The BBC asks Can HMV reinvent itself? The famous entertainment group, founded nearly a century ago, is currently, to put it bluntly, fucked. Its stock-market value is now under £50m and the banks are circling like hungrier, angrier, uglier versions of vultures, waiting for HMV to keel over so that they can strip its corpse for money meat.

The BBC gets one thing very wrong, though, when it argues why HMV’s gotten such a serious kicking of late:

Apple—with its iPod and iPad—is the silent white assassin of HMV, because more and more of us are choosing to download music, games and films, rather than buying those silvery discs. And Waterstone’s is being squeezed as we opt to download books on to so-called tablets.

The real assassin of HMV wasn’t silent and it certainly wasn’t Apple. Instead, it was Amazon, blundering into the UK, setting fire to the concept of ‘profit margins’ and undercutting every high-street retailer to the level that it made no sense to buy in a store. Instead, HMV rapidly became a kind of gigantic shop window, where you’d check out stuff you’d like to buy, before returning home and grabbing it from Amazon.

Where HMV then failed was in creating its own online offering that didn’t respond to Amazon (and also the likes of Play.com) competitively. HMV was comprehensively outmanoeuvred on price, and it for far too long welded hefty postage costs to its products.

The one smart move the group has made is in its 50 per cent purchase of 7digital, which may be dwarfed by iTunes but is nonetheless a highly respected online music store, with lucrative deals with Spotify and BlackBerry. But whether this is enough to convince the banks to hold fire is debatable—and that isn’t down to Apple, but HMV in continually reacting after the event, rather than presciently noting which way markets are heading in.

For the same price as the 32 GB Wi-Fi iPad 2 ($599, 100 bucks above the iPad 2’s entry-level model), Engadget reveals that the Motorola Wi-Fi Xoom will show up on March 27.

Good luck with that.

TechRadar reports that changes are on the way at eBay.

eBay is to give 50 free listings a month to all users, from April, in a bid to tempt sellers back to the site.

A smart move, which might drag people back from Amazon Marketplace. Presumably, eBay will cover its loses by upping its commission rate?

The once-dominant auction site, which has seen its market share damaged by the Amazon Marketplace in recent years, will also charge lower commission on items sold by the site from July.

Blimey. It looks like eBay has finally gotten a clue and stopped being total idiots, having introduced lots of stupid ideas and fees that screwed over small sellers (i.e. individuals) in recent years.

Hurrah!

Wait, what’s that?

The California-based company will also encourage merchants to offer free shipping to customers by charging a higher commission to those who charge buyers to have their items delivered.

Oh.

The music industry continues to both live in cloud cuckoo land along with taking advantage of rights laws that still haven’t been updated to tackle digital. A Law.com article reports that 13 record companies suing LimeWire demanded $75 trillion in damages, citing that “Section 504(c)(1) of the Copyright Act provided for damages for each instance of infringement where two or more parties were liable”.

Luckily, in this case, the federal district court judge wasn’t having any of it. Kimba Wood called the damages request “absurd”, adding:

As defendants note, plaintiffs are suggesting an award that is ‘more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877.’

Bon Jovi, in an interview with the Sunday Times:

Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.

He’s an angry rich rocker. Jobs, he says, has RUINED MUSIC FOR EVERYONE, the bastard.

Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it.

Yeah, you tell them, super-rich rock guy! After all, we all have wonderful memories of buying a shitty album based on the jacket, and that’s way better than being able to preview whatever you want, whenever you want, to make your purchasing decision based on the quality of the music. ONLY IDIOTS DO THAT KIND OF THING.

And, man, albums, eh? I’m really gutted that people will lose the ‘album’ experience, instead cherry picking the best songs. After all, this never used to happen at all (if you ignore, say, the entire singles market), and there’s no way whatsoever any band could ever persuade someone to buy an entire album these days (apart from by making every track worth buying, rather than shitting out an album with two decent tracks and eight lumps of turgid filler—BUT THAT WAY LIES MADNESS). And let’s also ignore the way in which Apple legitimised the download market, getting quite a few people to pay for downloads, rather than grabbing them from Limewire and Napster, because, as Bon Jovi says, JOBS HAS KILLED MUSIC. Never forget this as you go to iTunes, Amazon or 7digital to preview the tracks you’re interested in and then buy precisely what you want, with significantly more freedom than people had in previous decades. Just remember, as you click ‘buy’ on the one good track from Has Been Band’s new album (also grabbing a dozen tracks from a fantastic indie band you’d never have heard of without huge access to digital previews) that Steve Jobs has killed music for everyone.

Whether you’re religious or not, I hope you’ll join me in a silent prayer, to remember ‘music’ (which is now dead, apparently) and common sense (which followed it the second Bon Jovi opened his stupid rich rocker mouth).