"The digital music boom is continuing and it is growing at an exciting pace for the music industry," IFPI said.
However, revenue from sales of physical music formats, like CDs, fell 6.3% and the overall market by 1.9%, it said.
That translates to a global drop in the market from £7.6bn to £7.5bn, for all music sales - regardless of format.
DROP IN NON-DIGITAL SALES
US - 5.3% drop in value
Japan - 9.2% drop in value
UK - 4% drop in value
Germany - 5.8% drop in value
France - 2.7% drop in value
Source: IFPI
Meanwhile, IFPI said the surge in digital music sales was being driven by the increased use of broadband, 3G mobile phones and portable music players.
Tuesday 29 April 2008
Tuesday 22 April 2008
UK Music Industry Demands An iPod Tax
"The UK music industry has rejected the Government's proposal to legalise the transfer of music from CDs to MP3 players without a levy. It has asked for a tax on devices like Apple iPods which it says should compensate artists for the transfer."
UK's Music Business Group - "We acknowledge that consumers clearly want to format shift and also place enormous value on the transferability of music. Music fans clearly deserve legal clarity in this area as well as the freedom to enjoy any music they have legitimately obtained.But it is not only music lovers who benefit here. Enormous value is derived by those technology companies and manufacturers who enable consumers to copy. UK creators and rights owners are legally entitled to share in this value - as they hold the exclusive right to reproduce their music - but are currently excluded from the value chain."
The easy way round this "market failure" is to have a levy on MP3 players, like the one the UK considered on blank cassette tapes.
UK's Music Business Group - "We acknowledge that consumers clearly want to format shift and also place enormous value on the transferability of music. Music fans clearly deserve legal clarity in this area as well as the freedom to enjoy any music they have legitimately obtained.But it is not only music lovers who benefit here. Enormous value is derived by those technology companies and manufacturers who enable consumers to copy. UK creators and rights owners are legally entitled to share in this value - as they hold the exclusive right to reproduce their music - but are currently excluded from the value chain."
The easy way round this "market failure" is to have a levy on MP3 players, like the one the UK considered on blank cassette tapes.
58% Of Music NOT Paid For In America!
Most music comes from friends or from peer-to-peer file-sharing, according to NPD Group research.
2006 Figures
Physical Cd's - 41%
Paid Download - 7%
P2P (peer to peer download) - 14%
Burned from others - 21%
Ripped from others - 17%
2007 Figures
Physical Cd's - 32%
Paid Download - 10%
P2P (peer to peer download) - 19%
Burned from others - 19%
Ripped from others - 19%
In 2007, there was an increase in the volume of music acquired for nothing and a sharp decline in the amount paid for, according to NPD's annual survey of Internet users. Although more people paid for digital downloads; that market grew from 7% to 10%; it wasn't enough to cover the fall in CD sales; down from 41% to 32%.
2006 Figures
Physical Cd's - 41%
Paid Download - 7%
P2P (peer to peer download) - 14%
Burned from others - 21%
Ripped from others - 17%
2007 Figures
Physical Cd's - 32%
Paid Download - 10%
P2P (peer to peer download) - 19%
Burned from others - 19%
Ripped from others - 19%
In 2007, there was an increase in the volume of music acquired for nothing and a sharp decline in the amount paid for, according to NPD's annual survey of Internet users. Although more people paid for digital downloads; that market grew from 7% to 10%; it wasn't enough to cover the fall in CD sales; down from 41% to 32%.
Friday 11 April 2008
Technology
What is your chosen technology? Music technology
How is it marketed? Who to? Music is marketed in several different formats and both digital and analogue formats are available still. Mp3 formats are the most popular file type around at the moment draining the CD market down more and more as the formats are made better and smaller in file space. Digital files are produced on to disk space and sold through Cd's or through digital files on legal Internet sites such as iTunes. Sites such as iTunes have proprietary software grants attached to their files so the files may not be modified or put onto other music devices than the iPod or iPhone when purchased. This is one way in which digital music is stopped from spreading illegally from computer to computer.
Which companies provide it? How much does it cost? Most music providing companies now distribute it through both the Internet and shops such as HMV also have there walk in stores. These stores obviously need grants from all the music and record labels. Online stores such as iTunes sell each song for around £0.79 and an album for around £7.99. On a CD you would not be able to buy individual tracks and the album would cost around £9.99.
Hot/Cold media? Push/Pull technology? McLuhan explains that the radio is a hot media in that it uses a particular sense over the others but also explains that cold media emerged from jazz and popular music. Therefore i would put music technology in the category of cold/cool media because it requires more active participation rather than a less complete involvement. Push technology on the Internet refers to a style of communication protocol where the request for a given transaction originates with the publisher, or central server. It is contrasted with pull technology, where the request for the transmission of information originates with the receiver, or client.
Is it a new media, or an old media that is undergoing radical transformation? An old media; music production, distribution and consumption was around a long time before the Internet, and there has been lots of methods such as cassette and vinyl before the introduction of the internet and the heavy public use of the internet. The introduction of digitial music rather than analogue in the late 1900's, early 2000's has faced its advantages and its disadvantages.
Who has been responsible for developing it? Why? The article on my blog featuring iTunes highlights iTunes heavy participation in bringing music into a digital age. As well as iTunes though, smaller artists who are less known to the public have used digital files which are distributed over the internet to get their music known to the public as their albums are less successful and cannot find record deals without large numbered facts about their sales.
How is it marketed? Who to? Music is marketed in several different formats and both digital and analogue formats are available still. Mp3 formats are the most popular file type around at the moment draining the CD market down more and more as the formats are made better and smaller in file space. Digital files are produced on to disk space and sold through Cd's or through digital files on legal Internet sites such as iTunes. Sites such as iTunes have proprietary software grants attached to their files so the files may not be modified or put onto other music devices than the iPod or iPhone when purchased. This is one way in which digital music is stopped from spreading illegally from computer to computer.
Which companies provide it? How much does it cost? Most music providing companies now distribute it through both the Internet and shops such as HMV also have there walk in stores. These stores obviously need grants from all the music and record labels. Online stores such as iTunes sell each song for around £0.79 and an album for around £7.99. On a CD you would not be able to buy individual tracks and the album would cost around £9.99.
Hot/Cold media? Push/Pull technology? McLuhan explains that the radio is a hot media in that it uses a particular sense over the others but also explains that cold media emerged from jazz and popular music. Therefore i would put music technology in the category of cold/cool media because it requires more active participation rather than a less complete involvement. Push technology on the Internet refers to a style of communication protocol where the request for a given transaction originates with the publisher, or central server. It is contrasted with pull technology, where the request for the transmission of information originates with the receiver, or client.
Is it a new media, or an old media that is undergoing radical transformation? An old media; music production, distribution and consumption was around a long time before the Internet, and there has been lots of methods such as cassette and vinyl before the introduction of the internet and the heavy public use of the internet. The introduction of digitial music rather than analogue in the late 1900's, early 2000's has faced its advantages and its disadvantages.
Who has been responsible for developing it? Why? The article on my blog featuring iTunes highlights iTunes heavy participation in bringing music into a digital age. As well as iTunes though, smaller artists who are less known to the public have used digital files which are distributed over the internet to get their music known to the public as their albums are less successful and cannot find record deals without large numbered facts about their sales.
Sunday 6 April 2008
Music files through the years
Almost all music is distributed today in digital, rather than analog, form. Until recently, most digital music was sold in containers called compact discs. Developed and refined between 1965 and 1985, compact-disc technology swept the consumer market during the late 1980s and early 1990s, displacing almost completely long-play vinyl albums. In the past few years, a new method of distributing digital music has become increasingly popular: transmission of containerless files via the Internet, followed by storage on home computers. Music distributed in this manner typically is replayed either through stereo systems attached to the home computers or through portable devices analogous to the "walkman."
The technology that has made this new method convenient and popular is MP3, an audio compression file format. Musical files compressed using MP3 occupy approximately 1/12 of the disk space occupied by uncompressed files, enabling them to be transmitted faster and stored more easily. Two groups have embraced MP3 technology especially enthusiastically. First, musicians unable to obtain recording contracts with the major record companies have found that, at modest cost, they can record their material in MP3 format and then make it available over the Internet. Second, high-school and college students have discovered that they can obtain on the Internet MP3 copies of most of the songs of their favorite musicians. A high percentage of the MP3 recordings available in this manner were prepared without the permission of the owners of the copyrights in the music.
The technology that has made this new method convenient and popular is MP3, an audio compression file format. Musical files compressed using MP3 occupy approximately 1/12 of the disk space occupied by uncompressed files, enabling them to be transmitted faster and stored more easily. Two groups have embraced MP3 technology especially enthusiastically. First, musicians unable to obtain recording contracts with the major record companies have found that, at modest cost, they can record their material in MP3 format and then make it available over the Internet. Second, high-school and college students have discovered that they can obtain on the Internet MP3 copies of most of the songs of their favorite musicians. A high percentage of the MP3 recordings available in this manner were prepared without the permission of the owners of the copyrights in the music.
Music and the 'Internet Boom'
At the height of the Internet boom, it seemed that we might be on the verge of a true revolution in the way music was bought and paid for — one that had the potential to forge lucrative new revenue streams for established record companies and also to make home-based musicians rich beyond their wildest dreams. Sadly, it never really took off. At the level of the independent musician seeking to make a living from directly distributing their wares via the Web, the dotcom crash finished off or severely hampered many of the companies that were supposed to be bringing homegrown music to the Net-based masses. And as far as major-league commercial music sales were concerned, it was always going to be difficult to persuade customers to pay for downloadable music while the likes of the original Napster service were operational. How could you possibly succeed at charging for mainstream music when anyone could obtain virtually anything for free — albeit not legally — with a few clicks of a mouse? As a result, the major record labels steered clear of on-line sales for several years, or promoted cumbersome, heavily copy-protected schemes which offered a limited choice of material at relatively high prices, with a predictable lack of success.
Tuesday 1 April 2008
Citizen Journalism
What is citizen journalism?
- Citizen journalism is the new form public journalism in which any member of the public can publish either images, text, sound or videos onto media web-pages such as the guardian to create a more 'user generated context'. These forms of information can be published as newsto thousands across the web.
What vision of the future did the 'Googlezon' video present?
- 'Googlezon' is a fictional company created from the merging of the two greatest web companies at present, Google and Amazon. It came from the idea of the Google Grid - "a universal platform that provides a functionally limitless amount of storage space and bandwidth to store and share media of all kinds" and Amazons "social recommendation engine" and "huge commercial infrastructure". The idea is that the two will combine to battle with Microsofts 'Newsbotster' in the "News wars of 2010". Through the video it is apparent that 'Googlezon' come triumphant to create EPIC which is a universal, personalized news submission and distribution system that is so popular it effectively puts the fourth estate out of business.
What could be the advantages/disadvantages for us as consumers?
- The idea is that the news published to the individual consumers is relevant to their blog and their personal details, therefore the news they recieve will fit with what they see fit to be important news values and news agendas (advantage).
- This may leave out many headlining. important stories that a high population of the consumers would like to read, for the consumers that have not included terrorism or other important news stories in their personalised blog will not hear of these stories (newspapers will be out of business aswell). If this is not the case and headlining stories are included in everyones personal space, then who is to decide that and who is to decide the headlining stories if it is run digitally and by computers rather than editors etc.
What are the issues for newspapers and journalism?
- With the oncoming digital age, it is evident that fewer jobs are available in certian areas of jounalism, media and newspaper publishing. With the idea of EPIC running the media, issues are created for journalists as their will be no need for newspapers if consumers are getting personalised news from this kind of site. Newspapers will not see the same amount of profits by printing off personalised papers because consumers buy there papers from local stores rather than subscribe, and e-paper is a lot cheaper than paper.
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