Posts Tagged ‘iTunes’

IHS Screen Digest has published new movie download market share numbers and it appears that iTunes has suffered the first major drop in movie download revenue share in the U.S. in several years.

Cricket, a company that was until recently known only for its wireless broadband data services, is now offering a bargain data plan that includes unlimited voice, unlimited data – and unlimited music downloads. Steve Jobs, are you watching?

More than a decade ago, before Windows Media Player and iTunes, there was Nullsoft’s Winamp that opened up the world to MP3 audio files. After an acquisition by AOL in the dotcom boom era, Winamp largely disappeared, but it recently resurfaced as a media player that connects Android phones with a PC.

It’s not iTunes in the cloud. It’s not iTunes streaming. It’s much better: The Beatles catalog is apparently finally being made available for purchase tomorrow.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) this notes that The Black Eyed Peas’ song “I Gotta Feeling” has become the best selling digital single of all time and comes to the conclusion that success in today’s music business is not based on album sales.

Do we ever get tired of new iPods? Apple has announced a plethora of new products earlier today, ranging from a new iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano and iPod Touch, to a new Apple TV, a new iTunes with a new logo, a social network, and two new iOS versions. There was no shortage of news, but, for the first time in years, we wonder whether Apple may have announced the wrong products at the wrong time. In fact, we believe that Apple has exposed itself, and missed to upgrade its products effectively, which gives its rivals a chance to take a shot and challenge Apple’s leadership in key markets.

Deutsche Telekom, parent of T-Mobile USA and the main telecommunications entity in Germany, has questioned net neutrality for the first time and confirmed that it is evaluating a tiered bandwidth structure that would require services such as Google or Apple to pay extra for high quality Internet connectivity.

NPD has released survey results that point to a huge interest in an iTunes subscription service, which, in 2010 language, would be called a “cloud service”. NPD believes there is a market of about 8 million possible subscribers in the U.S. alone. Those subscribers indicated they would be willing to pay at least $10 per month, which would translate into the next billion dollar opportunity for Apple.

Apple may be gearing for a streaming music service at iTunes, as it announced today that it will shut down Lala at the end of next month. In consistent Apple tradition, there is no information what you options will be on May 31, but the rumor on the street is that Apple will be merging Lala with iTunes, an introducing streaming music as another revenue model to an estimated user base of 125 million iTunes customers.