The Top 40 will soon be going through the biggest change in its history when streaming is counted towards a song's chart position.

Every chart change before now has been predominantly about sales: from vinyl to tape to CD and then download, each of these constituted a purchase.

Streaming is, for obvious reasons, a whole different story. The purchase is the subscription and it is then up to the service to divvy those fees up among labels. This means that there will have to be some serious working out as to how many streams are the equivalent of a sale.

The mere fact that it is being considered, though, is a big step towards confirming what many music listeners already know: streaming is the future of music.

Or at least it will be if someone actually creates a model that works.

Cash rules everything around me

Spotify has shown that streaming can be embraced by the masses but there is a problem. If streaming is indeed the future of music, then more money needs to start flowing more freely. The current lack of cash – Spotify is yet to turn a profit – isn't yet stifling innovation but it has left many in the industry scratching their heads as to what to try next.

At the Music 4.5 Music In-App Economy conference in London, we tried to find out what was going to make the money needed to sustain streaming - but to understand what is happening at the moment, you have to go back a few years to see what went wrong.

Martin Kummer, head of digital channels and group marketing at Ministry of Sound is well versed in how the music landscape has changed, particularly when it comes to mobile as was once head of music at Vodafone.

Speaking at the event he noted that it was while in the mobile space that he found out first hand what could go wrong with streaming.

"Vodafone 360 and Nokia Comes With Music were streaming services that just didn't work," he said. "It was wrong decisions and arrogance that caused failure."

The reason he offered for the lack of success is an interesting one - both failed to balance the needs of the music listener with those of the big telecommunication companies.

"Nokia wanted people to pay for Comes With Music but as this was taking money away from the telcos and pushing it to the handset manufacturer it all ended in tears. Only Apple has managed to make this work so far."

Skip to today and streaming looks a lot healthier but Kummer believes that much more needs to be done.

"We only have three dominant music services but no viable business model. Spotify is six years in the game and there is still no profit yet," he warned.

The Ministry of Sound has been stung when it comes to streaming, so it is no wonder Kummer is not full of praise for the technology.

Back in 2013, the dance label launched a lawsuit against Spotify because it felt that the service's playlist features harmed its brand because you could essentially create playlists of Ministry of Sound album tracklists.

At the time, Ministry of Sound chief executive Lohan Presencer said, "After 20 years and more than 50m album sales, the value and creativity in our compilations are self evident... Until now, we've watched Spotify's progress from a distance. But we can no longer remain silent."

And while there was no word of this changing at any point, Kummer did admit that the Ministry of Sound will have to do something with streaming services in general in the future.

"We have to work with the Spotifies," he said. "I can't go into more detail but this will happen. We all know that streaming is not going away, so it is coming."

Crosstown traffic

Music isn't just pushing towards streaming as the main way to listen, though, it's gearing more towards mobile devices too.

Marcus Taylor, CEO of Venture Harbour, a digital marketing agency for music and film, says that mobile is by far the fastest growing sector for streaming.

"Mobile adoption within the music industry is growing exponentially. Music news sites are seeing 50% of all traffic coming from mobile, with 25% to streaming clients and artist-own services getting around 22% of traffic," said Taylor.

"We are seeing mobile campaigns massively outperforming our desktop campaigns - people are happier buying things from mobile devices."

Much of the conference was taken up with talk of Spotify and while the streaming site looks like it will rule for some time to come, there are some services happy to chip away at niches and even use Spotify's API to enhance what they are offering.

Shuffler.fm, a music opinion aggregator, is one such service that has offered up an app on Spotify, as well as made its service available through Sonos.

Its chief marketing officer, Steve O'Reilly, was upbeat about the future of music, believing that as long as you have a sound product and bigger services are willing to share their APIs then artists and fans will more than benefit.

"There has to be an artist and app relationship," said O'Reilly. "Bands really want to be able to send fans content and that is what Shuffler.fm can offer.

"We didn't need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to apps, we just made sure we have integration with all the big companies and could make apps within minutes. Access to these APIs made it all possible for us."

Source : techradar[dot]com

The 4K revolution is about to get personal. Key phones announced at Mobile World Congress quietly list Ultra HD video recording as part of their ever expanding armoury of features.

This provision will not only change the way 4K can be viewed in the home (if users want to see just how sharp their footage is they'll need to run it into an external display), but reveal mobile devices to be a key piece in the 4K content puzzle.

The simple fact is that Samsung's Galaxy S5 is poised to become the most popular 4K acquisition device on the planet.

Smartphones hold the 4Key...

As an adjunct to its 16MP camera, the Galaxy S5 will shoot 3840 x 2160 video at 30fps, using h.265.

The incoming Sony Xperia Z2 also offers comparable 4K video shooting. During demonstrations in Barcelona, which saw a Z2 playing directly into a Sony 4K TV, the brand revealed TV engineers had contributed to the R&D when it came to enhancing the Xperia's 4K Triluminos colour fidelity.

Ahead of MWC, LG also got into the act with the G Pro 2, another smartphone to proffer 4K.

4K video rendering has been seen as imperative by processor maker Qualcomm for some time now, and looks set to become a standard feature on high-end phones – and I think this advance could be game-changing.

Typical usage will see home brewed 4K transmitted wirelessly to compatible displays using Miracast, or over wires using the newly announced MHL 3.0 standard.

4Kompression

Although not immediately apparent, the arrival of MHL 3.0 is another vital evolution of the connected 4K eco-system. Until now, early 4K shooters like the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 were unable to display their UHD footage directly because limitations of MHL 2.0.

This latest iteration offers a simple direct TV connection fat enough for 2160p30.

Intriguingly, MHL 3.0 also supports HDCP 2.2 which could imply that a copyright secure 4K capable smartphone could also become a conduit for 4K streaming services, and not just 4K camcordering.

Is the mobile phone now on a trajectory that will make it a rival to the set top box of the future? Could the smartphone kill the Blu-ray player?

In a related development, ZTE also used MWC to show-off a pucker 4K capable TV box.

The ZXV10 B803 employs new Broadcom silicon able to decode 2160p60 content using HEVC h.265.

Indeed, something very similar was used by Netflix to demo its nascent 4K streaming service to me at CES 2014. Until now, STB decoding solutions have been locked at 2160p30.

This Spanish cameo signals more widespread set top box production is becoming a reality - which in turn will ultimately open the doors to a Sky 4K TV service, but I digress.

4Kameras

Of course, the 4K recording boom isn't going to stop at mobile phones. The contagion will spread to cameras too. The new Panasonic GH4 can also shoot 4K at 2160p30.

Footage can be played back into any 4K display using the miniHDMI output or distributed on SD card.

Not that all 4K cameras will be created equal. There's far more to UHD than just pixel density, after all. One of the more extraordinary properties of the new wave of 4K cinema cameras is their astonishing sensitivity.

Cinematographers can do things on a 4K shoot that simply are not be possible with lesser equipment. One scene in the Tom Cruise sci-fi outing Oblivion, which was shot on a Sony F65, has our hero illuminated by a single candlelight; nothing was fudged for this, there really was only one candle on set. Yet shadow detail is blisteringly sharp.

Peter Suschitzky, who lensed M. Night Shyamalan's After Earth, was awestruck at just what could be achieved when shooting 4K in dense jungle.

"I was full of wonder at the way the camera captures the image," he enthused. "It's so detailed and beautiful." It's probably fair to say you won't get the same result with a Galaxy S5.

But the Samsung Galaxy S6 may be another story…

Source : techradar[dot]com

There's life yet in Google's Project Ara as the modular phone endeavor just got its own developer conference. Make that conferences.

Google's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) division sang the news on its Google+ page (where else?), revealing the first Ara Developers' Conference will go down April 15 - April 16.

It will be an online affair with a live stream and interactive Q&A, though a small number will be able to attend in person at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

This will be followed by two more conferences sometime in 2014. The first will focus on the alpha release of the Ara Module Developers' Kit (MDK), which Google plans to release online in April. The MDK will essentially contain everything anyone needs to build an Ara module, or any component that can be used to build a smartphone, be it a keyboard, battery, processor or something else.

Why this matters

All was quiet on the Project Ara front after Google sold Motorola to Lenovo last month. The project was under Motorola's wing, but since Google kept ATAP in the divorce, Ara went along too.

Now that Project Ara has its own developer conferences, it appears Google is putting its chips on letting people mix and match their own handset parts.

In addition to its ready-made phones like the Nexus 5, Google is working on more experimental fare like Project Ara and Project Tango, an Android phone that creates 3D maps of a user's environment using Kinect-like sensors.

The April conference should shed light on whether Ara modules will ever make it into consumer hands or whether this moonshot is doomed to stay grounded. Either way, Google looks prepared to go all in.

• Know what else is going down in April? Build 2014.

Source : techradar[dot]com

Chinese manufacturers Meizu and BQ will launch the first Ubuntu phones in the fall of 2014, according to Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth.

The company is starting with lesser-known manufacturers so it can ensure those companies dedicate enough resources to focus on "placing the right device in the right hands," Shuttleworth told CNET at MWC 2014.

He said both manufacturers "are established at getting into difficult, entrenched, or congested markets" by identifying their target markets and "thinking very carefully" about branding and retail strategies.

That's key since the first Ubuntu phones "will be astonishingly great in some areas…but will come across as weak in others," Shuttleworth said.

Making plans

Ubuntu's launch will be focused on China and Europe for 2014. The early phones will be available in the US, but China and Europe will be more important initially, Shuttleworth said.

He admitted that Ubuntu "won't have 650,000 apps in the app store" but said building that up will be a focus. Part of that has been making sure app developers can use the same tools to develop on Ubuntu that they use for iOS and Android.

"We're perfectly aligned with Google and Apple so if you've got an HTML5 app that works with Android or iOS, it will work with Ubuntu, with only a tiny amount of friction that just one person can take care of," he said.

It's unclear exactly where Ubuntu will go after that, though Shuttleworth revealed that the company is "at board level with quite a few household names" in terms of manufacturers.

But one Ubuntu phone that won't hit the market in the foreseeable future is the ambitious Ubuntu Edge. Despite raising huge amounts of cash, the Edge also fell short of its massive $32 million (about £1.92m, AU$3.57m) goal "by a record," Shuttleworth admitted. And he doesn't consider that a success.

• Expect an influx of Ubuntu phones in 2014

Source : techradar[dot]com

Sony outdid itself with the launch of the Xperia Z1 Compact, bringing all the power of the full fat version and shrinking it down without much compromise. But those internals won't stop it being compared to the other smaller phones on the market, with one of the most popular being the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini.

Quite rightly, Sony is pushing the Xperia Z1 Compact as more than just another 'Mini' handset that will disappear into tiny handset obscurity.

The question remains then, in the quest for a smaller screened device, what are the differences and which one is the right one for you?

Design

With both the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact and the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini handsets coming with bigger brothers, it will be of no surprise that the same design DNA in the Sony Xperia Z1 and the Samsung Galaxy S4 is still there, if not a little more petite.

The Z1 Compact comes with a far sharper and more industrial look than the S4 Mini, a smart handset hewn of glass and metal. Samsung instead followed a far more natural and curvier look with its handsets and has produced a smooth plastic device with the S4 Mini.

That extra heft isn't unwarranted though - the design build of the Z1 Compact is decent, if a little chunky, and feels like it has a slightly higher bill of materials than the Samsung.

With that glass and metal construction it'll be no bombshell that the Z1 Compact comes in much heavier than the Galaxy S4 Mini, weighing in a whole 30g heavier than the Samsung at 137g. The Sony is also larger; vital statistics put it at 127 x 64.9 x 9.5mm.

Samsung's smaller handset is smaller all round at 124.6 x 61.3 x 8.99 and weighs a mere 107g leaving it sitting in the hand a lot more comfortably.

Design differences also spread to the inclusion (or exclusion) of hard buttons and soft keys. Where Sony has left the Xperia Z1 Compact to deal with Android's on screen controls, Samsung has taken its more traditional route with a large central home key and back/menu buttons sat either side.

Screen

With a quick look at the specs sheet it is clear that the Sony is way out in front. The Xperia Z1 Compact comes with a HD 720p (720 x 1280) screen that leaves the 540 x 960 resolution of the Galaxy S4 Mini a little behind.

All those extra pixels in the same 4.3-inch screen mean that the Sony comes out much higher in pixel density too; 342 beats 256ppi every day of the week.

Fortunately for Samsung this only tells half the story. The Galaxy S4 Mini comes packing the same Super AMOLED screen technology, which is both extremely bright and comes with higher levels of contrast than the TFT screen of the Z1 Compact. This goes a long way to easing any pain caused by a smaller resolution.

It would be harsh to call the Galaxy S4 Mini screen poor. It is more than sufficient for sending messages and surfing the web, or for viewing all those images of cats in funny poses and dogs diving for tennis balls.

The added brightness also means that the Galaxy S4 Mini is also easier to use when out and about when sunnier weather hits your window.

Camera

One of the biggest areas that the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact will look to beat the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini is the camera. This is because it comes rocking a massive 20.7MP sensor where the Samsung comes with only 8MP.

Both the S4 Mini and the Z1 Compact come sporting front facing sensors too, although these are much closer in stature. Sony has made sure it's won the battle, but this time the battle was much narrower; 2MP vs 1.9MP.

Samsung and Sony have both also taken a look at the camera app, meaning they both offer up more than the stock Android that sits beneath.

Sony has thrown a little more in the way of the camera offering up a few more modes. The more professional photographer may decide they want to forgo the Superior auto mode and take on the Manual mode. This offers up a variety of scenes, as well as allowing the toggle of white balance and exposure.

Instagram lovers have also been covered with varying picture effects and filters allowing easy creation of interesting looking pictures without the need for any Photoshop wizardry. An AR mode also adds extra features including elves and dinosaurs... make of that what you will.

Samsung's variation comes in the forms of different modes: Auto, Beauty Face, Best Photo, Continuous Shot, Best Face, Sound & Shot, Rich Tone (HDR), Panorama, Sports and Night. These don't add a lot of creative features, instead being aimed at perfecting the more basic shots.

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Colour reproduction on both is very good, although the contrast is much higher on the Galaxy S4 Mini. Much more detail has been captured on the skin of the satsumas though.

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Colour contrast again is higher on the S4 Mini, with the Z1 Compact appearing a little washed out.

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With the colours a little washed out on both, contrast levels are still much higher on the Galaxy S4 Mini. More detail on the cushions has been captured on the Z1 Compact.

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A far greater amount of detail has been captured on the Z1 Compact, with edges appearing crisper. Although the contrast is higher on the S4 Mini, colours are more natural on the Z1 Compact.

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Oddly, more detail has been captured in the background with the brickwork on houses coming out clearer with the Samsung. The Z1 Compact is much clearer in the foreground with text being much crisper.

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There is a massive difference in the low light capabilities, with the Z1 Compact's sensor letting in a lot more light. This means that images come out a lot clearer and more visible than on the S4 Mini.

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The zoom capabilities on the Z1 Compact are a lot greater than on the S4 Mini. Text is also much crisper and more legible on the Sony.

Source : techradar[dot]com