Tag: Itunes
Winamp – 10 years old and BACK to battle iTunes
Pretty much everyone’s first MP3 player back when the piracy scene exploded into life in the late-90s, it’s been a little quiet for Winamp over that last few years thanks to everyone, bizarrely, preferring to pay for music and use things like iTunes instead.
Well Winamp – and the 62 million people who still regularly use older versions – could be
Opinion: Why it's now COOL to be a GEEK
Jonathan Weinberg writes…
This is possibly the most important techno story I’ve seen all week, it’s officially ok to be geeky. A new list of the UK’s most coolest brands has been released and the top 10 contains SEVEN firms related to gadgets, gaming and the internet. So if that’s not a reason to embrace your virtual friends and give thanks I don’t know what is.
The iPod was only pipped into second place in the CoolBrands 2007 by James Bond’s favourite car, the Aston Martin, and you could argue there’s something geeky about being a fan of that motor. No longer is it nerdy to be geeky – because both are different…
Vodafone signs up MusicStation mobile music service to battle iTunes / Nokia Music Store
It’s safe to assume Vodafone HASN’T got the iPhone, then. The company has announced an exclusive deal with Omnifone to launch the latter’s MusicStation subscription service in the UK for Christmas.
It’ll cost £1.99 a week for unlimited music downloads, with the MusicStation application being preloaded on new Vodafone handsets, but also working with existing phones too (presumably you’ll be able to download the application from Vodafone’s Live portal).
iPod obsolete, Walkman device will rule, says boss of Sony-owned record label
Rick Rubin, co-chairman of Columbia Records, has publicly stated that the iPod and iTunes models are doomed, with the way to go being subscription-based, music-anywhere, services.
In fact, he thinks the whole music business will only be saved by going to a subscription model, but he’s quick to pick on the iPod. “The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home,” he said.
Rubin’s motivation is that adopting cheap music subscription services will curb illegal downloads, believing that “If music is easily available at a price of five or six dollars a month, then nobody will steal it.”
I’m not convinced.
NBC Universal pulls TV shows from iTunes: no more Heroes for iPod owners
It’s just a few days since Apple finally started selling TV shows on the UK iTunes Store for £1.99 a pop, but it’s now facing a serious hiccup over in the US.
NBC Universal has just announced that it won’t be renewing its deal to sell shows like Heroes (pictured), The Office and Battlestar Galactica through iTunes. NBCU apparently is responsible for 30% of digital video sales through the iTunes Store, so it’s quite a blow for Apple. Although in fairness, it’s also a bunch of own-nose-biting lost revenue for NBCU.
Rumour: Amazon to launch its iTunes rival by mid-September
It’s no secret that Amazon is working on a digital music store: the company announced it back in May. However, a well-sourced report in the New York Post says the new service has a tentative launch date of… this month!
Apple may launch official iPhone ringtones via iTunes on Wednesday
Even before the iPhone launched, we’ve been expecting there to be some way of purchasing and uploading ringtones to the iPhone via iTunes. Now several prominent US newspapers are reporting that Steve Jobs could use his special event on Wednesday (the star of the show rumoured to be new touchscreen, Intel-based iPods) to launch an iPhone ringtone service.
As the Crazy Frog will tell/irritatingly shout at you, there’s money to be made from ringtones, particularly as Apple may wish to cash in on the iPhone’s ability to assign individual tones to each contact.
First hands-on impressions of the Nokia Music Store
At today’s Go Play event, Nokia announced its new Nokia Music Store service (see the earlier story and liveblog for full details). In the afternoon, I got hands on with the web and mobile versions, to see how they’re shaping up.
First, some factual info that didn’t come out in the earlier press conference:
– The DRM-protected tracks will be WMA files encoded at 192kbps. Initially, it’s using Microsoft’s old Windows Media DRM, but in the future, there’s scope to switch to the newer PlayReady system (you might remember, a couple of weeks ago, Nokia and Microsoft signed a deal to work together on the latter).
Liveblog: Nokia's Go Play music launch in London
Nokia is hosting an event today called Go Play, which looks set to see the debut of the company’s rumoured digital music store, which would be a direct iTunes competitor. Its new N-Gage mobile games platform (as opposed to the old N-Gage games phones) is also set to feature.
I’m liveblogging the event in full: see below for the latest couple of entries, and click on the link below for the full liveblog in chronological order.
Nokia unveils Nokia Music Store, its iTunes rivalling digital music store
As predicted, Nokia announced its digital music store this morning, at its Go Play event in London. The new store is called Nokia Music Store, and it will launch by Christmas in Europe. Nokia claimed that it's the first…
