Anglonautes > English vocabulary > Arts > Music > LP, CD, WWW, internet, online

UK music download sales hit £1bn
BPI figures reveal total digital spending by fans since 2004,
with Adele's 21 the biggest-selling album
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/may/12/uk-music-download-sales

music business

music industry

recording industry

record companies

entertainment business

violate copyright law

online music
http://www.apple.com/uk/itunes/
http://www.napster.com/
http://www.ondemanddistribution.com/
http://www.listen.com/
http://www.kazaa.com/us/index.htm

legal music download business > iTunes, Napster

legal downloading

digital album sales
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jun/26/adele-drives-digital-album-sales

illegal downloading
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1791126,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/netmusic/story/0,,1671166,00.html
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3785847

Microsoft > Zune music service
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/05/27/business/AP-US-Microsoft-Zune.html

where to download music legally
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/netmusic/page/0,13368,1127237,00.html

download
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6534542.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/netmusic/page/0,13368,1127237,00.html

download
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2127345,00.html

downloader

the age of the download

music downloading

the cloud - online storage and software
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/arts/music/new-online-services-offer-hope-to-music-fans.html

Google's cloud-based music player
Allowing people to upload and store their music collections on the Web
and listen to their songs on Android phones or tablets and on computers
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/technology/10google.html

share files

illegal file-sharing network eDonkey
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article2504723.ece

file-sharing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/file-sharing
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article2592637.ece
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article2584831.ece
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1835520,00.html

file-sharing software

illegal filesharers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/04/filesharing-internet-illegal-burnham

Illegal filesharing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/21/musicindustry-internetipos

online music sharing

illegal file-sharers

face lawsuits for illegal file-sharing

digital pirate
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6534542.ece

illegally downloading tracks and violating copyright laws
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6534542.ece

online music pirate

crackdown on music piracy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/21/musicindustry-internetipos

piracy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/piracy

Featured Artists Coalition
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/21/musicindustry-internetipos
http://www.featuredartistscoalition.com/showscreen.php?site_
id=161&screentype=folder&screenid=2990&newsaction=showitem&newsid=2549&dc=6&sn=News

music and the internet
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/netmusic

music download service

online music service Spotify
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/04/online-music-spotify-hacked

peer-to-peer (P2P) technology

file swapper

online file-swapper

music fan

large-scale record store
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/arts/music/15virgin.html

on-line / online music store
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1239661,00.html

the first "official" chart to measure tracks bought on the internet
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1295488,00.html

music player

music player > touch screen
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/05/27/business/AP-US-Microsoft-Zune.html

music player market

digital music market

intellectual property

mainstream music industry

music industry majors

record label

legal sites

Apple’s iTunes, the largest legal download catalogue
http://www.apple.com/itunes/

Apple's iCloud > online music service
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/06/apple-pins-hopes-on-icloud

iPod
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/business/media/10audio.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/24/ask-leo-apple-repair
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/03/11/technology/tech-us-apple.html
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/innovations/story/0,,1888283,00.html
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-06-07-ipod-tops-beer_x.htm
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1784400,00.html

compressed computer files
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/business/media/10audio.html

sound quality
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/business/media/10audio.html

file-sharing network

KaZaA
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6534542.ece

Kazaa peer-to-peer file-sharing network
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6534542.ece

Gnutella

piracy

online piracy
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/netmusic/story/0,,1746741,00.html

EMI
http://www.emigroup.com/Default.htm

rip
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/11/digital-music-technology

"lossy" formats > AAC, M4P or MP3
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/11/digital-music-technology

MP3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3

MP3 jukebox manufacturer

MP3 blogs
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1458559,00.html

digital age
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/apr/24/mavericks-defying-digital-age

analogue artists
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/apr/24/mavericks-defying-digital-age

high-fidelity > Edgar Marion Villchur 1917-2011

Edgar M. Villchur's invention of a small loudspeaker that could produce deep, rich bass tones
opened the high-fidelity music market in the 1950s to millions of everyday listeners
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/business/edgar-m-villchur-hi-fi-innovator-dies-at-94.html

78rpm discs and gramophones
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/apr/24/mavericks-defying-digital-age

walkman
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/07/01/world/AP-AS-Japan-Sony-Walkman.html

Full Album Sales Showed a Little Growth in 2011

January 4, 2012
The New York Times
By BEN SISARIO

For the beleaguered music industry, any positive news about sales is cause for celebration. And in 2011, the numbers were slightly up.

Sales of complete albums, the industry’s most profitable product, reached 330.6 million in the United States last year, a 1.3 percent increase from 2010, according to Nielsen SoundScan, which collects sales data from retailers. Some businesses might call that level of growth flat, but since album sales had fallen every year since 2004, it was a notable improvement.

Some of that marginal growth came from one album, Adele’s “21” (XL/Columbia) which sold 5.82 million copies, the best one-year sales count for any album since Usher’s “Confessions” sold 7.98 million copies in 2004.

The increases were largely driven by consumption of digital music, whose growth quickened last year after a slow 2010. Last year 1.27 billion individual tracks were downloaded in the United States, up 8.5 percent from the year before, and sales of complete digital albums reached 103.1 million, a 19.5 percent gain from 2010.

Yet music executives, accustomed to the industry’s downward sales slope over the last decade, were cautious about interpreting last year’s gains as representing more than a small uptick. According to the Recording Industry Association of American, revenue from recorded music fell 52 percent from 2000 to 2010.

“It’s encouraging,” said Rob Stringer, the chairman of Columbia Records, which distributes Adele’s album in the United States. “But we’d be silly to jump up and down.”

After Adele’s “21,” the most popular titles of 2011 were Michael Bublé’s “Christmas” (143/Reprise), with 2.45 million sales; Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” (Interscope), with 2.1 million; Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter IV” (Cash Money/Universal Republic), with 1.92 million; and the country singer Jason Aldean’s “My Kinda Party” (Broken Bow), which had 1.58 million sales.

Adele, 23, a British retro-soul singer, has a straightforward style that is at odds with the electronic dance-pop that dominates the Top 40, yet her songs “Rolling in the Deep” and “Someone Like You” became hits on multiple radio formats. That helped her album, released in February, remain one of the Top five sellers for almost every week of the year.

Mr. Stringer attributed Adele’s success to the quality of her music, to a marketing plan that made use of all the modern tools like social media, and strategically chosen placements in film and television. Yet the label avoided the excessive branding deals and product endorsements that could have turned her fans off.

“We were omnipresent but not overexposed,” Mr. Stringer said.

Analysts also pointed to several beneficial trends in retail. Online, record labels and digital shops like iTunes and Amazon now regularly promote deluxe versions of albums, which offer bonus content for a premium price.

“Digital retailers are getting better and better at giving customers what they want,” said David Bakula, a senior analyst at Nielsen.

For the first time, digital music purchases surpassed those of physical albums like CDs and vinyl records: 50.3 percent of all units sold — whether singles or full albums — were digital, according to SoundScan.

But fire-sale pricing by retailers online and offline may be conditioning consumers to expect unsustainable discounts. In a promotion that enraged brick-and-mortar record stores, Amazon briefly sold the download version of Lady Gaga’s album for 99 cents. And to lure consumers to ever-shrinking CD racks, big-box stores regularly price “catalog” albums — titles more than 18 months old — at $5 or less.

Those discounts may have contributed to one of the more surprising statistics in SoundScan’s annual report: sales of CDs, after dropping 19.5 percent in 2010, fell only 5.7 percent last year, to 223.5 million. (As recently as 2004, however, total CD sales were almost three times that number.)

And sales of vinyl albums, which have bolstered independent shops, rose 36 percent to 3.9 million, their highest level since SoundScan opened in 1991.

Analysts and music executives pointed to the continued growth of digital music — and the expansion of streaming services like Spotify and MOG, whose revenue from advertising and subscriptions is not tracked by SoundScan — as the most promising signs for an industry in which hitting a low point is seen as a positive indicator.

“It’s a bit more than a blip,” Michael McGuire, a media analyst at Gartner, said of the slight growth in music sales last year. “I think it’s the sign that the music industry is finally starting to come to figure out the digital present and future, at least when it comes to download sales. Perhaps we’ve seen the bottom.”

Full Album Sales Showed a Little Growth in 2011, NYT, 4.1.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/business/media/complete-album-sales-showed-slight-growth-in-2011.html

The Cloud That Ate Your Music

June 22, 2011
Reuters
By JON PARELES

I’M ready for the cloud. Soon, I hope, it will be ready for me.

Recent weeks have been filled with announcements about music taking residence in the cloud, the poetic name for online storage and software that promises to make lifetimes worth of songs available to anyone, anywhere, as long as those people and places have Internet connections. (Which of course is a long way from everyone, everywhere, but utopian tech dreams tend to ignore mere hardware.)

I can’t wait. Ever since music began migrating online in the 1990s I have longed to make my record collection evaporate — simply to have available the one song I need at any moment, without having to store the rest.

But I have, as they say, special needs. In three decades as a critic I have amassed more vinyl, CDs and digital files than I know what to do with. Periodic weeding can’t keep up with the 20 to 30 discs that arrive in the daily mailbag; the overfull floor-to-ceiling shelves are already straining under thousands of CDs and LPs. Any affection I had for physical packaging, no matter how elegant or unique, has long since vanished; it’s a reference library, not an art collection.

And it grows, and grows, because I never know what I’ll need: the limited-edition 45, the home-burned debut CD. Yet I’d much rather have it in the cloud than in my apartment.

In recent weeks Amazon, Google and Apple have announced services to store individual music collections in the cloud, ready for access online and for syncing to multiple devices. Pandora Internet radio, which extrapolates individual playlists from users’ likes and dislikes, raised hundreds of millions of dollars with a huge initial public offering (followed, however, by a steep drop in stock price; with operating costs and royalties to copyright owners, the company has never made a profit).

Dar.fm recently arrived as a free service that records radio stations — like TiVo for radio — and, as a bonus, conveniently indexes any music from those stations that has been electronically tagged. (Choose a congenial radio station and assemble a well-chosen collection.) Other companies — Rdio, MOG, Napster, Rhapsody — have been offering huge catalogs of music on demand (and transferable to portable devices) for some time as subscription services for a monthly fee, and Spotify, already online in Europe, is likely to join them in the United States soon.

That’s not to mention the many unauthorized sources for music; virtually any album can be found for downloading with a simple search. Free or paid, the cloud is already active.

Dematerializing recorded music has consequences. On the positive side it hugely multiplies the potential audience, letting the music travel fast and far to listeners who would never have known it existed. It escalates music’s portability, as it adds one more previously stand-alone function — like clocks, cameras, calendars, newspapers, video players and games — to the omnivorous smartphone. That’s instant gratification, but with a catch: Smartphones aren’t exactly renowned for sound quality. And the MP3 compression that has made music so portable has already robbed it of some fidelity even before it reaches my earphones.

The ritual of placing an LP on a turntable and cranking up a hi-fi home stereo disappeared — when? Perhaps with the cassette and the Walkman, the ancestor of the portable MP3 player. Now even the thought of having a separate music player is a little quaint. The smartphone will do it all — just adequately, but convenience trumps quality. Baby boomers who remember the transistor radio, that formerly miniature marvel that now looks and feels like a brick compared to current MP3 players, can experience again the sound of an inadequate speaker squeezing out a beloved song.

As the last decade has abundantly proved, freeing music from discs also drives down the price of recorded music, often to zero, dematerializing what used to be an income for musicians and recording companies. Royalties generated from sales of MP3 files and by online subscription services are unlikely to ever make recorded music as profitable as it was in disc form.

There has also been another, far less quantifiable, effect of separating music from its physical package. Songs have become, for lack of a better word, trivial: not through any less effort from the best musicians, but through the unexpected combination of a nearly infinite supply, constant availability, suboptimum sound quality and the intangibility I’ve always thought I would welcome.

Now everyone, not just a critic, can feel awash in music, with an infinitude of choices immediately at hand. But each of those choices is a diminished thing; attainable without effort, disposable without a second thought, just another icon in a folder on a pocket-size screen with pocket-sized sound. The tricky part, more now than ever, is to make any new release feel like an occasion: to give a song more impact than a single droplet out of the cloud. This presents a challenge to culturally ambitious musicians: before they can be larger than life, they have to be larger than the LCD screen.

Or they can try to conquer that screen and play the Internet as an instrument, using its defining attribute: interactivity. When Google replaced its logo with a virtual instrument for Les Paul’s 96th birthday — not strictly speaking a guitar but a harp, with one note per string — people worldwide played tunes on it and recorded them into the cloud. And of course there are smartphone apps to simulate guitars, keyboards, drums and recording studios.

Bjork’s next album, “Biophilia,” is due to arrive this fall with a smartphone app built around every song: apps that diagram the song in both conventional music notation and invented graphic notation, that remap the songs as scientific phenomena like (among other things) planetary systems and crystal structures, that encourage listeners to toy with components of the music to create songs of their own.

“I’m excited to embrace a different handshake between the object and sound,” Bjork said in an e-mail. “It seems like every couple of decades this takes a somersault, and I enjoy the fresh point of view, like the honeymoon of the new format where you can really have an effect on the overall direction, and things like enjoyment, love and freedom matter again.”

She added, “I definitely wanted the songs to be a spatial experience, where you can play with lightning or a crystal or the full moon and the song changes. I would like to feel the apps are equal to the song in the same way I have always aimed for the music video to be equal to the song: the 1+1 is 3 thing. Not that it works every time, but you have to aim for it.”

But while musicians learn to play in the cloud, I need it as a repository. For the moment, the much-ballyhooed cloud music players leave me unimpressed. Each has different mechanisms, features, prices and limitations, including one major one: They all depend on first uploading the collection into the cloud.

Google Music Beta’s Music Manager has been running for days on my laptop, and it’s barely one-third of the way through a mere 4,000 songs from a single hard drive — a tiny random fraction of the collection. Amazon and Apple will automatically add the music purchased through their respective stores, but the rest is slow going.

Apple is also promising that later this year, for a fee it will share with record companies, that it will implement a service called iTunes Match, which will scan and recognize music and add Apple’s own copies without uploading. That was an idea that mp3.com implemented back in 2000, when its Beam-it function recognized CDs in home computers to add immediately to online collections. But Beam-it was soon stopped by a record-company lawsuit. Now Apple has gotten permission from the major labels, though at least one independent, the archivally minded Numero Group, has turned down iTunes Match, describing Apple’s financial terms as a “pittance.”

Meanwhile, as many technology writers have pointed out, iTunes Match as currently described will in effect launder music that was copied illicitly, replacing home-ripped files with standardized, good-quality MP3s. But now record labels and publishers will receive 70 percent of Apple’s fee.

As for the far greater part of my music library that’s just on CDs, well, it’s too bad no one is bringing back Beam-it, and even then the uploading would be endless. But yes, it’s charming to see an album that’s nowhere in my phone’s memory available for listening, with the option to copy selected files for offline (which to me means subway) play. The cloud services are, after all, just getting started; speed and storage capacity will only increase.

For me, though, the great hope of the cloud is the subscription services, like MOG and Rdio. Their catalogs are deep, their interfaces sensible, their sound quality decent though not spectacular. For every fan who imagines herself a D.J., there’s a new social curatorial model arising in these services, somewhere between the old homemade cassette mixtape handed to a friend and full-scale broadcasting, with a giant potential library. You can flaunt or hide what you’re listening to; you can get ideas from others’ playlists or copy them wholesale.

But as deep as the subscription catalogs go, they aren’t deep enough: imported albums, out-of-print albums, minuscule independents and big-time holdouts like the Beatles aren’t in that sector of the cloud.

Yet, again, there’s hope. Apple’s Match is a sign that copyright holders are starting to rethink their licensing terms for the cloud, which will make subscription catalogs even larger. And, practically speaking, for those obscure, orphaned releases there is the unlicensed but hyperactive community of collectors who continue to share their finds online, with downloads just a search away. As for sound quality — well, maybe that’s wishful thinking.

But I have to stay optimistic that it won’t be another decade before all my discs really can disappear into the cloud. And then, having solved the space problem, I can turn to something even more intractable: the time to listen to it all.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 26, 2011

A cover essay this weekend about the online storage of music misstates the name of the Apple service that will scan and recognize music and add Apple’s own copies without uploading. It is iTunesMatch, not iMatch.

The Cloud That Ate Your Music, NYT, 22.6.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/arts/music/new-online-services-offer-hope-to-music-fans.html

Google to Unveil Service to Let Users Stream Their Music

May 10, 2011
The New York Times
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

SAN FRANCISCO — Google plans to introduce its long-awaited service to allow people to upload and store their music collections on the Web and listen to their songs on Android phones or tablets and on computers.

The announcement of the new service, a so-called cloud-based music player, will be made on Tuesday at Google I/O, the company’s developers conference here, which will run through Wednesday.

The service, to be called Music Beta by Google, is similar to one introduced by Amazon in March, although it will store considerably more music. And like Amazon, Google does not have the cooperation of music labels, which means that users cannot do certain things that would legally require licenses, like sharing songs with friends and buying songs from Google.

But Google’s announcement at this time was unexpected because it has been negotiating with the music labels for months to try to make a deal to team with them on a cloud music service.

“A couple of major labels were not as collaborative and frankly were demanding a set of business terms that were unreasonable and did not allow us to build a product or a business on a sustainable business,” said Jamie Rosenberg, director for digital content for Android. “So we’re not necessarily relying on the partnerships that have proven difficult.”

After Amazon introduced its service, music label executives said they were disappointed and exploring their legal options.

Neither Google’s nor Amazon’s cloud players make true many Web companies’ dream, which is for people to be able to listen to their music whenever they want, on any device. Ideally, Web companies would keep a copy of every song in the cloud, creating a kind of Internet jukebox, and give users instant access to those they own without uploading. But that would require licenses.

“This whole upload thing just seems like a significant barrier to wide consumer adoption, because even with broadband it just takes a long time” to upload, said David Pakman, who invests in digital media start-ups for the venture capital firm Venrock, and helped found a similar music service, Myplay, in 1999.

But Amazon forced Google’s hand, he said. “If you’re faced with another six months of brutal negotiations and your competitor just launched this, you just get in the market and get a lot of users.”

Mr. Rosenberg characterized Music Beta as a first step in a broader cloud music service and said Google hoped to continue negotiating with the record labels to get licenses to offer other things, like a music store that sells songs or a service that suggests new music to listeners.

For Google, the new service is a way to compete with the iPhone by giving Android users the ability to easily use their music collections. Android users could previously store MP3 music files on their phones but it was a cumbersome process. Amazon’s service, Cloud Player, also works on Android phones, but stores many fewer songs free.

Since songs stored by Google will stream from the Web, they are not always as accessible as songs stored on iPods, because people can’t listen to them in places without data connections, like airplanes. But Google stores copies of recently played songs and certain songs that users choose for offline access.

The music labels have long argued that they should be paid when people listen to songs on various devices. Google, Amazon and Apple, along with start-ups like Spotify and the now-defunct Imeem, have struggled to strike agreements.

Apple is still expected to be working on such a service. It acquired Lala, a cloud music service, and built a data center in North Carolina that could store users’ music collections. It also has relationships with the labels through iTunes.

Google and Amazon, meanwhile, say they do not need licenses to store music for users and play songs on multiple devices because users upload the songs they own, just as they would if they backed up their computers. “This is really a personal storage service in the same way that you would put songs on an iPad or you would put songs on a backup hard drive, so this service does not involve licenses for the music industry,” Mr. Rosenberg said.

The service is invitation-only to start. Verizon Xoom owners will receive invitations and others can sign up at music.google.com. Users download an application to their computer and upload their music, which could take many hours. The songs will be available on any device linked to the user’s Google account using a mobile app or a Web-based player, as long as they support Flash, which excludes iPhones and iPads.

Users can store 20,000 songs free, as opposed to Amazon’s service, which stores up to 1,000 songs without charge.

The service syncs activity on different devices, so if users create playlists on their phones, the playlists will automatically show up on their computers.

“We looked at the power of Google to deliver a compelling cloud-based service and essentially married those technologies with what we felt was lacking in the Android experience up until now,” Mr. Rosenberg said.

Google to Unveil Service to Let Users Stream Their Music, R, 10.5.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/technology/10google.html

Platinum Is So Passé. In iTunes Era, the Singles Count.

August 30, 2010
The New York Times
By JOSEPH PLAMBECK

By traditional measures, the British hip-hop artist Taio Cruz is far from being a star. But in the new world of pop music, he is certified gold.

Mr. Cruz’s latest album, “Rokstarr,” has sold just 93,000 copies in 12 weeks, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and this week sits at No. 54 on the Billboard 200 chart.

But while he has sold relatively few albums, he has sold 4.9 million copies of two singles from the album, “Break Your Heart” and “Dynamite,” and videos for those singles have been viewed more than 49 million times online. For his label, Mercury Records, that means he is a commercial success.

For decades, the music industry has been looking to the album charts to establish what made a hit. In the past 10 years, though, album sales have plummeted, sales of singles have surged and new sources of revenue have emerged — like fees for music streamed online and ringtone purchases — that are changing the definition of a hot artist.

Still, much of the industry relies on the Billboard 200, the longtime album sales chart, as the primary measure and talking point about an artist’s moneymaking prowess.

“The music industry has trained people to focus on the album chart for 20 years,” said Jay Frank, the head of music for CMT, the country music cable network. “Now they need to get them to focus on something else.”

BigChampagne, a media measurement firm in California, believes there is an opening for a new chart that better captures an artist’s popularity and commercial success. Last month, the company introduced a service, which it is calling the Ultimate Chart, that ranks artists based on the number of albums sold, singles sold, songs streamed online and other factors. The service also ranks sales of albums and singles, though they diverge little from Billboard’s charts.

On the most recent Ultimate Chart, Mr. Cruz is the No. 2 artist. Lil Wayne ranks as the fourth most popular artist, while his most recent album, “Rebirth,” is on the Billboard album chart at No. 89. (The two charts are not always at such great odds. Eminem is the No. 1 artist on the Ultimate Chart while his album sits at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.)

The new charts reflect the shift in music industry revenue. Even established performers like Rihanna, whose latest album, “Rated R,” broke into the top five on the Billboard 200 in 2009, receives half of her revenue through those other avenues, according to Jim Urie, the head of distribution for the Universal Music Group, which owns her label, Def Jam, as well as Mercury.

“We used to have basically a single line on the revenue sheet,” Mr. Urie said. “Now we have many.”

For most labels and artists, though, revenue from those new streams has not made up for the sharp drop in CD sales. While labels would not discuss overall revenue for specific artists, total revenue from recorded music peaked in 1999, at $13.4 billion, according to Forrester Research, and was about half of that in 2009.

But the multiple ways to make money provide hope to a struggling industry and are also changing the kind of music that gets made and promoted. Album sales are often driven by older listeners who typically favor country and soft-rock artists like Taylor Swift and Susan Boyle.

Pop and hip-hop artists like Taio Cruz and Rihanna are sometimes underrepresented on the album chart, as younger fans in particular have moved to buying singles and streaming music online.

In the near future, that could mean more Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, less Nickelback and Keith Urban.

“It’s becoming clear this year, to the industry and the artists, that when you’re having real hit singles, it has great value,” said David Massey, president of Mercury Records, Mr. Cruz’s label. “They can be more important than the album chart position.”

The Billboard charts have been modified over the years as the music industry changed. Back in 1913, Billboard published a chart showing the popularity of sheet music. In 1945, Billboard magazine introduced a chart displaying the top five albums. Five eventually grew to 200, the number the magazine has stuck with since 1972.

The album charts were largely a guessing game and could be manipulated by music insiders. That changed in 1991, when SoundScan began electronically tracking sales by retailers. The labels signed on to the service, and Billboard used the data for its Billboard 200 chart.

It didn’t take long for the industry to realize that albums usually peaked in sales during their first week of release, rather than build up momentum over time, as they had long thought. That discovery changed the marketing strategy at record labels, said Peter Lubin, a former record executive, putting the focus on the weeks leading up to the release.

“The music industry got very good at creating stories about artist launches,” said David Pakman, a venture capitalist and former chief executive of the digital music store eMusic. “You created a story to get radio programmers to get behind it.”

If a record had a bad first week, Mr. Lubin said, the thinking at a label quickly became, “This record is a loser; if you invest any more money in it, you’ll be a loser, too.”

And no one wants to be a loser. But until a new measurement tool is widely adopted, labels are largely left to their own devices to figure out a profitable strategy and a way to compare their success with the competition.

Cliff Chenfeld, an owner of Razor and Tie, an independent label in New York, said his company tailored a revenue strategy for each project rather than immediately falling back on a calculation of how many albums could be sold.

The singer-songwriter Dave Barnes, an artist signed to Razor and Tie, has never broken the top 50 in the Billboard 200. But Mr. Barnes found success on Christian radio and landed a deal with SongFreedom.com, a site that provides music to wedding photographers and videographers.

The commercial success of that deal, according to Mr. Chenfeld, is not reflected on the Billboard 200, even though its revenue is “considerable, and opportunities like that are viral.”

“The reliance on album sales is very 20th century,” he said.

Bill Werde, the editorial director of Billboard, said its Hot 100 chart lists the most popular songs based on a formula that factors in single sales, radio airplay and online streaming. “We’re constantly evolving what we’re doing and how we do it,” he said. Nielsen, the company that provides the album sales data to Billboard, has started to compile an artist’s revenue streams on a single sheet that it calls a scorecard.

But the top spot on the album charts, like a No. 1 book or a big opening weekend at the box office, remains a salient — and marketable — shorthand for industry success.

“We still fight for the No. 1 spot,” said Lee Stimmel, executive vice president for marketing at Epic Records, a Sony Music label. “It’s still a very important tag to have on a record.”

Platinum Is So Passé. In iTunes Era, the Singles Count, NYT, 30.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/business/media/30hits.html

Retailing Era Closes With Music Megastore

June 15, 2009
The New York Times
By BEN SISARIO

The sounds of the Velvet Underground echoed in the Virgin Megastore in Union Square on Sunday afternoon, as bargain-hunting passers-by and hard-core music shoppers poked through what few items remained at the last large-scale record store in New York City.

It was the final day of business for the Virgin Megastore chain in North America, which at its peak had 23 locations but by Sunday was down to two: the 57,000-square-foot, two-level New York outlet, and a smaller Hollywood shop that was also set to close. In Union Square posters trumpeted 90 percent discounts and offered the sale of “all furniture and equipment.” But when the store opened, perhaps 90 percent of the merchandise had already been sold, leaving two tables of CDs and DVDs, a dozen T-shirt racks and a few other scattered displays.

With the music industry stuck in a decade-long crisis, the sight of a record store closing is hardly surprising. But for many shoppers at Union Square on Sunday the loss of a big outlet in one of the most heavily trafficked areas of the city was particularly dispiriting.

“Unfortunately the large retail music store is a dinosaur,” said Tony Beliech, 39, a former Virgin employee who was lugging around an armful of CDs that he said would cost him no more than $20. “It does matter because it was also a social gathering space, and that’s one thing that buying music online lacks.”

Dozens of smaller record stores are still open in New York, and at least 2,000 independent shops exist around the country, according to the Almighty Institute of Music Retail, a market research company. Many of those independents have banded together to promote events like Record Store Day, which had its second anniversary in April. They are also promoting Vinyl Saturday on June 20, which will feature specially produced records by artists like Wilco and Modest Mouse to draw customers.

But the record store ranks have been severely thinned in recent years, and New York, once home to at least three large-scale music chains, now has none. Last month Virgin shut down its other New York Megastore, in Times Square. (There are still Virgin Megastores in Europe and the Middle East, but under different ownership.) HMV — like Virgin, of British origin — pulled out of the American market in 2004; Tower Records closed its 89 American stores in 2006. Trans World Entertainment, which operates the FYE chain, has closed at least 280 of its locations over the last two years, leaving it with about 700, but none comparable in size to the Virgin Megastore.

“It’s clear that the model of the large entertainment specialist working in a large space is not going to work in the future,” said Simon Wright, the chief executive of Virgin Entertainment Group, North America.

To an extent the closings are a result of the overall drop in music sales. From the industry’s peak in 2000 — when some 785 million albums were sold — until the end of 2008, album sales fell 45 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Even with the rise of iTunes and other online outlets, however, CDs have remained consumers’ format of choice, though that advantage is slipping. As recently as 2006, CDs accounted for more than 90 percent of album sales. Last year that proportion dropped to 84 percent, and so far in 2009 it is 77 percent. As many as two-thirds of all album sales are made at large chains like FYE, Wal-Mart and Best Buy, according to industry estimates.

“The Titanic that is physical media started slowly sinking in 2000,” said Michael McGuire, an analyst with Gartner, a market research firm, when asked about Virgin. “Certainly this is a traumatic event for those who worked there, but it’s an expected product of the digital transition.”

But the end of Virgin is also a product of business concerns unrelated to music. Its first American store was opened in 1992 in Los Angeles, and it set itself apart from rivals by developing a clublike atmosphere with booming sound systems and by offering steep discounts. “The indies learned from them and applied that to our stores,” said Michael Kurtz, president of the Music Monitor Network, a coalition of about 100 independent retailers.

As CD sales declined, the Megastores remained profitable by offering T-shirts, DVDs and other items. The Times Square outlet, for example, had annual sales in excess of $50 million, according to company reports, making it by many industry estimations the highest-volume record store in the United States.

In 2007 Virgin’s North American branch was bought by two real estate firms, Related Companies and Vornado Realty Trust, and in a Reuters interview last year an executive from Vornado made it clear that the chain’s true value was not in its sales but in the real estate that its stores occupied. In both Times Square and Union Square, analysts say, Virgin’s rent was a fraction of the going rate.

Forever 21, a fashion chain, is taking over the Times Square store; a spokeswoman for Related Companies said it was in negotiations for the Union Square site but declined to identify any potential new tenants.

At Union Square on Sunday most new and popular titles had long since been gobbled up. In relative abundance, however, were Virgin-branded black T-shirts ($1), Guitar Hero action figures ($1.39) and a variety of Jonas Brothers memorabilia. Yet there were still some hidden gems. Mr. Beliech, the customer and former employee, scored CDs by, among others, the British folk-experimental group Current 93 and the hyperkinetic Japanese band Melt-Banana.

Max Redinger, 14, who was walking his dog, picked up some anime books and Guitar Hero figures. He said he buys most of his music on iTunes but still likes going to record stores and mentioned that a friend had recently introduced him to an independent shop upstate.

“I don’t really buy stuff from it,” Mr. Redinger said, “but it’s a really cool place.”

Retailing Era Closes With Music Megastore, NYT, 15.6.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/arts/music/15virgin.html

Apple Rolls Out Talking iPod Shuffle

March 11, 2009
Filed at 1:16 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By REUTERS

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple Inc introduced a smaller version of its popular iPod Shuffle music player on Wednesday with a new feature that tells the user what song is playing.

The new 4-gigabyte gadget costs $79, is half the size of the previous Shuffle, and carries up to 1,000 songs -- twice as many as the last generation of the device.

All of the controls on the new Shuffle have been moved from the device to the earphone cord. The new VoiceOver feature announces songs and playlists to users in 14 different languages, according to Apple, whose shares rose 4.5 percent.

The voice function is particularly useful on the Shuffle, which does not have a display screen like most iPods or other digital music players.

Needham & Co analyst Charles Wolf said the new Shuffle design was appealing and called the voice function a "nice a little gimmick. It shows that Apple intends to keep that piece of the portfolio going. They're going to continue to innovate, upgrade the sub-$100 device."

"It won't necessarily stimulate sales, but it clearly will keep sales of the Shuffle going forward," he said.

The VoiceOver feature works by synchronizing with iTunes software, which installs a voice kit on the user's computer. VoiceOver can also tell a user how much battery life remains.

"You previously couldn't have multiple playlists on the iPod Shuffle because you couldn't really switch between them as there was no way to know how you would switch," said Greg Joswiak, Apple vice president of iPod marketing, told Reuters. "So now instead of seeing, you get to hear."

Although Apple does not break out Shuffle sales, Needham's Wolf estimated some 7.5 million units were sold in the December quarter, it's biggest-selling quarter. Apple sold 22.7 million iPod units overall in the period.

The third generation of iPod Shuffle will be the world's tiniest music player, smaller than an AA battery. It comes in two colors, silver and black.

Apple will continue to sell the second-generation version of the 1-gigabyte, 240-song Shuffle for $49. but phase out the 2-gigabyte Shuffle, which sells for $69.

The iPod music player has played an important role in the revival of Apple's fortunes. The company has sold more than 200 million iPods since they launched in 2001. It launched the first Shuffle in January 2005.

The refreshed Shuffle comes just a week after the company updated its line of Mac desktop computers. Apple refreshed it MacBook laptop computers last fall.

Shares of Cupertino, California-based Apple rose $3.97 to $92.59 in early afternoon trading on Nasdaq.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke and Gabriel Madway; Editing by Derek Caney, Steve Orlofsky and Jeffrey Benkoe)

Apple Rolls Out Talking iPod Shuffle, NYT, 11.3.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/03/11/technology/tech-us-apple.html

In Harlem, 2 Record Stores Go the Way of the Vinyl

January 21, 2008
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

On Saturday morning, Bobby’s Happy House, a music store in Harlem that opened in 1946, was in a state of chaos.

The store’s owner, 91-year-old Bobby Robinson, who was wearing a dark blue suit and his trademark black fedora, seemed bewildered as he surveyed his store. Albums were stacked on the floor, photographs of him with Fats Domino, James Brown and others had been pulled from the walls and the store’s glass display cases contained only a few scattered CDs and cassette tapes.

A few hundred yards northwest, at the Harlem Record Shack on 125th Street, an employee with a handmade sign was urging passers-by to sign a petition to keep that store from being evicted.

Inside, the voice of the store’s owner, Sikhulu Shange, 66, rang through the Record Shack as he vowed not to go easily, even though he was under a court order to leave within a few weeks, after 36 years in business there.

Mr. Robinson and Mr. Shange, who have been friendly rivals for Harlem’s music dollars for almost two generations, are on the cusp of being forced out of business here within weeks of each other as Harlem continues its uneasy transition from being a haven for some of the city’s poorest residents to a place where apartments selling for $1 million and tripling commercial rents have become unremarkable occurrences.

Bobby’s Happy House, on Frederick Douglass Boulevard near 125th Street, is closing on Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Mr. Shange has been given until the end of March to vacate his store.

Each man represents a distinct generation of black men who arrived in Harlem as young men seeking to contribute to a neighborhood they had long heard about and had admired.

Mr. Robinson, originally from South Carolina, came after World War II. He speaks in the language of that time, using words like “colored,” which has long been retired.

Mr. Shange, who arrived from South Africa in the 1960s, came of age during that era’s tradition of protest. He wears dashikis and repeats words like “empowerment.”

Each man said the runaway pace of change in the neighborhood during the past few years was unlike anything they had seen before.

“Everything you see here, I built,” Mr. Robinson said, waving his arm around his store as friends and family members boxed up decades of mementos. “How do you think I feel?”

On the other hand, Mr. Shange, who was at the center of an eviction battle in the 1990s that culminated in gunfire and an arson attack that killed eight people, left no doubt about his feelings. He was angry.

“There was a time when everybody was running away from Harlem, but we stayed, keeping the culture alive,” he said, as shoppers surveyed the small store’s African, gospel, jazz and R&B selections that are kept in locked glass cases. “We don’t have nothing to show for being in the community all these years and keeping it beautiful. Tourists are not coming here to see McDonald’s and Burger King. They are coming here to see black culture.”

The two stores have survived so long, the owners say, because they offer services and products customers cannot get anyplace else.

At Bobby’s Happy House, those services included recording albums onto cassettes or CDs for customers and allowing visitors to pull up a plastic chair and chat with Mr. Robinson, who was a noted record producer. His work included Wilbert Harrison’s No. 1 hit “Kansas City” in 1959 and groundbreaking hip-hop songs by Doug E. Fresh and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five during the late 1970s.

The inspiration for the name of Bobby’s Happy House, which has had various names over the years, was a doo-wop song Mr. Robinson wrote for Lewis Lymon & the Teenchords in 1956 called “I’m So Happy,” a hit in the Northeast. (Lewis Lymon was the younger brother of Frankie Lymon, best known for a song with the Teenagers, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”).

At the Record Shack, customers have found in Mr. Shange, a former dancer, an authoritative source on American soul music and hard-to-find African music. In a nod to their customers, both stores continued to sell records and cassette tapes, formats most other stores have not sold for years.

“A lot of old people are ashamed to go to a store and ask them for cassettes,” said Mr. Robinson’s daughter, Denise Benjamin, who has managed Bobby’s Happy House for her father in recent years.

Both Mr. Robinson and Mr. Shange said it was unclear what role the downturn in the record music industry has had on their stores, but HMV and the Wiz, two large retailers that sold CDs and other items, have closed stores on 125th Street during the past few years.

Mr. Robinson and Mr. Shange said they had been caught off-guard by their evictions and the transformation of the neighborhood. Each has a different landlord. Within a few blocks of their stores are more than a dozen construction sites for projects that include a 19-story hotel, office towers and luxury co-ops and condominiums.

Once the last of the old records have been cleared from Bobby’s — and other tenants in the block-long building have moved out — the new owners, a partnership of the Sigfeld Group and Kimco Realty Corporation, have said they will tear down the structure and replace it with a four-story office building, including retail space on the ground floor. None of the old tenants, including Mr. Robinson, said they had been invited to set up shop in the new building. Several store owners have filed a lawsuit contesting their evictions.

Ms. Benjamin said family members decided not to join the lawsuit because they wanted to save their money to find a location nearby.

Representatives for Sigfeld and Kimco, which bought the building for $30 million in August, did not respond to phone calls and e-mail messages seeking comment. Mr. Shange’s landlord, the United House of Prayer for All People, won a court order forcing Mr. Shange to leave the store empty and “broom clean” by March 31. The church has not announced its plans for the space, and a church representative at its headquarters in Washington declined to comment. David M. Grill, the attorney representing the church in New York, did not return a phone call and an e-mail message seeking comment.

Mr. Shange, who has been paying $4,500 a month — about $500 more a month than Mr. Robinson at Bobby’s Happy House — said that he was willing to pay more, but that the church, which is above the store, had refused to negotiate.

Mr. Shange said the store was organizing a protest rally on Sunday at 11 a.m., when many of the church’s parishioners will be arriving for services.

A flier at his store advertising the rally reads: “Protest Greedy Landlords! We will not be moved from Harlem!!! We must reclaim, preserve and protect our historic black community. If we do not, no one will!!!”

Eight thousand people have signed a petition opposing his store’s eviction, he said.

When Mr. Shange faced eviction in 1995 during a dispute with a different landlord, who held the sublease for the Record Shack, weeks of demonstrations over the plans of the landlord, who was white, to evict the black-owned store took on a racial tinge. The dispute ended after a protester walked into the landlord’s store, which was next to the Record Shack, carrying a handgun and a container of paint thinner. After shooting and wounding four people, he set the store ablaze before shooting himself. He and seven other people died in the blaze.

Mr. Shange said he expected the coming demonstration to be peaceful, just as others in support of his store have been in recent months.

Unlike Mr. Shange, Mr. Robinson’s daughter said she did not particularly object to the changes occurring in Harlem, which have included new bank branches and grocery stores.

“I don’t mind change, but when people have had to endure everything — and you know if you’ve been here 60 years you’ve endured a lot,” she said, her voice trailing off. “This is everything to him.”

In Harlem, 2 Record Stores Go the Way of the Vinyl, NYT, 21.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/nyregion/21records.html

Record Companies Win Music Sharing Trial

October 5, 2007
Filed at 2:31 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

DULUTH, Minn. (AP) -- The recording industry hopes $222,000 will be enough to dissuade music lovers from downloading songs from the Internet without paying for them. That's the amount a federal jury ordered a Minnesota woman to pay for sharing copyrighted music online.

''This does send a message, I hope, that downloading and distributing our recordings is not OK,'' Richard Gabriel, the lead attorney for the music companies that sued the woman, said Thursday after the three-day civil trial in this city on the shore of Lake Superior.

In closing arguments he had told the jury, ''I only ask that you consider that the need for deterrence here is great.''

Jammie Thomas, 30, a single mother from Brainerd, was ordered to pay the six record companies that sued her $9,250 for each of 24 songs they focused on in the case. They had alleged she shared 1,702 songs in all.

It was the first time one of the industry's lawsuits against individual downloaders had gone to trial. Many other defendants have settled by paying the companies a few thousand dollars, but Thomas decided she would take them on and maintained she had done nothing wrong.

''She was in tears. She's devastated,'' Thomas' attorney, Brian Toder, told The Associated Press. ''This is a girl that lives from paycheck to paycheck, and now all of a sudden she could get a quarter of her paycheck garnished for the rest of her life.''

Toder said the plaintiff's attorney fees are automatically awarded in such judgments under copyright law, meaning Thomas could actually owe as much as a half-million dollars. However, he said he suspects the record companies ''will probably be people we can deal with.''

Gabriel said no decision had yet been made about what the record companies would do, if anything, to pursue collecting the money from Thomas.

The record companies accused Thomas of downloading the songs without permission and offering them online through a Kazaa file-sharing account. Thomas denied wrongdoing and testified that she didn't have a Kazaa account.

Since 2003, record companies have filed some 26,000 lawsuits over file-sharing, which has hurt sales because it allows people to get music for free instead of paying for recordings in stores.

During the trial, the record companies presented evidence they said showed the copyrighted songs were offered by a Kazaa user under the name ''tereastarr.'' Their witnesses, including officials from an Internet provider and a security firm, testified that the Internet address used by ''tereastarr'' belonged to Thomas.

Toder said in his closing argument that the companies never proved ''Jammie Thomas, a human being, got on her keyboard and sent out these things.''

''We don't know what happened,'' Toder told jurors. ''All we know is that Jammie Thomas didn't do this.''

Copyright law sets a damage range of $750 to $30,000 per infringement, or up to $150,000 if the violation was ''willful.'' Jurors ruled that Thomas' infringement was willful but awarded damages in a middle range; Gabriel said they did not explain the amount to attorneys afterward. Jurors left the courthouse without commenting.

Before the verdict, an official with an industry trade group said he was surprised it had taken so long for one of the industry's lawsuits against individual downloaders to come to trial.

Illegal downloads have ''become business as usual. Nobody really thinks about it,'' said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, which coordinates the lawsuits. ''This case has put it back in the news. Win or lose, people will understand that we are out there trying to protect our rights.''

Thomas' testimony was complicated by the fact that she had replaced her computer's hard drive after the sharing was alleged to have taken place -- and later than she said in a deposition before trial.

The hard drive in question was not presented at trial by either party.

The record companies said Thomas was sent an instant message in February 2005 warning her that she was violating copyright law. Her hard drive was replaced the following month, not in 2004 as she said in the deposition.

''I don't think the jury believed my client regarding the events concerning the replacement of the hard drive,'' Toder said.

The record companies involved in the lawsuit are Sony BMG, Arista Records LLC, Interscope Records, UMG Recordings Inc., Capitol Records Inc. and Warner Bros. Records Inc.

------

On the Net:

RIAA: http://www.riaa.com

Lawsuit-tracking blog: http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com

Record Companies Win Music Sharing Trial, NYT, 5.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Downloading-Music.html

Leading article: The sound of a revolution

Published: 04 October 2007
The Independent

A revolution has been taking place in the commercial music industry. For several years, online music file swapping has been hitting CD sales and diminishing the profits of the major record companies. The runaway success of high-memory digital music players and online music stores (iPods and iTunes in particular) has accelerated this process.

This week, the revolution entered a new stage. The Charlatans have announced that they will make their new album available to anyone who logs on to a radio station's website. And Radiohead are asking their fans to pay as little or as much for their latest album online as they see fit. The era of free recorded music would appear to be dawning.

This is another major blow to the record companies, which thought they had finally begun to arrest their profit slump by agreeing to sell their artists' products through online music stores at knock-down prices. If other bands follow the lead of Radiohead, the record companies will not even receive the 79p it costs to download a single song from iTunes.

But could this latest development also be damaging to popular music in general? A case can be made that it is a dangerous thing. It is all very well for established bands to give up their revenue from CD sales and rely solely on merchandise sales and income from live shows. But smaller, up and coming bands tend to rely on CD revenue for a much greater proportion of their income. They could never afford to follow suit. And if the superstars encourage the public to believe that recorded music ought to be free, will people not be less inclined to pay for the product of smaller bands?

That is a risk. But there are compensating aspects of the musical revolution as far as smaller artists are concerned. They can promote themselves and connect with their fan base much more effectively through the web. Smaller bands are also benefiting from falling CD production costs. Artists can produce their CDs themselves and keep all of what they sell, bypassing the old record companies entirely.

As for the record companies, the smart ones have already realised that targeting niche audiences through intelligent marketing and advertising is the future. The days when they could simply sign the hottest bands and then wait for the cash to flow in from record sales are over. They will have to work considerably harder for their revenue in the new musical marketplace. Some will thrive. Others will go to the wall. But one thing is for sure, the revolution is too advanced to be turned back now.

Leading article: The sound of a revolution, I, 4.10.2007, http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article3024698.ece

Microsoft Shows Off New Zune Players

October 3, 2007
Filed at 7:49 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

REDMOND, Wash. (AP) -- Microsoft Corp. took the wraps off its second-generation Zune digital media players late Tuesday, showing three models that bring the software maker's offerings more in line with Apple's market-leading iPod.

One model -- available in black -- has an 80-gigabyte hard drive and a 3.2-inch screen. It's slimmer than last year's Zune, which had a 30 GB hard drive and a smaller screen. Microsoft also will sell a smaller, flash memory-based Zune, similar in shape and size to the original iPod Nano, in pink, green, black and red with either 4 GB or 8 GB of storage.

Like the original Zune, the new models include an FM radio tuner and the ability to wirelessly share songs with other Zune owners.

The latest generation sports a shiny glass screen and a new touch pad navigation button. The gadgets use Wi-Fi to sync music, movies and photos wirelessly and automatically with users' PCs.

The new Zunes are to go on sale in mid-November. The 4 GB Zune will cost $149, the 8 GB one will sell for $199 and the 80 GB model for $249. The prices match those of Apple Inc.'s comparable iPod models.

Microsoft has yet to wow consumers or analysts the way Apple has done consistently. As of the end of the last fiscal quarter, Apple Inc. had sold more than 100 million iPods, while Microsoft had sold about 1.2 million Zunes.

''There's nothing earth-shattering there,'' said Van Baker, an analyst at the research group Gartner, in an interview about the new Zunes.

Baker said he expects the changes to help Microsoft keep its distant No. 2 spot in the digital media player market, but improving the software and adding a new model isn't going to radically change Microsoft's market share.

''Maybe next year they can make an aggressive push against Apple,'' he said.

To get its first-generation Zunes to consumers quickly last year, Microsoft relied heavily on partners, including Toshiba Corp. for the design of the device.

This time, the company bulked up its own staff to include industrial designers and rebuilt the software for the device and the linked computer and Web services from scratch.

Microsoft tweaked the look of the new Zunes' display and menus, and added the Zune Pad, a combination mouse-button and touch pad that lets users scroll down a long list of songs with a few flicks of the finger, then click the button to select tracks or change the volume.

Zune users can set up their devices to connect automatically to their home Wi-Fi network, and sync music, podcasts and video while the device charges. They can also sync the device with TV shows recorded using Windows Media Center on Windows Vista PCs.

First-generation Zunes will automatically get software updates this fall.

In November, Microsoft will also release redesigned Zune desktop software, revamp its Marketplace store and launch a social networking site called ''Social.''

The new Marketplace will carry about 3 million tracks, about 1 million of which will be sold as MP3s without copy protection, in line with the number of songs Apple offers without digital rights management.

Microsoft executives have denied plans for a ''Zune phone'' since the iPhone was introduced this summer. J Allard, a corporate vice president in Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division, said designing a touch pad instead of a touch screen was a deliberate decision to let users skip tracks and change the volume without having to look at the screen.

Allard said that for this generation, Microsoft was focused on improving the hardware and software.

''Market share comes after,'' he said.

Microsoft Shows Off New Zune Players, NYT, 3.10.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Microsoft-Zune.html

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