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Music TV battles to survive in Internet age | Entertainment | Entertainment News | Reuters.co.uk
Music TV battles to survive in Internet age
Fri Jul 28, 2006 2:22 PM BST167
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By Mike Collett-White
LONDON (Reuters) - Music television is the endangered species of the pop world, and is learning the hard way that it must adapt to the Internet age, or die.
“Top of the Pops”, the world’s longest running weekly music show, will be declared extinct on Sunday when it is broadcast for the last time on BBC.
Two days later MTV, one reason for the demise of Top of the Pops and at the cutting edge of music for so long, begins to reinvent itself with a new interactive TV channel and Web site that will target the online social networking craze.
Young, Internet-literate listeners are not prepared to wait for a weekly digest of chart acts, and the pre-selected programming of 24-hour music channels is also losing its appeal in an age where music choice is greater than ever.
Television must compete with Robbie Williams beaming live images from a concert to fans’ mobile phones and iPods playing downloaded tracks.
“I’m afraid to say that Top of the Pops won’t get that audience any more,” said Dylan White, director of Anglo Plugging which promotes bands to TV producers, referring to people aged between 16 and 30.
“They are eagerly downloading and getting their information far quicker and with a more focussed style than sitting there waiting for a programme to come around once a week on TV,” he told Reuters.
White believes that the 42-year-old Top of the Pops can be saved for pre- and early teenagers, but its makers have made clear they do not share his confidence.
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Bravo, the cable TV network owned by NBCUniversal, has launched its mobile TV/clips service, imaginatively called �Bravo To Go�. And its first distribution platform: the MVNO Ampd Mobile. The service will have three-minute video clips from such series as Project Runway, Inside the Actors Studio, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Kathy Griffin: My …
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SMS Will Come To The US | MocoNews.net
SMS Will Come To The US
Related Topics: Adv/Marketing, Social Media — Permalink - Comments (0) [by james] E-Mail This Post/Page
Business 2.0 has an article arguing that even though Americans don’t use SMS (text messaging) it’s just a matter of time…interestingly it focuses on the entrepreneurial possibilites of SMS, and almost makes it sound like the US will be the one country where commercial use of SMS will be bigger than P2P. Then again, it is a business magazine…
“Some skeptics think the overseas ardor for SMS is a quirk, somehow tied to a foreign nuttiness for cell phones, but they’re wrong. Instead, it’s a leading indicator of what will happen in the United States. Rather than substituting for PC-based communication, as it does in poorer countries, mobile messaging Stateside will untether commerce, social networks, and other applications originally tied to PCs.”
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Vodafone NZ is running a hypertag campaign at bus stops. �Customers will be able to interact with the ads to access �tongue in cheek� tips to help make the most of time spent waiting for the bus.� Which is a good idea, since its the classic example of when someone would use mobile content. �Moore …
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Sky Offers Mobile Music Downloads Via TV | MocoNews.net
Sky Offers Mobile Music Downloads Via TV
Related Topics: Mobile Music, UK — Permalink - Comments (0) [by james] E-Mail This Post/Page
Sky has partnered with digital music company Craze Productions to offer mobile music through Sky’s eBusiness Portal, Sky Net, which provides a website service on digital TV sets. “The channel currently contains details of Craze’s music catalogue spanning updated ringtone versions of the UK’s Top 20 singles chart, and ringtones and videotones…The site is now being developed in conjunction with Sky Net to offer an option for buying Ring tones, Video Downloads, Video Ring tones and Digital Downloads, due for official launch in October 2006.” It’s not clear how the music gets to the mobile phone, whether it has to use the operators network or whether there is another method.
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Upoc Sells To Dada Mobile; $7 Million Doesn’t Match $26.3 Million Investment | MocoNews.net
Upoc Sells To Dada Mobile; $7 Million Doesn’t Match $26.3 Million Investment
Related Topics: Europe, Social Media — Permalink - Comments (0) [by rafat] E-Mail This Post/Page
Exclusive: Upoc, one of the original mobile messaging community services, and among the most hyped names during the Silicon Alley heyday, is being sold to Italian/European mobile content firm Dada Mobile, MocoNews.net has learned. The amount: well, it doesn’t look pretty: about $7 million. From what I understand, other Italian/European firms were also interested, and even though they would have liked to sell to a U.S. company at a higher price, this is what they were getting.
Upoc has raised a total of $26.3 million since its inception: raised a $5 million third round from Apax and Advent International in 2004. In 2001, it raised a big $18 million second round, also from Apax and Advent, along with Tribune Ventures, 550 Digital Media Ventures, a Sony Group company, Allen & Company and Arts Alliance. The last two, Allen and Arts, were the first round investors, in which it raised $3.3 million.
Meanwhile, Dada, a public company trading on the Italian exchange, has been looking to expand aggressively into U.S. and has a U.S. off deck portal as well. This should help Dada develop more community audience and get into mobile marketing. Upoc, which started as an SMS community service in NYC in 1999, has gone through ups and down, management changes, and the vagaries of the wireless market in general. It expanded into mobile marketing solutions, something which Dada probably will use extensively.
Looks like the invasion of the Italians into the mobile content sector, following the failed attempt from the Japanese in the last couple of years. Earlier this week, Buongiorno USA, the US subsidiary of the Italian/European mobile content player Buongiorno SpA Group, bought out Los Gatos, CA-based mobile content firm Rocket Mobile, for about $17 million plus another $10 million in earnout. Another mobile content company, Acotel Group, owns Flycell in U.S., and I would not be surprised to see them buying some companies.
Related: For some background on the company, read this 2001 BW story: “Star-Spotting Goes Wireless“
Disclaimer: Alan Patricof, an investor in our company through his new fund Greycroft Partners, sits on Upoc’s board through a prior investment by Apax Partners.
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Business Ignores Mobile Internet At Its Peril | MocoNews.net
Business Ignores Mobile Internet At Its Peril
Related Topics: General — Permalink - Comments (1) [by james] E-Mail This Post/Page
Telco consultant Tomi Ahonen has claimed that “by 2010, the dominant device will be the 3G smartphone and all internet content will be formatted for the cellphone”, which is the sort of absolute generalization which is guaranteed to be incorrect. He goes on to say that “the PC is a transitional type of device – much like the Zeppelin was when air travel was first introduced – and that the mobile phone is the platform that the internet will be designed for in future”. While the mobile internet will be big, and there are a lot of things which work better on the mobile internet than on PCs (conceptually, at least) it’s also true that there are a lot of things which work a lot better on PCs than on mobiles.
Anyway, there is one very interesting fact given in the article — worldwide revenues for SMS outstrip the revenues for movies, music and games…combined.
“SMS revenues outstrip those from e-mail 14 to 1 ($70 billion from SMS versus $5 billion from internet messaging), and there are 1.4 billion SMS users compared with 680m e-mail users on the globe… “The SMS business generates more revenue than the music business ($30 billion), Hollywood ($20 billion), and video gaming software ($20 billion) businesses combined,” says Ahonen.”
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Fall Of Covertones Causes Russian Royalties To Soar | MocoNews.net
Fall Of Covertones Causes Russian Royalties To Soar
Related Topics: Mobile Music, Research — Permalink - Comments (1) [by james] E-Mail This Post/Page
Russian content providers are reporting that the amount of royalties they’re paying out for mobile music has soared, “as many mobile users now want to get music actually recorded in a studio and not only a song imitation, the daily reported”. The article reports content providers “estimating that about 10%-15% of ring tone sales revenue is paid to authors and 25%-40% now goes to record studios”.
I have some problems with this…first, covertones are normally cheaper than ringtones from the original artist because they don’t require those royalties, so it’s the consumer who pays the extra dough. Because this is a report on another article in Russian I can’t tell if the content providers are complaining or merely reporting a trend. The percentages given also seem a little on the exaggerated side, and I’m pretty sure that the money going to the record studios includes that which passes to the band which recorded the “realtone”. Copyright laws and royalties change from country to country, but I was under the impression copyright laws were less restrictive in Russia — at least, that’s what I picked up from the furor over AllofMP3.com.
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Earnings: Warner Music’s Mobile Revs Up; SMS Tones Rolling Out In Germany | MocoNews.net
Warner Music Group’s Q2 earnings report backs up its rep as a music company that “gets” digital. Revenue from online hit $92 million, up 109 percent from $44 million in Q2 last year. Perhaps more important, that represents 11 percent of the company’s total revenue and digital accounted for half of the year-over-year gain.
Worldwide, online and mobile revenue are split about 50-50 (mobile revenues outside U.S. are about $12 million); online is heavier in the U.S., wireless is heavier internationally.
WMG more than doubled its mobile reach in the past year to 1.4 billion subscribers; that includes the new agreement with China Unicom. WMG sees mobile as a way to make inroads in countries like China where physical piracy is endemic. During the quarter, WMG also became the first company to make SMS tones commercially available.
Variable pricing: Asked if mobile music prices were dropping, Michael Fleisher, CFO said: “We don’t set retail pricing; retailers set pricing so what the phone companies do or other retailers do is not our business. We have not lowered our wholesale prices to mobile operators.”
On SMS tones: Beginning in Germany, where more than 30 billion text messages were exchanged last year, we signed multi-territory agreements with operators including Vodafone and O2.
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Rudetones: Ringtones Are Getting Rude
June 24, 2005
Rudetones: Ringtones Are Getting Rude
Olga Kharif
You are sitting at a coffee shop, minding your own business, when a police siren starts wailing nearby. You anxiously peer out the window, looking for a murder scene or a high-speed chase, when you realize that the sounds come from a neighbor’s table — from his cell phone, that is.
What you are hearing is a rudetone, a different kind of a ringtone that seem to be a hit with teens and young adults worldwide. These rudetones come in the following flavors: police siren, car alarm, fart and even (don’t ask me what this sounds like, this really is gross) burp vomit. You can check them out on this Australian Web site.
Fortunately — or unfortunately — you don’t have to live in Australia to download these. An outfit called Bonus Mobile has debuted rudetones in the U.S. this May. And subscribers of T-Mobile and Cingular can buy rudetones directly from a specialized site, RudeTones.com.
Silly or not, rudetones could become a big business. Ringtones will turn into a $500 million market this year, and rudetones could grab a chunk of that cash.
So if you thought hearing a Britney Spears ringtone was annoying, you just wait for rudetones. Sorta makes one want to play that vomit rudetone again, doesn’t it.
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