The official blog of Stathis Kassios for Business, Media, Economics & Arts

Just a few days before I fly back to cold Scandinavia for my second year in the Arts & Entertainment Master program, I deliberately decided to purchase Pink Floyd's album "A Momentary Lapse of Reason", released through EMI records back in 1987 (first Pink Floyd album after Roger Water's departure). The album's evocative cover shows an infinite number of beds spread along a sandy beach being lost in a curved line where the human eye meets the horizon, a pretty unrealistic scene which always caught my attention in various records stores I had visited. The glorious days of EMI, the colossal record company that shared the success of Pink Floyd, Sex Pistols (who were later fired), The Beatles, seem as an ideal past, as nowadays, EMI is facing enormous economic problems, holding not more than 9,6% of the global music business market share, counting a failed acquisition that took place in 2007, when the company was acquired by Terra Firma Capital Partners for 4...

I believe that many Myspace users & artists have sometimes wondered about the fact that they receive so much attention for free. In other words, the Myspace miracle allows this obvious self - promotion without charging the user, providing free services, etc. That was the delicate story so far until I read that Rupert Murdoch, the boss of News Corporation, expects that in the near future all of his sites including Myspace, will start charging users by setting up subscriptions for example. The social networking site Myspace has showed declining revenues, causing a general alarm to the rest of Murdoch's media branches. Other authors have suggested that according to web history, similar - free of charge - sites didn't last long and were unfortunately closed down. So this leaves myspace with two choices. It will either start charging its users with a minimum monthly fee to keep it running or it will become a fading yet glowing webground.