If online music services are really going to take off, they need to demonstrate that they work, and work well. That means a seamless of experience of discovering tracks, previewing or ‘auditioning’ them, and committing either to buying them (in the à la carte, iTunes-style model) or downloading them ‘to go’ (in the subscription model […]
Month: September 2005
Stealth P2P research and its limitations
As the major-label record industry seems to be getting increasingly confident about pressuring peer-to-peer (P2P) music services to get into line, there is more open discussion about analysing P2P use as a source of marketing intelligence that can be used to grow sales. But by focusing exclusively on quantitative data obtained by stealth, the industry […]
Re-shaping The Guardian and the failed promise of personalisation
The Guardian newspaper is re-designing itself, turning to a format that is midway between tabloid and broadsheet, with a new typeface. Back in 01994, The Guardian produced a projection of how it thought it might look ten years later — as pictured on the left. Here’s a comparison between the projection and the reality, in […]
In-depth music documentary sources
While I was working through all the pages on this site I listened to the last six or seven episodes of The Story of Atlantic on the BBC Radio Player. They were broadcast on 6 Music Plays It Again, and you can still catch some episodes if you’re quick. This was a 14-hour series made […]
New section archives
I’ve gone through all the 279 entries on this site and classified them according to 14 new ‘secondary’ categories, which complement the primary categories included as tabs on each page (E-learning, Human-Computer Interaction, Music & Multimedia, Cultural Calendar). And I’ve changed the home page so that it links to these ‘Section Archives’ instead of the […]
‘CMALT’ launched at learning technology conference
As trailed previously, the CMALT (Certified Member of the Association for Learning Technology) accreditation scheme is being launched today at the Association’s annual conference. This scheme is a portfolio-based means of recognising the experience and competence of professionals working in technology-based and technology-assisted learning. Since we developed the scheme last year a second pilot has […]
Growing the market for music as an experience
In his Musicworks keynote presentation last week, Sholto Ramsay argued that the music industry ought to stop thinking of music as a ‘product’ and more in terms of an experience. The corollary of that, he said, is that music should be priced on the basis of its features (e.g. packaging and other extras), quality (as […]