In case you were wondering (I’m looking at you Levine): Live Nation and sister company Ticketmaster have jointly announced that they’ll be the ones powering the concert listings feature on iTunes 10.
In addition, the company said it will deliver a “way for millions of iTunes users to purchase concert tickets at Livenation.com and Ticketmaster.com“. → Read More
During their event today in San Francisco, Apple announced iTunes 10, the latest version of their music software. But they also introduced a big new feature in the app — Ping: a social network for music.
It’s like “Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes,” Jobs says. “But it’s not Facebook, it’s not Twitter,” Jobs is quick to note — “it’s a social network all about music.” And guess what? It has 160 million users in 23 countries built in right away (Apple will presumably be opening it up to other iTunes users later). And it’s available on your iPhone and iPod touch — right in the iTunes Store. → Read More
It’s like clockwork. 9 PM PT rolls around on Monday evening, and Apple rolls out an update to the iTunes Store. You see, Tuesday is the day that new movies and music are typically released in the U.S., so it makes sense to overhaul the store at this time to show off that new content. Only tonight, that didn’t happen. Why? Because why roll out an update when you’re going to completely overhaul the store the following day?
As you’re probably well aware, Apple is holding an event in San Francisco this Wednesday. They tend to hold events related to iTunes and the iPod every year around this time, though this is a little earlier than normal. The invitation gives every indication that it will be music-related, but it will likely be more than that. Speculation is mounting that we’ll see an update to the Apple TV, called iTV, and some new iPod hardware as well. But iTunes itself is also due for some changes, and that’s very likely why we’re not seeing any updates tonight. → Read More
Years ago, the music industry could have blamed falling album sales on piracy. “Nobody’s buying the latest Chingy because they’re just downloading a 128CBR rip from Suprnova~!” What’s the excuse now when people have loads of legitimate digital options—iTunes, Zune, Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, etc.—at their fingertips? Oh, right: it’s still piracy. Please update your act. → Read More
Apple this morning said iTunes U downloads have topped 300 million, making it one of the world’s most popular online educational catalogs. The company also says over 800 universities throughout the world have active iTunes U sites, and nearly half of these institutions distribute their content publicly on the iTunes Store.
Currently, iTunes users have access to more than 350,000 audio and video files from educational institutions around the globe, the company adds. → Read More
Reports are appearing this morning about a major security hole in iTunes accounts linked to PayPal. At least one group of scammers has found a way to charge thousands of dollars to iTunes accounts through PayPal. One targeted customer told us, “My account was charged over $4700. I called security at PayPal and was told a large number of iTunes store accounts were compromised.” His email was filled with nearly 50 receipts from PayPall for $99.99 each. He was able to catch it before his bank disbursed funds to PayPal.
But others were n → Read More
A new report by CNET’s Greg Sandoval yesterday gave an update on Apple and Google’s race to deploy music to the cloud. Basically, according to his sources, Apple isn’t close to doing anything massive in the space. Google, meanwhile, is likely closer but may have a hard time getting traction early on due to iTunes’ dominance. But the most interesting bit is buried a few paragraphs in.
According to Sandoval, the core Lala team (the music-streaming service Apple bought last December) inside Apple hasn’t been working on the cloud music solution. Hell, they haven’t even been working on music at all. Instead, they’re apparently working on “an undisclosed video feature.” → Read More
During Apple’s Q3 2010 earnings call, CFO Peter Oppenheimer fielded a question about the massive data center Apple is currently building in Maiden, North Carolina. The reporter wanted to know how it was coming, and if there were any updates? “It’s on-schedule,” Oppenheimer quickly said. “We expect it completed by the end of the calendar year,” he continued, noting that it should be fully operational after that.
The questioner didn’t follow-up with perhaps the most important question: what exactly is Apple going to be using this billion dollar baby on? After all, when it was revealed that Apple was pouring $1 billion into the center, sites such as Data Center Knowledge noted that this was about twice what companies like Microsoft and Google invest in the data centers they use for cloud computing.
The official statement from last year seems to be: “The facility will provide Apple with a major East Coast infrastructure hub to support its iTune music store and iPhone app store.” But again,this thing is something like 500,000 square feet. That’s about five times the size of Apple’s other regional data centers. Instead, might this be the central hub of Apple’s often-rumored iTunes-in-the-cloud offering? → Read More
If you’ll be so kind as to open up your Software Update, Mac users, you’ll find that iTunes 9.2.1 has been released, improving and speeding up sync support for iPhone 4, iBooks, and so on. Bugs are fixed as well, though I haven’t run into any of these bugs because I started using Songbird right after I wrote this post. → Read More
If you’ve created music playlists using iTunes, Spotify, Last.fm, YouTube, We Are Hunted, Winamp, Rhapsody, Soundcloud, or even if you’ve simply scribbled a list of your favorite tracks in a notepad file, you need to check out Playlistify soon. The basic, solid premise of the service is to let you enjoy your custom-made playlists anywhere you like.
I was looking for an excuse to write it up anyway, and now they’ve given me a decent one: they’ve added a new feature that lets you convert your music playlists into Twitter lists. → Read More
Imagine this, but much better According to the Blog of Record, Apple is bolstering its collection of engineers dedicated to the Apple TV. The sources, who “refused to be identified,” naturally, said ATV may be getting an OS update to iOS instead of the stripped down OSX kernel it is currently running. The rumors are pretty much what you’ve already heard: that the new Apple TV will be an entirely new animal, a $99 box will be more in line with the current Roku or Western Digital video sharing devices than the original Apple TV. The expectation, in fact, is that this new device will not have a hard drive and will instead stream from the Interworld. → Read More
This emerging story about how iTunes is bravely entering the cloud cracks me up. Haven’t we been doing wireless sync, and direct streaming for a couple years now with Zune? It’s funny how these things don’t really count until Apple does them. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad Apple is finally jumping on this. It’s not like everyone and their mom has a Zune and is constantly streaming things all the time, but these are features that have been on offer for quite some time now. → Read More
iTunes in the cloud. We all know it’s coming, it’s just a question of when, and with what capabilities? A story from Boy Genius Report today appears to answer at least one of those questions, and vaguely answers the other.
If BGR’s “reliable” Apple source is to be believed, Apple’s iTunes cloud strategy will consist of three parts: 1) Streaming content from Apple’s servers to your devices 2) Streaming content from your computers to your devices 3) Wirelessly syncing content to your devices. If true, that would obviously constitute a major push into the cloud by Apple. It would also likely elevate their war with Google. → Read More
iTunes in the cloud. We all know it’s coming, it’s just a question of when, and with what capabilities? A story from Boy Genius Report today appears to answer at least one of those questions, and vaguely answers the other.
If BGR’s “reliable” Apple source is to be believed, Apple’s iTunes cloud strategy will consist of three parts: 1) Streaming content from Apple’s servers to your devices 2) Streaming content from your computers to your devices 3) Wirelessly syncing content to your devices. If true, that would obviously constitute a major push into the cloud by Apple. It would also likely elevate their war with Google. → Read More
It took Apple’s review team close to a month, but the update to the Rdio iPhone application is now finally available from the App Store (iTunes link).
It’s unclear why it took Apple this long, considering the update merely fixes some software bugs and adds one minor feature (remembering which song you were playing when you last closed the app). → Read More
Okay, they aren’t really going to sell out. For those who will receive the new iPhone next Thursday, you need to first update iTunes to its new version. In it, you will find mostly minor updates that prepare you computer for iPhone 4.
Click ahead to find out what. → Read More
It shouldn’t be a huge surprise to anyone, but alongside the new iOS 4 (formerly iPhone OS 4) software launching on June 21, Apple will be releasing a new version of iTunes. I was told as much by an Apple employee during the hands-on time following the keynote at WWDC today when asking how certain new features would work.
Specifically, the employee told me that iTunes 9.2 would be unveiled in the coming weeks (and probably the same time as iOS 4) to allow for PDF syncing in the new iBooks for iPhone. The ability to read PDFs is the latest addition to the iBooks app, and isn’t currently available in the iPad version. According to the employee, people will be able to email PDFs to one another and open them in this reader — or they can simply sync them with their computer and this new iTunes 9.2. → Read More
App store analytics startup Distimo just released its May report, and zoomed in on the average number of days applications across various categories maintain their top rankings in Apple’s App Store. Analyzing data collected from November 2009 to April 2010, the company found that paid applications in the Top Overall, Games, Business and Entertainment categories stay in these categories for 27, 39, 59 and 38 days on average, respectively.
Free applications stay in the Top 100 for a significantly shorter time in those categories, with 19, 21 and 39 days on average, respectively. The exception to the rule seems to be the Entertainment category, in which free apps stay in the Top 100 for a slightly longer period of time than paid applications; 43 days compared to 38 days. → Read More
Today at Google I/O, Vic Gundotra introduced Froyo, aka Android 2.2. But he also went a bit beyond Froyo. Coming soon, is a way to download an app through the Android Market over the web — and have it automatically download on your Android devices too. But that’s not all. Gundotra also showed off a new section of the Market — Music. Yes, an iTunes competitor on the web from Google.
Details are sparse at the moment, but here’s how this basically works. You go to the Market on the web, find a song you like, click the download button, and just like with apps, the song starts to download on your Android devices. So it’s iTunes, over the web, with auto-syncing. No word on who the partners are for this, what the prices will be, etc. Undoubtedly, we’ll hear more about that soon. → Read More
