01.29.08 - 05:21pm
Fresh off the victory of signing all four major music labels allowing their music to be sold DRM free online, Amazon has announced they will be going global with Amazon MP3.
“We have received thousands of e-mails from Amazon customers around the world asking us when we will make Amazon MP3 available outside of the U.S.,” Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president of digital music, said in a statement. “We are excited to tell those customers today that Amazon MP3 is going international this year.”
No details were released on when the site will begin launching in other countries, but the news brings Amazon MP3 one step closer to outright competition in market share with Apple iTunes. Amazon’s songs are priced for less than Apple’s with most of their songs going for $.89 cents to Apple’s $.99 cents. Also all of Amazons 3.3 million songs are DRM free. iTunes has 6 million songs but only those from EMI are DRM free.
Category: itunes | Tags: amazon-mp3, apple, global-expansion, itunes | Be the First to Comment »
01.16.08 - 11:35am
Four years ago iTunes was just a fledgling set to rise to unparalleled heights. At the time the Super Bowl was a huge booster for iTunes which combined with Pepsi launched a commercial set to Greenbay’s version of the song “I Fought the Law” encouraging buyers to buy legally online from iTunes rather than illegally downloading tunes from various sources.
Over 1,000,000 songs from iTunes were given away free in the Pepsi promotion and iTunes has then grown expeditiously year after year, becoming the extreme dominant in the download market and helping to propel iPods to explicit dominion.
Today however, a new era is emerging and rather than Apple being the underdog to Microsoft, with an almost cult like following, Apple is now the one on top and as the new “King of the Hill” is the one everyone wants to overcome.
Category: MP3 Players, apple, itunes | Tags: amazon, apple, drm, itunes, justin-timberlake, pepsi | Be the First to Comment »
01.11.08 - 03:03pm
Amazon has added Sony BMG to their already large repertoire of DRM free music as BMG joins Universal, Warner and EMI, selling their songs DRM free from the Amazon website. This puts Amazon’s DRM free catalog at an impressive 3.1 million songs.
The addition of BMG’s music on Amazon puts a larger dent in the Apple/iTunes dominace over the market as Apple still has yet to sell any of its music DRM free except that from EMI. All the other music on iTunes can only be played on an iPod and have limited download use due to the Fairplay restrictions on the music.
“We are constantly exploring new ways of making our music available to consumers in the physical space, over the Internet and through mobile phones, and this initiative is the newest element of our ongoing campaign to bring our music to fans wherever they happen to be,” said Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business and U.S. sales for Sony BMG, in a statement.
Category: itunes | Tags: amazon, apple, drm, itunes, sony-BMG | Be the First to Comment »
01.09.08 - 01:59pm
After numerous allegation against Apple, fines and upcoming lawsuits Apple has chosen to reduce the price of music downloads in the U.K. bringing an end to the European Commissions anti-trust investigation against Apple.
The U.K. was one of the few left out of standardized pricing that Apple had already set in Europe as a result of complaints from people traveling from country to country and getting different pricing wherever they went. Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, and Spain currently have unified iTunes pricing. The U.K. however still had a .10 cent higher price per song, due to their use of the pound rather then the euro.
“This is an important step towards a pan-European marketplace for music,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We hope every major record label will take a pan-European view of pricing.”
Category: itunes | Tags: apple, europe, itunes, uk | Be the First to Comment »
01.02.08 - 02:41pm
Just how many Zunes/iPods were under the Christmas tree could be somewhat judged by the increase in traffic that the Zune and iTunes website received on Christmas Day.
The Zune site jumped up 392 percent Christmas Day compared to Christmas Eve. The site also showed a 299 percent increase in traffic from last year. The large increase over the year before does much to reflect the positive impact the new Zunes have had on the market vs the widely criticized first release just before Christmas in 2006.
Apple continued to dominate however, with iTunes getting six times the traffic that the Zune music site got. iTunes jumped 339 percent from Christmas Eve to Christmas day, less of a jump than the Zune site but Hitwise reported that the iTunes website market share was .68 percent while the Zune website market share was just .009 percent.
The Apple store was also a huge hit on Christmas Day jumping 169% over last year.
Category: Zune, iPod | Tags: hitwise, iPod, itunes, Zune | Be the First to Comment »
12.28.07 - 04:13pm
Just on the heels of Apple’s announcement that it will be renting downloadable movies though iTunes comes the closure of WalMart’s highly touted DVD movie download buying service.
Wal-Mart only opened its video download store 11 short months ago and has already called it quits due to less than expected performance. Wal-Mart was the first to have movie contracts with all the major studios, something Apple had been trying to due but was unable to pull off due to Apple’s insistence on offering the movies for $9.99. Wal-mart offered the movies for $12.88 to $19.88, but was not able to sell them at the higher price. After all why buy a movie to download that you can only play on one computer when you can buy the DVD for the same price or just a couple dollars more and play it anywhere, anytime? Apple in spite of not having all the new movies was still able to stay ahead with their $9.99 price tag.
Category: apple | Tags: itunes, movie-downloads, walmart | Be the First to Comment »
12.27.07 - 01:28pm
Apple has made its first deal in online movie rentals through iTunes with News Corp.’s Twentieth Century Fox.
The record breaking deal should boost lagging sales of movies from iTunes and Apple TV, as well as set the precedent for more deals should it prove successful.
Users will be able to rent a film from Fox with a limited amount of time to watch it before the DRM encoding makes it void.
Apple has been trying to make the landmark deal with movie studios for some time now and has finally succeeded. The full details involved in the deal are expected to be announced at MacWorld on January 14th.
Category: apple | Tags: apple, fox, itunes, movies | Be the First to Comment »
12.18.07 - 11:53am
Sonic the Hedgehog is one of the most popular video games in the world selling over 45 million copies, since its 1991 introduction. A Japanese game, the Hedgehog called Rocket Sonic is the main character who performs hair-raising loop-de-loops and dizzy dives as he tries to prevent Dr. Eggmans from achieving world domination.
The ever so popular game has been tweaked so Rocket Sonic can perform all his daring escapades on the famous iPod. “We thought Sonic on the iPod was a great fit, and fortunately Apple felt the same way,” says Simon Jeffery, president and COO of Sega of America.
Rocket Sonic is not alone in becoming an iPod performer. Peggle is also available for play. Peggle, named by MSNBC in August 2007, as one of the “Top 5 most addictive computer games of all time”, features a colorful 2D background filled with different colored “pegs”. The objective is to complete 55 stages by removing all the orange pegs by bouncing the balls off other pegs and obstacles before one runs out of balls.
Category: itunes | Tags: apple, itunes, peggle, sonic | Be the First to Comment »
09.26.07 - 04:54pm
We’ve heard about Amazon’s soon to be music store for months and it is finally here, proving to be everything iTunes but for less.
Amazon has decided to go straight DRM free, launching with over 2 million songs from Universal and EMI. All DRM free. Apple has some DRM free music from EMI but not from anyone else. Amazon was lucky enough to step in at the right time between the Apple and Universal feud and has secured Universals songs DRM free. If you buy the same songs on iTunes you are locked.
Amazon is also offering the tunes for less. 31 percent less, selling their DRM free songs for just .89 cents while iTunes DRM free songs cost $1.29. Along with that the varied pricing in Amazon lets them offer many albums for less than iTunes traditional 9.99 price, with many below $4.99. Some of course are more than iTunes $9.99 but those you can just buy from iTunes. (Ah, the wonderful world of competition.)
Category: itunes | Tags: amazon, itunes, mp3-music-downloads | Be the First to Comment »
09.25.07 - 04:02pm
Record labels are trying all sorts of ways to sell music in the new digital world and not involve iTunes whose policies on non-varied pricing is frustrating for the labels. Warner may have come up with one of the best solutions so far.
Sticking to the $9.99 iTunes per album price at least for the moment, Warner has decided to try an experiment using one of their hottest artists James Blunt and MySpace. The experiment allows the consumer to listen to the entire album, purchase if you like and recieve an instant download compatible with your iPod, and then get the CD through mail as well for no extra charge. All without leaving the MySpace web page.
Warner has tried to sell music through MySpace before but due to the DRM encodings they were not compatible with the iPod taking away 70 percent of the market right off the top, even with James Blunt’s 250,000 friends 30 percent just doesn’t quite cut it. Warner is excited about LaLa however, because not only do they play the tunes on your iPod and support the varied pricing but they also have a form of anti-piracy protection.
Category: itunes | Tags: itunes, james-blunt, myspace, warner | Be the First to Comment »
