itunes

Warner Music: It was wrong to go to war with our customers [Gasp!]

Truth will prevail, even when it first has to minnow its way through the calcified brain of a music-industry chief. At least, this is the story coming out of the GSMA Mobile Asia Conference, as reported by MacUser. Edgar Bronfman, a senior Warner Brothers executive, admitted to institutional incompetence:

We used to fool ourselves. We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won."

As TechCrunch notes, it's actually pretty amazing to hear the music chief openly admitting that the music industry considers[ed] its customers hostile combatants on the other side of a war.

Sad. But what may be worse is that Bronfman can't seem to understand the word "choice," as revealed by a later comment:… Read more

rVibe makes your music library streamy, viral

While the battle to access your music and video files on the go continues both of the software front with services like Qloud, Orb and Simplify Media, there's also the hardware side of things with placeshifting technology from Sling Media, SanDisk and others. Ultimately people want a really simple way to enjoy their stuff elsewhere with a soft or Webware experience that's easy to use.

rVibe is an interesting piece of Windows software that opened up its doors to the public last month. It's half jukebox, half social music marketplace that's taken a new approach to music pricing and sharing by giving users a sizable array of songs that can be both streamed and downloaded using two different price points. While the music comes from a combination of sources, the actual transfer of the songs is handled via p2p in a similar fashion to Napster in the days or yore.

Streaming a song will cost you $.03 a pop, while downloading an entire copy (sans-DRM and at a audiophile-friendly 320 kbps) runs $.99. RVibe has a built-in recommendation service that lets you suggest a track you've purchased to one of your friends. If they end up buying it, you get $.05 back, which can either be spent on more music or donated to charity. It's also worth noting that every time you pay for a streamed song, it will reduce the price of purchasing the track by subtracting the price of a streaming session, all the way down to $.78 a track (or seven streamed plays). While there's a preview portion of the service called "auditions" I wouldn't mind seeing a super low cost streaming option in other popular online music stores to avoid purchasing songs with deceptively good preview clips.

Today they're launching "rVibe Anywhere" which is their personal streaming component. Assuming you've got a copy of rVibe running on the machine with your music library, you can get full access to all your tracks, along with the capability to share any purchased songs with others with an embeddable player widget. While the incredibly popular iTunes software from Apple can accomplish similar feats locally (and across the Web by fooling it with plug-ins), rVibe's solution is a little more extensible from the get go when it comes to making music sharing a social experience. Despite Apple launching their own set of Widgets earlier this year, clicking on a song still requires firing up iTunes, which everyone might not have.

When ringtone love misses the mark

There's always potential for massive dorkiness when parents venture into a new pop culture arena like customized ringtones. I had stayed away from this trend, due to a general state of information overload as well as concerns about deceptive ringtone services that promise a free ringtone and then surreptitiously subscribe you to ongoing charges.

But this week I have been getting to know my iPhone better and the new version of iTunes has a ringtone function, so I decided to check it out.

The new iTunes feature is easy to use. You buy a ringtone-designated song from iTunes for 99 cents, select the snippet you want to use, and then pay another 99 cents to make it into a ringtone that you can upload to iPhone. Now there is theoretically a workaround that you can use to create free ringtone, but I can't vouch for it. For me, I wasn't going to sweat the $1.98, for which you do get the actual song added to your iTunes library.

Okay, getting the ringtone is easy, but who is there to solve the existential angst of deciding which song to use to announce the incoming call of that special someone? My husband Michael is a musician, so I didn't want any old piece of pop dreck to signal his calls. Given my taste, it was at least going to be a very special piece of pop dreck.

Who else is laughing at the music industry?

Warner Music Group--a company that originally took Apple and its iTunes service to task for not allowing it to sell music at a premium--has changed its entire outlook on the music downloading business and has praised Apple for knowing what is best for everyone involved.

"You need to look no further than Apple's iPhone to see how fast brilliantly written software presented on a beautifully designed device with a spectacular user interface will throw all the accepted notions about pricing, billing platforms and brand loyalty right out the window. And let me remind you, the genesis of the iPhone is the iPod and iTunes--a music device and music service that consumers love," Warner Music Group's CEO Edgar Bronfman gushed, according to a blog post by Simon Aughton on MacUser.

Am I the only one that enjoyed a hearty laugh after reading this clown wax poetic on how wonderful Apple is? If you look closely at what he said, you can almost see him kneeling at Steve Jobs' altar begging for forgiveness. Now that is what I call comedy.

But why has Warner Music seen the light all of a sudden? After months of claiming that his company knew what was best for consumers, Bronfman finally found out the hard way that the music industry knows nothing about consumers.… Read more

Episode 603: Dancing with the Google

Zune Fan Fiction

Does anyone know what the hell they're putting in the water cooler over at ZDNet?

Because.... damn.

Larry Dignan (does anyone know which one is Larry in that picture? Is he the sysadmin, the college professor or the metrosexual? [UPDATE: In comments, Larry says he's the sysadmin. Who had sysadmin in the pool?]) has seen the future, friends! And the future is...

ZUNE!

Actually, the Macalope suspects that Dignan drank a few too many Zimas and fell asleep watching Superman II and the line "You will bow down before Zod! You, and one day, your heirs!" … Read more

Simplify Media now lets Winamp users share music anywhere

Although it hasn't exactly exploded into the mainstream music-listening population at large, the music-sharing application Simplify Media (download it for Windows or Mac) is a fan favorite of several CNET editors and staffers.

Simplify Media has always allowed you to listen to your iTunes playlists on the road or share them with friends. Yesterday, it announced support for the popular digital-music jukebox app Winamp for Windows.

When you install Simplify Media, you must choose whether it will work with Winamp or iTunes playlists. Those of us who occasionally use both apps and thought we might be able to consolidate playlists are out of luck. You can, however, change your preferred playlist program after installation.… Read more

Is iTunes a monopoly? One out of one bloggers agree!

Boy, this whole thing with Adrian Kingsley-Hughes lobbing balls in the air only to have Apple bloggers mercilessly smashing them back down in his side of the court really doesn't make for very good tennis, does it?

Lord knows what satisfaction he sees in it, other than the increased hit counts from people linking to him and saying "Can you believe this guy?!"

Kingsley-Hughes has sadly trodden off the path of virtue he set for himself on his PC Doctor blog where his Q&A says:

Why do you rarely talk about anything Mac/Linux/etc ... … Read more

Episode 600: TiVo is watching YOU

iTunes 7.5: Updated, but who cares?

Apple's omnipresent media player iTunes has quietly upgraded to version 7.5 for both Windows and Mac. There's no grand new interface, no code-scrubbing to make the Window version load quicker, and certainly no support for Linux users. There's not a lot to bother with, period, unless you're a Old World iPhone customer.