80 dash 89 dot com

WSJ.com
The chief executive of EMI Music, Alain Levy, said EMI had discussed the issue with Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs and believed Apple planned to end its single-price policy for iTunes music.

It was bound to happen, but I dying to find out how VARIABLE the pricing will be.

Tags:iTunes, Music

So today not only I get a new version of textexpander we learn that indeed Apple’s Leopard operating system will be available on October 26th for $129. Over at the iTunes Store it seems they have added some indies to iTunes Plus (DRM free) and dropped the single track price from 1.29 to 99 [...]

Ars Technica
“Apple declined to pay more than double the wholesale price for each NBC TV episode, which would have resulted in the retail price to consumers increasing to $4.99 per episode from the current $1.99,” wrote the company in a statement. “We hope they will change their minds and offer their TV shows to the [...]

New York Times
NBC Universal, unable to come to an agreement with Apple on pricing, has decided not to renew its contract to sell digital downloads of television shows on iTunes.
The media conglomerate — which is the No. 1 supplier of digital video to Apple’s online store, accounting for about 40 percent of downloads — notified [...]

Apple News
Apple® today announced the debut of the John Lennon solo catalog on the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com). Sixteen of Lennon’s solo works from EMI Music are available for the first time on iTunes starting today, with the “Lennon Legend” and “Acoustic” collections making their worldwide digital debuts. For a limited period of 30 days, exclusive [...]

New York Times
Universal, the world’s biggest music conglomerate, said it would offer albums and songs without the software, known as digital rights management, through existing digital music retail services like RealNetworks and Wal-Mart, nascent services from Amazon.com and Google, and some artists’ Web sites.
But the music will not be offered D.R.M.-free through Apple’s iTunes, the [...]

Today @ PC World
Today the band AC/DC says it’s bypassing Apple’s iTunes and has brokered an exclusive deal with Verizon to sell its music through Verizon’s online music store.

I hope AC/DC is getting a big cut from Verizon because there is no way are going to move as many copies as they would through [...]

Yahoo! Finance
Apple® today announced that more than three billion songs have been purchased and downloaded from the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com). iTunes is the world’s most popular online music, TV and movie store featuring a catalog of over five million songs, 550 television shows and 500 movies. iTunes recently surpassed Amazon and Target to become the [...]

Steve Gordon over at the The Register thinks that music companies should get a royalty on each iPod sold. Of course the assumption is that iPod owners are thieves and that the music companies should be able to recoup some of their losses by instituting a tax on consumer electronics.

Tags:iPod, Music

azcentral.com
Viacom Inc., owner of Paramount Pictures, is considering offering movie rentals through Apple Inc.’s iTunes online store, Chairman Sumner Redstone said.
Those things are being considered,” Redstone said today in an interview at the Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. Viacom spokesman Carl Folta and Apple spokesman Steve Dowling didn’t return phone calls [...]

Times Online
Retail sales, for which figures have been compiled since 1969, the year that the Beatles’ Abbey Road album was released, have never fallen by so much, although there was a 9 per cent decline in 1982 before the arrival of the compact disc.

Tags:CD, iTunes, Music

New York Times
Album sales have continued their downward slide this year, but sales of digital tracks are up almost 50 percent over this time last year.
A total of 229.8 million albums were sold in the United States from Jan. 1 to July 1, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures released Wednesday. That is a 15 percent [...]

DVD Jon has found a way to hack the iPhone so you don’t have to activate it with AT&T. You lose the phone functionality and it’s a Windows only hack at the moment. So if you’re interested in a $600 Wi-fi enabled iPod this may be for you. I suspect in a future update this [...]

InformationWeek
Apple appears to be in a state of denial. The company reportedly told the San Francisco Chronicle that it is still in negotiations with Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group (UMG).
“We are still negotiating with Universal,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told Chronicle staff writer Ellen Lee. “Their music is still on iTunes and their not re-signing [...]

WSJ.com
Highlighting ongoing tension between the music industry and Apple Inc., Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group is set to notify the Cupertino, Calif. company that it is not renewing a long term contract to sell digital music downloads through the increasingly powerful iTunes Store, according to people familiar with the situation.
The move does not mean, however, [...]

Ever since they come out with iTunes Plus the iTunes music store has been dog slow. It took me two days to download 177 songs when I upgraded them to iTunes Plus (I have a 6 meg connection). Now I’m getting a lot of time out errors when I click on links; listening to a [...]

AppleInsider
Olivia Harrison told reporters on Friday that the work of her late husband and his bandmates was finally on a fast track to the Apple online music store now that multiple artistic and legal hurdles were out of the way.
“We just have a few things to work out elsewhere,” she said.
Though hopeful for a release [...]

iTunes 7.2 was just released and it adds support for DRM free music. Expect some DRM free music to appear on the iTunes music store later on today. Some of Paul McCartney’s back catalogue is also starting to appear on iTunes.

Tags:DRM, iTunes, Music

CNN Money is reporting that Amazon will be starting a DRM free music download service later this year. They will be offering songs from EMI and independents with no copy protection in the MP3 format. No word on pricing or the bit rate the songs will come in.

Tags:DRM, EMI, Music

Billboard
McCartney tells Billboard in an exclusive interview to be published tomorrow (May 11) that a deal to finally make the Beatles catalog available for sale online is “virtually settled.”

Tags:Beatles, iTunes, Music