Feedback #2

Leila,

This demonstrates consistent research, however you do lack music related quotations and stats. You must demonstrate secondary research in your exam response. Look at adding some depth to your study - browse some of the other blogs to get ideas.

Issues

There is plenty of controversy surrounding new media technologies, which is probably great for business. Warner Music, EMI, Sony BMG and Vivendi Universal claim music piracy is having an 'absolutely calamitous' impact on US earnings, putting industry employees out of work and wreaking havoc with record label bottom lines. So we can see that music on the Internet is a double-edged sword, as it were, particularly from the POV of record labels. Transactions online for music has certainly soared, but it can be argued that spending has actually decreased, as we can now buy one song from an album, instead of having to buy the whole album.

Developments in television technology are considerable, too. The possible physical size of TVs is giant, and digital has opened up massively the space available for aspiring presenters, directors and writers. However, children are watching more and more television, and are getting fatter and fatter and doing less and less exercise:

I. FAMILY LIFE
Percentage of households that possess at least one television: 99
Number of TV sets in the average U.S. household: 2.24
Percentage of U.S. homes with three or more TV sets: 66
Number of hours per day that TV is on in an average U.S. home: 6 hours, 47 minutes
Percentage of Americans that regularly watch television while eating dinner: 66
Number of hours of TV watched annually by Americans: 250 billion
Value of that time assuming an average wage of S5/hour: S1.25 trillion
Percentage of Americans who pay for cable TV: 56
Number of videos rented daily in the U.S.: 6 million
Number of public library items checked out daily: 3 million
Percentage of Americans who say they watch too much TV: 49

II CHILDREN
Approximate number of studies examining TV's effects on children: 4,000
Number of minutes per week that parents spend in meaningful
conversation with their children: 3.5
Number of minutes per week that the average child watches television: 1,680
Percentage of day care centers that use TV during a typical day: 70
Percentage of parents who would like to limit their children's TV watching: 73
Percentage of 4-6 year-olds who, when asked to choose between watching TV
and spending time with their fathers, preferred television: 54
Hours per year the average American youth spends in school: 900 hours
Hours per year the average American youth watches television: 1500

We can also draw links with violence:

Number of murders seen on TV by the time an average child finishes elementary school: 8,000
Number of violent acts seen on TV by age 18: 200,000
Percentage of Americans who believe TV violence helps precipitate real life mayhem: 79

While Sky and digital has indeed meant more room for informative channels and 24-hour news reporting, are these really the most popular channels? I think not. The government recently considered banning TV-viewing for the under-3s, thank god.

I think the physical album will retain its position as most quality purchase. There's still nothing like going into HMV and paying £10ish for a CD and the artists' artwork. Sales have and will continue to decrease, but won't diminish completely. Stores will simply find ways to keep up.

Audience

We are the answer: the audience is the key to success in the eyes of big business since, after all, we buy the products and we won't if we don't like them. We are the victims, it could be argued, of corporate brain-washing at the hands of huge companies like Sony, Microsoft, and Apple. 'Old' media is slowly but surely being replaced by 'new' media, more active, more interactive, less linear. Often these big companies do a clever job of playing up to our modern-day insecurities about social class, wealth, and our 'needs'. And of course, if the product becomes successful, it is a fashion, thus more than simply a technology.

We respond to inventions by purchasing and this allows companies to decipher what is popular and what isn't. Questionnaires may be distributed too.

However, spending more and more time playing on games consoles and listening personally to music means consumers are spending less time interacting with friends and family, which has subtle but prominent consequences for us all. Society is changing: some would say from a community-centered society to a fragmented one. Where before, playing cricket or having picnics on the common were leisure (OK, maybe not, but seriously, it did happen once), now it is seen as a good thing for the whole family to settle down to enjoy a TV programme together. Even this is outdated now as each generation of the family has its own niche in NMTs; have you seen the Nintendo DS family adverts??? I think they're unbelievable! How the government can allow such blatantly influential marketing for a clearly detrimental product is beyond me. The family stare into each of their individual screens and talk to each other through the machines, without looking at one another or talking to each other.

Of course, there are the advantages of convergence, e.g. the 'simplicity' of having lots of devices in one, and it's fun to play on these things, but it's probably true that most people are totally unaware of the fact that the driving force behind these NMTs is economy. Also, they appeal mainly to people who have too much money (sorry, who are wealthy) and leave behind the majority of people who are the 'working class'.

Institutions

Apple is the obvious company, producing iTunes in 2001. Like Windows Player and Realplayer, iTunes is a 'digital media player application', but it also has its iTunes Store section, an online 'store' where you can buy and download music at a monetary cost.

The big record companies, e.g. Sony, EMI, Universal, stand to gain from the boom in online music. They get a share of the money paid for songs on iTunes, and a cut of the price of the albums they endorse. Various deals are in place here, but since the emergence of digital technology, the risk of piracy has soured. We can see how iTunes has reacted to audiences' demands with their plan to release DRM-free music downloads. This is hugely advantageous to their customers, as it means they can buy one song and read it through several different types of hardware (although, of course, this is an extra 20p). An earlier example is the progress from solely-audio iPods to video iPods, and the eagerly anticipated iPod phone.

Apart from in the music industry, plenty of other institutions are reaching out to their customers through convergence, for example the inclusion of a DVD player in the games console PS2.

However, these media institutions will need to try and reverse the huge threat of piracy which has catapulted since the 'dawn of digital'. Additionally, there are deeper arguments at play here with convergence: why do you need a DVD player in your PS2 when you already have a DVD player? And what if you can't afford all the latest advancements in NMTs? Why should you have to pay extra just to put a legally bought song on an MP3 player which isn't an iPod?

Music: the future

The popularity MP3 is driving changes in the music industry that will bring a leveling of income to composers and performers, increase in their share of gross revenues, and drastically increase the number of composers and performers that are accessible to the music purchasing public.

After MP3 as finished remodeling the recording industry, the industry will consist of three players:

1. Remnants of the current/former recording industry.
2. Internet companies that sell CDs.
3. Internet companies that sell individual recordings.

The first area will contain the fewest artists and will operate much like today's recording industry operates. The major difference will be that the ease of creating and distributing unauthorized recordings will limit how successful any artist can be. The more successful the artist, the higher the percentage of unauthorized recordings being passed around. Efforts to create a copy-proof format will fail because at some point the audio has to be converted into an analog signal that can drive the speaker. This analog signal is in the computer in digital form before it is sent to the audio card and can easily be recaptured and converted into any format without loss of quality. And after the first digital copy is made then all subsequent copies will have the same quality as the first.

Next will be Internet companies that handle CDs recorded by full-time professionals. They will have downloadable (reduced audio quality) selections from the CD available at their sites. The consumer will listen to the download to determine if they want to order the high quality CD.

Finally will be Internet companies handling individual audio files from anybody who has a yearning to create music. These files will be of the highest quality that the individual artist can produce since the file is the product that is being sold as opposed to being a step on the way to selling a CD. These files will be distributed as shareware. Artist earnings will come from shareware payments and more importantly from having their music included in custom CDs where the consumer will pick which audio selections to put on the CD that they order. MP3Shareware.com is a new Internet company intent on capturing this market.

The bottom line is that the music industry is going to have to adapt to new technology. One way would be find another way to make money on recorded music than just selling CDs. For example, many online retailers are losing money on their merchandise in order to be competitive but are making up for this loss by selling ad space on their sites. Even if they can't stop people from sharing copyrighted music, people will still by CDs. After all, it's much easier to purchase a CD than find and download every song on that CD and put it on a recordable media.

The recording industry has to evolve and figure out how to use new technology to make money instead of clinging on to the past. If they don't figure out how to use digital media to their advantage, they will be left behind in the new millennium. It will soon be impossible to make a significant profit from the sales of recorded music.

Napster

Napster is an example of a peer-to-peer network, and the grey area that is the legality of such things. Its huge library of free music attracted 80million music-lovers by 2000. It panicked the record industry as they were not being paid for the distribution, simply the initial purchase, and they could not prosecute individuals because they were simply sharing files; they are virtually impossible to close down

Napster was shut down in 2001 and re-opened as a legal download site, and yet record companies faced greater challenges from other such networks like Kazaa. Time has proven that people will continue to download music illegally, especially in the face of rising prices (like iTunes' recent announcement, which stated that DRM-free files will be available at 99p, as opposed to the previous 79p), so should these networks be made legal?

Music in the multimedia home

Music is now an integral part of many homes, in more ways than before. New convergence technology, e.g. hi-fi, PC, DVD player, games consoles, and radios, has massively opened up the ability for popular music to penetrate the home environment.

In the same way that production has been changed, the action of listening and experiencing music has also been affected. As new media technologies expand and 'improve', our universal consumption is ever-changing.

The digitisation of music files has, at grass-roots level, caused this, as now music can be shared and played through anything which can read and process the series of 0s and 1s.