How will my leisure activities be affected by information technology?
Information technology is being used for all kinds of entertainment, ranging from video games to telegambling. It is also being used in the arts, from painting to photography. Let's consider just two examples, music and film. Computers, the internet, and the World Wide Web are standing the system of music recording and distribution on its head and in the process are changing the financial underpinnings of the music industry. Because of their high overhead, major record labels typically need a band to sell half a million CDs in order to be profitable, but independent bands, using online marketing, can be reasonably successful selling 20,000 or 30,000 albums.
Team Love, a small music label established in 2003, found it could promote its first two bands, Tilly and the Wall and Willy Mason, by offering songs online free for (Dowloading—transferring data from a remote computer to one's own computer—so that people could listen to them before paying $12 for a CD. It also puts videos online for sharing and uses quirky websites to reach fans. "There's something exponential going on," says one of Team Love's founders. "The more music that's downloaded, the more it sells."'" Many independent musicians are also using the internet to get their music heard, hoping that giving away songs will help them build audiences/*4 The web also offers sources for instantly downloadable sheet music. One research engineer has devised a computerized scoring system for judging musical competitions that overcomes the traditional human-jury approach, which can he swayed by personalities and. polyphonicHMI and a Spanish company, PolyphonicHMI, has created Hit Song Science software, which they say can analyze the hit potential of new songs by, according to one description, "reference to a finely parsed universe of attributes derived from millions of past songs."
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