EMI just signed a deal with YouTube to make their music videos available online for free. But unlike with iTunes, EMI is the last of the big four record companies to partner with YouTube.
What would make record companies willing to put their music on YouTube but not on iTunes?
Why would EMI hold out while all the other companies are signing on?
Here's the article:
EMI and YouTube Set Licensing Accord
By SHIRA OVIDE (Wall Street Journal)
June 1, 2007
NEW YORK -- EMI Group PLC became the latest major recording company to strike a licensing deal with Google Inc.'s YouTube.
EMI Music, the music division of EMI Group, will make music videos and recordings available on Google's popular online-video Web site. YouTube visitors will also be able to include EMI content in their own video postings on the site.
"With this deal, all four of the world's major music companies are now official YouTube partners," Chad Hurley, chief executive and co-founder of YouTube, said in a press release Thursday.
Citing copyright hurdles, EMI had been the lone holdout of the four major global music companies in striking a licensing agreement with YouTube.
EMI said it will work with YouTube and Google to develop business models for content that YouTube users create with EMI-owned and copyrighted audio and video. EMI is responsible for music groups such as Coldplay and David Bowie.
YouTube will help EMI track its content on the Web site and compensate the company and its music acts for relevant use. EMI also will have the ability to ask YouTube to remove its content from the Web site.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Matching and Price Competition: Would Personalized Prices Help?
Georgy Artemov, a Ph.D. candidate, published a paper analyzing the possible welfare from the NRMP switching to a differentiated salaries model. It specifically focused on the effect of imperfect information of preferences.
Here's the abstract:
We analyze the generalized deferred-acceptance algorithm when
preferences are known with an error. This algorithm incorporates personalized
salaries and is considered as a replacement for the current
algorithm for National Resident Matching Program (NRMP). Maintaining
Bulow and Levin’s (2006) assumption on preferences, we show
that an error in preferences of a worker propagates through the algorithm,
leading to a change in the salary of every more productive
worker. Thus, relatively small individual errors accumulate toward the
top and may lead to highly distorted salaries for top workers the same
way as mild compression translates into highly compressed salaries on
the top in the Bulow and Levin study of the current NRMP algorithm.
The article is slightly mathy, it reads a lot like the textbook, but it's interesting nonetheless. He uses a lot of the assumptions from Levin's model we saw in class, and it goes into more depth about the deferred acceptance algorithm than we went over in class. It's an interesting perspective! Check it out at: http://www.econ.brown.edu/students/Georgy_Artemov/artemov_personalized_mistakes_IJGT_f.pdf
Here's the abstract:
We analyze the generalized deferred-acceptance algorithm when
preferences are known with an error. This algorithm incorporates personalized
salaries and is considered as a replacement for the current
algorithm for National Resident Matching Program (NRMP). Maintaining
Bulow and Levin’s (2006) assumption on preferences, we show
that an error in preferences of a worker propagates through the algorithm,
leading to a change in the salary of every more productive
worker. Thus, relatively small individual errors accumulate toward the
top and may lead to highly distorted salaries for top workers the same
way as mild compression translates into highly compressed salaries on
the top in the Bulow and Levin study of the current NRMP algorithm.
The article is slightly mathy, it reads a lot like the textbook, but it's interesting nonetheless. He uses a lot of the assumptions from Levin's model we saw in class, and it goes into more depth about the deferred acceptance algorithm than we went over in class. It's an interesting perspective! Check it out at: http://www.econ.brown.edu/students/Georgy_Artemov/artemov_personalized_mistakes_IJGT_f.pdf
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
The Marriage Market
Here are some readings for Thursday's class...
A piece for the Aplia Econ Blog that I wrote a while ago. The NYT article it references is pretty interesting...
A comment by Al Roth and Muriel Niederle on some of their findings about the NRMP and wages...
An article in the WSJ about the matching mechanism recently introduced in the market for Ph.D. economists...
Robert Frank on polygamy and marriage search.
More to come. Feel free to post links to other articles in comments...
A piece for the Aplia Econ Blog that I wrote a while ago. The NYT article it references is pretty interesting...
A comment by Al Roth and Muriel Niederle on some of their findings about the NRMP and wages...
An article in the WSJ about the matching mechanism recently introduced in the market for Ph.D. economists...
Robert Frank on polygamy and marriage search.
More to come. Feel free to post links to other articles in comments...
Monday, May 28, 2007
GM Attempts to Capture Public Approval by Going Green
After a $2 billion loss in 2006, GM is trying something new. It wants to alter its reputation as a producer of gas-guzzlers, seeing that Green is in.
"The auto maker, as with companies in others industries, has concluded it can no longer wait and see how the public debate on global warming and the world economy's increasing thirst for oil plays out. A big consideration in this change: GM fears it will sell fewer cars if consumers associate it with gas guzzlers.'We have to have people think we are part of the solution, not part of the problem,' said Lawrence Burns, GM's vice president for research and development and global planning...
"A big part of GM's problem is that it is stuck with an image as a maker of primarily big trucks and sport-utility vehicles. By 2005, GM's top executives and members of its board were convinced it could get sales moving again in part by turning around its reputation on fuel economy and the environment. 'We saw how quickly the mantle of environmental leadership had been seized by Toyota because of the Prius.' GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz said in an interview."
In other words, they're seeing how the public's tastes and preferences are changing horizontally, and trying to cater more towards the environmentally friendly sentiment that is increasingly conquering the United States.
They also are trying to gain a quality advantage, capturing some advantages in terms of vertical differentiation. GM plans to release two hybid SUVs later this year with "a system that GM believes has advantages over Toyota's hybrid technology."
In fact, their strategy includes trying to innovate in gas-economizing technologies and to push their image as an environmentally friendly company.
Full WSJ article posted as a comment "Shifting Gears, GM Now Sees Green."
"The auto maker, as with companies in others industries, has concluded it can no longer wait and see how the public debate on global warming and the world economy's increasing thirst for oil plays out. A big consideration in this change: GM fears it will sell fewer cars if consumers associate it with gas guzzlers.'We have to have people think we are part of the solution, not part of the problem,' said Lawrence Burns, GM's vice president for research and development and global planning...
"A big part of GM's problem is that it is stuck with an image as a maker of primarily big trucks and sport-utility vehicles. By 2005, GM's top executives and members of its board were convinced it could get sales moving again in part by turning around its reputation on fuel economy and the environment. 'We saw how quickly the mantle of environmental leadership had been seized by Toyota because of the Prius.' GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz said in an interview."
In other words, they're seeing how the public's tastes and preferences are changing horizontally, and trying to cater more towards the environmentally friendly sentiment that is increasingly conquering the United States.
They also are trying to gain a quality advantage, capturing some advantages in terms of vertical differentiation. GM plans to release two hybid SUVs later this year with "a system that GM believes has advantages over Toyota's hybrid technology."
In fact, their strategy includes trying to innovate in gas-economizing technologies and to push their image as an environmentally friendly company.
Full WSJ article posted as a comment "Shifting Gears, GM Now Sees Green."
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Un-Bundling
An article in the New York Times talks about how airlines are now charging separately for things they used to bundle in with the price of a ticket. Why are they doing this? Is it welfare-improving?
Monday, May 21, 2007
What's so special about EMI?
We spoke on Thursday about why EMI might be more willing than other record labels to allow the sale of their material DRM-free. Well, it turns out that EMI may be bought out by a private equity firm (see story). Why would an impending sale potentially affect EMI's decision to go DRM-free?
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Targeted Advertising: TV Networks and Bloggers
Like the Targeted Advertising campaign Google is undertaking, TV Networks are doing their own form of advertising: they give popular bloggers free stuff to entice them to write about specific shows on their network.
Big television stations, such as ABC, CBS and Warner Brothers have been using a new system to target their advertising. They identify popular blogs related to the subject of their shows, and invite the writers on an all-expenses paid trip to the studio, usually to meet the show's stars and witness the shooting of an episode.
"Warner Bros., the studio that produces the show for CBS, identified 12 blogs about motherhood, a key theme in "Old Christine," and invited the writers to spend the day on the set. The bloggers got free DVDs, watched a rehearsal and made videos with Ms. Louis-Dreyfus and other cast members to post on their sites. "
ABC even cast a popular blogger as a guest-star in "Scrubs". And it worked: "Since January, Mr. Ausiello has posted more than 20 items about "Scrubs" on Ask Ausiello, his popular blog. In comparison, he mentioned "Desperate Housewives," a show that reaches an audience four times that of "Scrubs," fewer than 10 times." The article cited several other advertising campaigns which induced the bloggers to write about their shows.
"Bribing" bloggers is the new wave in targeted advertising. Networks have had a long tradition of wining and dining news reporters. However, "mainstream news outlets now have strict rules governing to what extent their palms can be greased. Presents valued at more than $25 are typically banned, and that includes travel. But most blogs, many less than five years old, don't have such rules."
These advertising tactics seem exactly on target. It should be even more effective than newspaper or TV news advertising. Who is more interested in a sitcom about motherhood than women who are regular readers of a motherhood blog?
I posted the article in a comment, maybe it'll be useful in our discussion tomorrow.
Big television stations, such as ABC, CBS and Warner Brothers have been using a new system to target their advertising. They identify popular blogs related to the subject of their shows, and invite the writers on an all-expenses paid trip to the studio, usually to meet the show's stars and witness the shooting of an episode.
"Warner Bros., the studio that produces the show for CBS, identified 12 blogs about motherhood, a key theme in "Old Christine," and invited the writers to spend the day on the set. The bloggers got free DVDs, watched a rehearsal and made videos with Ms. Louis-Dreyfus and other cast members to post on their sites. "
ABC even cast a popular blogger as a guest-star in "Scrubs". And it worked: "Since January, Mr. Ausiello has posted more than 20 items about "Scrubs" on Ask Ausiello, his popular blog. In comparison, he mentioned "Desperate Housewives," a show that reaches an audience four times that of "Scrubs," fewer than 10 times." The article cited several other advertising campaigns which induced the bloggers to write about their shows.
"Bribing" bloggers is the new wave in targeted advertising. Networks have had a long tradition of wining and dining news reporters. However, "mainstream news outlets now have strict rules governing to what extent their palms can be greased. Presents valued at more than $25 are typically banned, and that includes travel. But most blogs, many less than five years old, don't have such rules."
These advertising tactics seem exactly on target. It should be even more effective than newspaper or TV news advertising. Who is more interested in a sitcom about motherhood than women who are regular readers of a motherhood blog?
I posted the article in a comment, maybe it'll be useful in our discussion tomorrow.
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