Just Add Music

Overhype

from the aren't-we-cool-now dept

Almost exactly two years ago to the day, Mike wondered what sites wouldn’t launch their own music download stores. While it seemed for a while adding blogs was the current hotness in Web sites, music is coming back en vogue. Today, Procter & Gamble said it was adding music downloads to its Home Made Simple site that’s aimed at homemakers, while four publications in the UK said they, too, will start selling music. We’ve talked about how music downloads are used as loss leaders, but it’s hard to see exactly how the strategy will work for these sites, assuming they’re not getting any better pricing than Apple and will also sell songs at a loss. Will anybody go, “oh, the Daily Star is selling downloads, so now I’ll read it online” when there are already so many other well-established download stores? Somehow we get the impression that’s not important, so long as some out of touch exec can feel on top of things because the site they run is cool since it now sells music, like that iPod thing Apple’s got.