snapshot 12/28/07

Americans more wired: survey
About 38 percent of U.S. consumers are watching TV shows online, 36 percent use their cell phones as entertainment devices and 45 percent are creating online content like Web sites, music, videos and blogs for others, according to a new-media survey from Deloitte & Touche.

The "State of the Media Democracy" notes that in Deloitte's first edition of the survey just eight months earlier, 24 percent of consumers used their cell phones as entertainment devices, meaning that usage has soared 50 percent. About 62 percent of "millennials" (consumers 13-to-24-years-old) are using their cell phones as entertainment devices, up from 46 percent in the previous study conducted February 23-March 6, 2007. And among Generation X consumers (25-to-41-year-olds), the number grew to 47 percent from 29 percent in the earlier survey.


Netflix hopes flickering
Netflix has had a nice run, but it won’t last. This week the mail order DVD company got some bad news when the Financial Times reported that Apple (AAPL) is joining up with News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox to rent out digital movie downloads through the iTunes service. Given how Apple changed the digital music racket, it’s only natural to expect the company to make big inroads into the home movie business as well - most likely at the expense of Netflix and its struggling rival Blockbuster (BBI).


Test driving Amazon’s MP3 store
The store is quite easy to use. It doesn’t work directly with iTunes, however, so you have to drag your music over. The songs I downloaded were recorded at 44.100 kHZ with bit rate of 266 kbps, variable. It encoded with LAME and the Song ID was encoded in the info as well along with the artwork. I’m glad to say Amazon got this MP3 store experience just right — maybe an MP3 player should be next?


Music Download Warning List via Our Digital Music
Got a new iPod, Zune or other music player and can’t wait to fill it up with great music? A quick Google search for the best download opr mp3 sites will show some deals that seem too good to be true. Well, they probably are…

You want to steer clear of web sites that claim to offer legal music but don’t have licensing agreements with major record labels; and the nice folks at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) have created a lost of the top offenders. Not only is downloading music from many of these sites illegal; there is no guaruntee that the tracks don;t come with nasty viruses or what these guys might do with your credit card info. Read it here and avoid problems later.


'Noel' is music's saving grace
While Groban's "Noel" has crossed 3.5 million in sales to become the top-selling disc of the year, overall music sales during the Christmas shopping season were down an astounding 21% from last year. From the week of Thanksgiving up through the day before Christmas Eve, 83.9 million albums were sold, a decrease of 21.38 million from 2006's 105.28 million.


Why (And How) I Just Canceled All My Music Subscriptions
Now that three of the four major labels have decided to sell music without DRM, I've finally decided to drop it too. I've subscribed to Napster, Rhapsody, Yahoo Music, and other music services over the years, but I canceled them all on Thursday as a sort of preemptive new year's resolution.

For much of the time I've covered online music, it was necessary to subscribe to these services, but the digital music scene has largely evolved past DRM. Services that use it are simply not where the action is. I may consider buying (and advising people to buy) un-DRMed music downloads from these services, but paying for a monthly subscription -- even though I can expense or write off the fees -- just doesn't seem as worthwhile as it did on the other end of 2007.


Apple, Zune web traffic surge on Christmas
Traffic to the websites for Apple's iTunes and Microsoft's Zune has made major strides on Christmas day, according to new information published by stats tracker Hitwise. The Zune in particular saw major gains, with traffic nearly tripling at 299 percent compared to the Christmas before; the increase was also a 392 percent spike versus the 24th. Most of the visits are connected to downloading the necessary Zune software and to sign up for the Zune Social service that lets users share their music tastes online, Hitwise says.

The researchers have declined to publish the year-over-year gains for Apple but note that Apple's overall site traffic for Christmas is still several times that of Microsoft's, with 0.69 percent of all detected web traffic belonging to the iTunes site and just 0.09 percent attributed to official Zune pages. However, day-to-day traffic increased 339 percent for Apple versus Christmas Eve while the Apple Store itself climbed 169 percent. As with Microsoft's site, most of the jump between the 24th and 25th for the iTunes website is connected to new owners downloading copies of iTunes. Boosts to store traffic are unaccounted for but may relate to gift cards or late gifts.


Apple Making Deals for Web Video Rentals
Apple has been trying to interest a number of Hollywood studios in an iTunes rental service, and several people familiar with the negotiations said that more than one studio would appear onstage at the company’s MacWorld exhibition here beginning Jan. 14 to endorse a new Apple movie rental service.

These people, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the negotiations, confirmed the Apple-Fox relationship. Apple now trails several companies offering digital movie rental services, including Amazon and Movielink.


Kirsten Hirsch & Cash Music - “I wonder if we might be able to do this together”
Kirsten Hirsch (of former Warner act Throwing Muses and now successful solo artist), along with a number of other artists, has started cashmusic.org. The basic premise of Kirsten’s offering is basically something Techdirt’s Mike Masnick had suggested all the way back in 2003.