The MUSIC and New Digital Media REPORThttp://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3id4800d851700dee992e99acf8408de0a
By 2015, there could be as many as 64 million, with 26 million in-car radios and 37 million in smart phones.
“Stursberg’s CBC is ratings-driven, populist, pop-culture-obsessed in its news coverage, lightweight, disdainful of the arts and mortally afraid of appearing highbrow.”
“…anyone who thinks that Stursberg’s departure means a reversal of his various TV and radio implementations is kidding him- or herself. The five-year plan has more to do with capital spending, hardware and financial management systems than it has to do with dramas and sitcom on TV or the genre of music played on CBC radio
channels. Things are not going backward. If you worship at the altar of the old CBC of Peter Gzowski and Barbara Frum, you are not going home again. We’ll all be living with Stursberg’s CBC for a long time to come.”
The fees paid by Yahoo Inc. and RealNetworks Inc. for licences to play music on the Internet should be recalculated, a U.S. appeals court ruled Tuesday in the first case over music usage involving so-called new media.
At Netflix, the picture is darkening
“Netflix (NFLX-Q152.78-1.83-1.18%), with a series of deals to stream movies and television shows over the Internet, seems poised to make a technological transition that its floundering competitor Blockbuster Inc. failed to do.”
“And that is where the growth is: Standard & Poor’s credit analyst Jayne Ross believes the broadband home-video market is expected to increase by more than 50 per cent annually over the next several years, even as the overall movie rental business will be flat to slightly up.”
From Globe and Mail article about Google and Sony joining forces with an Internet televison:
Those relatively modest sales figures show how reluctant people have been to inject the Internet into the three to five hours they spend, on average, in the so-called “lean back” mode of watching television.
But that almost certainly will change as younger people who have grown up Web surfing on their computers while channel surfing on the TVs look for products that bring together the different media. The only question seems to be how much longer it will be until the market reaches the tipping point where Internet TV goes mainstream.
Sony’s own research has identified consumers who are under 44 years old as the most likely buyers of the new Google TV sets. McQuivey thinks the market is probably even narrower than that right now, ranging mostly from people between 30 and 45 years old who have settled down into their own households and can afford fancy TVs.
Convinced the Internet TV will be the next big thing, other consumer electronics manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics Co., Vizio and Mitsubishi also are promoting Web-connected sets and Blu-ray players.
Bob Lefsetz argues that in order to create competition for Apple’s iTunes, music providers must initially allow their content to be provided to a start up such as Spotify for free.
Apple has too strong a “default” hold, and this will only be strengthened by its new Ping service and whatever streaming service they announce in the future.
http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2010/09/02/applestreamingsubscription/
Heritage minister stirs hornet’s nest with ‘radical extremist’ comments
Mobile phone use for accessing music is still limited, but in North America, there are still only a small number of cloud-based services available.
From “Report: Cloud Streaming Unlikely To Spur Multiple Device Use”
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i76b408899045994dfa43ba2e243a32f9
The new study—“360 Music Experiences: Use the Cloud to Target Device Use Orbits”—relies on data from a third-quarter 2009 Forrester survey of 5,264 North American adults 18 and older. In it, Forrester found that the leading device remained the home computer, commanding 41.6% of digital music consumption. MP3 players ranked second at 32.5%, music-enabled phones at 12.1% and home streaming devices at 11.1%. According to Forrester, only 23% listened to music on both their PC and MP3 player–the two largest categories–while only 9% used both a PC and mobile phone and only 5% of consumers accessed music on all four. Mobile access to music services through smartphone apps, while certainly an area of great activity, has yet to make meaningful dent.
“There’s been a good organic increase in the amount of people using phones [for music], but it hasn’t changed the music device landscape,” says Mulligan. “Mobile music still remains heavily skewed towards the younger user.”
Of the Forrester survey respondents listening to music via mobile phones, 63% were aged 18-24, which Mulligan says is the largest demographic skew among all device categories. And of the way they listen to mobile music, sideloading MP3s to phones was more popular than streaming music to a smartphone app. Of the total time U.S. adults spend listening to music, 9.7% is via sideloading to a phone while only 4.9% is streamed to the device.
Now much of this is due to the fact that despite all the recent talk about cloud-based music service, few are actually in operation today. Spotify remains barred from the U.S. market as the company continues to negotiate licensing deals with a skeptical music industry, and neither Apple nor Google have so much as publicly announced what cloud-based music strategies they may have, let alone launched them yet. And it’s worth noting the Forrester survey took place before some of today’s cloud-based services launched–such as MOG, mSpot and Rdio–but others like MP3Tunes and even veterans Rhapsody and Napster had.
Heritage Minister James Moore ignited a wasp’s nest of angry responses when he labelled those oposed to copyright reform “radical extremists”. Most of the response comes from those who do not wish to be hindered in how they choose to use digital media they have purchased.
However, no one seems to have an alternate solution for how the creators of digital media can be ensured that they get compensated for creating. Everyone wants unfettered access to what is created, and unfortunately in this day and age, piracy has pretty much killed my ability to make a living creating music.
Digital locks will not prevent this, but what other model is there that today’s consumer would support that would ensure that I can get paid for what I produce?
Should I work at Tim Horton’s, and in my spare time, produce music for everyone to have access to for free?
The MUSIC and New Digital Media REPORT 