Technology has an important role as an enabler, spurring the development of new products, services, distribution channels, business models and, on occasions, driving the emergence of significant new sectors. Digital technologies in particular have had a profound effect, from the impact of CAD and desktop publishing software on the design industry in the 80s, through to the recent rise of social networking.
As amply demonstrated in the music industry, the ability of content to be digitised and distributed on line had an immediate and dramatic effect on the business model of the companies creating it. The music industry has spent the last decade trying to come to terms with the implications of digital content online. The traditional routes to market, such as the major record companies, book publishers and broadcasters, no longer control the channels to market in the way that they did. Their business models are being challenged as the internet allows for more direct and richer communication between artist and audience.
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Slice the Pie
Slice the Pie has turned the old style record label model on its head by turning the investment and A&R decisions over to the music fans themselves.
Artists sign up and upload their profile. They are entered into appropriate Scout Rooms based on genre, location etc. Music Fans are incentivised to listen, rate and review tracks.
The highest rated Artists are showcased, giving fans and serious music financiers the opportunity to invest sums from £1 upwards until they reach the £15,000 target. (If the Artist fails to hit the target after 6 months, they drop out of the Showcase and all investments are refunded.) Artists with established fan bases can bypass the Scout Rooms and raise up to £500,000, with investors receiving exclusive access to the Artist, a free copy of the finished album, their name on the album sleeve and a share in the financial returns from album and single sales. The Artist receives the money and records the album.
Contracts become tradable on the Slicethepie Exchange, fluctuating in value depending on the anticipated number of album and single sales. Albums are released on iTunes and Amazon, with the Artist paying a £2 royalty on every album sale and 20p per single. The Artist keeps all their copyright and publishing rights and remains free to sign a record deal at any time.
The company launched in the UK with an investment of £1.5 million ($3 million) on June 18, 2007. In March 2009, they announced a partnership deal with social network operator Bebo, which claims more than 22 million unique visitors worldwide.
To date, the site claims to have raised in excess of £200,000 and financed over 20 artists. Another 30 artists are currently raising finance.
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5.2.1 Role of technology in the Creative Industries
Technology has three separate relationships to creative industry businesses:
- as a technology enabled product i.e. digital content or applications software;
- as a means of increasing or transforming business processes or business models themselves; and
- as a means of engaging with and strengthening the relationship with the consumer.
5.2.2 Influential developments
Technology continues to evolve at a consistent rate and its capacity to influence and disrupt the sector does not diminish. Innovators often find their users responding to new technologies in unexpected ways (e.g. the unexpected popularity of SMS text messaging and the recent use of voice synthesis in iPod Shuffles to navigate menus without screens). Below we discuss those developments that are having a broad impact across the sector. Appendix 2 contains an outline summary of the sub-sectors.
Digitisation and network technologies: As process and content have become more digital, there has been a proliferation of intermediate and consumer digital assets. With the drive to higher audio and video definition, there has been a further increase in data volumes requiring more computing power to process and bandwidth to transmit. The doubling of notional computing power every two years described by Moore’s law continues, with the growth in processor performance, storage capacity and sensor resolution, supporting demand for high data rate applications.
The UK has embraced these new technologies – currently ranking fifth in the OECD in penetration of broadband and 11th in households with PCs. Consumers were also quick to respond to ecommerce, becoming the largest online retail market in Europe. The UK is also leading the way in internet advertising, securing an 18.9% share of domestic advertising spend (compared to 13% in US). The demand has stimulated investment in infrastructure [11] e.g. Virgin Media’s commitment to offer 50Mbits/s broadband to 70% of its customers by end 2008 and BT’s investment to deliver speeds of 40Mbit/s to 40% of all households by 2012.
Visualisation, modelling and simulation: Visualisation of complex datasets is becoming more commonplace with applications from medical imaging to material structural analysis. Traditional applications, such as mapping, are being transformed by rich media data, from birds-eye views to ground level 3D immersive experiences. The time-consuming practice of constructing physical 3D models is being replaced by virtual representations that can be distributed and accessed more easily. Models can be rendered within virtual worlds, allowing the viewer to see their application in context – contributing to quicker and more effective decision making.
Personalisation, interaction and co-creation: The reverse process of translating 3D models into solid objects using Rapid Prototyping/ Manufacturing technologies can return virtual models to the physical world. With the integration of design and production tools, the prospect of co-creation or personalised design and manufacture is coming close to reality.
When a user requests a webpage, the content they experience as a single page may in turn be made up of smaller content elements such as news teasers, embedded movies and advertisements. Those content elements can in turn be subdivided into images, paragraphs, links. Therefore, a single webpage can be considered as an organised hierarchy of information. Other types of content are similarly structured, i.e. as virtual presentations made of simple and compound 3D objects, films of scenes and shots. The borders that delineate these different types of media are blurring. Users are being empowered to modify that structure. Website navigation and layout can be personalised; 3D avatars can be redesigned; films can be mashed up. Databases are being used to store structured content and deliver it in response to implicit and explicit searches. This leads to a situation where no two user experiences are exactly the same
Open source and collaborative platform development: An open source collaborative approach to product development has been a feature of the success of the Internet (e.g. Wikipedia, Linux and Firefox); 66.7% of web servers run open source Apache over second place Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) at 18.7% [48]. Companies have benefitted from leveraging the resources of their consumers, gaining from their commitment, diversity and passion while incurring only a marginal cost to facilitate their activity.
Some projects are made wholly of user contributions while others are seeded by a company releasing, or opening up, its intellectual property to the community. Large technology players such as Amazon, Google and Yahoo have opened up access to their platforms1 through open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), interfaces that allow programmers to develop entire web services, and a corresponding legal framework for their commercialisation. Even information publishers, such as Guardian Media Group and the BBC are providing platform level access to their content to foster new ideas and business models.
With many competing open source programs available, the navigation, selection and implementation of technology has become an expert task, especially when multiple components must work in harmony. Despite this, open source offers a very effective route for low-cost experimentation. For creative companies delivering online services, such as social networks or publishing data, open projects can provide the building blocks with which to discover and innovate. New web-based applications and services can be brought to network quickly, allowing prosumers to decide how to use the technology and even shape its development.
1 The term platform combines program code, knowledge assets, computing power, storage and network infrastructure.
Interface and sensor technologies: Embedded sensors such as cameras, GPS chipsets and advances in display technologies in hand-held devices, are enabling applications to contextualise content based on a user’s location. They are enabling the consumer to interact with their environment for more immersive experiences, enabling entirely new applications, particularly in the field of Gaming. Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) create fictional interactive narratives that use the real world as a platform. Location-based technology is also enabling advertisers to target consumers based on their location and behaviour as well as their consumer profile. For example, brands can target consumers close to retail environments with specific messages or incentives to encourage purchase of their products.
The number of players in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) has increased dramatically over the last decade as server performance, network capacity and concurrent algorithm design have evolved. Those same drivers are improving the dramatic performance and therefore credibility of non-playing characters (NPCs). Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are progressively bridging the perceptual chasm between real and virtual players, especially in closed-vocabulary interactions such as those found in role-play or strategy games.
Haptic devices, such as Nintendo’s Wiimote or Apple’s iPhone, are using gestures and device orientation to understand a user’s intention, whether hitting a virtual tennis ball or taking a picture in landscape rather than portrait.
Trends towards wearable technology are emerging as computers, sensors, storage and power supplies start appearing embedded within clothing. Such smart materials are already reaching fashion collections, where optical materials (light emitting) and biomimetics (inspired by mimicking nature) are appearing on the catwalk.
Devices: With miniaturisation, devices have become more portable, more powerful and, as price decreases, more pervasive. Where in the past users may have carried several function-specific devices, such as a portable music player, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and mobile phone, they are increasingly carrying one single multifunctional device. Running counter to this convergence of outwardly similar gadgets is the divergent creation of newly specialised devices such as eBook readers or hybrids such as Netbooks.
Services such as video conferencing, which ten years ago might have been limited to home or office use, are now available on the move. Mobile phones have sufficiently high frame-rate cameras embedded along side high resolution displays to capture and playback video, which when coupled with mobile broadband networks (3G), facilitate video calling. This increase in the mobility of applications and services, while technically challenging, creates an opportunity for greater productivity and reduced downtime [49]. Demand is growing for high-performance low-power design, from algorithm to chip, in order to extend battery life.
Distribution: Alternatives to client-server distribution models, such as P2P are gaining traction, although their association with illegal file sharing threatens to undermine the value of what is a highly efficient use of resources. Distributed rendering projects (e.g. SETI@Home), distributed secure file systems (e.g. Tahoe) and control systems (e.g. GIT) all make use of processing power and storage capacity across the network. Increasingly such applications hide from the user the complexity of where and how there data is stored and processed. Cloud computing is extending the concept. Storage and processing resources are virtualised, aggregated with infrastructure, platform and software services and delivered over the Internet.