eMarketer
MAR 21, 2013

Examining mobile, social and digital video activity among boomers, Gen X and millennials

While internet usage is nearly ubiquitous in the US, mobile phone and mobile internet usage are taking a far greater role in digital activity among consumers of all ages—and uptake is poised for further growth.

eMarketer estimates that overall, 75.7% of the population goes online at least monthly, and penetration is even higher among younger demographic groups.

Among Gen Xers, for example—defined as people born between 1965 and 1980—88.8% were monthly internet users as of December 2012, according to eMarketer estimates. Gen Xers are also highly connected on the go, with nearly 95% using mobile phones, and 60.3% of that group using smartphones. In 2012, 38.4 million Gen Xers, or 62.2% of Gen X mobile users, used the mobile internet at least monthly. That accounts for three in 10 mobile internet users in the US.

Gen X internet users are avid consumers of online content. They typically use social networking sites on at least a monthly basis (74.5% of Gen X web users did so in 2012), and nearly two-thirds used Facebook in particular (65.6%). Growth in these areas, as in internet usage as a whole, is relatively flat due to market saturation. Twitter, however, reached only 14.7% of Gen X internet users at the end of last year, eMarketer estimates, and usage is growing quickly, expected to reach 19.5% of this audience by 2017.

Digital video is even more popular among Gen X internet users than social networking, with 78.7% downloading or streaming video online at least once per month.

Millennials take online activity up a notch—though on mobile their profile is very similar to that of Gen Xers: 92.3% used a mobile phone in 2012, among whom 63.2% used the mobile web and slightly fewer used smartphones. (more…)

THE ATLANTIC
MICHAEL SERAZIOJAN 29 2013

Pro sports teams are like what religion and sociology scholars call “totems”—symbols of greater entities that communities gather around for identity and unity.

The Super Bowl, professional sports’ highest holy day, is again upon us. As fans paint their faces and torsos, pile on licensed apparel, andquixotically arrange beer cans in the shape of team logos, the question must, again, be asked: Why exactly do we do this for our teams?

Why, in my own case, do I feel the need to sport a Chargers cap on fall Sundays sitting in front of the television when decades of futility, not to mention common sense, suggests it has little effect on outcome?

The answer—and the secret of fandom—might just be found in a context far removed from professional football.

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Almost precisely a century ago, Emile Durkheim pondered along similar lines. Durkheim, a pioneering sociologist, began digging through accounts of “primitive” cultures like the Arunta tribe of Australia, hoping to excavate the ancient source of ties that bind. His conclusion—as revealed inThe Elementary Forms of the Religious Life—remains as profound and relevant today as it is elegantly simple: Whenever a society (or, here, sports subculture) worships a divine form, it is, in fact, also simultaneously worshipping itself. (more…)

Buying films or TV episodes from a digital media outlet may be great if you watch though one particular device. But what happens if you change from iOS to Android? From a PC to a Mac? From a Roku to Apple TV? We chart it out.

by Danny Sullivan
January 31, 2013

Have you decided to ditch DVDs and Blu-rays to instead buy movies and TV shows only in a pure digital format?

There are certainly advantages to that. But one of the biggest downsides of going all digital is that how you can view your content is largely dependent on the service you purchased it from.

Digital video providers
In this column, I look at how “trapped” video content purchased from iTunes, Amazon, Vudu,Xbox and Google Play may be. The first four video marketplaces were listed yesterday by NPD as among the top ways people purchase digital video. Google Play is probably still in the “Other” category. But with Android devices growing and Google continuing to push its own Google Play marketplace, it seemed well worth including in this survey.

Why would anyone give up on physical discs? My last column, “Keep your Blu-rays and DVDs, Hollywood — I’ve gone digital,” covered some of the reasons I want to abandon them. Digital means I don’t have to get off my couch, find a movie disc and shove it into my Blu-ray player. My Roku player can just pull a movie I own down from the cloud. Digital also means if I’m on a trip, and away from my physical movie collection, I can pull the movie down to my laptop or tablet.

The digital trade-offs
But as many people who commented in response to my last column note, giving up on discs means giving up control. They’re entirely correct, too. You’re giving up the ability to absolutely, positively know that the movie or TV show you own is available to watch in the highest possible quality, without some terms of service down the road possibly taking it away. (more…)

Zoe Keating published on her blog the details of what she made in royalties from the Web streaming of her music. It wasn’t a lot.

By BEN SISARIO
January 28, 2013

Like plenty of music fans, Sam Broe jumped at the chance to join Spotify two summers ago, and he hasn’t looked back.

Spotify, which began streaming music in Sweden in 2008, lets users choose from millions of songs over the Internet free or by subscription, and is increasingly seen as representing the future of music consumption. Mr. Broe, a 26-year-old from Brooklyn, said that having all that music at his fingertips helped him trim his monthly music budget from $30 to the $10 fee he pays for Spotify’s premium service.

“The only time I download anything on iTunes is in the rare case that I can’t find it on Spotify,” he said.

A decade after Apple revolutionized the music world with its iTunes store, the music industry is undergoing another, even more radical, digital transformation as listeners begin to move from CDs and downloads to streaming services like Spotify, Pandora andYouTube.

As purveyors of legally licensed music, they have been largely welcomed by an industry still buffeted by piracy. But as the companies behind these digital services swell into multibillion-dollar enterprises, the relative trickle of money that has made its way to artists is causing anxiety at every level of the business.

Late last year, Zoe Keating, an independent musician from Northern California, provided an unusually detailed case in point. In voluminous spreadsheets posted to her Tumblr blog, she revealed the royalties she gets from various services, down to the ten-thousandth of a cent.

Even for an under-the-radar artist like Ms. Keating, who describes her style as “avant cello,” the numbers painted a stark picture of what it is like to be a working musician these days. After her songs had been played more than 1.5 million times on Pandora over six months, she earned $1,652.74. On Spotify, 131,000 plays last year netted just $547.71, or an average of 0.42 cent a play.

“In certain types of music, like classical or jazz, we are condemning them to poverty if this is going to be the only way people consume music,” Ms. Keating said.

The way streaming services pay royalties represents a major shift in the economic gears that have been underlying the industry for decades.

From 78 r.p.m. records to the age of iTunes, artists’ record royalties have been counted as a percentage of a sale price. On a 99-cent download, a typical artist may earn 7 to 10 cents after deductions for the retailer, the record company and the songwriter, music executives say. One industry joke calls the flow of these royalties a “river of nickels.”

In the new economics of streaming music, however, the river of nickels looks more like a torrent of micropennies.

Spotify, Pandora and others like them pay fractions of a cent to record companies and publishers each time a song is played, some portion of which goes to performers and songwriters as royalties. Unlike the royalties from a sale, these payments accrue every time a listener clicks on a song, year after year.

The question dogging the music industry is whether these micropayments can add up to anything substantial.

“No artist will be able to survive to be professionals except those who have a significant live business, and that’s very few,” said Hartwig Masuch, chief executive of BMG Rights Management.

Spotify has 20 million users in 17 countries, with five million of them paying $5 to $10 a month to eliminate the ads seen by freeloaders.

In a recent interview, Sean Parker, a board member, said he believed Spotify would eventually attract enough subscribers to help return the music industry to its former glory — that is, to the days before Mr. Parker’s first major enterprise, Napster, came along.

“I believe that Spotify is the company that will make it succeed,” said Mr. Parker, who is also a former president of Facebook. “It’s the right model if you want to build the pot of money back up to where it was in the late ’90s, when the industry was at its peak. This is the only model that’s going to get you there.”

Spotify, which began streaming music in Sweden in 2008, lets users choose from millions of songs over the Internet free or by subscription, and is increasingly seen as representing the future of music consumption. Mr. Broe, a 26-year-old from Brooklyn, said that having all that music at his fingertips helped him trim his monthly music budget from $30 to the $10 fee he pays for Spotify’s premium service.

“The only time I download anything on iTunes is in the rare case that I can’t find it on Spotify,” he said. (more…)

Business Insider
Dylan Love
Jan. 29, 2013

Tim Ferriss is an entrepreneur, lifestyle hacker, and author who writes about how to optimize aspects of your life.

His newest book is 4-Hour Chef, and while there are plenty of recipes in it, it’s actually about about how to maximize your learning ability. Ferriss teaches the reader the techniques he used to go from being indifferent towards cooking to becoming a kitchen warrior.

Ferriss’ previous books, 4-Hour Workweek and 4-Hour Body, were released through conventional publishers, but he’s one of a growing number of A-list authors opting to go with Amazon’s publishing model instead.

We conducted a brief email interview with Ferriss to get his thoughts on where books and publishing are heading, and here are some of the highlights on what he had to say: (more…)

The Next Web
January 2013

And so the end of another year and inevitably the time for tech bloggers to share their predictions for the year and naturally I’m no exception.

Here then are my thoughts on how the entertainment industry will evolve through use of technology in 2013.

1. More media streaming services become third-party ecosystems

Following the lead from Spotify, more streaming services will use their accumulated user data, combined with information available from API’s provided by the likes of The Echo Nest and Rotten Tomatoes to power apps – either within their own sphere or on mobile, where of course even more contextual data such as location or time of day is available.

For example – imagine a Netflix-powered app which could utilise users taste in genres and their favourite actors to make recommendations for forthcoming films that will be screening at their local cinema. (more…)

ReadWrite Play
John Paul Titlow
December 23rd, 2012

The new Philip Glass album is completely mesmerizing. I don’t mean the CD, or the MP3 download or even the vinyl version – I mean the app. In addition to more traditional formats, the famed composer has released REWORK, a compilation of remixes, as an iPad app. An immersive, interactive and incredibly cool iPad app.

Normally, releasing an album in the form of an app would seem like a dumb idea. All the open-source-minded, anti-walled-garden, Web-is-better-than-native-apps advocates out there would agree. Why trap your creative hard work behind the impenetrable wall of a proprietary mobile application? I couldn’t agree more, in theory, but something about the REWORK_(Philip Glass Remixed) app for iPad has me wondering if this apps-as-albums concept might be a surprisingly large part of music’s future.

As I’m writing this on my laptop, my iPad is propped up next to me. Just beyond my direct field of vision, there’s an array of cubes floating in 3D space, flowing like water to the rhythm of the drums backing this electronic soundscape I’m listening to in my headphones. If I touch the screen, some of the blocks fly upwards. If I move my finger across the screen, more blocks are disrupted in its path. (more…)

MediaShift

During my grad school days nearly a decade ago, I relished the stories of editor extraordinaire Maxwell Perkins nurturing a promising, yet unknown F. Scott Fitzgerald. Granted, by the time I was studying book publishing, tales of editors and authors toiling together for years to perfect a manuscript were no longer occurring in a business at the mercy of output, distribution, and rising production costs. Those days had been long gone.

Yet, still, I knew writers at the time who wrote books for a living. That’s it. Career authors who weren’t cut from the same cloth as brand James Patterson or renowned writer Maya Angelou or self-publishing marketing phenom Amanda Hocking. They were what the industry considers mid-list writers — talented, consistent, thoughtful, between brands and one-hit wonders, but a necessary piece of America’s literary tradition all the same. A great novel still had the power to trump the number of Twitter followers an author had. Well, Twitter had not yet existed.

These days, however, I know literary mid-list writers who are self-publishing because, while their work has been celebrated, book sales haven’t kept up and their longtime publishers no longer have a place for them on their front lists. Some are excited to take control of their work into their own hands but are simultaneously overwhelmed by the prospect. A number of them, however, are resentful, tired and defeated. They aren’t, understandably so, marketing gurus or on the pulse of the e-book evolution. They are, simply, writers.

The future of books is certainly not a new conversation. But what’s often left out of the discussion is what is to become of the author — the consummate writer who made her living by writing books. The young man who dreams of being a novelist in the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway. What will become of him?

THE EFFORT VS. COMPENSATION SPLIT

Donna Grant and Virginia DeBerry recently put their writing careers on hold because of the pressures of the new publishing world. (more…)

December 03, 2012
Chris Ballard

ROCKETS G.M. DARYL MOREY TAKES A MORE ANALYTIC VIEW THAN OTHER NBA EXECS—AND HE’LL RISK EVERYTHING TO BACK IT UP