Friday, December 14, 2007

snapshot 12/14/07

Happy holidays for video game biz
It's shaping up to be a huge holiday season for the vidgame biz, as boffo sales in November for Activision's "Call of Duty 4" and "Guitar Hero 3," Nintendo's "Super Mario Galaxy" and Wii console and Ubisoft's "Assassin's Creed" drove the industry to a new record. The year is going so well, in fact, that the $13.1 billion in total industry revenue as of Dec. 1 surpassed the total for all of 2006, according to the NPD Group. "If the year had ended on Dec. 1, 2007 would be up 5% vs. last year," said NPD analyst Anita Frazier. "With the biggest month of the year yet to go, total industry sales are on track to achieve between $18 billion and $19 billion in the U.S."


Mobile makers shake up music biz
Mobile operators are losing their grip on the mobile-music business. The latest threats: a planned free service from handset vendor Nokia and a new music-downloading service from rival Sony Ericsson that will launch next spring.

Sony Ericsson plans to offer more than one million full-track songs that users can download straight to their phones or PCs with a service called PlayNow. It's a gutsy move, because PlayNow undermines Sony Ericsson's best customers, mobile carriers like Orange and Vodafone that buy hundreds of millions of phones.


E-Commerce Sites Continue to Struggle With Holiday Traffic
Thirteen years after Pizza Hut debuted the first web-page order form, you'd think online retailers would have all the kinks worked out of their e-commerce sites. Guess again: Retailers have seen record sales online this year, but there's also been a host of embarrassing outages at major sites.

Holiday web traffic has always been strangely problematic. Even though retailers have compensated for growth by continuously increasing the capacity of their sites, a rotating cast of retailers continues to experience e-commerce meltdowns on high-traffic days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This year was no exception, with Sears.com's eight hours of downtime on Black Friday matched by Yahoo Shopping's 10-hour crash on Cyber Monday.

But many retailers, it seems, haven't learned that web stability is more about shoppers than actual buyers. "While e-commerce isn't doubling or tripling, it's catching some online retailers off-guard in another way," explains Harpointner. "There is an increasing number of users who are going online to price items, and they are driving traffic to the sites and using bandwidth in the process." In other words, the retailers have enough online cash registers for customers who are buying, but not enough floor space to accommodate the crowds who are only looking.


More Bands Experimenting With Free As A Part Of The Business Model
Eric the Grey writes in to let us know about yet another band understanding the economics facing the music industry. Apparently the band Big Head Todd and the Monsters isn't just giving away free downloads of their new album, but are also giving away 500,000 CDs. They're actually doing it in an interesting way. Somewhat similar to Prince's recent offering to give away CDs with newspapers, BHTM is giving the CDs away via radio stations. Fans could sign up on the band's website for the CDs or get them from radio stations who are being given the CDs in batches to be given away. While giving away physical CDs doesn't make as much sense as just offering the downloads (it's a lot costlier...), it appears that the folks involved with this project understand the basics: "This sort of thing might very well be the future of music distribution. Give away the music, build a bigger fan base [and] generate revenue through live shows, merchandising and other platforms." That, of course, is what plenty of folks have been suggesting for years, while having record label execs insist it would never fly.


Comedian Hofstetter experiments with pay-what-you-want — and provides numbers
Following in the footsteps of Radiohead, Steve Hofstetter, an up and coming comedian with a strong Internet following among high school and college-age kids, has released his latest album “The Dark Side of the Room” on his Website. He’s believed to be the first comedian to take a pay-what-you-want approach.
  • He currently is averaging about $6 an album, including freeloaders. That’s more than triple what his royalty would be if this we released by a label.
  • The most common price paid is $9.95, what the album would cost on iTunes.
  • Unlike Radiohead, Hofstetter has his fans choose between various payment levels — 1 cent (I wish it were free!) to $4.95 (a bargain!) to $8.95 (save a buck) to $29.95 (big tipper!) and everything in between.

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