UK streaming music service Blinkbox has been a quiet success on one level this past year, with 1m registered users and more than 1bn streams, with its backer Tesco helping it reach a more mainstream audience. Yet an analyst claimed earlier this year that the Blinkbox group – which includes stores for films and e-books – was losing £25m a year (Bulletin, 5-Sep-14). Now there are reports that Tesco wants to sell its majority stake in the business, after newly-installed chief executive Dave Lewis apparently decided it wasn’t core to the supermarket chain’s business. Of relevance here may be the recent news that Tesco had overestimated its first-half profits by £250m, which may have affected its appetite for risky new digital businesses. Reports about the potential selloff all seem to be focusing on the movies element of Blinkbox – The Guardian describes it as a “video streaming service” for example – so the threat to the music service remains unclear.
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Tools :: We Are Giant
With “fan communities” being on every artist’s team’s mind, we’re fans of the fact that…