I think far from destroying the music business, he put it on a path to redemption,” said Tom Freston, former head of Viacom and MTV. “With the iPod and iTunes, Steve not only created his own ecosystem, it turned out to be one that was contagious and created opportunities not only for his computer business, but for all the Apple products that came behind it.”

Mr. Jobs was initially pegged as a technologist who didn’t understand the media and entertainment businesses, but his track record as an operator is pretty enviable. In 1986, he bought the company which would become Pixar from George Lucas for $5 million and invested $5 million more.

more digital share cropping - this time consumer products ala stickybits

First, raise public consciousness about debt the way the anti-smoking activists did with their campaign. Second, create institutions that encourage thrift.

eople who have more ambiguous information about a product expect to be happier with what they have bought than those who have more specific details. It is aptly named “The Blissful Ignorance Effect.”

It merges data from people's cable set-top boxes with consumer-purchase databases, such as the information stores gather from frequent-shopper cards. For instance, a company could see whether households that watched an ad for its toothpaste later bought t

Money:Tech insight: devin wenig, reuters - consumer media trends are starting to move into business media and information markets

The programming “had nothing to do with our brands,” Mr. Lachky said during his speech. “Branded content is what the consumer wants, and it’s what we’ll use that space for.”

U.K. consumers spent £83 million ($164.8 million) on mobile games during the 12 months ended March 2007, compared with £76 million ($150.9 million) on ringtones, £23 million on music, and £11 million on video.

In fact, the DMCA, and other recent laws and regulations passed under pressure from media companies, are pretty hostile when it comes to consumers.

Should music companies drop DRM? Vote Results...

expand and potentially commercialize Project Apollo, the national marketing service in development since May 2005. Apollo LLC plans to make a decision by mid-year whether or not to commercialize the service.

Digital music is still seen as more disposable and less ‘precious’ than music in CD format. But it is also more convenient. Brands thinking about associating themselves with music would do well to bear this in mind.

the time young people spend on the net comes particularly at the expense of time they might otherwise have spent on print media (magazines, local and national newspapers). Ofcom graph of reduced consumption driven by net useConversely the time middle-aged

The letter also confirms that the RIAA's interest lies solely in preserving its existing ways of business, with the hope that it can maximize profits by limiting innovation and undermining long-standing consumer rights.

the average duration of the call is 10 to 11 minutes. If we generously assume the shorter time, then the three million members who dropped AOL in the 12 months through March had to make an involuntary investment equivalent to 250 work-years in order to wr

One in five Americans over the age of 12 now own a portable digital music device, and one in 20 of those quizzed said they possessed more than one.

I didn't look at Pandora's examination of the song's musical DNA. I didn't need to. Because I had to admit that, yes, that guitar sounded a lot like stuff I listen to all the time -- the only thing it was missing was the proper indie pedigree.

Sprint Music Store was rated 21 points higher than Verizon V CAST Music by Strategy Analytics' advanced user panel in San Diego. Sprint outscored the Verizon Wireless service across all attributes tested in categories of Usability and Network Performance.

None of these music services alone justify upgrading your cell-phone service or your phone. Instead, they offer a possible extra capability to those who are considering those upgrades for other reasons

62 percent of Internet users say they turn to the Web to research their purchases.

67% of respondents found winning things nonmembers can't to be a "very valuable" part of belonging to a station database. Sixty-seven % rated a chance to win free music downloads as very valuable, while 54% said the same about concert presales and 49% fin

YouTube.com, reports that it serves more than 40 million video views and processes as many as 35,000 new video uploads daily.It's surprising to me that so far nobody has built a system where they go into the middle schools and high schools to give cameras

“The context is the overall communications environment today. More groups compete for anyone's attention. Today you are faced with as many as 4,000 marketing messages per day; 15 to 20 years ago it was less than half that amount

WE the citizen users creating social content at the edge (blah, blah) are going to wake up and realize that Web 2.0 is all about making money off of the fruits of OUR labor, and we will rise up and demand fair compensation

poll found that 54 percent of television viewers said they would prefer to buy channels individually, while only 43 percent said they'd rather pay a flat fee for a fixed number of channels.

"We want to be influential, but we want to give away as little information as possible," says Goldstein. "We can give away no information at all, but that's sort of like storing all your money in the mattress. This provides a way to control your data whil

Sites belonging to Microsoft, Yahoo! and Time Warner received over 100 mln unique visitors in March 2006.

1 in 4 web users access online video at least once a week.

In a response to several lawsuits and a rash of publicity over how iPods contribute to hearing loss, Apple Computer has released a software update for all iPod Nano and 5th-generation devices that allow users to set their own maximum volume limit.

Furthermore, 73% of the early-adopters that already own 3G phones rarely use the 3G services and applications available to them.

FCC Media Bureau Report Finds Substantial Consumer Benefits in A La Carte Model of Delivering Video Programming. (word doc)

Their popularity indicates that fans are flocking to online services like iTunes at least in part to pluck out celebrated oldies, not to mention the occasional 90's alternative memento (Oasis's "Wonderwall" has sold more than 251,000 copies so far)

Respondents to a U.S. consumer survey said they spend 14 hours a week on line, which is the same amount of time in front of a television

Company switched the so-called "MiniStore" feature to give users the choice of turning it on, rather than having it automatically activate with its new version update of iTunes.

Random House will refund readers who bought James Frey's drug and alcohol memoir "A Million Little Pieces" directly from the publisher, a move believed to be unprecedented, after the author was accused of exaggerating his story.

The key point to remember is that this issue is larger than Sony. It's the fact that many companies feel free, even entitled, to change how computers work because they know few people will realise it.

On average, consumers open them at a rate of about 33% and "unsubscribe," or ask to be taken off the mailing list, at an annual rate of 9%, according to a Forrester survey of 137 online retailers.

Amazon has not only pulled all of Sony's rootkit-infected CDs from its catalog, they're also contacting everyong who bought a rootkit CD and offering a full refunds, whether or not the CD has been opened.

The individual's haven't changed, they've always been fragmented. What's changing is their media habi

Fair Use: Its Effects on Consumers and Industry: expanded fair use section that would allow consumers to copy protected digital material to other devices they own for their own private use -- by circumventing (DRM) software

Amazon says it's treating the XCP CDs as defective merchandise and will offer a refund with shipping, as long as the customer specifies the reques

Even without the contacts and the distribution channels, the promising pop star could make the leap from living room to Top of the Pops with some digital jiggery-pokery

The video-on-demand (VOD) phenomenon isn't confined to cable-system menus and iTunes downloads. The entire Internet is, in a sense, media on demand

"Consumers should say, 'Apple, we won't buy your music until you make your DRM interoperable,' " says Apple competitor Rob Glaser, CEO of RealNetworks.

It's ultimately the millions of viewers who will decide which video-watching models succeed.

But music purchased from iTunes does not easily transfer to other brands of music players. If you don't own an iPod, you could wind up with a lot of music on your computer's hard drive that isn't playable on your portable machine.

My take? Audio CD’s that install software onto your PC are just creepy. I believe that distributing copies of a CD to the Internet at large is wrong, so I understand the record companies’ concern. But installing secret, self-masking code onto customer

key recommendation from all panelists was to relinquish control. Consumer generated media can not be controlled. However, it can be listened to and joined in a way that provides marketers rich detail about brand perception and a channel through which to d

from blog to usa today in a week..."National Public Radio interview with Sony's president of Global Digital Business, Thomas Hesse, in which he said that "most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"

is Service Pack removes the cloaking technology component that has been recently discussed in a number of articles published regarding the XCP Technology used on SONY BMG content protected CDs.

Researchers call such customers “lead users”. GE's healthcare division calls them “luminaries”.