No Rock And Roll Fun

DOT SWAPS AGAIN: For what seems to be the sixth time this week, Dotmusic has changed hands again - this time BT has flogged it to Yahoo, who seem incredibly vague about what they're going to do with it, what with their already owning Launch and all.

Dotmusic was originally a heady attempt by Music Week to launch something that tapped into the public's desire to spend money on online, but never really took off. We always put this down to the shit name - we remember listening to an expensive promotional campaign on local radio which struggled to make clear it was dotmusic.com and not .music.com or dotmusicdotcom. First rule of your internet, innit, that you need a domain name which is easy to verbalise to someone - nothing with tricksy spelling or confusing punctuation (are you listening, orcado or whatever you are?). Up til today, the whole shebang had been sitting as part of the BT empire; they'd bought it when they were getting excited at being content providers rather than just the people behind the copper wire, but its position had looked shaky ever since they admitted they were shit at that sort of thing and invited Yahoo to take over their pootling portaling.