and realize that the world has moved on from these two properties. That’s why I hope to closely watch the tracking data on the Jonas Brothers. This brand has a Disney Channel flick coming up shortly, entitled Camp Rock.

Besides the Jonas act, I hope Disney is incubating other discoveries. It’s not an easy job to figure out where the next big thing is coming from, and the process is nowhere close to perfect, but Disney needs to aggressively focus on remaining a leader in the tween space, and to not rest on its laurels. You know, Nickelodeon could stumble upon its own Hannah at any time.

I have to admit, I am disappointed that the article didn’t make any mention of Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. Yes, those characters are aging, and their icon status might not be so strong among the very young these days. Hopefully Disney has plans to work on its portfolio of classic characters and make them as relevant as they can in this era of Miley Cyrus and Pixar cartoons.

Again, though, as a shareholder, I do appreciate the synergistic appeal of Disney’s various divisions and how they work in concert to deliver double-digit growth in retail sales for consumer merchandise. And I hope Disney keeps the growth going by finding new fads for the tweens to fall in love with.

Disclosure: I own Disney; positions can change at any time.

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Filed under: International markets, Google (GOOG), Marketing and advertising, Middle East

It seems to me like the ultimate test of a tool lies not with its functionality, but with who uses it. This goes double for search tools, as their ability to access information vastly increases their popularity, and thus marketability. Personally, I firmly believe that most questions in the world can be answered by one of three sites. If it’s a movie or Television question, I head to IMDB. If IMDB doesn’t have the answer, I generally head over to Wikipedia. And if, for some reason, Wiki’s answer doesn’t suffice, I pull out the large guns and head over to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). Of course, so does pretty much everyone else in the world.

This, of course, explains why the United Says has begun investing heavily in Google Ads in foreign countries. While the government’s on the web presence is pretty impressive, even the ideal website is only useful if it can generate hits; given the United States’ overseas unpopularity right now, getting foreign nationals to visit its sites is an uphill battle. With this in mind, Google now displays ads for various United Says government agencies when the user enters various key words and phrases. Currently, the terms that’ll generate an ad from the America.gov website include “terrorism,” “Middle East peace,” “human rights,” “press freedom,” and “U.S. elections.”

The U.S. is paying Google based on the number of hits that its ads generate. Currently, that ranges from $25,000 to $30,000 per month for the America.gov website and a further $15,000 for other Middle-East oriented sites. Given that the $15,000 expenditure generates roughly 300,000 hits per month, it seems like a pretty good deal. For that matter, it’s worth noting that an world wide web search platform has become the U.S. government’s go-to guy for worldwide advertising. If Google can get people in Saudi Arabia to express an interest in the U.S.’s informational website, it seems like there’s little that the company can’t do!

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Filed under: Fun, World wide web, Productivity, Web services, web 2.0

Bringing together a group of people can be a pain. Facebook events and groups, eVites, emails, text messages, smoke signals.

Mobaganda aims to make the gathering process that much easier.

Simplicity seems to be the new h0t on the internet, and we enjoy it.

As soon as you visit Mobaganda, you’ll notice that you don’t have to sign up for anything. State what? Useless you say! I HAVE to put in my username/pass somewhere!!!! Nope.

All you’ve to do is name the event and set the date and you’re off!

As soon as you create the event, a unique page is created like this one. After 60 days, the pages go away, so no worries about URL’s being gone forever.

People can RSVP on the page, and an RSS feed is immediately available to track which cool children are coming.

Simple, easy, that’s it.

Manage the mob with Mobaganda and spend your time on more important things, like grabbing the keg.

[via epicfu]

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Filed under: Business, Productivity, Social Software

Despite some recent competition from sites like Plurk, Twitter is hanging tough as the microblogging center of the internet. Now stock-market investors are catching on to Twitter, too, with an add-on site called StockTwits. StockTwits collects tweets that mention a stock symbol, prefaces with a dollar sign. For example, $AAPL was very popular this week, with the Steve Jobs keynote at WWDC.

If you want to see what the Wall Street speculators on Twitter are talking about, head over to StockTwits and check out the info in tag cloud form, in stream form, or by searching. Each tweet is displayed under a graph of the current performance of the stock mentioned. There’s also a cloud of users, so you can easily locate your fellow investment junkies and connect with them over Twitter. Of course, we can’t vouch for any of the advice you might get, but this looks like an intelligent use of microblogging technology.

[Via Tim Sykes]

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Filed under: Products and services, Consumer experience, Marketing and advertising

According to U2’s manager Paul McGuinness, the revolutionary and landmark method English band Radiohead used last fall to release the album In Rainbows was a failure and “backfired.” Speaking to the BBC, McGuinness critiqued the band and the “pay-what-you-like” method because it still resulted in over 60%-70% of listeners acquiring the album through illegal channels. He told the BBC that U2’s forthcoming new album, due this fall, would not be released in a similar method at all.

The primary reason U2’s album will not be released like Radiohead’s In Rainbows, is probably because the Irish quartet is still contracted with Universal Music Group for album releases. Radiohead released In Rainbows without the assistance of a record label or any firm of the music industry. Their management and the band’s website was utilized to oversee the release of the album. Perhaps McGuinness realized how much would be required for him if U2 chose that method? The new U2 album is due near the end of October, regardless.

McGuinness also told the BBC that physical sales “are still an enormous part of [U2’s] business and [the band] still sell a lot of actual CDs.” Although Radiohead didn’t release In Rainbows on CD in the beginning, when the CD appeared in January it went straight to number one in various countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. The band has still not revealed exact figures from the experimental method, but that has not kept other groups and critics from examining it, including McGuinness. The U2 album will likely sell well, but that shouldn’t mean that a download-only method initially was a failure.

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Filed under: Products and services, Consumer experience, Marketing and advertising

According to U2’s manager Paul McGuinness, the revolutionary and landmark method English band Radiohead used last fall to release the album In Rainbows was a failure and “backfired.” Speaking to the BBC, McGuinness critiqued the band and the “pay-what-you-like” method because it still resulted in over 60%-70% of listeners acquiring the album through illegal channels. He told the BBC that U2’s forthcoming new album, due this fall, would not be released in a similar method at all.

The primary reason U2’s album won’t be released like Radiohead’s In Rainbows, is probably because the Irish quartet is still contracted with Universal Music Group for album releases. Radiohead released In Rainbows without the assistance of a record label or any firm of the music industry. Their management and the band’s website was utilized to oversee the release of the album. Perhaps McGuinness realized how much would be required for him if U2 selected that method? The new U2 album is due near the end of October, regardless.

McGuinness also told the BBC that physical sales “are still an enormous part of [U2’s] business and [the band] still sell a lot of actual CDs.” Even though Radiohead didn’t release In Rainbows on CD in the beginning, when the CD appeared in January it went straight to number one in various countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. The band has still not revealed exact figures from the experimental method, but that has not kept other groups and critics from examining it, including McGuinness. The U2 album will likely sell well, but that shouldn’t mean that a download-only method initially was a failure.

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