burnlounge

Last Thursday, BurnLounge announced that it is eliminating the "network marketing" element in which some retailers pay start-up fees to the company, then earn money by convincing new members to become paying retailers. This was the aspect of BurnLounge that drew a lot of criticism, and eventually led to a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation, as I blogged about a couple weeks ago.

Instead, the company will focus on the free service, in which anybody with a Web site can become an online music retailer. Excellent move. The network marketing aspect seriously dampened my enthusiasm for what otherwise … Read more

Beginning musicians tend to be big dreamers. And there are an awful lot of us--Guitar Center's got nearly 200 stores now taking in more than $450 million per quarter, and you know that most of those buyers are thinking, at least in the back of their mind, that they'll be the next Jimmy Page. Or Joe Strummer. Or Kurt Cobain.

As you might expect, this combination tends to draw a lot of, shall we say, questionable businesspeople to the music industry, particularly the lower reaches. Over the years, I've heard it all: unscrupulous managers, publicists and promoters … Read more

Well, the music offerings at South by Southwest are heating up, and we'll keep you posted on the good ones. I mentioned BurnLounge in a Hoooka, which is a start-up that lets you sell music through a MySpace widget. BurnLounge, which has been around for a while longer, has a similar model: create your own music store, choose the music in it (WMA format), add your own reviews and recommendations, and (optimally) profit. But until this point, it had been just that--standalone personalized music stores, lacking additional functionality that most people think of when they think of new Web … Read more