April has proved to be another gloomy month for the cats at Apple as retail sales continue a downward arc, according to figures from the NPD Group.
Analyst whizz Gene Munster from Piper Jaffray cast his beady eyes over the sales data and noted that Mac sales were down 1.8 percent compared to a year ago.
The media may be stuffed full of hand-wringing tales of evil pirate downloaders busily hammering the last nails into the music industry, but new figures show that legal downloads are soaring.
UK industry bods the BPI have announced that 9.5% of the population bought music downloads in 2008, a mighty leap upwards from the 5.1% who bought music online in 2007.
Sony has hoisted a vast box of its new X Series Walkmans into the air and given them a hefty kick towards the general direction of consumers at a UK launch today.
Looking to take on the mighty iPod Touch, the new Walkmans look pretty good to our eyes, sporting a 3in touch-screen and coming in 16GB or 32GB flavours, capable of ferreting away up to 7,000 songs or 40 hours of video.
Continue reading Sony X Series Walkman Takes On Apple’s iPod Touch
Music streaming service Spotify has struck up a deal with 7digital to offer users paid MP3 downloads.
The collaboration will give listeners access to more than 6m tracks for downloading and should help make what is already an irresistible app even more compelling.
Continue reading Spotify Teams Up With 7digital To Add MP3 Downloads
Another one falls.
Vodafone have announced that they are switching their music catalogue from Universal Music, Sony Music and EMI away from DRM-protected music to MP3 format.
This makes Vodafone the first global mobile operator to do it.
Not only will these tracks but DRM-free in the future, but people who have bought DRMd tracks already will be able to change them to MP3 for FREE. Are you listening Apple? No DRM-dropping tax.
Remix culture has just found its latest incarnation.
Kutiman, a member of a collective called bacon oppenheim, has taken music videos found on YouTube and blended the audio and used the visuals to create individual versions of tracks – essentially using YouTube as a box of samples to pick from to create some great tunes.
Continue reading ThruYou: Remix Cluture’s Latest Incarnation
A new UK based survey has found that nearly half of web users have used illegal file sharing sites to help themselves to free content.
A study involving over 1,000 consumers by Tiscali.co.uk and music site DrownedinSound (DiS) found that 46% of users had used peer-to-peer sites (P2P), with Limewire (34%) and BitTorrent (25%) being the most popular.
Continue reading Nearly Half Of UK Web Users Have Illegally Downloaded Music
The BBC is set to revolutionise radio listening with the introduction of a new “visual radio player” this month.
The technology is set to be trialed for a week on Radio 1’s Chris Moyles weekday mornings show (6.30am to 10am) and on the Annie and Nick show on Sunday evenings (7pm to 10pm), and will let users listeners head off to the DJs website and get a load of “complementary visuals.”
If you haven’t heard, mxiwit, the great Web service that lets people create their own online mixtape, complete with a player that looks like a real old compact cassette tape with rotating reels, is closing, describing their situation as being “between a rock and a hard place.”
There’s two pieces of good news to add to this sad news.
For a long time, one option for the music business to save themselves has been to offer an ‘all you can eat’ option for music – pay a monthly fee and listen to all of the music you fancy.
Continue reading Spotify Mini Review: (91%): Public Launch of Serious iTunes Competitor