Ownership of music, movies and software slipping away

First it was physical media that was threatened by the shift to digital, now it’s ownership of entertainment and software.
Consider the music business. For decades, physical ownership of music ruled, first with LPs and cassettes and then CDs. Then Apple changed the game when it launched the iTunes download store in April 2003.
Fast forward to today and iTunes sales are dropping as consumers switch to ad-supported and subscription streaming music services like Pandora and Spotify.
Why own the music when streaming is so convenient? You can access your favorite music from multiple devices without the hassle of finding your copy.
In the movie business, DVD sales are down as more consumers sign up for Netflix, Amazon Prime Instant Video and other subscription streaming services.
Once again, with streaming, people don’t have to load their personal copy of a video into a consumer electronics device. They just search from a menu and hit play.
Another benefit of streaming video vs. DVD is not having to slog through all those trailers, ads, piracy warnings and menus you get before you can actually watch the video you want. With streaming, it starts when you hit play.
However, a drawback is the likely disappearance of special features like deleted scenes, movie documentaries and director commentaries.
Computer software also is shifting from buy-and-own to monthly subscriptions. Microsoft, Adobe Systems and other software companies now offer to rent PC software applications as opposed to buy-upfront licensed software. This is part of the shift to cloud computing.
Amazon.com even has a subscription electronic book service called Kindle Unlimited.
It all sounds like a good deal, but consumers might end up paying more for software and entertainment content this way.
Also, if you don’t own something, you have less control over it. Some of the content you like could just disappear when a service loses the rights to it.
Plus, you usually need an Internet connection to access your content.
As with all new things, there are tradeoffs.

Brands, logos and advertising – more interesting business lists

Here are some more thought-provoking business lists curated from across the Internet.

7 iconic brands that just vanished. (24/7 Wall St.; July 3, 2013)

The list includes Compaq, Sony Ericsson and Cingular Wireless. (The Huffington Post also published the list.) 

Interesting facts about 10 famous brands. (Graphic Design Blog; Sept. 9, 2010)

This list includes Apple, Adobe, Cisco, Google, Intel and Sony. 

It’s an arrow! Famous logos with hidden images. (Divine Caroline)

15 inadvertently lewd company logos. (Business Pundit; April 2, 2013)

“Logo Life: Life Histories of 100 Famous Logos” by Ron van der Vlugt. (Designboom; Sept. 4, 2012)

“Logo Life” from BIS Publishers charts the evolution of some of the world’s best known logos, such as Lego. (See above photo.) 

15 super creative print ads starring animals. (Business Pundit; Jan. 23, 2013)

This list includes a funny ad for Google featuring a sheep and the text “Did you mean? Battleship.” (See below. Click image for larger view.) 

Clips: Another journalist anachronism

This year I finally went all digital when it comes to saving my published articles.

I’ve been clipping my stories from newspapers for nearly 30 years. I’ve got boxes of “clips” – that’s what old-time print journalists call their saved articles. My clips go back to my days at the Daily Illini, the college newspaper at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

For decades, when journalists applied for jobs, they’d provide their clips as samples of their work. Articles now can be e-mailed as attachments or sent as weblinks.

I suppose the word clips is going to end up in the dustbin of outmoded journalism terms like “slug” and “spike.”

Since the start of the year, I’ve been saving PDFs of my work. PDF stands for portable document format, a standard developed by Adobe Systems. As I’ve stated previously, you can’t trust weblinks to work one month to the next. So I’m hoping the PDF format will stand the test of time.

Photo: One of my recent articles from IBD.

Advertising, publishing industry woes weighing on Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems, maker of graphic design and electronic document software, is going through a slow patch in sales right now. Two of its key customers – the advertising and publishing industries – are struggling during the current recession.
Magazines and newspapers are hurting because advertising sales are down. Journalism Web sites provide a depressing litany of news about newspaper and magazine layoffs and closures.
The problems of the advertising and publishing industries are one reason for slow sales of Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 product family, which launched in mid-October 2008. CS4 revenue is running more than 20% below CS3 at the same point after its release, Adobe Chief Financial Officer Mark Garrett told me June 16.
“People are starting to talk about CS5 already, but we think there’s still a lot more opportunity here,” Garrett said. Creative Suite is upgraded every 18 to 20 months. Following that pattern, CS5 would be out in mid- to late 2010. The Creative Suites include such separate design products as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash and Dreamweaver.
“The silver lining in all of this is we could get some pent-up demand for CS5 because we’ve potentially got people who in this economy just won’t migrate to CS4,” Garrett said. “But we’re a long way from giving up on CS4 adoption.”
I asked Garrett about the struggles of print media and its impact on Adobe’s business.
“To your comment on newspapers and magazines, yes, some will fold, but others will move to the Web,” Garrett said. “I think we will have the opportunity to sell potentially different tools and services as they move to the Web than we were able to do before. Similar to the way Photoshop used to be just about print and then moved to the Web. I don’t think the impact is going to be as severe as you might think. We’re just going to be selling them tools to help them get on the Web now.”

Senior correspondent reports on bizarre animals created with Adobe Photoshop

Tech-media-tainment’s senior correspondent filed this next report.
And by senior, I mean senior citizen, since it was my mom. And it’s not so much a report as an e-mail that she forwarded to me from her cousin.
Usually she sends me cute animal photos or alarming news reports that turn out to be false (thank you, Snopes.com).
Today she e-mailed me a bunch of wacky Photoshopped chimeras – different animals merged together such as a bird with the head of a wolf or a dog with the head of an eagle.
Her comment with the e-mail was “This is really something – Mother.” I guess that counts as a report for Tech-media-tainment.
She’s right, the photos are pretty amazing. Posted above are several samples. They’re from Worth1000.com. Get it? A picture is worth a thousand words. Worth1000 is a Web site that sponsors contests for digital artists. It was created by the founders of Aviary, a privately held company based in Long Island, N.Y., that makes software tools for graphic designers.