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?
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It wasn’t very long ago that Warner Music Group boss Edgar Bronfman Jr. was demanding a share of Apple’s iPod revenue and calling for mandatory peer-to-peer filtering and taxes on recordable media and MP3 players. So to hear him calling for higher royalties from video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Star isn’t all that surprising.
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Back in 2000-2001, when the Recording Industry Association of America was still trying to recover from its CD price-fixing scheme with poorly reasoned justifications for CD price inflation (”Listen, if CD prices were governed by the Consumer Price Index, you’d be paying $33.86 for them instead of $12.75!”), a little company called Napster came calling. [...]
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Coming to a PDF Near You: Adobe announced today that it is teaming with Yahoo to put text-based ads in PDF files. … The new and improved version of Apple’s iPhone will be able to download from the Internet at a faster rate, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson announced last night. … For Facebook, Nothing’s Set in Concrete: Responding to criticism from MoveOn, Facebook execs are looking into changes to the recently launched Beacon advertising tool.
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World War II was won by the Allied forces, not only because we were right, but also because we had more men and women, more weaponry and more money, and that money in turn would train more men and women and build more weaponry.
“But being fair, and being just, is what allowed our civilized society [...]
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The per-device royalties Universal Music Group receives for every Zune player sold were apparently substantial enough to buy CEO Doug Morris a bigger set of balls, because he’s out drumming up support for an industry-owned subscription service with which he hopes to loosen Apple’s grip on the digital music market.
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