snapshot 10/04/07

Britney Spears tops digital download chart
In the midst of a court fight for custody of her children, pop star Britney Spears topped the digital songs charts on Wednesday as her new single, "Gimme More," posted 179,000 U.S. downloads for its first week in release.

The first track from Spears' forthcoming album stole the top spot away from teen rapper Soulja Boy's megahit "Crank That," which had spent most of the past 12 weeks at No. 1 on Nielsen SoundScan's digital songs chart.


The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free
The economics of recorded music are fairly simple. Marginal production costs are zero: Like software, it doesn’t cost anything to produce another digital copy that is just as good as the original as soon as the first copy exists, and anyone can create those copies. Unless effective legal (copyright), technical (DRM) or other artificial impediments to production can be created, simple economic theory dictates that the price of music, like its marginal cost, must also fall to zero. The evidence is unmistakable already. In April 2007 the benchmark price for a DRM-free song was $1.29. Today it is $0.89, a drop of 31% in just six months.


Keeping your wallet safe from the digital music shakeout
It's a dirty little secret; Many DRM formats will simply die if their benefactor company stops paying the internet bill.Maybe we should explain; When you cough up a buck for a digital track, you aren't really buying anything, rather you're leasing that music for as long as the store manages to stay open, and to support that particular DRM format. If the store disappears, or your DRM format falls victim to obsolescence, you can say goodbye to all those tunes you paid for. Virgin is encouraging users to do something for which they often chastised customers before, burn those tracks to CD and then rip them back to mp3.


AimeStreet Beta's Fantasy Record Label
"Use your new favorite Amie Street tracks to build a Fantasy Record Label. The better your 5-song Fantasy Record Label performs, the more money you'll earn for mp3 downloads from AmieStreet.com. Try to get the highest score as you compete against your friends, and even see how you stack up against all of Facebook. Every song has a score that rises and falls depending on its popularity..."


Time Warner Cable Debuts MusicNet-based Digital Music Service
Time Warner Cable, the nation's second-largest provider behind Comcast, on Wednesday launched two digital music services for subscribers powered by MediaNet Digital's MusicNet and Synacor. The subscription service and download store Road Runner Music will offer unlimited access to more than 3 million songs, radio stations and music videos from MusicNet for $9.95 per month; for $5 more, the Road Runner Music Portable service allows porting to up to three devices. Synacor will provide billing and other back-end services.


Ad-Supported Experiments Elicit More Negativity
Ad-supported digital music concepts continue to bubble, yet the mood among music industry executives remains downbeat. During recent discussions at the Digital Music Forum in Los Angeles on Wednesday, deep questions continued to dog the emerging space.

A major concern surrounded the logistics of layering advertising into a form of entertainment that encourages multi-tasking. "People generally don't look at their screens when they listen to music, they are doing something else," said Albhy Galuten, vice president of Digital Media Technology Strategy at Sony Corp.


Ted Cohen: “Subscription Is Going To Win Over A La Carte Pricing”
At our recent Millennials NYC Conference, Dan Porter, VP of Corporate Development at Virgin USA, said that the only people buying music from iTunes are 35-45 year olds from Silicon Valley and there are not enough of them to make the music industry prosper again. When DMFW kicked off in Hollywood on Wednesday, the music music industry is gathered to share the latest developments about what is going on, besides iTunes, in the digital music space. “Subscription is going to win over a la carte purchasing”, said Ted Cohen, Managing Director, TAG Strategic in his introductory remarks. “The best defense against piracy is great label (approved) music services”, he continued.


Starbucks Rolls Broadened Music Strategy, Giveaways
Additionally, Starbucks is also positioning album download cards for sale, an easy stocking stuffer. Once purchased, the buyer - or gift recipient - can redeem the download on iTunes. That is part of a growing Apple partnership, one that also includes open WiFi access for iPhone-based iTunes purchases at select locations. The gratis wireless program also enables on-the-spot downloads of music currently playing in the store.


The AudioFile: Understanding MP3 compression
Since its standardization in 1991, MP3 has gone from being a little-known portion of a video file format to the kind of ubiquity that most brands can only dream of having. It's both widespread, with small players flying off the shelves, and controversial, dropping from the lips of politicians and advocates for all sides of the intellectual property debate.

But what is MP3? The usual explanations usually take one of two forms. The long version, available in technical papers, is written in jargon and filled with math. The short version, often used by newspapers and nontechnical periodicals, simply states that the process eliminates parts of sound not normally heard by the human ear. But this one-sentence description raises more questions than it answers for any reasonably tech-savvy reader: how does it find those unheard sounds, and how does it get rid of them? What's the difference between the different bit rates and quality levels? If you're anything like me, you've often wanted to know the mechanics of MP3, but not to the point of writing your own encoder.


As for Music, Gates’s Taste May Not Be Adventurous but His Strategies Are
In an interview here this week, Mr. Gates hinted at his strategies for taking potential customers from Apple and expressed bewilderment that the recording industry had failed to turn digital music into a big moneymaker. Mr. Gates said Microsoft’s music strategy focuses on selling songs without copy-restriction software — roughly a third of its overall library will not have the software, known as digital rights management, that limits music copying or sharing.


Apple Fairy: high-def AppleTV content coming soon
According to the Apple Fairy, close relative of the Fat Nano Fairy, there’s gonna be a pretty substantial update to iTunes sometime this month that’ll help to bring AppleTV back from the teetering edge of extinction. Apple has apparently placed a gargantuan order for more AppleTV units in anticipation for the upcoming “iTunes HD” or whatever it’ll be called.

The name aside, you’ll soon be able to purchase a selection of high-definition movies and television shows that’ll work on AppleTV.