Would You Wear Your Music?

Apple Thinks Big With The Wearable Tech Market

From all indications it appears that the Apple - Beats Electronics deal will come to pass, and as we move forward from the initial leak a week or so ago, many analysts are focusing on the wearable tech part that Beats may bring to the Apple deal.

As I and other industry observers have written, Beats headphones are as much a fashion accessory as an audio accessory, with the balance clearly leaning towards the fashion side of things. There are plenty of other headphones available from serious audio manufacturers that not only sound better but are also cheaper, but virtually none come close to the sales numbers. Beats excels at marketing (much to the chagrin of the serious audio manufacturers), and as a result its headphones are all the rage, especially in the Urban community thanks to co-founder and uber-producer Dr. Dre (“Beats By Dr. Dre” is the brand name).

This scenario is one that’s actually very near and dear to Apple’s heart. It wasn’t that long ago that the iPod was the go-to music device for anyone that was even remotely into music, and the distinctive white earbuds made exactly the same statement then that Beats makes today, only to a much broader demographic.

The trend continued with the introduction of the iPhone, where you just weren’t hip unless you had one (signified again by the white earbud/microphone), which carried on until the various Android smartphones gained marketshare over the last 12 months or so. As a result, owning an iPhone no longer holds the same status as it once did. Read more on Forbes.

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MP3 Players Are Dead

What was once a hot business sector now looks to be going the way of the CD player and cassette deck as sales for MP3 players have plummeted over the last year. Although that part of the electronics business is still a somewhat signifanct revenue stream, it's going down fast.

According to numerous sources, sales in the UK have dropped 22% in the last year alone, and Apple has found their global iPod sales down a full 19%. That figure still meant sales of 5.3 million units in the last quarter, but you can see the trend here.

All this sounds pretty ominous for music, right? Well it turns out that people are still listening to more music than ever, just on a different device. That's right, there are more than 1 billion smart phones in use around the world and that's what people are doing most of their listening with. What's more, consulting firm Strategy Analytics believes that figure will double in the next two years.

So say goodbye to the device that saved the music business, and hello to the one that may save it again.

How many of you haven't made the transition to a smart phone yet?

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Apple's Latest Music Announcements

Apple's press conference today didn't introduce the iPhone 5 like everyone was anticipating, and the general feeling was that it was underwhelming in terms of product announcements. If you look underneath the surface of the event though, it wasn't really about product at all. This was more for the investment community and developers to let them know that Apple was still in good hands and there was truly some continuity from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook as the guiding light of the company.

That said, there were a few announcements that did affect the music industry. First was the official introduction of iCloud, which officially launches on October 12th. According to Apple, fully a third of all music sold on iTunes store is purchased on iOS devices, so iCloud is an important tool for the future of that ecosystem. As we were lead to believe, songs purchased via iPhone or iPad on iTunes will automatically be downloaded to a user's Mac for no additional charge.

And finally, some real details on iTunes Match, which launches at the end of October as well. With over 20 million songs, Apple claimes that iTunes is the largest music store in the world, which becomes an important piece to Match. Match "scans and matches your library against our 20M songs we’ll upload. What we don’t find, we’ll stream,” according to Apple's Eddie Cue. The operative word here is "stream." The price is $24.99 per year. Worth it? We'll see, although it seems to be a no brainer at the moment.

Finally, news about the death of iPod are extremely premature apparently. Apple introduced a new iPod Nano with a modified touch screen and a new clock face that also measures walking and running sessions, and a new iPod Touch and Shuffle were also introduced. It seems there's some life left in those Pod's, and the digital files in your life, yet.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

What The Music Industry Looked Like On 9/11/01

Here's a look at what the music business looked like on September 11, 2001, thanks to Digital Music News. We've come a long way since then.

• There were 5 major labels: Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG), and Universal Music Group.  

•  CDs accounted for 94.5 percent of overall recorded music sales, according to the RIAA.  Cassettes still accounted for roughly 2.5 percent of the total, LPs were roughly 0.2 percent, and album downloads were essentially nonexistent. 

•  The labels were on their way to concluding their third-best year ever (the best being 1999), though they were also in the early stages of a decade-plus decline.  

•  Napster was just days away from concluding a partial, multi-million dollar damages settlement with major label groups. The application had been shutdown in July.  

•  Kazaa was about 6 months old.

•  The iPod was still two months from being announced. The iTunes Music Store was still about 20 months away.

•  Justin Bieber was 7 years old.  Justin Timberlake was 20.  Daniel Ek was 18.  

•  Mariah Carey's Glitter Soundtrack was released on September 11th.  The movie arrived at theaters a few weeks later.

•  The best-selling album on September 11th was the self-titled release from Aaliyah.  The singer had recently passed on August 25th, 2001.

•  The song with the most spins on radio on September 11th was "I'm Real," by Jennifer Lopez.

• Janet Jackson, Sade, Aerosmith, and Dave Matthews Band were dominating the live circuit.  U2 was preparing the North American leg of its Elevation tour, and actually planned the official announcement on September 11th.
  
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Apple Ads That Launched Careers

I saw this article on Mashable recently and thought it would be good for a repost. Apple has had a great effect on a number of music careers thanks to the artist's songs being included in their television advertising. Let's look at a few.

• Jet - "Are Your Gonna Be My Girl." Used for the iPod campaign of 2003 and 2004, the band went from unknowns to selling more than 3.5 million copies of their Get Born album thanks to this commercial.

• Feist - "1, 2, 3, 4." Part of the iPod Nano campaign of 2007, over a half-million people searched Google to find out what the song was after it first aired. Her YouTube plays also jumped 1000%, and her digital downloads doubled. Here's the link to the music video.

• CSS - "Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex." Talk about the ultimate in user generated content, British student Nick Haley made a fan-boy video for the iPod that caught the attention of some Apple execs. They then flew him out to the States to do the official version with their ad agency. Funny thing is that Microsoft used the same tune for a Zune commercial a year previous that did absolutely nothing. Of course, Google searches for the song and band were over the top as soon as it aired.

• The Ting Tings - "Shut Up And Let Me Go." Used for the iPod 2008 campaign, the band had already had some success in the UK, but the commercial was their breakthrough in the States. The song eventually hit #1 on Billboard's Hot Dance club chart.

There's a school of thought that says that exposure on television doesn't necessarily help your career, but these artists have found otherwise. Of course, the musical landscape is far different in 2010 than it was in 2003 or even 2008.

For more examples see the full Mashable article.

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Follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.