This is a bit of news that shouldn’t come as a surprise to most of you, according to a recent study by the University of Reading, 75% of students would rather pay to download their music, than pay to stream music from a site or  purchase it in a store. I could have told you that! Not only that, but the students want to download from the cheapest website, meaning they don’t want to pay the extra money for iTunes and their digital rights management fees.

A new site, TunesPro.com, was recently launched and is competing with other music downloading services. The target base for the site is the younger generation who know where to download free music, but are swayed by the possibility of corrupted files and viruses. TunesPro has one advantage in it’s favor, for many songs, it only charges a mere 19 cents per song with a steep discount with the purchase of an entire album. The record companies do pick the prices, so there is a higher price for songs that come from, presumably, the larger record companies, but the site has agreements with many record companies in an attempt to keep prices as low as possible. Continue Reading

It’s safe to say that that most of us are able to catch up on our TV shows thanks to the wonderful world of streaming online. In fact, there are many who may not even have cable due to the convenience of streaming television shows today. If your show is not available on the network’s website, then it’s probably on Hulu.

It’s somewhat like the evolution of mp3s. Songs used to come in a package called a “COMPACT DISC” – CD for short. Anyone remember those? Just because CDs are becoming extinct as mp3s dominate music form thanks to iTunes, Apple now seems to think they can take place of your cable box, too.

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Yesterday was a big day for Apple. The iPod Nano got outfitted with video, the iPod Touch doubled in size, and most importantly, Steve Jobs was back from his liver transplant and in full fighting force. While there was no official announcement of The Beatles coming to iTunes, there was still plenty of excitement, and thanks to Wired we have the whole rundown.

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The Tap is back.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the film This is Spinal Tap, beloved mockumentary band Spinal Tap have released a new seven-minute short film called Stonehenge: ‘Tis a Magic Place. The film is available to download exclusively from iTunes starting today for $1.99.

The seven minute short marks iTunes’ first original film, where Spinal Tap, having put Stonehenge on the map in their legendary song about the world heritage site, pay their first visit to the monument.

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iTunes continues to climb its way up the ladder to their final destination: Total domination in sales.

They’ve made a few changes here and there with the 3-tier pricing but it seems like it hasn’t phased digital consumers out there one bit. According to a release statement the NPD Group, Apple’s iTunes accounts for 25 percent of all music units sold, up from 14 percent in 2007 and 21 percent in 2008.

Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD, states, “The growth of legal digital music downloads, and Apple’s success in holding that market, has increased iTunes’s overall strength in the retail music category.” This is very true, except we’re not sure how steady the rate of legal or illegal downloads will be.

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Alice in Chains have released a new song entitled “A Looking In View” today on iTunes. The band, which was one of the main bands of the so-called Grunge movement in the early 1990s, was basically considered finished when vocalist Layne Staley died of an overdose in 2002. However, the surviving members of the band, which came out of the same Seattle area as fellow prominent bands Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, has since enlisted a new vocalist, by the name of William DuVall.

Before I heard this new song, I was apprehensive at best, as I always am when bands replace singers. Staley was the main focal point of Alice in Chains, so the prospect of replacing his thunderous voice made me skeptical. “A Looking In View”, though, BLEW ME AWAY. DuVall channels Staley so well it’s eerie. The track sounds like it belongs on one of AIC’s albums in the early 1990s. I almost can’t believe it came out today. I think this reinvention of Alice in Chains might just work, as DuVall seems more than capable of handling the singing duties.

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British police have arrested a group of London-based DJs who allegedly were involved in a music scam where iTunes and Amazon were used dishonestly to claim illegal royalties.

The 10-member group of DJs are said to have uploaded 19 song compilations to iTunes and Amazon via music distribution service Tunecore. Afterward they used over 1,500 stolen US and UK credit cards to open new accounts and buy the music at $10 per purchase.

The swindle was designed to reap the royalty payments off the music, which was paid by the unaware download sites.

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Music download service eMusic announced on Monday that it had struck a licensing deal with Sony Music. Sony will be including some of its older catalog releases in eMusic’s library of more than 5.5 million tracks later this year.

eMusic is a subscription service that gives users a allotted number of tracks for a monthly fee. As part of the recent Sony deal, the company has raised its price from $10 a month to $12, and lowered the allotment of tracks from 30 per month to 24. Some quick math shows that the price per track jumped from 30 cents to 50 cents.

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Amazon is partnering with Tunecore to provide any artist with on-demand CD printing and distribution for $31 a year. For that lowly sum, they will handle the creation of a 10-track album, passing all other costs to the buyer.

Finally, a service that will remove the middle-man and make it easier for artists to provide albums for fans on Amazon and iTunes, without the exorbitant cost normally associated with CD manufacturing.

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