Snowcrashing » Mobile Content Trends

A good read on the importance of sites like The Pirate Bay “The complete DNA of social media was right there, from the very start of P2P”: buddy lists, user uploads, filtering content by user, viral marketing, ad-supported content and the potential of mining valuable data. “Even as the content industry celebrates another false victory over file sharing, the world is moving on, to cloud-based, on-demand streaming services — some licensed — where you can hear music and watch videos faster and in a more social way than you can with bit torrent. And as content holders look to monetize those networks, P2P networks provide the only useful template, because they share so many characteristics with today’s social-media networks”

-Cnet: Copyright holders cheer Pirate Bay verdict

Top industry executives voice their hope that the verdict will finally discourage illegal downloaders

-Mike Masnick at TechDirt: Pirate Bay loses a lawsuit; Entertainment Industry loses an opportunity

What comes out of this story according to Masnick, a long-time advocate of the necessity for the music industry to innovate. A good summary of Masnick’s view is his MidemNet presentation.

His take on the verdict moves along those lines: the battle was lost in a court by file-sharing fans, but the war will be lost by the entertainment industry if it doesn’t innovate and find new business models soon. And by Pirate Bay fans, Masnick points out, you have to account for not only consumers but also content creators as “Paulo Coehlo, who found that “pirating” his own book helped him tremendously, and who recently spoke out about what a useful tool The Pirate Bay has been.”

-Billboard: Hundreds Protests Pirate bay Conviction

TRENDS

-Hypebot on Online Radio: Edison Infinite Dial Study Shows Growth And Potential Of Online Media Online radio and video viewership grows, only 21% buy music online.

-TechCrunch on Kindle2: 300,000 Kindle 2s Sold To Date

-TechCrunch on Facebook vs MySpace ComScore Data: Closing The Gap: Facebook Only 9 Million Visitors Away From Passing MySpace In U.S. Facebook is booming in Europe too. According to comScore, unique visits in February more than quadrupled to 100 million, on a year-over-year comparison. On a global scale, unique visitors jumped 175 percent to 275 million.

GOING UP, DOWN AND UNDER

Going UP

The Music Meta-Data Industry (Muze and Macrovision)- DigitalMusicNews: How Macrovision Changed Music Metadata Overnight…

Some big financing rounds emerged this week. Goom Radio attracted $16 million, and SoundCloud lured $3.3 million.

GoomRadio – a new interactive radio service centered around “social DJs streams” and with already a discrete success in France – gets a fairly bad review on TechCrunch where it is dubbed as a new Pandora for the mainstream: Goom Gets $16 Million To Litter Web Radio With Beyonce And DJs

German-based SoundCloud shows some potential with its filesharing services aimed at empowering musicians- but competition (both the professional and free one) is fierce. VentureBeat has the details: SoundCloud raises $3.3 million for audiophile file-sharing

Going UP and DOWN

Itunes Variable Pricing Effect- Billboard:iTunes Price Change: Sales Down, Revenue Up In Week 1 Tracks that now sell for $1.29, up from $0.99, sold 12.5 percent fewer units than during the previous week, while tracks whose prices were unchanged sold 10 percent more than the week before. (Overall track sales were up 3 percent during the week). Billboard also looked at how the sales of iTunes’s top 100 songs (about half of which now sell for $1.29) were impacted by the price hikes. While unit sales dropped about 1%, revenues were up over the prior week, according to iTunes, though exact figures weren’t provided by Apple.

WORKING ON IT

MOG Revamped Service – Hypebot-MOG Music Network Gets A Makeover. Wannabe the Huffington Post” Of Music

MySpace Music is on roll planning to release new features, recover from theFacebook storm and possibly generate some revenues.

–TechCrunch gathers rumors about Warner regrets for a poorly negotiated JV deal- An Embarrassed Warner Music Regrets MySpace Music Deal

–AP raises its praise to MySpace Music CEO, music executive Holt, but it might be too little too late- MySpace hopes to turn free songs into needed cash

QTrax come-back gets a harsh review from ArsTechnica: Hands-on: Free but inconvenient music doesn’t work for Qtrax “Ars gave it a runthrough and found that the P2P-based music service sounds much better on paper than it does in real life.”

UNDER

DigitalMusicNews reports that Passalong Networks Shutting Down; Top Execs Departing

MOBILE

Nokia Comes with music: going up?? Moconews: Nokia’s 5800 Combined With Comes With Music A “Big Hit” 20% of the downloads are over-the-air.

NineInchNails Iphone App is LIVE

Popular industrial band Nine Inch Nails has released a free application for the iPhone, allowing fans to interact with one another and receive streaming content, accessing content and remixes by fans, chatting with nearby fans,etc.

Ars Technica review: NIN’s iPhone app brings you Closer to the band

Chris Borgan insighful post: What Nine Inch Nails Knows About Tribes

Wired excellent video:

MediaPost on the AT&T and Iphone extended exclusive deal: Report: AT&T In Talks To Extend iPhone Deal

PCWorld on Verizon CEO plans for a 4G IPhone: Verizon CEO Says 4G IPhone Could Be on Verizon

MocoNews on new Iphone UI features that would be based on the user activity: Apple Patents Reveal Plan To Adjust IPhone UI Based On User Activity

AlleyInsider on an upcoming (maybe) Hulu Iphone app: Hulu iPhone App Coming Soon, ‘Badass’

MUSIC & SOCIAL MEDIA

Good reads for the week on Discovering Music Through Social media:

-Mashable on HOW TO: Use Social Media for Sharing Music

-Gizmondo: Discovering Music in 2009: The New Tools

New Services

New Chart Scans Web For Top Talk On Tracks We Are Hunted: tracks the most-favored music on P2P and social networks, Twitter, web forums and blogs. It then presents the 99 hottest tracks (according to its calculations) through an intuitive Brady Bunch-style interface. Wired: Sneak Preview: A Fantastic New Way to Find Hot Music

Hypebot shortly reviews WikiCharts “Somewhat like the just launched We Are Hunted, The Wiki Chart tracks data from a bunch of different sources of music (blogs, Billboard, YouTube, iTunes, radio, imeem, last fm lots more) and come up with a weekly top 40 of the most buzzed about tracks”

Marketing through social media

The most viral video ever: Susan Boyle. Mashable: Susan Boyle: The Biggest YouTube Sensation Ever?

Tapulous joins forces with iLike to promote the Coldplay-branded Tap Tap app -DigitalMusicNews iLike, Tapulous Marketing Alliance Begins…

Twitter as a Music Platform: Mike Skinner releases its new songs via Twitter. NME: He’s writing a song a day this week, and giving them all away for free

A lot has been happening in the TwitterSphere this week. Some snapshots here:

-Twitter’s U.S. users nearly double in March

-Oprah, Ashton Kutcher mark Twitter ‘turning point’

MUST READ

TuneCore CEO Jeff Price discusses music marketing and the state of the music industry

Music fans pitch in to design covers, back CDs, map tour

Like DRM, only Sinister-er?

Interview: Lala Co-Founder on 10-Cent Songs, iPhone Apps and Cable Partnerships

Weekly Digest on the Music Industry -April 5, 2009

Antonella Stellacci — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:36:02 +0000

BREAKING NEWS (SORT OF..)

-Google launches a free ad-supported music service in China with the blessing of the labels. [WSJ]

TRENDS

-Why buy when you can listen free?

- The agreement between Spotify and 7Digital sparks a debate on the mixed streaming-store business model. Glenn Peoples at Billboard views Lala as a possible winner because of its more focused user experience. [Billboard]

-But what do teenagers in the US want? According to a new report by NPD, teens acquired 19% less music in 2008 than they did in 2007. CD purchasing declined 26 % and paid digital downloads fell 13% compared with the prior year. In contrast, 52% of teens listened to online radio in 2008 vs 34% in 2007. Downloading or listening to music on social networks also saw a large increase from 26% in 2007 to 46% in 2008. [NPD Press Release].

-TIme for more numbers with Q1 already over. And the reality is again doom and gloom for the music industry with no Platinum album for the entire first quarter of 2009. Not a single new album sold more than a million copies in the U.S. (enough to win the platinum distinction) [MusicIndustryReport]

GOING UP, DOWN OR UNDER

-Fearing the outcome of lawsuits by Warner Music and EMI, music search engine and playlist generator SeeqPod has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection. [HypeBot] Streamzy which let users build playlists from the songs on SeeqPod and YouTube, is on sale on eBay. [Epicenter].

-After blocking all music to UK users, YouTube is now yanking tunes in Germany, after the expiration of its contract with local royalty collector GEMA [PaidContentUK]. At the same time, Amazon opens its MP3 store in Germany [HypeBot]

-Last.fm is still free. Plans to launch the subscription service worldwide except for the US, UK and Germany have been delayed and Last.fm will focus on accelerating new features as SMS billing [MusicAlly]

-How is MySpace Music doing? Epicenter has an in-depth review. Reading is recommended. [Epicenter]

-What is Facebook Connect for? There are many ways to use it and one of them is to automate file-sharing:that’s what Pirate Bay is up to. Now under each track you can find a Share it on Facebook link! [HypeBot]

-More headaches for Ticketmaster, faced with a new classaction for its secondary ticket market practice. This one comes from the US. [MusicAlly]

GOING MOBILE

-On the AppStore side, some good news for Music Apps: the Pandora IPhone App hit 4 million downloads, AOL Radio 3.6million and other music app stars as Clear Channel iHeartRadio, Shazam, Tap Tap Revenge are not far (though numbers are not confirmed) [DigitalMusicNews]. In the meantime, Lala is rushing to get its app live, but still has some kinks to work out according to TechCrunch [TechCrunch]

-At CTIA RIM launches its new BlackBerry World App and one of its focus will be Music [MocoNews]

-And what is Nokia up to? It’s preparing its app store and it promises it will be a “smart” and “social” one. [VentureBeat interview]

GOING SOCIAL

-The clever team behind MusicMetrics launches MuZoid. a Twitter music exploration application. Send a tweet with the name of a band or artist to twitter.com/muzoid and in seconds you receive a link to a web page with gigs, a discography with price comparisons between vendors, and a recommendation of similar artists that you might enjoy.MuZoid uses MusicMetric’s text-mining technology to provide gig and album information for each artist. The company regularly sifts through data from a database of over 6 million artists. If MuZoid doesn’t know an artist, she makes a note of it and gets busy learning. Once enough information’s available, she’ll tweet back to the original querant with an update.[TechCrunch UK]

-Moonalice will post live tracks from their new CD release show on Twitter. Immediately following the end of each song, Moonalice’s sound team will upload it and “Tweet” its availability! [HypeBot]

-SellaBand, one of the online services that enables music fans to invest in up-and-coming artists, will sell its artists on CreateSpace, an Amazon company via a dedicated SellaBand store [Press Release]. Chuck D, named its US Ambassador, speaks about the project and the importance of being good internet marketers to win in the new digital era of music [MusicAlly]

-TopSpin CEO on the importance of engaging fans as a marketing tool [TopSpin]

The BlackBerry App World and the mobile music stores new ecosystem

Antonella Stellacci — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:36:03 +0000

It’s StoreMania again. This time thanks to RIM.

At CTIA, the new Blackbery App World was announced. The store has hundreds of apps available at launch, and RIM says it expects around a thousand to be available in its first week. Like Apple’s store, RIM’s offers both free and paid apps that download directly to your device.

The Blackbery Store has a nice inteface, but some oddities. The main one is that it is only available for relatively recent BlackBerry models–the ones with trackballs, starting with the Pearl which means that millions of people with older models can’t use the app store.

Besides the details, what’s interesting is that as for the IPhone, RIM plans to focus its Store on Music. RIM’s president Mike Lizaridis pitched the Store in his CTIA keynote by pointing out that not only is it sponsoring U2’s upcoming world tour, but there’s a ton of music applications: Slacker, Pandora and Shazam, iheartradio and Will.i.am’s DipDiv. RIM has also secured an exclusive with Ticketmaster, which allows people to buy tickets to shows. In addition, BlackBerry is supporting both Windows Media Player and iTunes to allow people to get songs on to the device and is rolling out Bluetooth devices that are plugged into your car or home stereo, so you can listen to your music on your BlackBerry without having to dock it.

It didn’t take long for the Iphone App Store to become a paradigm shifter in the music industry and mobile entertainment space.

A few milestones from the last few months

-Pink! launches a branded Iphone app, FunHouse, to promote her new album. The app is sort of bare-bobe, with 30-second previews of songs from the album, photos, news and a discography and obviously direct links to buy Pink’s back catalog from the iTunes Store.

-SnowPatrol follow with the release a 3-D interactive booklet, a very artsy one with lyrics and videos.

-David Cook sells his single LightOn as an app with a virtual lighter, for double its normal Itunes price

-it’s then the turn of the Nine Inch Nails with their edition of the Guitar Hero-like app for the iPhone and iPod Touch which lets you tap along to 13 songs from The Slip and Ghosts I-IV on the famous game’s three note tracks. It costs $4.99 in the US, and ties in with a competition for NIN gig tickets and a signed guitar.

-Innovation continues with the Deadmau5’s iPhone app ($3 on iTunes) that lets you load any of 10 quantized Deadmau5 tracks into a dual-track playback engine, which works like a professional DJ software while being easy enough for anyone to experiment with.

-In February The President of the United States of America release four albums as an iPhone application that costs just $3. The app includes the four albums whose rights are owned by the band, as well as rare recordings, live tracks and demos. They’re all streamable playlists – which doesn’t come as a surprise since their singer is also a mobile music veteran, now VP of Business Development at Melodeo (the maker of nuTsie a software application that can stream your iTunes playlists to any web-connected PC, your Blackberry and your Facebook profile).

-It’s then the turn of free apps for Lady Gaga, the Pussycat Dolls, Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em, the All American Rejects, and Keri Hilson. The apps include video content from the artists’ Kyte channels, as well as branding and advertising, click-through links to buy music and merchandise, a built-in RSS reader to pull in news updates, and community features like chat, comments and sharing. Kyte has a partnership with both Sony Music and Universal Music Group.

As predicted by Wired, the AppStore has changed the way music is merchindised and bands interact with their fans. RIM is following and for sure it doesnt want to be just a follower. So more is to be expected.