To assure a thorough understanding of the SimWeb market sectors, we will be undertaking a series of in-depth analyses of the European online music and news industries - identifying the existing, offline markets; differentiating and analysing participants in the digital music and online news sectors; isolating the critical driving factors for both these markets sectors; and finding out how multi-agent modelling can provide information to market sector participants.

Online news and online music were selected as our target sectors because (1) they are actively evolving and include many SMEs typical of the online marketplace; (2) they differ from one another in terms of take-up and use of new technologies, and in their acceptance by the marketplace; and (3) they are sectors in which new technology of many sorts (Internet-based, P2P, and mobile) is being adopted, and changing rapidly.

Since SimWeb is primarily directed towards the European market, SimWeb will survey companies and markets in European Commission member countries and selected Accession countries in two stages, to provide a realistic picture of the present and future of innovative small businesses in this region. We anticipate a sample size of between 100-350 companies per country for the stage 1 of the survey (online questionnaire) with a minimum sample size of 80. Industry bodies will be able to provide substantial assistance in identifying members both in the Internet and mobile sector, but we also expect to make use of specialist interest groups for mobile technology.

In the second stage, we will undertake in-depth interviews with companies in a sub-set of these countries, identified on the basis of their responses to the online questionnaire in stage 1. It is our intention to interview between 10-20 companies in each country, which will require approximately a week of time spent in the country undertaking interviews and checking data with interviewees.

SimWeb will survey and analyse the digital online music market and the online news market. Our intention is to survey individual companies in ten European countries (Belgium, England, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain). The companies would be active in B2C or B2B for digital online music (retailers, end-to-end deliverers, portals, Technology manufacturers etc.) and/or online news suppliers. We invite all companies working in this area and located in one of the countries mentioned above to participate in the survey.

For further information, you can contact Cornelia Krüger on Tel: +49-261-287 2862; Fax: +49-261-287 2851; Email: ckrueger@uni-koblenz.de

In this Sector Report we describe the current state of play in the online news and music sectors in ten European countries as at the end of April 2003. The outcomes are based on the first two phases of a three-phase market study, which included "expert talks", an online survey and which, in the third phase, will include a series of face-to-face interviews. In the report we consider three levels of the environment in which online news and music stakeholders operate: the macro, business (meso) and the specific business models (micro) environments. We discuss the macro and business environments rather more generally and consider in greater detail the Internet business models of the companies working in these areas. The macro environment includes basic economic data and the issues of Internet diffusion and use in the countries under investigation. The business (meso) environment deals with the changes to the value chains in these sectors, the technological development and the digital rights issues which are important for online music and online news. At the micro level, when considering the business models we found, we started by analysing the literature relevant to this field and then analysed the business models we found in the real business world to reach an understanding of the components which the SimWeb consortium needed to build the multiple agent simulation of these two markets (although this report is not described at the level of granulation needed by the programmers themselves - being designed for a more general audience). The report concludes with an identification of the key driving factors for these two industries.

Table of Contents

Executive Summary

The complete survey can be ordered for € 250,-. Please contact Cornelia Krüger.