Author: Clinton Forry

Arkansas juggernaut seller of all things Wal-Mart had better keep an eye over shoulder. Business Week reports that iTunes has surpassed Best Buy and Target to become the #2 music retailer.

AppleInsider.com states that the download store sold 20 million tracks on Christmas day 2007. In one day.

I guess that will work until everyone gets on board with the subscription streaming model, where we pay for access to everything ever recorded. [Or at least as much as the copyright holders will license.]

The more music I download from eMusic, the more it gets lost on my harddrive. [I don’t buy much of anything from iTunes because of their extant & punitive DRM.] I end up buying physical copies of things I really enjoy hearing, even though I have paid for them to some degree through my subscription to eMusic. This is probably silly and counter-intuitive, and the main reason that this next month’s membership will be my last month.

I have gone back and forth on this, and I am strongly considering putting that eMusic subscription money towards a Rhapsody subscription. Rhapsody has the unlimited streaming of songs for a set price of $12.99.

This model will support the behavior that I am certain I am not the only one engaging in. Being a sometimes fan of some pop songs, I enjoy hearing them more than once. I could pay a buck on iTunes, or about 33 cents on eMusic, and have the single track get lost in my 11,000 song iTunes library. I have done that. I don’t make playlists, and I don’t burn many mix CDs, so these precious few singles quickly fall between the cracks.

My main interest is in full albums and compilations; I will continue to buy those physical objects. With an outlet for my pop song interests pointed at Rhapsody, I won’t have the urge to by albums that in the end, I really don’t want. I’ll go to the site and stream them.

And everyone is happy. I’m glad we worked that out.

Oh, and congrats iTunes. I guess.

The day of reckoning for one of the extended-resolution video formats has come. Toshiba announced that it will no longer pour cash down the HD DVD hole. The BBC News site has a quick Q&A about what went down.

Wal-Mart backed the competing format, Blu-Ray, as did Best Buy and several major film studios. When both options launched in 2004, each had relatively equal backing from equipment manufacturers and film studios. The tides turned, and HD DVD has gone the way of the wax cylinder.

Format wars are something that we have discussed here in the past at length. They are often expressions of R&D dollars, with outcomes that are driven more by marketing budgets rather than true technological superiority. For an example, see the advert above for the product referenced so many times with this news: Betamax.

Betamax died an unfair death, it could be said. It was a capable format, and was refined to a great degree for the Japanese market where it thrived for many years after VHS’s domination in the US. Wrong place, wrong time, perhaps.

I remember when my folks came home with our family’s first VCR, a Quasar, in 1984; it was a front-loader, rather than a top-loader [good choice #1] and it was VHS [good choice #2]. It was a crap shoot. At the small-town electronics retailer, there was no clear winner to be had in the format war. The only advice offered was that of, “Well, you can rent more videos in VHS.” Sold!

My old boss at the record store that employed me during my college years was an advocate for all formats. He claimed that if you are a real collector, a real fan, you need the capability to play as many formats as possible. He had Beta decks he kept proudly in solid working order.

Even the old Edison cylinder phonograph, too, succumbed to an unfair fate. The phonograph cylinder was superior in quality to its predecessor, the flat Gramophone disc format [which later evolved into the LP record].

While watching a movie on the USA Network yesterday, I was pelted with appeals to visit the USA website; this is normal. What they were promoting is less common, but becoming more so.

USA has a section on their website, launched last year, that invites viewers to create avatars and play games based on the USA programs and characters.

My pal Brad does this kind of development for Cartoon Network. With the younger demographic, the Cartoon Network was smart to pursue this some time ago. The games there are not exclusively tied to the content on the cable network, giving the game creators and network execs more room to experiment. The same is true of the offerings on the USA site.

The casual gaming world is one that we will see more of in the near future. A logical extension of the website, these brand-reinforcing exercises promote another tie between the viewer and the network. They are relatively simple, based in the Flash world, making them easily compatible across platform & browser.

As media outlets strive for brand loyalty amongst the consumer base, they are wise to consider offering their wares to the people to be consumed how, when, and where they want. That will not be enough. Just as extras on DVDs have become a selling point, so too will ancillary offerings from content creators. Behind the scenes material, extra material, and related not-of-the-primary-format material will all be of interest to the people.

…the more they stay the same.

Symantec, the company that provides millions of folks with their Norton anti-virus software, has put some resources into a project that will give a better understanding of online behaviors. This survey is interesting because of its multi-national [eight countries, in total] perspective. From the site:

The Norton Online Living Report gives a snapshot of how different cultures and different countries approach the Internet and provides insight into how their daily lives are affected by the online world. All the data is constantly changing and will be updated in further iterations of this first bi-annual report.

The report focuses primarily upon the things you might think a company involved in provided security software might zero in on: the confidence index of web users, types of activities those users engage in, and overall tech literacy. There are many other gems to be found in there. It is worth examining, but laid out in a funny way on the site–there is no single report to download that covers all things. Visit this page and hit the links.

So why the tired platitude of a title to this post? I point you to this tidbit, from page 6 of the UK report:

Nineteen per cent of UK children say they do things online that they know their parents would disapprove of. That figure is even higher in China with 55 per cent responding in the positive.

Yup. Kids are doing things their parents wouldn’t approve of. Still. Now online, in sizable percentages. We can end with yet another tired platitude: There is nothing new under the sun.

Something we have touched on a number of times on this blog is how technology often amplifies existing activities / impulses / social constructs. Rather than creating a new phenomenon, we see the new thing [be it gaming or social networking sites or IM] giving kids a new chance to sneak a cigarette behind the bleachers.

As we travel further and further down the road of music commerce, more exit ramps pop up with the solution to the problem of illegal downloads.

Radiohead gave fans the chance to pay as much as they wanted for their new record [even if that amount was $0]. This story was covered in Bluegrass Now magazine. [!]

Trent Reznor, the man behind rock outfit ‘nine inch nails’, suggests a tax at the Internet Service Provider [ISP] level to offset the impact of illegal downloads. While this would be fraught with imperfections, it sounds vaguely similar to the tariff on audio cassettes and Digital Audio Tapes.

Rick Rubin, record producer superman, posits a subscription model; pay a the portal, rather than the ISP. Several services have been doing this for some time, like Rhapsody.

Perhaps the most unexpected response is the resurgence of vinyl LP records. Time magazine has a feature on this, and they have some frankly surprising statistics:

…990,000 vinyl albums were sold in 2007, up 15.4% from the 858,000 units bought in 2006.

The article points out that this will not be taking over the digital realm of music distribution anytime soon, but that it is the manifestation of the “equal and opposite reaction” phenomenon we see in physics and pop culture.

There has been no shortage of discussion on how the line between content consumers and creators is being more and more blurred. A number of artist have offered tracks up for remix, whole albums, artwork, etc.

Now, it appears that there is a new group in Dodge that is looking to gather like-minded folks around this very directive. It is called CASH [for Coalition for Artists and Stakeholders.] Before the Wu-Tang Clan refrain of “cash rules everything around me” begins, look at what the group is set to do:

CASH Music: a Coalition of Artists and Stake Holders. CASH is a platform for engagement. A way for audiences and creators to exchange creative perspectives and ideas. Why is this good? Because it’s how thing are now — and in our humble opinion it’s a change for the better. An engaged and participating audience has a stake in the continuation and existence of the artistic output. An engaged audience is a healthy, vibrant ‘scene’ grown up around creative works.

They are using the Creative Commons licensing concept to eventually let fans do legally what they have been doing in basements and garages for years. And, they are letting them post it near the original conceptions. It is a subscription based model, offering at least some semblance of a business model. Keep an eye on it!