Despite fears that streaming access cannibalizes sales, classical music record label X5 tells me when it launched an app within Spotify and saw streams of one album increase 412% in a month, that album’s iTunes sales shot up 50%. The Swedish label’s “The 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music” soon reached #1 on the iTunes Classical charts, and broke into the iTunes Top 200 album charts for the first time, hitting #152.
The stats back up claims by some record labels and Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek that there’s no evidence of Spotify or other streaming services negatively impacting music sales. More data like this could encourage artists and labels to promote their streaming music presences, and push acts like The Black Keys and Paul McCartney who’ve pulled their catalogues from Spotify to come back. → Read More
According to new data released today by mobile analytics firm Flurry, Amazon’s Appstore for Android is generating more revenue per daily user than the Google Android Market, which was recently rebranded as the Google Play store. That shouldn’t be surprising, given that Amazon vets apps for quality, runs promotions to entice users to return daily, and perhaps most importantly, is able to leverage its established user base of Amazon account holders who already have credit card information on file – perfect for one-click checkouts. → Read More
According to new research from mobile analytics service Mobilewalla, Sunday is the best day to release a mobile app, but Wednesday is the most popular day among developers. The company studied the apps released in the iTunes App Store and Android Market over a 17-week period between May 16th and September 8th, 2011, to determine its findings. During this time, there were 91,754 iOS apps released into the iTunes App Store and 122,220 apps released into the Android Market.
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Starting next Tuesday, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment and Lightstorm Entertainment will be selling a special edition of blockbuster movie AVATAR with nifty behind-the-scenes content exclusively on iTunes for $14.99 (or $19.99 for the HD version). Available for pre-order now, the special digital edition of the movie lets people ‘deconstruct scenes’ in simultaneous views to, basically, see how director James Cameron applied special effects throughout the flick. → Read More
As expected, the launch of iTunes Match is now upon us, with today’s release of iTunes 10.5.1, available from the iTunes website here. For those living under the proverbial rock, iTunes Match is the new service from Apple that gives you legal access to store all your music in iCloud – even those songs you didn’t originally purchase from iTunes. For $25 per year, iTunes Match will match tracks in your music collection to those in the iTunes catalog – a catalog that now includes over 20 million songs.
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If you’re not already running on the developer build of iOS 5 (whether you’re an actual developer, or a cough-cough-yeah-for-sure-I’m-totally-a-”developer”-shut-up-and-give-me-iOS-5), tomorrow’s the big day. After roughly 4 months of Beta builds, iOS 5 is finally launching to everybody.
Before you can dive in, though, you’ll need iTunes 10.5 — anything less just won’t do the trick. Looking to ensure that their servers don’t eat it too hard with tomorrow’s launch, Apple has opted to make the iTunes bit of the equation available this morning. → Read More
It’s been a busy morning in Cupertino at Apple’s ‘Let’s Talk iPhone’ keynote. The big headline was the iPhone 4S, but no iPhone 5. Perhaps you had a hard time following all the news from Apple on the iPhone, iOS 5, other iOS devices and apps. Apple didn’t offer a live online webcast to the public. But the TechCrunch team, on two continents, has been busy tracking all the Apple news. Click inside the post for an organized summary of the headlines. → Read More
As the summer winds down and we near the fall, we know two things are for sure about to enter existence in the world of Apple: iOS 5 and iCloud. Given that both offer third-party developers various opportunities, both are in the process of being tested by that community. And that means things are starting to leak out. Tonight brought perhaps the biggest surprise revelation yet: iTunes in the Cloud will support streaming as well as downloading of music.
Now, before everyone works themselves into a tizzy yelling “FIRST!!!”, yes, it’s true that other music services have offered cloud-based streaming before — notably both Google Music Beta and Amazon Cloud Player this past summer. But neither of those is iTunes, the largest music retailer on the planet (online or “offline”). And there are plenty of other services that are streaming-only. It now seems certain that this fall, iTunes will offer both cloud downloading and cloud streaming. → Read More
Streaming music service Rdio from Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, is today launching two new music gifting options – physical gift cards and online credits. Consumers will be able to purchase the virtual gift card options in $10, $25, $50 and $100 values or in user-selected amounts. Meanwhile, physical cards in the $10 and $25 values will be sold in over 600 Target retail stores here in the U.S.
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Apple has been planning to launch a new cloud-based movie streaming service, which would allow you to re-download your movie purchases to other devices for no extra charge. The service, a part of “iTunes Replay,” was originally planned to launch within “the coming weeks,” according to multiple reports.
But now it seems that will not be the case. → Read More
An Apple TV update is rolling out today. But this device update isn’t the news. Sure, streaming purchased TV shows to the device is a welcomed, but not really novel idea. Now, post update, users will have the choice to either buy or rent a TV show and stream it to their Apple TV. Great. But this update turns Apple’s little hobby into a full-fledged money-making machine. → Read More
The Financial Times would rather not have Apple take a 30 percent cut of in-app subscriptions for its iOS publications, and has launched a HTML5 Web app that enables readers to access content across tablets and smartphones.
As part of the Web app’s debut, FT will provide free access during launch week.
FT acknowledges that the Web app has been initially optimized for the iPhone and the iPad, but says it will also be adapted for Android-based devices and the BlackBerry PlayBook. → Read More
The Financial Times would rather not have Apple take a 30 percent cut of in-app subscriptions for its iOS publications, and has launched a HTML5 Web app that enables readers to access content across tablets and smartphones.
As part of the Web app’s debut, FT will provide free access during launch week.
FT acknowledges that the Web app has been initially optimized for the iPhone and the iPad, but says it will also be adapted for Android-based devices and the BlackBerry PlayBook. → Read More
Apple CEO Steve Jobs just announced his infamous “one more thing” at WWDC and it’s iTunes In The Cloud-related; iTunes Match will upgrade your ripped songs to 256 kpbs AAC DRM-free for a $24.99 yearly subscription.
Basically iTunes Match will scan a users iTunes library for any music you haven’t bought through iTunes and subscribers will be able to get a high quality copy of those songs for iTunes In The Cloud. → Read More
Once far off in the distance, iCloud is now quickly approaching. It will be a new service with many layers that Apple will first unveil on Monday during the keynote at WWDC. But the most interesting layer, at least from a consumer perspective initially, is the music one. And the details continue to emerge about what’s likely coming.
Today, two reports state that Apple has finalized deals with all four major music labels. CNet notes that Universal is now on board as are many publishers. The LA Times confirms this and suggests that the publisher deals could be completed tomorrow. That means the service will be set for a Monday debut. → Read More
As we’ve suspected for a long time, Apple is very close to launching an online music service which may go by the name iCloud. The basic idea is that it will mirror your iTunes collection online so that it is available on any device without clunky cable syncing.
While getting rid of those cables will be a big step forward, if iCloud is nothing more than a music locker service it won’t go far towards transforming digital music, as BusinessWeek proclaims. Apple’s iCloud will be iTunes online, with a few features that make it slightly better than Google’s Music Beta—namely, I won’t have to spend hours uploading my music collection and I will get better quality audio files for some songs. That’s all great, but I am not sure it is enough for me to pay a monthly subscription. If it’s bundled with MobileMe, it certainly would make that service more appealing, but I wouldn’t pay for iCloud as a standalone service if that is all there is to it. And certainly, this could turn out to be only one part of a revamped MobileMe service. Depending on what else will be added, iCloud could help push more MobileMe subscriptions overall. → Read More
Streaming media is the future. You know this if you’ve used Netflix, Rdio, Grooveshark or any of the other popular music services. Apple is said to be getting into the game as well and a recently-released patent application from 2009 shows iTunes streaming will in fact offer something different from the rest of the players.
As much as I love Rdio, and I do love Rdio, I can’t always guarantee that the mobile app will start playing music when I press play. There’s always this waiting game as my Droid X fights for enough Verizon bandwidth to start streaming. Once the little blue bar partially fills up, signifying that there’s enough of a buffer for seamless playback, the song starts. This is where Apple will offer something better and different. → Read More
With regard to their cloud music offering, it looks like Apple is now just about ready to rock and roll. It would seem that this is now coming together even faster than they anticipated. And that may be thanks to two unlikely sources: Google and Amazon.
CNet’s Greg Sandoval is reporting tonight that Apple has signed an agreement with music label EMI to offer its music through Apple’s upcoming new cloud music service. This means that Apple now has agreements in place with two of the four major labels (Warner signed last month). And Sandoval believes that deals with the remaining two, Sony and Universal, could be wrapped up as early as next week. Again, rock and roll.
With those deals in place, it means that Apple will be free to launch their cloud service anytime they please. And while we had heard the initial plan was to do so at their annual music event in the early fall, Apple could indeed move the launch up to WWDC in early June (just a few weeks from now). We haven’t heard anything definitive about this either way, but you can bet that Apple is thinking about it. → Read More
Spotify, the music service Americans don’t get to enjoy, announced several very cool new features today. The European music service is rolling out new versions of its desktop and mobile apps today, which will allow all users (even those pesky ad-supported freeloaders) to sync Spotify desktop tracks with mobile devices, be they iPods, iPhones or Androids.
And just in case it wasn’t clear whether or not Spotify intends to compete directly with iTunes, Spotify is also introducing its own music store, or “download service”, in which users can buy a range of MP3 “bundles” at 10 songs for roughly 8 pounds. Or 100 songs for 50 pounds. → Read More
MP3s are so last century. As we’ve previously reported, Apple is moving iTunes to the cloud and is slowly signing on record labels to supply content. The latest company to fall is apparently Warner Music. The company signed a deal with Apple last week. → Read More
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