Monday, July 27, 2009
Apple Tablet to Recreate “Heyday of the Album (With One Good Song)”
Apple’s long-rumored tablet device may arrive at market before the winter holidays, not after them. This according to the Financial Times, which has managed to flesh out some recent reports coming out of China. According to the FT, the “full-featured” tablet is being prepped to launch alongside a next-generation digital album format Apple is cooking up with the four largest recording companies, one designed to gin up sales of CD-length music.
Microsoft is adapting its Zune digital music player to the “realities of the market”–those created by recent turmoil in the economy, as well as the harsher ones created by Apple’s iPod juggernaut. It’s slashing prices across the Zune line in the hopes of protecting holiday sales.
Not that it would ever have happened anyway, but Apple will not be shutting down the iTunes Store in protest over increased royalty rates paid to songwriters and publishers for CDs and digital music downloads.
Overall CD sales are plummeting after eight years of unflagging erosion. Digital music sales now account for 15 percent of recording industry’s revenues worldwide and 30 percent in the United States, according to recent data from The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. And those numbers are climbing faster than ever. Consider: This past June, Apple said it has sold some five billion songs on its iTunes Store. Clearly, physical media are giving way to the Internet as a means of music distribution. What better time, then, to reinvent the music industry’s business model for physical media, as SanDisk hopes to do with its new microSD memory card album format?
Guess AC/DC and Garth Brooks have something in common after all. They’re both Wal-Mart-only artists. When AC/DC’s new album, “Black Ice,” arrives at market on Oct. 20, it will be sold exclusively in the U.S. at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club. 
Apple’s iTunes digital media store has now sold more than 5 billion songs since its 2001 debut. And with downloads of digital movies having reached 50,000 a day, the service has become the leading purveyor of online music and videos.
Turns out the long-playing (LP) record album may not be as much of an anachronism as once thought. As CD sales slip into the mud, and digital music outlets pop up on the Web as quickly as Starbucks stores, vinyl is staging a comeback.
If Bono is U2’s geopolitical pragmatist, the band’s manager, Paul McGuinness, is its neo-Luddite. At the Music Matters confab in Hong Kong, McGuinness slagged broadband Internet service providers, accusing them of aiding and abetting music piracy while CD sales and royalty payments to musicians plunge.
