David Jennings's Profile

Christmas is looming and no doubt we will all soon again be inundated with presents we didn’t actually want. As soon as the turkey and mince pies are finished, it will be off to join the Boxing Day queues for many of us, receipts clutched tightly in our hands. Online shopping has made this time of year much easier to bear, but anything bought online will present its own unique set of challenges. I shall most likely fail in any attempts to return music to iTunes, while getting a refund from Amazon because the ‘customer who bought this item also bought’ just seems far more trouble than it is actually worth.

The most comprehensive empirical study of digital music sales ever conducted has some bad news for Californian technology utopians. Since 2004, WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson has been hawking his "Long Tail" proposition around the world: blockbusters will matter less, and businesses will "sell more of less".

Paragon Media Strategies reports that 14- to 24-year-olds mostly say their radio listening has increased over the last year or two, while they said the opposite last year. Paragon recruited the respondents and conducted the study online.

“Radio stations may be doing a better job at connecting with those people,” said Larry Johnson, the study’s author. “The music may also simply be more interesting. There tends to be a cycle.”

If information is the currency of democracy, as Thomas Jefferson allegedly said, then during last Thursday's vice-presidential debate between Senator Biden and Governor Palin a lot of people used Google Search to get a bit wealthier, metaphorically speaking. Using Google Hot Trends, we can see some of the more interesting things that people were researching, and you can do the same to follow along yourself during tomorrow night's second presidential debate.

Music pirates can be deterred by warnings from their internet service provider (ISP), suggests a survey. Almost 75% of music pirates would stop if told to by their ISP, the survey of 1500 UK consumers found.