Welcome to Scribble

One of our favourite times of the week where we pick our stand out stories of the week gone by.  From the sublime to the ridiculous, here are the stories that have been the talk in our office:

Apple launched the Mac App Store, which already boasts over 1,000 apps for PC users. Lets us know what you think of it.

In our interview with Capital’s Andi Durrant on Tuesday 4th Jan he tipped production duo Dirty Secretz as producers to watch in 2011. Why not judge for yourself? Download their guest mix which originally featured on Roger Sanchez’s radio late last year.

Anyone heading to leading music industry conference Midem in Cannes this year?  Super producer David Guetta will give a key note speech on how he’s adapted to digital media; Midem Sync will run where participants can pitch music for video gaming publishing and MTV TV campaigns; and very interestingly will be a panel on how apps are influencing music sales. Find out more in the funky Midem Preview digital magazine.

For the second year on the trot, unsurprisingly, digital album sales are on the rise again.  Are you one of the few still buying physical copies?

And finally, a woman in Denver, Colorado captures a burglar on her iPhone web cam app!

Dance act Faithless are launching a new campaign to sell their new album and up coming tour tickets through the Shazam app.

The campaign starts this week with TV adverts promoting their latest single.  The ads prompt viewers to tag the track using the app, directing them to a mobile site where they can purchase tickets for the band’s latest tour dates or purchase its album The Dance.

We like the idea of this campaign and its good news that more high profile artists are using app technology to promote their music and sell tickets through mobile devices.

We thought we would share some interesting data on the blog this morning.

Below is a graph created by Asymco.  As you can see, the App store has reached the same total downloads in 2.2 years as the iTunes music store reached after five years.  The two curves are likely to be the same height (around 13 billion each) before the year is over.  Pretty staggering.

The BPI announced a few days ago that recorded music sales revenue has began to stabalise and even showed signs of growth.

The BPI said that the total UK recorded music trade income has risen 1.4% overall to £928.8m.  Although trade revenue from physical formats has gone down 6.1% to £739.9m Digital income has increased by 47.8% to £189.9m

Digital income now represents a fifth (20.3%) of overall recorded music revenues, taking into account earnings from online downloads alongside mobile, subscriptions and ad-supported services.  2009’s digital revenues total of £188.9m is 47.8% up on the £127.8m earned in 2008.

Geoff Taylor, BPI Chief Executive said:  “It’s encouraging to see industry revenues stabilise and even show modest growth in 2009.  This is testament to continuing investment by UK labels in talented artists despite challenging economic conditions, and the innovation labels have shown in licensing new digital services.

Ad-supported services, such as Spotify, we7, Last.fm and YouTube, grew their contribution to industry income by 247% to £8.2m.  Despite this being the largest increase of any sector of the market, these revenues still represent less than 1% of the annual total.

Income from subscriptions also recorded healthy growth of 37.2% in 2009 to reach £11.8m.  With revenues derived from monthly fees to download or stream music, this result was driven by services including eMusic, Comes With Music, Napster, BT Vision as well as income from Spotify Premium – an ad-free version of the popular streaming service.

Mobile revenues fell by 13.3% to £12.7m over the course of the year with only income from single track sales increasing by 6.8% to £8.1m.  Although a decline in mobile revenues for 2009 we expect a strong growth in 2010 as apps make music easier to purchase on your mobile devices.

We blogged a week or so about mFlow which was a music streaming service that combined social media features for sharing music amongst friends.  This week Spotify has announced an update so it now has its own social side.

The new social features include:

Star tracks – Tracks or albums can be ‘starred’ and grouped into a favourites folder.

Facebook Integration – with Spotify profiles it automatically brings in your name, profile pic and friends that are using Spotify from Facebook.  With your spotify profile you can then share your top tracks, artists and playlists with your friends and choose to publish them via Facebook.

Inbox – By dragging and dropping a track into your friends profile it will appear in their inbox as a recommendation and can then be clicked and streamed by the user whose inbox they have been dropped to, making song recommendations a quick drag and drop affair.

Add your own files – with this feature it is moving in on iTunes territory as you can make a library of all the mp3′s on your computer and then sync this with your mobile device.

We think that these are some great updates and has taken fan to fan marketing to the next level.