It may have just been a matter of time , but it finally happened: streaming music is now the biggest cash cow for the American music industry. The RIAA’s latest year-end sales report reveals that streaming accounted for 34.3 percent of US music revenue in 2015, barely edging past the 34 percent of downloads. Physical sales, meanwhile, were down to 28.8 percent. And despite concerns about free listening hurting the bottom line , paid subscriptions were the star of the show. While ad-based streaming pulled in 30.6 percent more cash versus 2014, paid subscriptions jumped 52.3 percent — suddenly, forking over $10 a month for unlimited music wasn’t such a far-fetched idea. The label-backed organization partly credits the boost to the rise of new entrants like Apple Music and Tidal . Streaming was simply the hot space last year, and everyone stood to gain whether they were fresh or an incumbent like Spotify . Internet radio (think Pandora and SiriusXM) and music videos also played roles, but only tiny ones. No matter what, online tunes were enough to offset the drop in demand for hard copies, as the entire industry’s revenue grew a modest 0.9 percent. It’s hard to say that streaming will keep growing at the pace it has, since there are only so many people willing to either subscribe or put up with ads. Even so, the data might be enough to have labels changing how they distribute and push music. Rather than treat streaming as just one of multiple options, they may be more likely to steer you toward the on-demand services first and foremost. Via: Wall Street Journal Source: RIAA
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Streaming is now the US music industry’s biggest money maker
An anonymous reader writes from an opinionated article on TechCrunch by Tom Hadfield: If Facebook announces the “Messenger Bot Store” at F8, as many predict, it would be arguably the most consequential event for the tech industry since Apple announced the App Store and iPhone SDK in March 2008. Today, Facebook Messenger has 800 million monthly active users — more than 100 times the number of iPhone owners when Apple launched the App Store. In January, TechCrunch first reported rumors of Facebook’s secret Chat SDK for building Messenger bots. If and when Facebook announces a Bot Store, it will mark the “end of the beginning” of a new era: messaging as a platform. Over the summer, The Information broke the news that AI-powered Facebook M would enable Messenger users to make purchases, restaurant reservations, and travel bookings within the messaging interface. A Messenger Bot Store would have far-reaching consequences not only for entrepreneurs and investors, but also developers and designers. Sam Lessin, the CEO of Fin, says the rise of chat-based user interfaces will mark “a fundamental shift that is going to change the types of applications that get developed and the style of service development.” For a time, bots were perceived to be plain-text exchanges and as such were often described as “invisible apps.” As Jonathan Libov at USV points out, “just because the container is a messenger doesn’t mean that all the apps inside are text-based.” Tomaz Stolfa says there is “unexplored potential in blending conversational interfaces with rich graphical UI elements.” If 800 million Facebook users start discovering bots in Messenger after F8, it will vindicate those who have been saying bots are the new apps. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
More details have emerged about Intel’s Optane, a new kind of memory and SSD that utilizes 3D Xpoint. The upcoming 3D Xpoint technology, which is supposedly 10 times denser than DRAM and 1, 000 times faster than flash storage, will be compatible with NVMe, a storage protocol that allows an SSD to make effective use of a high-speed PCIe. Several MacBook Pro models already support NVMe technology. Apple is often among the first companies to adopt emerging standards and technologies, which has led many to believe that the Cupertino-based company might leverage Intel’s Optane solid state drives for super fast performance speeds in its next batch of laptops. Apple is expected to announce the refreshed MacBook lineup sporting Intel Skylake processor later this year. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 