During my second full week at MTV Digital Music, I began by organizing various receipts that required processing by date. This was done in order to make my supervisor Dan Russo’s tasks of submitting a report much easier to conduct. Other tasks that I helped with included starting a more long term project of creating a large music library that will be available through the network here at MTV Digital. This included research on finding the correct external hard drive, and ripping the CD’s at the right bit rate. I will be ripping these CD’s as I work on other projects throughout the internship.
Secondly, I continued to tweak my ideas for my ongoing project regarding online music stores. I began to thoroughly read about such products as iTunes, Napster, along with an early history of file sharing, and Urge. Also, I have tried to keep as up to date as possible with the events that are occurring even in the news today that have an impact on this department, in particular the recent discussion between CEO’s Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft. Apple currently provides the iPod and iTunes music services and makes up a majority of the increasing market, while Microsoft and MTV have worked together with Windows Media Player to initiate the Urge music store project. The two recently met to much publicity and discussed the future of their products, relationships with one another, and specifics in the digital music industry.
I also read an article in Thursday, May 31’s New York Times that discusses the growing trend for consumers to emphasize the bit rate and quality of the music they are downloading, which has prompted iTunes to just come out with DRM (another quite controversial topic I’ve been reading about) free music of higher quality at 256 kbps as opposed to the standard 128 kbps, which will be offered for $1.29.
Finally in terms of very recent trends, I looked at several of the new services that Facebook, the extremely popular social networking site, has used to promote music that has been launched in the past week. The site has created a “files” section, where users can upload whatever files they so choose (which might come to include music, legal or illegal). I also took a look at the iLike feature, which allows users to type in their favorite songs (which are then advertised to other users who can then purchase and preview them), as well as music quiz’s, upcoming concerts, and the ability to sync up with other popular music browsers like Last.fm.
Other subjects that I had time to start to gloss over a bit included the expansion into video downloading in music stores, as well as the pros and cons of subscription based services.
Finally, I conducted a brief errand into the Urge offices here at MTV and had the idea of talking to one of their representatives at a later date to discuss the research I am doing. This would give me further background on the product they are developing and ideas they are throwing around, as well as allow me to possibly grant my own input from an outsider’s perspective on what might be beneficial for the service. I discussed this idea briefly with my supervisor who thought that having Urge attend my final presentation was a good idea overall.
Next week, I will continue the music library project, conduct day to day activities, and continue my research on online music stores.
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