David Emery OnlineThe Sky Is Falling
CD sales are falling.
Digital sales are rising. But not nearly enough to counteract the fall in CD sales.
CD sales are only going to get worse and worse, as the whole set up is in a feedback loop; CD sales are falling, which means that record stores are having a very hard time of it (see the death of Tower Records, and Virgin shutting some of there stores). This has two knock on effects: firstly, their are less places to buy CDs from, so CD sales fall further and quicker. Secondly, the retailers that are left become even more conservative, as they’re on really shaky ground. Which reduces CD sales even more.
So, CD is dead; no surprise there.
What is more of a surprise – to the record industry at least – is that digital just isn’t picking up the slack. Album sales currently just don’t seem to happen digitally – they only make up on average 10% sales. The format seems to be working well for single sales, where (in the UK at least) they are starting to dominate (we again have a download-only number 1 at the moment), which makes a lot of sense considering the format’s ease-of-impulse-purchase.
So, the album...
Read more ➔The National
I realise that this blog is rapidly turning into a photoblog.
Sorry.
Just got back from seeing The National at the Astoria in London.
They were fantastic.
Below are some pictures of both them and also Annuals who were supporting (ok, but not amazing):
Land of the free
I’m still very much recovering from my stateside trip; two thoughts:
1) How on earth are you supposed to sleep on a plane?
2) Surely the easiest way to cause a plane crash – rather then sneaking explosives through security in your shoes – is to turn on your phone, pager, wifi enabled laptop etc mid flight. If not, why do they make such a fuss? And if they could take down a plane, why don’t they make you check them in?
Friday Links XIV
As mentioned last Friday, I’ve been in New York this week which is why posting has been light – I hope to get back into it properly on Monday (jet lag permitting) but for now here’s your weekly dose of Friday links…
Amazon announces long-rumored DRM-free music store – I think everyone has know about this for quite a while, but it’s good to see it finally out in the open. This is going to be the first serious challenger to iTunes, depending on what their pricing model is – it’s a shame they haven’t got more of the majors on board (yet).
Sometimes, a phone is just a phone – having experienced the US’ mobile coverage first-hand this week I can understand why they seem to place a lot more emphasis on things like reception and call quality. We’ve moved well past the point where “just a phone” was really what most people want, as you can get there here with relative ease. It’s doubly interesting then, that the phone-backward US is bringing out one of the most interesting phones in ages next month.
The psychology of banner ads – I guess the thing to remember is that...
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On Textpattern
Drew McLellan has just posted a rather interesting article on the current state of Textpattern – well worth a read.
As regular readers may know, I’m a heavy user of Textpattern – this blog runs on it, and so do 18 other sites under my control so I’d like to think I’m in a position to talk about Textpattern with some authority.
I both agree and disagree with Drew’s post*; the state and future of Textpattern development is certainly on rocky ground, but it doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be using it. It would be really, really great to both get more regular updates to Textpattern, and to have some form of roadmap for the future.
As Drew says, while you can add enormous amounts of functionality to Textpattern by using its plugin facility, or by submitting patches, it’s a system that brakes down completely either when Textpattern gets updated, or if you need to use another plugin which assumes it’s running on a stock install. As a case in point, our internal intranet is running on a very customised version of Textpattern 4.0.3, running a host of plugins – some written by us – to add things like posting...
Read more ➔Friday Links XIII
New Version of Google Analytics! – beautiful work from the Google Analytics team; is this the point where we start to see Google taking design seriously?
HTML 5: Positive Momentum – great to see some positive motion, finally. With this and the renewed energy of the Internet Explorer team, who knows what the future holds for the web…
Wilder Shore – this photo was taken at night! Makes you re-think what you see when it’s dark, and how accurate our site is anyway – I wonder what the world really looks like.
MC Hammer Declared An “Expert” — Web2.0 Finally Jumps The Shark. – MC Hammer? Seriously? I truly hope this is a really good joke.
MySpace Announces Site-Wide DRM – Wired get the title a touch too hyperbolic, but it’s unsurprising that MySpace are adding copyright filters onto their upload process – all the big players (or at least the ones that want to deal with the big media companies) will do the same.
Search, and ye shall fail – a nice bit of form markup-foo from Steve.
YouTube’s New Inline Ads: Screenshots – I’d much prefer very short pre/post roll ads (like what Joost is doing) to...
Read more ➔Fast and nimble
Work related today.
We’ve just launched a shiny new site for the rather ace To My Boy:
I’m really happy with the way it’s turned out; we went for a rather unconventional horizontal layout, which I have to say turned into a massive headache but we managed to get there in the end with some creative CSS-ing. It’s augmented by a rather nifty javascript based dragging system – you can drag the pages around left and right like a Google Map!
The main content – news, tour dates, videos etc – is all powered by Textpattern, which is still very much our lightweight CMS of choice. On top of that we’ve layered two separate things; firstly, we bring in – via their superb API – photos from Flickr, which I think is by far the best way of getting photos on a website.
Secondly, we’ve got something we call “the Grid”. The Grid is, in its simplest form, a social network for To My Boy fans. You can sign yourself up, get your self a page on the site (and a place on the home page) and start talking to other fans. It’s something we’ve developed from scratch in-house – we couldn’t...
Read more ➔Plugin Powered Javascript
This is quite interesting, not so much for what it is but the general ideas behind it: Iris: Example of combining Java applets and Ajax
To start with, the video they present is very slick (and I’m only going on the video at the moment as the site isn’t loading); I’m quite impressed with the desktop <-> web interaction they’ve got going on, it seems to work quite nicely. I’m much less impressed with the touting of 3d in browser as being a first, as you’ve been able to do 3d in Shockwave for ages now – I’ve even seen passable 3d in Flash 9, so it’s hardly revolutionary.
What I find most interesting though is the idea of combining a plug-in based architecture with a javascript powered html front end. A plugin for the heavy lifting, masked from the user (to prevent interface differences and usability issues) with a “traditional” dynamic html interface (what a lot of people think of when they say “ajax”).
Now, in this example they’re using the latest version of Java which not a lot of people have installed, and I think there are several critical UI problems that would prevent me from ever deploying a site...
Read more ➔The biggest social network you've never heard of
Today I’m going to continue the social networking kick I seem to be on at the moment – sorry about that, I’ll try to find something more interesting to right about tomorrow.
Anyway, introducing the biggest social network you’ve never heard of:
First impressions are pretty much same old same old; you can almost tick off the routine features (profiles pages, friends, blogs, photos etc), and the design aesthetic is Web 2.0 101, with shiny bits everywhere and bubbly, rounded fonts (neither of these things are necessarily a bad thing, though – in the social software space good design is at a premium).
They do have a few interesting features dotted about, particularly in the music section where they seem to be going for a Last.fm angle with auto-generated artist pages, featuring players, charts, play counts and the like. However, on the whole they’re fairly uninteresting.
So, why write about them?
This is why:
In the graph above Netlog’s traffic is the sharply rising blue line, which has shot past Bebo – the previous holder of the crown “Biggest social network you’ve never heard of”. Also worth noting, while we’re here, Facebook’s...
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