Tag Archives: mindshare music

Sex vs free music? Free Music for 70%!

The Guardian report that Marrakesh Records and Human Capital surveyed 1,000 15-24 year-olds highlighting not just how important music is to young people, but their changing attitudes to paying for content.

Here are the stats….– More than 60% of young people would rather give up sex than music
– Rising to 70% for 16-19 year-olds.
– 70% don’t feel guilty for illegally downloading music from the internet.
– 61% feel they shouldn’t have to pay for music.
– 43% of the music owned by this age group has not been paid for
– Increasing to 49% for the younger half of the group.
– £6.58 is a fair price for CD album
– A downloaded album should be just £3.91
– And singles just 39p
– 75% have watched a music video online
– 70% bought a CD
– 62% played music on their phone
– 52% paid for a music download
– 45% had played music on their games console.
– 67% find new bands on the radio
– 63% get new band recommendations from friends
– 49% take new band recommendations from music channels
– Newspapers were rated by 21%
– Music mags and 17%
– Blogs just 14%.
– YouTube was the most popular site for exploring new music for 38%
– MySpace was cited by just 15%,
– Official band sites also 15%
– Facebook followed at 8%
– NME just 4%
– Last.fm also 4%.

Everyone’s 2nd favourite discussion point…

OK, everyone is currently talking about Twitter. But close behind on everyone’s radar is the Swedish music service, Spotify.

Spotify….

1) …is brilliant.
2) …is virally spreading like wildfire which is great news for both the music industry & the fans
3) …’s subscriptions model is good, but from my brief research (conversations), very few are opting for the paid model
4) …have only one (mightily annoying) advertiser (the energy saving trust) and their own subs advertising
5) …will be taking an enormous financial hit at the moment to pay the artists for use of their music
6) …will need to get more advertisers on board quickly, otherwise they could face a real problem…

I really hope that Spotify proves to be a success, however, unless they get some advertisers on board they’ll face some serious funding issues.

Credit Crunch creates music hits…

well, web hits anyway….some bright spark has been feeding stock charts through Microsofts new Songsmith software, to create music!

Christian Bale the musical…

So Christian Bale freaks out.  It gets posted all over the internet.  Then someone puts it to music…..(warning: we didn’t say the music was any good….)

Looking good there Kanye…

Pop star lesson number 1:
Always make sure the people around you look worse than you…

Ex EMI boss launches “the ultimate online music community”

Ex-EMI top dog, Eric Nicoli has launched an online music community RandRWorld, aimed at unsigned bands, music lovers, music professionals and venues.  Perhaps 5 years too late, RandR outline their mission statement to ‘music lovers’ in a format that probably looked good on a Powerpoint slide, but really won’t engage the modern day consumer. 

We hate to be negative on this blog, but this looks to be a bit of a lame duck on 1st viewing….

Cadbury’s don’t quite hit the right note

Cadbury’s new ad again sees music playing a key role, but they’ve not gone quite as iconic with the choice of track – this time it’s Freestyle ‘Don’t Stop The Rock’.  Nice ad concept, but bad choice of track.  Maybe next time they should try something a bit ‘bigger’….like Daft Punk, Run-DMC (the Jason Nevins mix of ‘It’s Like That), or Depeche Mode.

Police & ISPs target Pirate Bay…

Denmark’s largest ISP and owner of most of the cables, has decided to block access to The Pirate Bay. Meanwhile, in Sweden, police are lobbying for a new bill to enable them to pursue filesharers accused of lesser copyright crimes, targeting users of high-profile torrent sites including the aforementioned, dominant Pirate Bay.  You have been warned…..although Pirate Bay will no doubt be several steps ahead…

U2 return

U2 have launched the first single from their new album, following the recent trend of making it available to hear online, and you can hear it in all its glory here.  Scroll down the page to see some very clever packaging for the album, with non-downloadable exclusives for the fanbase, featuring magazines, hardback books and the like, once again making the physical product an attractive purchase.

95% of music downloads are illegal

DrownedInSound.com report the above and they have rather pro-actively come up with two solutions.  Read it here