Google: We won't sell music

Company appears to put brakes on expectations for retail play in music, other areas of digital entertainment.

The story "Google: We won't sell music" published August 5, 2006 at 7:04 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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[kobe wild]

Selling music lets not be Evil.

Being that the music business in general is evil.
It would be kind of a conflict of interests.
That if there going to stick with there motto of not being evil. DRM is evil.

Besides there's no money there.
You have to compete with 50+ other companies all who are trying to fight for pennies.
Worse yet you have to deal with the RIAA.

Google does not have to go to the gutter for cash.
The the bums who are already there fight over the loose chance and that last bottle of ripple.

zbeast

[danny_f]

Power Play

The majority of all the internet portals such as Yahoo! and Microsoft getting into online music retail is only a power play. Apple is selling billions of songs online and is hardly making enough profit to write home about.

Sure you can make an argument about non-portability of iTunes purchased music onto non-Ipod devices, but if memory serves me Apple released the iPod quite a while before the iTMS.
The Apple iTMS was a reactionary business effort to allow for easier legal downloads onto their already majorly popular iPod. The iPod has a damn big piece of the market share pie chart, and it is damn easy to buy from iTMS.

There is barely any business sense in making pennies catering to a much smaller market share aside from that fact that Apple's iTMS's success is a major thorn in a lot of people's sides.

But hey, if Microsoft thinks that is can take a large enough chunk of the portable music player market share from Apple, enough so to actually make a decent profit from it all (and judging from Microsoft's history of creating wildly expensive hardware to combat their constant late game penetration into a profitable market), good luck to them.

[qazwiz]

you both missed the point of article

gVideo is lackluster at best (toilet is more like it) and the low expectations for profits are the expected reason for Google's refusal to enter markes...

they just made brownie points by announcing it at a music sellers convention.

[J.G.]

A player is really needed

As the first commenter observed, it is the combination of iTunes
and the iPod that creates the 800-pound gorilla. Unless Google is
going to bring out its own player, there's no way it will be any
better equipped to compete with Apple than Microsoft was. BUT, I
don't think Google should even try. Do something different
instead of being derivative.