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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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Netflix’s Binge-Watching Problem

Tim Mulligan
Netflix has announced that it is going to start releasing new episodes of The Great British Bake Off and reality series Rhythm + Flow on a weekly basis . For a company which de-facto created the phenomenon of binge-viewing, this decision brings it more into line with current market trends in streaming where scheduled releases for big-budget originals with significant marketing clout are increasingly becoming the norm.
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How Technology Is Radically Reshaping Politics

Mark Mulligan
As I write this, the UK is in the midst of a potential constitutional crisis following the UK government’s proposed changes to political norms in order to push through Brexit. In some ways this is what you get when a country only has a part-written constitution and never quite got round to phasing out archaic tools such as proroguing parliament (a monarchical prerogative that was used by medieval Plantagenet kings such as Edward I and Edward II in the 13thand 14thcenturies).
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Sports Fans Consumer Trends 2019

Hanna Kahlert
This post features excerpts from MIDiA’s recently published Sports and Marketing and Brands report, Sports Fans Consumer Trends 2019 by Alistair Taylor . Sports-centric subscription video on demand (SVOD) services have largely struggled to entice subscribers, based on their current value propositions which consist mainly of niche rights.
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