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ZDNet: U.S. sales of digital music albums grew by 60% in the first six months of 2007 but failed to offset the rapid sales decline of compact discs, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan.

Total sales of albums were down by 15% for both digital and CDs, with CDs alone falling 19.3% to 205.7 million units.

Meanwhile, digital album sales jumped about 60% to 23.5 million units.

The recorded music industry is struggling in the early stages of a transition to digital formats, such as MP3, from the dominant CD format. CD sales are declining faster than industry executives and analysts have expected.

Digital music sales are currently dominated by Apple’s iTunes Store, which by some estimates has more than 70% of the market.

The largest music company, Universal Music Group, owned by French media giant Vivendi, had the biggest share, about 27%, of digital sales, and nearly 31.6% of the total market share.

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TVPredicitions.com: Universal’s Ken Graffeo says the format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD is good for consumers.

Additionally, he says Universal will continue to support the HD DVD format exclusively, the only studio to do so.

Blu-ray and HD DVD are locked in an intense battle for the new high-def disc audience. Four of the eight major studios are backing Blu-ray exclusively while Universal is behind HD DVD. The others are releasing titles in both formats.

However, many industry officials, particularly retailers, are urging an end to the format war, saying it’s confusing consumers. Consequently, they say, high-def player and title sales are well below what they should be.

But Graffeo tells the Daily News that his studio still believes that HD DVD offers the “better set of mandatory specifications” because every HD DVD player has an Ethernet port and carries the software to support interactive features.
“In Blu-Ray, the interactive specs are still just an option. The only Blu-Ray player now sold with an Ethernet port is the PlayStation 3,” he said.

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Guardian: Sony’s dream of an early victory in the next-gen DVD format fight has been dashed by poor PS3 sales.

If it was a Hollywood movie it would be a remake of Alien v Predator. On one side is the giant Sony corporation, which is backing the Blu-ray high definition DVD format by building it into its PlayStation 3 games consoles.

Facing it across the global battlefield is Toshiba, backed by Microsoft and Intel, promoting the rival (and incompatible) HD DVD format.

The stakes are very high indeed for companies on both sides. Yet Sony, the pre-fight favourite – with the best-selling games console franchise in the world and the backing of seven Hollywood studios (basically all of the big ones except Universal Pictures) making their movies available on Blu-ray – is nowhere near delivering the early knockout blow it wanted.

Instead, early defections from the Blu-ray-only camp and lagging sales of PS3 consoles have blurred the picture of which format will win. Samsung broke ranks with Blu-ray last month by announcing it will make players that play both HD formats, following a similar move by LG.

In addition, most analysts acknowledge that the PC manufacturers will play a key role in the format war – and having Microsoft and Intel behind HD DVD is significant. Neither of these two Toshiba allies has shown signs of switching camps so far. (…)

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High-Def Digest: After weeks of complaints from early adopters, Universal has issued a statement regarding playback issues with several of their most recent HD DVD releases.

The issues first surfaced in late March when ‘Children of Men’ was released on HD DVD, and consumers experienced inconsistent playback problems on both the Xbox 360 add-on and other stand-alone HD DVD playback devices.

Since then, readers have reported similar playback issues on ‘The Good Shepherd’ and other more recently released Universal titles.

While the studio had been silent on the topic for over a month, this week they issued a statement acknowledging the problems, and initiated a disc replacement program for affected consumers.

Any customer problems should be directed to USHE.ConsumerRelations@worldmarkinc.com.

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Cliczune: There is a lot of testing going on at Zunerama and ZuneThoughts about songs that can or cannot be shared when purchased or acquired through the ZunePass. Both sites are coming with numbers of around 40% of songs that “can’t” be shared from Zune to Zune. This is an important number considering that on of the key highlight of the Zune marketing is based on sharing and Wifi. Indeed, the Wireless device inside the Zune can only be used for sharing.

We wanted to know from what record label those artists are associated with. We were surprised to find that Universal, who signed an aggressive deal with Microsoft by grabbing a royalty for each Zune sold, does have a lot of artists cut in the “Zune sharing prohibited” list. Sony Music is also limiting the Zune sharing for a few of their artists.
(more…)

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The Register reports the Vivendi Universal Music Group will make their entire music back catalogue available as free legal downloads. The new Spiral Frog music service will be funded by advertising and is due to start up in December.

the Press Release

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