snapshot 1/03/08

Netflix, LG to offer movie set-top box
DVD rental company Netflix Inc on Wednesday said it was developing a set-top box with LG Electronics Inc to let subscribers watch movies streamed directly from the Web to their TVs. The leader of online DVD rentals will be entering an increasingly crowded and confusing market when it rolls out the new device via an LG-networked player sometime in the second half of 2008.


EU screens plan for single market in online films, music and games
The European Commission said Thursday it would draw up plans to boost the online market for music, films and games while promising to uphold intellectual property rights. The commission said content providers, telecom companies and Internet service providers should work together to make more online content available, while ensuring the robust protection of intellectual property rights.


CinemaNow, Macrovision ink tech pact
Online movie download site CinemaNow Inc. has struck a deal with software maker Macrovision Corp. aimed at making it easier for manufacturers of media players and other devices to make their products compatible with CinemaNow's on-demand movi


Apple, Microsoft to Tangle over Music Extras
There is a reason people still buy CDs more than they do digital albums. Actually there are several, but viruses that come along with music via peer-to-peer sites (P2P) and a concern over digital rights management (DRM) aren't the only culprits. Digital music files just don't provide the same amount of content that a CD package does. That includes liner notes, extended album art and lyrics. Buy a digital album today and all you get are a list of tracks and (maybe) a thumbnail image of the album cover that you can't even read.

It's one of the reasons music fans still turn to P2P networks for their music. In addition to providing music free of charge and free of DRM, P2P sites in many cases also include digital copies of such extras typically found in the CD. According to label sources and pirate network tracking firms, fans downloading full albums from BitTorrent sites almost universally choose files that include scans of the CD booklet over those that don't.


Radiohead: Artists often screwed by digital downloads
You might think, if you didn't work in the music business, that famous artists stand to make mad cash from popular albums on iTunes and other digital storefronts. Sadly, that's not the case, and Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has spent the last week calling out the labels for it. He recently told BBC Radio 4 that "the big infrastructure of the music business has not addressed the way artists communicate directly with their fans. In fact, they seem to basically get in the way. Not only do they get in the way, but they take all the cash."

It's a common complaint from artists. "Weird Al" Yankovic noted on his web site last year that "I actually do get significantly more money from CD sales, as opposed to downloads," though he seemed a bit puzzled about why this was the case. "This is the one thing about my renegotiated record contract that never made much sense to me. It costs the label NOTHING for somebody to download an album (no manufacturing costs, shipping, or really any overhead of any kind) and yet the artist (me) winds up making less from it. Go figure."


Rhapsody Pulls Plug On Non-Public APIs, Effectively Shuts YottaMusic Down
A reader of ours tipped us off today about the recent demise of a highly regarded music service called YottaMusic that was shut down on December 30th after Rhapsody had given the service a December 31st deadline for ceasing use of its non-public APIs and data.


Country Album Sales Down 16% in 2007, Digital Sales Lag
Over at MusicRow.com there are some stats on last year's country music sales. Country album sales dropped 16.3% in 2007, to 62.7 million units from 74.9 million units. That's the worst annual total for country in the Soundscan era.

But the genre's health should be measured by market share, which held steady at 12.5% (compared to 12.7% in 2006). To gauge country labels' 2007 performance, the final tally should be adjusted to remove The Eagles' sales. The band's label-less Wal-Mart exclusive, Long Road Out of Eden, represented an incredible 4.4% of country sales in 2007. That's about 2.75 million units. Adjusted for Long Road Out of Eden, an album that probably would not have been released on a country label if it was released by a label, country sales dropped about 20% in 2007 and its market share was roughly 12% (as opposed to the official mark of 12.5%). Country fans are behind the curve when it comes to digital music. Country digital album sales represented just 4.5% of total album sales in 2007 (versus 10% overall).


Study: iPod, PMP markets near-flat in 2008
his year will be the first that the world's dedicated portable media player market will show clear signs of having neared or reached its peak, according to a new study published by iSuppli. While growth in 2007 was already cooling off compared to the rush of early years, having edged 8 percent ahead year-over-year, 2008 will represent considerably slowed results. Predictions have sales income expanding by only 3.5 percent; the slowdown is expected to continue until at least 2011, where growth may be virtually non-existent at just 1 percent higher than it is today, according to the report. At least some of this can be attributed to lower-cost music players, which may sell in greater numbers but ultimately generate less revenue than in the past.

The majority of this chilling effect is because users are changing over to cellphones, iSuppli says. While few actively use the devices for media playback, the numbers of customers who rely on their cellphones for both calls and media duties is expected to increase sharply and take a significant portion of stand-alone media player sales in the process.


Sony thinking about an online subscription game service?
This is just the faintest whiff of a rumor, but Sony Asia just put up a questionnaire in which it asks how interested PlayStation Store for PC customers would be in a "Monthly subscription plan (1 price for unlimited download)." That suggests that the company is at least thinking about a service that would let gamers play as many downloadable PS1 and PSP games as they want for a monthly fee -- although it's not at all clear if the service would be PSP-only or work on both the PSP and PS3, which would sweeten the deal considerably.


Digital single tracks soar in sales as albums drop
Album sales (including digital sales of entire albums) dropped 15% from 2006, a record SoundScan-era drop and a continuation of a three-year downward trend. The total was 500.5 million albums sold, down from last year's 588.2 million. But digital track sales continued to soar, aided by a record-setting final week of the year. Digital tracks hit 844.2 million, up 45% from 2006's 581.9 million.

The 42.9 million downloads sold last week shattered the previous standard of 30.1 million, set in Christmas week 2006. Two tracks, Flo Rida's Low and Timbaland and OneRepublic's Apologize, broke the record for weekly sales for an individual song, which had been held by Fergie's Fergalicious with 294,000. Low sold 467,000; Apologize racked up 319,000.