[Posted by Reineke Reitsma]

Follow me on a

My colleague Bruce Temkin recently published a report with insights from the 40 applications it received for Forrester's Voice Of The Customer award.

The terms "earned, owned and paid (aka bought) media" have become very popular in the interactive marketing space today. In fact, taken together they can be applied as a simple way for interactive marketers to categorize and ultimately prioritize all of the media options they have today. Nokia was an early pioneer in this space (see Dan Goodall's posts on the subject). They now categorize all of their global interactive media as earned, owned or bought.

We have just published a report examining the digital music adoption patterns of the different regions around the globe. While there are pockets of sunshine, the overall picture indicates that making money from digital music is tough everywhere. Europeans for instance are quite savvy in both online and mobile music activities but have yet to start buying digital downloads in meaningful numbers. In the US, which took the lead early on in online music activities and paying for downloads; adoption is starting to plateau even before hitting mass market. And across Asia, mobile is king but piracy is and will likely remain a big issue in all but a few of the countries. 

I also happened to be in India, part of the time that I was writing this report. Here are a few observations on digital music adoption in India:

"Dear book industry, I'm so sorry to tell you this, but your books really aren't worth $25. Just like newspapers weren't really worth what people were paying for them and magazines, either. And CDs, and DVDs."

I caused a bit of a fuss last week when I blogged these words here, or in a mirror post on Paidcontent.org. This has been one of the most commented and tweeted posts I've ever offered and much of the feedback centered on this question: was it fair of me to drag the price of books down?