Sony BMG’s global digital business president Thomas Hesse was full of optimism about the emerging opportunities brought about by digital distribution channels such as iTunes and ringtones.
Speaking at the Music 2.0 conference, Hesse predicted that digital music was expected to grow to 19-20 percent of the market by 2008, adding that this was “a fundamental transformation.”
Although the single format no longer rules the pop world, Hesse enthused about lucrative new possibilities brought about by digital music technologies which could increase returns on songs.
These might include whetting the public’s appetite with extra bundled content such as exclusive digital sales, artist interviews, video footage and acoustic versions of songs.
The Sony bigwig suggested that the record industry could learn from the movie studios where carefully-timed “release windows” have helped maximise commercial opportunities for new films.
Historically, the record industry has usually shunted everything out at the same time, but Hesse advised that early releases to specific formats like ringtones and iTunes downloads could rake in extra dollars, with the “real” tracks arriving later in a host of other digital and physical formats.
Hesse also expressed his preference for new payment systems for artists, where they get paid a percentage by total revenue sales, rather than unit sales.
Sony BMG Exec Sees Brave New Digital World [Digital Music News]
We’ve all known for a long time that TV as we knew-and-loathed-it was under pressure, as people discovered there were things more rewarding in their lives than passively sitting in a darkened room, being bathed in light from a box in the corner of the room, watching whatever the channel controller decided to ‘entertain’ them with.
In 2003 the BBC did some far more interesting research in this area. Of course they found that numbers of hours watched dropped, but what we found significant was that those hours that were being spent in front of the TV, weren’t dedicated to watching it.
Let’s start this week’s news with some nice, old-fashioned, technological paranoia: As a teenager, you start to realise that giving everyone your mobile number, letting people know where you live and freely handing out your email address can be a bad thing. Imagine my surprise then when I found out that the Australian government had 
DRM on motherboards
In other news: After years of Apple thinking themselves obviously superior by having just the one mouse button, and after years of jokes about how Mac users are inferior because they can’t use more than the one button, Apple has gone back and decided to bring out a mouse with not one, not two, but three buttons, as well as a four way scroll wheel. They have called their mouse, quite simply, 
It’s farewell to film at Dixons, as the company announced that it would no longer stock 35mm film-based cameras.
After reaching a peak in the UK of 2.9 million cameras sold in 1989, 35mm camera sales have been steadily falling, with the public being wooed by the convenience, improving quality and falling costs of consumer digital cameras.
“Time and technology move on … digital cameras are now the rule, rather than the exception. We have decided that the time is now right to take 35mm cameras out of the frame,” Magrath added.
After a period of speculation, a press release on UK cable company NTL’s Web site makes it official that they intend to move their customers to broadband connection “up to 10Mb as standard.”
We think it may be some time before this actually gets to the customers, as NTL are also talking of introducing an interim service, ‘The Turbo Button,’ which will burst a connection to higher speeds, when customers are downloading bandwidth heavy content like video.
O2 is set to introduce the new Windows Xda Exec, touted as the most feature-packed smartphone ever released.
Powering the smartphone is an Intel PXA270 520MHz processor supported by 128MB ROM and 64MB RAM onboard, with expansion taken care of via a MMC/SD Card slot (supporting SDIO).
Yahoo is testing a new Audio search facility to let users find audio files on the Web.
Although the service is still in beta we were impressed with its speedy and simple interface: typing in the name of one of my (sadly) obscure old punk songs immediately brought up the album details, a list of download locations and links to reviews and other released albums.
Almost a fifth of US consumers have admitted falling victim to identity theft, with younger adults at greatest risk, according to new figures.
Experian-Gallup found that around two-thirds of consumers who have yet to experience identity theft felt that it was unlikely to happen to them, with only six per cent taking the precaution of purchasing some form of identity theft protection.
Mobile operator 3 has announced a partnership with EMI Music UK to supply full-length music tracks directly to the three million customers on their network.
The agreement will also enable customers to access music from EMI’s other UK labels which include Parlophone, Relentless and Virgin with the “hottest and freshest” 100 EMI Music UK’s tracks made available for downloading in either WMA or AAC format (depending on the handset).
In a flurry of synergetic deals, Robbie Williams launched his single “Misunderstood” on the 3 network before it had been heard on TV or radio and Natasha Bedingfield and Rooster have also streamed concerts live to 3’s customers.
BSkyB has announced The Gnome, a wireless digital receiver gadget that lets Sky subscribers listen to radio (or TV) anywhere around the house.
The natty wireless receiver works with all Sky boxes and lets subscribers get an earful of over 80 digital radio channels – as well as the television channels in their Sky package – at no extra charge.
A somewhat mellower Brian Sullivan, BSkyB’s director of customer products and services, observed that the Gnome was a “fun product that adds value and flexibility for Sky’s growing customer base.”