snapshot 7/11/08

Coldplay’s Viva La Vida Download Sales Total 394,000 - Biggest To Date In US
Coldplay has sold 394,000 downloads of its latest album, Viva La Vida, the biggest paid online album total in the United States. Not only is this the largest three week total for online sales, but it also represents 35% of the total sales of the album which has sold 1.1 million during the same period, a demonstration of the emergence of digital sales. Coldplay also nailed the best pre-order and first-week album totals on the iTunes Store, according to information confirmed by Apple.


Listening To Music Via TV And PC Rises
… a new survey by Parks Associates says 2/3rds of US and Canadian broadband households regularly use the PC to play music at home and a surprising 1/3 say they use their TV to listen to music. MP3 players ranked equal to TVs. In the report, Parks Associates analysts recommend that developers and service providers account for these standard platforms when designing new digital entertainment services. Music marketers should do the same.


Pandora and AOL Radio apps on the iPhone rock, roll users over to iTunes to buy
Enter two new brilliant apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Pandora and AOL Radio. Both services, available for free through Apple’s new App Store, take music discovery on mobile devices to the next level. While services have been around for a while that will tell you an artists name and track title, none do it quite as easy as these two apps do all on one device.

One of the killer features (at least for Apple) of both of these apps is that you can, with the touch of one button, find the music you are listening to on iTunes. It launches directly into the iPhone/iPod Touch iTunes app and takes you to that song/artist.


Guitar Hero aims to take on iTunes
Activision Blizzard, the games company formed by the merger of Activision with Vivendi’s games unit, plans to capitalise on the popularity of its Guitar Hero franchise by developing an online music platform that could rival iTunes. In an interview with the Financial Times, Bobby Kotick, chief executive of the new company, said creating a Guitar Hero online music platform was “the natural evolution” of a franchise that has sold close to 20m units and generated $1bn in revenues


Shazam on iPhone could change music discovery
he concept behind Shazam is simple: whenever you hear a song playing and can't identify it--on the car radio, at a friend's house, at a bar--you activate the Shazam application on your mobile phone. It "listens" to the song for about 30 seconds, then sends a text message to your phone identifying the artist and title. Shazam's database contains audio fingerprints for nearly 5 million songs, so there's a pretty good chance of a positive ID. However, closing the loop with an actual purchase was hard--you had to tag the song, then consult a Web site to see your tagged item, then go to another service (such as iTunes) to buy it.

The version of Shazam for the iPhone 2.0 fixes this problem: once you've tagged a song in Shazam, you can launch iTunes directly from that tagged song and buy the song immediately. That's assuming you have a Wi-Fi connection to the Internet--iTunes doesn't let you download music over a 3G data connection yet.