The future of the music industry?

Radiohead has a new album coming out October 10th. It's their first album in a number of years and their first since they finished up a multi-album contract with EMI. They've decided not to sign with another record label and are releasing the new album online. While that in itself is a little different for a big band what is most compelling about this is how they are pricing their album. They've decided to let the purchaser decide how much they are willing to pay for the album! That's right, you go to radiohead.com and you can (pre)-order the album, you enter any price you want down to 1pence and then submit your order.

For someone like myself who hasn't purchased a lot of music in recent years this is very intriguing. Clearly Radiohead can do it more easily than some other bands since they are filthy rich already but by allowing the consumer to price the product as they want it makes the proposition of purchasing music for someone like myself much more viable. I can know decide myself how much I value the music and also ensure that the money is going to the band, not some big record label.

This probably isn't the first band to do this but as far as I know they are the biggest to try something like this. Is this the future of the music industry?

eBay vs. eBay

Recently I had two very different experiences with eBay, one good and one not so good. First off, I'm not an eBay newbie (in fact I've even sort of work for eBay at one point and know a lot of eBayers) and I generally have an excellent idea of what goes on on it's online marketplace. The two experiences, however, show that even a fairly knowledgeable person can have problems. The first auction was for a low priced item which I bought directly (no auction) and paid for quickly and easily through Paypal without thought, the item arrived in less than a week from Texas, perfect. The second auction was for a high priced item which I bid on, the bidding went smoothly enough except near the end someone placed a higher bid which they quickly retracted, interesting. After winning the auction, the seller promptly contacted me and ask that I send payment via a different method than originally advertised to a name and address that didn't look right. Needless to say I didn't feel comfortable doing this and after a number of emails with the seller and eBay I decided to not pay for the item and drop out. :(

eBay is based on trust, without it nothing would get sold since there is no fool proof method of online payments that is quick and easy to protect users. For small value items I'm willing to extend more trust to a seller (or buyer) and the transaction will likely get done , with higher priced options that level of trust doesn't always exist. eBay has done a great job creating trust (feedback, Paypal payments, etc) but there must be more that could be done, I can only imagine how many users have fallen into the same situation as me but are more trusting and less knowledgeable about what goes on online. I'd love to know what the stats are on auctions that never get finished because of scams or lack of trust? Based on what I know about online fraud I'm sure it's huge.

WeatherBill.com

Had coffee this afternoon with David Friedberg who runs Weatherbill.com (another Index Venture), we did a bit of brainstorming on ideas to grow OANDA and I was very impressed with what he came up with.

I was also impressed with his own company which stands to solve the problem of rained out vacations or snowless ski trips. Who wouldn't want to spend $20-30 extra on a vacation knowing that if the weather sucks you'll get a refund? Once weatherbill.com gets added to travel sites I think it has huge potential, very cool.

Hey Apple.ca, tax matters.

I'm still shopping for a new laptop, haven't had an urgent need to buy one but as Liisa is returning to Europe in a couple of months and I'll be without computer at home. I've been seriously looking at a Mac laptop, especially since they've just released new versions which means some of the current versions are being sold off cheap.

So I went to the apple.ca website and checked out some prices, found a model that I liked and started going through the purchase process. I confirmed the purchase and was happy with the price I paid but a couple of minutes later I received a confirmation email with a different price on it! The difference, tax. The apple.ca site doesn't calculate or show tax when you place your order which confused me a bit since every other Canadian online retailer shows tax properly, apple.ca does show shipping when you order however. Not showing tax up front is either a mistake that could be easily fixed or a sleazy way of making it look like their products are cheaper than they are.

Tax added 14% to the order and I figured I could get a cheaper price elsewhere so I canceled my order before they processed it which was a bit disappointing.

On top of this problem I repeatedly had to log into the apple site in order to navigate around and when I canceled my order I got a cancellation confirmation email in French while all the other emails I got from them were in English? Nice products, but could use a little improvement on the e-commerce side.

Where's Skype?

I was looking at bidding on an item on eBay and decided to use the "Watch this item" feature as the end date is a couple of days away and I wasn't interested in bidding yet. I noticed that you could be notified by IM so I thought that getting a Skype update would be cool. Unfortunately as I went forward I see that Skype isn't one of the options for notification, surprising considering eBay purchased Skype for $2.4 billion awhile back. :(

Any chance of getting Skype updates on eBay anytime soon?

Facebook Marketplace

Facebook added a new feature to their site today - Marketplace. It works as a online classifieds similar to Craigslist. It has a couple of unique features: items are listed as part of your Network making listings more local to you, you can view items that are being sold by just your contacts and it adds "6 degrees of separation" to any listing telling you if the seller is a friend of a friend, etc.

This is definitely a departure from Facebook's normal operations. I find that a lot of people are already starting to worry about the creeping commercialism and lack of privacy with Facebook and wonder if this new feature will continue to foster those fears. This could however, be a decent niche player in classifieds, in particular with student products such as used textbooks and student services.