Music is universal. Everyone loves music. Doctors, lawyers, kids, moms, daddies, old people, babies, everyone loves music. Most people prefer listening to music than to making music. Online music downloading has been enormously popular. The industry has struggled a little to reign in illegal music downloading. That battle appears to have been won.

Online music markets are set to grow. By making music accessible and with prices set at a reasonable cost, defacto industry standards are being put in place. The defacto industry standards are coming from Apple, Real, and Microsoft. Service providers have 500,000 songs available for download. Celebrity play lists are one way of attracting listeners to a site. Online music providers feature exclusive tracks from major artists.

Online music single costs range from$.79 per song to $0.99 per song and $10 for an album. People can compose their own albums. As prices for songs drop to $0.29 per song by 2009, markets will achieve new growth. The music industry is set to take some lessons from the DVD industry. The broad acceptance of the Internet is creating demand for a means of music media content delivery. Digital music media is set to leverage the Internet transmission system. Consumer markets have accelerated demand for sophisticated communications transmission.

Apple has achieved a dominant position in the music industry by making downloadable music easily available. The company now accounts for one percent of the music industry revenue. It is well positioned to address growth in online music. Virtually all music will be downloaded by the end of the forecast period. Traditional retail outlets have failed to address the changes brought by the Internet. A market of downloadable music services includes Apple iTunes service. Hewlett Packard is including Apple music software on its machines. HP is positioned to help Apple expand its online music service beyond Macintosh computers to the PC market that uses Windows.

Rhapsody offers unrestricted access for file-sharing. People can listen to hundreds of songs or hundreds of albums for the same low price. That flexibility is helping make Rhapsody the leading online music service for consumers. Rhapsody has an unlimited listening approach designed to encourage subscribers to explore a wide variety of musical artists and styles. By paying $9.95 for unlimited access to the service library of 28,000 albums, people get a bargin.

Napster offers a free trial to get people to try the fee-based music downloading service. Napster features top streams. Napster offers access to tracks. Napster premium permits listening to and downloading 500,000 tracks for $10 per month.
500,000 songs from all genres of music are available. Napster seeks to make the digital music experience is easy and fun for all music consumers. Integrating popular devices with the service allows Napster to make it easy to move digital music onto a device directly. Napster focus is on consumer choice. The nucleus of the digital music service is positioned to ensure that music fans have high-quality experiences. Individual needs are a priority. Over 60 devices from a variety of manufacturers are available that support WMA. Napster provides music in WMA format. This gives Napster customers the combination of device, a music service, and a flexible, high quality music format. Markets at $359.1 million in 2003, are expected to be $14.7 billion by 2009.

Key Topics In This Report Include:
- Online Music Markets
- Online Music Forecasts
- Revenue Model
- Restructuring Networks For Advanced Multimedia Services
- Information Sharing Between Different Environments
- Music Is Universal
- Streaming Media Segments
- Digital Online Music Standards
- Oktv® Child Health Controls
- Recording Industry Association Of America
- Ip Network Delay And Congestion
- Network Strategy
- Telecom Market Structure
- Challenge Of Broadband
- Media Hosting
- Operating System Focus On Media Delivery

Companies Profiled in this report include:
- Market Leaders
Online Music
Apple Computer
RealPlayer
Online Music Subscription Services
RealPlayer
Microsoft
Apple Computer
Online Music Advertising
Microsoft
Real Networks
Apple Computer

- Other Market Participants
BuyMusic.com Cisco
CNET Networks Hewlett Packard
Liquid Audio Liquid Digital Media
Loudeye Macromedia
Matsushita Electric Industrial MontVista Software
Music Choice Musicmatch
Music Now/Full Audio MP3.com
Music Net Roxio/Napster
Sonic Solutions Viewpoint
Wal-Mart Stores Zoran

From:http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/54569

Amy Winehouse's melancholy Back to Black sums up the state of music sales on the high street: while concerts are jam packed and iPods full, retail sales are in a slump. Some industry bosses expect an 11 per cent decline in worldwide sales this year, making 2007 the worst year for the industry in more than 25 years. CD sales were down by about 20 per cent in the first half of this year in the US, the world's largest music market, according to data released by SoundScan. Even allowing for growth in digital downloads, total sales fell by 9.3 per cent. In Britain, the number three market after Japan, official data shows that CD sales dropped 10 per cent, or 6.5?million.

With illegal downloads at an all-time high - 43 per cent of people download tracks illegally, up from 36 per cent last year, according to the latest survey from Entertainment Media Research - this is hardly surprising. However, legal downloads are also having a dramatic effect. It is now possible to listen to songs and watch music videos legitimately on sites such as YouTube without paying. In addition, Apple's dominant iTunes online record store allows listeners to buy their favourite tracks individually instead of the entire album, depressing revenues further.

After years of kicking and screaming, there are signs that the industry is coming to terms with the fact that the market has changed for good. The internet is now the stage where stars will be born and established artists can indulge their fans in the hope of sell-out crowds when touring.

With the launch of KylieKonnect (kyliekonnect.com) last month, Kylie Minogue became the first star to create a dedicated social-networking site. It allows her fans to create personal profiles, upload images and blogs, and communicate with other fans across the globe using their mobile phone or web browser. Similarly, Habbo (habbo.co.uk), one of the largest virtual worlds for teenagers, has been used by McFly and Bullet for My Valentine to engage with their fans. Artists have an avatar created that looks like them and then chat with their fans in a public room on the site in real time. Other artists, such as Oasis and Sean Kingston, have chosen Habbo to launch previews of new material.

And some musicians are happy to turn a blind eye to bootlegging, it seems, as long as they are able to whet the already strong public appetite for live music. "An ever increasing percentage of revenue produced by artists comes from tours, merchandise and synchronisation deals," says Dan Cryan, an analyst with Screen Digest. "Record companies are, at last, taking action to reinvent themselves as proper consumer marketing companies."

As Cryan explains, bands used to tour - often at a loss - to stimulate sales of their latest album. Now it's the other way around. The Charlatans are planning to give away their forthcoming album as a free download in a deal with radio station Xfm. There have been similar innovations from Radiohead, who allowed their fans to decide what they were willing to pay for their latest album, and Cliff Richard, whose new album Love will be reduced in price as the number of downloads increases.

Retailers are usually critical of artists who give their music away. In July, Prince sparked a major row with HMV when the singer gave away his latest album, Planet Earth, free with a Sunday newspaper. HMV claimed it devalued music and the Entertainment Retailers Association said that the move "beggared belief". But HMV stopped short of withdrawing the newspaper on the day of Prince's album giveaway.

The Entertainment Retailers Association has reacted to the Charlatans' Xfm deal by stating it could be damaging for the music business as a whole. Kim Bayley, its director-general, says: "This model is workable if you are a group that already has a strong following, but as an association we are concerned that it might affect the ability of new bands to get started."

The huge success of the music recommendation site Last FM (last.fm), which organises competitions for unsigned bands, shows that this concern may be unfounded. Alternative schemes in the pipeline include advertising-supported free downloads from a company called We7, which will ensure that artists continue to receive royalty payments, even if the customer isn't paying.

But not all artists will like the idea of their fanbase being subjected to invasive advertising. "I can't see one single business model prevailing in future," says Mike Walsh, Xfm's head of music. "Artists will use a range of creative methods, and go with whatever works best for their audience and their situation. It will be an ecosystem of clever joint ventures and revenue-sharing deals."

A glimpse of this world is available on All Dig Down (alldigdown.com), a website that enables artists to earn revenue from record sales and royalty payments from tracks streamed on the site. They can even build and share their own music library, earning a commission on sales of these tracks. Those who have signed up range from 1 Giant Leap to Jamie Cullum, the Verve, the Klaxons and Jamiroquai.

'Everyone is talking about the demise of the music business, but it's really just the demise of big business in music," explains Shelley Taylor, the site's founder. "Digital has not, and will not, become the cure for what ails us. We also need to continue to deliver quality, for which there is no substitute." That Elton John and the Rolling Stones can command up to £350 per seat at their concerts demonstrates the true value of a star performer.

Attendance figures at arena rock shows were up by more than 10 per cent in the UK last year, and seem likely to rise again when the statistics for 2007 are compiled. The bigger the concerts, the more we seem to like them. This explains the rude health of the festival trade. In 2007, there have been around 450 such large-scale gatherings so far, ranging from the Glastonbury festival to the one-day Underage festival in Hackney, said to be the first aimed exclusively at 14-to-18-year-olds.

At the root of the music industry's transformation is a rediscovery, or a renewed appreciation, of the communal origins of music-making and listening. As MP3 players and online video have grown in popularity, so has an appreciation that music isn't just something that goes on between your ears.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3355482/Bands-and-the-net-make-sweet-music.html