The move to the new ecology continues apace. TechCrunch reports:

MySpace is getting into the music business. They announced today that they will allow nearly 3 million unsigned bands to sell their music directly to Myspace users. Snocap will provide the back end technology for the service. The agreement also includes performance-based warrants to purchase stock in SnoCap (Fox recently took an equity stake in startup SimplyHired as well).

The music will be sold in MP3 format without copy protection of any kind (see eMusic and Amie Street for similar models, as well as others). This comes as major labels are starting to experiment with free music downloads, albeit with copy protection.

It’s unclear whether Myspace will also offer music from major labels pursuant to the deal. The agreement does not prohibit these sales, and Snocap has deals with most major labels.

Downloads of music from labels would require copy protection pursuant to Snocap’s existing deals. Look for additional deals from Myspace as they continue to develop their overall music (and revenue) strategy.

New York Times report on this here.

Hmmm… The Economist has an oddly unsatisfactory article on the dim future of newspapers. “Newspapers”, it concludes, “are making progress with the internet, but most are still too timid, defensive or high-minded”. The associated Editorial is more succinct:

Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world’s general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.

Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people’s daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on- and offline. And they are investing in free daily papers, which do not use up any of their meagre editorial resources on uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.

Useful piece in Slate by Edward Jay Epstein…

Once upon a time—two generations ago—the movie business was about making movies. Nowadays, it is about creating intellectual property that can be licensed in a raft of different markets. The Hollywood studios still make movies, of course, but by 2005, only 14.2 percent of their revenues came from movie ticket sales, while 85.8 percent came from licensing or selling their products for use in the home. (Click here for the studio revenue numbers.) Until 2005, the studio’s principal access to the home market came through pay TV, free television, video rentals, and DVD sales. But now, with products such as Apple’s video iPod and TiVo-type digital recorders becoming widely available, Hollywood is inching toward an even more lucrative way of exploiting the home market…

Here’s an interesting project.

The Echo Chamber Project is an open source, investigative documentary about how the television news media became an uncritical echo chamber to the Executive Branch leading up to the war in Iraq.

By developing collaborative techniques for producing this film, then this project can potentially provide some solutions for incorporating a broader range of voices and perspectives into the mainstream media…

FROM THE Pew Internet & American Life survey.

By the end of 2005, 50 million Americans got news online on a typical day, a sizable increase since 2002. Much of that growth has been fueled by the rise in home broadband connections over the last four years.

For a group of “high-powered” online users – early adopters of home broadband who are the heaviest internet users – the internet is their primary news source on the average day. Within this group – which makes up 40% of home high-speed internet users in the United States – 71% go online for news on the average day, while 59% get news from local TV. Just over half get news from national TV and radio on the typical day and about 40% turn to local papers.

“The broadband difference is now permeating the news environment,” said John B. Horrigan, Associate Director for Research at the Pew Internet & American Life Project and principal author of the report. “High-powered internet users are heavily into other media sources as well, but the preeminent place of online news suggests that it shapes their offline information choices in an important way.”

Across age groups, the impact of online news is greatest for American adults under the age of 36 with a high-speed internet connection at home. For this age group, the internet is now on par with local TV as a daily source for news, and surpasses national TV, radio, and local papers as a news source. Fully 46% of this group gets news online on the typical day, compared with 51% who turn to local TV, 41% who turn to radio, and 40% to national TV news…

Very good analysis by TechCrunch of Sony’s decision to shell out $65 million for the Grouper online video outfit. Excerpt:

The Grouper acquisition price is out of whack when compared to other recent video acquisitions. US Comscore data says Grouper had about 542,000 unique visitors in July 2006, compared to YouTube’s 16 million. Viacom’s recent acquisitions of iFilm (December 2005, 3.3 million U.S. uniques) and Atom/Shockwave (August 2006, 1.3 million U.S. uniques) for $50 million and $200 million, respectively suggest a per-unique-visitor valuation of $15-$20. Grouper’s per-unique-visitor valuation, by comparision, is roughly $70 – $120, depending on whether you look at June or July 2006 data.

It’s hard to use Comscore data for meaningful analysis as it doesn’t necessarily reflect total videos uploaded or viewed, and doesn’t reflect videos embedded on third party sites. I also only have U.S. Comscore data. However, noting those issues, the $65 million valuation on Grouper suggests a YouTube valuation of around $2 billion.

Of course, it looks like Sony was most attracted to Grouper’s P2P technology for movie distribution, meaning YouTube comparisons are inappropriate. $65 million is still a lot to pay, however, and bittorent, as well as services like Red Swoosh (covered here), are proven and effective means of moving large amounts of data over the Internet.

Wow! This I didn’t expect.

Senior executives at the UK Cabinet Office have posted their first two short films – ‘Transformational Government’ and ‘Sharing the leadership challenge’, a slightly longer clip concerning Whitehall plans to save money by consolidating service departments and the leadership challenges this poses for managers…

Nice MediaGuardian column by Jeff Jarvis

Bloggers don’t think they’ll replace reporters, they want to work in symbiotic bliss, amateur alongside professional, complementing each other’s skills to expand the reach of the news. I call this networked journalism and I am seeing more examples of the two tribes coming together not to clash but to conspire.

For example, when a Reuters lensman faked up photos from Lebanon, blogger Charles Johnson at littlegreenfootballs.com demonstrated just how Photoshopping had oomphed up the action. Johnson was the same blogger who showed how the documents underlying former CBS anchor Dan Rather’s investigation of George Bush’s military service had been faked. But big media’s reaction this time was different. CBS stonewalled for 11 days. Reuters responded by suspending, then firing the photographer. They also gave Johnson credit, which is to say that Reuters saw they were on the same side – the side of honesty.

Similarly, when AOL released millions of web searches, thinking the information was anonymous, it was bloggers, like techcrunch.com’s Michael Arrington, who realised searches can reveal our identity. The New York Times reported a magnificent story tracking down searcher “no. 4417749” as an old lady in Georgia who’d sought “women’s underwear” and “dog who urinates on everything”. The Times, like the Washington Post, gave nods to bloggers for doing the legwork…