Music Economy Basic Information Service

The website for easy to understand facts and background information about the music business - statistics, basic economics, financial information, album-calculations, marketing and musicians income.

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This site is exclusively sponsored by Alex Merck to help musicians and others interested in economics to better understand the realities of the music business. Alex Merck has taught executives via IIR (Institute for International Research) seminars and music-industry seminars by "eBAM Academy". Some specific information and predictions are only available through these seminars or by direct consulting.

News and stock tips May 2007

NEWS: still disastrous music sales situation worldwide, with sales of CDs falling further - - - - - - - CD-R and DVD-R burning is now really hurting the film and TV industries as well as music industry - - - - political left populism is now hurting almost all fields of entertainment, since hardly any steps are taken to protect creators of music or films or anything else copyrighted. It only appears as if the state pressure was just against large media companies, in reality the lack of protection works mainly against musicians, authors and photographers - - - - in music almost the only field where musicians can make a living in the live concert field, which leads more and more to strongly rising prices for shows, something we have seen happening in SE Asia for a long time --- a bad joke came from Steve Jobs and Apple calling for the labels to drop DRM: Apple has strongly profited from DRM in building a market advantage, but now he would need a standard to push the i-tunes store further. They think that more than the current 5 percent of the tracks on most iPods could be bought at their store if they were not protected. I hope it will not come to the point where they (and everyone else) will have to learn the error of this thinking. We need DRM-standards or interoperability if we want to get to the point where it is possible to earn a living with recorded music again. --- This said, Jobs has one point: all the old tracks that are already available unprotected in the form of normal CDs can not be made protected again anyhow, so here some watermarking or even no protection can be acceptable depending on specific situations. NEW releases though should not even be made available on "Soundcarriers" like CDs. Strict adherence to this might hurt some manufacturers of CD-drives, but will speed up the transition to digital distribution and will benefit everyone in the end.

Stock tips (Aktien-Empfehlungen im Medien-Sektor) are available in both DEUTSCH and english language.
Our sell recommendations including Dt. Telekom, mp3.com during the last years were overall extremely successfull -
In view of the current optimistic earnings expectations of most analysts I can not suggest buying stocks of most european (and especially german) companies. Most shares in the german DAX-index and most western European markets are not great value anymore.

 

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Last updated: 07.May.2007
Author: Alex Merck