Preliminary Task and Final Product Analysis

In the first picture the quality is lacking an awful lot and the proffessional look about it is almost none existant. The downsides to this piece of work would be firstly the dull and plan look to the text on it. This is a bad feature because having a boring font will not attract an audience to therefore would hardly be read by a lot of people. Another bad feature about this would be the effect on the bottom picture. This effect is completely un-needed and would not be usually seen on a newsletter.

Some features that actually work on this would be the colour scheme. The reason why this is good is because these colours are associated with the school, so therefore there is a reason for them being there. Another feature would be the school logo in the top right hand corner. This is an expected feature on newsletters because the logo usually represents the school and seeing it the audience associates it with the school.  Another feature would be some of the phrases on the piece. The reason why I say this is because most newsletter will want to display some content without giving too much away and I believe that having open ended sentances such as “new block builds futures” and “read all this inside..” does this efficiently for a school newsletter.

In the picture below some features that you can tell are suited for a magazine would be the issue number, barcode, website and price. These would not be needed on a school newsletter but In this certain media they would not be proffessional if they werent on there. Aswell as these I have also added another couple of features that I expected to see on the front of a media piece such as this. These would be the “Free Posters” part to try and persuade the audience to buy the magazine and also the “special interview with fergs” part. This would hopefully attract people who would want to find out more about this interview so by displaying that it would be featured inside, it would hopefully attract a certain audience to buy it. Another part of this magainze would be putting the ‘Download’ logo on the front. This would make people who are familiar with the festival, want to know what the magazine had to say about it.

A feature about the picture below that I would point out that could be done better on a more proffessional product, would be the font. The reason why I have point this out would be because the font doesn’t suit the title as much as it could. A way to improve this would be to make the font in a simlar colour or have it in the same font as the title. This would keep a sutiable house style throughout the product. Although different fonts would be good to have I feel that the font used isnt as suitable for the style of magazine it is.

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.

Streaming Media

Streaming means watching a video or listening to music over the Internet in real time instead of downloading the file onto their computer. This is done by 'buffering' which means loading the file ahead of the point that you are up to so it is seemingly playing all the way through without downloads. This has mainly taken off when broadband came into use and Internet speeds became quick enough to handle this constant stream of data over the Internet.

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'.

Music Industry and Online Piracy

http://www.thecmuwebsite.com/article/record-industry-sees-slight-growth-for-first-time-since-napster/ 
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.