[Manic Monday] What The Resurrection Of RBT And Arrival Of iTunes Store Indonesia Mean For You

December 5th, 2012 was a good day if you worked in the recording music industry in Indonesia – well, at least, considering the doom and gloom that hung over the industry players recently. After over a year since the so-called Black October happened, Indosat, XL Axiata and 12 of Indonesia’s largest music labels,launched a major initiative to support ringback tone sales. The program integrates the promotion of ringback tones of both telcos, formerly using separate dial-in numbers, to a single code applicable to both telcos, and also combines the promotion efforts – and marketing money – done by both telcos.  The telcos are now investing heavily again in promoting ringback tones to their customers.

The other bit of good news is the sudden availability of music, movies on the Indonesia iTunes store. After being left out of the iTunes launch in several Asian countries, reportedly at the last minute, Apple lovers discovered that they could download songs, movies and even ringtones for their gadgets. The offering was initially limited to content from the major labels, but gradually started to offer content from Indonesian music labels as well (and within a short time, having Cakra Khan and NOAH top the singles chart). Although Indonesia is said to have a very low iOS device penetration level, a number of users have resorted to using US iTunes accounts to buy music, and we will yet see the impact on the industry on a larger scale.

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[Manic Monday] Books Might Disappear, But The Words In It Won’t

When was the last time you read a book? How many times have you read a book for the past month, say compared to, the amount of articles you read on the internet, or from social media feeds? I probably read only one book a month, and usually science fiction. Everything else is gobbled up in small bites through articles on the Internet here and there. I don’t think I have enough bandwidth in my head to keep up reading more books, either by quantity or quality or genre. I still buy books and try to collect books by my favorite authors, but even my reading habit has started to move over to Kobo.

Last week, Wiku posited an interesting question on Twitter, on whether book publishers have lost their appetite in printing quality books due to the prevalence of information, quality or otherwise, on the internet. This is an interesting question, and I would say the short answer is: Yes.

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