Music Ally

We’re paraphrasing heavily there, in a doubtless irresponsible media manner. Scottish academic Dr Tracy Alloway has revealed research into the effect on your “working memory” of using social media.

Apparently, Facebook is good for it, improving your ability to temporarily store and manipulate information in your short-term memory. Twitter is not so good though: its endless stream of information that doesn’t need to be processed reduces your attention span.

Which reminds us… Oh no, sorry, it’s gone. What were we talking about again?

Comes With Music and PlayNow plus have yet to launch, but analysts are already predicting big numbers for the respective unlimited mobile music services of Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

Specifically, TNS Technology estimates that this category of services could result in British consumers downloading 2.1 billion tracks a year, cutting piracy but accelerating the decline of CD sales.

It’s worth digging into how the market research firm came up with that figure though (a gold star if you just shouted ‘market research?’). TNS apparently asked more than 1,000 people whether they were interested in signing up to these services, and if so, how many tracks they’d download a month.

More than a quarter expressed interest, and the average number of tracks they thought they’d download was 64 a month. In other words, that’s 768 songs a year per person, although apparently the figure was double for 16-24 year-olds.

“If replicated across the UK, that would equal 2.1bn tracks downloaded a year,” notes The Guardian, while also reporting the survey’s findings that 45% of users would buy fewer CDs as a result of using these services, 47% would buy fewer downloads from digital stores, and 38% would “reduce” their use of illegal file-sharing sites.

So, the headline 2.1 billion figure is based entirely on people who say they’d be interested in these services guessing how much they might download a month. Highly speculative, in other words, although TNS has been transparent about the methodology behind its prediction.

That ‘47% of users would buy fewer digital downloads’ stat is interesting, though – it seems unlimited mobile services might cannibalise existing digital sales more than CDs.

A new survey from Synovate claims that 58% of adults worldwide don’t know what online social networking is, while of those who do, 36% are actually losing interest in it.

The survey quizzed more than 13,000 people in 17 developed nations, although it didn’t include anyone under the age of 18 – one of the keenest demographics for social networking. In the US, the proportion of users losing interest was even higher, at 45%.

With the music industry so excited about social networking, what’s your view? Are we leaping onto a bandwagon as users leap off? Or could music be one of the features that actually keeps people interested in MySpace, Facebook and their rivals?

Things are looking up for EMI, at least according to an email sent out to staff by chairman Guy Hands, which hails a positive Q1 for the company – generating positive ebitda of £59.2 million compared to a loss of £45.1 million in the same quarter last year. (more…)

The IFPI has published its latest set of data on recorded music sales in 2007, including performance rights revenues as part of the total figure for the first time. Strip those out, and you’e left with recorded music sales of $18.8 billion in 2007, down 4% from 2006. Digital revenues increased by 39% during the year. South Korea was the best market for digital in terms of percentages  61% of recorded music sales there were digital. It was followed by the US (24%), India (17%), Japan (16%) and Canada (11%). None of the other top 20 music markets had double-digit percentages of digital revenue.

Vivendi Universal has announced its first-quarter financials, including those for its Universal Music Group subsidiary. UMG saw revenues increase by 0.6% year-on-year to ?1.03 billion ($1.6 billion), while UMG?s EBITA of ?111 million was 94.7% up too  due to higher recorded music margins, a 33% increase in digital sales, and the inclusion of BMG Music Publishing and Sanctuary in the results. (more…)