Rapid Web News

So, out of the three, who would you think comes out on top for growth and sales? Could it be music? After all with most phones having some way to get MP3s onto them nowadays it’s easy to get music on the move. Or is it movies for the same reason – movie player integration into a lot of smartphones? The gaming market is huge but is it widespread enough to take the ‘Media Backbone’ title? Well let’s take a look at some figures…

I’m going to run with a couple of reports for industry growth for 2006 over 2007 just to give us a look at how things stand and also using the US for sales figures as there is a few more people over there buying media. Let’s start with 2007; The Entertainment Software Association announced in January 2008 that total sales for 2007 were $18.85 billion with $9.5billion of that from games revenue (to include console and PC games) and $9.35 billion spent on consoles; big numbers I think you’ll agree, a 28.4% growth up on the previous year.

The music industry didn’t have such a good 2007 with sales in the US only reaching a mere $10.3 million – a fraction of the gaming industry, almost ‘chump change’, that’s to include a 75% of physical sales with the rest lending to digital downloads. These figures also include music video formats. An estimated 10% decrease from 2006.

The industry, on paper, seems very lack lustre, I personally love listening to music but do I buy a lot of albums these days? Nope! Spotify, You Tube and such programs allow me to have a huge music collection without spending a penny. Sure on occasion I’ve paid 99p for 24 hours without ads but I can’t remember the last time I bought a physical copy of any music. Perhaps if the music industry unified its selling prices throughout the world more people would buy them, I mean if all CD’s were a fiver I for one would no doubt buy 2 maybe 3 a week. CD’s range from £8 right up to £15 dependant on retailer yet the same CD can be sold halfway around the world in less fortunate countries for £3 – its exactly the same copy but people in certain countries aren’t considered quite so well off. I feel the music industry has been shooting itself in the foot for sometime…

So what about movies? Surely sales from this particular media will challenge the gaming industry? Big titles in 2007 like Ghost Rider, Wild Hogs, 300, Blades Of Glory, Spider-Man 3, Shrek The Third, Pirates Of The Carribean: At Worlds End, Oceans Thirteen, Surfs Up, Ratatouille, The Transformers, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, The Simpsons Movie, No Country For Old Men, Enchanted, I Am Legend – the hitlist just keeps on rolling! Sadly the figures still fall short; $9.66 billion reported for the year, almost half the gaming industry figure. A growth of 1.8% up on 2006.

Is there a logical explanation for this? Has the advent of HD and Blu ray destroyed cinema ticket sales or is it that cinemas are just pricing themselves out of the market? The cost for a family of 4 is in the region of £30 to go and watch a new movie at the cinema, then obviously there’s popcorn and a drink so you’re looking at around £40 for a night at the cinema! The cost of a new DVD movie these days is a mere £12 with a new Blu Ray movie coming in at around £20, both very much cheaper than a night at the cinema and you can watch it more than once.

The games industry, on the other hand, is booming! This has to be down to the more successful developers truly knowing not only the target audience and what they want but to also unify prices as best as they can. PC and Wii games will normally cost no more than £30, Xbox 360 and PS3 games around £40 and the handheld market games usually come in at around £25 so there’s rarely a surprise at the checkout with games. I’ve often gone to the counter to buy a CD and been stunned that its £15! I suppose one argument could be that movies are half the price of games but in defence of this, movies rarely have the appeal to be played more than 10 times but games on the other hand can be played for much longer. What can we draw from this then? Is piracy that rife that it’s causing the music and movie industry to suffer so greatly? If that were the case the games industry would be suffering too? Games are the most expensive media out of the 3 so why doesn’t piracy seem to be affecting the games industry? Perhaps it doesn’t come down to price…

So finally legislation is to be put in place to stop repeat piracy offenders but is it enough? Lord Mandelson believes so…

“…Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, has outlined action to tackle piracy that will see repeat offenders’ internet connections disconnected within a minimum of 15 months from their offence…” 15 months eh? Nothing like rushing it through. Surely in that time ‘pirates’ will continue to download, with a potential 50meg unlimited download speed that’s more than enough time to build up quite a collection – wouldn’t a suspension pending investigation be a better move? This breaks down like this; say for instance I were to start downloading music/movies/ T.V. shows etc now and got caught no punishment at all would potentially happen until 2011 or later! The pirates, I’m sure, are laughing their illegal socks off!

“…In Stage One, illegal file sharers will first receive a warning letter. Then there will be an indefinite number of subsequent warnings, which will state that legal action will be taken if the account holder continues to download illegally. Legal action will then be taken by the rights holder against the worst offenders. Communications regulator Ofcom will set up a body to hear appeals. The regulator will report quarterly to the Secretary of State, with a goal to reduce piracy by 70pc. If the Stage One process is unsuccessful, then the internet disconnection process, or Stage Two, will begin. This will begin with further warning letters threatening internet suspension and further infringement will lead to the offender being included on a “serious infringer list”…”

Some big names are chomping at the bit for stronger legislation to be put in place, names like Sir Elton John. Noel Gallagher, James Blunt and Lily Allen stating that piracy is particularly harmful to young, new musicians and also composers who are not performing artists. James Blunt claimed that websites which make money from file shares are akin to drug dealers, strong but true in a way. Maybe holding out and sending letters over such a long period isn’t really displaying the severity of this digital theft? But as ever I guess you can draw your own conclusions.

Any media is still best as a bought item, come on peeps, get your cash out

So everyone in the computer industry seems to always be on about the next big ‘Holy Cow’ idea, what’s going to be the next processor development? How much RAM can you stack up in a 128bit OS? When will the 15gig graphics card hit the market? – Yeah, ok I’d love to know those things deep down but let’s just look directly under our nose for a second. So who likes music? Surely everyone? Surely…

So the whole office here at Rapid Web have been using Spotify now for quite some time and I’m probably shooting myself in the foot here like I did when I pumped Grooveshark, last time I used it the servers could no way handle all the traffic, ahh heck to it, spread the wealth I say. So what is Spotify? Well in a nutshell its AWESOME, ok you actually wanna know, well it’s a peer to peer music streaming service allowing anyone who can get to a PC with internet the biggest music collection EVER! I’m not exaggerating; according to reports if you listened to the current catalogue of music offered by Spotify it would take you 35 years to listen too, that’s right 35 YEARS!

So what’s the catch? Well that’s the point there isn’t one! Standard DRM rights apply so you can’t save the music to your PC but why would you want to, it’s always accessible. If you do have favourite tunes you can build playlists so you could have a “…I just got in from work, feeling beat, just want to kick back with a beer…” type playlist, right up to a “…let’s call the troops, throe on a shirt and paint the town a bluish green colour…” There are also adverts that appear roughly every 10 tunes but come on its free! There’s a great spread of different music on their site “…do you have Ghosts ‘n’ Stuff by Deadmau5, ya know, the one featuring Rob Swire…” a 5 second search tells me!

You can also pay £9.99 for a premium service which allows some very groovy extras; these guys don’t just wanna sting you for a tenner a moth to get rid of adverts. Offline mode, for one, is a great feature:

“…Offline mode allows you to listen to your favourite tracks even when you’re not connected to the internet. Create a playlist or use an existing one and switch “Available offline” to the ON position. Spotify will sync the tracks to your computer so when you’re on the go or at the summer house with your laptop and no internet connection you can still listen to your tunes. Offline mode allows you to sync tracks on up to three computers or mobiles phones at the same time. Each device can sync a maximum of 3,333 tracks…”

– take that iTunes! And you are reading correctly: sync tracks on up to three computers or mobiles phones, so provided you have a decent phone you also have a huge collection of music that’s instantly accessible – take that iPhone! Ok, just to clarify I’m not an apple hater, far from it, if they supported more hardware and software I probably get one but I just feel there not the most user friendly of devices or software plus they feel a little like devices for the super rich, whoa, almost off on a rant! I hear ya, reign it in Clay…

Back to Spotify then, so say you find a cool new tune and want your friends to hear it, like the Deadmau5 tune I mentioned earlier which, indecently, I can’t stop listening to at the minute. All you have to do is right click on the tune and hit ‘Copy Spotify URI’, paste it into a mail and then hit send! Those said friends then take that link and put it into the search engine on Spotify and Voila! spotify:track:4ua0IepBEISCWwF8dTJvcU – here’s the link for the Deadmau5 tune to get you all started, its super funky and a good tune to put you in the mood for a night out – get in. It’s free to join the basic service which still gives you access to all the tunes, go on, treat yourself…

Ubuntu 9.10, the user-friendly, free, Linux-based operating system, is to be released tomorrow (the 29th of October 2009). Canonical, Ubuntu’s corporate sponsor, states that Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala, ‘puts the user at the heart of its new design’, and being an Ubuntu user myself for about three years and a Linux user for significantly longer, I can certainly agree.

Having been a tester of Ubuntu 9.10 during its development, I can tell you that Ubuntu 9.10 will feature the following upon its release.

• E-mail and Chat Features – Ubuntu 9.10 will feature a built-in instant messenging client, Empathy, which can connect to many of the most popular instant messaging services, including Yahoo, Gmail (Google Talk), MSN (Windows Live), Jabber, AOL, QQ and many more. In addition to instant messaging, the latest version of the e-mail and personal information management program, Evolution, is included. Evolution can manage your contacts, e-mail, schedule, tasks and memos – all for free.

• Internet – Ubuntu 9.10 ships will the very latest version of Mozilla Firefox, which is much faster and excellent for browsing modern websites and web applications which are heavy on dynamic client-side content, such as Javascript. Complex web pages such as Facebook, Google Maps and others will load and work lightning fast.

• Music and videos – Music and videos are managed with ease in Ubuntu 9.10. Simply plug in your iPod, PSP, MP3 or MP4 player and use the built-in media player, Rhytmbox, to download, store, buy and play your music collection. Ubuntu 9.10 can play many video formats with no problems and anything it can not play it will offer to download and install the required codecs automatically, and for free.

• Office and productivity – Word processing, spreadsheets or presentations can all be handled by the latest version of OpenOffice.org which is including in the latest version of Ubuntu. OpenOffice is compatible with all other office applications including, but not limited to, Microsoft Office.

• Store, share and synchronise – Ubuntu 9.10 features integrated ‘Ubuntu One’ service, which allows you to easily and seamlessly synchronise your contacts, notes, files and folders between all your Ubuntu computers. Even if you are on a computer running Mac or Windows you can still access all your files online, meaning you’ll never be at computer without your files.

• Software centre – The brand new software centre for this version of Ubuntu allows you to download and install thousands of free and open-source applications automatically with only 2 or 3 clicks.

• Gaming – Linux-based systems are generally not well known for their gaming prowess. However, Ubuntu 9.10 ships with the ability to download over 400 fun games directly from the built-in software centre. All these games are still completely free and installable with only a few clicks.

This latest version of Ubuntu provides advantages for both business workstations and home user desktops. Although not mentioned in this article so far, for enterprises and small home/offices, the server edition of Ubuntu 9.10 is also released tomorrow alongside the desktop edition.

For more information about Ubuntu, visit the official Ubuntu website.