No Rock And Roll Fun

PLUG ME IN, PLUG ME IN: Jupiter Research has been holding its annual Plug.IN conference, which seems to be the first attempt by the music industry to start pleading poverty over digital sales as well as physical sales. The message is: steady now. Jupiter are now saying that digital music sales will hit USD1.7bn in 2009, although last year they were saying USD3.3bn, so we're actually chalking this up to "We don't actually have so much as a single clue." They also unveiled frankly baffling research which seemed to suggest that nobody need bother increasing storage size on portable devices, claiming "77 per cent of consumers would want no more than 1,000 songs on a player at any given time, regardless of the size of their music collection" - which is the sort of statement that sounds like it was based on an idea they came up with in the taxi. So, a person with, say, a collection of 500 albums would rather have a player which they had to keep deleting and reloading tracks onto, rather than one which they could store all their collection on? Why would that be? We suspect there must have been a methodology that was pretty flawed.

In an interesting speech to the masses, BMG North America president/COO Charles Goldstuck made comments to the effect that the structure of the US music industry will be dictated by the CD and not the digital download for a long time yet - or, in other words, the record companies intend to try and prop up their lucrative dying format instead of investing in the way the consumer is heading. Good business choice, boys.