Recorded music retail sales in Japan were flat in 2012 at $5.8 billion on the unexpected bounceback of CD sales, amidst the ongoing collapse of mobile music sales

Smartphone adoption is driving up internet track sales, which topped mobile track sales in 2012, but the internet’s price discount to mobile is squeezing track revenues

Japan will be dynamic in 2013 and beyond for ‘access’ subscription services, newly launched by Sony, J-pop label-backed RecoChoku, and carriers

By the end of 2013 there will be more iOS and Android devices in use than PCs. Google is using Plus and Android to reposition itself to take advantage of this, extending its reach and capturing far more behavioural data

We believe a helpful way to look at Google is as a vast machine learning project: mobile will feed the machine with far more data, making the barriers to entry in search and adjacent fields even higher

For Google, Apple’s iOS is primarily another place to get reach: we see limited existential conflict between the two. However, mobile use models remain in flux, with apps and mobile social challenging Google’s grip on data collection

On 28 June, News Corporation split into two companies:
• 21st Century Fox will consist of the TV and entertainment assets: Cable Network Programming, Fox Filmed Entertainment, Television, Sky Italia, its 55% stake in Sky Deutschland and its 39% stake in BSkyB.
• New News Corp will consist of the publishing assets (Dow Jones, The Sun and Times/Sunday Times, the New York Post, News America Marketing Group, the Australian newspapers and Harper Collins), as well as Fox Sports Australia, the digital education business Amplify, a 61.6% stake in digital property business REA Group Limited and a 50% stake in Australian pay-TV operator Foxtel.

The split partly reflects industry trends. Over the last five years, a number of media conglomerates, including McGraw-Hill and Time Warner, have separated low growth, low multiple publishing assets from higher growth parts of the businesses in order to optimise valuations and management focus.

This report provides a breakdown of the divisions within the two new companies and analyses their growth prospects.

The amount and distribution by time of day of TV viewing, as well as the PSB group viewing shares have remained notably stable over the last ten years in which the major shift from analogue to digital transmissions has occurred and timeshift/catch-up viewing has become commonplace.

The topline trends nevertheless mask significant age-related under-currents of change, which have seen a large loss of younger audiences and sharply ageing profiles for BBC1, BBC2 and ITV.

Whilst the more youth-oriented Channel 4 has avoided the ageing profile effect, it faces its own challenge of averting audience decline, as it finds itself at the sharp end of change among younger adults and faces declining support among older viewers.

Apple’s iTunes will add free-to-the-user online and mobile radio to the platform in the autumn of 2013, meshing music purchase with enhanced tools for discovery.

iTunes Radio also meshes with Match, the cloud-based music storage and retrieval utility sold for $24.99/year, whose users will enjoy ad-free online and mobile radio.

The main casualty of iTunes Radio is likely to be #1 US internet station Pandora, which this week launched the next phase of its battle to win the better royalty terms of commercial radio.

Channel 4 enjoyed a bumper year in 2012 with regard to delivering its public service remit, epitomised by the London Paralympics

Public service successes notwithstanding, the continuing decline in main Channel 4 audience share post digital switchover is not being fully compensated commercially by large gains across the rest of the Channel 4 portfolio

Overall, we expect group revenues to remain quite stable in 2013 and 2014, but current record levels of investment in programme content origination have yet to bear fruit in terms of strong returning series

Google Play, the digital content platform from Google for Android devices, has added a music subscription service to the sale of music, ebooks, videos and apps.

All Access, available only in the US initially, benefits from integration in Google Play, the default storefront on Android smartphones and tablets (excepting Amazon’s Kindle Fire). All Access isn’t available on Apple devices, in the majority in the US, severely limiting its reach.

Google’s main objective with Google Play is to support the Android ecosystem and attract and retain Android device owners, and thus OEMs and developers. We expect Google Play to operate slightly above break even like iTunes.

In the past two quarters the French cable operator has seen its retail segment resuming growth after years of decline.

The improvement strengthens Numericable’s attractiveness as a consolidation partner.

As smartphones have grown in the UK, so has mobile use of social networks However, mobile messaging services that offer an alternative channel to Facebook have become almost as important Meanwhile analysis by smartphone platform shows that iPhone users continue to have a higher propensity to install and use apps than do Android users. Android skews young and lower income, and messaging apps in particular start as a means to save money (though they are now much more than that), but even in this category iPhone users appear to care more

This report provides an update on the UK commercial radio sector, covering listening trends, digital platforms, group strategies and advertising expenditure.

Over the last few years, Global Radio has cleverly exploited the regulatory framework to rebrand, merge and share programming across its stations, creating the quasi-national Heart and Capital networks and slashing its operating costs in the process. But Global appears to have misjudged the competition regulators’ attitude towards local media mergers in its purchase of GMG Radio and has been ordered to sell off eight stations in seven local markets.

With at least eight stations to be divested from the Global/GMG portfolio and Absolute Radio still potentially up for sale, hot on the heels of Bauer's recent acquisition of Planet Rock, the radio industry is in the midst of a new wave of M&A activity. This report assesses the performance of the leading commercial groups and the strategies they have employed in recent years.

Alongside the formation of branded networks, another key development has been the launch of digital spin-off stations, first by Absolute Radio and more recently by Smooth and Kiss. We also discuss the impact of DAB growth on listening behaviour, the continuing challenge of getting digital radio into cars and the potential for smartphone listening growth.