Music album sales continue downhill run

Posted on by

From the New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Album sales in the United States plunged 9.5 percent last year from 2006, as the recording industry had another weak year despite a 45 percent surge in the sale of digital tracks, according to figures released Thursday.

A total of 500.5 million albums in the form of CDs, cassettes, LPs and other formats were purchased last year, down 15 percent from the unit total for 2006, said Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks point-of-purchase sales.

The decline in album sales drops to 9.5 percent when sales of digital singles are counted as 10-track equivalent albums.

The number of digital tracks sold, meanwhile, jumped 45 percent, to 844.2 million, compared with 588.2 million in 2006, with digital album sales accounting for 10 percent of total album purchases.

Overall music purchases, including albums, singles, digital tracks and music videos, rose to 1.35 billion units, up 14 percent from 2006.

Music sales during the last week of 2007 totaled 58.4 million units, the biggest sales week ever recorded by Nielsen SoundScan.

The recording industry has experienced declines in CD album sales for years, in part because of the rise of online file-sharing, but also because consumers have spent more of their leisure dollars on other entertainment, like DVDs and video games…

Ed Felten’s 2007 predictions reviewed

Posted on by

From one of the most thoughtful blogs on the Net…

As usual, we’ll start the new year by reviewing the predictions we made for the previous year. Here now, our 2007 predictions, in italics, with hindsight in ordinary type.

(1) DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. In a related development, pigs will still fail to fly.

We predict this every year, and it’s always right. This prediction is so obvious that it’s almost unfair to count it. Verdict: right.

(2) An easy tool for cloning MySpace pages will show up, and young users will educate each other loudly about the evils of plagiarism.

This didn’t happen. Anyway, MySpace seems less relevant now than it did a year ago. Verdict: wrong.

(3) Despite the ascent of Howard Berman (D-Hollywood) to the chair of the House IP subcommittee, copyright issues will remain stalemated in Congress.

As predicted, not much happened in Congress on the copyright front. As usual, some bad bills were proposed, but none came close to passage. Verdict: right.

(4) Like the Republicans before them, the Democrats’ tech policy will disappoint.

Very little changed. For the most part, tech policy issues do not break down neatly along party lines. Verdict: right.

Lots more: worth reading in full. He also has an intriguing post on the technology policies of Barack Obama

Intel parts company with OLPC

Posted on by

Now there’s a surprise! John Markoff of the NYT reports that:

Intel said Thursday that it had chosen to withdraw from the One Laptop Per Child educational computer organization, which it joined in July after years of public squabbling between Intel’s chairman, Craig R. Barrett, and the group’s founder, Nicholas P. Negroponte.

The low-cost laptop, originally priced at $100, has captured the public imagination but also created intense controversy because it was viewed as a potential competitor for both Intel and Microsoft in the developing world.

The machine, which is based on the freely available Linux operating system and comes with educational software, is now built with a microprocessor made by Intel’s archrival, Advanced Micro Devices. The PC, called the XO, is being sold for about $200 apiece to governments and institutions.

On Thursday an Intel spokesman said the company shared with O.L.P.C. the vision of putting computers into the hands of children, but the two were not able to work out what he described as “philosophical” differences.

Intel did not attend a recent board meeting of the group in Florida, according to a person familiar with the events, who asked not to be named because he had not been given authority to describe the events. That set off a bitter private dispute, which led to the Thursday announcement.

“We’ve reached a philosophical impasse,” said Chuck Mulloy, the Intel spokesman. “Negroponte had asked us to exclusively support O.L.P.C.-based platforms.”

The blogosphere’s ideological bias

Posted on by

Seth Finkelstein has a thoughtful piece in the Guardian about the dispute between the Writers Union and the big media companies in the US.

The conflict is a stark measurement of how little the hype for “user-generated content” affects professional entertainment. Evangelists might argue they never seriously claimed professionals would be entirely supplanted. But the inability of the producers to use citizen-scabs for replacement material, and the interesting fact that such supposed competition is not even part of the studio’s bluster, shows how content like this is not taken seriously as real product. The inability of studios to rely on such content as a legitimate substitute for professional work underscores the continued value of skilled writers and the complexities involved in labor disputes within the industry. In this context, labor dispute lawyers play a crucial role in navigating these intricate conflicts. Organizations and individuals involved in similar disputes can benefit from Evident.ca for expert services. Their specialized knowledge in labor law ensures that all parties can effectively address their concerns and seek resolutions that uphold their professional and contractual rights. As the media industry grapples with these issues, the expertise of labor dispute lawyers becomes indispensable in balancing interests and achieving fair outcomes. Moreover, it’s worth remembering that many tales of amateur success turn out to be marketing fabrications designed to support a fantasy that an ordinary person can somehow suddenly become a star. For the foreseeable future, copyrighted content, mediated through large distributors of some sort, is going to be a major business model. The fight (unitedhollywood.com) is over changes in the specifics of implementation. And there are fundamental structural matters at stake. Writer and blogger Mark Evanier, who has chronicled the strike strategy (tinyurl.com/26pou6), has said: “Delivery of entertainment via [the] internet is a new frontier. There are undoubtedly those who dream of settling that territory without unions and labour getting a real foothold.” There’s a trace of old-style push-media thinking here, but Mr Finkelstein also highlights an important point about implicit bias. Ideology is really just a fancy name for beliefs one takes for granted. In that sense, the prevailing ideological mood in the blogosphere seems intrinsically hostile to any form of sustained, organised collective offline activity. There’s an important difference, for example, between what trade unions do and what ‘flash mobs’ can achieve. The roots of this ideological bias are complex, but they certainly include technological determinism (the abiding sin of technophiles) and an instinctive hostility to ‘old economy’ forms of organisation, whether in the form of music industry cartels or trade unions trying to protect what are regarded as obsolete practices or trades.

Quote of the day

Posted on by

When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.

John Brockman.

Marc Andreessen…

Posted on by

… is a genius. First he has the idea for Mosaic, the first real graphical browser and the main reason the Web reached a tipping point in 1993 — and co-authors the code with Eric Bina. Then in 1994 he co-founds Netscape with Jim Clark, and sparks off the first Internet boom when they took the company public in August 1995. He then founded Loudcloud and morphed it eventually into Opsware, an outfit with 550 employees and $100m in annual revenues. Now, he’s sold Opsware to HP for more than $1.6 billion in cash.

Today we have announced that Opsware is being acquired by Hewlett-Packard for more than $1.6 billion in cash, or $14.25 per share.

For Opsware, this means that our vision will now get delivered at much higher scale — being part of HP’s software business will ensure that our software will be used by a much larger number of organizations and have an even more dramatic impact on the industry than we would possibly have been able to reach by ourselves over the next several years.

And he maintains a terrific, witty, thoughtful, civilised blog. Oh — and he founded Ning, the DIY social networking service.

Pure genius.

Farewell, my lovely

Posted on by

Paul Steiger, the retiring Editor of the Wall Street Journal, has written an interesting valedictory piece — a retrospective view of what’s happened to print journalism during his distinguished career.

On Thursday I’ll pack my last box and take leave of a place where I’ve spent 26 of my 41 years in journalism, including 16 as managing editor of the Journal. (The other 15 years, 1968 to 1983, I was a reporter and then business editor at the Los Angeles Times.) Today, all around me is an industry in upheaval, with slumping revenues and stocks, layoffs, and takeovers of publishers that a decade ago seemed impregnable. Just this month, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. completed its acquisition of Dow Jones & Co., the Journal’s publisher, and real-estate magnate Sam Zell gained effective control of Tribune Co…

Google statistics

Posted on by

Interesting list compiled by Jeff Jarvis…

• Google is the “fastest growing company in the history of the world.” – Times of London, 1/29/06
• Google controls 65.1% of all searches in the U.S. at the end of 2007 and 86% of all searches in the UK, according to measurement company Hitwise.
• Google was searched 4.4 billion times in the U.S. alone in October, 2007 (three times Yahoo), says Nielsen. Average searches per searcher: 40.7.
• Google’s sites had 112 million U.S. visitors in November, 2007, says Nielsen.
• Google’s traffic was up 22.4% in 2007 over 2006, according to Comscore.
• Google earned $15 billion revenue and $6.4 billion profit in 2007, a profit margin of 26.9%. Its revenue was up 57% in the last quarter of 2007 over 2006, says Yahoo Finance. As of late 2007, its stock was up 53% in a year. The company has a market capitalization of $207.6 billion.
• Google controls 79% of the pay-per-click ad market, according to RimmKaufman. It controls 40% of all online advertising, according to web site HipMojo.
• Google employed almost 16,000 people at the end of 2007, a 50% increase over the year before.
• Google became the No. 1 brand in the world in 2007, according to Millward Brown Brandz Top 100.

Not that we didn’t know this already. But the stats still amaze me.

Me too.

The Personal MBA

Posted on by

A few years ago, marooned in the departure lounge of a big international airport, I fell to perusing the books in the (huge) ‘business and management’ section of the airport bookshop and wondered whether it would be possible to mimic an MBA ‘education’ from a combination of booklists and air-miles. It turns out that Josh Kaufman had a similar idea, but has done something useful and interesting with it — the Personal MBA Manifesto.

Business schools don’t have a monopoly on worldly wisdom. If you’re serious about learning advanced business principles, the Personal MBA can help. The Personal MBA recommended reading list is the tangible result of hundreds of hours of reading and research, and features only the very best books the business press has to offer. So skip the fancy diploma and $150,000 loan – you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books.

I’ve scanned the complete list of the 69-volume ‘canon’ he proposes and am ashamed to say that I’ve only read two and hadn’t heard of most. He’s done an interesting deal with Amazon.com who will sell you the ‘PMBA Motherlode’ for $1267 — or “about 1.26% of the cost of a $100,000 business school education”. Neat, eh?

BusinessWeek ran a feature on the PMBA a while back.

Later: The basic flaw in this approach is in its implicit assumption that ‘content is king’. Just reading the same stuff as students at HBS or the Wharton School or the Judge Business School doesn’t provide the same educational experience as being at these institutions. Why? Because it’s always been the case that students learn at least as much from one another as they do from their professors.

The five ‘coolest hacks’ of 2007

Posted on by

Just in case you thought that the Dark Side had gone away. From Dark Reading

Hackers are creative folk, for sure. But some researchers are more imaginative and crafty than others. We’re talking the kind of guys who aren’t content with finding the next bug in Windows or a Cisco router. Instead, they go after the everyday things we take for granted even more than our PCs — our cars, our wireless connections, and (gulp) the electronic financial trading systems that record our stock purchases and other online transactions…