Old Media Seeks Fountain of Youth
Read any newspaper or magazine, and you’re likely to read not about music, but how music is listened to. These days, the technology is what grabs headlines. Over the last few weeks, it’s been an older technology that’s been in the news. Terrestrial radio knows that it is being shunned, and it’s ready to adapt and attack. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has “Radio Feels the Heat of High-tech Competition.” What’s terrestrial radio doing to combat satellite radio, Internet radio and the iPod?
“The corporate strategy at Clear Channel is to be ‘more entertaining, more interesting and more compelling to keep step with the ever-changing environment,’ Gene Romano (senior vice president of programming for Clear Channel) says. Clear Channel stations made a concentrated effort to decrease the number of commercials per hour, which Romano says has led to a ‘substantial reduction.’ The number varies and is determined by individual station managers, And there is an emphasis ‘on hiring—and keeping—great personalities, both local and syndicated,’ he says.”
The State of P2P
As we await President Bush’s upcoming State of the Union address, I wonder about the true state of P2P traffic. Are the number of users up or down? How much traffic is there? What percent of that traffic is comprised of worthless files? Digital Music News cites some statistics from an article at eCommerce Times. in 2004, P2P networks hosted 13 billion tracks, and the number of files swapped increased by 28%. But let’s put an asterisk next to those figures, because companies like Loudeye are helping content owners flood P2P networks with spoofed files—fake files that appear to be actual songs. Many say spoofed files inflate P2P traffic figures. How many spoofed files are out there? It’s hard to say. In one MIT study, a small sample of popular songs was downloaded from two P2P networks. Almost 30% of the files turned out to be spoofs. In some cases, most or all of the files were spoofs.
Sony Connect Fills Out Change of Address Form
Sony Connect, reports Hits’ Rumor Mill (via a Los Angeles Times article), is finally getting down to serious business. Connect’s employees will finally be housed under one roof after Sony signed a five-year, $11.3 million lease for the top three floors of a high-rise building in Westchester, CA. The Connect staff was split between two locations. It goes without saying that an online music store can’t get terribly serious about competing against iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody and the others as long as interoffice mail has to travel between Santa Monica and Culver City. Getting everybody under one roof is a classic business management way of saying, “Now the ball is really rolling!”
Gamers, Meet Music Downloads
Marketing magazine’s article on Sony’s plan to allow its PSP (Playstation Portable) to download music had people talking. Oddly, it was the gaming magazines that did most of the talking. Said the website Prodigious Gaming, Sony “appears to be looking to its ever-strong PlayStation brand to break back into this lucrative market with the PSP.” Gameshout News interpreted the move as a call from Sony to the tune of “Don’t buy iPod now, wait for PSP later.” And from The Register: “Given the PSP’s multimedia focus, it’s entirely possible the service could subsequently be used to deliver video downloads.” And why not download music to a game console? Experts are bullish on the future merging of cell phones and music. A gaming/music merger makes just as much sense, no?
Glenn works in the music industry in New York City. He writes about the industry and music in general at his blog, Coolfer.