In short, it’s not an easy place to make money to support your music, unless you have scale.

Indeed on certain platforms bands with low sales may be losing money in putting their music out on the internet, although if you look at the detail it remains relatively modest outlays on sign-up fees and materials.

Most interesting was how little money they were receiving from Spotify. A miserly 0.003 euros a play or 0.029 euros if you listen to the album all the way through. That means that even if you listened to the album a hundred times they’d still only get 2.95 euros. That’s some serious fan loyalty.

Now of course their rates may well be different to those negotiated by the major labels and don’t include a breakdown of whether the rates are higher for those listening via a premium account versus a free ad-supported account. Even then the chances are if you’re a premium user you’ll be listening to a high number of songs, so the £4.99 or £9.99 a month won’t go a long way when split between the song publishers.

Things are more positive for the band on Amazon and iTunes where they see a 70/30 split at obviously a much higher price point, with iTunes the more lucrative due to the higher price point.

Interestingly, they have followed the lead from Radiohead’s pricing experiment by letting you pay what you want for music from their own site via the Bandcamp service whereby if you paid 5 euros, Paypal would take 0.37 euros and Bandcamp 0.75 euros.

Although it’s far from a comprehensive review of the economics of the record industry, you can see why the shift towards live events and merchandising is taking place.

You may not like what you find...

If you receive a significant amount of email, then it’s not always easy to keep up with which mails you have and haven’t read. You may indeed mark emails as ‘unread’ to remind you to action them later and if you do it’s easy to lose them among pages and pages of old emails.

Help is at hand though through a simple Gmail command. Just enter the following the search box and start adding to your to-do list as you discover all those emails you meant to respond to!

Enter ‘label:unread’. Job done.

Down but by no means out - click on chart to see in more detail

The story of Android has been one of a dramatic rise. While Apple have largely held their market share in Smartphones, Blackberry, Nokia and Windows Mobile have lost out to Android. However, new data from Needham suggest that this trend is changing in the US for now at least.

The reason? The iPhone coming to Verizon.

Take a look at the chart on the right to see the dip by Android and the rise by Apple. In the first quarter of 2011, Apple gained 12.3% to reach 29.5% of the US Smartphone market. Android’s share fell from 52.4% to 49.5%, but again it is the other players that really lost out.

And of course the iPhone 5 is still to come to balance out the flood of Android devices that are due later this year, so expect to see further turbulence in this chart, especially with Nokia’s partnership with Microsoft still yet to start shipping devices.

But how many have they actually sold? According to an estimate from Deutsche Bank it was only 100k by April. Compare that to 300k iPads on its first weekend of sales, although you’re not comparing like with like given the huge hype that greeting the arrival of a new product in a new(ish) category.

But they may not even have sold that according to Global Equities who estimated that out of 500-800k manufactured they had only sold 25-120k, although given the large range of the estimate it’s hardly a reliable stat.

Whoever the analyst it’s clear that Android tablets still have a lot of catching up to do with the iPad and lag behind the huge success of Android phones.

But let’s not forget it’s still early days and there will be many, many more Android tablets coming out in 2011 and likewise many improvements to the operating system.

With Smartphones increasingly becoming the default phone in the major economies, it’s no surprise to see sales increase by 85% year-on-year, but this could have been even higher according to Gartner:

manufacturers announced a number of high-profile devices during the first quarter of 2011 that would not ship until the second quarter of 2011. We believe some consumers delayed their purchases to wait for these models

So, who are the winners and losers?

It’s no surprise to see Android at the top with a massive increase in market share from 9.6% in Q1 2010 to 36% in Q1 2011. Apple was the other winner with a steady increase from 15.3% to 16.8%. Android in particular took big chunks out of Nokia’s Symbian as it fell from 44.2% to 27.4%. RIM (Blackberry) grew in handset sales, but lost out in market share from 19.7% to 12.9%.

For the full breakdown see the table on the right.

The big number: 424.85 million mobile devices sold in Q1 2011 versus 359.61m in Q1 2010, a modest 19% increase overall compared to the real growth area of Smartphones which rose 85% year-on-year.

For all the talk of Nokia’s ongoing difficulties in the Smartphone market and their bold move to partner with Microsoft, they remain the dominant player in overall handset sales with 25.1% of the market. However, even here they are down 5.5% year-on-year. The risers are Apple, HTC and a Chinese manufacturer you may be less aware of ZTC.

For more details see the table on the right from Gartner.

You can of course upgrade to self-hosted WordPress and install any number of analytics tools and your own ads as the javascript code will not be blocked.

However, if you’re not ready to make the leap, then there are still ways to improve your analytics at no cost. There are others available, but I’m using the Statcounter WordPress.com service. The free version is limited and again not the most sophisticated of tools (referrers are blocked I believe due to lack of javascript), but it’s a step up from the default WordPress analytics service.

Essentially, you create a text widget and add the code to the permanent sidebar and away you go.

Instructions are here, but I’d be interested to hear of other and better services.

How to separate the Twit from the Twat

As a reminder that you should never take yourself or indeed social media too seriously (please note, consultants), Stewart Lee provides this great spoof of a presentation I’m sure many of you will have sat through and a number will have given…

Just a shame that WordPress.com prevents me from embedding the video or you could enjoy it here in all its TechnoCloud glory. Just click on the image or on the link here to view it.

Comparing Apples with, um, Androids

Reliable market share statistics are often hard to come by. Do you mean share of new phones, share of unit sales, share of actual handsets owned, Smartphones, feature phones or all phones and everything in between. And then this quarter, the year as a whole or indeed this month? No wonder it’s confusing.

This week saw stats from Kantar WorldPanel Comtech on UK Smartphone share for those interested in the ongoing struggle for market share between Apple and Android. For what it’s worth, the stats show Android with 38% (up from 8% in the same period last year) of the UK Smartphone market versus Apple with 23%. This covers handset sales for the 12 weeks ending February 20th 2011.

In the US, Android is even stronger with an impressive 54.7% of the market and Apple 27.2%, together a dominant 81.9% of the market between them.

Make of those what you will, but perhaps more interesting is comment from Kantar WorldPanel Comtech themselves about where the new customers are coming from (and where they are not):

“The vast majority of new Android and Apple iOS consumers came from a non-smartphone background. For example in Great Britain 74.9% of iOS and 73.8% of Android’s new customers previously owned a non-smartphone. However there is some switching between the smartphone manufacturers, with 17.3% of new Android customers coming from Symbian, 6.3% from Windows and 1.6% from RIM.

“What is clear is that neither Android nor Apple’s iOS are currently stealing many customers from each other – Symbian, RIM and Windows beware.”

Indeed. More interesting comment comes from the research agency with the less than memorable name and Consumer Insight Director, Dominic Sunnebo:

“Whilst it may seem that Android is moving forward virtually unchallenged in Europe, once you start to dig a little deeper, it can be seen that each country has a very different OS make-up. For example, in the UK,  BlackBerry is responsible for nearly 25% of all Smartphone sales with its customer base increasingly dominated by under 25s and females; while in Germany BlackBerry’s market share is just 3.4%, as the brand is still primarily seen as a business-based device.”

And why is Blackberry so strong in that demographic in the UK? It’s those kids using the Messenger to chat, chat, chat.

Smartphone market share

But which vendor has the biggest market share and whose share has been rising and falling? The table from IDC answers these questions and its no surprise to see Apple on the rise and Nokia in sharp decline, although they are hoping that their deal with Microsoft will avert the decline.

Most interesting are those with Android handsets with Samsung and HTC the biggest winners doubling in market share and doing even more in terms of units.

The market as a whole has nearly doubled in size in terms of units from 55.4m in Q1 2010 to 99.6 in Q1 2011 and set to be well above 500m across 2011 with the market predicted to grow by 49.2% in 2011.