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.

Because I was curious to see whether anyone was actually reading my rants on this website, I installed an exciting statistics doohickey two weekends ago, and it’s amusing to note that even on a blog such as this one, the usual suspects kick the face off of all other articles (in terms of traffic, rather than literal face-kickage).

I’m happy to report that even on days where I don’t write anything, Revert to Saved still has traffic, and that the stats aren’t swaying me in the slightest regarding any new content I’m going to write. They do, however, show how tempting it must be for a publisher to follow the AOL way and just churn out shit to appeal to search engines.

For example, I spent a few hours a couple of days ago writing a long, considered review of GarageBand for iPad. Even online on a typical tech blog, it’s the sort of thing I’d expect to have gotten around £150 for. By contrast, I also that day fired off a bitchy little rant about an Adobe video that pretty much went WAH WAH WAH APPLE COCOA WAH CS5 JOBS HATES US WAH WAH WAH. The Adobe piece got ten times as many visits as the GarageBand review.

Similarly, keywords in titles make a big difference. A two-year old article Steve Jobs is going to die! still gets lots of hits, no doubt fuelled by people eager to know that the CEO is about to pass. (How disappointed they must be to find an article essentially telling everyone to leave him be, that Apple will be fine without his daily involvement, and ending with “Get well soon, Steve”.) This knowledge won’t change anything on the site either, because I admit to ensuring titles are likely to be picked up by search engines and roving eyes, but then that’s been something I’ve done since first writing for magazines a decade ago. You write interesting titles for articles, or the subs rewrite them for you and get all grumpy at the extra work.

The only exception to not making changes due to statistics has come from the interview with Rob Janoff, which is still bringing in a lot of traffic—if only I’d had stats running the day that went live!—which has made me wonder whether I should reprint some other interviews I’ve done over the past year or two. I’m not sure any would have quite the same impact as the Apple logo designer, but the interest seems to be there. Some of these are uncut interviews with people like Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov, which could be presented in a similar fashion to the Mike ‘Hellboy’ Mignola interview I posted a few years ago. Any feedback on this would be appreciated.

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.’