When one company becomes the first to tap a geyser of a market, every other company that follows suit just looks like a bunch of copycat opportunists, even if they had it planned in advance of their rival’s success. When Apple iTunes sold one million digital music tracks in four days to the Japanese, Yahoo! and Sony seemed surprised that the folks who invented karaoke might be music lovers.
The resounding “sugoi!” hit the boardrooms of both companies as they watched the numbers come in, dry erase markers squeaking as Yahoo! and Sony eked out a counter attack. At 150-210 yen a track, that adds up to a lot of green, er, tan.
Last week, two of Japan’s largest online music distributors, Oricon Inc., and Label Gate Co., clasped hands together as well combining their inventories to launch a service offering 310,000 in the island nation of 125 million potential music lovers.
Yahoo! wasn’t far behind, slapping its own music service into place on Monday offering streams of free songs to encourage CD sales. These “samples” cannot be saved to a computer or MP3 player, but Yahoo! is the first to offer full length samples. One might imagine it won’t be long until the search portal’s full music download subscription service is made available as well.
But all companies have a difficult fight if they want to take down Apple in the music arena. As The Register has noted, Apple iTunes has an exclusive music format, and iPods don’t support WMA, the choice of every major competitor. This basically rules out winning over any iPodder as they’d have no incentive to switch over to another format and a new MP3 player.
Yahoo!, Sony, and the rest will have to dig up a less loyal market.
