Amie Street Also Takes Away Features... But At Least Is Honest And Upfront About How They Hate Having To

from the take-a-lesson,-emusic dept

We've covered how eMusic (which had a fantastic reputation for a while) totally failed in communicating changes to its service, which involved increasing prices and taking away many valued features. The company tried to bury that news along with the fact that Sony Music would now be included, not recognizing that many of its users didn't care, and were pissed off at the way eMusic presented this as a good thing. At least some others may be learning. Ragaboo alerts us that online music site Amie Street is also removing some features (such as the ability to redownload tracks -- just like eMusic has done), but did so by admitting that it sucked and apologizing, but basically saying its hands were tied. They also gave advance warning of the changes. While Ragaboo isn't thrilled about he, notes that he appreciated the honesty from the company. Here's the email that he received:

"In several weeks we're going to be making a change to how Amie Street handles downloads, and we want to be certain you are fully informed in advance about this change. In brief, starting on August 5th we'll only be able to offer a single download of your purchased music unless you've encountered a technical problem.

Although most people only download their music one time, we've noticed that you have done so more than once on occasion. We realize that the ability to re-download files has been important to you, so it's understandable that you might be disappointed to see this no longer available. Unfortunately a number of factors beyond our control, including legal and royalty concerns, have made this impossible going forward.

We're very happy to say, however, that you can continue to stream all of the music you've purchased on Amie Street. That means wherever you have access to the internet, you also have immediate and unrestricted access to stream the entirety of your Amie Street music collection from your Library.

To make sure that downloading music continues to be as easy as possible, we'll be keeping a close eye on the user experience and making updates to the site as needed. The primary voice that directs any such changes will be yours, so if you have suggestions based on your experiences using the site, we'd love to hear from you. Tell us exactly what you like and don't like, and we can make Amie Street even better!

Peace,

The Amie Street Team""

Of course, the fact that both Amie Street and eMusic have removed the ability to redownload tracks over royalty issues makes you wonder what exactly is the issue here. Are record labels really demanding a royalty payment every time people redownload a song?

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Examining Fact And (Gov't Crafted) Fiction On The Number Of Chinese Web Surfers

from the it-ain't-that-many dept

Statistics lauding the growth of the Internet in China have become so commonplace as to inspire yawns, despite breathless press reports of hundreds of millions of Chinese going online and signing up for the 'net. With the Chinese Government declaring that their internet population surpassed the US last year, it would seem that the real opportunity for expansion and growth online is not in the West, but somewhere behind the Great Firewall of China. Cue the ads for Chinese Web Hosting, Chinese Industry Liaisons, and the omnipresent legions of Chinese business agents.

Many Western technology companies have heeded that call, but have found themselves cast onto the rocks of Chinese shores including companies like Microsoft, Google, Cisco, eBay, and Yahoo! The massive markets just never seem to have materialized in the Orient for these giants, or when success has loomed on the horizon the murky Chinese bureaucracy has stepped in to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Partnerships have vaporized overnight, and (particularly in the case of Cisco) core Intellectual Property has been outright stolen, reverse-engineered, or redistributed. Perilous waters, indeed.

So it was with this skepticism that my friend Gersham viewed the latest piece of propaganda emerging from our friends in China that we have now reached the new height of 338 million Chinese Internet users; a 13 percent increase since the end of 2008, and just about exactly one quarter of the country's population. All of this, of course, seems to have been tabulated and distributed by the slightly inaccurately-acronymed Chinese Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) which, by its own admission,takes orders from the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) to conduct daily business. In fact, google Chinese Internet Traffic and you'd be hard-pressed to find data that did NOT originate from the CNNIC. Hmm. Call me a cynic.

It is likely difficult for most (any) of us to corroborate or even conceptualize these high numbers, but it seems suspicious nonetheless, particularly from a country whose median income is around $3400 and whose Per-Capita GDP is ranked 104th, right behind Armenia. In trying to substantiate this, once can point to Alexa's site rankings which currently reveal that 3 Chinese-language web sites rank in the Top 20: Search Engine Baidu (#9), IM chat and portal QQ (#14), and portal Sina.com.cn (#18). Sounds good, right? But look closely at the rankings. Baidu, an undisputed leader in Search for China, reaches 5.73% of the internet populace, whereas Google.DE (#13) reaches roughly 3% of global internet users while servicing German, Swiss and Austrian users exclusively. Combine the populations of these three countries and they don't even add up to 100 million people.

Gersham pointed me toward the Firefox Download Stats, where, as of this writing, Germans have made 4,948,666 downloads of various Firefox versions compared to only 672,972 for China. Again, Germany has a population of 82Million vs. 1.3Billion in China. As a control, Americans have downloaded Firefox 7,959,727 times as of this writing. Do the Chinese really just prefer Internet Explorer?

In January 2009, Comscore measured the Chinese internet audience at closer to 180 Million users, still an impressive 18% of the Internet population. This site quotes murky Nielsen Online data pegging Chinese Internet Users at roughly 300 Million. Beyond these hearsay reports, empirical measurements are difficult to come by.

So, let’s throw up our hands and try to reverse-engineer the data using published stats. According to June 2009 data from Comscore, Google has captured 65% or so of US Search Traffic. This made it the #1 web site in the world, with 157 Million US Visitors in June, according to Comscore. In the Chinese Market, Baidu has captured 73% of Chinese search, with Google in the Number Two spot. Yet Baidu.com barely moves the needle by comparison, according to compete.com, alexa.com, and others, hitting roughly 600,000 unique visitors per month globally. High-side estimates of the Internet's penetration in the US peg it at 72.5% of the populace, or about 220 million. This makes the data on Google's penetration vs the addressable market reasonably accurate (71% if you do the math). Following this logic, if Baidu in fact has 73% of China's purported 338 Million users, it should be ranking as the #1 web site by far, with 246 Million unique visitors per month. In fact if any of this data were true, then Chinese sites should occupy at least 4 of the Top Ten global web sites.

Whatever your opinion of Compete's and Alexa's relative methodologies, it's impossible to reconcile anything even close to the numbers coming from the Chinese Government. If that isn't good enough for you, let's turn to profits. While serving what was allegedly the world's largest internet audience, Baidu appears to be tracking to earn about $500 Million in revenue this year. Google's revenue appears to be tracking to about $23 Billion for 2009 with its pithy 157 Million unique visitors. Any way you slice it, if China's internet userbase is as large as Beijing says it is, and if Baidu's market share of that audience is what it's widely purported to be, then both the number of uniques reported by external traffic sites and the revenues reported by the public company that owns Baidu should be exponentially greater.

These stats seem to either indicate that Chinese do not use search very often, or that there just aren't too many of them heading out into the wilds of the Internet. Either way, statistics emanating exclusively from bureaucratic sources within Beijing, particularly those which seem to fly in the face of all other external metrics, are not to be believed. The thesis of this post is not to suggest that China is NOT a massive opportunity for online properties and other technology purveyors, it is simply an attempt to point out that, like in a lot of cases in dealing with the People's Republic of China, things are not what they may seem. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Cross-posted from IanBell.com.

Ian Bell is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Ian Bell and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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L'Oreal Keeps Trying: Appeals French Ruling Against eBay

from the can't-stop dept

It appears that L'Oreal just refuses to give up. The company has sued eBay in a bunch of different countries trying to get a court somewhere to admit that eBay is somehow liable for actions of its users. To date, it's been a clean shutout against L'Oreal, who has lost cases in Belgium, the UK and France (I believe cases are still pending in Germany and Spain, though it's hard to keep up). The ruling in France was the biggest surprise, given that French courts have ruled the other way in the past. Given that, it looks like L'Oreal isn't done yet on its home turf, as it's appealing the ruling in France. At some point, one would hope that L'Oreal would realize that going after eBay is targeting the wrong party, but it appears that no one at L'Oreal seems all that interested in actually understanding the issues, and wants to see how many shots it can get at making eBay pay up.

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If You're Taking Away Features From Users, Don't Tell Them It's For Their Own Benefit

from the that's-called-lying dept

Sometimes, I really wonder if companies think their users are stupid. There are times when they treat them that way. My favorite examples are when companies are taking away features or raising prices, and claiming (somehow) that it's for the benefit of those customers/users. For example, when eMusic raised prices and disabled features it put up a blog post trying to spin it as a positive, claiming "more of the good stuff!" Yes, at a higher price, with fewer features, but why let that get in the way of claiming good news?

The latest example is online music streaming site imeem. The company has struggled of late under absolutely draconian terms forced on it by the record labels. Rumors held that the company came close to going out of business until Warner Music agreed to renegotiate its suffocating deal. Still, there are many who question how the company can survive without a drastic change in business models. But, taking away features from customers with little warning and pretending it's a good thing isn't exactly the best way to go about things. Clay Shirky points us to the news that imeem is removing features for users to upload videos or pictures without even offering a "download to save" option. But, even worse, the blog post announcing the change tries to play this up as good news again, saying that it's all about "simplifying imeem" as part of an effort to enhance the site.

Sure, simplifying a site can be a good thing -- but unilaterally removing features that people use, with little warning, isn't really simplifying. You can simplify without removing features. If you have to remove features, for whatever reason, why not at least admit the truth: it's not for consumer's benefit, but for some other reason, and you realize it sucks for many users.

In other words, sound human, rather acting like your users are morons. If you want to see a company that's actually done a good job of this, look at Hulu. While we think it's ridiculous that the company caved in to content providers and tried (and failed) to block a specific browser (Boxee) from viewing its content, at least Hulu's CEO was upfront and honest about the fact that it sucked:

The maddening part of writing this blog entry is that we realize that there is no immediate win here for users. Please know that we take very seriously our role of representing users such that we are able to provide more and more content in more and more ways over time. We embrace this activity in ways that respect content owners' -- and even the entire industry's -- challenges to create great content that users love. Yes, it's a complex matter. A tough mission, and a never-ending one, but one we are passionately committed to.

For those Boxee users reading this post, we understand and appreciate that you're likely to tell us that we're nuts. Please know that we do share the same interests and won't stop innovating in support of the bigger mission.

eMusic, imeem and others would be wise to take note. Taking features away and pretending your customers are stupid enough to believe it's for their benefit isn't likely to fly.

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eMusic Also Took Away Right To Download Songs Already Purchased

from the thanks-for-nothing dept

In all the fuss over eMusic's poorly managed plan to sign Sony Music and raise prices at the same time, the company apparently also was able to sneak through another anti-customer move. For years, as an eMusic customer, you were able to go back and access songs you'd previously downloaded. This is, for obvious reasons, a very useful feature -- especially considering the fact that people change computers or lose hard drives and such. However, apparently, along with the price increase, eMusic has quietly dropped this feature as well. It's not clear why they would do this. Perhaps Sony didn't want this, but that doesn't explain why the feature was removed for everyone. It's like eMusic is punishing their loyal customers. The company claims that it will allow people to redownload if there's a technical problem, but the convenience feature is just gone.

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Just Because You Offer A Free Service, It Doesn't Mean Your Users Aren't Customers

from the blurring-the-lines dept

The world of Twitter got its collective knickers in a twist earlier this week when the company made a change to the settings of its service. The particular change was pretty small, but seemed to disproportionately effect "power users" and early adopters, so, of course, the uproar over it was pretty intense, and Twitter changed the change. The details of the change aren't all that important, but like with the response to Facebook's recent TOS change, it's dragged out some rather interesting opinions. A personal favorite of mine is the response to the backlash that since users aren't paying anything for these services, they have no right to complain. Apparently users should "pay up" so they have the right "to voice [their] displeasure as a customer rather than as a user" -- and this coming from a guy who writes a blog about open-source software. It's one thing for a business to ignore complaints that don't come from customers or potential customers, but in the case of free services, to imply that users' opinions don't count because they're not ponying up any cash is fairly ridiculous. Most free services rely on their users to create revenue in other ways, such as by providing traffic to monetize; alienation of users that results in a downturn in traffic, and in turn, ad revenue, has exactly the same effect as losing paying customers' repeat business. The distinction between "customer" and "user" is, in many cases, becoming increasingly irrelevant. And never mind that in many instances, such as with Twitter and Facebook, it's impossible for users to become paying customers. It's hard to imagine that either company thinks it's okay to ignore its users simply because they don't pay.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Google Doesn't Want To Disclose Korean YouTube Uploaders; Turns Feature Off Instead

from the letter,-not-the-spirit dept

Some new internet regulations recently went into effect in South Korea, forcing sites with more than 100,000 users per day to confirm users' personal information before they upload content or leave comments, so they can ensure people post content under their real names. The cutoff was lowered from sites with 300,000 daily users, and the new, lower bar caught YouTube Korea. But instead of complying with the system, Google has instead disabled uploading and comments on its Korean site (via PaidContent). Google's stance on censorship of its search results in China garnered it a lot of bad press; the fact that YouTube Korea lags behind other local video sites in popularity probably made this latest decision a bit easier. Apparently, though, people can easily get around the ban by using versions of YouTube aimed at other countries -- highlighting the frivolity of these sorts of laws given the global nature of the internet. Unless countries want to go as far as setting up Great Firewalls of their own, users will easily circumvent the rules, should they so desire.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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AT&T Says It Will Cut Off P2P Wireless Users; But What About Pandora Users?

from the be-careful-on-that-iPhone dept

While those who like to claim that the US broadband market is more competitive than it really is like to point to the rise of 3G wireless networks as proof, they almost always ignore the fact that those 3G networks come with insanely restrictive terms of service, that allow the providers to cut users off for almost any activity outside of email or web browsing. For example, using such a service for video and music has been prohibited in some terms of service. Sprint was the most open with their 3G wireless until recently.

Now AT&T is admitting that if it discovers users of its wireless broadband 3G service are making use of P2P apps, it will cut them off completely, and claims that it makes this clear in the terms of service. It hasn't happened yet, but this bit of data will supposedly be used by a dissenting FCC commissioner this week to show that Comcast's traffic shaping is pretty tame compared to other "rules" out there on network usage (ignoring the very different nature of the networks in question, of course).

This raises a number of questions: If AT&T's biggest concern about P2P file sharing apps is clogging its 3G wireless network, why does it allow streaming apps to run on the iPhone? For example, one of the most popular apps on the iPhone is Pandora, whose customized streaming radio offering is super popular (and appears to work quite well). So is AT&T going to cut off users of one of the most popular apps on the iPhone? And how will AT&T respond when someone (inevitably, if they haven't already done so) develops an iPhone app for P2P file sharing as well? This really just seems like AT&T slipping an excuse into the terms of service to cut off anyone they don't like -- but in the long run it may backfire as people get pissed off at AT&T for limiting what new devices like the iPhone can do.

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