By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: April 20, 2013

Graphic

Comparing Generations

Wednesday, April 10, 2013
by  Helienne Lindvall

While this week’s IFPI report on the global revenue from recorded music saluted the growth of digital downloading and streaming, there were two countries in the top 20 markets where the trend was going the opposite way — Japan and South Korea.

The Japanese market, which now makes 80 percent of its revenue from physical, saw digital revenues drop by 25 percent in 2012.  This was attributed to a continued fall in the mobile market (which has dominated digital music consumption in the country) and an increase in piracy, causing the country to introduce laws that criminalise illegal downloading.  However, the country’s 11 percent growth in physical more than offset the decline, as Japan was the only country in IFPI’s market top 5 that saw overall growth – by a full 4 percent, making it the second biggest market in the world.

Though the South Korean market has grown steadily since it introduced strict anti-piracy laws, it fell by 4.3 percent in 2012.  (In 2008 it grew by a whopping 25.6 percent, in 2009 by 10.4 percent, in 2010 by 12.3 percent and in 2011 by 6.4 percent).  South Korea’s digital revenues also dropped by a massive 25 percent, which is largely blamed on the collapse of one the country’s biggest digital services, the social networking platform Cyworld.

It appears that a large part of Korean music fans moved from digital to physical when this happened, as the physical market grew by 11 percent and is now representing 74 percent of all revenue.  But because digital had dominated the South Korean music market up until then (in 2010 it made up 53 percent of overall revenue, with physical only representing 22 percent), that rise couldn’t offset the digital drop.

So why is Japan and South Korea bucking the trend? The answer is: K-Pop and J-Pop.

European A&R executive of Universal Publishing Pelle Lidell has been a pioneer among western music executives by tapping into South Korea as a new songwriting frontier about six years ago. Explaining why CDs are so popular there, he points to the fact that K-Pop music companies, the biggest being SM Entertainment, don’t release them in ordinary CD cases; they’re all in glossy luxury packaging.  They’re also often released in multiple different packages – and K-Pop fans buy them all.

Last year, Korean female groups KARA and Girls’ Generation released their CDs in multiple versions, featuring different covers with each girl in the band – and there are nine members in the group.

Sure, PSY’s “Gangnam Style” single (which, by the way, is not in the K-Pop genre) became Korea’s biggest selling single of last year, thanks to its international success.  But it didn’t make a dent when it came to albums.  In that chart, K-Pop ruled supreme. Matter of fact, all top 10 albums were in that genre, with Super Junior at the top, followed by BigBang and TVXQ.

Japan’s equivalent, J-Pop, has also played a major factor in the rise of CD sales.  In 2012, the number of CDs sold (166.4m) surpassed the number of single digital tracks sold in the country (150.1m) for the first time since 2008.  This may be attributed to Japanese companies selling CD singles bundled with promotional content, such as photos and tickets for handshake events.  You don’t get that with a digital download.  ”CDs are becoming the new merchandise in Asia,” said Sandy Monteiro, president of southeast Asia, Universal Music Group.

Sometimes when Lidell gets a cut with a K-Pop song, he’ll make three different adaptations: Korean, Japanese and Chinese.  This is because the Korean entertainment companies often replicate an act’s success in those countries, sometimes with a local slant. TVXQ call themselves Toshinki in Japan, and though SME’s boyband Super Junior is Korean, the company has also put together a Super Junior in China.

As the love of K-Pop has spread across southeast Asia, Korea recently joined a select group of countries that export more music than they import – the other three being the US, the UK, and Sweden.

So what can music labels in the rest of the world learn from these two countries?  That they should invest in K-Pop?  Not necessarily. K-Pop lyrics are usually in Korean with a few English lines thrown in here and there (in particular the hooks), and so far no K-Pop acts have managed to replicate their incredible success outside southeast Asia – not even the ones who have used all-English lyrics.  It’s doubtful that K-Pop artists can replicate PSY’s success, as Gangnam Style’s success wasn’t K-Pop – not even the video was made in a K-Pop style.

Can they learn that they need to provide a large choice of legal digital music services in order to do well? There are conflicting messages here: in Korea, the loss of one of the biggest digital music services resulted in a drop in overall revenue.  In Japan, the decline in digital boosted overall revenue.  But maybe that’s because Korea already relied on digital much more than Japan did.

What is clear, however, is that being creative in the way you package CDs and what you bundle them with could turn around the steep decline in sales – and that, in turn, could stem the decline in overall revenue.  Maybe the music industry shouldn’t be so obsessed with turning all music fans into digital consumers.

April 09, 2013
By Lucas Shaw

Alan J. Sokol uncovered the power of Spanish-language television more than a decade ago, when he did some research into Telemundo. Noting the nation’s growing Hispanic population, he recommended to his bosses at Sony that they buy the network.

Sony did just that, partnering with Liberty Media and Apollo Adviseres to purchase the company in 1998 for $539 million. Four years later, they sold Telemundo for $2.7 billion. It remains the best deal in Sony’s history.

Now Sokol (left), who spent time as COO at Telemundo during the Sony years, is ready to unleash that power in the world of cable as the CEO of Hemisphere — which, began trading on Friday, is the first public TV company dedicated solely to Spanish-language fare.

Formed by the mergers of assorted smaller companies, Hemisphere operates two U.S. cable networks. One of them, Cinelatino, is the second largest Spanish-language cable channel in the United States.

Sokol is convinced that Spanish-language cable is television’s next gold mine.

“Hispanic cable in the U.S. is a sweet spot not just of Hispanic media but all U.S. media,’ he told TheWrap. “Hispanic cable is akin to where the general cable market was 25 years ago when the audience was growing.”

Back then, cable networks like MTV and CNN were just starting to find an audience, but advertisers had not yet caught up. They were not ready to embrace these upstarts with small but loyal audiences.

Cable went on to take the television industry by storm, and most media companies now make more money from their cable channels than anything else.

The Spanish-language cable industry finds itself in a similar position. Networks like Telemundo and Univision have parlayed their large audiences into advertising relationships with almost all of the nation’s biggest companies.

Yet while McDonald’s and Coca-Cola see a lucrative opportunity on broadcast networks, they have yet to embrace Spanish-language cable — which now reaches about 19 percent of the total Spanish-language viewing audience, but receives just 12 percent of its advertising dollars.

Sokol approaches his new company Hemisphere with the conviction that both of those percentages are about to rise dramatically. He acknowledges plans for strategic acquisitions to bolster the company’s portfolio, but for now his focus is on growing what they have.

Also Read: Viggo Mortensen: Why Don’t Spanish-Language Films Get Any Respect?

The company’s biggest network is CineLatino, a cable movie channel that boasts 12 million subscribers across the U.S., Latin America and Canada.

While the majority of that audience is in Latin America, it has about 4.3 million subscribers in the United States, reaching everyone who subscribes to a Hispanic program package.

“We are uniquely positioned as the dominant channel in the current movie space,” Sokol said, pointing to deals for all the most popular and recent movies in the Spanish-speaking world.

His other two networks, WAPA TV, the top broadcast network in Puerto Rico, and WAPA America, its stateside cousin, will target what he considers underserved portions of the Hispanic market, in particular the 15 million non-Mexicans in the United States.

“Univision and Telemundo are squarely focused on the Mexican audience and that leaves the rest of the market underserved,” Sokol said. “It’s not that a Dominican won’t watch a Mexican soap opera, but they don’t have the same level of connection. We want to be the destination for viewers seeking an alternative.”

Sokol sensed a similar opportunity 15 years ago with Telemundo, and his prediction turned out to be correct.

“I joke to some of our investors that I know more about Spanish-language media than any Jew in America,” he said.

If his joke has some truth in it, those will be happy investors.

The French economic newspaper Les Echos recently published an infographic using comScore Video Metrix data showing the main online video properties worldwide in January 2013. In 12^th place is the French online video site Dailymotion, which attracted 116.12 million online viewers worldwide during the month.

The leading global properties for video ads and video content were Google Sites (755 million unique viewers), Facebook (296 million) and Vevo (256 million).

Tim Lewis
The Observer
Saturday 6 April 2013

Seven of the top YouTube creators, from left to right: Lex Croucher (tyrannosauruslexxx), Klaire De Lys (KlaireDeLys), Benjamin Cook (ninebrassmonkeys), Christopher Bingham (slomozo), Hazel Hayes (chewing sand), Shirley B Eniang (shirleybeniang), Thomas Ridgewell (tomSka). Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer

By Robert Cain for China Film Biz
April 6, 2013

Year after year I keep telling myself that China’s box office growth has to eventually slow down. An industry that has been rising at a pace 4 or 5 times faster than its country’s GDP for over a decade can’t continue at that rate for long. But year after year I’m amazed that growth just keeps accelerating. From 2001 to 2007, theatrical revenue increased at a 34 percent compound annual rate (as measured in US dollars); from 2008 to 2012 the pace quickened to 43 percent per year. So far in 2013 China’s movie revenue has increased 51 percent, and there’s no sign of a slowdown.

This year, China’s theatrical movie business is growing more than 6 times faster than its GDP. North America’s theatrical business, in contrast, has been growing slower even than its recession-worn economy, at an annual rate of just over 1 percent since 2002

Over the past few days China enjoyed a national holiday, the Qing Ming Festival (清明节), and again moviegoers turned out in huge numbers, roughly doubling last year’s holiday box office total with over $31 million in revenue on Thursday and Friday.

There are three main factors driving this incredible growth:

1. China is undergoing the largest and most rapid development of a middle class in human history. Hundreds of millions of people are moving up from subsistence to affluence before our eyes.
2. Cinema construction is booming. Thousands of new screens are opening each year, affording millions of potential customers the opportunity—many of them for the first time ever—to enjoy the moviegoing experience in modern multiplexes.
3. The Chinese population has embraced movies, both foreign and increasingly domestically made Chinese movies, with exuberance. High ticket prices and generally mediocre films haven’t deterred them from filling up theaters to capacity.

Things will eventually have to cool off, but with so many big cities still lacking multiplexes, it will be many years before China reaches a saturation point. The biggest factor constraining growth is the shortage of screens. There are currently about 15,000 movie screens in 3,700 theaters across the country, the second largest national total in the world, but with its 1.3 billion population China is still woefully under-screened, with just one per every 90,000 people. The U.S. has almost 40,000 screens, or roughly one per every 8,000 people, according to the MPAA. To reach the U.S. level of screen density per capita, China would have to build an additional 150,000 screens.

Even if we assume China never gets anywhere near that massive screen count, and even if we assume that the growth trend slows down, it’s inevitable that China will soon have a much, much larger movie business than North America. For the sake of illustration let’s make a few conservative assumptions:

1. Box office growth in China slows down to 30 percent for the next 3 years, then 20 percent for the following 4 years, then 10 percent for the following 5 years until 2025.

2. Growth in North America maintains its 1.5 percent historical annual growth.

What we wind up with is a picture like this:

Under conservative assumptions, we’ll see China’s gross box office surpassing that of  North America by 2018, and going on to double North America by the middle of the next decade. No other territory will come close even to North America, except possibly India. Hollywood’s century of hegemony over the global movie business will clearly soon come to an end.

Robert Cain is a producer and entertainment industry consultant who has been doing business in China since 1987. He can be reached at rob@pacificbridgepics.com and at www.pacificbridgepics.com.

In the Middle East’s capital of music, tunes and politics are intertwined. Sham Jaff explores Lebanon’s musical development, from the nationalist song of Wadih El-Safi to modern seminal electro-Arabic fusion bands such as Soap Kills.

In the period after World War II a number of artists emerged in Beirut, a fulcrum between oriental and occidental, most famously Fairuz, Sabah, Wadih El Safi, Majida El Roumi, Nasi Shemseddine, Ziad Rahbani and Marcel Khalifa.

Since then, Lebanese music has established itself as a symbol and leader of Arabic music. Today’s stars such as Najwa Karam, Diana Haddad, Nancy Ajram, Haifa Wehbe, Wael Kfoury, Assi El Helani, Fadhel Shaker and Elissa have become household names in many countries around the world.

But when exploring a country’s music, attention must not only be paid to its singers but also to its instruments. Lebanon’s traditional music incorporates the deep and mellow sounds of the Oud, the beautifully decorated Derbakki (a kind of drum also known as the Tabla) and the Deff (also known as the Riqq, corresponding to the English tambourine).

DON’T MISS Yasmine Hamdan – femme fatale of Arab music

But if you really want to know all about Lebanese music, you will need to dance. Dabke is the national dance and the Lebanese people take particular pride in their skills in dabke dancing. Comparable to the Irish step dance or the Greek Hassapiko, songs such as Nasri Shemseddine’s Ala Ali El Dar’ have the perfect beat.

Wadih El-Safi’s and Sabah’s songs had distinct nationalist tones, reflecting the fact that many Lebanese were among the first Arab nationalists, particularly within the field of music. Mohammed Falafel, a servant of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, composed songs that became the anthems of many Arabic nations. From the very beginning, nationalism and music have been intertwined in Lebanon – the Rahbani Brothers and Fairuz are two other acts that should be mentioned here.

After World War I, Lebanon was occupied by France until 1946. Following independence, many Lebanese artists emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, carrying on a tradition that was born under the French mandate. Mixing Western and Oriental music styles and instruments, the Rahbani Brothers popularized local folk music and made Lebanese music a highly distinguishable and unique genre.

In the early 1970s, Fairuz also performed more Western songs, with lyrics that were closer to European traditions such as ‘Habaytak Bi-Sayf’ (which means ‘I loved you in Summer’), which catapulted her to fame in the West. Another favourite is Samira Tawfik’s ‘Balla Tsoubou Hal Kahwa’, which is literally about drinking coffee and adding more cardamom to it. The 70s not only produced these gems but also singers, if you will, like the Bandaly Family with their infamous ‘Do you love me?‘. Bear in mind that this was shortly before the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 began.

In the landscape of post-civil war Beirut, there was a vacuum that needed to be filled, and around 1993, peace began to feel like a possibility for the first generation of post-war youth who were eager for change. Lebanon is surely not stuck in its past and it is thus one of the few Arabic countries which has an actual alternative genre to its rich traditional music, with artists such as the rappers Ashekman or Rayess Bek and alternative bands like Mashrou’ Leilaor Youmna Saba. Seminal electro-Arabic fusion bands such as Soap Kills are considered to be the voice of an entire generation. Sounds derived from the production influences of Massive Attack and Portishead, Beirutian music has always been interpreted anew.

But Beirut is a complicated place. On July 12th 2006, Israel launched an offensive attack. After 33 days of heavy bombardment, Beirut’s alternative scene suffered greatly. Its political instability however is not characteristic of its population. Not only did Lebanese music never cease to exist, but it was always subject to experimentation and innovation. Unlike in many countries of the West, where there always has been a clear line between music and politics, when in Beirut, one finds the two intertwined. Maybe this is the only place where musicologists also have to be good historians too.

Sham Jaff is a passionate student of Political Science and Middle East Studies in the heart of Bavaria, Germany. Read more from her on her blog or follow her on Twitter @butifulabsurdt.

COLUMBIA, Md., April 2, 2013 /PRNewswire/ – One in three Americans aged 12 and older now listen to all forms of online radio¹ on a weekly basis according to the new national survey from Arbitron Inc. (NYSE: ARB) and Edison Research, The Infinite Dial 2013: Navigating Digital Platforms.

The study, released today, is the 21^st in a series of studies dating back to 1998.  Among the many other findings:

• Fifty-three percent of all Americans aged 12 and over (an estimated 139 million people) own a smartphone; three-quarters of those aged 18-to-34 own these devices
• Weekly online radio listeners report listening for an average of 11 hours 56 minutes per week, up by more than two hours over last year’s listening levels (9 hours 46 minutes in 2012), and nearly double that reported in 2008 (6 hours 13 minutes). During the same span of time, Arbitron’s RADAR service indicates that AM/FM Radio has grown to 243 million weekly listeners and time spent listening has remained approximately two hours a day
• More than one in four Americans (27 percent) check their social network several times per day, estimated at 71 million people
• AM/FM radio is an “almost all of the times” or “most of the times” in-car choice for nearly six in ten adults aged 18 and over; dashboard AM/FM radio (58 percent) far outpaces frequent in-car use of CD players (15 percent), portable digital audio/MP3 players (11 percent) and satellite radio (10 percent)
• AM/FM Radio delivers far more consumers (49 percent) than other media during the half hour before they arrive to shop, more than twice the number reached by the next closest medium (advertising on Billboards at 21 percent)
• Twenty-nine percent own a tablet; this is up more than 70 percent in the last year, compared to 17 percent ownership in 2012
• Among the nearly half of Americans (45 percent) who say it is important to learn about and keep up-to-date with new music, AM/FM Radio is the top source for new music discovery at 78 percent

“We are now seeing the highest levels of weekly online radio listening with the increasing strength of AM/FM streams and other online radio brands and the near ubiquity of devices in which consumers can listen,” said Bill Rose, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Arbitron.

“In the smartphone, the majority of Americans now have powerful computers in their pockets, which has irrevocably altered not only out-of-home listening behavior, but out-of-home purchase behavior as well,” added Tom Webster, Vice President of Strategy and Marketing, Edison Research.

This study, as well as previous studies, may be downloaded free of charge via the Arbitron and Edison Research websites at www.arbitron.com andwww.edisonresearch.com.

How the study was conducted

A total of 2,021 persons were interviewed to investigate Americans’ use of digital platforms and new media.  From January 15 to February 10, 2013, telephone interviews were conducted with respondents age 12 and older chosen at random from a national sample of Arbitron’s Fall 2012 survey diarykeepers and through random digit dialing (RDD) sampling in geographic areas where Arbitron diarykeepers were not available for the survey.  Diarykeepers represent 45% of the completed interviews and RDD sampled respondents represent 55% of the completed interviews.  The study includes a total of 711 cell phone interviews.

About Arbitron

Arbitron Inc. (NYSE: ARB) is an international media and marketing research firm serving the media—radio, television, cable, and out-of-home—the mobile industry, as well as advertising agencies and advertisers around the world. Arbitron’s businesses include: measuring network and local market radio audiences across the United States; surveying the retail, media, and product patterns of U.S. consumers; providing mobile audience measurement and analytics in the United States, Europe, Asia, andAustralia; and developing application software used for analyzing media audience and marketing information data.

The Company has developed the Portable People Meter™ (PPM®) and the PPM 360™, new technologies for media and marketing research.

About Edison Research

Edison Research conducts survey research and provides strategic information to a broad array of clients, including Activision, AMC Theatres, Disney, Dolby, Google, MTV, Samsung, Siemens, Time Warner, Yahoo!, The Voice of America and Zenithmedia. Edison Research works with many of the largest American radio ownership groups, including Entercom, Clear Channel, CBS Radio and Radio One. Another specialty for Edison is its work for media companies throughout the world, conducting research inNorth America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Edison Research is the sole provider of election exit poll data for the six major news organizations: ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC and the Associated Press. Edison is also the leading provider of consumer exit polling and has conducted face-to-face research in almost every imaginable venue.

Portable People Meter™, PPM®, and PPM 360® are marks of Arbitron Inc.

¹Online Radio = Listening to AM/FM radio stations online and/or listening to audio content available only on the Internet.

SOURCE Arbitron Inc.

We’ve heard a lot about sales and projections for smartphones in China – such as 199 percent smartphone growth in the past year – but how about active mobiles in the hands of Chinese users? The cross-promotion and ads platform Umeng has released its newest report accompanied by an infographic. It shows that, at the end of 2012, China has 160 million active Android users, with 85 million engaged in using iOS.

Newly activated Android devices really started to rocket in numbers last summer, the report notes. Across both platforms, smartphones are now so ingrained in the lives of Chinese mobile users that mobile app sessions rose 16-fold in 2012, with a 12-fold increase in the time spent within the apps that Umeng observed.

As well as lots of interesting demographics and app trends in the infographic, it also points out that iOS jailbreaking is on the decline in the long-run – down from 42.4 percent of Apple iOS gadgets in September 2012 to just 32.3 percent a few weeks ago. Here’s the full graphic:

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

By Shea Bennett
March 19, 2013

Those good people at the Pew Research Centre recently
updated their annual look at who is using social media, discovering that 16 percent of U.S. internet users are now active on Twitter, with the social micro-blogging network continuing to be popular with black and hispanic users, adults aged 18-29 and folks who live in urban areas.

But what about some of the other major social platforms? Aside from Twitter, who exactly is using Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr?

The infographic below (courtesy of Adweek) takes Pew’s data and represents it all in a pleasing visual form, including these key takeaways:

• City dwellers are significantly more likely than rural residents to be on Twitter
• Women are five times as likely as men to use Pinterest
• Blacks and Hispanics are more likely than whites to use Instagram

(Source: Adweek.)