Summary—Week 4: June 11-14

This week at MTV Digital I conducted a vast amount of research and furthered the development of my Power Point presentation. I also arrived at a date for this presentation, that being Monday, August 13^th.

Among the day to day operations I conducted, I organized many different files neatly into different folders and ordered necessary office supplies. I also continued the ongoing project of importing my supervisor’s real music library into the digital iTunes music player. Also, it was necessary to call different clients to receive a receipt of all bills in the past several weeks.

Over the course of my work, I have learned not only about the business side of things at MTV, but also a great deal in regards to the music industry. My supervisor has emphasized the power of networking on several occasions, and through my research I have learned about the importance of partnership, as well as a little bit about how the industry is run.

More specifically, I read about some cool new features that help to conveniently converge different technologies, among them the online music store. I read about such services as the Hype Machine, a buzz and blog compiler, that may eventually prove useful to online music stores, which have not fully integrated music news yet. I also came across Songbird, a music player where one can browse the Internet and easily play online media in their player like any other MP3 file. Other subjects I explored was the new relationship between a UK social networking site, Bebo, and iTunes. Users on Bebo can now download iTunes music directly off of Bebo. Another place of interest was 7digital & Muse.ie, which has created a free online storage “locker” for all of the songs bought online while also offering one minute track previews.

Another very important current news event took place in Europe where an online music service called MusicStation has launched, and it allows users to download as many songs as they would like for around $4 a month to their mobile phones. The service is now compatible with more than 75 percent of all phones in Europe.

Finally, I found some very useful statistics regarding how people listen to music and other media, what they own to do so, and how many people in total do this. It seems clear now that there is a battle between the phone companies and external third parties, as cell phones are bridging the gap on computers at an extremely high paced speed. Also, the music industry is at a crossroads where it faces declining hard record sales, so it has moved towards an all new advertising platform, seeking to make more money around aspects of an artist or musician other than the music itself.

Other areas that I glossed over were open source technology, the growing movement for on demand radio sponsored by ads, and the ever growing online movie rentals services (which Apple is rumored to enter into very soon).

Specifically, next week I would like to test many of the existing online music stores out first hand to get a better feel for things they have already adopted and things that haven’t been developed yet.