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Streaming Surpasses CD Sales At Warner Music (ft.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The times are a changin'. "Warner Music Group has become the first major record company to report that streaming has become its largest source of revenue, surpassing sales of physical formats such as CDs and vinyl," reports Financial Times. Last year, Warner's streaming revenue surpassed its sales for downloads. It goes to show just how much of an impact streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are having on the music industry. Warner is the third-largest record company and has embraced streaming more quickly than the rest of the industry. "This rapid transformation is evidence of our ability to sign, develop and market artists that thrive in the streaming world," said Stephen Cooper, Warner's chief executive. The company reports that total recorded music revenue grew 10 percent to $610 million in the first three months of the year. Overall digital revenue increased 20 percent to $328 million, offsetting declines in physical formats like CDs.
Rent your dwelling place.
Rent your computer time in the cloud.
Rent your media
Rent your communications device.
Rent your transportation unit..
Rent everything.
You own nothing.
Slave.
"Warner Music Group becomes the first major music company to see physical media sales plunge to levels beneath streaming"
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I sold my 400+ CD collection in ~2001 and haven't looked back.
I ripped my CD collection and stored it in the cellar. Eventually I'll probably throw it away since it's probably not worth enough money to pay for the gasoline I would burn driving to the nearest flea market and who wants CD's these day anyway. Show a CD to somebody under twenty and they look at you as if you just asked them to prepare their own food by skinning a deer with a flint hand axe and roasting the raw meat over a fire in the back yard instead of just eating the food that magically appears in the fridge every day. Having said that I wonder how long it will take before one has to pirate streaming services to get one's own no-strings-attached offline copies because all of the musicians are locked up in 'streaming only' contracts and are getting fucked over even worse by the streaming services than they were with the record labels? Hearing indie musicians talk their music seems to have become a promotional tool they use to sell vinyl records and T-shirts and tote bags and occasionally to generate a windfall of real money from live performances. Nobody except Wall Street banks and the old record labels who own the streaming services is making tons money off of streaming.
What's a CD?
Am I going to have to change my sig?
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
If we're talking about music, it's not an "Apple proprietary codec" at all, it's AAC.
Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates.
AAC has been standardized by ISO and IEC, as part of the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 specifications. Part of the AAC known as High Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) which is part of MPEG-4 Audio is also adopted into digital radio standards like DAB+ and Digital Radio Mondiale, as well as mobile television standards DVB-H and ATSC-M/H.
If you have a device that cannot play AAC audio files in 2016, it's time to upgrade. Even an old Nintendo DSi from SEVEN YEARS AGO can play these files.
Apart from that, I do agree with most of what you said. If Apple continues on their current path, they're doomed. And I say that as a Mac/iPod/iPhone user.
It's not like that checkbox was working anyway.
Hell, for weeks now I don't even see my posts appear when I click on "submit". They do post but they don't display on my end, I need to reload the damn page. And there's the "Working" status at the bottom that never goes away either...
You morons have been played by the record companies. They have shifted you from buying and owning physical product to paying for radio and owning nothing at all.
They are pissing themselves with laughter as you throw money at them and proclaim "old" people to be luddites for not being streaming hipsters.
Just get an ad blocker. Its what I do. The checkbox never really worked for me.
I rip all my discs, and still occasionally, when the artist actually puts together a complete disc, buy one. Why? Because the quality is far better than any streaming service. Oh, and *owning* my music is far better than an ongoing payment system leaching money from your wallet every month.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Dinosaurs are not known for their speed...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You don't know how an adblocker works?
Good riddance, what were you doing here in the first place?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you think that Apple is the olny ones doing this, pull your head out of the sand.
All of the content companies are doing this and forcing companies like apple to do it.
Why do you think the ZUNE killed the most innovatinve features and turned into a steaming turd by release? The record companies forced it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
not hard at all to snag from streaming. the problem is all the streaming is low grade dog food quality audio. It's the other way they are making sure you cant even exploit the analog hole. Give everyone lossy crap audio that sounds good on their bluetooth headphones and not anywhere else.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Also agreed, as long as we're talking about media files.
"Compsognathus was roughly the size of a turkey, but with a top speed of 64 km/h" (40 miles an hour for you backwards people)
Seems like speed to me. :)
PS Cue the "I'm a dinosaur you insensitive clod"
I don't know about you, but I have gone to sites that have intelligent software that detects your ad blocker, and does not download the page.
If we're talking about music, it's not an "Apple proprietary codec" at all, it's AAC.
MP3, AAC, AVC, and HEVC are proprietary in that they have a proprietor, or patent holder, that requires distributors of encoder software to sign a royalty-bearing patent license. Vorbis, Opus, VP8, and VP9 are non-proprietary in the sense that they are documented and royalty-free.
True, Apple doesn't own MPEG-4. Other AAC decoders can play any musical recording purchased from iTunes Store since Apple phased out FairPlay DRM 2009. But Apple is an MPEG-4 fanboy for a couple reasons. It's part of the patent pool because the MPEG-4 container is QuickTime, and since version 5 back in 2001, QuickTime has included "Sorenson Video 3" (SVQ3) based on an early draft of what became AVC. And in a sense, the implementation of AAC in QuickTime and iTunes is an "Apple proprietary codec" because the encoder and decoder are proprietary software whose copyright is owned by Apple Inc., even though encoded files are playable elsewhere. Perhaps by calling Apple stuff "proprietary", people are just expressing their bitterness that OS X and iOS ship without support for royalty-free containers, such as Ogg or Matroska, or royalty-free codecs, such as Vorbis, Opus, VP8, or VP9.