The government has for some time been shifting the problem of children-at-risk to the not-for-profit sector without further funding for those agencies including NSW Family Services Inc. Those agencies were already at breaking point themselves after having received insufficient funding for over 12 years. Their lack of resources was requiring them to turn away children in need as there were already waiting lists of 6 months for the services they offered. They have been lobbying the government tirelessly for increased support, and DoCS supported the recommendations to Treasury for such an increase.
This pressure has finally paid off because it has recently been announced that the NSW State Government is going to invest $36 million in early intervention and prevention programs, and conduct up to 750 home visits by child experts – as part of its Keep Them Safe program. This is excellent news and could not have come at a more crucial time. The funding also includes $10 million to run early intervention programs with specialist psychologists and mental health experts for children from Kindergarten age to Year 2 students showing disruptive behaviours.
Premier Kristina Keneally and Minister for Community Services, Linda Burney, announced on 29 March 2010 $9 million each year for four years from the NSW Government’s Keep Them Safe program which will go to better support families through prevention and early intervention – improving the lives of babies and young children at risk.
As part of the $36 million plan, the NSW Government is planning to provide:
· $18 million for parenting skills, general advice and support programs. This will allow non-Government organisations to help parents to develop the skills to respond to children who are showing signs of difficult behaviours. It will focus on new parents with babies and toddlers, and parents of adolescents.
· $10 million to run a new early intervention program for children from Kindergarten to Year 2 who have disruptive behaviours – Getting on Track in Time or ‘GOT It!’ Children and their parents participate in weekly group sessions with psychologists, mental health experts, and school staff for the duration of a school term.
· $8 million to extend the Sustained Health Home Visiting program, increasing the number of families assisted by the program from 450 to 750. This program will give more parents with children from newborns to 2-year-olds access to home visits by specialist child and family nurses who can identify problems early, and assist in getting the services they need from the start of a child’s life.
Since its introduction in March last year the Keep Them Safe program has produced:
· An online set of ‘Mandatory Reporter’ Guidelines to help people decide when to report suspected cases of abuse and neglect to the Child Protection Helpline;
· Information sessions for 23,000 mandatory reporters on the new system, plus introduction of training package to 200,000 other workers;
· New laws allowing more information sharing between agencies in cases when it will help ensure children’s safety and well being;
· WellNet – a computer system that helps agencies share information about children where there are safety, welfare or well-being issues;
· Four Child Well-being Units established in January 2010 in the departments of Health, Education and Training, Human Services and the Police; and
· An Aboriginal Impact Statement to assess the effects of the reforms on Aboriginal children, young people, families and communities.
This vide has been posted before, but this time it comes with a little twist. This new video comes with the latest in technology… sound. Yes, that’s right, it has sound. The previously posted video portraying the new Office app, and Calendar all working nicely from the HUB.
Anyways, if you are interested in re-watching this video to finally hear what his saying, go for it, and comment below.
We have reported how the “Humane Society” of the United States (HSUS) uses misleading advertising to make donors believe that contributions to the organization will go to local hands-on pet shelters. On the contrary, HSUS seems more interested in cows and pigs than dogs and cats. The group funnels much of its $100 million annual budget to push a radical anti-farmer agenda. In the meantime, the local pet shelters that actually take care of animals are strapped for cash – and HSUS is at least partly to blame.
Case in point is the Halifax Humane Society (HHS) in Daytona Beach, Florida. In a recent op-ed, the HHS community relations director Michelle Pari discussed the difficulty of trying to raise money in competition with groups like HSUS. Although Pari didn’t specifically cite HSUS, it’s clear that’s who she has in mind.
“One of the biggest problems HHS faces, as a local private non-profit organization, is public misperception about where donations made to large national groups actually go,” writes Pari. “It is difficult to compete with multimillion-dollar organizations that have the financial means to solicit money through television, newsprint, radio and Internet advertising worldwide.” She goes on to add that people are “shocked” to learn that not a penny of the donation they send to the “national organization” ever reaches the local animals in need.
In a speech before the Animal Agriculture Alliance this week, the editor of HumaneWatch.org pointed out that that less than one-half of 1 percent of the HSUS budget goes to pet shelters: “They have about a $100 million budget, $24 million goes into fundraising, $37 million goes to salaries, with more than 30 lawyers on staff.” In addition to funding activism, HSUS believes in taking care of its own. The HSUS pension contributions of $2.5 million are five times greater than the meager grants to pet shelters.
We strongly agree with Pari’s recommendation that if you really want to help those dogs and cats in your community, give to the local shelter directly – or else they will likely never see a penny of your good intentions.
Today is the first day the HTC Droid Incredible which weve already shown you a bunch of times has officially started to sell in Verizon Wireless stores today. And it looks like the smartphone is already very well received by U.S.-based Android adopters.It looks like Verizon cant ship anymore HTC Droid Incredible handsets until at least May 4 so youd better head to a Verizon or Best Buy store to buy one. If youre really lucky chances are that youre going to grab one soon. Otherwis
We’re usually pretty rough on the Wolverines at tBBC, and as the Owner/President/CEO of this site, I feel it’s time that I admonish Jim for publishing two straight days of “point and laugh” articles at our friends up North.
It’s fun to pick on those guys, but even we should promote happy tidings when they point towards prosperity for UM.
So, to counter Jim’s writings of late, I decided to scour the news and find something that will be good news for Michigan fans. It didn’t take long to find good news for the enemy to the North…..
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — A bowl game is supposed to be a reward for a good season. Now, with the glut of postseason contests, a team with a losing record might get an invitation.
“I think it stinks,” former Nebraska player Aaron Taylor said Wednesday in a text message. The CBS college football analyst said the sport “is becoming perilously close to losing the purity and amateurism that separates it from it’s pro counterpart.”
Finding enough winning teams to fill bowl slots is a fairly recent concern. The number of bowl games has nearly doubled from the 18 held in 1996.
So, chins up, Michigan fans!!! There’s something to hope for in 2010!
The bar has been raised**! Slide under it while you still can!
———-
** – The BBC apologizes profusely if former Michigan Head Coach Gary Moeller was at all confused by our mentioning a bar.
Just when we thought China’s automotive industry had made some headway in the quality department, we get word that complaints about new car quality in the country have risen significantly over the past few months. During the first quarter of this year, complains on vehicles purchased within the last six months climbed 15 percent over last year’s figures. Those numbers come courtesy of the China Association for Quality.
Even more surprising, the increase marks a nine-percent jump over the number of complaints filed during the fourth quarter of 2009. By and large, the defects concerned engine issues as well as small parts. A total of 94.6 percent of the complaints were lodged against cars costing less than $44,000.
Scientists investigating ovale malaria, a form of the disease thought to be caused by a single species of parasite, have confirmed that the parasite is actually two similar but distinct species which do not reproduce with each other, according to research published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases this week.
The largest ever trial of fish oil supplements has found no evidence that they offer benefits for cognitive function in older people. The OPAL study investigated the effects of taking omega-3 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acid supplements over a two year period on the cognitive function of participants aged 70-80 years.
Pfizer Inc. and Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) have entered into an agreement for the development, access and delivery of a fixed-dose combination treatment consisting of azithromycin dihydrate (AZ) and chloroquine phosphate (CQ) for the Intermittent Preventive Treatment of P. falciparum malaria in pregnancy (IPTp).
There are Christian organisations (even one micro political party) which have their future dependent on frightening people in Australia with tales of terrorism and fanatical expansionism of Muslims in Indonesia. They never say anything that presents a balanced picture of Christianity in Indonesia.
Did you know that every Sunday there are more Christians in church in Indonesia than there are people in Australia? That the memberships of the larger churches are double that of the largest churches in Australia? That there are churches that are more opulent and which seat more than any church building in Australia? That Muslim communities are fearful of the rapid growth and conversion rate of Muslims by evangelical churches?
Microsoft is preparing the launch of an all-new Windows Live Messenger as part of its Wave 4 version of Windows Live. The range of new features will appeal to the modern online generation and are a significant step up over previous versions…
Continue Reading Microsoft announces significant update to Windows Live Messenger
While I have some very serious concerns about the way the UK’s collection agency PRS for Music conducts its business when it comes to threatening small businesses — including going after a woman playing music to her horses and woman singing while stocking the shelves at a store — over the past few months I’ve been having a series of interesting conversations with Will Page, the Chief Economist for PRS.
Page, of course, put out that famous report last summer, that pointed out that the music industry in the UK appeared to be getting bigger, not smaller (contrary to what you hear from many people). Page is a fun guy to talk with about music industry economics, and we decided to run a little interview with him here. There’s plenty that I disagree with him about, but plenty that we agree on too. There’s so much in this interview that I’d like to dig deeper on, and I hope to do that in a series of posts in the future — and some more back and forth with Page — but I figured at this point it was worth getting our discussion as it stands out there for people to read.
We wrote about your study last
year showing that the UK music industry was actually increasing — contrary
to most of the headlines were saying. Can you give a quick summary
of why your numbers show a very different story than the popular press
keeps saying?
It’s a
‘different story’ to what people are accustomed to simply because,
for too long, people have characterised the music industry as being
about just the recorded music industry. That’s largely due to the
fact that the only data out there for people to discuss is recorded
music statistics. When we published ‘Adding
Up The Music Industry for 2008’ last year, it was an important step towards showing (i) how much the
whole music industry was worth and more importantly (ii) how it all
hangs together. One of the many audiences we aimed this work at was
Government, who need to understand the broader picture of what the music
industry comprises of, and the value that it brings.
The Insight paper allowed two new pieces of the pie to be illustrated
and properly understood: firstly live music revenues of
£1.4 billion and secondly business-to-business licensing revenues which
were over £900 million. From a total pie worth
£3.6 billion, that implied that recorded music made up a nudge over
a third of the total revenues — that’s a significant sum, but definitely
not the only show in town.
Both of us are
skeptical that the digital music sales market will ever replace the
physical music market. Can you summarize why and what numbers
you've seen about the digital market?
My concerns about the digital market
start with the same word that introduced me to economics:
‘scarcity’ — there is little scarcity in selling digital media
goods and that inevitably affects price. I think the best way to illustrate
this is to look, instead, at the live music industry as those folks
are the masters of pricing scarcity
— they view tickets as ‘lots’ and want to maximise the willingness
to pay for each. Live music mastered their demand curve a long time
ago; digital music is still trying to discover theirs. Another problem
with this topic is that interpreting digital music revenues is not a
straightforward exercise, especially in Europe. We published a paper
on ‘Understanding
and Interpreting the Digital Market’ two years ago to help folks try and get their head around this
complex market, and it’s not got any easier since!
I’d like to flag two observations
for your readers. Firstly, don’t view digital in isolation, when it’s
shown that one-in-five albums sold in America were digital, that tells
you more about the collapse in the five, that the outperformance of
the one. Secondly, the UK has really outperformed its European neighbours
in developing a large, and importantly diverse, digital market. UK digital
revenues per capita are twice, maybe three times, that of our main European
neighbours, which is a great testimony to the work that Jez Bell at
PRS for Music and folks like Francis Keeling at Universal have done
on the licensing front as well as the
incredible achievements of the services
like We7, Spotify and 7 Digital which have taken out the licences and
launched here.
Finally, whilst the digital makes
up 20% of recorded music revenues, and 5% of PRS for Music collections,
what I really have learnt to appreciate is that these digital services
are legal ‘venues’ — a concept that Eric Garland drilled home
to me — and somewhere north of four million
folks in the UK are going to sites like
Spotify or We7 and doing their thing
— now it might not be producing the monies people once wished for
but they are arguably not going to Mininova, an illegal venue, and that’s
an important achievement — especially when Mininova celebrated its
10 billionth torrent download
three months before iTunes celebrated theirs. Engagement with legal
venues is worth more than the top line
revenues might initially suggest.
You mention ‘scarcity’ in the context of live vs. digital, but live has a real scarcity (seats — over which they can control access). Digital doesn’t have that kind of scarcity. You say that digital hasn’t ‘discovered their demand curve,’ but might the bigger issue really be that without the scarcity the supply curve is the issue? My view has always been that the digital market is a red herring due to the lack of scarcity, but instead the music world should focus on external scarcities that widespread digital music creates (including things like seats at concerts). Is the real issue not the demand curve but the supply and the failure (of some) to recognize that they need to think broader in terms of what they’re selling?
That’s a very insightful question — and you’re right as one of the many mistakes economists make is to forget about the supply side dynamics of a problem, and instead focus on demand. It’s worth citing Jean Baptiste Say, and his Law of Markets which is that “supply creates demand.” What this means, with regards to your question, is that “overproduction” in a free economy is actually impossible. That’s a controversial proposition though, as I think it comes up against another trade off which we could call the attention economy, where a wealth of information leads to a poverty of attention. Stepping back from the theory, there is clearly more noise in the market place — more artists, more songs, more places to hear them — therefore more investment is needed to stand above the noise, to enable the benefits of your ‘external scarcities’ to kick in. One final piece of twisted economics is this idea of a ‘freemium’ model, which is cool but has a flaw — if everyone did it, the less successful it would be. Point being there would be more noise in the free market, which erodes the value of the premium offering — an increase is supply depresses price, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that basic principle.
You call services like Spotify and We7 “legal venues” and things like Mininova as an “illegal venue,” which I assume many of our readers may have an issue with — especially given that Mininova has long had a program for artists to offer up their own content, and there certainly are a small, but growing, number of artists who have embraced those venues for legitimate marketing reasons. Is there an argument to be made that, given the size of some of the userbases of those venues that you (and many) deem illegal, that there may be ways to embrace and engage with them, rather than write them off as such?
The best way to embrace those users is to ensure the services they use are licensed and respect the value of music. Now, we have over a thousand digital music licencees here in the UK, and we’ve been granting online licenses since 2002, long before iTunes — a fact often overlooked. The best way to approach the unlicensed services is to think of it this way — we’re all chatting about whether Spotify will sink or swim, right? That’s the hot debate at the moment. Well, I would argue that at the margin Spotify would have far more chance of swimming, or up selling the subscription service, had they not had to face this unfair competition of illegal free. That’s a powerful argument when you run it through, as it moves away from the old arguments and towards a more plausible observation: what opportunities are being foregone in the legal digital market due to the unfair competition of illegal free? One last thing on Spotify, which is that they went legal before going popular, bucking a regrettable trend. When you explain that to an emerging artist or songwriter, offering a counterfactual of many other sites which have become incredibly popular (and then flipped for incredible amounts of money) before taking out licences — it really hits the message home.
Both of us are still
quite optimistic that there's still a huge opportunity for the overall
music market to grow. Where do you think that opportunity exists
— and why is it mostly ignored?
If we pick up on
‘Business-to-Business’ revenues, or licensing income, this makes
music free at the point of consumption with compensation taking place
elsewhere. This part of the music industry is likely to make up an increasing
part of an increasing pie, and that by default presents opportunities
However, what’s frustrating is that music licensing is an area of
the industry that’s often least understood by emerging bands
and songwriters — the MySpace generation —
who are trying to get one foot on the ladder to success. To realise
those opportunities, the first thing artists and songwriters
need to do is protect their rights by joining PPL and PRS for Music
in the UK, or their equivalents in their respective territories. Secondly,
it’s very important that the licensing bodies
around the world get involved with the artists and songwriters. Here
at PRS for Music, we’ve got Myles Keller leading our membership development
and we’re getting increasingly involved with our songwriters through
programming events like The
Great Escape on the 13th May, whereas in America you have
‘walking encyclopaedias’ like Todd and Jeff Brabec who are very
accessible on the panel circuit and their bible ‘Music Money and Success’ is required reading. I guess my point is
that the best way to realise the licensing opportunities that exist
is to get involved. Passivity doesn’t pay.
You stress the importance of getting people to sign up for collection societies/licensing organizations — which isn’t surprising, given your employer — but myself and many of our readers are concerned about the incentive structures when musicians rely on such organizations (even when– as in many cases — they’re non-profits). With such organizations, you can take away some aspect of market-pricing, especially when there are issues of compulsory licensing and/or only one provider in the market. It also creates situations where those organizations constantly push for greater rights, or the ability to collect from more places for more reasons– often upsetting other aspects of the market (for example: bars and restaurants no longer letting bands play live or hosting open mic nights to avoid having to pay licensing fees). While I agree that, given today’s setup, it makes sense for musicians not to pass up revenue that’s there for them via these organizations, isn’t there a risk that these types of organizations distort the market from a purely economic viewpoint?
Each collecting society is different, so firstly — let’s be wary of generalisations. In America, for example, you are absolutely unique in that you have competition within collecting societies with ASCAP, SESAC and BMI — the latter which is owned by the broadcasters! Similarly, the story behind SoundExchange is unique too — and in many cases the US is playing ‘catch up’ with the rest of the world when it comes to neighbouring rights. So, I just want to be clear for a predominantly US Techdirt audience, the US experience with collective rights organisations will be unlike anywhere else in the world. I really mean that too — it’s such an exception to the rule.
Now to your question — let’s start by asking what is the rational for collecting societies. I would argue that the answer is three-fold: (i) reducing transaction costs for both rights holder and user, (ii) preventing fragmentation and (iii) solving co-ordination in many-to-many markets. The bottom line is this: PRS for Music enables start ups to start up, and songwriters to get paid. If you wiped the board clean and tried to devise a new model, which can hold together a blanket licence and balance the needs of unprecedented digital services, you would probably end up with what PRS for Music is doing just now. It’s not an easy task, and armchair critics would do well to consider the complexity in this two-sided market and the trade-offs that we face every day, but to read that We7 now feel that add funded music can add up is heartening as it suggests we’re getting this delicate balancing act right.
You've noted that the UK music
market appears to have again gone up in
2009 over 2008 and appears to be growing faster than other countries.
Why do you think the UK market has been different than elsewhere?
Firstly, The UK is not alone in bucking
the downward trend as Sweden, Denmark and Australia can also claim to
be outliers in some form. However, these are the exceptions as
opposed to the rule, and it’s a stark contrast to the downbeat sentiments
I’m hearing from the US, and chalk-and-cheese to the situation in
Spain which really is frightening on many levels. I’d offer three
exceptions which have bucked global trends rule. Firstly, the live music
industry has continued to exhibit robust growth in the UK even in the
middle of a credit crunch, whereas other territories suggest the market
might have matured. Secondly, UK labels have arguably done a better
job of diversifying their revenue streams , due in part to the success
story that is PPL, and I doubt that level of diversification is being
reflected by labels in many other regions. Third, the UK really values
music. It’s a simple point, but it really matters. Think: the role
of the BBC in championing emerging bands, the explosion in music festivals
in every corner of the country, the insane amount of work of Feargal
Sharkey at UK Music has put in to get all the stakeholders (including
ISPs) to banging heads together to face up to the challenges — all
these ingredients help illustrate that this thing called “music”
actually matters to the UK. Conversely, I’m spending an increasing
amount of time in Spain now, and what you see there is that music doesn’t
matter as much…if at all. It’s one of the few western countries
that can claim a thriving digital AND physical piracy problem and investment
in domestic talent is drying up as there simply no return. It’s actually
kind of eerie when you compare the quality of debate and level of activity
being had in the UK to that of other countries, it’s not that we’ve
solved all the problems, far from it, but it’s more about not dodging
them and actually doing something about them.
On Spain, I know the IFPI’s recent report said the industry is in trouble there, and you do the same here, but we keep hearing from people who claim otherwise — that there’s a renaissance of music in Spain due to more widespread ability to promote and distribute musicians. Anecdotally, in the last year, I’ve actually picked up (yes, legally bought, on CD) albums from a few Spanish bands. Do you have some numbers for Spain — since between the two of us, we seem to have very different anecdotal experiences? Could it just be that the business models haven’t adapted yet?
Neither of us is from Spain, nor do we currently live there — so we have to work this one out based on our own anecdotal experiences. What I’ve noticed is that trade revenues of record labels have halved in less than a decade, in nominal terms. I’ve also noticed incredible resentment to ‘paying for music’ in Spain, there’s a real ‘stick it to the man’ attitude which is puzzling. I come back to the point on domestic investment — given the situation there, would you (and that could be a label, publisher, manager or third party) invest in developing domestic talent in Spain, or would you invest somewhere else with a lower risk profile and then import into Spain. I’m sure there are lots of opportunities down there on the ground, but how many of those opportunities lead to a sustainable living for professional artists and songwriters. For me, Spain’s situation is like a tipping point which other countries should take note of.
One point that you’ve noted is
that the live music market has grown and actually
surpassed revenue from recorded in the UK. Critics dismiss this,
claiming that the live numbers are dominated by "heritage"
or "legacy" acts. Is this true? You claim that
the revenue for live covers "more bands, more tickets, more seats,
more events." Who's right?
You’re right to pick up on the changing
of the guard observation from last year, and it’s incredible to think
that five years prior, live was less than half the size of recorded
— which makes you ask three questions: (i) how has live captured so
much value, (ii) how has recorded lost so much value and (iii) is there
a link. However, read beneath the top line and you can consider the
distribution of those revenues: who got what share of the spoils.
As with recorded music, in live we’re witnessing a hit heavy skinny
tail distribution, and that intuitively makes sense. The bigger you
are, the more forms of revenues you’re able to exploit and the distribution
skews to the head naturally. When Take That played to over a million
people, that’s an example of more tickets, more seats and more events
but it’s just one band. Down in the tail, the picture is less clear
— with worrying stories of support bands having to pay to play needing
to be balanced with the fact that the explosion in festivals gives more
opportunities for acts to get wider exposure. There’s some interesting
signals coming out of the market place though, for example I was told
that there was noticeably less record label A&R presence at SXSW
this year, with agents and promoters filling up the bars on Sixth Street
— perhaps that’s a sign of the times.
You've noted in the past that
60% of the UK population don't buy music anyway and that "you can't
cannibalize zero" when it comes to things like file sharing "taking
away" revenue. Do you believe there's evidence that the 60%
of people who don't buy music are helping to contribute revenue elsewhere
— and if so how and where?
It’s a vital observation that needs
to be rammed home as the rights holders are understandably obsessed
with cannibalisation, but sometimes blinkered to the wider problem.
The legendary Rory
Sutherland remarked on
that "Can't Cannibalize Zero" phrase as a masterpiece and
told me that it reminded him:
“Of working with
ATOC, and First Great Western. They were obsessed with the risk of Revenue
Abstraction — the rail phrase for cannibalisation. In other words, any
special off-peak offer was viewed with terror, lest it attract people
prepared to pay full fare. But, just like music, 60% of people don't
use trains – ever!”
Rory makes you think about the problems
differently — and here, the problem is how can we re-engage the lost
majority? I collaborated with Spotify on a piece of research called “How
to dance to ARPU” which
allows rights holders and users to approach that infamous acronym with
more clarity. At the back of my mind, though, is this: most of the folk
of my parents generation love Spotify and none of them ever bought music
…ever. Engagement is the horse, and monetisation is the cart — if
services like Spotify are helping re-engaging those who gave us nothing,
there’s a better chance of getting something going forward.
Following up on the B2B side
of the market, some also point out that this part of the market may
also be dominated by large legacy acts who can score big sponsorship
deals. Do you think that's true and if not why not? What
opportunities are there for less well known bands in this area?
To quote from the paper, ‘brands
investing in music trough sponsorship are drawn to it through the potential
audience affinity and reach; this means that much of the major expenditure
is biased towards the larger priorities and artists, which provide larger
fan bases.’ That means that it’s tough in the tail for bands wanting
to strike sponsorship deals. That said, there is a lot of scope to use
initiative to innovate in this sector. Here in the UK, we have organisations
like Music Ally and FRUKT who are doing some great work in this sector,
especially in terms of offering training and workshops for artists and
managers — their material is well worth tracking as opportunities
in this sector don’t find you, you have to find them.
Lots of people have suggested
that even if live is now outpacing album sales, it was still the record
labels that really financed tours and the growth of live. Are
there mechanisms to support and nurture live if the record labels continue
to decline? Where might it come from?
The kicker is this — the money is
live is centred around the head, and much of that head is heritage in
status — so the question I always ask is who’s going to offer the
tour support for new bands to build the sort of fan bases that provide
the live industry with the heritage acts of the future. That’s a legitimate
question to ask, and not an easy one to answer, but you’ve got to
look forwards not backwards, and I’m really hype on the company Songkick it’s basically Facebook for folk who
love going to gigs with full functionality for ticketing, recommendations
et al. I think that what Ian Hogarth has done there is a real game changer
when you fully think it through — and it also helps level a heavily
tilted playing field as emerging acts can benefit as much as the established
bands from Songkick’s functionality. You have to manage expectations
as it won’t make touring across a country in a bus sitting next to
a drummer with an odour problem any less unpleasant, but it does have
the potential to lead to more bands performing to more fans, and importantly
more data to build upon that success.
Notably absent from your discussions
on these numbers is anything (outside of live) having to do with direct-to-fan
opportunities that we've discussed on Techdirt. These numbers
may get mixed in elsewhere as they sometimes include
album sales and sometimes include live, but do you have any thoughts
on that market? Do you have any numbers on how those efforts are
doing?
Firstly, I’ve recommended your excellent Trent
Reznor case study to literally
everyone and their dog. What’s really good about that is that you
echo what I’ve stressed every time I’ve explained ‘In Rainbows, On Torrents’ case study which was that this was a solution
for Radiohead, and was NOT a solution for the music industry. That said,
what Radiohead and NIN did were ‘experiments’ and we’ve got to
learn from these experiments. You got to ask the right questions —
so ‘of what worked, what’s transferable?’ Second, whilst Topspin
was behind your Trent Reznor case study, there’s another Toronto based
company worth checking out called Official
Community. They’re providing
direct artist to fan infrastructure which allows for disintermediation
of the value chain, more empowerment of the artist and faster cash flow.
When you look into these models though, it’s important to keep a balanced
perspective and manage expectations — it’s not going to change the
world, and it might not even change the actors involved in a ‘conventional
deal,’ but this existence of more options should, if anything, allow
artists and songwriters to negotiate better terms. Third and
finally, I agree with the premise of the question — what’s happening
outside the conventional radar is probably bucking the southward trend,
but because it’s not being picked up — the trend continues southward.
I learnt recently that the annual Cambridge Folk Festival is a massive
player in selling CDs of those folk artists to fans — literally tens
of thousands of CDs being shifted on location. Now, you may be tempted
to dismiss this as just a niche festival and just niche CDs, but they’re
shifting lots of them and there’s are lots more similar festivals
up and down the country who are increasingly doing the same thing and
its questionable how much of this is getting picked up on the conventional
radar. That offers optimism for the future as regards the “known unknowns”
which are out there, but also presents numerous headaches for myself
and Chris Carey as we try to calculate this year’s ‘Adding up the
Music Industry’ report together which is due for publication in July
2010.
You mention the “skinny tail” and that some of the success today is from heritage acts, but then we see numbers from folks like TuneCore that show a massively successful long tail. It makes me wonder if — as TuneCore notes — the long tail success stories simply aren’t being seen in the data because it’s the wrong data. We hear so many stories of musicians successfully embracing new business models down the tail that it makes me wonder if what’s happening down there is simply not being counted. Thoughts? Any ideas on better ways to measure?
Both Chris Anderson’s work on Long Tail, and our analysis since, has suffered a lot of misinterpretation because you can’t dive into this topic and expect a simple tabloid headline to explain it all. Statistical distributions of large data sets are not the sexiest topic for the music industry to discuss — on that we can both agree! But let’s roll back to what I’ve stated repeatedly in our work here — I loved the concept of the Long Tail, still recommend the book to colleagues and wish it would work the way we all hoped. However, it is a book about the supply curve — here’s what happens when lots of goods can get to market. What I was able to do, thanks largely to the mathematical guidance of Andrew Bud, is derive the demand curve for digital music — which is like saying “okay, once you’re on the digital shelf, who actually wants you.” You need two curves to tango in economics, and we’ve been able to develop an unprecedented understanding of this digital music market place as a result. What’s great though, is to know where economics needs to hand over to other disciplines, such as psychology, sociology or anthropology — basically how do we understand culture.
I can illustrate what I mean by offering your readers a genuine exclusive — by exhibiting the Lorenz curves for We7 and Spotify side by side, and comparing those with the sort of distribution Chris Anderson’s theory predicted:
The red line is to show what a “great example of the Long Tail at work” should look like, where 95% of the niche inventory (reading from bottom left to bottom right) makes up 75% of the streams — a fat tail. Clearly, neither We7 nor Spotify look like that, with both curves tugging into the bottom left hand axis point and this is what’s meant by a hit heavy, skinny tail distribution. However, the curves are different, and that is to be expected — as We7 has a strong editorial with excellent artist promotional campaigns, whereas Spotify is editorial free and allows the consumer to graze the field at their leisure. Consequently, you can see that We7 (blue line) is more hit centric with a 90/5 rule and Spotify (green line) is more democratic with an 80/5 rule which, when you step back, is common sense made complicated but it’s nice to see the math adds up!
The key thing for Techdirt readers is that’s what economics can tell us when rights holders and users collaborate to understand unprecedented markets, and it’s great that PRS for Music and Digital Music Services are willing to work together like this — I think it’s a important part of the success story in the UK. However, economic analysis can only tell us so much and it’s at this point when the baton must be passed on to folks from other disciplines or backgrounds who can bring new insights to the table to work out what that actually means in terms of this intriguing thing called ‘culture’ — which also means this is a good point to conclude this interview.
Thanks to Will for this fun discussion… which I fully expect to continue. If you want to see one of Will’s recent presentations on the state of the music market, it’s embedded below:
Nokia has announced a new entry level handset today the Nokia X2 which will apparently go to India at least for now. Nokia is still the main cellphone manufacturer when it comes to the total number of Nokia units shipped each year but its definitely not the most important smartphone maker anymore. The X2 has pretty simple specs which will certainly meet the needs of those people looking for a simple device and not a true smartphone. The X2 will offer you a 2.2-inch QVGA display Blu
Likening the state’s technical school system to an “unwanted stepchild at the dinner table,” Sen. Thomas Gaffey said the system will no longer be ignored.
“They will get their just deserve,” said the education committee chairman from Meriden.
Tonight, Gaffey explained to his Senate colleagues why a broad-based bill meant to improve the state’s 16 technical schools is important. Technical school parents and staff have told him about a shortage of supplies and about students not being bused to job sites and athletic events because buses were not operable, he said. Last summer — just two weeks before the start of school, Gaffey said the schools were worried about teaching positions, athletic programs and extracurricular activities because a state budget has not been passed.
Gaffey’s bill would require the state Board of Education to hold a public hearing before closing or suspending the operation of a technical school. It would also require the technical school system’s superintendent to share statistics annually with lawmakers about the employment status of technical school graduates and about the adequacy of resources available to schools, and it would help the system secure state funding. If money is available, the State Bond Commission would be required to vote twice a year on whether to issue the system at least $2 million for general maintenance and trade and capital equipment.
Finally, the bill would require the state to replace any technical school bus that is 12 years old or older, of has been subject to an out-of-service order for two consecutive years for the same reason. The Courant reported in February that nearly 60 percent of the system’s buses had serious safety violations in 2009.
Sen. Edith Prague, D-Columbia, said she supported the bill and believes that it will help restore the technical school system. Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney, D-New Haven, agreed. “The vo-tech schools should not be orphan schools in our system,” he said.
Sen. Leonard Fasano, R-North Haven, however, said he was concerned about the provision that involves the State Bond Commission. Fasano said he worries that requiring the commission to vote on capital requests for the technical school system would chip away at the commission’s independent authority and could ultimately hurt other projects deserving of money.
Funding for technical school systems is not just another project, Gaffey responded. The state owns the technical schools and has the obligation to maintain building and provide equal educational opportunities for all students.
The Senate passed the technical school system bill unanimously. It now heads to the House.
Today, Amazon posted an overview of what Kindle owners can expect in its version 2.5 software update now slated for late May.
This will be the first major feature upgrade to Amazon’s e-paper device line since the launch of the Kindle DX last year. After the launch of that model, there was a single software update, which moderately improved the user experience by stretching battery life and adding native .PDF support.
But with that update, one hand gave while the other took away: It also turned off the default text-to-speech option, amid the disputes it caused with the Author’s Guild. In the meantime, however, Amazon was busy growing the Kindle platform with applications that allowed the consumption of Kindle-formatted e-books on iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Windows, and Mac OS devices.
The slow pace of innovation for the e-reader made me wonder last month if Amazon was already forgetting about the hardware that launched the whole Kindle brand.
Fortunately, it’s not. And the 2.5 software update will add exciting and long- overdue features to the device.
Firstly, the native PDF reading function added in the v.2.3 software update was mostly useless because you could not pan and zoom within the frame to read your files. (I put a lot of vintage video game magazine scans in my Kindle, but they’re all unreadable because each page is zoomed to format the screen and the text is tiny.) With the v.2.5 update, PDF pan and zoom will be added.
Secondly, the poorly-designed menu system will be upgraded to let you organize your books into collections. Currently, it’s just a single paginated list that you have to scroll through to reach your files, which are organized alphabetically. With the v.2.5 software, you will finally be able to group books by author, genre, or publication type.
Finally, users will be able to share their highlighted passages with the rest of the world directly from their Kindle. They will be able to be posted on Facebook or Twitter, or will be counted in Amazon’s “Popular Highlights” of e-books. In other words, users will be able to see what the Kindle community thinks are the best lines from their books or books they’re looking to purchase.
There will also be more font sizes added, improved image clarity, and a password protection option in the update. The update will be rolled out in a limited beta soon and will be released as an automatic OTA update to all Kindle 2 and DX units in late May.
Thats right folks it looks like Rogers is interested in offering its subscribers a new Android device the Acer Liquid E. While we dont have a definitive arrival date Canadian Android fans that happen to prefer Rogers for wireless service should hold off buying any new Android device before they see this baby in stores.The Acer Liquid E will definitely be a handset worth considering as its ready to offer you a 3.5-inch touchscreen display a 768MHz Snapdragon processor a 5-megap
In the history of modern media, it’s unlikely that anyone — at least, no one of similar size or scale — has embraced open principles more than Wikipedia. Co-founded by Jimmy Wales, the so-called “open-source encyclopedia” has grown to the point where it now encompasses 3.2 million articles, and is almost certainly far more influential than print-bound predecessors such as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Although the site has a team of editors, known internally as “the cabal” (a wink to conspiracy theorists), and occasionally locks down contentious articles, the vast majority of the site is still open to anyone to edit.
As part of our ongoing series on the tension between “open” and “closed” across a range of industries and markets, I spoke to Wales via Skype from London. Our conversation follows, edited for clarity and length.
GigaOM: Where do you stand on the debate between open and closed standards? I’m assuming that given the nature of Wikipedia, you would probably come down on the open side.
Wales: Well, there are benefits and costs to both approaches, and a lot of those are well known at this point — although I do think that today, the open approach still isn’t as well understood as it should be, because it is a newer approach. There’s a big tendency to gravitate towards a closed and proprietary approach too easily, because it’s what [companies] know, it’s what they’re familiar with, and sometimes thinking up your business model in an open context is a lot harder. When you’ve got something closed and top-down and proprietary, you pretty much know what you’re going to do — you’re going to make something and then you’re going to put it in a box and sell it; and the box might be a downloadable box in the modern world, but it’s the same concept. Whereas with the open approach, it’s more about fostering an ecosystem and then making money in various other ways. What I would encourage people to do if they’re looking at doing something is to sort of step back and recognize the downsides of a proprietary approach.
GigaOM: Taking a more or less closed approach doesn’t seem to have hurt Apple — if anything, it seems to have succeeded more than anyone ever imagined, despite being closed. What are your thoughts on that?
Wales: If you look at the emerging competition between iPhone and Android, clearly the iPhone has the early edge, and of course Apple is quite good at what they do, their extreme controlling nature allows them to do certain things quite well. But at the same time, we’re seeing the beginning of a flood of new phones coming out from all kinds of different manufacturers…because of the open nature of the Android platform, and that’s going to pose a very interesting kind of competition. Google, in this instance, ironically, is more playing the Microsoft role here, to Apple’s Apple. One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they’re viewed as proprietary. But the truth is that compared to a lot of other companies, they really embraced a very open set of standards and had a very open platform, and it enabled them to gain dominance.
GigaOM: And what about the open approach when it comes to desktop software? Being open may have helped Microsoft in the early days, but it doesn’t seem to have helped Linux become competitive. Why?
Wales: One of the key pieces there for me is that there are some business models around Linux, but those business models — like Red Hat — have tended to focus on the server market, where certainly in the web-surfing world, the LAMP stack [Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP] is dominant. And it is dominant in that area in part because there emerged business models that made it possible for people to do things in a sustainable way, whereas Linux on the desktop so far hasn’t really generated a business model. If you think about Android, it can be open source, or very nearly open source, and that doesn’t hurt its chances of succeeding simply because Google has a business model around it that has nothing to do with selling the software. They can fund it, they can support it, and it makes business sense for them to do so, in a way that it has never made a lot of business sense for anybody to really spend the money to get Linux on the desktop to that kind of polished state.
GigaOM: So even if you are taking an open approach, you need to have a business model?
Wales: I’m not sure about the term business model, because if you think about Wikipedia, Wikipedia has a business model, but it’s not a business it’s a charity, and its business model — so to speak — is getting people to donate, because they love Wikipedia. So there isn’t a good buzzword for this, but you need a sustainability model; you need a model that brings in enough attention, revenue, whatever resources you need to make something happen in order to actually get it done. And what we’ve seen is that in open-source software, in some areas it’s worked and it’s great — so if you want a fabulous web server, and you want to scale up a web farm, the tools are free, they’re out there, there’s a whole ecosystem of developers, and it makes a lot of economic sense for people to participate in that ecosystem and it works. On the other hand, if you want to get your mom a laptop, I’m still not recommending Linux right now, because there hasn’t been an ecosystem, a sustainability ecosystem around making that happen in a really professional way.
GigaOM: There seems to be a belief that open systems are more free, but that they are also more chaotic and in some cases ugly, and that a closed approach like Apple’s works because it produces a uniform experience and high-quality design.
Wales: There’s definitely a lot of truth to that [but] at the same time, I don’t think it’s the whole story. We don’t have enough data points, really. We have Apple at one extreme and Linux at the other extreme, and Microsoft somewhere in the middle; so at one end you’ve got the highly controlled thing from a very controlling company that is obsessive about design; it’s proprietary, it’s top down, and it’s gorgeous, beautiful, elegant, simple design. And the open source thing is chaotic, hard, difficult, complicated — but also embodies a lot of amazing values, and it’s highly customizable, and really enjoyable if you like tinkering. You can do all kinds of things with it; it’s very powerful. We shouldn’t be too quick to judge the two. We can envision, for example, a proprietary system that is also complicated and difficult, but powerful because of the complicatedness and difficultnes. But we can also imagine an open-source process that produces a really simple and clean design — I think probably Firefox is the best example.
GigaOM: And why did you decide that Wikipedia should be built on a completely open approach?
Wales: Nupedia (Wikipedia’s predecessor) was top-down and not very open — it was open source, but in terms of management it was centrally controlled. But it failed, because it wasn’t fun for the people who did it; it didn’t harness the passion of the individuals who were involved in that project. I think it’s fair to say that we couldn’t have built such a huge project with literally thousands of people without taking that kind of open approach — it just wouldn’t function. I suppose with a lot of money and time we could have created a traditional encyclopedia, but couldn’t have done this.
GigaOM: But Wikipedia has added controls to the system through the use of moderators and editors and so on, yes?
Wales: Yes, we’ve had to add some features like that. My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged. It’s a balance that you have to strike, where if you leave it alone then the trolls take over, but if you’re too central and controlling, then you can crush it, and we try to strike that balance.
GigaOM: I’m trying now to imagine what Wikipedia would be like if Steve Jobs ran it.
Wales: It would be interesting — it would probably be prettier, too.
Yesterday, Sprint announced their first quarter earnings, and though the numbers were slightly down, they represented an improvement over past quarters. At the end of the quarter, Sprint had 48.1 million customers (33.4 million of which are postpaid) and operating revenues closed at $8.1 billion, an $865 million loss.
Postpaid churn was at 2.15 percent, due in part to the deactivations of former Helio customers (2.12 percent without). The number represented a drop from 2.25 percent in Q1 2009. All in all, the company lost 75,000 net wireless customers (including losses of 578,000 postpaid customers), and wireless postpaid ARPU (average revenue per user) was at $55, a year-over-year drop from $56.
“Sprint’s first quarter results, including increased net operating revenues and significant year-over-year net post-paid subscriber improvements show we continue to make progress in improving the business,” said Sprint CEO Dan Hesse.
Despite the fact that the numbers are somewhat lower than the competition’s, I have to give Sprint credit. People are quick to peg Sprint’s earnings as “dismal,” “average,” and “the usual expectation,” but they’re trimming their losses, working to improve customer service, and have at least one hot new device coming in the next quarter (EVO 4G, in case you were wondering). Given the improvements they’ve made over the past year on several fronts, I could see them gaining customers by the fourth quarter of this year. Now it’s time to hear from you – sound off with your thoughts on Sprint’s quarterly earnings!
Not since the Carter administration has the White House benefited from photovoltaics. Solar company Sungevity is offering President Obama free solar panels for the White House rooftop, including installation. Eco Geek reports:
Sungevity is offering the 102-panel, 17.85 kW solar system, installation and warranty as a free donation, at no cost to the Obamas, the government or tax payers. The only costs associated with the panels would be the upkeep and maintenance. In case the president isn’t comfortable with the $107,900 donation, they’re also offering a 10-year lease of the equipment at $537/month with maintenance and monitoring included.
Obama would be a fool not to take Sungevity up on their generous offer.
