Category: Music

Amazon’s New Preview Jukebox

Amazon's new jukebox featureAmazon.com have quietly rolled out a nifty new music preview feature, allowing much more convenient previews than before. The site’s erstwhile preview system was always a bit hit and miss, lacking in some obvious functions, but the new system, comprising of a pop-up box control panel with more than a whiff of iTunes about it is much better and demonstrates that it’s not just the better download sites that allow you to try before you buy.

The new feature makes it mush easier to browse music samples and discover artists and tracks that you might like, with all the pertinent information and links near at hand. Tracks from albums are queued up and played in order, so you can get a feel for a whole albums without having to budge.

The Preview section has been reorganised, with the new Amazon Music Sampler coming first – clicking on a link opens up the preview window. Customers can now jump between albums by the same artists, or even samples of recommendations and top sellers, from the same window. For convenience, the Add to Basket button is never too far away.

Samples are streamed to your PC without firing up an external media player, and most samples are 20Kps quality-wise.

Try it out

UK Music Downloads Exceed 500,000 Tracks Sold

Figures from the Official UK Chart Company demonstrate that the record industry can’t have its cake and eat it: although paid music downloads this year have just broken the 500,000 barrier, CD single sales are down. Something has to give somewhere, and music lovers are turning to the convenience of downloads whilst buying correspondingly less singles.

The bestselling download in the UK so far this year is “2,000 Miles” by Coldplay.

Looking at the quarterly totals for January/March, the sales value of CD singles is down by 32% on last year, whilst CD albums are down nearly 3% this year, though the picture for the entire last 12 months is more encouraging.

Surprisingly, that great love of DJs, the 12” single has suffered a dip of 14%, possibly due to the slump in interest in trance – but bafflingly, 7” singles are up 47% on last year. Expect a retro CD single sales peak in about 2021.

Once iTunes launches in the UK and the new Napster finds its feet, we expect that CD singles will be affected even more dramatically, and music labels will need to find some way to make singles more compelling to the public to avoid cannibalising the market.

The British Phonographic Industry is upbeat about the state of the market, expecting great things from DVD music sales and “truetones” (ringtones that sound just like the track they’ve sampled) – no doubt something to do with the 3.8% increase in CD album sales that the year to March 2004 saw above 2003.

BPI Quarterly Market Review

iTunes and Sony Connect Launched This Month; Napster UK High Pricing Explained

Although Apple is yet to make an official statement, many sources believe the European version of their iTunes music store will launch in the middle of June. Although Euro iTunes is expected to be more expensive than its American cousin, the price difference is not expected to be as dramatic as the one demonstrated between US and UK Napster.

Sony has just completed deals with European independent labels, adding another 75,000 tracks to its catalogue. The Connect store uses Sony’s SonicStage software to protect the ATRAC-encoded tracks, and does not serve MP3s. On future developments, Sony US lead Howard Stringer hinted that Connect might feature video content too – which, considering Sony’s huge range of capable hardware, is probably a very smart idea.

We’re grateful to Napster UK for getting back to us on our query regarding the remarkable disparity in pricing between its US, CA and UK stores. The reason? Greedy labels. Adam Howorth, Communications director at Napter UK told us: “it’s simply down to the higher wholesale price we get from the record companies in the UK. If they would reduce their prices, so would we.”

Connect Europe

iTunes

Napster UK

Coming Soon: Ringtone Top 20

Now that the market is worth over UK£70 million (€105 million), KPMG are compiling a fortnightly chart listing the top 20 ringtones downloaded to the UK’s 45 million mobile phones. The chart will be officially recognised by the British Phonographic Industry and published in the trade news paper Music Week.

Even scarier, some sources report that ringtones now account for 10% of the global music market – or US$3,000,000,000 (€2.45 billion). There an interesting contradiction here. On the one hand, the music industry say that it’s customers are quite happy to pay for a ringtone sample from a single, yet on the other hand the same labels claim that the public won’t pay to download an actual music track, instead preferring to rob artists. Could this have been because of the easy availability of licensed ringtones to buy as opposed to a complete lack of legitimate music services in some markets, such as Europe?

Incidentally, it’s a race between Eamon’s “I Don’t Want You Back” and Britney Spear’s “Everytime” to be the top spot on the first chart. Contrast this to Al Martino’s “Here in My Heart” which topped the first singles chart in 1952.

Too bad panda-headed Digital Lifestyle’s favourites Super Smart don’t really have a look in.

Music Week

pro-music.org: 100 Music Stores and Climbing

With over a 100 online stores and more to come, the music download business is certainly booming. It seems that everyone has one – from Oxfam to Coca Cola.

To celebrate it’s first birthday, pro-music.org has published a directory of the legal music download sites and stores on the web today, and it demonstrates just how the industry has grown in just a year.

Twelve months ago, when pro-music.org launched, there were 20 sites, with an catalogue of about 200,000 tracks. Now that number is over a hundred, and the major sites have catalogues of more than 500,000 tracks – as more and more distribution deals are made, that particular number will rise dramatically.

pro-music.org has launched sister sites in Germany, France and Italy to reach internet users around the world.

Jay Berman, Chairman and CEO of the IFPI said in a statement: “Pro-music has achieved over twelve months what its founding alliance partners intended it to be – a successful international educational campaign about online music. Pro-music is supported across the music sector, has attracted tens of thousands of visitors and rolled out in national versions in French, German and Italian. The site spells out in clear and simple terms the legal and copyright concerns around online music. It explains the fight against internet piracy. And, above all, it has tracked the surge of new legitimate services that have come on stream in the last year. Pro-music has a vital role to play in improving awareness in this area, and there seems no doubt that the second year of the campaign will be even more important than the first.”

pro-music.org

Napster Canada Launches

Racing out music stores globally to get in ahead of iTunes, Napster have launched their Canadian service. It’s exactly the same as the others – with the small exception that it’s much cheaper than the UK store. Yet again.

Tracks start at CAN$1.19 (€0.72) and the subscription is CAN$9.95 (€5.98), compared to the UK costs of UK£1.09 (€1.64) per track and UK£9.95 (€14.90) for a subscription.

Confident pricing, eh? Yes, they have sales tax in Canada, it runs at about 14%, dependent on where you live – so VAT is not to blame.

Since we can be fairly certain that Napster UK realise that their customers have access to the internet and can check prices and do conversions, I wonder what their thinking is with making the UK store twice as expensive as all the others?

If anyone at Napster would care to email with an explanation, I’d be delighted to give them a voice here.

Napster.ca

N-Gage QD Ships

Nokia has announced that the N-Gage QD mobile gaming phone has started shipping in Europe. The QD is a extensive revision of the original N-Gage console, and contains a number of new features and improvements, including better multiplayer features, rethought controls and a display that may not actually blind you after prolonged use.

The price begins at a startlingly cheap €49.99 (US$60.77) with a contract, in some markets.

The QD is backwardly compatible with older N-Gage titles, and Nokia are promising another 50 new games by the end of the year.

With competition from Nintendo’s DS and Sony’s PSP imminent, the QD will have to rely on its multiplayer online functions to survive. Nokia are putting a lot of faith in their N-Gage Arena service to connect gamers and build a fan community. Quality, high exposure titles like Sims Online (which is essentially like handing people crack, isn’t it?) and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 will no doubt help to achieve this.

We will have the definitive review of the console here shortly, once we’ve given the console a thorough going over.

Nokia’s N-Gage QD

Music Price Wars – But What About Ringtones?

Just why are ringtones so expensive? Don’t get me wrong here: I hate them, but there is a huge discrepancy between the cost of downloading a music track and downloading a new ringtone for that phone that’s you’ll probably only own for a month. Often the ringtone will cost more than the entire original song it is based upon.

Consultancy firm Informa have published a report on the state of the ringtone market, and it looks like it’s all the music companies’ fault.

A ringtone based on a sample from a track can set you back up to four times the cost of downloading the whole song from iTunes – the cost is inflated because record labels require royalties of between 25 and 55% of the cost of the ringtone.

For example a track off iTunes will cost you about €1.50 (US$1.82 – nearly twice as much as the US store. I’m sure that’s justified) when the site appears suddenly next month, yet downloading a ringtone can cost a staggering €6 (US$7.30). And thank you T-Mobile UK, for that confident pricing. How much pocket money do kids get paid these days anyway?

“The reseller is really between a rock and a hard place,” said Simon Dyson, a co-author of the report. “They are torn between raising the price or keeping it steady in the hopes of establishing a market. Demanding such high percentage rates by the record companies could certainly lead to the market being depressed.”

Depressed? That’s nothing compared to what will happen when phones are released that can just play an MP3 file as the ringtone – then commuter-bothering phone owners won’t have to buy anything at all. Then the US$3 billion (€3.6 billion) market will vanish over night – instead of growing to the US$5 billion (€8.5 billion) monster it’s expected to be by 2007.

Incidentally, I know some pandas who have a really good ringtone album out.

Informa Media Group

Clear Channel Entertainment Acquires Restrictive Patent on Live Concert CDs

Clear Channel has purchased a patent relating to the recording then sale of a CDs at a live performance – and are claiming that it relates to every venue in the US.

Clear Channel operate a service in their venues called Instant Live, where fans can pre-order a recording before a gig and then pick it up at the venue. Clear Channel purchased the patent for this from DiscLive, who have a similar set up. Now Clear Channel are asserting that the patent doesn’t just cover their 130 venues, but all venues in the US.

This all might have something to do with the fact that DiscLive recently predicted it would gross about US$500,000 (€412,600) selling live recordings at gigs this spring.

Clear Channel, (somehow recently nominated by the Fortune 500 as one of America’s Most Admired Companies) have granted US$1 licenses to small bands using the DiscLive service, but are telling everyone else that they can’t sell live CDs at gigs. Apparently, the patent doesn’t apply to bands who sell their disks days after the performance, only when the recording is sold immediately afterwards.

Steve Simon, Clear Channel executive vice president and the director of Instant Live told the Rolling Stone without a hint of irony: /2We want to be artist-friendly. But it is a business, and it’s not going to be ‘we have the patent, now everybody can use it for free.'”

Expect test cases to begin soon.

The Rolling Stone covers the story

Oxfam Launches pan-European Music Service Today

Oxfam have launch their own OD2-backed music service, Big Noise Music, on 26th May. Instead of scratched vinyl records of ELO’s Out of the Blue, the charity hopes to lure customers with 300,000 pristine tracks. How they’re going to recreate the musty charity shop smell and the insane elderly volunteer staff is anyone’s guess.

Tracks cost the usual UK£0.75 to UK£0.99 (€1.12 to €1.48), with UK£0.10 (€0.15) from each going to Oxfam’s good causes. The site is pan-Europe, but the genius move is that all the prices are in Sterling.

Adrian Lovett, Oxfam’s Director of Campaigns and Communications said in a statement, “Bignoisemusic.com works for everyone. Music lovers get great tracks and artists see their music helping some of the poorest people in the world, through real cash support and by building the worldwide movement to Make Trade Fair.”

The site has received plenty of endorsements from stars, featuring exclusive tracks from George Michael and Coldplay.

Big Noise Music