Digital Trends
The BBC has reported that an 18-month old threat from Apple that it might close iTunes has emerged just as digital music royalties are due to rise. And yes, they’re connected.
They digital music royalty rates could rise today from nine cents per track to 15 cents, as the Copyright Royalty Board meets to request the increase. And who would pay that increase? It would be the customer, the retailer or the record company – and you can pretty safely say it won’t be the record company.
Market research firm NPD has released its analysis of consumer technology spending during 2007, and while 2007 was a growth year for the industry overall, a slowdown during the second half of the year and a lackluster holiday season may not bode well for growth during 2008—but that may not actually hurt company’s bottom lines.
NPD found that some 47 percent of consumer tech spending fell into just five categories: notebook computers, LCD TVs, desktop computers, digital point-and-shoot cameras, and MP3 players. In 2006, those categories accounted for 42 percent of U.S. consumer tech buys, and in 2005 they were just 36 percent of sales.
Unit sales growth was even stronger, as the total for 2004 hit 18.85 million units, an increase of 28 percent compared to unit sales in the previous year.
CEA Market Research shows that consumers also increasingly turned to higher resolution digital cameras. Digital cameras with five or more megapixel resolutions sold more than 7 million units, an increase of 176 percent compared to 2003. Digital cameras with four megapixel resolutions were also extremely popular and totaled more than 3.78 million units, an increase of 141 percent from the previous year.
Total revenues for the month reached more than $707 million, a slight increase compared to the same period in 2002. Overall category sales were given a boost from strong sales of portable audioproducts and, in particular, MP3 players.
Portable audio product revenues showed a 24 percent increase compared to September of 2002, pushing factory-to-dealer sales to nearly $260 million, thanks in part to impressive sales of both MP3 players and CD/MP3 combinations. Manufacturer-to-dealer sales of MP3 players increased some 258 percent over the same period in 2002 to generate more than $82 million in revenues. Sales of portable CD/MP3 player combinations reached more than $223 million with an increase of 21 percent over 2002.
Quote from the review at Vipers Lair:
“Compared to our stock speed Splinter Cell numbers, we see an increase of about 2 to 3FPS across all the non-AA resolutions, and the 8xAA/8xAF resolutions. Not much of an increase, so we’ll leave it up to you if it’s worth the risk in OCing.”
Our take: This is actually the card I was thinking about purchasing. If I remember correctly it comes with like 10 computer games, and a ton of features.
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