"Can something like this save the music industry?''

Record labels are predicting that this month's launch of three new mobile phone music services will usher a return of rising sales after years of decline.

Apple's music-playing iPhone grabbed the headlines with its arrival in Britain last week. But music executives are just as excited about the new unlimited downloads service launched on Vodafone. Also Nokia, the world's largest maker of mobile phones, has opened a digital music store.

The world's biggest music company, Universal, is backing the MusicStation, the Vodafone service.. "We are at a turning point in the UK," predicting digital music sales here could offset falling CD sales within a year.

One place where the gap has been closed is Japan. Total music sales there edged up 1% last year. Japan's success in offsetting falling CD sales is largely attributed to the prevalence of mobile downloads.

There are already indications that mobile music sales are picking up in the UK. The Orange UK network says its music sales jumped 70% over the past six months and it expects them to double by the end of 2007.

analysts say that new handsets are helping the mobile music market move away from mere ringtones to full song downloads. They expect the UK mobile music market to almost double from a predicted $83m this year to $156m in 2011

There are hopes handsets will improve further from a music-playing perspective thanks to the iPhone..

Although prices have fallen, payment is simpler and handsets easier to use, telecoms experts still list several obstacles to record labels' fortunes being transformed.

"Can something like this save the music industry? in the short term no. Because it's only on Vodafone at the moment and secondly it's very cheap, meaning that the actual revenue for the music industry per user can only be quite small."

Jonathan Arber, agrees users want more simplicity ,being able to play what they buy across various devices. That is already happening with developments in Sony Ericsson's Walkman phones, which synchronise with computers.

Questions:
1) To who would this new music player be aimed at?
2)How will it appeal to its target audience?
3)Do you think it will be successful? why?
4) What are the disadvantages of this?

my computer= EPIC FAIL D:

Google and MySpace have announced they are collaborating in a deal which could shake up the social networking industry.

MySpace has agreed to join OpenSocial, Google's new platform designed to allow developers to build applications that will work on any website.

MySpace joins other sites including Bebo, LinkedIn and Orkut in signing up to OpenSocial.

'Next stage'

The participation of MySpace, which is the biggest network with more than 200 million users, will encourage many more developers to get involved.

It will also be seen as a major challenge to Facebook, the fast-growing network which opened up its site to outside software developers in May.

In a press conference in California, Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt and Chris De Wolfe, president of MySpace, said the two companies had been working on the deal for more than a year. "The web has moved to its next stage," said Mr Schmidt. "We always knew the web would be social."

Google said it had "reached out to everyone" in the social networking industry, and indicated that included Facebook.

Real test

But the network, which was valued at $15bn (£7.2bn) after selling a 1% stake to Microsoft last month, appears to be sitting on the sidelines waiting to see whether OpenSocial takes off.

Tens of thousands of developers have now written applications for Facebook, ranging from online Scrabble, to movie reviews and video sharing services.

While Google has now staked its claim to be a big player in the social networking world, it is not yet clear just how big a threat it will pose to Facebook.

That will depend on whether developers decide it is better to work with a system which will cut the cost of producing new applications for all sorts of sites.

But the real test will be whether social network users care about just how open source their site is.

Questions:

1) What are the aims of 'open social' networks?

2)How can social networking benefit people?

3)In your opinion, how successful will the partnership between Google and Myspace be?

media...stuff. :D

Cats aside, i figured i better start with some actual media work. I do not want to provoke Mr Whites wrath.
N.M.T stands for new music technology.
One example of NMT are ipods. I have one, you have one, everybody and their dog has an ipod.
The Apple ipod was first launched in October 2001 and were instantly a huge success among the music loving generation. Apple first decided to created the iPod becuase they belived current handheld music players were; "big and clunky or small and useless" or quite simply "unbelievably awful," (lol)
so Apple decided to make their own. \o/
The original iPod has been upgraded many times:
-The first ever iPod, the 'iPod Classic' was released in October 2001. This similar style was continued and reproduced until the arrival of 'iPod mini' in October 2004 which was smaller in size, had larger memory and came in a range of colours.
-This was then closely followed by the ipod Nano, which was yet still smaller in size and also came in various colours, this was continued and eventually remodeled to hold videos aswell as music.
-Apple then created the iPod Shuffle, a much smaller compact music player without a screen, designed presumably for more 'on the go' type people.
-Finally, the last ipod that has been released is 'iPod touch' with Safari browser, touch screen, and wireless access to the iTunes store and Youtube (..wowza)
Im not very good at the electronic side of things. Infact I am terrible. I could sit here, find lots and pots of info about gigabytes and chipsets etc etc and throw other gadget-y type lingo in your face.
But I am not going to.
But I will tell you this for free: iPod is amazingly amazing and I think we can all agree that it has enriched our lives and music enjoyment ALOT.
Thankyou Apple.

Your lolcat fix: I haz it

hahahaha