TotalMusic: Total fail

Further evidence that the record companies are better at lawsuits than they are at retailing: Total Music has been closed down.

The first sign was that Ruckus was closed. That was the company which had been bought by TotalMusic to do the heavy lifting on streaming music to paying customers. TotalMusic, of course, was Sony and Universal's attempts to become digital distributors, cutting out Apple and the others and selling direct to those few people they're not busily suing.

TotalMusic VP is blaming the recession:

And, so do I. I know what you are thinking… “Hey Herskowitz, you were only there 3 months, how did you manage to screw it up so quickly?!”. Heh… all I can say is that in that short time I had the privilege of working with some great people on something that I *know* was going to be extremely compelling. I regret that we didn’t get to show you guys more about what we built - but in these extremely hard economic times (particularly for those in the music industry) it’s hard to blame them from pulling the plug on a still-highly-speculative offering .

Well, that's probably true - who can blame them for not wanting to lose money replicating things that were being done better, elsewhere, by people who have more understanding of what end-users actually want?

Still, no wonder Universal spent the week trying to think of nice things to say about Apple.