Andy Nelson's A2 Contemporary Media Issues Blog
Friday, 3 May 2013
Second Screening
Another way in which second screening can be used is along side the consoles for gaming. This is a feature that is being used with consoles such as the wiiU but will be used a lot in future gaming.
The main advantage of this would be that it makes interactivity among medias and may be a way of stopping piracy
Friday, 26 April 2013
Kickstarter and Twitter Music App
The Twitter Music application has the same kind of features as Spotify where the user will be able to search for a band and listen to them. This is also combined with such Twitter features such as sharing with friends through re-tweets and favourites. This provides a more social media in the music industry. However this may not be completely successful because of some similar ideas before this one such as iTunes' "Ping" which has not done so well. This suggests that people do not see a need for this style of media.
Sunday, 17 March 2013
Preliminary Task and Final Product Analysis
Friday, 8 March 2013
The role of Napster in 2001 & the role of iTunes
Napster was originally founder in 1999 as a peer to pee service where the share audio files. This is unique because it revolutionized the idea of sharing files over the internet for free. The response from the consumers would be that the could now get their music for free so it would have been popular and appealing due to the fact that it man all be done from your home. At the time that this website was created the laws on copyright would not have been as strict so therefore people would not have known many of the consequences of thia illegal act. Nowadays the law has been enforced enough for people to know what can happen. An example if this would be when Metallica sued Napster for $10 million($100,000 for each song) which was more than likely what made Napster eradicate illegal downloads. The ways that piracy affected the artists would be the massive loss of profits for them through CD sales. Saying this in 2012 sales in music had risen by 0.3%. This would be by having new ways of distributing music legally such as streaming through services such as Spotify.
iTunes was introduced on January 9th 2001. The services that iTunes offered was that you could download either full albums or individual songs completely legally. In later years the ability to download and own books, films and podcasts. A new feature that iTunes has incorporated would be the musical social networking 'Ping'. This allows for a more social interactive aspect so a piece of software thay was originally a media player. The way that iTunes has changed music would be by being able to distribute music in a more convenient manner from the comfort of their home. This had lead to the death of highstreet music stores such as HMV.
Thursday, 7 March 2013
Streaming Media
Fork many companies this is the new way of distributing content to the public for such businesses as Netflix and Spotify. This service relies on in Internet connection to be constant which is only taken off in the last decade. For some businesses like Blockbuster, this new way of distributing was bad news because they did not join in quick enough an now they have been shut down because people like the idea of a cheaper, more suitable method of acquiring their content.
As well as these businesses taking advantage of this new streaming technology, there have also been others who have utilised this feature very well such as YouTube. This website is now the largest website for user created content and is still rapidly growing. This site has now incorporated such things as 'live streaming' where users will upload to this site in real time and users will be able to see the video as it is being created. This is now being put into new technologies such as the PlayStation 4 which is supposedly meant to have a feature where the users will be able to upload their game footage straight to 'uStream'. Another website that has the largest amount of live streaming content would be 'twitch'.
Wednesday, 6 March 2013
Music Industry and Online Piracy
This article outlines the fact that since the start of the piracy craze, which started when the software 'Napster' was created in 1999, music sales have been very low and artists have not made as much money as they used to prior to this. As of last years sales in music, the record industry has seen a slight growth in sales (0.3% higher than 2011). This may not seem like a large amount but if this continues, this whole piracy situation for the music industry may possibly become eradicated.
Some reasons for this sudden change in sales could be due to the more digital way of distributing content to the audience. Digital distribution is without doubt the near future of most purchases so therefore giving people the option to get a virtual copy of the product legally, and most of the time cheaper through micro-transactions, can sway some of the people who acquire the content illegally.
Saying this people nowadays don't always have to buy the music, there has been recent programs such as 'Spotify' which enable the user to simply pay for the right to listen to a large database of songs. This is a much preferred option for some people as they pay a monthly subscription to listen to as much music as they want, completely legal.
Another way in which the music industry has seen profit would be through the advert service on websites such as 'YouTube'. On this website there are channels such as 'Vevo' which host musical content, but by placing advertisements before these music videos they acquire money which would be a similar concept to the act of someone buying the bands music.
http://theweek.com/article/index/240718/the-anti-piracy-copyright-alert-system-is-the-napster-era-finally-dead
In this article it talks about the new idea of the 'Six Strikes Copyright Alert System' and how it may be a solution to this new era of pirating content. In my opinion there can be as much punishment for online piracy as the government wants but if the content is there it will not stop people getting through the blocks in which the law have put in place. For example when internet providers banned their customers from accessing 'ThePirateBay' the creators of the website simply changed their website name and added proxies to make it harder for the law to track what people were doing. In my opinion the only way to make piracy undesirable would be to offer the product with more advantages for acquiring it legally. I do not think that punishing people for wanting free things at the comfort of their own home is fair at all, and if the problem for the companies producing the content is that their product is not making enough money, then they have not attracted the audience to want to 'own' it properly, and they would need to come up with new marketing techniques.
Wednesday, 27 February 2013
Music Industry before the Internet
Going back to the beginning when music was first being used as a job in the entertainment business, people would gather to see the artist perform live. Back at this time the music would have been very orchestra based and people would then purchase the music they had seen in the form of musical notation for them to play in their own time. This evolved when the Gramophone came into use around 1877. This changed the way people listened to music and was revolutionary in the fact that people were now able to hear artist play their own pieces without going to see them in concert. This method of listening to music was around for a long time and advanced very slowly because the use of vinyl's to put the music onto was only upgraded in about the 1990's. This was around the time when CD's came into use and provided the public with a more 'compact' version of the vinyl aspect.
Soon after the creation of CD's there was then the product of portable CD players such as 'Walkman'. These revolutionised music because people where now able to listen to their music wherever they wanted as long as they had a CD to play and a Walkman to play it on.
Around the time of the 1980's this was when digital recording methods were replaced with digital recording. The benefits of this were that the recorded tracks sounded a lot smoother, and without the small buzz which used to happen with analogue. They were also a lot easier to change if mistakes were made in the recording, which beforehand the artist would have to play everything perfectly how they wanted it to be heard. In essence this style of recording took more talent but also possible more time to get it completely right. As well as these benefits the producers then has a choice of digital effects to put into the songs which made it a lot easier to make new sounds and creativity among new pieces.
The internet has also played a strong part in advertising for bands. Before the internet the bands would have had to rely on word of mouth, or if people heard them get played on the radio. This was really the only way of getting to know more bands because there was no alternative method of distributing the bands music to the masses.