Texting "Gone Mad"

The average teenager sends over 3,000 texts per month. That's more than six texts per waking hour. According to a new study from Nielsen, our society has gone mad with texting, data usage and app downloads. Teens are sending 8 percent more texts than they were this time last year. Other age groups don't even come close, either; the average 18 to 24-year-old sends "only" 1,630 texts per month. The average only drops with other age groups. However, in every age bracket, the number of texts sent has increased when compared to last year. Texting is a more important means of communication than ever.

Read more here.

Making Money in the Music Business

For the past ten years sales of recorded music have declined so steeply as to become a cautionary tale about the disruptive power of the internet. The rise of illegal file-sharing and the end of the digital “replacement cycle”, in which people bought CDs to replace tapes and records, caused spending to collapse. In Japan, the world’s biggest CD sales market, the number of discs sold fell by 6% in 2008 and 24% in 2009.

Yet the music business is surprisingly healthy, and becoming more so. The longest, loudest boom is in live music. Between 1999 and 2009 concert-ticket sales in America tripled in value, from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion (see chart 1). It is not that more people are going to concerts. Rather, they are paying more to get in. Fans complain bitterly about the rising price of live music.

Music’s best business customer is television. “Watch an evening’s worth of TV and count how many times you hear music in the background,” says Jeremy Lascelles, chief executive of Chrysalis.

In a sense, the recorded-music market is not so much dying as greying. America’s bestselling album since 2000 is “1”, a collection of Beatles hits from the 1960s. Some music executives fret that the stadium-filling acts will not be replaced.

Read more in The Economist.

Digital Forensics

How do we check the accuracy of news images, particularly in moments of breaking-news urgency? Though we’re seeing a blossoming of fact-checking in text-based journalism, we have yet to see an equivalent movement in image-based news reporting — mostly, of course, because we lack good tools for determining whether images are authentic or manipulated, whether they depict what they claim to or something else entirely.

Enter Hany Farid. A computer science professor at Dartmouth, Farid is a pioneer in the field of digital forensics, figuring out how to analyze images to determine their authenticity. (Think CSI: Photojournalism.) Now, photo-tampering is becoming so prevalent, Farid notes, that mistrust of images is slowly becoming our default. “There’s almost a backlash,” he says, “and now there’s this over-skepticism of everything out there. It’s amazing.”

Read more here.

Facebook's 'Herding Instinct'

Research from Oxford University shows that consumers have a herding instinct to "follow the crowd" once a clear winner is established. However, this instinct appears to switch off almost entirely if the product fails to achieve a certain popularity threshold. The study concludes that while some books and films are highly advertised by their producers, that element is only a small fraction, leaving the great majority of books and films exposed to the forces of social influence.

The study concludes that social influence had a key role in whether apps became flops or hits.
They discovered that once an app had reached a rate of about 55 installations a day, its popularity then soared to reach stellar proportions.

Read more here.