AOL has been stepping up its online music efforts lately, and last week it rebranded its indie offerings under the
spinner.com umbrella. When we first heard this news, we thought something sounded familiar—and a pal who surivived the first dot-com shakeout reminded us that back in the day, spinner.com was an online music service offering downloads and streaming radio, and it was snapped up by AOL in 1999 as part of the NullSoft/WinAmp buyout. The price for that package?
A cool $400 million. Spinner chugged along for a while until it was folded into AOL's attempts to revive the Netscape brand (ah, the old days), and the domain name had been dormant
since 2002.
More »
Idolator
Sadly, the self-proclaimed "nine man hard rock enigma" Slipknot will not be teetering around stages in their own production of Easter Island Comes Alive! when they tour in support of their forthcoming album, All Hope Is Gone. No, those masks represented their spring collection, and the band is ready to "unveil its new imagery in an exclusive partnership with AOL Music, the web's most trafficked online music destination." You guys, I'm so scared! There's even a—gasp—visitor-length-inflating retrospective photo gallery! What will we tell the children? A shot of the new masks is after the jump.
More »
Yahoo! and AOL may shut down their Internet-radio services, which have become a pricey proposition for the two online companies because of the 38% royalty increase mandated by SoundExchange. "Yahoo and AOL stopped directing users to their radio sites after SoundExchange, the Washington-based group representing artists and record labels, began collecting the higher fees in July.... As a result, the number of people using Launchcast fell 11 percent to 5.1 million in October, according to ComScore. AOL Radio users declined 10 percent to 2.7 million from 3 million." [
