That subject line should also mention that’s average number of CDs per head of population. Is this something to feel proud about? Given recent news that digital downloads aren’t necessarily more ecologically sound than CD buying (I still find that hard to believe), perhaps I should be. I’ll also admit to an enduring love of physical formats. It’s an interesting article: apparently the average price of a CD fell below £9 for the first time last year; also UK music revenues fell 5% between 2001 and 2005, which doesn’t seem that bad, given the diversity of other media increasingly available and may as much reflect a tightening of margins rather than a death rattle for the industry as a whole. Anyway here’s the full list:

CD sales per person in 2006

Britain 2.7
US 2.1
Norway 2.1
Ireland 1.9
Australia 1.9
Denmark 1.8
Belgium 1.7
Sweden 1.7
Switzerland 1.7
Japan 1.5
New Zealand 1.5
Canada 1.5

It would be interesting to know the average number of MP3s purchased for those countries as well, I’d guess Japan and the US would top that list.

Link: Guardian article

Share this post:

We7 is a new venture, currently in beta, that offers free, legally downloadable music. The catch is that each track is prefaced with a brief (10 second) audio advertisement. There are currently only a few tracks available, but they’re from relatively well-known artists e.g. Herbie Hancock, Hall and Oates and Coolio. This may well be evidence of the sort of backing for this project (Peter Gabriel is the big name). The music is DRM-free. The We7 website states that relevant ads will be attached to the track on download so that they can be targeted according to user demographics.

When I registered with the website, the technology worked smoothly and I was able to download and play a Herbie Hancock track without a problem. The advertisement consisted of a female voice stating “I’ll pay for a download when I die, until then… We7″.  I’d rather not have had to listen to it, but it was brief and pretty painless. The business model is certainly innovative - it will be interesting to see whether it succeeds when it launches properly this summer.

Link: We7
Via: Soundtracking

Share this post:

A new service launching 14 May will supply purchasers of vinyl with 320Kbps non-DRM MP3s of their music at no extra cost. Digiwax is a new enterprise from UK-based First Word Records, suppliers to the DJ market. Every purchase of double-weight vinyl comes with access to a password-protected area to download the same music from the Digiwax’s website. It’s not clear whether this is limited to artists signed to the company or not. However, it sets a welcome example to other vendors and neatly sidesteps the irritating process of having to digitise vinyl. I’d very happily purchase more records if this service were offered more widely.

Links: Wired Gadget Lab blog, Digiwax
Via: Mediaor

Share this post:

The web has been positively buzzing with speculation since the announcement of an imminent EMI/Apple “exciting new digital offering”. Would it be the Beatles back-catalogue made available on the iTunes Music Store or something else? Turns out it’s the latter - EMI will be making it’s entire catalogue available via iTMS without DRM restrictions. It’s the first of the mega-corporates to take the leap and it’s difficult to imagine that Steve Jobs wasn’t aware of this when he made his own call for the abolition of DRM.

Everything isn’t quite glory and light: it appears that the deal is $0.99 for tracks locked with DRM and AAC encrypted at 128kbps or $1.29 without DRM at 256kbps. Given Apple’s emphasis upon simplicity, this is a rather surprising move.

Share this post:

The media have had a busy week with Apple’s new streaming media device - they’ve been tinkering, taking it to bits, hacking it and general trying to make sense of whether it’s a great product or not. The concensus seems to be a guarded ‘yes’, though with most reviewers lamenting Apple’s ‘walled-garden’ approach and wishing for more flexibility. Although the primary function of the Apple TV is to play back television and film content managed by - and possibly purchased from - iTunes on your (widescreen) television, this also means that users’ music collections can also be accessed via your television. I’m not an expert in this area, but I assume a significant number of people will welcome the opportunity to play their music through their surround-sound equipped TV. Those considering purchase Apple TV in part to enable this should note the following from PC World’s review:

(…) Apple TV starts copying your content from your iTunes library onto its hard drive in a specific order: first movies, then TV shows, then music, etc. If there was a way to move something to the front of the line, it wasn’t obvious to me.

Walt Mossberg notes in the Wall Street Journal that music and video content can be streamed from any of five computers additional to the primary sync’ed computer with which Apple TV can communicate with, so this isn’t such a concern. However, the following point is more worrying:

Music playback was very reminiscent of the iPod’s interface, with lots of ways to view your collection. Album art for the music I was playing displayed beautifully—so beautifully it made me wish I could navigate my collection by the cover art, like the cover flow view in iTunes. But, alas, that option isn’t available. One other complaint: Once you left the music area, your album stopped playing. I would have liked to be able to continue listening to my choice while I was picking through pictures or watching a slideshow.

Update: Example of Apple TV confusion regarding streamed music

Links: Apple TV product page, PC World review, Walt Mossberg review

Share this post:

Gadget watchers sat up the other day when Slacker announced the debut of its personalised streamed music service, delivered via in-car/home satellite, wireless, web and a bespoke portable player. According to Engadget’s report, Broadband Instruments is a San Diego-based company that has employed former execs from the likes of iRiver, MusicMatch and Diamond Rio, so there’s a fairly impressive pedigree there already.

Users can indicate their preferences via the web or by flagging played tracks. Users will be able to use the Slacker portable player, pictured above, to listen to personalised radio stations, provide feedback to improve the accuracy of the music, and purchase and download tracks (at the now-standard $0.99 rate). It’s claimed that the player, which will debut this summer, will offer capacities between 2GB and 120GB (!) and supply metadata gleaned from AllMusicGuide, the web’s most comprehensive music information service. Fascinatingly, Wired reports that the company has employed professional radio programmers to programme genre-specific channels:

(…) even after users customize the channels, they will follow longstanding programming principles. For instance, rather than merely providing “shuffle within the hip hop genre,” stations will kick off every hour with a “power track,” emphasize new, hot tracks, and mix well-known tracks with lesser-known tracks to allow users to discover new artists without becoming alienated.

Slacker’s website player offers a plethora of radio stations, but tellingly while it offers the following (often pretty funny) alternatives for Rock: Rock, Classic Rock, Hard Rock, Soft Rock, Southern Rock, Party Rock, 90s Rock, 80s Rock, 70s Rock, 60s Rock, Oldies and Teen Rock, under its Electronic/Dance section it only offers Progressive Trance, Chill and Disco. Choosing Electronic/Dance indicates that it will play the “best music from Jamiroquai, Orbital, The Crystal Method, Underworld, The Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and more” - in other words the usual, unimaginative suspects and a few dodgy people who shouldn’t be there. This isn’t that much of a surprise given the mainstream US slant, perhaps the situation will improve if Slacker proves popular.

Another test is what similar artists Slacker recommends when an artist’s name is supplied. A Kraftwerk query results in an emphasis on 70s electronic German rock (Neu! Can, Tangerine Dream) alongside Brian Eno, Depeche Mode and New Order. Looking to Last.fm, which supplies similar artists based upon user listening habits, shows people who like Kraftwerk listen to Aphex Twin, New Order, Depeche Mode, Boards of Canada and Brian Eno. A fair correlation, though without the German electronic rock (which only comes 19th and 24th).

The web version of Slacker is live now. Reports are that the service is good. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to get it to work on Firefox, Camino or Safari on my MacBook Pro. However, the online FAQ doesn’t indicate any Apple incompatibilities, so I’ll keep trying until I can report back on its performance. A free version of the service with ads will be available or there’s a paid-for version for $7.50 with enhanced personalisation and no ads. The free version bears the dread limit on number of songs that can be skipped that I first encountered with FineTune’s service.

From the coverage it looks like this is the equivalent of Pandora or Last.fm’s recommendation radio stations, but freed from its ties to the computer. Whether its ease of use will make for a serious threat to the iPod’s hegemony will prove interesting. Slacker, the revenge of radio?

Via: NYT, Gizmodo, Engadget, Wired

Share this post:

The above is one of a series of scans of a delightfully weathered CD sold off by my local library. It’s published over on my personal blog, A Personal Miscellany.

Share this post:

The following excerpts indicate the remarkable lengths to which the record industry has gone to respond to the unpopularity of DRM, as described in a recent NYT article (my italics):

“… the expansion of the online marketplace, coupled with ever-worsening CD sales, is now all but forcing the music companies to tread on ground they once viewed as off limits.”

“Starting this week, Suretone Records, a label distributed by the Universal Music Group, plans to distribute video files featuring popular acts […] on file-sharing networks that the industry has long viewed as illicit bazaars for pirates… the video files will not be wrapped in protective software to limit copying, executives say. But they will also be incomplete: users who download them will see perhaps half the video and will be directed to the label’s own Web site to watch the complete version.”

“RCA Records […] plans to advance its promotional campaign for Avril Lavigne’s new album with the first in a series of short manga — Japanese comic-book episodes … The video clips, which run two to three minutes each, are expected to be released in unprotected form as free podcasts on iTunes, among other outlets. Fans will also be able to use special software, probably offered on a label’s Web site, to take snippets of the episodes and rearrange them, executives said.”

“[Suretone Records’] files are being distributed online in an arrangement with ArtistDirect’s MediaDefender unit, which is better known as a contractor hired by labels to place fake, or decoy, versions of songs or other media files on file-sharing networks to thwart would-be pirates. Before the Suretone video deal, the company had also begun planting fake files containing promotional messages for advertisers like Coca-Cola.”

Link: Music Labels Offer Teasers to Download (NYT)

See also: Engadget overview of reactions to Steve Jobs’ DRM declaration

Share this post:

Reaction has been mixed: The Economist thinks Jobs is dead right, but PC Mag quotes an unimpressed Norwegian Consumer Rights Group spokesperson as follows:

“ITunes Music Store and others are unfair to consumers no matter how many download services follow the proprietary approach,” wrote Torgeir Waterhouse, a senior advisor at The Norwegian Consumer Council, in response to a letter written by Apple CEO Steve Jobs and posted on the Apple Web site on Tuesday.

More: NYT: Europe Cool to Apple’s Suggestions on Music, Digg listing on ‘Steve Jobs DRM’

Share this post:

In an unprecedented move, Steve Jobs has published a statement entitled Thoughts On Music in which he details his views on DRM. Unsurprisingly, he states that iPods can freely play music ripped from CDs and other media before laying responsibility for the increasingly unpopular rights management applied to music sold via the iTunes Music Store fairly and squarely at the feet of the big record companies:

Since Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the “big four” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI. These four companies control the distribution of over 70% of the world’s music. When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied. The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices.

He then goes on to suggest three future scenarios: continuing on the current course with incompatible players and systems (not at all desirable for users), licensing Apple’s Fairplay DRM to third parties (deemed highly problematic because difficult to control) and thirdly to abolish DRM (is that cheering I hear in the distance?) with the following argument:

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

Given the growing number of European countries threatening to pursue Apple in the courts, Jobs’ statement is timely. Needless to say, the web is awash with the news, it’s excellent PR and it puts Jobs firmly on the side of the consumer.

Link: Jobs’ statement on the Apple site
Further comment: Macworld , Playlist, TechCrunch

Share this post: