Lady Gaga get $167 for a million listens

Cloud-based, streaming music is poised to replace the mp3, and Spotify, Last.fm, Pandora, and Rhapsody are the big names that currently dominate the format. Most of these sites have a free-to-users, ad-supported model, but the labels are starting to grumble that too much money is being left on the table. Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” was one of the most popular songs on Spotify in Europe, but she reportedly earned just $167 for a million listens through the service.

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A Search Engine That Relies on Humans

Social search aims to connect people with questions to people who can answer those questions. By contrast, regular Web searches take questions, break them into keywords, and then find Web sites that have the most relevance to these keywords. The idea has been floating around tech circles for years. Yahoo, among others, has tried to develop social search as a way to challenge Google.

The idea has gained momentum with the increased use of Twitter and Facebook, where people rely on their networks for information, blasting queries to their social networks and, if their networks are good enough, getting useful, personalized responses.  NY Times

Kindle Books in Snack Sizes

The FT Press, a unit of Pearson, has introduced two series of short, digital-only titles for professionals who want quick snippets of advice for $2.99 or less.

The publisher, through a new imprint named FT Press Delivers, has quietly begun selling what it is calling Elements and Shorts through the Kindle electronic bookstore on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore. The Elements, which the publisher has priced at $1.99, are stripped-down, 1,000- to 2,000-word versions of already-published books, while the Shorts are newly written essays of about 5,000 words, priced at $2.99.  NY Times

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Average family is spending as much on Home entertainment over devices as they are on dining out or buying gasoline.

Dollars Flow Out as Data Flows In

It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07.

Sex on TV: It’s increasingly uncut — and unavoidable

Viewers are about to see full-frontal male nudity, heterosexual, homosexual and group sex, and graphic scenes rarely — if ever — seen on mainstream TV. “You need to get eyeballs. You need to be loud,” says Spike programming chief Kevin Kay, who is pairing Blue Mountain with reruns of HBO’s sex-centric Entourage. “Our viewers are experiencing content on other cable channels or the Web. Movies and video games are going after this audience, too.”   USA Today

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Online Video Explodes

The online video market continued to grow in December, as nearly 178 million U.S. Internet users watched 33.2 billion videos in the month alone, said comScore last week. When broken down, the numbers mean that 86.5 percent of total U.S. Internet users watched online videos and averaged 187 videos per user. The average length video watched was 4.1 minutes, up from 3.5 minutes in a report from last March.

Google sites account for 13.2 billion videos, or almost 40 percent of the total. More than 134 million people watched more than 13 billion YouTube videos, averaging 97.1 videos per user.  PC World

Booksellers Protest Rep Cuts

Today the board of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association sent a letter to sales directors and heads of houses at the big six house to voice their “alarm” about cuts to field sales. “This draconian move against our bookselling segment will be responsible for the disappearance of book culture,” they maintained. “Field sales reps are a crucial part of our business.”

Echoing the letter, Joe Drabyak, president of NAIBA and a bookseller at Chester County Book Company in West Center, Pa., told PW, “The field reps really are the worker bees, and they’re cross-pollinating the industry. There’s a difference being on the phone with somebody and meeting with them face-to-face. That interaction means everything and it really results in sales.”   Publishers Weekly

Is it vanity to self-publish?

Is paying to see your work in print always vanity?  I don’t think so. That’s self-publishing, albeit still based upon a degree of vanity or at least self-belief. But surely that’s a business model, a standard template for ambition? The conviction that what you’ve got is good enough to release into the wild and stands a reasonable chance of selling is at the heart of launching any new product. Guardian

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Why do users like Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace

A survey to poll users of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and myYearbook on why they used the various services. We provided 12 options and asked the user to pick the three that mattered most to them. You can see in the charts below why Twitter has been able to differentiate from Facebook, while Myspace, which shares three of the four main reasons for using Facebook—including the main reason—has not.   Paid Content

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Why Is Apple Banning Location-based iPhone Ads?

This week, Apple prohibited its app developers from using an iPhone’s GPS to determine which ads to show users. From an advertiser standpoint, such a capability could be great: ads targeted by location can be a lot more effective — and lucrative. From an iPhone owner standpoint, I’m not sure I see the harm. What’s Apple’s goal in preventing app developers from utilizing device locations?

So why won’t Apple allow that? Is the company worried about users not wanting advertisers to know their location? Perhaps. But there’s also speculation that Apple might just want all that location-based ad revenue for itself.   The Atlantic