Music Ally has been studying the intersection between entertainment and technology since 2000, publishing reports throughout that time. But now that we’re fewer than two weeks from the start of a new decade, Music Ally has taken some time to reflect on the past ten years – a decade that will forever be remembered as the era when digital entertainment went mainstream.
Since 2003, all subscribers to the full Music Ally service have been able to search our archives of news, insight and analysis. Today, as part of a series in which we excerpt the most fascinating digital music events of the years 2000-2008. we unearth some of our reports from the year 2000.
Sign up for a free two-week trial to Music Ally and get access to all our past reports and bulletins plus a suite of research tools including market data, a deal tracker and an analyst forecast tracker. In the most recent PDF Report you can find a rundown of 2009’s big events plus an extensive timeline detailing the key digital music happenings of the past ten years.
And continue reading after the jump to take a look back at the year 2000, as we reported it at the time.
Research In Motion’s music push will soon include a dedicated BlackBerry download store, courtesy of UK firm 7Digital. It plans to launch its store in September with a catalogue of around six million songs in the US, UK, Canada, France, Italy, Germany and Spain.
Tracks will be sold as MP3s and will be downloadable over the air. Songs are expected to cost £0.79 / $0.99, and albums £7.99 / $9.99. “We see the BlackBerry application as very much an impulse thing,” says 7Digital boss Ben Drury, making it clear there’ll be no Comes With Music style unlimited service.
The store will take the form of an application, distributed through RIM’s BlackBerry App World. It raises the question of whether this is an exclusive deal, or whether other music retailers – Amazon, for example – could launch their own store apps for BlackBerry.
It seems Amazon UK’s £0.29 price tag on a slew of MP3 albums today was a cock-up rather than a special offer. The company has swiftly changed their prices back, indicating that the reduced pricing was a mistake.
Earlier today, we discovered that Lily Allen’s latest album was selling for 29p on the site, and further investigation revealed the latest platters by Coldplay, Metallica, Jason Mraz and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were selling at the same price point, as well as a 24-track Led Zeppelin remasters album.
We bought several, so they were working (see screenshot above – click on it for a larger version). But checking back on Amazon now, and the prices have been changed. Lily Allen is back to £7.99, Coldplay is £9.29, Led Zeppelin is £8.98, and so on.
Users might be able to keep all the songs they download from Nokia’s Comes With Music service, but its DRM means they can’t be played on other devices or burned to CDs. It seems this may change, though, judging by a report on industry site Mobile Entertainment.
The story claims that at last night’s UK launch of the N97 handset, Nokia said it will remove DRM from its Nokia Music Store by the end of 2009, and is aiming to make Comes With Music MP3-only in 2010 to boot. It would be a logical move, given the announcement this week of Virgin Media and UMG’s unlimited music service, which is DRM-free.
ME also says Nokia has hit back against claims that Comes With Music is performing poorly, and has confirmed that “60% of all CWM device owners in the UK, and over 70% in Mexico, activate the unlimited track service”. Although we have to say, why on earth haven’t the other 40% / 30% done it, given that it’s the raison d’etre of the phone they’ve bought?
The store has been offering super-cheap one-day discounts on big albums for some time in the US, using its Twitter feed to publicise them. 550,000 people follow that feed, making it a powerful promotional mechanism.
Having paid full whack for the album from Amazon when it came out, we’re a tad cheesed off, but that’s what you get for being eager, we guess. Ah well. UPDATE: also on sale at the £0.29 price point are albums from Kings of Leon, MGMT, Metallica and, best of all, a 24-track remastered Led Zeppelin best-of.
As reported the other day, Kasabian have released a free MP3 of Vlad The Impaler, the lead-off single from the band’s new album, accompanied by a video featuring Mighty Boosh star Noel Fielding. It’s embedded above.
We were wondering how the band would get around the current UK YouTube ban on music videos, but the answer appears to be use Vimeo instead. You can download the MP3 from the band’s website, where tickets for their upcoming tour will go on pre-sale tomorrow (Wednesday). It’s a neatly tied-in promo campaign.
Here’s the weird thing, though: we were sure the site said earlier that the download wouldn’t be made available until it had been played on Zane Lowe’s Radio 1 show later tonight – yet the site is now allowing it to be downloaded, and we received an email from the band’s official mailing list with the link. Maybe it leaked, and they released it early?
It might be engaged in a public licensing spat with the music industry in the UK, but in China Google is the good guy, following its launch of a free and fully licensed music downloads service.
It’s launched with 350,000 songs from artists on all four major labels, with plans to expand the catalogue to over 1.1 million this year. Google is sharing advertising revenues from the service with the labels, and working with Chinese music site Top100.cn to run it.
Google hopes to gain ground on local search rival Baidu, while the labels hope it’ll attract Chinese consumers away from illegal download sites.
IFPI boss John Kennedy has already hailed the move, describing it as “fantastic news” and “the perfect marriage between first-class technology and creative talent to produce a great product”.
There are no plans at present to expand the service beyond China.
Vodafone has announced that it’s to sell DRM-free MP3 tracks from three of the four major labels – UMG, Sony and EMI – through its mobile and PC digital music stores.
The deal covers a million tracks in all, including artists like Coldplay, Britney Spears, Duffy, Lady GaGa and The Fray. The tracks will be sold through the Vodafone Music Store, and customers who’ve already bought those songs in WMA format from Voda will be able to upgrade them to MP3 at no extra cost.
That last detail is significant, given that Apple has been charging iTunes customers additional fees to upgrade their DRM’d files to iTunes Plus DRM-free ones. Voda has kept some details back – it only says that the DRM-free music will be available “through a number of Vodafone countries by the summer”.
As grumpy Brits, we were even more grumpy earlier this week when we found out that Amazon’s US MP3 Store was selling the new U2 album – No Line On The Horizon – for $3.99. They certainly weren’t flogging it that cheap on this side of the Atlantic.
However, supermarket Tesco has come to the rescue, with a week-long deal selling the MP3 version of the album for £3.97. It’s another sign of the digital music price war that’s threatening to erupt here, with retailers taking the hit in order to pick up market share.
Will it be just short-term gains, though? Even if not, U2 fans are the winners. At least, those who didn’t grab the album off BitTorrent when it leaked last week…
A survey conducted by Strategy Analytics claims that 26% of UK broadband users cite Amazon as their preferred service from which to buy digital music, compared to the 23% who said iTunes. This, despite Amazon only launching its MP3 Store late last year in the UK.
“Amazon is still some distance behind Apple’s iTunes when it comes to actual market share, but our survey results suggest that Amazon’s dominance and brand strength in traditional online retailing put it in a strong position to lead the UK’s fast growing premium digital media sector in the years ahead,” says Martin Olausson, director of digital media research at Strategy Analytics.
However, the music data in the survey was only based on 246 people talking about their interest in buying downloads, so it has no relation to current market share. Amazon also came out on top for video and games.
