Tag: Digital Music
30 Trends in Digital Music: 6-10
It’s time for the second in our series of posts looking at the big trends in digital music – an area that Tech Digest has been covering more and more this year. Today’s set of five include choose-your-own pricing, USB music sticks, record labels taking on iTunes, gnarly old bands getting webby, and the potential of Joost and online TV for music.
30 Trends in Digital Music: 1-5
The world of digital music is an exciting place, whether you’re a record label, a band or a music fan. 2007 has seen huge amounts of activity, including DRM-free downloads, social network widgets, the rise of mobile music, Radiohead’s choose-your-own-price album, recommendation services, personal online radio, video karaoke sites, and the first trials of free music funded by advertising.
Analysis: Can the Nokia Music Store take on iTunes?
Nokia cut the virtual ribbon on its Nokia Music Store this morning in the UK, so I’ve spent the last few hours playing with it. You can read the blow-by-blow account of my first hour or so here, and check out a few screenshots here, but this post is an attempt to set down the strengths and weaknesses of the service in a more organised fashion, and come to a verdict about how it compares to iTunes.
More screenshots of the Nokia Music Store in action
This is just a companion post to my earlier blow-by-blow review of the Nokia Music Store, which went live in the UK today. Feast your eyes on the shot above, and the others after the jump, to see how it all works. The one above is the genre category page (click on them to get bigger versions)
Nokia Music Store launching this Thursday
That’s right, Nokia’s wannabe iTunes-killer is set to go live this Thursday morning (7am GMT to be precise). It was revealed at a launch event for the Nokia Music Store tonight in London, where the company was offering hands-on demos.
British Airways launching digital music single
So much easier is it these days to get into digital music, some rather unlikely players are jumping on board. British Airways releasing a single for digital download? Apparently, it's part of a drive to improve customer affinity and enhance…
Analysis: Have music download stores had their day?
It’s the best of times, the worst of times to be a digital music retailer. It’s the worst of times if you’re one of the less popular download stores, even if you’re owned by a big company.
In the last few weeks alone, Sony has announced plans to close its Connect service, Virgin has announced that its Virgin Digital service is for the chopper, and Yahoo is reportedly deciding whether its Yahoo Music service is worth continued support. Meanwhile, independent service AnywhereCD announced yesterday that it too is closing.
Opinion: HMV need more than gimmicks to attract kids to "cyber store"
Quick quiz now – do you still buy CDs on the high street? I rarely do these days, unless it’s an impulse buy in a sale as I browse, but then I don’t get much time to do that either like I used to. Let’s face it, we’re a cash rich, time poor society now and that means one thing – the Internet!
I’m not going to spit out the obvious downloading facts and figures that we all already know, digital music is big business and only a miniscule percentage of people reading this will never have bought or “found” a music track via the web…
Rumour: Amazon to launch its iTunes rival by mid-September
It’s no secret that Amazon is working on a digital music store: the company announced it back in May. However, a well-sourced report in the New York Post says the new service has a tentative launch date of… this month!
First hands-on impressions of the Nokia Music Store
At today’s Go Play event, Nokia announced its new Nokia Music Store service (see the earlier story and liveblog for full details). In the afternoon, I got hands on with the web and mobile versions, to see how they’re shaping up.
First, some factual info that didn’t come out in the earlier press conference:
– The DRM-protected tracks will be WMA files encoded at 192kbps. Initially, it’s using Microsoft’s old Windows Media DRM, but in the future, there’s scope to switch to the newer PlayReady system (you might remember, a couple of weeks ago, Nokia and Microsoft signed a deal to work together on the latter).
