The top 5 digital stories of 2009

Before we head in to 2010 and look at some of the potential trends for the year, I wanted to look back and review the top 5 digital stories of 2009. All of which have had a major impact on how we plan and use digital channels and technology, and all of which will undoubtedly form a significant part of the landscape and our thinking for next year. So in no particular order:

1. Facebook’s remarkable growth

Ah how predictable, but 2009 has been a quite phenomenal year for Mark Zuckerburg and team. They started the year with on-going negative press over the beacon debacle, and with 'only' 150m users worldwide. They end the year with over 300m and are still growing; despite the rise and rise of Twitter. The launch of Facebook Connect has further embedded Facebook in to the landscape, and that has over 60m users across over 10,000 websites.

We’ve also seen Facebook really take off as a branding and marketing tool, with Facebook pages replacing traditional websites, streamed live events, advertising explosion and perhaps most excitingly, the launch of a couple of ecommerce pages. The ecommerce opportunity in particular, could well be Facebook’s major revenue opportunity in years to come, as they take a % of the sales for brands selling on their platform.

2. Digital media $ overtakes Television in the UK

Ooh I couldn’t resist sneaking this one in, yes in July this year the advertising money spent online in the UK surpassed that on Television for the first time, the first market in the world for this to happen (the vast majority of the money was spent on Search - 60%). The UK market is particularly unique of course, you can’t advertise on the most popular Television channel, and super fast unlimited broadband for all.

All roads point to this occurring in Australia around 2012/2013, as Search grows ever stronger, our advertising continues to get more sophisticated in the digital space and KRudd rolls out the Broadband network.

3. Twitter bursts in to the mainstream

Wow! 25billion tweets sent a day this month, from around 5 billion in January tells us enough about Twitter's growth this year.

But it's the impact the service has had on customer service, journalism and real-time searching that I see as most significant. Many brands are now actively embraced Twitter to manage customer service (Optus has a team of 80 managing tweet complaints/comments). Today’s news is now breaking from the hands of the consumer who are at major events (e.g. Hudson river crash) and the Iran election was a seminal moment in Twitter moving from technology focused to mainstream news. But it is Twitter's ability to deliver real-time search that is most exciting, something that had led to a scramble from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to deliver real-time search from the likes of Twitter. Watch out for the real-time battle hotting up in 2010.

4. The iPhone

You only need to look round the 303 office to see the impact the iPhone has had on the mobile market this year. From 0 mobile sales in early 2007, to 30m+ in 2009 and a 17% share of the market, and rising - fast. Almost more important than the handset share is the remarkable difference in data usage between iPhone users and other handsets. We are now chewing 7x more data than standard phone users, and twice as much as the BlackBerry crowd.

The app store is a major part of the revolution, with over 90,000 apps and 2 billion downloads (and a tidy profit for Apple thanks very much). Apps range from the quite ridiculous (playing the flute) to the quite remarkable (the Tom Tom sat nav, photoshop and many more). All roads point to even more success for Apple with the iPhone in 2010, despite significant pressure from the Android.

5. The arrival of Bing

Finally! A proper threat to Google's utter dominance of the search market, and certainly something the industry needs. Bing 'the decision engine' has got some reasonable traction in the market since the launch in June, and some excellent reviews from people in the know.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, they’ve not eaten away at Google’s dominance just yet, but there is at least a platform to launch from, and with the deal with Yahoo struck – where Bing powers Yahoo search, Microsoft will have a 30% share of the Search market. A platform for which to try and eat away at Google’s phenomenal power.

So, there it is – some of the big stories in Digital in 2009. There were plenty more, notably Social Gaming, Augmented Reality, Susan Boyle, Android and online video - some of which form a significant part of the landscape for 2010 and beyond.

We’ll be back in the New Year, firstly with a look at some of the key trends for 2010.

Thanks for all your support this year.

Nic and team

The runaway train

Yes I know this Facebook stuff can get a little boring sometimes, but put that to one side for a moment and look at the graph below. Facebook has now reached 350m users worldwide.

It is the speed at the growth that is particularly staggering about this figure, they have scooped up 200m new users worldwide in 11 months. That is a phenomenal 600,000 signing up A DAY.

There is, as ever another side of the argument, as many observers claim it is hard, almost impossible to leave Facebook, and that actual unique visitors isn't a patch on the 350m number, but you wouldn't expect it to be. And 130m unique daily visitors isn't half bad is it? Further to this, Australia has now topped 8m active accounts, more than half the internet population.

And there is little sign of this abating in the coming months. All more fuel that us creative and media agencies need to better equip ourselves to integrate Facebook (and other social channels) in to our thinking.

Cheers

Nic

What is a real journo?

Jeff in 303’s Digital team used the phrase “Real Journo” in an recent email to me and it got me thinking...What is a “Real Journo?”

It would be safe to assume he was referring to a staff writer or freelancer for a major news corporation. No problem with that.

What I found interesting is that even cutting edge Gen Y’ers like Jeff still hold the traditional media hacks in some sort of mythical esteem = “Real Journos”

From a PR perspective I’ve always had a slightly more sceptical view of what constitutes ‘real journalism’ especially in Australia, “land of the free, home of the media cartel fighting for advertising dollar.”

Approx 60%- 80% of everything that appears out of major news corporations in Australia is written, sourced, researched by a PR person. It lands on news desks as a pre-packaged product. The media clip, cut and post it with their name attached to it. Job done. The media release is the original user-generated content.

When you add into the mix syndicated stories from overseas and the growing number of opinion pieces from the public and you begin to get a picture of how ‘real’ local journalism actually is.

Over the last few years, very quietly the citizen journalist has begun to surpass ‘real journos’ in one area. Sports reporting. Yes, really.

Try being the Herald Sun in Melbourne and reporting objectively on the AFL when access to players and administrators form 90% of your entire sports coverage and your readership is interested in little else. Write an investigative piece on the AFL, see how far it gets past editorial and business management. You need them more that they need you.

Add the complication of advertising dollars from the AFL and If you are a serious sports fan, bloggers and online community are your only source of genuine opinion or unbiased analysis. The same goes for all of the major football codes. The Sydney media has the same devils contract with the NRL.

However the resistance is gaining ground with sites like www.theroar.com.au using content from frustrated major corporation writers and citizen journos and providing them with equal billing. Opinion egalitarianism of sorts. As a result the quality of user-generated content posted is far beyond anything you are likely to see from News Corp or Fairfax anytime soon. Opinion egalitarianism seems to raise everybody’s game.

So what is a ‘Real Journo?” - I would say one with the freedom to write without looking over his/her shoulder.

The digital age is producing plenty of these – You.

Nigel

IKEA and Facebook

Hi

Just wanted to share this piece of work from Sweden for IKEA. A wonderfully simple idea, utilising one of Facebook's most popular features - photo tagging.

It's examples like this and Whopper Sacrifice that really display the opportunity for creativity in Social Media channels.

Cheers

Nic

Social media ROI

From the people (Socialnomics) who brought you the last 'amazing digital and social media statistics set to a piece of music' video, here's their latest version.

There are actually some excellent stats in here, and an important point of view in terms of the measurement of Social Media, so it is well worth a few minutes. Share on with clients and colleagues if you can.

Enjoy.

Nic

More Google Wave...

If you missed the outline I sent on Google Wave a couple of weeks ago,

you might prefer this one.

Google Wave Pulp Fiction style.

Cheers Nic

Nowism

Many of you will know Trendwatching, so apologies if this is old news, but I thought it was worth sharing their latest briefing called "Nowism" which focuses on today's society, the need for instant gratification, leaving feedback, comments and opinions.

Considerably fuelled by the interwebby and Social Media of course, but they include some interesting references offline too.

http://trendwatching.com/briefing/

Enjoy. Sign up for future ones and they'll pop straight in to your inbox.

Cheers

Nic

Ride the Wave?

A couple of weeks ago Google invited tens of thousands of people to test Google’s new big thing “Wave”, much to PB’s disgust we didn’t make it on the list.

Anyway, if Google get their way it’ll be a major development in communications so we thought a quick outline of it would be useful. Here’s what Google say:

"A Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more."

Basically it is a platform that combines all of the good things from email, instant messenger, Social Media, wikis and blogging to aid collaboration. Essentially it allows multiple people to join a conversation (social or business) at any given time and see all of the information from the start of the conversation, add their comments and content in real-time to make communication an all round easier prospect. Simple.

Mashable provide a far more expansive outline for you to read http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/

And this video nails one small (but important) part of it in just 2 minutes.

Opinion on whether it’s an over-hyped red herring or the next big thing is somewhat mixed so we’ll just have to wait and see… Personally, I'm a fan and when you think of the thousands of emails you get in a week - you can only see this will help.

Enjoy

Nic

Hey, it's all a bit crazy right now, but we haven't posted for a little while which isn't cool.

So to make things easy I wanted to post a video. 

We liked this video on Twitter and monetisation from Gary Veynerchuk who is probably the most animated faces talking digital right now. It's only a couple of minutes long.

Enjoy.

Nic

Is Twitter just for the techies?

It's a question we get posed a fair bit, and probably fairly, because with any new technology or social network the initial core audience will always be full of early adopters. We only need to review Facebook phenomenal growth in the last 12 months to see that (there are now over 700,000 Australians over 50 on Facebook each month, many of whom have signed up during 2009).

Thankfully, and perhaps surprisingly for some it seems that Twitter is following Facebook in to the mainstream. We know this part through the celebrity craze that has long been publicized (Kutcher is up over 2m followers now) but more so through Twitters Trending Topics, which is basically the most talked about words and subjects on Twitter at any one time. And with c.18m tweets in a day it’s not inconsequential.

 A quick look at todays shows that it is mainstream news, entertainment and culture that is forging the main content:

• True Blood (TV series)
  
• Iran Election
  
• ‘Music Monday’
  
• Vegas
  
• LA Station Fire
  

And whilst I don’t have the trending topics from a year or so ago I think it’s a fair assumption to say these will have had a far more technological and digital marketing feel to them. Definitely good news as it is further confirmation that Twitter is a valid channel for many brands, and dare I say it – here to stay (for a while at least).

Mind you, as more and more Aussies jump on board we should remember to practice safe social networking. A study in the UK has shown that many Facebook and Twitter users are telling the world they are going on holiday, giving burglars easy pickings. You have been warned.

Cheers

Nic

 

The question is, why does Facebook want Friendfeed?

Facebook bought Friendfeed for an undisclosed amount of money. Mountain View, Calif.-based FriendFeed was started by co-founders Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor and Sanjeev Singh, all ex-Googlers, and raised $5 million in Series A funding from Benchmark Capital and its founders. Facebook is said to have paid up to $50 million for the company – $20 million in cash and rest in stock.

The question is, why does Facebook want Friendfeed?

No, this deal is not about Twitter. It is about Google — to be more precise: Google vs. Facebook.

The reason behind the deal is twofold: ability to publish more and more information in real time and the resulting explosion of data on the web. These two trends will soon make it nearly impossible to deal with the resulting information overload. As a result, the current seek-search-consume popularized by Google will eventually hit its outer limits — and when that happens…

In 303’s last blog (http://303digital.blogspot.com/2009/08/content-is-king-but-who-is-going-to-pay.html), content creation, distribution and consumption are amid a sea change. Whether it’s photos, videos, tweets, status updates or whatever…the content is getting constantly atomized. In order to consume it all, we need to find smarter tools for content consumption. FriendFeed is one of them.

If you look at the rapidity with which many of us are uploading information on Facebook — 1 billion photos a month, a billion pieces of content shared every week, 30 status updates a day — you know that the problem of plenty is only going to get worse.

The good news is that Facebook bought a solid team to solve this problem.
The FriendFeed team — ex-Google programming rock stars — just out-executed Facebook and kept launching new features at a breathtaking pace.

FriendFeed’s unique ability is to foster conversations — not a massive user base. If Facebook can take this capacity to “converse” and marry it to its mobile clients, what the company will have on its hands is a true interaction platform, befitting today’s always-connected life. This will give it a further boost against Twitter, a small, but fast-growing, micro-messaging company.

FriendFeed has built a real-time information aggregation platform that is impressive, to say the least. Facebook’s news stream will benefit from FriendFeed’s real-time expertise.

Facebook, after having copied so many of FriendFeed’s features, buying it was the right thing to do.

The history of the web in Australia

I wanted to share with you a stunning representation of the history of the web in Australia, courtesy of Nielsen and AIMIA. It shows the development of user numbers online since 2001.  Check out the video or for a richer experience go here http://avant.interactionconsortium.com/australian_internet/#

It shows how quickly our web habits have changed in terms of the most popular sites. Take Ebay for example, it leaps from 700,000 unique monthly visitors in 2001 up to a peak of over 6m in 2006 before dipping off to today's 3m. This compares to Facebook which didn't even register as late as the end of 2006, then had 400,000 monthly uniques in early 2007. and now, 2 years later has over 6m uniques! That's 48% of the total online population, and 28% of the country as a whole. Staggering.

Spare a thought for sites like Alta Vista (remember them?), over 1m uniques in 2001, gone by 2003.

Anyway, that's enough excitement for me for one day. 

Take a look and have a play for yourselves - there are multiple axis to play with. 

This is a great one to share with clients.

Cheers

Nic

Content is king, but who is going to pay for it?

Rupert Murdoch made big headlines this week with the announcement that he plans to charge for content across his digital portfolio by mid 2010.

 

“Quality journalism is not cheap,” said Murdoch. “The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites.”

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/07/2648972.htm?section=entertainment

 

Ultimately, Murdoch is spot on with his assessment here, he and news organizations around the world are providing daily and immediate content for every man, woman and dog; people who can simply elect not to pay for it by going online. Not only do you not have to pay for it, but the experience you have with that news is more engaging, more involved (through video, comments and forums) and most importantly of all – real-time. Ironically, you only have to look at this story itself to prove this point - it has generated over 5,000 stories online and 15,000 blog posts in the past few days. Hard for a newspaper to deliver that!

 

It is this web 3.0 (sorry) thirst for real-time information that is driving more and more people online for their news, and why the likes of Murdoch have seen a 30% drop in revenue for their offline properties. 

 

At some point in time, users will have to pay for content online because the advertising model doesn’t support the investment the publishers are making. But it takes a brave man (And I think we can say Rupert is that) to lead publishers in to a new pay revolution because there’s little doubt it’d be easier if they all did it together… 

 

The flaw in his argument is that the news he is presenting isn’t particularly specialist, so we could all simply get our news feeds from the good old ABC and BBC. Rupert references the Wall Street Journal who has been charging for content for years, but news.com.au is hardly on the same page as them. Financial comment and political news from the Economist or Fin Review - yes, Rugby League player naked in a hotel or Paris Hilton breaks a nail – no. 

The great ‘pay for music’ debate is a good guide too, no-one pays for music anymore – over 95% of all music downloads are illegal, which shows the uphill battle Murdoch and peers face with todays online audience.

Please post your comments, it'd be interesting to hear your views.

 

Nic

Gadgets

I was watching some coverage from past British Golf Open's (80's-90's) last night and was amazed to see how they were updating the scores on the course. Up until as recently as the late nineties they were still using scraps of paper and runners to update the main leaderboard...

Anyway, there's little doubt technology continues to move forward at an electric pace, you only have to look at the iPhone to see that. Here's a couple more fun products that display this too, both of which have been around for quite a while now.

The wireless umbrella - the umbrella is linked to your home's wireless network and takes weather feeds from the web. If it's going to rain then the handle will pulse to tell you to pick it up. Cool, but it does mean relying on a forecast which is hardly the most reliable, but good for those (men) who never pick a brolly up until it is thumping with rain.

The second one is the Surfers pillow, which works in exactly the same way - through your wireless connection. After you pick your favorite surf spot, the software monitors the conditions at that location and, at a designated time in the morning, send a signal to the pillow. 

If the waves are high, the pillow will vibrate strongly, jolting you out of bed; if they're low, the vibrations are a little softer. The pillow can even communicate the frequency of the waves: long, regular intervals between vibrations mean good waves, while fast, irregular intervals signal fewer waves. Mercifully, if the surf is too low, the pillow doesn’t activate at all--ensuring that dreams of perfect ground swells and radical curls continue uninterrupted. Might be one for you Murph.

Cheers

Nic

What is a browser?

Before you read on, ask yourself the question in the title of this post, agree on an answer and then you can carry on.

Google recently conducted some research on web browsers, which has delivered some pretty interesting results in the video below. They were doing this research as part of the marketing push for their new web browser - Chrome. They went out to locations across the States - in this example Time Square, to ask people what a browser was, which browser they used and so on. 

You might be surprised (or not - depending on your answer to the question) to find out that fewer than 8% of the people questioned knew what a browser is. 

It acts as a reminder that your average Joe Bloggs probably thinks about this stuff a little bit less than us... 

Cheers

Nic

Will Bing change the way you think?

Image from Don't touch my moleskin.

Are you excited about Bing too?

There is a lot of chat about Bing this week.

If you haven't already heard of it...

Bing is a new product designed by the Microsoft team.

It is branded and designed as a decision making engine, not just a content aggregator based on content relevance which is essentially what search engines do... find the most appropriate info you queried by scanning all corners of the web and if people refer to your pages on the info your ranking will also be higher on the search results (proven credibility).

The Bing Teaser video has not gotten a whole lot of views, but it still illustrates how the product can be used to make your search on the web a little more intuitive and social (referral marketing at work).

What does this mean for the future of Google?

At this stage, probably not a lot since the technology is still at its infancy and there are question marks over whether the product is suitably different (one doubts it is)

It would be interesting to see how the users from different countries adopt Bing and whether the design of the search algorithm will continue to evolve into a social phenomenon like Google had in the 90s but only time will tell.

There is a lot of heat from the business community on what Microsoft's search engine prospects are despite its attempt to aggressively advertise and differentiate its market position.

Personally I do not want to be dismissive about Bing, I am excited that there is something that can move the attention from Google for a little while. Hopefully Bing will make search more dynamic and socially inspired to help us make better decisions about what others think of the content we are looking at.

Bing is also supposed to be localised for the Au market soon as well, so keep an eye out and give it a go.

- jeff

Being eaten by our own statistics

I thought we’d have some fun with a few stats. Ok I admit, we’re busy and this is kind of easy to send ;-)

Cheers

Nic

 

20 hours of video are uploaded to You Tube every single minute.

The word Google is Googled on average 68 million times every month

It would take you over 457 years to watch all of the content on You Tube.

346 million people read blogs across the world.

Over 11 million Tweets are sent a day. Check out this counter for the live counter… if you really want to. http://popacular.com/gigatweet/

700 million photos are added to Facebook every month.

The average Australian Facebook user has 107 friends.

40 billion songs were downloaded illegally in 2008, and 95% of all music downloaded is illegal.

Talking is all good as long as it is purposeful

Photo by Pong

My friend Ash constantly talks about social media and human interaction which inspired me to write about the impact Twitter has on our lives (not just GEN-Y) and beyond the TV talk show's coverage on the technology...

I am not the most hardcore fan of the technology but I do acknowledge it is very much part of my life as it is Facebook and Myspace for totall different reasons. Social tools have become part of my way of connecting with different friends...

On Myspace I still find heaps of unknown bands which is hugely important to me.

Facebook is technically my secondary email, arguably my first.

Twitter has become my recreational newsfeed and a place for me to share my current interest to friends... and the beauty of it is, it won't let me write more than 140 characters!

First of all I would like to dispute the idea the more followers you have the better you are. This is simply misguided and not true. It is worthwhile to inspect how one uses their Twitter account. For me @jefske it is just an extension of me to my friends and people I have met thru work, and it is just a small update service on what I find interesting and to stay in touch with a subgroup of friends who have also embraced Twitter. I think people follow others for social curiosity at a very basic level of interest, for the more serious Twitters, it literally is a new source of information from people they find valuable to know.

A lot of people still don't see the value in Twitter and it is perfectly normal, because a lot of tweets are inspired bya lot of nothing really but some people/brands have used the technology to really engage their audience to become more loyal followers/customers. The food outlets are a good example, they can really use this as a killer App as this AdAge piece has suggested.

The ability to tweet has revolutionalised the way to distribute info and essentially sharing content. Like the video below, normally it might take a few scans on my RSS reader to find some new obscure music for kicks. Now I am just a tweet away thanks to my music loving friends.

One thing to take away from this brief shout on Twitter is.... don't discard it if you haven't tried it and if you have tried it but don't really get it, there are LOADS of info on Twitter and how brands and Joe blogger are using it... people never seem to be bored of writing about it (at least yet). There are also some really useful applications that integrate Twitter as a greater communication channel, you can usually find a load of them on Mashable. So don't be shy.... give it a go and see whether you still want to sit in front of TV for news stories...

- jeff 

Twaddle?

The Apple rumour mill was hot again this morning as word spread the ‘blogosphere’ and the ‘Twitterati’ that Apple had lodged a $700m bid to acquire Twitter.

Twitter, the media ‘darling’ of the digital world has rejected previous bids, most notably a $500m bid from Facebook last year, and another tickle from Google .

Few people are actually expecting a deal to go through however. Twitter is in a pretty strong position right now with traffic going through the roof globally, with thanks to Oprah and gang (although I recognize that it could peak), and the reasons for Apple to buy aren’t blindingly obvious (as opposed to say, a Facebook or a Google).

It might be that they want to beef up their web development expertise, in much the same way they have mobile but that’s not particularly convincing. Maybe they want to get even cooler? (is that possible?) Who knows.

The clearest reason why this won’t happen is that Apple are always involved in some of the most ridiculous buy out rumours. In the last few years Apple have been “at advanced stages” with no other than: Adobe, EA, Disney, Nintendo and now Twitter.

This one will pass like the rest of them I’m sure. Twaddle.

Nic

My, we love an Internet phenomenon

This is all rather old news now and it’s only 5 days old...

Anyway, if you’ve not been on the planet since Saturday, you won’t know that a 40 something single woman from deepest, darkest  Scotland called Susan Boyle appeared on UK show Britain’s got Talent’ at the weekend.

And much to the judges and audience surprise she pulled off the performance of a lifetime. Take a look at the video if you haven't already seen it, it's worth watching right to the end.

Her 15 minutes of fame beckon, and boy she deserves it after an emotional and performance for the true underdog, 'battler' to use the local parlance.

It’s the speed at which the Susan Boyle story has erupted that is interesting to us, and shows how news – good or bad can spread in an instant online. Susan has to date:

- 20m views on You Tube, traffic to the ITV website that broadcast the show has risen 300% since it aired.

- Had interviews with the BBC, ITV, Fox America, CNN, CBS. And an invite to appear on Oprah.

- Has a fan website at www.susan-boyle.com, which is already serving advertising. Oh and it had the small matter of 500,000 page views on Wednesday alone.

- T-shirts and badges being sold on eBay “I might be ugly, but I can sing like Susan Boyle”. Pleasant stuff.

- Demi Moore "oh it was so emotional"... and millions of other tweeters talking about her on Twitter. Her name is being mentioned in approximately 30 tweets a minute this morning, that’ll be 43,000 today alone. A Twitter account in her name is underway too, not that she'll be behind it.

In a marketing sense, it shows what we already know – that social and digital media, with the help of broadcast can bring tens of millions of eyeballs to rich content in an instant.

Cheers

Nic

Smartphones changing the game

If you didn't think Smartphones (led by the iPhone, but soon followed by Android and Blackberry) were changing business then think again. And it is applications that is the real game changer.

There are now over 30m iPhones in use across the world, and over 25,000 applications available to download, a mere 18 months since launch. Developers across the world are spying big income if they can get the product right... As an example, I have a free GPS store locater app for a Canadian coffee chain (Tim Hortons), and on that app the developer is advertising the same app for Starbucks (works across the world). He’s selling that for $1 so it won’t take him long to earn some big dollars there. 

The iPhone has seemingly has its sights firmly set on the handheld gaming market, with new gaming titles being introduced by the day. Over 60% of the top 100 applications are games, and this is bound to rise as software companies rush to create iphone versions from traditional gaming platforms. iPhone sales are far outweighing sales of handheld devices DS and PSP so it is inevitable that it has quickly become a major player. Nintendo and Sony have recently opened up their platform to game operators in a direct response to the iPhone threat... 

The long running battle about music, copyright and digital is old news but smartphone applications could change the game again. US band - The Presidents of the USA have created an app for $3 that has 4 of their albums on it (4 albums, $3!). Users can download the app and enjoy the albums and access new unheard content from the band. If you want to buy a song and add it to another MP3 player you can do so. Incidentally, they give Apple 30%, which is the same deal as selling through iTunes.

Pink has recently launched a free app with previews from her upcoming album, and Snow Patrol, Nine Inch Nails are reported to be doing the same thing. Users will then be directed back to the iTunes music store to buy – winner. 

The beauty of the app route is that the band can update users with new content so they have a totally captive audience for the next album/tour/promotion/whatever. The next stage of course, is for users pay top dollar for brand new music, photos and news – straight to their handheld. Interesting developments.

Thanks for reading.

Nic