Last autumn I took time off to go back to school. The timing turned out to be just right: My American economic history course at the University of California at Berkeley got to the Great Depression in early October, around the time everyone became convinced we were about to have another one.
You know the foolish game of cat and mouse Palm has been playing with Apple? The one where Palm hacks its own Pre phone to masquerade as an iPod and climb unnoticed into iTunes' bed?
Back in my day (a day not long ago, as it turns out), you could go down to the local record shop and plunk down your paper-route money for little disks of plastic that were embedded with the latest sounds of your favorite musical performers.
Apple unveiled a change in the pricing structure for its iTunes music downloads Tuesday, ending the 99-cents-a-song pricing that has helped iTunes dominate the industry.
The Brits were the music service's most-downloaded acts of '08 – ahead of Lil Wayne and Rihanna
It looks like Apple won't be closing the iTunes store because of a dispute with music publishers over royalties on downloaded songs.
For five years, Apple's iTunes Music Store has been the Internet's most successful music store. But as music publishers have sought a higher share of its proceeds, Apple has threatened to shutter iTunes.
Jeff Bezos has done it again. The Amazon CEO has created an MP3-download store that has quickly become the second largest digital music outlet after Apple's iTunes. Now he's struck an exclusive deal to build a similar store for the soon-to-launch MySpace Music.
Customers in China of Apple Inc.'s iTunes online music store were unable to download songs this week, and an activist group said Beijing was trying to block access to a new Tibet-themed album
RealNetworks' Rhapsody music service is launching a full-scale assault on iTunes.
Last autumn I took time off to go back to school. The timing turned out to be just right: My American economic history course at the University of California at Berkeley got to the Great Depression in early October, around the time everyone became convinced we were about to have another one.
You know the foolish game of cat and mouse Palm has been playing with Apple? The one where Palm hacks its own Pre phone to masquerade as an iPod and climb unnoticed into iTunes' bed?
Back in my day (a day not long ago, as it turns out), you could go down to the local record shop and plunk down your paper-route money for little disks of plastic that were embedded with the latest sounds of your favorite musical performers.
Apple unveiled a change in the pricing structure for its iTunes music downloads Tuesday, ending the 99-cents-a-song pricing that has helped iTunes dominate the industry.
The Brits were the music service's most-downloaded acts of '08 – ahead of Lil Wayne and Rihanna
It looks like Apple won't be closing the iTunes store because of a dispute with music publishers over royalties on downloaded songs.
For five years, Apple's iTunes Music Store has been the Internet's most successful music store. But as music publishers have sought a higher share of its proceeds, Apple has threatened to shutter iTunes.
Jeff Bezos has done it again. The Amazon CEO has created an MP3-download store that has quickly become the second largest digital music outlet after Apple's iTunes. Now he's struck an exclusive deal to build a similar store for the soon-to-launch MySpace Music.
Customers in China of Apple Inc.'s iTunes online music store were unable to download songs this week, and an activist group said Beijing was trying to block access to a new Tibet-themed album
RealNetworks' Rhapsody music service is launching a full-scale assault on iTunes.
She joins forces with Justin Timberlake in a special effects-laden clip for "4 Minutes"
Public Enemy's Chuck D. has spent his career rapping about the effects of racism in America. The self-described "prophet of rage" isn't too happy with the music industry either.
Can't get enough of Britney Spears? Then her new video for "Gimme More" is just the ticket, with the singer playing dual roles: sexy brunette pole dancer, and a curious blonde watching her.
Starbucks Corp. plans to give away 50 million free digital songs to customers in all of its domestic coffee houses to promote a new wireless iTunes music service that's about to debut in select markets.
Apple is in talks with major Hollywood studios about launching a movie rental service from its popular iTunes store, according to a report Tuesday.
Starbucks Corp. and Apple Inc. announced a deal Wednesday that will soon let people in hundreds of the coffee retailer's stores buy and download music from Apple's iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store.
NBC Universal has decided not to renew its contract to sell digital versions of its television shows on Apple's iTunes store, according to a report Friday.
A side effect to today's fractured, tumultuous music industry is the fluctuating meaning of the greatest-hits album.
AmieStreet, a digital music site that prices songs of new artists according to their popularity, said on Monday that Amazon.com Inc. is leading a first round of investment in the start-up.
Apple Inc. said Tuesday that sales at its online music store iTunes have topped 3 billion songs.
Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company, has declined to sign a long-term deal with Apple Inc.'s iTunes music store, leaving open the possibility for exclusive deals with other services, an industry source said on Sunday.
Apple Inc.'s iTunes Music Store is now the third largest retailer of music in the United States, overtaking Amazon.com in the first quarter with nearly 10 percent market share, according to a survey by NPD Group.
EMI Group PLC. announced a deal Monday with Apple Inc.'s iTunes to sell its music catalog without the anti-piracy protection known as DRM restrictions.
The music industry is rife with infighting. But for years the biggest record companies agreed on one thing: They refused to sell songs in the popular MP3 format, arguing that it might hasten their ...
Steve Jobs Tuesday called on music companies to abandon digital rights management software, which restricts how digital song downloads can be used. This message from the Apple CEO was posted on Apple's Web site on Tuesday:
I tried to resist the giddiness with which the world greeted Apple's latest bauble this week.
Power is highly mutable. Take the world's two richest men, a couple of bridge-playing buddies named Bill and Warren. They've been immensely wealthy for years, sure. But now, by combining their fortunes in a single philanthropic organization, they, along with Bill's wife, Melinda, just might wipe out deadly infectious diseases. In part because of the ever-shifting value of influence in the business world, this year we decided to eliminate rankings from our annual study of the subject and instead provide, literally, snapshots of power: In the gallery that follows are 25 portraits, photographed by Albert Watson, of the characters who had the most impact on 2006.
News Corp., the media conglomerate that owns the Fox movie studio, is in talks with Apple about a deal to sell its films on Apple's popular iTunes music store.
Growing up in a small town in southern Norway, Jon Lech Johansen loved to take things apart to figure out how they worked. Unlike most kids, though, he'd put them back together better than they wer...
Always the online media innovator, Apple Computer has been the front-runner in online music, and is quickly following suit with television downloads. But Steve Jobs and company are now taking on a new frontier: movie downloading. At a media event earlier this month, Jobs unveiled iTunes 7.0, which features the Apple iTunes Movie Store and other upgrades to the omnipotent software.
In the first six days after the launch of its new iTunes movie download service, Apple sold a million dollars worth of Disney films, or 125,000 downloads, according to Disney's CEO, Robert Iger. Before the year is out, Iger added, Disney expects to reap $50 million from iTunes movie sales.
Have you ever seen a really bad Hollywood movie and wondered, Did anybody in Hollywood watch this movie before releasing it? Did no one have the courage to stand up to the director or the studio head and say, "This movie sucks"?
THE LAW Go where the staff know what they're talking about. There are too many opportunities to get sidetracked by bogus specs and useless features. Nothing but chain stores around? Do your homewo...
The gadget industry depends on your remaining ignorant. Otherwise you'd know that contrast ratios (a flat-screen TV spec) are basically bunk, that megapixels in digital cameras have become almost irrelevant, and that good marketing doesn't always equal good technology (applies to everything).
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Amazon.com is spending heavily to build a digital-download business - and that has investors worried, as it prepares to take on Apple, the undefeated champion of online music, in a fight over online movies.
When a European court last week voted to annul the 2004 marriage that created Sony BMG out of the music divisions of Sony and Germany's Bertelsmann, investors quickly concluded that the ongoing courtship between Warner Music Group and Britain's EMI would never happen. Warner's stock sold off 16 percent on the news.
How are you going to watch movies at home in the future?
Last weekend, I had a craving to watch "Blazing Saddles" again.
Stocks opened moderately higher Tuesday morning after the latest economic numbers came in mixed and failed to scare a market already rattled with the inflation jitters.
Music makers seek out the often hand-crafted and custom-designed top instruments from small businesses.
In an ideal digital world, we'd be able to buy copyrighted music and videos wherever we wanted, not just on a designated store. But that's been the fate of iPod users, who can only buy content off of Apple's iTunes Music Store.
You'd think Steve Jobs would be the hero of the music industry, after a year in which online music sales almost tripled to $1.1 billion. But no. The record labels are again pressuring Apple to raise prices at the iTunes Music Store from 99 cents a song. Apple and the labels are renegotiating deals struck when its music store launched three years ago, and a key issue is variable pricing -- the right to charge more for singles from a hot band, and less for music from lesser-known acts. But charging more could backfire, since pirated music is still widely available to consumers on file-sharing networks, Needham & Co. analyst Charlie Wolf told the Associated Press: "[Customers] have an alternative -- they can get it for free."
Microsoft has long set its sights on the living room. But the Xbox 360 could be the Trojan Horse that carries out its invasion plans into the world of entertainment. Take last week's announcement that pop star Natasha Bedingfield would release her next music video exclusively on the Xbox 360, the first in a year-long deal with music label Epic Records. Then, at this week's Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, the software giant announced that it would open up its Xbox Live online service to independent game developers so that they can program multiplayer online games for the new Xbox 360 console. With Xbox Live now offering online chat, video downloads and multiplayer games, Microsoft just needs one more thing to complete its hold on the Xbox's young, mostly male audience: the long-rumored Xbox Portable.
Microsoft's $500 million marketing campaign, which targets IBM, is already drawing skeptical reviews. Tech author Nicholas Carr says that Microsoft's "people-ready" campaign reminds him of Apple's "1984" ads, when Apple launched the Macintosh as a liberating, humanistic response to IBM's overbearingly corporate PC. Carr points out that neither Apple nor IBM won that fight -- the winner, two decades ago, was Microsoft. In this new Microsoft-IBM fight might leave the field open to another surprise victor. Google, anyone?
Steve Jobs has had much to celebrate lately. But the Apple CEO was particularly happy in February when he announced that the iTunes Music Store had sold its billionth song, to a teenager in Michiga...
• WHAT IT IS Download TV shows, sports broadcasts and music videos for between 99¢ and a few bucks a pop to view on your PC screen.
Steve Jobs helped save the music biz from file sharers like Shawn Fanning and Wayne Rosso. Now Fanning and Rosso--the creator of Napster and former president of Grokster, respectively--want to save...
HIT Flower power.
The number of songs downloaded from Apple's online music store iTunes sped past one billion Thursday as a customer in Bloomfield, Mich., purchased Coldplay's "Speed of Sound" as part of the band's X&Y album.
SAN FRANCISCO (Business 20) -GigaOm and Venkatesh note that Google seems to be testing it's click-to-call program, which connects web surfers and advertisers by phone. Searching for "hotels, New York," Venkatesh got an ad with a little green phone icon. Clicking on the icon prompted him to enter his phone number, which Google says it will use to connect a regular telephone call from the advertiser to the customer (without revealing the customer's number to the advertiser). AOL, a unit of Time Warner, started running its own pay-per-call ad program last year. The advantage of these ads: Advertisers pay Internet outfits much higher fees for pay-per-call ads than for the traditional pay-per-click ads, because they are more likely to lead to sales. But Venkatesh feels Google's technology is lacking. Clicking on the ads, he noted, did not yet yield any further information about the advertiser, unlike in AOL's system, which sends surfers to a "landing page" that gives surfers details about the business they're ...
SAN FRANCISCO (Business 20) -GigaOm and Venkatesh note that Google seems to be testing it's click-to-call program, which connects web surfers and advertisers by phone. Searching for "hotels, New York," Venkatesh got an ad with a little green phone icon. Clicking on the icon prompted him to enter his phone number, which Google says it will use to connect a regular telephone call from the advertiser to the customer (without revealing the customer's number to the advertiser). AOL, a unit of Time Warner, started running its own pay-per-call ad program last year. The advantage of these ads: Advertisers pay Internet outfits much higher fees for pay-per-call ads than for the traditional pay-per-click ads, because they are more likely to lead to sales. But Venkatesh feels Google's technology is lacking. Clicking on the ads, he noted, did not yet yield any further information about the advertiser, unlike in AOL's system, which sends surfers to a "landing page" that gives surfers details about the business they're
On Wednesday night, Gene Munster was thinking about going to the movies; but he did something else instead. He spent $1.99 to watch a campy 1960s TV show on his laptop. The first season of the Munsters -- a comedy about a family of monsters and their struggles to lead an all-American life -- was available for download on iTunes. Munster, for obvious reasons, couldn't resist.
When ABC and NBC started selling episodes of prime time shows like "Desperate Housewives" and "The Office" on Apple's iTunes Music Store, some worried that it would hurt broadcast viewership. Instead, TV Week reports, ratings have actually jumped, especially in the young-adult demographics most appealing to advertisers.
Apple Computer is set to announce Tuesday that it will offer a limited number of "Saturday Night Live" skits on its iTunes Music Store for viewing on video iPods or personal computers, according to a published report.
Investors and economists will find out Thursday morning if it truly was a happy holiday, and that is likely to set the direction for stocks.
Media companies are going old school.
HOW COULD THEY not make beautiful music together? It's just over nine months since Motorola, maker of the gorgeously thin and stylish RAZR V3 mobile phone, announced that it was planning a baby wit...
After more than a year of false starts and rampant speculation, Steve Jobs finally unveiled Apple's much anticipated iTunes phone.
With Apple's new iTunes-compatible cell phone, consumers can download music and listen to it, take pictures and play games. But they still can't buy music straight from the phone.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The Rolling Stones have fully embraced the digital music bandwagon. Is it time for the Beatles to do the same?
Why release physical CDs if consumers are just going to rip them? That question is prompting an unprecedented move by Warner Bros. Records. On Sept. 13 the label will unveil the debut album from Oh...
Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs is preparing for a showdown with major record executives over the price of songs on the iTunes service, a published report said over the weekend.
Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes may be available on cell phones sooner than you might expect, according to the New York Post Thursday.
Could it be this easy? Gap's new marketing promotions will give customers a free iTunes download just for trying on a pair of its jeans.
ONE OF MY FIRST illicit thrills was staying up past bedtime and tuning the AM radio to a station broadcasting only at night from hundreds of miles away across the Mexican frontier, one that played ...
iTunes users subscribed to more than one million Podcasts in the two days after Apple introduced new iTunes software with built-in Podcast technology, the company said.
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"My God, there really has been a genie locked in that bottle! Apple's innovation and creativity have been unleashed in a way that they haven't been in 20 years. Look at the results. This isn't a co...
PHOENIX (Komando.com) - Although Apple's iPod and iPod mini has a huge fan base, using it is not an entirely glitch-free Windows experience.
The ads were ubiquitous last autumn: U2 rocking out in the black-shadow style of Apple's colorful iPod campaign. Annoying? To some, no doubt. Effective? You bet.
The years, they go by so fast. Just when I was getting used to the currency of the phrase "Boston Red Sox, World Series Champions," the calendar now tells me that I must say "last year" when referring to it. Alas, 'twas ever thus.
DON'T YOU HATE IT when a band covers your favorite song with a new version that's inferior to the original? Microsoft's new music service, MSN Music, which makes its debut in mid-October, is not ne...
Goodbye CD, we barely knew you.
Twelve months ago, if you wanted to download music from the Internet, the only way to do it was illegally.
Apple Computer Inc. said Monday that more than 100 million songs have been purchased and downloaded from the computer maker's iTunes Music Store, and that the man who bought the 100 millionth song won a PowerBook.
Apple Computer Inc. said Monday that more than 100 million songs have been purchased and downloaded from the computer maker's iTunes Music Store, and that the man who bought the 100 millionth song won a PowerBook.
Apple has become quite the investor darling. Since June 9, the company's stock has risen to three new 52-week highs.
Apple and AOL have launched a long-awaited iTunes music store online in France, Germany and the UK.
"Extraordinary how potent cheap music is," Noel Coward wrote. Sure enough, the 99-cent legal song download is having a potent effect on the music industry as we near the first anniversary of the Ap...
When Apple introduced the world to desktop publishing nearly 20 years ago, suddenly anyone with a Macintosh, a LaserWriter printer, and a copy of Aldus PageMaker could create professional-quality p...
Sharp eyes and a bit of patience paid off Thursday for iTunes fans who figured out a way to "hack" the popular music download service's Pepsi promotion.
Napster proved that tens of millions of consumers were eager to download digital music from the Internet. They just weren't inclined to pay for it, which led music companies to believe that the Int...
How's this for a business model? Sell for 99¢ something the guy down the street is giving away for free. If Apple's new iTunes Music Store were a lemonade stand, it would already be out of busines...
The going rate for downloading songs from online music services like Apple's ITunes Music Store, MusicNet, Pressplay, and Rhapsody is about $1 a pop. Yet the economics of recorded music sales haven...
Steve Jobs loves music. But as with a lot of geeks in Silicon Valley, his musical tastes are a little retro. He worships Bob Dylan and is the kind of obsessive Beatles fan who can talk your ear o...
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