Media Revolution (BBC 2)

Over the past 10 years a mass amount of newspapers have lost a mass amount of readers. The figures show that; The Dailies have lost 2.25 million readers, The Mirror have lost 750,00 readers and The Sun lost 400,00 readers. The Guardian has lost 10% of readers and Telegraph gone down by 17%.

The Sunday papers lost 500,00 last year alone (2008). These facts may need to be looked into again as this documentary (Media Revolution) was made in 2009.

Advertising has had a huge effect on newspapers as it has gone down, meaning that the sales of newspapers have also gone down. 75% of revenue comes from advertising for local papers. Therefore if they are loosing readers, advertisers will not publish their ads within that specific paper resulting in sales dropping dramatically.

Rupert Murdoch revolutionized the newspaper production in the mid 80's by moving his papers out of Fleet Street to new digital offices outside of London. The Sun is the only newspaper to not have lost any readers over the last year. The newspapers has successfully increased their circulation by cutting its cover price down to a small 30p.

In order to counteract the loss in revenue from advertising newspapers have put up their cover prices and decided to start to giving away free-bees with their newspaper. The Mail on Sunday is highly famous for doing this as it gives away a CD or DVD or book near enough each week. McFly made a deal with the Mail on Sunday to give away their new album for free. The Mail on Sunday gave them a lump sum of money in order for them to be allowed to give away the albums for free. The normally rate on a sunday of papers being sold is 2.1 million, where as on this particular day the rate was increased to 2.4 million.

The free newspapers have created the opportunity to deliver newspapers to commuters who are traveling to and from work who would not normally stop off and buy a newspaper. They have dumbed down the content so it is simpler and easier to read.'The metro' is a free paper made up of 55% news and 45% advertising. The audience they are targeting are great for advertisers as people who are not spending money on newspapers, have money to spend on other things which shall be presented to them through the adverts displayed.

The web has had a huge impact on newspaper readers, especially the younger audience, as they can read whatever they ant wherever and whenever they want, they have mass choice.

The Telegraph has now embraced the digital age by opening new digital high-tech offices with huge projectors where the workers can see what the website looks like as they are working. Also within the offices they have a huge table displaying which article is being read the most and the exact figure of people who are reading it.

Online access has had a huge effect on the industry as new things have been invented with easy access wherever such as The Kindle and The Ipad.

The Guardian are now online however only 1/3 of their audience online are based in the UK. 1.3 of America are reading The Guardian and the final 1/3 is from the rest of the world.

Case Study : HMV

Another case study I am going to use is HMV. HMV are closing down 60 of their stores this year due to a loss in profit.

How have online media developed?

The development within the online media has caused record stores to lose a mass amount of sales as people are now buying music online through itunes legally or through illegal sites such as LimeWire. Spotify is a software which people are downloading where you can get it for free or pay for a better version. Spotify are aimed at building the bridge between downloading illegally and legally. They are offering people to listen to music for free to a certain extent, however the artists are still making money because they get a fee from Spotify for their tunes to uploaded onto the software. Therefore people do not need to leave their homes and go to a store to buy a CD. As the online media age develops CDS will not be available in shops as the sales keep dramatically decreasing.

What has been the impact of the internet on media production?

The internet has had a huge impact on media production. With people downloaded illegally, no money is going into the music industry as people are not paying for the music they are listening to therefore record companies are not making money. Many artists put a lot of money into producing videos and albums for their audience and when people are sharing them for free they are not getting money back to pay for their hard work.

How is consumer behaviour and audience response transformed by online media, in relation to the past?

People are not going out to buy as much music from shops such as HMV therefore they are not making the money they need to stay up and running. Back in the day you could only get music from stores therefore they were booming businesses. However when people can access what they want whenever they want from the comfort of their own home it has become a necessity to turn to the internet instead of the high street.

To what extent has convergence transformed the media?

Convergence has transformed the media massively as people can now link music up to their phone which they have illegally downloaded therefore they are spending no money on buying music to take on route with them. Also if you download some songs illegally off the internet you can make a CD via your computer and then say you want to take it on holiday or put in your car you have access to the CD for free. Also you don't have to just buy an album that has been produced by one artist or band, you can select a range of different genre of artists and songs and place them all on one CD for your own personal enjoyment. People would rather make their own where they will like every song rather then buy it from a record shop where it will be just one artist or maybe a variety of artists however they will not like every song. This could be classed as 'a waste of our money'.

Useful Link to the decrease in music sale

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/jun/09/games-dvd-music-downloads-piracy

Case study: Limewire

How have online media developed?

The initial release of Limewire was on May 3rd 2000. The software was discontinued on 26th October 2010. When Kimba Wood issued an injunction forcing LimeWire to prevent "the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality" of its software. A trial investigating the damages necessary to compensate the affected record labels is scheduled to begin in January 2011.

As a result of the injunction, LimeWire 5.5.11 and newer have been disabled using a backdoor installed by the company. However, version 5.5.10 and all prior versions of LimeWire remain fully functional and cannot be disabled unless a user upgrades to one of the newer versions.

When the software was up and running anyone with access to the internet on their computer could download limewire and downloaded and share files illegally.

What has been the impact of the internet on media production?

Limewire is just one of the many softwares which have enabled users of the internet to download content illegally over the past decade. Recently the effects of illegal file sharing has had a huge effect on record companies and artists. 95% of music is downloaded illegally and it said that the music industry is loosing an estimated 12.5 million a year. This has resulted in a major record company 'mercury records' announcing that they shall be not producing anymore 'singles' because they don't have the money to make this possible due to so many people not buying their music.

How is consumer behaviour and audience response transformed by online media, in relation to the past?

When internet access was very limited people had no option but to purchase their music from stores. With the progress of illegal file sharing exploding lately, music has become more available to a wider audience than ever before. People who could not afford music before are able to access it through sites such as limewire. It has been explored that those who are downloading illegally spend around £77 a year on music, where those who buy everything legally only spend £44. The advantage of online file sharing could be that it is a 'view and buy' process. People may listen to the album, like it and then decide to buy it rather than spending the money and finding they don't enjoy the artists content!!!!

To what extent has convergence transformed the media?

Limewire is a method convergence as you can download songs via your computer through the Limewire software. Once you have done this you can successfully share the songs you have illegally downloaded with your friends through msn or maybe create a CD and share it with your friends. This has transformed the media in a positive way as the media is now more accessible and people can afford it more often. However this is affecting the artists and the music industry in general as people are sharing their music for free. As well as sharing for free, the majority of people who have downloaded the music which they then share, have downloaded it illegally in the first place. Due to illegal downloads record companies are loosing industries and not being able to take on new artists to create new music and are now starting to abolish the production of singles.

Case Study: Theories

Theories to take into account when explaining my case studies

§The Long Tail

§Wikinomics

§We Think

§We the Media

§Web 2.0 & 3.0

§Active/Passive audiences

§Ideas from the Virtual Revolution (The Great Leveller & the Cost of Free)

Case Studies

Example - Spotify

Mark Scheme

The Digital Economy Act

The Digital Economy Act 2010 is an act of Parliament of the United Kingdom regulating Digital Media. Introduced by Peter Mandelson, Lord Mandelson, it received Royal Assent on 8 April 2010, and came into force on 8 June 2010.

The Act's provisions against the act of copyright infringement proved controversial.^[2] It establishes a system of law which aims to first increase the ease of tracking down and suing persistent infringers, and after a minimum of one year permit the introduction of "technical measures" to reduce the quality of, or potentially terminate, those infringers' Internet connections. It also creates a new ex-judicial process to handle appeals.^[3]

The new process, which will come into force when Ofcom's regulatory code is approved by Parliament, begins with rightsholders gathering lists of Internet Protocol addresses which they believe have infringed their copyrights. (This data could be gathered most easily by a rightsholder connecting to a Peer-to-Peer download of a work they own, and noting the other IP addresses to which their computer connects.) They would then send each IP number to the appropriate Internet Service Provider (newly-defined in the Act as a provider of IP addresses^[4]) along with a "copyright infringement report".

You will be a sent letter informing you that what you are doing is wrong. If you fail to stop downloading illegally, your internet may be slowed down by your providers or stopped entirely.

Charlie Leadbeater and We Think

If you thought we were done with the 'big ideas' after the long tail and wikinomics, think again. Charles Lead-better's intervention - We Think - takes a similar view on the revolutionary nature of the internet, but develops this further - beyond business and consumption - to argue that the way we think and make sense of 'knowledge' is fundamentally shifting in the online age.

For Lead-better, open - access knowledge - building communities on the web allow ideas to be shared and tested much more quickly and effectively. Ultimately, this leads to us becoming more creative and innovative, as we are liberates from the usual institutional constraints on how things are invented and changed by scientists and academics. Leadbetter uses World of Warcraft to make his point and extend it to challenge the world of education, which might be of a particular interest to us.

Web 2.0 and Web 3.0

Web 2.0 encourages us to be more active users to the media meaning we can contribute to the content being broadcasted within the media.

Web 3.0 is now being developed in order to improve your web experience and help you find exactly what you want as quickly as possible. Cookies can be placed within our computers to look at the information we have been looking at or searching for, therefore they can direct advertisements towards us and begin to create an image of who we are and what we like. This is a good feature of the web as we can access and find what we want very quickly instead of searching for hours, however a negative about this could that our freedom is being reduced. We don't seem to have as much choice anymore as we are being narrow channelled into selecting certain things directed to us by companies.

The Social Network

The Social Network is a 2010 semi-biographical drama film about the founding of the social networking website Facebook and the resulting lawsuits.

The film shows the consequences and effects of the creation of the online social network site, face book. The film takes into account the copy right matter of the website when a law is taken place as the task of finding out who the initial idea for the website first originated from.

The Long Tail Theory

The Long Tail Theory was created by Chris Anderson in October 2004. The theory is based on the statement 'more of less, and less of more'. The theory expresses how businesses can make just as much money selling a large amount of niche products as they can selling the most wanted products at the time.

The Virtual Revolution

To web was invented by Tim Bernes Lee in 1990. At the present time, 20 - 25% of the world is using the Web. Within Britain 35 million people log onto the Web every day.

'The Great Levelling' is what gives power to the people resulting in 'equal access, equal voice, equal potential'. The original ideologies for the web were based in San Francisco within the 60's.

The first website created was called 'The Well' (1985 San Francisco). Email was born within 1965. The first website went online within 1991.

The aim of the web when it was originally designed was to connect information between different computers. The creator of the web creates 'social and cultural innovation by connecting people, resisting authority and giving it away for free.

Bill Gates played a part in the virtual revolution by putting his software on home computers. Within the 90's Microsoft owned 90% of the market. Shawn Fanning created Napster in 1999. In 2001 it was shut down. According to the record industry 95% of music is downloaded illegally. The estimated loss in revenue from the illegal sharing of film, TV and music is 531 million.

Wikinomics - The Five Big Ideas

Peering is the free sharing of material on the internet. This is good news for businesses when it cuts distribution costs to almost zero, but bad news for people who want to protect their creative materials and ideas as intellectual property.

A positive example of Peering would be Jessie J. She came to fame first by uploading videos of her singing her songs onto YouTube in order for people to hear her name, her music, and recomend her to others. People listened to her music because they didn't have to pay. If they did have to pay and hadn't heard of her before many people no doubt would not have paid much attention. After this Jessie J managed to make it big because of people talking about her and listening to her songs via the internet.

However when artists are famous, they are making a living through producing music. Like any of us, we have a job in order to make a living and none of us like working for nothing. Therefore when their music is being shared on the internet for free, the artists must feel they are working hard for nothing. This is an example of how Peering can be negative.


Free Creativity - An example of Free Creativity would be 'Life in a day: Ridley Scott Global Youtube Creativity'. This was where the film maker asked people to record themselves or things that happened during a certain day and uploaded all of the footage and created a film. This didn't cost the director anything as he relied on people to upload the footage which they had captured. All he had to do was piece the film together. This may have been free to produce and not made money but it will have shared his name around the world and his creation via the internet.

The media is democratised by peering, free creativity and the we media journalism produced by ordinary people.

An example of this can be The News. As a nation we can now send in our stories and pictures to The Newspapers and News channels on the television. This enables us to have the chance to be producing the news stories instead of the Editors and journalists feeding the news to us. Many years ago we could not comment on stories that were being produced within the media however now we can, expressing our own opinions. However this can take a negative toll as somebody will know doubt be controlling what comments can be accepted and which can't when people are broadcasting their feelings towards the article that has been produced. Therefore this could mean that comments could be deleted and filtered so that only certain comments can be seen in order to form a structure to the debate.

Web 2.0 makes thinking globally inevitable. The internet is the 'worlds biggest coffeehouse', a virtual space in which a new blog is created every second. In this instantly global communication sphere, national and cultural boundaries are inevitably reduced.

The perfect storm creates such a force that resistance is impossible, so any media company trying to operate without web 2.0 will be like a small fishing boat on the sea during this freak meteorological occurance.

Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams published WIKINOMICS in 2006. Along with the 'long tail theory', this is the other 'big idea' about business and commerce in the online age. I agree with Tabscott and Anthony Williams when they state that the media is democratised. This is because the media is now produced by ordinary people. Also I believe with the term 'the perfect storm' because I believe that any business needs to be involved with the internet and be advertised over the internet. I believe that the internet is a powerful tool that can now expand businesses and help them reach out to a wider range of consumers.