Friday, February 15, 2008

snapshot 2/15/08

Beatport To Launch Hip-Hop Download Store Beatsource Today
Beatport, the leading dance music download store, is set to launch Beatsource, their online store devoted to Hip-Hop and urban music today. After several months of promotional teases, the store is now ready for prime time.


Report: iTunes more popular than illegal file sharing
A recent report from market research company NPD Group shows that purchasing music from Apple’s iTunes Store is more popular among 9- to 14-year-olds (also called tweens) than illegally downloading music over the Internet. However, even though iTunes is making gains against piracy, the issue of illegally sharing music is still strong.In the report, NPD said that 70 percent of tweens are now using legal means to download music. iTunes, the most popular such service for this age group, was used by 49 percent of those surveyed.


The Eagles' Comeback Record Certified 7X Platinum
The Eagles' comeback record, Long Road Out Of Eden, was certified seven times Platinum by the RIAA in January for over seven million copies sold. Country artists were the big winners for the month, as Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats" became a double-Platinum digital single and "Jesus Take The Wheel" went Platinum as a digital single. Superstar Garth Brooks saw his newest best-of set, The Ultimate Hits, go five times Platinum.


News Corp. Working On Music ‘Hulu’ For MySpace
paidContent has learned that News Corp (NYSE: NWS). is pursuing a music joint venture for MySpace—similar to Hulu, its video joint venture with NBC Universal (NYSE: GE), but with variations on the theme. The constant in both instances is content for equity. Under this scheme, MySpace would be the operator with the major music labels—Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG), EMI—as content providers and equity partners. MySpace would be a distributer but, like Hulu, the idea would be a mixed portal-distribution experience. Music would be DRM-free and ad supported. No label has signed yet but a source familiar with the situation said that could change in a matter of weeks. The theory is that once one signs on, the rest will follow. (EMI would seem a likely candidate but Sony (NYSE: SNE) BMG already has an interesting deal with MySpace.) That doesn’t always work but, as Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) has shown, it can.

MySpace, which claims more than 7 million bands with on MySpace Music, has explored and experimented with numerous ways to capture the full value of music to the site, including a recent limited test of ad-supported music downloads. Music has been at the core since the beginning and remains a major driver. Last fall, MySpace and Sony BMG set up a revenue-sharing partnership for sponsorships and ads with the label’s artists’ video and audio content within MySpace.


The Complete Guide to iTunes Movie Rentals, Part 1
Rented content is restricted to only being stored in a single place at any given time. Unlike purchased content, which is synchronized from your main iTunes library onto your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV, and can easily be in several places at once, rented content must be moved from your iTunes library to whichever device you want to use it on. If you decide later that you want it on a different device, you must move it back to your iTunes library, and then move it back out to the new device. To make matters even more complicated, you have to actually be connected to the iTunes Store and logged in using the account that was used to rent the content in question.

  • No specific facility is provided for moving a rental from one iTunes library to another. Copying the file between libraries manually will not work, as the authorization keys will not be updated—the resulting video will import into the secondary iTunes library, but will not play regardless of computer authorization. The only way to accomplish transferring content to another iTunes library seems to be via an iPod or iPhone - a much more convoluted process than should be necessary.
  • In terms of iPod support, iTunes rented content is presently only supported on the current model iPods—the iPod classic, iPod nano (video), iPod touch and iPhone. Rented content cannot be transferred to or viewed on a fifth-generation iPod.
  • Supported iPod models and the Apple TV must be running recent firmware versions. The Apple TV requires the major 2.0 update, while the iPod classic and iPod nano require v1.1 firmware, and the iPod touch and iPhone require v1.1.3 firmware. The $20 application package for the iPod touch is not required to enable rental support.
  • Content rented on the Apple TV 2.0 interface can only be stored and viewed on that specific Apple TV. It cannot be transferred back to your iTunes library, or transferred to a different Apple TV device.
  • High-Definition content can only be rented from the Apple TV 2.0 interface. It is not available via the iTunes application itself.

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