Category: Business

Will music kiosks change the retail landscape? – Yahoo! News

Will music kiosks change the retail landscape? – Yahoo! News

Still, Kiosk business is at an all-time high, with some providers readying U.S. deployments numbering in the thousands, an executive at startup kiosk provider MediaPort says. Such major chains as Starbucks and McDonald’s have experimented with them

I have never found my self in McDonald’s wondering where I could get Britney/Jessica/Christina mix tape RIGHT NOW.

But seriously, I like the idea that people are trying to take advantage of digital technologies.

Music retailers also like kiosks because they make it possible to offer more titles than what is available on shelves, as well as offer custom CDs to digital-savvy consumers accustomed to burning their own music at home.

That’s cool, but that already exists on my computer at home. I don’t quite get why a machine in McDonald’s or Starbucks or the airport is going to get me to buy music when I can do it at home.

Maybe an impulse buy at the airport if I am bored, but I no longer carry a CD player when I travel, and the machines won’t load to my iPod. I guess I could rip it to my laptop, then put it on the iPod, but it might be easier to just buy a newspaper or Sports Illustrated to kill that 30 minutes at the airport.

Sometimes the big music labels remind me of the government. They have this great knack for taking what could be the seeds of a good idea and finding a way to mess it up.

Saving music, one MP3 at a time

From the national Post in Canada: Saving music, one MP3 at a time

…the commercial universe is no longer the be-all and end-all. Today, discerning music listeners aren’t at the mercy of a few label bosses, marketing gurus and program directors.

If they’re willing to invest even a small amount of effort, they can go online, confer with other fans and have at their fingertips every imaginable artist in every imaginable genre.

The result is that, more so than generations past, the current one really is appreciating musical performance.

A look at how the proliferation of iPods and the ready availablility of music has effected the way people value music.

More Music, Less Opportunity?

Joel Harrison write in his All About Jazz piece More Music, Less Opportunity?:

There seems to be an inverse ratio between numbers of creative music makers and jobs, record deals, airplay, media coverage. Every jazz player is perennially asking, “How do I stay relevant? How do I get my music heard?”

I don’t know that he answers this question, but he does get the conversation started.

Buying Music From Anywhere and Selling It for Play on the Internet – New York Times

Another story about the ever evolving new music business.

Buying Music From Anywhere and Selling It for Play on the Internet – New York Times

…the economics of online stores is changing the financial calculations of the music business, making it profitable to sell a relatively small number of copies of a song, as long as a compact disc is not manufactured and distributed.

The place where I am seeing the implementation of this get sticky is when you hit a niche market that is audiophile heavy. There is a notable percentage of free jazz listeners that are into audiophile experiences, and digital distribution is still lacking in that area. Hopefully the bandwidth and lossless codecs will catch up soon.

Legitimate music downloading enjoys dream week | CNET News.com

Legitimate music downloading enjoys dream week | CNET News.com

…a dramatic rise in the tide of authorized download sales in recent weeks suggests that changes may be afoot in the consumer’s relationship to digital music.

The important question for the music business is whether 20 million downloads represents the new baseline for digital track sales. A year ago, a 33 percent pop in download sales in the week following Christmas permanently raised the bar on weekly download volume by 2 million tracks.

The future continues to arrive.

Boing Boing: Amazon’s author-blogs and the Age of the Conversational Artist

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow has some interesting insights into the artist/reader(listener) relationship.

Boing Boing: Amazon’s author-blogs and the Age of the Conversational Artist

Today there’s the explosion of choice brought on by the Internet. All entertainments are approximately one click away. The search-cost of finding another artist whose music or books or movies are as interesting as yours is dropping through the floor, thanks to recommendation systems, search engines, and innumerable fan-recommendation sites like blogs and MySpaces. Your virtuosity is matched by someone else’s, somewhere, and if you’re to compete successfully with her, you need something more than charisma and virtuosity.

You need conversation.

and

Conversation with an audience recruits fans to choose, through evangelism and advocacy, which art will succeed and which art will fail. It changes the system where the sole arbiters of such decisions work at publishing or entertainment concerns.

Buying an album has become a political act

London Free Press – Dan Brown – Web Exclusive – Buying an album has become a political act

To go to the trouble of actually walking into a record store and paying full price for an actual CD is now a transaction that carries with it all kinds of meaning. It signifies that a music lover is making a choice to support a particular group or musician. It’s a way of saying “I’m casting a vote in favour of the record labels and all of the traditional gatekeepers of the recording industry.”

Or, I would like to add, buying music directly from an artist’s website, either in platic disc or digital format, is casting a vote for that artist, AND for the future of the music industry, or at least one vision of the future of the music industry.