Seattle Office of Film + Music
Seattle has been a growing hub for film, music and digital media over the past several years, and it is vital for these three communities to interact for our city to continue to thrive. The monthly Happy Hour offers just such an environment for people from these industries to socialize, network and build a unified community. Join us for Happy Hour tonight from 5:00 – 7:00 at Spitfire in Belltown. See you there, Seattle!
4Culture
4Culture seeks media works for presentation in e4c, its storefront gallery for electronic art. 4Culture is seeking electronic artworks for e4c. Up to sixteen media works or media proposals will be selected for presentation through this public, electronic gallery for a period of up to one year. Due to the transitory nature of the audience, works between 1-5 minutes are desired. Media artists working in all genres are encouraged to apply. e4c is located adjacent to Gallery4Culture facing Prefontaine Place South in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood. Applications will be evaluated on appropriateness in concept and content for a public location. Work samples should represent the artist’s ability to prepare a high quality media presentation. For more information on guidelines and to apply follow the above link.
Hollywood Reporter
What started as a panel discussion about how media companies make money off the Internet evolved into a discussion of how entertainment companies — even such recent entrants as Google, Hulu and YouTube — remain relevant as the pace of change accelerates. Moderator and Disney president Robert Iger framed the first part of the debate by questioning how to get enough money out of new media to keep paying the costs of producing and distributing television shows, movies, games and other content if consumers think they are going to always get everything for free online. “Will we ever be able to monetize our content on new platforms as we did on traditional platforms?” he asked his four panelists, all of whom were from the cyber side of the equation. Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, said the question implies that everything will always be free, but that isn’t the case. “Free and pay are going to co-exist and compete,” he said. Anderson used the example of music. There is lots of it available free on the Web today, but many people still pay to download from iTunes and other sources. He said that is because iTunes is not just selling music, “It’s selling convenience.” Iger asked Chad Hurley, CEO and co-founder of YouTube, how Google was going to get back the money it paid to buy his company. He said that it is adding new formats beyond just showing videos to find the answer. Hurley said YouTube also has added more new applications and formats — including transactional sales — in the first half of 2009 than it did in all of 2008 and that it fine-tunes its model daily, sometimes hourly.
Ars Technica
Despite the popularity of digital music, from single-track purchases to subscriptions, physical media has continued to generate the most music revenue in (almost) every market in the world. According to data from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), though, that will soon change: revenue from digital music sales worldwide are on track to equal that of physical sales as early as 2016, and by 2010 in the United States. Consumers in the United States buy the most digital music relative to their total music purchases—revenue generated by digital music was 36 percent of the total at the end of 2008. Asia trails the US when it comes to digital music buying, though South Korea is currently the only place in the world where digital downloads trump physical formats.
CNET
Facebook most’s popular music application comes from iLike, and soon the company will try to turn that social-networking cachet into song sales. Seattle-based iLike, a social music service, is expected to launched a music download store on Friday. The new store will debut as a beta version and will feature songs from at least three of the four top major recording companies. CEO Ali Partovi says, “we’re focused on music discovery: we deliver all the other things that music consumers love without risking a lawsuit or paying high royalties. Besides sampling music, people use iLike to get concert notifications, recommend new bands to friends, see video messages or tweets from their favorite artists–all of which has built iLike an audience of more than 120 million uniques per month across all our apps and widgets while maintaining very low costs.
Hollywood Reporter
Global entertainment and media spending will rise to $1.6 trillion in 2013, amounting to 2.7% compound annual growth driven by digital gains, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ annual “Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2009-2013.” But U.S. gains will underperform the worldwide trend, with the domestic entertainment and media market expected to grow at a 1.2% compound annual growth rate to reach $495 billion in 2013. The advisory firm also sees U.S. consumer spending on media and entertainment as the main growth driver over the five-year period, while advertising is projected to decline.
Hollywood Reporter
Economic uncertainty that is hampering most media won’t stop the growth in video games. Revenue generated in the U.S. and Canada by the video game industry, minus hardware sales, will grow at an average clip of 5.8% annually over the next five years, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis due out Tuesday. Such growth prospects exceed that of other media, with notable exceptions being online advertising and Internet access — the latter being driven by a continuing shift from dial-up to more expensive broadband.
Hollywood Reporter
Will digital downloads kill the video game store? That’s the multibillion dollar question facing retailers from Wal-Mart and Target to GameStop, as Internet distributors continue to grow. Retailers including Target splashed out on large booths at last week’s E3 Expo in Los Angeles, showcasing games such as Activision’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” But gamers — especially on personal computers — are increasingly turning to alternative methods to play and buy games, such as downloading or “streaming” online games, rather than trekking to a store.
Hollywood Reporter
Wall Street is holding its breath in anticipation of the Dow finally closing at a gain for the year. On Monday, it was still 12 points shy of positive territory. Meanwhile, most big-media stocks are up year-to-date amid signs that the worst of the recession is over and the ad market is stabilizing, not to mention the booming film boxoffice. The Hollywood Reporter Showbiz 50 index is up 10% this year, compared with the Dow’s less-than-flat performance
Seattle Weekly
Seattle tech startup UrbanSpoon scored such a hit with its iPhone app that it sold last month to IAC/InterActiveCorp. That company is madly acquiring other small app makers who score on the ubiquitous handheld platform. In a New York Times story, UrbanSpoon is reported to be “one of the App Store’s most popular products, having been downloaded close to five million times.” But there’s another local connection to this Seattle success story. IAC is a partnership between media mogul Barry Diller and Amazon.com. By trolling the app market, IAC is betting on the so-called “long tail” model of doing lots of little sales over a long period of time, rather than depending on one big blockbuster of a game or movie (which take much longer and much more money to develop). Thus, IAC assembles a portfolio of apps with a potential cross-selling link to Amazon.
