April 8th, 2009 | Posted in Audio | 
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With the major labels cajoling Apple into upping the cost of the most popular tracks on iTunes, I wondered how long it would take other music download stores to follow suit. Not long it seems – less than a day in fact – with paidContent and Ars Technica reporting that Amazon, Wal-Mart, Lala and Rhapsody have followed Apple’s lead and introduced ‘variable pricing’.
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April 7th, 2009 | Posted in Audio | No Comments
7digital has announced a partnership with AOL to integrate its music download store with AOL’s popular Windows-based music player Winamp, following similar deals with Spotify and Songbird.
Built using 7digital’s publicly available API, European users of Winamp can purchase tracks from 7digital’s six million strong MP3 catalogue through the application’s ‘Now Playing’ menu, as well as access additional artist, track and album information.
The partnership follows a similar arrangement with open source music player Songbird (a top ten digital lifestyle product of 08) and the new favorite kid on the block, music streaming service Spotify (last100 review), although in Songbird’s case, the 7digtal store is more prominent, featuring its own dedicated iTunes Store-esque menu item (see screen shot below).
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April 7th, 2009 | Posted in Audio | 7 Comments
Hoping to turn ‘supply and demand’ economics on its head, at the request of the major record labels Apple has introduced ‘variable pricing’ to the iTunes Store.
Under the new pricing structure, announced back in January at Macworld, tracks cost either 69 cents, 99 cents or $1.29, depending on their popularity. Or as the LA Times recently reported:
True to supply-and-demand economics, the price of music downloads will be geared to the artist’s popularity. Releases from new artists would receive the lower pricing, while tracks from popular acts would get slapped with the higher rate. Even classics, such as Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” could retail for the higher price. Most of the 10 million songs in the iTunes catalog are expected to remain at 99 cents.
Except, the new pricing model has nothing to do with “supply and demand” economics, which states:
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April 6th, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Mobile | 1 Comment
With today’s news that the next generation iPhone could feature an FM transmitter so that music stored on Apple’s handset can be played on a car stereo (or any device with an FM tuner in close proximity) without the need to carry around extra cables or a separate iPod add-on, I was reminded that Nokia’s N85 and a few of the company’s other existing handsets already offer this feature. Since I currently have an N85 on loan, here’s a quick walk-through of how the FM transmitter works on the device…
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April 3rd, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Mobile | 1 Comment
At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this week, Palm announced that third-party developers can now apply for access to the company’s “Mojo” Software Development Kit (SDK) for the upcoming Palm Pre and webOS. Not all developers will be let in at first however – word on the street is that priority will be given to apps that take advantage of the hooks provided by webOS into the Pre’s address book, GPS and calendar – but as the SDK becomes more robust and Palm is able to scale support, access will be made more widely available.
Meanwhile, five hundred odd miles away in Las Vegas at CTIA 2009, Palm was busy demoing a number of third-party apps from developers who’ve been given extra early access, including Fandango, Pandora, Nascar and Sprint. The Fandango and Pandora apps are particularly impressive (see video below courtesy of CrunchGear), and are a good example of how Palm hopes to compete with the likes of iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia and Android.
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March 25th, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Mobile | 1 Comment
After news last week that SpiralFrog has shut its doors, another reality check for ad-supported music services. CBS-owned Last.fm has started charging users outside of the US, UK and Germany, €3 per month (approx. $4.40), to make up for the short fall in advertising revenue.
“While we would like to provide the same service for users of all countries – the world is a huge place and it’s not cheap to deliver music over the Internet”, Last.fm’s Owen Parry explained on the company’s blog.
More bad news has since slipped out. Following an update to the service’s public API, which allows third-party developers to build applications based on Last.fm, the company is no longer tolerating unofficial mobile clients, such as Pocket Scrobbler on Windows Mobile or the Symbian S60-based Mobbler, which I run on my beloved Nokia E71. Both of these apps were free to download, which can’t be said for FlipSide, a Last.fm client for BlackBerry that will also soon be silenced. Ouch.
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March 20th, 2009 | Posted in Audio | 7 Comments
I can’t say I’m surprised but it’s sad nonetheless. Ad-supported music download service SpiralFrog appears to be no more.
Unable to raise a further round of funding and crippled by debt, the service couldn’t overcome “a macro-economic perfect storm”, a source close to the company tells CNet.
Basically, any startup whose revenue is purely tied to advertising is facing tough times – last100 included – as the downturn means that brands are cutting their marketing budgets or at least being far less experimental in how they spend their money. That’s bound to make new business models like SpiralFrog’s particularly vulnerable.
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March 18th, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Mobile, Net TV | 1 Comment
If it wasn’t already clear who owns the customer – Apple or its mobile carrier partners – yesterday’s announcement that ‘In App’ purchases will be a prominent feature of the next version of the iPhone’s OS suggests, once again, that power resides very much with Steve Jobs and co. in Cupertino.
When iPhone OS 3.0 is rolled out this summer, developers will be able to charge for additional content within their applications – so that, for example, an iPhone game could at anytime prompt a player to purchase additional levels or other in-game content, such as maps, without the user having to leave the app and billed through their existing iTunes account. For the privilege, Apple takes its standard 30% cut, once again bypassing the carriers. That in itself is disruptive enough. However, there’s another force at play.
Micro-payments. Or more broadly, in an era of free and ad-supported, getting consumers used to the idea once again of actually paying for content, albeit online.
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March 16th, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Net TV | 1 Comment
No longer a ‘one trick pony’, Vudu’s ambition to become a fully-fledged platform, capable of pulling in content from a range of third-party services, appears to be bearing fruit.
Today the company announced that owners of its set-top box now have access to Internet radio service Pandora. Features include support for multiple Pandora accounts, “enabling every member of the family to play his or her own personalized Pandora stations”, along with the ability to create custom stations and tweak them dynamically by thumbing tracks up or down.
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March 12th, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Mobile | No Comments
Vodafone, which currently operates music download stores in over 20 countries, is to become the latest company to jump on the DRM-free bandwagon, announcing this week that it will soon be transitioning its music catalog away from the copy-protected WMA format to standard MP3s. Additionally, customers will be able to covert their existing Vodafone purchases to DRM-free versions at no extra charge, unlike Apple’s current iTunes arrangement where users wishing to ‘upgrade’ are effectively asked to pay twice.
That’s the good news as far as Vodafone is concerned. The bad: only three of the four major record labels are on board – Universal Music Group, Sony Music and EMI – with Warner, for now at least, refusing to join in the fun, and the whole DRM-free deal only applies to a la carte downloads not Vodafone’s MusicStation all-you-can eat subscription service.
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