Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation's BSkyB, is shutting its Sky Songs service from next February. It couldn't attract enough customers prepared to pay 4.99 pounds a month to stream popular music. That might be a bad sign for Murdoch's newspaper pay walls. Someone should tell him that people won't pay if they can get it free from elsewhere.
The publishing industry around the world is keeping a close eye on how Murdoch's pay wall at The Times is going and whether it's going to make any money. No one knows, it's uncharted territory. If it succeeds, you can bet every other publisher in the world will adopt the same model. But there's a reason they haven't jumped on board yet. Right now, we don't know the answers.
NewCorp's digital chief Jonathan Miller admits revenue from paying online subscribers hasn't yet fully replaced a falloff in advertising sales but he insists it's on an "immediate path" to do so within a matter of months. We just have to trust him.
On the other hand, The Guardian says Murdoch's numbers are about as vague and as meaningless as the sort of data the Soviet Union used to produce about its economic progress. And we all know what happened there.
Maybe Sky Songs is giving us a hint of what to expect. The question for News Corp is whether its other subscription models might suffer the same fate. Watch this space
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