Month: June 2010

  • Venture Capital

    File-Sharing Pioneers Now Selling Music

    June 3, 2010, 2:34 am

    In the music business, they would call it a comeback. Almost a decade ago, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, European technology entrepreneurs, unleashed the Napster-like file-sharing program Kazaa on the Web, allowing millions of users to freely download songs, movies and TV shows.

    Kazaa was sued by record companies and Hollywood studios and settled the litigation for tens of millions of dollars, just as the pair sold their next company, Skype, to eBay for more than $3 billion. Now Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis are returning to their musical roots, Brad Stone writes in The New York Times.

    Their new start-up, Rdio, will unveil itself on Thursday amid what is suddenly becoming a crowded market for Internet music services, a field still largely dominated by iTunes from Apple.

    Rdio will charge $5 to $10 a month for unlimited access to a large music catalog, including songs from the major record labels. This is a similar approach to that of other subscription music services that have not fared well, including the newly independent Rhapsody and Napster, a division of Best Buy.

    Rdio customers paying the full amount will be able to stream and store songs on a range of mobile devices, beginning with the BlackBerry and iPhone, and soon, phones running the Android operating system from Google. The company is backed through the founders’ Atomico Ventures, a venture-capital firm based in London.

    “Kazaa exploded and was used by an extreme number of people,” Mr. Friis said. “We tried to negotiate some of the things we are doing now with Rdio, but it was obviously way too early.”

    Mr. Friis said that during the years spent in courtrooms and across negotiation tables, he and Mr. Zennstrom developed good relations with music industry executives. “You gain a certain respect for each other, through a good fight, so to speak,” he said.

    Michael Nash, an executive vice president for digital strategy at the Warner Music Group, which has licensed its catalog to Rdio, said the duo’s history creating free file-sharing tools had been forgiven amid the industry’s search for a business model, as CD sales continued to decline.

    “We resolved the past,” Mr. Nash said. “These guys are focused on the future.”

    Rdio, which has headquarters in San Francisco and 22 employees, will open this week in an invitation-only preview period and will become more widely available later this year. Its chief operating officer is Carter Adamson, an original programmer at Skype. Its chief executive officer is Drew Larner, once an executive at the film studio Spyglass Entertainment, who still looks to Hollywood for clues about the future of the music business.

    “The sale of DVDs once drove the movie business, but a lot of people don’t care about owning DVDs anymore,” Mr. Larner said. “We think that is going to apply directly to music.”

    Despite the recent emergence of companies like Rdio and a similar subscription service, Mog All Access, subscription Internet music has not yet captured mainstream consumers. Rhapsody, introduced in 2001 and spun out of the digital media software maker RealNetworks in April, has lost money and still has about 650,000 subscribers. Napster has declined to release membership numbers since Best Buy bought it in 2008. Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, has repeatedly said Apple is not interested in offering a subscription service.

    Also, the major music labels have so far rejected a United States version of Spotify, a popular European subscription service. Music executives object to the fact that music can be played free on Spotify, along with ads.

    A person briefed on Spotify’s plans said the company, based in Sweden, was still aiming for a United States introduction this fall, though elements of the service here could be altered.

    Some industry analysts say companies like Rdio and Spotify can exploit technological changes that have improved the viability of subscription music by allowing people to more easily and cheaply listen to Internet music on a wide range of devices. They point to the proliferation of smartphones, the emergence of broadband wireless networks and the expanding ecosystem of applications allowing complex software to run on mobile devices.

    At the same time, music labels have become more flexible on licensing terms and no longer wrap individual songs in so-called digital rights management software, which often created technical problems for customers trying to get music services to work on various mobile devices.

    But one problem is that many of these new subscription music services are nearly identical. Rdio is betting in part on its social elements — the ability to follow friends on the site, see what they are listening to and see a list of the most popular music among people you know. But such features may not make much of a difference to casual users.

    Survival might ultimately come down to which music start-up has the largest bankroll, and which service can ally itself with big companies like cable providers and wireless carriers that might want to wrap subscription music into their more comprehensive monthly plans.

    Rdio executives say they are looking at that possibility. They also say they could link up with Skype, the free Internet calling serviced used by 560 million people around the world. Last year, Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis joined an investment group that bought Skype back from eBay — another example of their returning to their roots.

    “We obviously will be doing distribution deals,” Mr. Friis said. “And Skype is definitely one of the companies where there could be a compelling fit.”

    Go to Article from The New York Times »

    Copyright. New York Times Co. 2010 All Rights Reserved

  • Ball Kids Wake Up the French Open

     
     
    Ben Solomon for The New York Times

    Ballboys ran through the Roland Garros complex at the French Open.

     
     
     
     
    June 1, 2010

    Ball Kids Wake Up the French Open

    By JOHN BRANCH

    PARIS — The children line up outside Court No. 1 before the gates open to the public. There are 250 of them, les ramasseurs de balles, the gatherers of the balls. They are between 12 and 16 years old, and they dress in matching shirts and shorts.

    A couple of the older ones at the front of the line give a “un, deux, trois.” Suddenly the children are running down the brick path toward Court Suzanne Lenglen, about 200 yards away. And they are singing.

    “On est les ballos!” the children toward the front shout, and the rest of the pack echoes in sing-song fashion. “De Roland Garros! (De Roland Garros!) On va ramasser! (On va ramasser!), Toutes les célébrités! (Toutes les célébrités!)”

    Yes, they are the “ballos,” from Roland Garros. They will pick up for the celebrities.

    It is a simple song, only three choruses divided by a simpler refrain. But, rooster-like, it serves as the wake-up call each morning for the French Open.

    “It’s a pleasure for them to do a little show in the morning, to wake up the stadium,” said David Portier, who oversees the ramasseurs de balles from a small, windowless office behind a high-energy ball-kid lounge underneath Court No. 1.

    But if it was all about the show, the song-and-run routine would wait until the gates open. Instead, the public rarely sees the ball boys and girls doing anything but silently chasing balls, rolling them underhand along the edges of the court, and dutifully offering balls and towels to the players. Their mission is to be efficient, silent and invisible.

    That does not apply in the morning. The children run the straight stretch to Lenglen, up a set of wide stairs, then curl to the left. For 10 minutes, they run laps around the outside of Roland Garros’s second-biggest show court.

    Then they break into assigned groups around the pathways and sidewalks surrounding Lenglen, sorted by which court they will work that day. And they exercise.

    Directed by a coach — an older, experienced ball boy or girl who supervises a particular court’s ramasseurs — they run in tight ovals, hands behind their backsides while kicking their heels high. They do side-to-side shuffles and lunging leaps. They side-step forward, again and again, practicing the underhand bowling method used to pass tennis balls around the court.

    They stretch by windmilling their arms and reaching for their toes. And at the end, they lie on their backs, feet together in a circle, creating a star. And they stay that way for five minutes.

    “It’s a moment to relax, to calm down,” Portier explained.

    On a recent morning, the exercising came just after the gates of Roland Garros were opened to fans. The ball boys and girls weaved their way between the strolling fans, many of whom stopped to watch, smile and take pictures.

    That is why Portier tries to get most of the warm-up done earlier. Not only do the grounds become crowded, but he is worried about who is taking pictures of the children, and where those pictures end up.

    “I’m very sensitive, because parents give me the responsibility of their children,” he said.

    The ball boys and girls, chosen from about 2,500 applicants around the country, meet at 9:30 each morning. They fill part of the upper stands at Court No. 1 to hear Portier makes announcements. When he is finished, the children answer with a “merci,” like a congregation answering with an “amen.”

    Then the children are told their assignments. It is based on performance.

    “It’s a very important moment for them,” Portier said. “I think ball boys know if they do a good or a bad job. But it is in the morning that they learn how they actually did.”

    Once called, they exit the portal and line up out on the walkway. They have spent weeks training for these days, and it was during one of those training sessions in either 2004 or 2005 that a few of them came up with the song.

    It is a melody borrowed from the football team in the film “Remember the Titans.” But the words are all original. The term “ballos” has no meaning in French, but it rhymes with Garros and seems to fit in.

    “Ooh, ah, géant,” goes the refrain. “Ooh, ah, Roland! Ooh, ah, ballos! Ooh, ah, Garros!”

    We are the winners, the children call and answer in French, the latest collectors. All the day we will do our best.

    The last verse uses names of some of the major players.

    De Roger à Henin

    On ramasse toujours bien

    De Djoko à Nadal

    On ramasse toutes les balles!

    Down the path they go. Then the gates open, and the ramasseurs de balles, the gatherers of the balls, are rarely heard from again.