Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 05, 2008 by CyberNet.

Last week we wrote about how iTunes was getting new movies and making them available to purchase the same day as the DVD release. This is a pretty big step for Apple, and now we’re learning that they’re actually losing money on these new movies. The Wall Street Journal reported that while Apple is selling newly released movies at $14.99, they’re actually paying the studios about $16 for each movie. This translates to about a one dollar loss on each movie sold which adds up over-time.

Why would Apple be willing to take a loss? Our guess is because they feel that the loss will eventually turn into big gains if they can get people to regularly buy movies from them. Clearly, they’ve been extremely successful selling music, but they haven’t experienced quite the same success in selling movies. This could help bring in new customers and new customers could provide sales in all areas of iTunes including music, movies (not just new releases), and TV shows.

Movie studios end-up benefiting from sales of the digital format as well because they save costs in distribution and returns. The WSJ says:

Apple hopes it can translate some of its music success to movies. If it works, studios could end up making more money, too. While the wholesale price that studios are getting is less than they make selling movies to traditional retailers, studios will end up with a bigger profit for each sale, executives say. Their savings will come from the elimination of expenses like distribution and returns, which don’t exist with online movies.

In the end, iTunes really isn’t the big money-maker for Apple anyways, the hardware is. New iTunes customers can help sell the hardware that brings in the money for Apple whether it’s a new iPod to play the music or movies, or an AppleTV for playing movie rentals and watching TV shows.

Sometimes it’s worth it to take a loss and make-up in gains elsewhere which is what Apple is doing here…

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

Is the piracy of music a big deal? On the business side of things, sure. Music downloaded basically equals to album/single sales that have been potentially lost. After all if you can have it for free, why bother paying for it, right? Record labels, publishers, and some artists see it that way, but then again there are also those who don’t think of it as too big a deal, and legendary British metal band, Iron Maiden, is one of them. The band relied on data-mining company, Musicmetric, to monitor its growth on social media websites and found that there was a spike in popularity over in Latin America.

Ironically enough Latin America is also where a large amount of Iron Maiden’s materials get pirated, but instead of using those metrics to hunt the pirates down, Iron Maiden decided to fly down there and put on a show for them. Their efforts, instead of pursuing the legal option, have actually managed to net the band around $2.5 million in revenue from a single show that was recently held in Sao Paulo, Brazil. This move also managed to garner the band an additional 5 million followers on its social media pages from 2012 to 2013.

Artists typically make a huge bulk of their money from touring and selling merchandize. While album sales are important, they are typically used to help recoup expenses made by the record label in the production and marketing of the album, with cuts typically favoring the label (although this depends on the contract between the artist and the label). Iron Maiden is also well-established which means that this would be easier for them to pull off compared to an up and coming artist, but what do you guys think?

Iron Maiden’s Response To Piracy Has Actually Gained Them More Fans original content from Ubergizmo.

Turbines are huge, intricate, beautiful machines. And if you drop something inside of them, they double as musical instruments. But as YouTuber AgentJayZ demonstrates, the delightful xylophone sound that makes is actually horrible.

Read more…

It would appear that bands that have gotten over the madness hump that is the realization that their music is being pirated have begun taking advantage of that fact. One … Continue reading

We’ve seen a way to play drums using normal objects and even a steering wheel. DrumPants takes on the final frontier: you. Despite its misleading name, DrumPants are not actually pants or even restricted to pants. They’re wearable drum pads that attach to clothing and other objects using velcro.

Each kit comes with two drum pad strips, two pedal strips i.e. foot sensors and a control box, which seems small enough to fit in your back pocket. The foot sensors are wired to the two strips, which are in turn wired to the control box. The box has more than a hundred built-in sounds, including other instruments such as synthesizers, guitars and pianos.

Pledge at least $99 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a DrumPants kit as a reward. As hinted at in the video above, DrumPants can be connected to other music apps. It can even be used to emulate keyboard strokes, meaning you can use them to control even non-music software. If you’re interested in these additional functions, make sure to get the kit that comes with a Bluetooth adapter so you can interact with your computer wirelessly. Check out DrumPants’ YouTube page for more demos of the kit.