Another day gone.  First the Rolling Stones grabbed (Ruby) Tuesday, Blondie snared Sunday (Girl), next the Bee Gees cornered Saturday (Night Fever) then the Bangles nabbed (manic) Monday, it seems certain that Friday is also now off the menu.  Pop Friday now belongs to Rebecca Black. So all we are left with is the 2 [...]

So, how good is the new Lady Gaga track ‘Born This Way’?  Released on Friday for the first time… In the world of promotion, hype, crazed fandom and eggcentric Grammy performances  it is well nigh impossible to strip away the noise and simply focus on Lady Gaga’s music - ie what’s ‘in the groove’.   Until now.  Check out how [...]

It’s a big day for music, with Apple’s massively anticipated announcement due. In other news there’s also a whole lot of noise about Facebook’s ‘not’ email.  In both cases the noise is worthwhile, both Apple and Facebook are leaders in their fields. Will Apple’s announcement make more of an impact than Ping did, probably, will [...]

So it seems last night we saw the death bell toll for another iconic British company.  It now seems inevitable that EMI has but months to live.  Guy Hands has rolled his last dice on the deal that, from the music industry’s perspective, looked doomed from the start.  In an industry where failure of your peers [...]

So MySpace notched up losses of around $500,000,000 over the past year (about the same as it was sold for in 2005).  Quite an achievement for a website that once dominated the social networking world.  Is there a route to profitability?  History suggests not, when users move on from social networks they rarely return – look [...]

It’s almost 10 years since iTunes launched and almost 5 years into the mainstream social networking revolution.  But something odd is happening – if the future is all about mass personalization and the decline of one-to-many mass broadcast, how come terrestrial radio is in rude health and right now is attracting more listeners than ever [...]

We’ve looked at the stricken economics of the streaming sector and the challenges of the artist services sector, now it’s time to take a look at the evolving industry from a new perspective.   A lot of effort is going into trying to recreate the old music industry online when perhaps we should look at how [...]

In Part 1 we looked at the economics behind streaming services and concluded that on a pure play basis the gap between consumer appetite to pay and the cost of provision remains gaping.  Although consumers will pay for access to media (eg broadband, 3G etc) they increasingly balk at paying for content.   Music will increasingly [...]

It’s been a couple of years since launch, but we’ve finally decided to start a modest blog, its likely to be pretty random with a number of STP bods contributing from time to time, but we hope you’ll find time to drop by occasionally. Swimming around as we do in the digital music world we [...]