MusicBites put together a panel of experts for its end of year review of the digital music business, the recording of which can be downloaded here (Note: 49MB file).
It took place at one of London’s best private members clubs, Adam Street, which is rapidly becoming the hub of entrepreneurs and media/digital businesses in the UK’s capital city.
The panel discussed some of the big moves made this year by the likes of Apple, the major record labels and most recently Microsoft. And we looked to the year ahead – making a few predictions along the way… (Click here to download)
Participating were:
Paul Sanders, Co-founder of Playlouder MSP, the ground-breaking subscription music ISP.
Nick Watt, Director with New Media Knowledge and In The City, the annual music conference.
Helen Keegan, Founder and Managing Director of Beep Marketing, the mobile marketing agency and a specialist in mobile music.
The discussion was chaired by Mike Butcher, Editor and Publisher of MusicBites.com
(To listen to the podcast please click to download. It’s a large file (49MB), lasting 50 minutes, and hence we wanted to give Podcast subscribers the opportunity to check this file size before downloading).
“I’m a dinosaur, part of a shrinking generation of daily print newspaper readers who likely will disappear in a few decades. And we’re being replaced by folks who “consume media” through the use of RSS feeders, Web portals and blogs.”
Evan Williams calls content generated by ordinary people ‘casual content’ but I don’t see anything casual about stuff like Moblog.co.uk’s pictures of the Buncefield oil clouds.
MSNBC’s plans to flood the Internet with ads for its new shows is, well, really stupid. Sure, they are advertising on blogs via BlogAds. That’s very, well, nice. However, they’d be far better off using a blog network to provide direct links rather than trackable ad links – those would give them better search engine rankings. If they have targetted the right blogs, it may work. But since they’ve included UK blogs like mine (see right), I doubt they’ve put much thought into it!
Mind you, at least it’s not quite as insane as taking out an ad on this, which may improve search rankings, but boy is it ugly.
As my article in The Guardian today shows, putting the full content of your site into the RSS feed is a tricky business. The main problem is from unsavoury characters taking feeds and using them on splogs. Personally I think even full feeds, with adverts, still won’t cut it against the sploggers – they’ll just rip out the ads – and the audience for RSS is still not really that big anyway. The next version of Windows may change that, but I think the ‘headline and link’ interface culture is pretty ingrained now.
Some interesting new research from Jupiter:
Jupiter thinks the European music industry is facing “a demographic time bomb”. In its report “European Music Consumer Survey, 2005″ it says that European consumers who download music from illegal file sharing networks currently outnumber those downloading from legal services such as Apple’s iTunes Music Store by a factor of three to one.
Some 15% file share while just 5% pay to download. Uh oh.
Jauntily upbeat however, Jupiter says “there is solid demand for paid downloads”, with 10% of European consumers willing to pay, rising as high as 31% in Sweden.
But file sharing penetration in Europe is highest among younger consumers (34% of 15-24 year olds) and is impacting the way they value music with many having little concept of music as a paid commodity. Among the 46% of European online 15-24 year olds who use the Internet to consume music, the CD is becoming increasingly irrelevant: 40% do not consider the CD to be a good value for money and 43% prefer to copy rather than buy CDs. Unless these consumers are encouraged to develop music purchasing behavior soon they may never develop meaningful music buying habits.
In a release Mark Mulligan, Analyst at JupiterResearch said: “Illegal activity is a key threat. The Digital Youth of today are being brought up on a near limitless diet of free and disposable music from file sharing networks. When these consumers age and increase spending power they should become key music buying consumers. But unless the music industry can transition these consumers whilst they are young away from free consumption to paid music formats, be they digital or CDs, they may never develop music purchasing behavior and the recording industry could suffer long-term harm.”
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