Friday, 20 May 2011

Music Case Studies - Question B

Music streaming services - Launched in October 2008 by Swedish startup "Spotify AB", the service has approximately ten million users as of 15 September 2010; about 1,000,000 of these are paying members.The post states that all 'Spotify Open' and 'Spotify Free' members would be moved onto a new product which limits the amount of streaming to 10 hours per month. In addition, a user can only listen to a track a maximum of five times. 'Spotify Unlimited' and 'Spotify Premium' members are not affected by this change


HMV Closure - HMV sold 314 waterstones stores for £53 million



Zavvi - It was the UK's largest independent entertainment retailer before being placed in administration on 24 December 2008. Store closures took place from January 2009, with the last to cease trading on 20 February. HMV purchased 19 Zavvi stores to be merged into the HMV chain. Former managing director Simon Douglas and business partner Les Whitfield purchased five of the stores to form Head Entertainment All of which eventually closed in early 2009, after less than a year of opening. On 2 March 2009, The Hut Group relaunched the Zavvi website



Play - Play Ltd. trading as Play.com, is a Jersey-based online retailer of DVDs, CDs, books, gadgets, video games, DRM-free MP3 downloads, and other electronic products, as well as clothes and accessories



Apps to create music - garageband app from Apple.



Illegal File sharing -

Oink - Oink's Pink Palace (frequently written as OiNK) was a prominent BitTorrent tracker which operated from 2004 to 2007. Following a two-year investigation by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the site was shut down on 23 October 2007, by British and Dutch police agencies. These music industry organisations described OiNK as an "online pirate pre-release music club", Alan Ellis was tried for conspiracy to defraud at Teesside Crown court, the first person in the UK to be prosecuted for illegal file-sharing, and found not guilty on 15 January 2010

Piratebay -

The Pirate Bay (commonly abbreviated TPB) is a Swedish website that hosts torrent files and provides magnet links. It bills itself as "The world's most resilient bittorrent site"[3] and is ranked as the 85th most popular website in the world and 17th in Sweden by Alexa Internet[2] since 2008[4] and has over 4 million registered users.[5] According to the Los Angeles Times, The Pirate Bay is "one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading" and "the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright or pro-piracy movement".[6]

Initially established in November 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau) the website has been run as a separate organization since October 2004. The website used to be run by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij who are known as anakata and TiAMO, respectively. They have both been charged with "assisting in making copyrighted content available" due to their involvement in The Pirate Bay. On 31 May 2006, the website's servers in Stockholm were raided by Swedish police, causing it to go offline for three days.[7] On 15 November 2008, The Pirate Bay announced that it had reached over 25 million unique peers.[8] The Pirate Bay has been involved in a number of lawsuits, both as plaintiff and as defendant. On 17 April 2009, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström were found guilty of assistance to copyright infringement and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of 30 million SEK (app. 4,200,000 USD; 2,800,000 GBP; or 3,100,000 EUR), after a trial of nine days. The defendants have appealed against the verdict and the judge was accused of bias.[9] On 26 November 2010, a Swedish appeals court returned the verdict, decreasing the original prison terms but increasing the fine to 46 million SEK.[10] On 17 May 2010, due to an injunction against their bandwidth provider, the site was taken offline.[11] However, access to the website was later restored with a message laughing off the injunction on their front page. On June 23, 2010 the group Piratbyrån disbanded due to the death of Ibi Kopimi Botani, a prominent member and co-founder of the group.[12


Limewire -

LimeWire is a free peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) client program that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other operating systems supported by the Java software platform. . A free software version and a purchasable "enhanced" version are available.

On October 26, 2010, US federal court judge Kimba Wood issued an injunction forcing LimeWire to prevent "the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality" of its software in Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLCAs a result of the injunction, LimeWire 5.5.11 and newer have been disabled using a backdoor installed by the company. However, version 5.5.10 and all prior versions of LimeWire remain fully functional and cannot be disabled unless a user upgrades to one of the newer versions. The program has been "resurrected" by the creators of LimeWire Pirate Edition.


Napster - Shawn Fanning -

Napster is an online music store and a Best Buy company. It was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing internet service that emphasized sharing audio files that were typically digitally encoded music as MP3 format files. The original company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement, ceased operations and was eventually acquired by Roxio and later by Best Buy. For more information about the current service, see Napster (pay service).



Distribution of music on sites such as sound cloud -



Online digital music stores - iTunes (how much of downloaded music is downloaded by iTunes)

iTunes hit 1 billion downloads, Adele 21 was the most downloaded album



Artists which have used the internet to become famous online - Kate Nash, Justin Beiber, Jessie J.


Lady Gaga - using Farmville to release songs in build up to her album, release album cover on Twitter account, countdown to video release of 'Judas'



Issues and Debates (opinion)



Illegal downloading



death of music industry



does the online age cater more for niche music, easier to access niche music - diversifying our range of music

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