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Apple iTunes Store Records 10 Billionth Download, Gives Away $10,000 Gift Card

Paul Lilly — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 09:45:18 -0600

Apple on Thursday announced that more than 10 billion songs have been purchased and downloaded from the company's iTunes Store.

"We're grateful to all of our customers for helping us reach this amazing milestone," said Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president of Internet Services. "We're proud that iTunes has become the number one music retailer in the world, and selling 10 billion songs is truly staggering."

Louie Sulcer, a 71-year-old from Woodstock, Georgia, made the 10 billionth purchase when he bought Johnny Cash's "Guess Things Happen That Way." As a result for his good timing (and good taste in music), Sulcer will receive a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card.

Web App of the Week: Tunesbag

David Murphy — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:50:14 -0600

Problem: You have a ton of awesome jams on your iTunes / Zune / Windows Media Player / multimedia organizer of choice, but you don't always use the PC that contains your ultimate rock collection. What do you do? There are a few answers, but all require some software setup in order for you to be able to access your music from afar. You could use Hamachi-based networks to access a shared iTunes library; You could also set up your primary machine as a radio server, which you can then use to stream your files via an easy-to-operate, Web-based interface!

Still, that's a lot of work. There has to be an easier solution, right? There is. It's called TunesBag, and it offers the same functionality you'd otherwise get by building your own Internet radio station the hard way. Although the service is limited to one GB of music for free accounts, that's still a hefty amount of rocking out for your average listener. And uploading, playing, and categorizing music using TunesBag's Web-based interface couldn't be easier--or faster!

Here's how it works: Sign up for the free service and you'll be given one gigabyte of space to upload music to. You can either dump your files into your TunesBag... bag... using a Web-based upload tool or a desktop updating client that integrates nicely with iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Winamp libraries. You can also email files in if you have no other recourse for getting that song you just downloaded into your Cloud-ish library.

From there, you can create playlists of your online library and sort through songs using a number of different criteria. It's analogous to a stripped-down version of iTunes' organizational scheme. To play a track, just click on it. The included player on the Web page will start blasting your music. If you want to shuffle your tracks, just hit the randomize button. As well, you can also search for more jams from the artist and rate the current song you're listening to all using the controls on your TunesBag page.

Simple, easy, efficient. While it would be awesome to find a way to automatically synchronize your library with TunesBag, I'm not going to complain about a Web-based player that takes all of five minutes (plus uploading time) to set up!

Each week, Maximum PC picks a new free or shareware download as its favorite of... the week. Have a nifty application that you can't live without? Twitter David Murphy @acererak with your latest suggestions.

Apple Pressing for Cheaper TV on iTunes

Bart Salisbury — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:53:14 -0600

Apple looks at the digital marketplace and it sees great potential. There are more digital consumers than ever, more options for consumption than ever, and more content than ever. But, the digital marketplace is underperforming. Going back to Econ 101, Apple suspects the lack of demand is related to price--specifically, prices are too high--especially for video. To open the floodgates of demand, Apple is asking TV networks and studios to half the price of their content on the iTunes Store: from $1.99 to $0.99 per episode.

For TV networks it’s not that simple. They draw revenue from over-the-air broadcasts, cable, DVD releases, and other pay-for-content providers. While revenues overall may be down, they don’t see how Apple’s proposal works for them. Sure, they may see additional revenue if digital demand picks-up in response to lower prices. But, they also risk taking a hit if there’s a concomitant drop in demand elsewhere. That’s a risk they don’t appear eager to take.

Apple’s request, which would definitely help its bottom line, is compatible with the preferences of an emergent class of digital consumers. They want their content. They want it now. And they want it cheap. These preferences, however, aren’t compatible with today’s content providers, who generate revenue from a variety of sources, and have interests that directly conflict with the emergent digital marketplace. For example, Comcast is about to swallow NBC, which makes it a content provider and a conduit for content. Comcast can’t let digital consumption threaten either. As long as this remains true, realization of the potential of the digital marketplace will be a long time coming.

Image Credit: Apple

Rumor: iTunes to Double as Cloud-based Music Streaming Service

Pulkit Chandna — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 08:30:31 -0600

Contrary to speculation, Apple's acquisition of LaLa may not lead to a run-of-the-mill subscription-based music streaming service, according to Mp3.com founder Michael Robertson. In a guest post on TechCrunch, Robertson revealed that Apple plans to use the acquisition to thrust iTunes and millions of its patrons into the cloud, instead. From the face of it, his insider sources were kind enough to let him on a lot of details.

An iTunes upgrade in the near future may deliver the cloud-enabled functionality that LaLa is known for. The upgrade will let users access their personal music library from anywhere through a web browser. It might not even require that a user's entire music collection be uploaded to the cloud. Instead, it will only be necessary to upload those tracks not already available on iTunes – quite a rare possibility.

“The Lala setup process provides software to store a personal music library online and then play it from any web browser alongside web songs they vend. This technology plus the engineering and management team is the true value of Lala to Apple,” Robertson wrote.

Apple Nabbed 99.4% of Mobile App Sales in '09

Paul Lilly — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 07:22:29 -0600

If market research firm Gartner's numbers are even remotely in the ballpark, then Apple just socked Android in the face, knocked its rival down, and then tea-bagged the little green open-source fanboy. Harsh? You bet, but there's really no way else to describe dominating the $4.2 billion mobile app market by grabbing a 99.4 percent share, leaving just .6 percent for the also-rans.

"As smartphones grow in popularity and application stores become the focus for several players in the value chain, more consumers will experiment with application downloads," Stephanie Baghdassarian, research director at Gartner, said in a statement. "Games remain the number one application, and mobile shopping , social networking, utilities, and productivity tools continue to grow and attract increasing amounts of money."

And most of it falls right into Apple's pocket. Even if Apple should lose some of its market share this year -- and it probably will -- the company still stands to make a king's ransom. According to Gartner, some 4.5 billion mobile apps will be sold in 2010, resulting in $6.8 billion in revenue. Jump ahead to 2013 and Gartner says there will be 21.6 billion apps sold for a total of $29.5 billion in revenue.

Download of the Week: SpeakerShare

David Murphy — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:25:00 -0600

Are you ready to rock? Because you'll be doing a lot of head-banging and dancing around once you've transformed every computer in your living area into a collective speaker system. Perhaps the better question remains unasked: Why would you do this? Because you can. Because you want to. Because it reverses the issue of having to connect to or stream from a central music repository (like an iTunes database) and instead allows you to push tunes out of a single music hub to anywhere you want to them to go.

Also, you want to do this because the app that makes this cacophonous symphony possible--SpeakerShare--is super-easy to use and well worth the small time investment you'll make. Here's how it works: You start by running an instance of SpeakerShare on all the networked computers (connected to all the speakers) that'll be blasting your music. These get set up as client servers in the main architecture. All it takes to do so is the click of a single mouse button. It's that easy.

You then head over to your main computer--the source of the music or audio you'll be sending out to all connected PCs. Use SpeakerShare to configure this system as the server, then select the appropriate sound output that represents all the sound your system plays (like Stereo Mix or Wave Out). That's it. Your sound goes over your network and out the speakers of SpeakerShare-enabled systems on a one-second delay. And you, friend, are now the life of the party.

Don't forget, you'll need to give SpeakerShare some kind of sound output to stream out--if your system doesn't have this kind of "What You Here" output, you might be out of luck. You'll also have to install Apple's Bonjour before you start streaming, but don't worry--this comes as part of its iTunes program.

In-flight Wi-Fi Provider Gogo Gears up to Launch an iTunes Style Video Rental Service Later This Year

Justin Kerr — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 14:25:32 -0600

Ever been stuck on a flight watching Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and wished you could whip out you’re laptop and download something else? Well Aircell, the founders of the largest in-flight Wi-Fi network are hoping that’s true, and are planning to launch a new video rental service later in the year to capitalize on that very idea.

Movies downloaded using the Aircell video service can be saved to any Windows PC and the renter has 24 hours to watch their purchase. The approach is similar to the iTunes model, but Aircell promises that the pricing will be competitive with Apple at $2 to $4 per TV show or movie, and presumably the file will be optimized for the limited bandwidth available in the air.

Surveys conducted by Aircell have suggested that a video on demand service would be popular with users who find most airlines entertainment options somewhat lacking. Unfortunately we still don't know if users will need to pay the $5-$13 Wi-Fi access fee in addition to the rental costs for the video, and clearly this will make or break it for most people. If you pay $10 for a 2 hour flight + $4 for a movie, that’s a $14 rental. It’s hard to imagine this would be the case, but you never know when it comes to the airlines these days.

Apple Adds Web-based Audio Clips to iTunes Preview

Paul Lilly — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 07:30:12 -0600

If you're going to call something "iTunes Preview," it'd be nice to, you know, actually be able to preview songs, and now you finally can.

To get it to work, head over to iTunes Preview through Apple's iTunes Charts page. Once there, mash on any album or artist and then hover your mouse cursor over a track number. You'll now see a little play icon which, when clicked, results in a 30-second snippet.

There are some caveats. You'll to have iTunes installed, and you can't preview an entire album. Nor does iTunes Preview offer up samples of movies, TV shows, audio books, or anything other than music. Still, it's a start, and a badly needed feature if iTunes Preview was going to live up to its name.