snapshot 7/7/08

MasterCard Campaign Offers Free UMG Downloads
MasterCard this week launched a campaign with an extensive music component. As part of a new campaign dubbed "Roots of Rock" from New York ad agency McCann-Erickson the credit card maker is offering MasterCard holders free downloads from the entire Universal Music Group catalog from priceless.com. While financial terms of the deal were not disclosed the card maker did say that once 100,000 songs had been downloaded the company would continue to offer the catalog at a price of .80 per track.

In addition select live performances that have aired over the past years on PBS's "Soundstage" will be available for unlimited free download to cardholders. Some of the artists available include: Heart, Counting Crows, Billy Idol, Jewel, and Ringo Starr.

Mobile Music A $7.3 Billion Industry By 2011
Music on mobile devices is expected to account for $7.3 billion of the global amount spent on recorded music by 2011, according to new data from eMarketer. The report, titled "Recorded Music: Digital Falls Short," predicts that music sales as a whole will continue to decline, but online and mobile markets will grow rapidly.

As more and more multimedia-capable handsets are released, the mobile music market is expected to jump from $1.7 billion in 2007 to $3 billion by the end of the year. The figure is estimated to grow to $4.8 billion in 2009, $6.2 billion in 2010, and $7.3 billion in 2011. As CD sales plummet, the music industry is expected to see a $5 billion decline in total music sales in the next three years, from $31.8 billion to $26.2 billion. Because of this, record labels will look to the mobile space for additional revenue.


MP3 player celebrates 10th birthday
The MP3 player is set to celebrate its 10th birthday this summer. The device that would revolutionize how and where music is played -- and the music industry itself -- first appeared in South Korea in the summer of 1998. SaeHan Information Systems' "MPMan" player offered 16 megabytes of storage capacity. Today's iPod Classic, with 160 gigabytes of space, boasts 10,000 times more space. But it was the Rio PMP300 from Diamond Multimedia, introduced in fall 1998, that set the industry in motion.


Listening Post's Top 10 Hottest Music Sites
Change is the only constant in the music business, and that goes double for the digital music business. Nonetheless, we've assembled a list of the 10 hottest digital music websites in the world. Criteria were simple and admittedly subjective: Sites were chosen based not only on what they currently do for music fans, but also on their potential to impact the future development of the music industry. Based on how things go with the first iteration, this list could be updated periodically and opened for voting.


Digital Music Still Has a Ways to Go
That's the latest chapter in a soap opera whose storylines of bitterness and attempted betrayal are positively Gothic, but at least this time consumers are benefiting instead of being punished. Today consumers have a growing number of legal, unfettered choices for digital music, and they all work smoothly with iTunes. The more likely it is that consumers can find songs they want and listen to them easily, the more likely they are to buy them instead of swiping them. The overall trend is a welcome one, and dust-ups between Apple and the labels (however entertaining they may be) are unlikely to derail that.

But the Rhapsody announcement raises questions, too -- ones that have dogged digital music for some time. Yes, more choices are better, but buying digital music is still a needlessly complicated, haphazard process. And why are subscription services like Rhapsody's core product so stubbornly stillborn?


SpiralFrog Claims Six Million Uniques in June
The Deal (via Ad-Supported Music Central) has an article with some stats on SpiralFrog. In the last week of June, founder and chairman Joe Mohen predicted six million unique visitors for the month. The problem with its catalog is evident in the fact that only 50% of searches were fulfilled.

SpiralFrog is available only in the U.S. and Canada, which have a combined population of 333 million. With six million uniques, that's 1.8% of all citizens. In both countries, there are about a combined 88 million people between the ages of 15 and 34. Again assuming six million uniques, the service is hitting about 7.4% of all people from ages 15 to 34 -- almost one in 14. We don't know anything about length of visit or total tracks downloaded, but that is a very large ratio for such a young and incomplete music destination. (My rough math assumes one user per household for the sake of simplicity.)