Global Music Revenue

"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.

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The State Of The Fourth Estate

What is the fourth estate?

• Edmund Burke announced that the fourth estate acted as a check on abuses of power by other estates (religion, parlaiment and the courts). They do this by 'holding them accountable to the electorate and providing information to ensure democracy is allowed to operate efficiently'.

Is new media technology responsible for the decline in newspapers?

• The new access of news via satellite and cable with 24 hour rolling news channels, and the news available on the internet has more or less run down the newspapers, since all newspapers had to compete against in the past was merely teletext. On top of this it is read free of charge online or via cable!

What does it mean "maybe the internet is already the cyberspace of the fourth estate"?

How has digital technology had an impact in the film industry?

Digital cinematography is the process of capturing motion pictures as digital images, rather than on film.

Production - On-set monitoring allows the cinematographer to see the actual images that are captured, immediately on the set, which is impossible with film. A digital cinematographer can choose a film 'light' stock he or she is familiar with, and expose film on set with a high degree of confidence about how it will turn out. Advances in digital technology mean that films can be shot straight onto a Hard Drive rather than using a reel of film. Digital tehnology has opened more opertunities in post production aswell, for example, frames from 35mm film can be scanned into a computor for digital editing - this enables effects such as colour grading, shifting focus with lighting or adding completely new elements.

Distribution - Films are still available from general stores but in all different formats, we now have DVD, HD, Blue-Ray and other formats available to us from download or purchase. Films have not switched to digital yet and cinema's still have the films layed out on a real, very old school! Cinematogrophy may change in that it will turn to digital which will enable it to be better quality etc, this will get rid of those annoying black spots on the screen that come up from time to time. The digital age has opened a new world of piracy - Hollywood claims piracy has cost it $6bn (£3.2bn), digitising films means that copies are easily made and distributed illegally which is a big threat to the industry. Example of piracy: By the time the Phantom Menace reached Asia for example, box office receipts were far lower than expected. Piracy was blamed because so many people had already seen it. The second film was given a simultaneous world wide cinema release as a result, probably a good idea as 10 million people went online to download it.

Exhibition - Films are now experienced through many different ways because of the digital age, we now experience them in the comforts of our own home and through the cinema's. Quality of our film experience has also risen greatly with the indroduction of digitally stored films. Not particularly, i went to Odeon the other night and it was the same as when i went to see Tarzan when i was 5! But on serious notes, cinema's are changing but not dramatically but slowly. Yes and No, the whole cinema experience is based on the fact that it is not available at home legally at the time, so cinema attracts the people that want to see it comforting conditions and earlier than others. But the transformation to a digital cinemtagrophy has made it easier for the cinema experience to be in the comfort of your own home.

Moral Panics and Concerns with Online Technology

Social Networking...is it taking over? The internet being created into a more and more reliable source for communication or online socialising. Games like Second Life show the start of an online world where anything can be achieved, life itself is being turned into a cyber-life, where all form of communication can be carried out via computer and nothing else seems necessary to most people. Some good examples of growing online socialising companies include Myspace, Facebook, Second Life, World of Warcraft an more. Although easier to use etc. it is not as reliable as a real-life exchange of whatever the subject or object is and problems can occur which can effect people financially or moraley. People are starting to interact differently in that face-to-face interactivity is becoming less and less necessary and people use, games, blogs, online profiles and other forms of social networking to achieve there goals be it financialy, personal, information or general conversation. Large services, such as MySpace, often work with law enforcement to try to prevent such incidents. There is an issue over the control of data - information having been altered or removed by the user may in fact be retained and/or passed to 3rd parties.

Future for online technology

1. Chris De Wolfe is the Co-founder of myspace, a social netowrking site which allows users to transfer there offline lives onto screen. he believes that the future of social networking will become 'infinitely more personal, more portable, and more collaborative'. He predicts that social netowrking will more or less take over the world as it becomes more portable (use via mobile phones etc). He believes a new generation of developers will lead to a more collaborative and dynamic web and directly affect the tools and feature sets available on socially-based sites. Quote; 'the evolution of social networks is kick-starting a broad global shift for how people, content and culture collide on the web'.

2. Chad Hurley is the Co-founder of the most widely used video broadcasting site in the world; Youtube and he explains that his companies goal is to get users to the centre of their video experience, allow users to gather more information and overall create the world a smaller place by this means of communicating. Chad Hurley is a positive technologival determinist as although i think there is plenty of media communications available on the internet and that 'creating the world into a smaller place' by this means is another way to see that we are misusing the planet, he means to do good by his morale thoughts and by the majority of the world.

3. Maurice Levy says that the challenge for advertisers is to become a lot more creative and to start thinking/portraying creativity now, something that is avialable both digitally and analogue. 'Liquid media' is where you can move seamlessly in and out of different settings compared to 'linear media' where you can only go through the object in the A-B... order it is set out in.

4. Norvig parallels Edison's invention of electricity with the development of online technology in terms of searching for information in that Edison created electricity thinking of how useful it would be to him and others around, but did not think of how many ways it could be used, and never would of considered some of the applications we use electricity in today. This parallels with the development of online technology in that the development people make within online technology is another step to the unknown and that the online applications could be used for any unknown future ideas.

5. A current developing issue today is creating an internet link to southern and eastern Africa via an undersea connection but a lack of infrastructure and lack of money in such places limits its oppurtunites. There is a limited national infrastructre which will limit internet development from now till 2012. But mobile telephoney has exploded the African market into one of the fastest growing markets in the world, and with SMS available it can provide financial, agricultural, health, and other information services. A digital divide is evident now in this world as digital technology takes over there is less and less reason for any personal meetings as such, and more availability to communicate, transfer and propel through this form of technology.

New Media

New Media

Digitality - new way of gathering imformation, binary (on or off).
Interactivity - new ways of streaming compressed information (satellite). 'Interactive'!
Hypertextuality - organisation of texts, no longer linear, shuffling, jumping wherever you likein the data.
Dispersal - to do with how the inofrmation is shared and communiacted. Increasing market for producers
Virtuality - ideas linking with the real and represenation (iconography), virtual worlds can be represenational.
Convergence - big issue, new technologies and merging into one, mp3 players showing photo's, phones that can e-mail etc. SIZE MATTERS!

Audience?
Regulation and Control?
Ownership?