Obama Twitter Campaign

In 2008 Obama took to twitter in the hopes of helping to secure money for his fundraising campaign, and accoring to many sources including Time Magazine this was one of the main reasons he was able to win the campaign as he did. The reason for this was simple, even though Obama's rivals had more big money backers than he did, Obama's twitter campaign brought in more small money backing though the use of email, mobile, website and of course Social Media sites such as twitte and facebook. It has been shown that in 2008 Obama raised $500Mil for his campaign, $403Mil of which was funded by digital means.

Blockbusters Goes Into Administration

Over 500 stores are now set to close as Blockbusters announces administration, but the surpirse is theat the administrators believe the core of the business is still profitable. 3 reasons for this is digital technology, competition from discounted online sales and the continuing sqeeze from economic downturn.

Now, it's up against agressively-priced offers of streaming video content from Netflix and Lovefilm. This is particularly dificult for Blockbuster's business model to compete with multiple episodes and box sets.

Christmas trading reports so far show it's online that's le[t successful retailers' numbers rising while those without an adequate strategy for online sales are struggling.

HMV Goes Into Administration

HMV has been in the news this week after announcing it going into administrations, meaning that the last major music retailer on the high street may disappear forever. The demise of HMV is a sad reminder for those who began buying music in the 80's/90's that life will never be the same again.

High street shops such as Virgin Megastore, Tower, Zavvi and Our Price have already disappeared in conjunction with the rise of illegal downloads and sites such as Amazon, Play.com and iTunes.

You could say that HMV has gone into administration after not adapting to Chris Anderson's Long Tail Theory, were despite the store stocking certain obscure artists/DVDs their was nothing there to guarentee its availability. Thus HMV lost out to other online retailers digging them even more into a £176 million debt.

Ofcom

Ofcom is a independant regulation body which handles complaints for broadcasting. It regulates on the content of advertisements, television shows and radio broadcasts that are broadcast to the general public, as well as this it covers postal regulation and telecommications.

Regarding the BBC, Ofcom regulates their television and radio broadcasts to see that the program(s) are abiding the certain codes of practice. Issues covered by Ofcom include phone line rates, content featured on these broadcasts and the accuracy of information shown on various programs.

Sponsorhip is where companies pay broadcasters to have their products/services

Amazon/Play.com In The News

Amazon offers free MP3's to CD buyers.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/amazon/9793647/Amazon-offers-free-MP3s-to-CD-buyers.html

Amazon are offering free MP3's of the CD's they have bought going back to 1998. This includes more than 50,000 CD's from Sony, Warner and many other independant labels. This service is only available in the US at the moment but is hoping to be available in the UK at the end of 2013.

Play.com closes direct retail service.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-jersey-20953357

Play are moving out of the direct retail business intending to become a marketplace on from march 2013. In a statement Play.com said: "Moving forward we are intending to focus exclusively on our successful marketplace, which is our main business area, and to phase out the direct-retail part of our business."

Chris Anderson's 'The Long Tail' Theory (2006)

In 2006, Chris Anderson published a paper on how media in the online age has affected retailers to stock more variety of niche products, called 'The Long Tail' Theory. As shown in the graph above, there may be more volume of popular products, but businesses are stocking more lesser-known or 'niche' products since there being a lot more of them, thus called 'The Long Tail'.

'All those niches add up. Although none sell in huge numbers, there are so many niche products that collectively they can comprise a market rivalling the hits.'

(Anderson 2006: 53)

This theory can be applied to many industries, but the one I will be applying it to is the music industry. For example, A music store pre-internet era would stock only the most popular 'top-hitting' forms of music in their stores, while other 'underground' forms had to be sought after through various means. But now in the internet era,  these niche forms of music can be easily found and bought alongside the most popular forms of music.