Tag: Digital
Apple explores new music options – iTunes Pass
This is what I like to see – innovative new ways of buying music that encourages people to actually spend money on bands they love. Venturebeat reports that Apple is experimenting with something called iTunes Pass, which allows fans to buy a pass for a certain group or artist and then get everything that artist releases for a given time period.
Apple’s piloting it with Depeche Mode. You can buy a pass for $19 and you’ll get the band’s new single right now, the album when it comes out, and some other exclusive tracks too. You’ll also get any videos and artwork that the band puts out before June 16th, which is when the pass expires.
All the content you get is DRM-free, though it will show up in Apple’s AAC format. Apple also guarantees that the value of the pass won’t exceed the value of the individual items, so you’re getting a good deal however you look at it.
For my favourite bands, I’d definitely sign up for this. For stuff I’m less excited about, I wouldn’t, but that’s not really the point of the scheme. It’s about making fans feel special, giving bands a greater connection to those people, and maybe actually making some money off music again. Good work, Apple.
Is it something you’d use? What bands would you sign up for if they were offered? Let us know in the comments.
(via Venturebeat)
VIDEO: Spotify iPhone application in action
Digital Buzzard’s managed to get hold of a video of a Spotify iPhone application in action. We’ve been aware of the iPhone app being in development for a while, as well as an S60 app, and presumably an Android one, but we haven’t seen it running before now.
As you can imagine, it looks fantastic. It promises to give you access to over-the-air streaming of Spotify’s entire music library, as well as playlist access. Best of all, you’ll be able to cache playlists while in Wi-Fi areas so that you’ll be able to play them back when you’re on the go. Initially it’ll only be available to Premium users (presumably because it’s tricky to work out how to serve ads in cached mode).
But the big question here is “will Apple let them do it?”. This service completely replaces everything that the iTunes store does on the device, offering on-demand access to songs. We’ve seen what happens when companies try to improve existing iPhone functionality.
That said, Last.fm exists happily on the device. The difference might be that the Last.fm application won’t let you listen to tracks on-demand, just offers you various radio stations based on your listening habits. It won’t cache songs, either.
Proper streaming mobile music is the holy grail for a lot of people. Already I barely listen to my MP3 collection on my PC any more, relying almost totally on Spotify. If I could get it on my mobile phone, too, reliably, then my Zune might end up totally retired.
(via Digital Buzzard)
Create EPIC panoramic photographs with the GigaPan EPIC digital camera image stitching robot thing
You know those photo-stitching options you get on digital cameras and phones? You know how they’re rubbish and they never work? So you never use them? Because they’re rubbish? And they never work?
Well this one does. The GigaPan EPIC works because it removes the human being and it’s wobbly handy and blurry vision from the equation, automatically taking then building panoramic photos with megapixel counts that can hit the thousands.
You plop your digital camera in the holder and DigiPan’s PRECISE MOTORISED HAND rotates, snaps and builds…
NOISE GATE: Napster 4.6 – the return of Napster?
Ahhhh, Napster. Back in 1999, I sat there for days, on a 56kbps connection, downloading music. As a result of that, and Audiogalaxy, I became an enormous music fan and I’ve spent thousands of pounds on music over the years that I’m very convinced that I wouldn’t have spent if it hadn’t been so easy to ‘try before you buy’.
Today the news broke that Napster’s relaunching in the UK. Of course, it’s not the real Napster – it’s what was formerly Roxio – a DRM-based subscription service. The company has just released version 4.6 of its player, which purports to allow subscribers to access and play their music on any internet-connected computer, without downloading any software.
Top 10 Tuesday Wednesday: Free, Legal, Music on the Internet
I’m going to take a break from gadgets today, like Dan did yesterday for Technology Deathmatch, to tell you about some of my favourite sources of free, legal music on the internet. It’s entirely possible, contrary to what major record labels would have you believe, to live completely free of paying for recorded music.
Not all offer downloads that’ll work on your MP3 player – some just stream – and not all these sites are going to be around forever, due to the turbulent nature of the digital music market around now, but if you can live with both those caveats, then click over the jump for my top ten sites where you can get free, legal, music.
Universal digital chief: Android's selling bucketloads of Amazon MP3s, litigation is not a long-term fix to piracy
I haven’t exactly hidden my contempt in the past for Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group. For many years, UMG has ridden the coattails of the other record labels, particularly the trailblazing EMI, when it came to digital music. It was with mild trepidation, therefore, that I began to read Cnet’s interview with UMG’s Digital Music head honcho, Rio Caraeff.
There are a number of interesting nuggets of info in the interview – that Android’s driving “a ton” of sales for Amazon MP3, that litigation is not “a definitive or long-term fix” for piracy, and another confirmation of the “tens of millions of dollars” that Rio had previously claimed the label was getting from YouTube.
Most interesting of all, though, is the way that Rio sounds like a guy who’s really got his head screwed on. He speaks very knowledgably about digital music, but the most telling statement is when he says “We’re trying new things constantly. There is nothing we won’t try.” Trying new stuff was one of the central themes of my Six Tenets series about how the next generation of music companies will work. Good to hear someone so high up in the ‘traditional’ industry echo those sentiments.
Cnet’s Rio Caraeff Interview
Related posts: Universal Music: We’re getting heaps of cash from YouTube | Dell fills its PCs with Universal MP3s
CES 2009: Casio compacts – Exilim EX-Z400, EX-Z270, EX-S12, EX-S5, EX-FS10 and EX-FC100
Gosh, what a long list of product names. No time for a long, gratuituous intro then, let’s jump straight into specs.
The big hitters are the EX-FS10 and EX-FC100. The former has a 9.1-megapixel sensor and 3x optical zoom. It’s 16.3mm thin, and has a 2.5″ LCD display. The latter is also 9.1 megapixel, and expands to a 5x zoom and 2.7″ touchscreen. It’s also got CMOS anti-shake.
Impressively, though, they can both capture at amazingly high speeds – 30 shots-per-second 6-megapixel still images, and movies at up to 1,000fps. That speed is going to good use, too – you can set it to take a burst, and automatically pick the least blurred, smiliest, eyes-open photo, or you can pick the best one yourself. It’ll also do 720p HD video. $350 (£231) for the EX-FS10, and $400 (£264) for the EX-FC100, both out in March in the US.
T-Mobile adds Last.fm and Wikipedia to its mobile jukebox service
This is potentially game-changing for mobile music. T-Mobile has added music-discovery functionality from Last.fm to its mobile jukebox service. The addition means that users of the service can simply put in an artist’s name, and they’ll receive a list of other musicians that they might like.
With each option presented, you’ll have the option to stream a 30 second preview (why not a full preview?) and then buy the track. Users will also get plenty of biographical info about the artist, thanks to a partnership with Wikipedia.
iTunes DRM-free before the year end?
There’s a lot of rumbling this morning on the intertubes about iTunes potentially going DRM-free on all labels as of today. It would be a dramatic change from Apple’s famously ‘locked-down’ way of doing things, and could damage the iPod’s sales as consumers learn they can play their media on other devices.
Download site 7Digital won a coveted Tech Digest Official Badge of Awesomeness earlier this year for being the first download site to go 100% DRM-free. Many have since followed, but iTunes remains a holdout, with the majority of its catalogue still lumbered with restrictions.
The Mintpass Mintpad internet, notepad, writing, watching, digital camera, media THING
The global gadget development arms race to see who can fit the most stuff into the smallest, whitest box has taken a dramatic turn today, thanks to this clever little everything-in-one miniature… digital… wi-fi… thing.
You can write on it, browse the internet on it, listen to music on it, take photos on it, watch films on it and, most importantly of all, get it out of your very smallest pocket and impress people with it by showing them all of the above. It all happens on a fairly minuscule 2.86″ touch screen, mind…
