TheAppleBlog

I once spent almost 3 months trying to track down a song that I had heard a few times on the car radio while commuting to and from work back in 2000. I was pulling my hair out because I kept missing the DJ to catch the name of the record. To make things worse, [...]

Following in the ambient footsteps of Eno’s inaugural iPhone app, Bloom, comes RjDj. Developed by Reality Jockey, an Austrian dev outfit, they describe RjDj as, “the next generation of walkman or mp3 player… a digital drug which causes mind twisting hearing sensation.”
Wrapped up as a cute little iPhone toybox, RjDj is actually a platform for Reactive [...]

Yesterday the YouTube team announced via their blog that they would begin incorporating “click-to-buy” links which direct users to iTunes or Amazon.com alongside videos of select YouTube partners.  According to the blog, the links are intended to help scratch that “I love this song/game, I wish I could buy it right now!” itch that viewers [...]

Seemingly not content with having fathered an entire musical genre, pioneered generative music, produced U2’s Where The Streets Have No Name, collaborated with Bowie and generally rubbed-shoulders with a raft of modern music legends, Brian Eno has now released his first iPhone app dubbed Bloom ($3.99).
Developed by Peter Chilvers, in collaboration with Eno, the app [...]

Norway has taken their two-year fight against iTunes and Apple’s FairPlay DRM to its next step, and will now ask the government to force Apple to open their iTunes music to other devices besides the iPod. 
As background, this all began when Norway’s consumer ombudsman, Bjorn Erik Thon, ruled that Apple’s FairPlay DRM violated the country’s consumer rights [...]

We reported earlier on the possibility of a 66% raise in royalty fees for digital music distributors. Have no fear readers, the iTunes store will continue offering the generous service of providing somewhere for you to dump all that spare cash. According to CNET News, the Copyright Royalty Board informed interested parties yesterday [...]

Fortune has an article on an upcoming ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board where artists are proposing a 6 cent (66%) hike in the per-track royalties they receive for digital music retail sales. Needless to say, Apple is not happy with this situation and has indicated that the continued operation of the iTunes store would [...]

This morning, SanDisk announced its next foray into the world of digital music. Too bad this digital music idea, like their previous ones, will be going the way of the dodo bird.
SanDisk’s slotMusic product is a 1GB microSD card loaded with an album. You purchase the card from your local Wal-Mart or Best Buy and [...]

There is a lot of buzz surrounding music labels’ agreements to sell DRM-free music in marketplaces other than the iTunes Music Store. The problem is that they miss the big picture. They don’t pay attention to the two things that really matter.

People want to be able to buy their music easily
People want their purchased music [...]

On February 27th, Apple announced that it had sold 4 billion songs total in the iTunes Music Store. Today, Apple quietly announced that it has now sold over 5 billion songs. Let’s do some quick math. It has been 114 days. One billion songs in 114 days is just over 9.5 million songs every day.
Also, [...]

Ars Technica is reporting that the NPD Group’s numbers are out! Apple is the number one distributor of music. They sell more music than anyone else, well, besides those “others” who are always throwing a wrench in the plan.

Credit: Ars Technica
Apple was in third place in just June of 2007. They have been steadily climbing [...]

I love iTunes (and my massive music library); if my MBP is open, there’s a 98% chance that it’s got music coming out. Using it all day long like this, I wanted some hot keys for it.
Man oh man, did I find some. After trying a host of options – including Quicksilver – [...]

It appears that we may be hearing from Apple in a few hours, on the topic of DRM-Free digital music downloads. Details seem to indicate that the EMI tracks that have historically been available for $1.29 without any copy protection, will drop to the normal $.99 price point. Along with EMI, some Indie [...]

Amazon recently launched a really great effort in the digital music arena called Amazon MP3. I’ve been a hardcore iTunes Store customer since it’s debut and haven’t really been tempted by other digital music stores. That is, until Amazon MP3 made its debut.

The big news this week is undoubtedly Apple’s announcement of the new iPod product line and the lower price of the iPhone. With new iPods comes a new version of iTunes — 7.4 in this case — but despite The Steve’s Thoughts On Music and NBC’s very public departure from the iTunes Store, iTunes [...]

Fans of The Beatles and John Lennon can now officially rejoice: As of today, sixteen of Lennon’s solo albums are available for the first time for immediate download from the iTunes Store. Some of those albums also contain exclusive video content for the first 30 days of availability—so get them while the getting’s good.
The albums [...]

Thanks to innovative software Simplify Media, sharing your killer iTunes library has never been easier. In the good ol’ days before DRM was such a hot topic, libraries could be shared unfettered across the Net. Simplify Media makes that possible once again by allowing users to invite others to browse and stream their iTunes to [...]

For the past month or so I’ve been using Crayon Room’s Moody app almost religiously. It’s just so good.
Moody lets you tag your iTunes music based on color with “upper red” being for sad-intense music and “lower green” being for happy-calm music. There’s no right or wrong way to tag a tune, so it’s [...]

Let’s say you’re a budding musician or a podcaster who would like to have some music for your show but you don’t want to run into any potential copyright issues. I had this situation pop up when I had to get some music for my new vidcast, Complicate Life. Using someone else’s work [...]

Since Tiger was released it has seemed to me that Automator was one of the unsung heroes that shipped with the operating system. I’m guessing more people use it than we hear about, but just in case, I wanted to show off the use of Automator when saving workflows as plugins, rather than Automator [...]