Jango scales the royalties wall
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
I have a column on latimes.com today about Jango and its effort to monetize what people do while listening to music (as opposed to selling the music itself). The company interested me because its approach strikes me as one of the foundations of the new music-industry business model. I skipped over one aspect of Jango’s strategy, though, and that’s its widget, which can be posted on blogs or MySpace pages (and, before too long, Facebook profiles). You can inspect the one I created after the jump. Although I recognize that it’s a customer-acquisition tool, I have to confess that I don’t understand why companies do stuff like this. In essence, Jango is paying to provide entertainment to other sites, rather than using entertainment to draw people to its own pages (where they can generate revenue). And the widget, which is just a jukebox, doesn’t really sell the highly social Jango experience. Maybe it’s just about getting some name recognition....