Word: mp3
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...thing I hate: buying music. I haven't bought a CD or MP3 in years. Instead, I subscribe to music. I pay a small monthly fee to Rhapsody, an online digital-music service, and can access most of the world's music--more than 5 million songs--by streaming it via the Net to my home audio system. I can listen to just about any song I want, anytime, anywhere. That's known in the geekosphere as "music dial tone...
...thing I hate: Buying music. I haven't bought a CD or MP3 for years. Instead, I subscribe to music - I pay a small monthly fee to Rhapsody and can access most of the world's music (more than 5 million songs) by streaming it via the Net to my home audio system. I can listen to just about any song I want, any time, anywhere. That's known, in the geekosphere, as "music dial tone...
That kind of response is generating more and more heat in the emerging field of transformation design--a hybrid of business consulting and industrial design. Firms like Humantific, whose founders are designers, apply the same process used in designing sleek MP3 players and ergonomic teakettles to unwieldy intangibles like cell-phone promotions and hospital organization, transforming their effectiveness. Along the way, the field is creating some unusual teamwork between designers and business people...
Wringing more out of plastic discs won't be enough to secure the record companies' futures, though. More pressing is the need to sharpen strategies for the digital market. Record companies were slow to turn on to digital; Doug Morris, the boss of Universal Music, once slammed MP3 players as little more than "repositories for stolen music." But last year those companies saw their revenues from digital sales hit an estimated $2.9 billion, up almost eightfold since 2004. However, that's not exactly the fortissimo it may appear to be. The 38% annual growth in digital sales last year...
...ease the pressure on their revenues, record companies may paradoxically have to offer more for free. Today's music consumers shell out hundreds of dollars on MP3 players, but they spend an average of just $20 a year on downloads. To the crucial teenage market, paying for music is as outdated as picking up a newspaper. But companies can get something in return for giving them music. Advertising-supported free music services such as Last.fm pay the major record companies from ad revenue; in return, their users can stream the companies' music for nothing. Such outlets offer record companies...