wineliterature.com

The answer is, of course, not a chance.

And it’s not because they don’t like music. Quite the opposite, actually. The popularity of online streaming music sites, rise of music blogs, and skyrocketing digital music sales from places like iTunes, Wal-Mart.com, and Amazon.com show that young people are voracious music consumers.

Electronics companies like JVC and Kenwood, known for their audio equipment, said last week they had officially set up shop together after what seemed like a yearlong dance. They will fold the brands into one company, JVC Kenwood Holdings, in hopes of reducing costs and scaling their distribution in the already crowded Japanese consumer electronics market.

“If I stopped people on the street and asked them to name (an audio) company other than Bose, 80 or 90 percent wouldn’t have a clue,” he said.

The brand is now on the block, its personalized service, handcrafted products, and attention to detail no longer as relevant to the majority of music consumers.

The effect is that it’s slowly killing an industry.

I’d bet the average person under 30 hasn’t purchased a serious home stereo system in the last five years.

Music today is a commodity–ripped for free track by track, or bought for 99 cents and eventually added to a vast digital library, either destined to become a favorite, or more likely forgotten for good after a couple of listens. Today’s music players are regarded the same way–mostly as disposable. Either the player will work for two or three years before sputtering and dying, or a newer, faster, smaller, better player that has far more cachet will be released in six months.

Home audio sales have been in decline for the past half decade, and have drooped even lower in recent years. Home CD player sales totaled $36.2 million last year, but that’s 35 percent below 2005 sales figures. Home speaker sales are down 2 percent, but home shelf systems sales are down 40 percent in the same time period, according to data gathered by the NPD Group.

And why not? If you think about it, the equipment that has traditionally defined the audiophile is antithetical to the way we experience music today. Speakers are clunky and immobile, and expensive shelf systems don’t play easily swappable digital files. Instead, stereo shopping nowadays often means picking up an
iPod and a speaker dock. The combination is cheaper, mobile, convenient, and, for better or worse, cool.

But are they true audiophiles? No, at least not in the way people who came of age trying to find the perfect sound on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon were. They’d buy high-fidelity speakers and systems that play back music in a quality as close to the original performance as possible.

Little brand awareness
The problem is that the awareness of audio equipment beyond the iPod and its ilk is disappearing, according to Guttenberg.

“Before, people would listen to music through their stereo system, or 10, 15 years ago over their home theater system; that doesn’t happen anymore,” said Steve Guttenberg, who writes The Audiophiliac for the CNET Blog Network. “People have sort of moved away from that sort of mindset. It doesn’t happen except for audiophiles.”

While it’s unclear if it was the cause or simply a response to a new generation’s needs, the runaway success of the iPod played an important role in this change. The iPod either tapped into our desire to listen to music on the go–and bring the entirety of our music library with us–or told us that’s what we should want.

“I often wonder about the 30-year-old iPod,” Guttenberg mused. “Will someone still use an iPod in 30 years,” like audiophiles do high-end speakers?

But those two are not alone in their plight. Last month it was revealed that D&M Holdings, known for audio brands like Denon, Marantz, McIntosh, Snell Acoustics, and Boston Acoustics is up for sale, and that Harman International, which already operates dozens of brands, is interested, along with JVC Kenwood, in snapping it up.

In the face of slowing sales and brand awareness, the industry has responded by consolidating many of the original home audio brands and manufacturers.

Companies like McIntosh, the original high-end audio company, catered specifically to audiophiles. Begun in 1949 in Binghamton, N.Y., it still builds its speakers by hand, just as it always has. If any of its products were ever in need of repair, the company would take it back and fix it, not just replace it. The products were made to last for decades, not just the length of a one-year warranty.

Fuel cells are electrochemical devices that use hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity, and continue to produce it as long as the fuel lasts. This is not only ecologically correct, but it also weighs less. The company calculates that on a typical 72-hour mission, each soldier requires 27 pounds of rechargeable military batteries.

XX25 powers a MiTAC V100 rugged laptop.

The Army’s Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) and DARPA (PDF) have extended UltraCell’s development contract so that tests can continue. A year ago, CERDEC deemed the 25-watt model safe enough to be worn by soldiers in the field and used to power portable devices, a first for this type of fuel cell.

The XX25, as it is called, internally generates fuel cell-ready hydrogen from a highly concentrated methanol solution, providing power to a field computer and communications equipment at weight savings of up to 65 percent, according to Livermore, Calif.-based UltraCell.

(Credit:
UltraCell)

A California company has introduced a 25-watt mobile fuel cell system designed to power a ruggedized laptop computer for up to 14 hours at a time using a single 250cc cartridge.

(Credit:
UltraCell)

As an aside, Digsby’s got some good-looking emoticons that resemble bubblier versions of Yahoo IM favorites. Although they’re mapped to a range of character sets meant to be compatible with a variety of networks, some things are still lost in translation. (An emoticon for a kiss on the cheek I sent from Digsby transformed into a sloppy wet one right on the smacker when it materialized on a co-worker’s screen. Oops.)

The shouts of indignation from defenders of the two big multiprotocol IM apps, Pidgin or Trillian, are a bit more hushed these days. The newest chat client in town makes them both look passe.

Digsby is a free beta release of a supercharged communications client that gathers up major IM networks like Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Google Talk, Jabber, and ICQ with Web mail and social networks. From a single skinnable interface, people can chat, check e-mail, update Twitter, and view MySpace and Facebook activity feeds. Instant messaging, e-mailing, texting, file transfers, and voice and audio chat can all be launched from within the conversation window.

The wealth of preferences lets users rein in the number of activity notifications that pop up and customize privacy settings and most aspects of the display. I highly recommend ripping out the system-tray icons, which only add clutter, and shutting out strangers in the privacy settings. I accidentally let the latter lapse the first time I evaluated Digsby and was pestered by spim (spam IM) that I couldn’t immediately quash.

When you’ve got your preferences just so, including some splendid skins, you, too, may begin to see Digsby as a perfect example of where integrated services are going. Based on my imagination, I predict a basic mobile version and integration with image editing and video playback next.

On a related note, I read a long but excellent blog posting from a longtime musician that basically says: forget about the business; music’s power has nothing to do with unit sales and marketing models.

• Sites devoted to meticulously tracking news about the album and the progress of the tour.

So did the Web campaign help sales?

• Ninetynights.com, which included exclusive short videos of the recording process.

• Two dedicated URLs for the band’s first two
videos from the album.

The posts are written by Ethan Kaplan, the Warner Bros. vice president of technology who worked with the band to design a technology-intensive publicity campaign.

But how much of that has been due to the Web campaign, and how much of that is due to the fact that Accelerate didn’t totally suck?

Highlights include:

It’s required reading if you’re spent more time thinking about In Rainbows pay-what-you-like download model than listening to the actual record.

• REMDublin.com, which evolved into a wiki-style collaboration between fans and resulted in fan-created videos scoring top-popularity spots on YouTube.

Well, Accelerate did sell 115,500 copies in the U.S. during its debut week in April. And by July 30, it was up more than 300,000, according to SoundScan. That’s already more than the 232,000 U.S. sales of its execrable last album, Around the Sun, and close to the 415,000 of its underrated 2001 album, Reveal.

R.E.M. fans (like me!) and music-biz folks interested in exploring new ways to use the Web should check out the two-part series on Hypebot.com about the band’s online campaign for its latest album, Accelerate.

All good stuff, and the Ninetynights.com site did spark my awareness that a new R.E.M. album was coming out. But Kaplan failed to answer the main question. As he wrote, “After a string of disappointing releases (one artistically, all three commercially), the band decided to regroup and refocus….”

Microsoft’s response is to wait until the end of the year. That’s when
IE 8 is slated to debut. Microsoft may get some buzz with the IE 8 beta 2, due in August. But it’s never going to generate the sort of buzz the Mozilla folks are enjoying today. Glitch, or no glitch.

I haven’t had a chance to get my hands dirty with the new version of Firefox. It got a rave review from PC Magazine. Also, here’s a video review from CNET’s Seth Rosenblatt.

Shouldn’t it have gone smoothly from the get-go? Natch. But there are worse things in life. The site was flakey for the better part of two hours (depending upon your time zone), but it’s working now. Hey, if the engineering Einsteins over at Twitter had that kind of track record, investor Fred Wilson wouldn’t have to pump the service so hard on his blog anymore.

Meanwhile, News.com’s Stephen Shankland has it right. This is a new front in the browser war:

(Credit:
Mozilla)

I know things go bump in the night. That’s the nature of the beast. Especially when your servers are spitting out 14,000 downloads per minute. So for the hair splitters out there turning purple over a temporary glitch at Mozilla’s Web site, have a Coke and take a few minutes to inhale.

As the Web transforms from a static repository of content into a foundation for applications such as word processors and graphics editors, browsers are growing up from mere gateways into the tool that makes those applications possible. In this new era, it’s
Firefox–the heir to the Netscape legacy–that’s going up against the victor of the last era, Internet Explorer.

(Credit:
Kevin Rose)

Blogger Kevin Rose offers this photo of what he says is the redesigned iPod Nano.

Rose offers some details on what he says will be coming, though he doesn’t provide any info on his sources. The Nano, he says, will see a significant redesign, with a shift to a longer, skinnier case. As it happens, that matches up with design murmurings from earlier in the summer. The iPod Touch, meanwhile, will see just cosmetic changes, Rose reports.

Price cuts are on the way for the iPod line, too, to avoid cannibalization from sales of the $199 iPhone 3G, Rose says.

And will OS X 10.5.6 include Blu-ray support? Could well be, Rose reports.

Certainly, September has a solid track record as the month that Apple favors for its iPod launches. And as my colleague Tom Krazit pointed out the other day, drawing on a report on AppleInsider, some inventory management changes at retailer Target lend credence to the notion of old iPods giving way to new iPods next month. Tom has also pointed to reports of a potential redesign of the iPod Nano.

The Touch will be the first, he says, to have the 2.1 software, after which Apple will bring that software to the
iPhone. The world will also see the arrival of iTunes 8.0–”a true point upgrade,” according to Rose.

Expectations are running high that Apple next month will bring out new
iPod models.

Against that backdrop, we bring you to today’s tip sheet, the blog of Digg founder Kevin Rose. His take: “Sometime between now and the end of next month, Apple’s going to be refreshing quite a bit of their iPod line.”

Oracle isn’t alone in this space. IBM still kills it on product and services. Identity is one of CA’s healthiest businesses. Novell has great technology, and Microsoft is a sleeping giant. These guys won’t lie down, but Oracle went from nowhere to become a market leader in three years. That won’t change in the future.

• Identity management is a business–not an IT–initiative. Back in the 1990s, identity management was all about technology tools to manage user provisioning and security. Now it’s about mapping employees and outsiders to business processes, managing user roles, and meeting regulatory compliance mandates. When identity management evolved from a set of IT tools to a business application, deal sizes skyrocketed.

Once again, common wisdom was completely wrong. While others struggle or abandon this space, Oracle has vaulted to a leadership position. In fact, my sources tell me they see Oracle in every large deal these days. The fact is that Oracle saw the identity management space as strategic and invested accordingly to become a market leader because:

• Identity management projects can be huge. Identity management is like ERP in that it means years of process definition, role creation, custom development, and systems integration. This is right up Oracle’s alley.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Oracle dabbled in the identity space with database access controls and a network directory. But it really wasn’t considered a player in this space.

• Identity management is middleware. Oracle wants to own identity middleware just like it wants to own application integration middleware. Identity is the glue between users, applications, and distributed systems.

This changed in 2005 when Oracle acquired its way into identity management with the purchase of Oblix and Thor Technologies. Even with these acquisitions, many industry watchers never thought that Oracle could buy its way into the market and weave disparate products into an integrated suite.

Over the long weekend, some of us were slouching down in plush movie theater seats (flanked by a 24-ounce Icee and a tub o’ popcorn ) and enjoying the latest adventures of Indiana Jones. Others, however, were setting off on an actual adventure.

British rower Roz Savage pushed away from San Francisco and set off under the Golden Gate Bridge just before midnight Saturday, in her second attempt to become the first woman to row solo across the Pacific. Last summer, Savage set off only to be foiled by bad weather some two weeks into the trip. She was rescued by the Coast Guard about 90 miles off the California coast.

(Credit:
Roz Savage )

Savage, who also aims to raise awareness about the effects of pollution in our oceans, is rowing across the ocean in three stages over three years. She expects to reach Hawaii in a few months. In all, she plans to travel more than 7,000 miles, ending up in Australia.

Among the safety gadgets she has aboard her 24-foot boat is a positioning beacon from Marine Track. Find out her latest position by going to her blog. Information includes latitude, longitude, and speed. Even better, if you want to develop some virtual sea legs, you can subscribe to Savage’s podcast.

Roz Savage, shown here in 2007, aims to reach Hawaii in the next few months, the first leg in her solo journey rowing across the Pacific Ocean.

On Day 2 of her blog, Savage writes about meeting a couple of marine biologists out by the Farallon Islands. They offered her beer, bananas, and M&Ms. She declined the beer. “I traded them a business card for the food. Don’t ask me why I have business cards onboard. You just never know who you’re going to meet when you’re mid-ocean, and I hate to miss the opportunity to make a new friend.”

Consumers are increasingly willing to pay for songs they acquire over the Internet, but declining interest in CDs is dragging down overall music consumption among Internet users.

Among Internet users, according to NPD, overall music demand was down 2 percent year over year in the third quarter of 2008. That figure takes into account purchased CDs, purchased digital music downloads, files obtained via P2P sites, and music files borrowed to rip to a computer or burn to a CD.

Peer-to-peer sites, meanwhile, saw an increase in the overall volume of song files being shared, up 23 percent for the same quarter last year, though some of that increase was attributed to a greater number of downloads per user, according to NPD. The number of P2P sharers among Internet users, NPD reported, stayed flat at 14 percent.

Also, credit popular video games such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero with spurring consumers to make a music purchase of some sort. In many cases, “gaming can help remind customers of the music they grew up with…and to re-engage with the artist,” said Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD.

That jibes with reports from Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group. Both labels have recently seen vigorous growth in sales of digital music. Warner, for instance, said last month that in the third quarter, digital music sales rose 27 percent to $167 million.

During the third quarter, there was an increase both in the number of people buying digital downloads and in the number of tracks sold, according to market researcher NPD Group. Legal music downloads were up 29 percent from the same period last year, and sites such as iTunes and Amazon MP3 chalked up an additional 2.8 million music buyers, to a total of 15 percent of Internet users.

Not surprisingly, teenagers were a big factor in the gains–they accounted for 34 percent more paid downloads than in the third quarter of 2007, and P2P downloading spiked 46 percent among 13- to 17-year-olds.

“The value of each music customer is declining,” Crupnick said. But, he added, “anytime you can add 2 (million) to 3 million buyers year over year, that’s very encouraging.”

Largely, that slippage is a result of the continuing drop in sales of CDs (down 19 percent in the third quarter), most notably among teens and young adults, but also including adults over the age of 36.

But the music labels, knocked off their stride by the advent of the digital music era, still face challenges.

“We need the help of ISPs. They have the technical ability to manage the flow over their pipes,” Shira Perlmutter, a vice president for global legal policy at the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, said earlier Monday at a technology conference sponsored by the Progress and Freedom Foundation. “The good news is that we’re beginning to see some of these solutions emerge, in particular in Europe and Asia.” (IFPI is the Recording Industry Association of America’s international affiliate.)

All in the pursuit of upholding the law, of course. (Naturally.)

The real problem facing the RIAA and MPAA is that they’re still flummoxed seven years after (the original) Napster’s shutdown on how to thrive in the digital world. First, they decided to unleash a legal jihad. Then it was off to use technology to disrupt high-traffic networks suspected of assisting illegal digital file swapping. Now it’s pushing a Orwellian agenda where it’s perfectly fine to spy because it’s all serving a higher good.

Back to reality, what all this demonstrates for the umpteenth time is that the RIAA and MPAA still show themselves to be in possession of quite the tin ear. I’m not getting too exercised because broadband providers know how to count noses. While the issue got settled in court, this much is clear: we would witness the mother of all mass departures of subscribers to rival providers pledging not to monitor their customers.

Wish I could read minds because I’d love to know what the representatives from Comcast and Verizon were thinking as they listened to lobbyists from the recording and film industries push them to snoop on their customers.

Clearly, the content industries have legitimate interests to protect, but I doubt that any of that would hold up in court. The idea strikes me as a perverse reading of the U.S. Constitution. You don’t need to be a paranoid anchorite holding out in the remote hills of Montana to grasp where this policy prescription inevitably heads. But let’s suspend that skepticism and momentarily assume that some ISPs would play along. Would you trust your friendly broadband provider not to monitor other prohibited items beyond pirated songs and movies? There would be no shortage of First Amendment lawyers queuing up to get a piece of this case.