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Have We Reached Peak Tech?

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Mark Mulligan
In last week’s Take Five I highlighted a Vox story which reported that over the last year the number of companies using terms like ‘tech’ or technology’ in their documents is down 12%. This is an early indicator of a much more fundamental concept – we may have already reached peak in the tech sector, the business sector that has driven the fourth industrial revolution.
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Amazon Launches HD Streaming: Is Quality Still Enough to Escape Commodification?

Zach Fuller
This week, Amazon will launch Amazon Music HD in the US, UK, Germany and Japan, offering 50 million lossless HD songs with a sample rate of 44.1kHz described by Amazon as ‘CD quality’. It is an interesting move for the company and arguably the first to meaningfully push HD music streaming back into the music streaming conversation since TIDAL’s launch back in 2016.
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How Fender Riffed on Trends to Drive Its Future Forward

Cover image for How Fender Riffed on Trends to Drive Its Future Forward
Keith Jopling
By now everyone connected with business, music or both, knows the cautionary tale of Gibson Guitars. Rescued from insolvency in 2018, Gibson had been taken to the brink by a series of calamitous decisions, from transforming into a music lifestyle business loosely modelled on ‘what Nike is to sports’, to the digital self-tuning ‘robot’ guitar.
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Songwriters Aren’t Getting Paid Enough and Here’s Why

Mark Mulligan
Music Business Worldwide recently ran a story on how Apple has proposed a standard streaming rate for songwriters, with Google and Spotify apparently resistant. Of course, Apple can afford to run Apple Music at a loss and has a strategic imperative for making it more difficult for Spotify to be profitable, so do not assume that Apple’s intentions here are wholly altruistic.
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