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News Corp mogul Rupert Murdoch is a paid-up member of the iPad fanclub, judging by his comments in an interview with his own Fox Business Channel.

“All media is going to go on to the iPad, whether it be music or books or newspapers or movies, you’ll be able to get on your iPad… they’ll get better and better and you’ll be able to do more tricks with it.”

He also returned to his criticisms of search engines from Google and Microsoft, for the way they supposedly cannibalise News Corp’s content.

Anyone want to place a bet now on Murdoch falling out with Apple in a year or two’s time over Apple’s controls on iPad content?

Research commissioned by the International Chamber of Commerce claims that 1.2 million jobs across the EU are at risk in the next five years, due to online piracy.

It suggests that piracy could cost more than €240 billion of revenues from the music, film, TV, software and other creative industries by 2015.

The survey also indicates that the UK could be the worst hit, with a quarter of a million jobs at risk. BPI boss Geoff Taylor has backed the findings: “We’re approaching a tipping point where investment in our talent will dry up due to mass illegal downloading”.

There may be criticism of the research’s methodology if it turns out that the €240bn figure is based on the assumption that every illegal download is a lost sale, though.

Online radio service Slacker has confirmed its deal with Hello Music, which will allow unsigned bands to create their own branded stations on the service.

The stations will feature their name, photo, bio and several of their songs – which must be originals rather than covers – while also playing related artists. Slacker has around two million active listeners according to CNET.

It’s one of the partners for Hello Music’s new virtual A&R service, which aims to cherry-pick talented unsigned artists and help them get onto commercial music services.

YouTube has taken the wrappers off its new Musicians Wanted scheme, which lets independent and unsigned artists create their own YouTube channels and share in the advertising revenues around their videos.

It means they get access to the same features as bands signed to larger labels. Artists still have to apply to take part in the initiative, via YouTube’s Partners Program, but once accepted, they can also add purchase buttons for music, tickets and merchandise to their videos. For now, it’s US-only.

You might have heard of one of the first applicants: OK Go. “YouTube has always been a great match for OK Go – creativity flourishes and we can connect directly with our fans,” says frontman Damian Kulash.

“So when we heard about Musicians Wanted, it was a no-brainer: it sounds great for us. We’re honored and excited to be the first applicants. We can’t wait to get new videos up on our channel.

In separate news, YouTube says that 24 hours of video is now uploaded to the site every minute. A reminder that simply getting your videos onto the site – with or without your own channel – is just the start of the process. Getting people to find and watch them is the real challenge.

The promo video for Musicians Wanted is embedded below:

Unsigned musicians in the US now have the opportunity to approach Youtube directly to strike deals to monetise their videos on the site. There’s an initial approval process which artists must complete that involves uploading tracks and information for Youtube’s approval. The things they’re looking for are potential rights issues and general audio and song quality.

Once approved artists will share in revenues generated from pre and post roll ads placed within their videos, this means that they will still make money even if they’re embedded outside of Youtube. There’s also the potential for an e-commerce element by building in purchase buttons for music, tickets and merchandise.

The entertainment industry is known to commission reports and research that hugely benefit their lobbying practices. A new report, “Building a Digital Economy” was released yesterday. This report investigates the impact of piracy on Europe’s creative sector and was paid for by the same industry.

As expected, the reports paint a disastrous picture. In just 5 years from now the total number of lost jobs in Europe could grow to 1.2 million and the lost revenue for the industry may skyrocket to €240 billion in the same time frame. The report was quickly praised by anti-piracy outfits including the BPI and IFPI who will use it in their political lobbying efforts.

Of course, those who took the time to take a good look at the report will have seen that there are many assumptions and statistical tricks that led to these outrageous claims. We will discuss a few of them below and show that depending on what sources are used, one could come to entirely different conclusions.

- The report suggests that there’s a direct correlation between Internet traffic growth and lost jobs. That is, the more traffic that is generated on the Internet, the more money will be lost. This correlation is 1 according to the report, which assumes that all growth in Internet traffic will increase piracy at the same rate.

- The report makes another bogus assumption by stating that more traffic will mean more piracy and thus more lost revenue. It does not account for the fact that people might consume higher quality files which are greater in file-size. All projections are based on bandwidth and not the number of pirated goods.

- The report cites some academic literature which suggests that piracy leads to a decrease in sales. Studies that reported the opposite or a null-effect were carefully left out. This bias defines the entire outcome of the report. If they used studies that found a positive effect they would have found that piracy would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the years to come.

- The report uses fixed substitution rates. They assume that 10 downloaded albums results in one lost sale and this figure is not adjusted for the projected increase in piracy. One would think that the public’s budget for entertainment is limited and that the substitution rate would go down as piracy goes up.

- Related to the previous point, if the industry did indeed lose over €240 billion in revenue by 2015, consumers would have a lot of extra cash to spend. Depending on where this money was spent it might create more jobs than the entertainment industry claims it is losing. As a report commissioned by the Dutch Government showed last year, the overall effect of piracy on the economy might actually be positive.

- It gets even more ridiculous when we take a closer look at the claims. In the UK consumers spent €6.3 on audiovisual products. If the projected trends continued, the ‘lost’ revenue because of piracy would exceed the actual revenue, meaning that the music and movie industries would end up having to pay people for pirating their products.

- Lastly, the researchers seem to have trouble putting a decent report together as they messed up the legend of one of the critical figures. In this figure the bars for “file-sharing” and “global Internet traffic” are switched around. This makes us skeptical about the other statistics that are published in the report.

We can go on for a while listing the many implausibilities and research failures but we have to draw a line somewhere. Unfortunately, most news outlets won’t take the time to read through the report, meaning that these figures will be re-posted without questioning the source.

Both the UK Pirate Party and the Open Rights Group have responded to the report criticizing its one-sidedness and propagandistic nature.

“I am fed up of hearing corporate propaganda being deployed in order to justify intrusions on our rights to freedom of speech, privacy and to a fair trial,” Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group said in a comment on the report.

“The claimed losses of £1200 per household in the UK are clearly ludicrous. I certainly don’t know anyone who has an extra £1200 in their pockets thanks to piracy,” Pirate Party UK leader Andrew Robinson added.

The entertainment industry lobby, however, has already managed to get support from various politicians in the EU Parliament and will continue to use the report to justify their call for tougher measures against online piracy. We can only hope that the majority of them will see through the misleading setup and bogus numbers.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

This makes a change from the barrage of news/tweets/videos artist apps. Techno artist Plastikman has launched SYNK, a free iPhone app that’s a companion to his 2010 world tour.

It’s described as “an experiment in audience-performer interaction, blurring the lines of perception and participation”, which piqued our interest.

Fans attending a Plastikman gig are asked to fire up the app before the performance starts and connect to the dedicated Wi-Fi network at the show.

Features include the ability to interact with the live samples being used; a video stream giving “an internal perspective of the performance”; and synchronising the stage LED wall with the iPhone screen.

Heaven knows how much this is costing, but it’s a really interesting project nonetheless. In between shows, the app still has a use, acting as an “atmospheric location shifter: Using the iPhone’s built in microphone and accelerometer, users will be immersed in a Plastikman environment”.

Which sounds a bit like RjDj’s apps for Little Boots and Air, although this app appears to be the work of Plastikman – aka Richie Hawtin – and a couple of developers.

According to market studies conducted by the Yankee Group, there is currently an insatiable interest in both paid and free applications among many different categories of costumers. The company’s updated prognosis now approximates total US application revenue in 2010 to revolve around the staggering figure of $1.6 billion, compared to initial projections of $537 million.

The research firm believes the application frenzy will gradually lead to bigger sales over the next few years, until the $11 billion margin is reached, by 2014. These revised forecasts were produced after observing the consumers’ tendency to spend more money on higher quality phone applications, which already accounts for an increase in paid downloads of almost 30% this year.

Although not cheap, iPhone applications are in high demand, each consumer downloading an average of 60 a year, well over three times more than the average smartphone user. Consumption of free applications has also increased significantly. Along with paid applications, the total projected figure for such downloads is 6 billion by 2014.

Market studies reveal that games, search and social networking applications are consumers’ favorites, suggesting people mainly download these as a form of entertainment, with less emphasis being placed on overall practicality.

Despite the favorable prognosis enjoyed on short-term, with the peak set around the year 2014, the popularity and demand for both categories of paid and free applications is expected to plummet once the market saturates and developers focus on designing more versatile Web-based solutions. Until then, however, Yankee Group believes that many more companies will emerge into the market, leaving no other option for existing popular brands but adopt better strategies of promoting their offer, in order to maintain their dominance and maximize their profits.

In an interview for eMarketer, Jeremy Lockhorn, director of emerging media and video innovation at Razorfish, stated that application developers would soon need to consider substantiating promotional budgets to increase the exposure of their products if they are to stand a chance against the continuously growing competition. Without proper advertising, their offer will only sink into the sea of other brands once introduced into the market, thus failing to attract the eye of the targeted consumers.

(via mediapost)

China adheres to its policy of restricting access to file-sharing sites, having recently added the Canada-based BitTorrent site IsoHunt to the country’s infamous Great Firewall. Since the order has entered in effect, the number of IsoHunt Chinese visitors has spiraled down dramatically, with site reports indicating a 99% drop in traffic.

According to experts, the statistically registered decrease in traffic is so pronounced that any technical difficulties have to be excluded from the overall picture. By the end of last week, IsoHunt had only received 1,349 visitors from China compared to 131,362 a few days before.

Curiously, the Chinese authorities have made no public statements regarding the ban of IsoHunt, although there is speculation that this decision to block access to the site may be linked to the P2P site mass closedown program undergoing in China.

Gary Fung, the man behind IsoHunt, announced on the TorrentFreak blog that he advises Chinese users who want to access the site further should connect using a foreign proxy. Despite admitting that China never produced a substantial amount of traffic to the site, Fung strongly opposes the authorities’ decision to deprive Chinese users of the site’s services, and considers that the ban will have a major impact upon the controversial net censorship plan instituted by the local government.

Fung encourages P2P site users to take stance and publicly express their discontentment regarding the ban of IsoHunt. Pointing out that Chinese authorities are known to have oscillated between enforcing and canceling site ban orders over the last few years, he believes that by exerting pressure against the decision through public opinion could be effective, giving the Wikipedia case as an example.

At least for now, other popular foreign BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and BTjunkie remain untouched by the grasp of the Great Firewall and can still be accessed by Chinese users, although these online resources are permanently held in check by the local authorities’ censorship movement.