There have been two announcements from content creators in the last week, each making an effort, to innovate their business models, and generate profits online.
In my view the Financial Times has been brave in its attempt to circumvent Apple, whereas although the Kaiser Chiefs has repackaged its new album in an innovative way, it remains shackled to a music publisher.
The Kaiser Chiefs published a new album called The Future is Medieval on Friday. It consists of 20 tracks and potential purchasers are invited to mix their own album of ten tracks for download. Once you select and album cover and buy an ‘album’ and you get the opportunity to resell it to your friends via a personal web page for a £1 cut.
It’s a smart move you might think; an attempt to revive album sales and halt privacy. But it still has a music publisher, Universal in this case, underpinning the operation and taking a slice of the action.
If the Kaiser Chiefs had wanted to be truly innovative they would have set up the web infrastructure themselves and sold direct to their fans taking a larger slice of sales.
That would have been truly media disintermediation. After all it’s what Radiohead did. The British band famously parted company with its record label EMI in 2007 and released its album Rainbow directly to fans via the internet.
The Financial Times meanwhile has announced an Android app based on an open web standard to rival and usurp its iPhone app. Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, has long been critical of the non-negotiable 30 per cent that Apple demands for the carriage of iPad apps on iTunes.
The Financial Times will almost certainly maintain both Android and iPad apps but the threat to bypass Apple could not be clearer.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=0c2201a1-1a08-4939-a719-4acf883f3699)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=385f171c-b0cd-4601-8e38-390726ebf81c)
