This was far from a vintage year for Glastonbury - none of the headline sets were really up to previous memorable performances. There was little musical or stage show innovation here, and nothing too much to write home about. Florence and the Machine on the first night was just like every other performance we have seen of theirs, Kanye was too minimalist, a little disjointed and woefully out of tune on the Bohemian Rhapsody Kanye-Oke, and The Who looked somewhat tired.

Headline sets ...

Our dynamic duo Markus and JC attended the PPA New Talent Awards last night and were quite overcome by the large number of friendly faces they encountered. All are of the opinion that this was a superb event, so well done to PPA for organising and Lisa Smosarski for hosting. The top picture features ’New Business Journalist of the Year’ Peter Apps (Inside Housing, Ocean Media Group) flanked by our CEO Markus Karlsson and host Lisa - hearty congratulations obviously.

Here is...

A recent article on the Media Briefing quotes chief digital officer Alceo Rapagna of Italy’s RCS Media Group, who states that traditional sources of revenue are still shrinking and likely to continue to dwindle. RCS Media Group is already diversified into TV, newspapers, magazines and book publishing, yet this is still not considered sufficient to safeguard the group’s future.

For me a great counter-point is the growth of alternative media services such a Vice, Newsy, ...

Music

My personal input of course, but for me - Music- and TV-wise it’s been a vintage year, pretty good for literature too, not so good for film though. There were a few trends in music with several artists self-publishing their albums and making them free to download - including my top rated ’The Weeknd’ (x2) which I was relatively late to latch onto, thanks to FACT Magazine for the introduction. Björk famously released interactive apps for each of her album ...

A few weeks ago I posted a blog titled ’The Increasing Internationalisation of Media’ - about how consumers are influenced by and access media globally. I often get musical recommendations from the 4 corners of the world - via various mailing subscriptions and music blogs, and end up buying the CD on import from CD WOW! or similar - as for whatever reason Amazon or iTunes don’t make that track or album available for me - either in hard copy or download format!

One of the blogs I...

Simon Cowell has obviously been keeping one beady eye on Glee’s success in releasing show music via iTunes. Glee just recently surpassed the Beatles in achieving 75 Billboard Top 100 hits - the Beatles amassed 71 in circa 30 years, Glee has achieved its success in under 2 years.

An email has just comes through from Apple announcing that all of tonight’s live X Factor performances are available for download - for the princely sum of £0.99 each. For trial purposes I downloaded my ...

The Internet is largely a multi-cultural and International environment. Peoples of many countries follow the same news, blog and entertainment resources, yet don’t have the same access to related media content. I can perfectly understand for live broadcast events - why you might want to and need to have Geo-blocking and Regional restrictions in place, I no longer understand why for general Videos, DVDs, Music etc. there are restrictions from one country to another.

This failing was ...

In view of the declining consumption of ’solid media’ that is to say - Printed Media and CDs in particular, it is becoming ever more important to justify / qualify the cost of digital media. A whole generation has grown up with the ’Free Internet’. There are enormous numbers of digital media consumers who pay nothing for the privilege of viewing, reading, listening to or even downloading their daily fix of media.

Back in my childhood days the type and number of media ...

The Future of Music Retail - Introduction

2 Significant music-related things happened for me in 2009. Firstly, I signed up for the Premium version of streaming service - Spotify; secondly, I finally succumbed to Apple and bought into the iPhone smartphone. I have several discarded MP3 players and iPods which have somewhat fallen into disuse as I found it a burden to carry around so many devices. The fact that the iPhone comes with iTunes / iPod functionality means that I now always ...