It is easier to make the case that the music industry, far from imploding, is one of the great success stories of the recession. The most dramatic example of this is in what kids are supposed not to be buying any more: single tracks. Last year sales of singles soared to an all-time record of 152.7m units, an astonishing 33% rise in a year when the whole economy (GDP) contracted by 3.3%. If the music pundits seriously think that these are not being bought by kids, then it shows how out of touch they are with their customers. These same youngsters who were – and probably still are – massively downloading free music from the internet were prepared to pay up to £3 a pop for an insipid ringtone (interestingly, not included on the industry’s statistics unless they are full-track ones). Why? Because there is an easy payment system on phones which didn’t exist on the web. Now there is an easy payment system (iTunes et al) on the web they are starting to pay again. If the big music companies had spent their energies dreaming up a payments mechanism for web downloads instead of suing their customers they could have swept all before them. Instead they were like the crew of a sinking boat that blames the sea instead of trying to mend the leak. If they were in the bottled water industry, they would probably be urging the government to stop free downloads of tap water at home as unfair competition. Yet the bottled water industry should have been their model. It got away with charging us lots of money for a product that was no better than free tapwater through clever marketing.
Even now practically everyone I meet from the music industry protests that it couldn’t be expected to combat the technological disruption that was eroding its traditional model. What piffle. Lots of books have been written about disruptive technologies. They can’t say they weren’t warned. As it turned out, pretty well every system for monetising music – iTunes, Spotify, We7, Shazam, Nokia’s Comes with Music et al – has come from outside the industry. What a missed opportunity.
Sales of singles are, of course, only one part of the industry. There has, unsurprisingly, been a fall in sales of albums – down from 133.6m units to 128.9m last year, not helped by the closure of key UK retail chains Zavvi and Woolworths – but that was more than offset by growth elsewhere in sponsorship, live shows and merchandising where there is something of a boom happening in Britain. Overall, the music industry grew by an amazing 4.7% in recession-ridden 2008, according to PRS for Music, and will probably be resilient when the full 2009 figures come in. A key fact is that last year income from live music overtook that from recorded music for the first time. Don’t think tracks, think music. Guardian
]]>![[DISNEY]](http://sg.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MK-BB648A_DISNE_NS_20100311180025.gif "disney free audio books")
As the business model that propelled Hollywood for more than a decade fades to black, Walt Disney Co. is retooling how its movie studio makes and markets films.
The Disney studio, which is to unveil its production slate this spring, is backing away from one-off comedies like “When in Rome” and “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” according to people familiar with the studio’s new gameplan.
In their place, Disney plans to focus on films that are essentially brands—like a planned Muppets movie—that can be exploited across its network of theme parks, videogames and commercial products. The recent success with “Alice in Wonderland” has given a new team of executives who run the studio confidence in their approach. Wall Street Journal
]]>Huge numbers now use mobile phones instead of desktop computers to get online — a development that has spawned whole new business models in China, the world’s biggest Internet market.
Paying to read content on the Web, an outlandish idea as recently as a year ago, is slowly but surely establishing itself as the next business model in the Western media mainstream, spearheaded by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp
But meantime, sales of smartphones — part of a telecoms economy very different from the PC Web — are set to outpace sales of desktop computers by 2012, IT research firm Gartner said this week. Some believe it could be as early as this year. Reuters
]]>
The world’s largest bookseller faces an unwelcome stock fight while trying to deal with radical market shifts.
The story line for bookstore giant Barnes & Noble Inc. is growing ever more dramatic, with falling store sales, increasingly stiff competition and a fierce battle over the company’s shares led by a billionaire Los Angeles investor.
Barnes & Noble changed the face of book retailing in the 1990s with its aggressive rollout of hundreds of superstores nationwide. Today, the New York company sells about 300 million books a year and accounts for roughly 18% of U.S. book sales, making it the world’s largest bookseller. L A Times
]]>
A small device that looks like a microphone–but with something on top of it that looks like a ping pong ball with an LED inside–Move is Sony’s bid to gain control over the motion controller wars that are currently led by Nintendo, with its Wii controller, and which many think will be dominated by Microsoft and its Project Natal controller system.
To Sony, releasing the Move is an obvious move for the PlayStation, given it believes it started the motion controller era with its Eye Toy. Sony held its press conference during the Game Developers Conference here.
Now, the Move, which will be available this fall in a starter kit that begins at under $100 for a Move, a PlayStation eye camera and a game, is its attempt to jump ahead of Microsoft’s Natal and to begin winning over Wii users.
]]>
If your Twitter friends aren’t interesting, you can now follow a dozen lactating bovines and read their teat tweets after they’ve been milked by a robot.
“As far as we know they’re the only cows tweeting,” said Marcel O’Gorman who is behind the University of Waterloo’s critical media lab project.
The tweeting cows are poking fun at the popular Twitter network and are meant to push people to think about where their food comes from and the high-tech nature of farming, he said.
“Hey human, I just pumped out 9.3 kg for your pleasure. Show me some love,” said a recent tweet of dairy cow Attention Please referring to her milk output. National Post
]]>
Ever since the configurations and their prices were announced in January, Bits readers have e-mailed me asking for input on which iPad to buy: 3G or Wi-Fi only? The answer to that question could make a big financial difference, since the 3G versions cost $130 more upfront and an extra $15 to $30 a month, depending on your 3G usage.
So how do you make a smart decision? This Q&A might help:
]]>
Now that the Oscars are over, Hollywood’s less glamorous — but still important — partners in the movie theater business are stepping into the spotlight prior to the industry’s annual ShoWest convention next week.Exhibitors on Wednesday heard the announcement that they’ve desperately wanted for more than two years: The three biggest chains — AMC Entertainment, Cinemark, and Regal Entertainment — have a $660 million funding deal to accelerate the rollout of digital projectors to 14,000 screens in North America. USA Today
]]>
The New York Times has big digital plans for its Book Review supplement — one of the most popular and influential book review publications. The paper is planning to make Book Review an individual product (separate from the rest of the NYT’s e-reader content) on the three major e-reader platforms — Sony’s e-reader platform, Amazon’s Kindle, and Barnes and Noble’s Nook.
Poynter Online reports that the NYT is carving out Book Review as part of a larger “disaggregation” effort to figure out which content it can sell individually. The paper’s $13.99 Kindle edition, for example, also lacks the famous NYT crossword puzzle. The puzzle was originally excised because of difficulties implementing it on e-reader platforms, but as its implementation becomes more of a possibility, it’s also being looked at as a ripe standalone offering. Venture Beat
]]>Putting all this together suggests that while the young continue to join social-networking sites — mainly Facebook — they are increasingly also spending time on specific services to chat and play games with their friends. A real-world analogy would be meeting in the playground and then splitting into groups to play a specific game. Meanwhile, since they all have mobile devices, they tweet each other or use one of the new generation of mobile apps. Wall Street Journal
]]>