iPhone Cafe

Apple has announced that all four major U.S. networks are now selling primetime TV shows in HD on the iTunes Store. The store first began selling HD TV shows from ABC, NBC, and CBS, Fox has since begun offering its programming in HD. Additionally, Apple confirms that the iTunes Store is now the world’s largest online TV store with over 200 million TV episodes sold, including more than one million HD episodes since the launch of HD TV on September 9.

HD shows are priced at $2.99, versus the standard-definition cost of $1.99. Most of iTunes’ TV content falls into the latter category, as there are over 70 networks represented on the site.

The Copyright Royalty Board has made its decision when it comes to the royalty rate for CDs and music downloads from places like iTunes: it will stay the same. The CRB also established a rate for ringtone purchases for the first time at a ridiculous 24 cents a song. Music publishers may also now seek a 1.5 percent late fee per month from distributors that don’t pay up on time. The CRB also reaffirmed a decision from last week about royalty rates for subscription and streaming services.

Yes, it looks like many popular online music stores, and Apple’s iTunes store in particular, dodged a bullet. Who are we kidding there was never any real danger that Apple was ever going to shut down iTunes, no matter what a vice president at Apple tried to hint at.

Could a 66 percent raise in the royalty rate have caused Apple to change the iTunes business model? Sure. Prices may have been raised for music or iTunes could have even gone with subscriptions, but the service would have remained intact.

iTunes is a key component in the Apple machine. While the company doesn’t make a huge amount of money from the store, it keeps the iPods and now iPhones moving off of the shelves. iTunes provides the content that make the devices what they are.

MySpace, the world’s largest social networking site, has recently unveiled it’s long anticipated music service with several major music companies including Sony, EMI and Warner in a bid to compete with Apple’s iTunes Store.
MySpace is hoping to shake up the digital music scene and give its roughly 120 million users free access to hundreds of thousands of songs from the world’s largest recording labels, comprehensive music catalogs, concert tickets, merchandising and other entertainment features.
Users will have free access to hundreds of thousands of songs from hundreds of record labels, but there’s a catch. MySpace’s 120 million users who want to use the free service will have to deal with the advertising that comes with it, and they will only be able to access the service using a PC.

Unlike much of the material at Apple’s iTunes store, the music being sold through MySpace’s new service doesn’t contain the protections that limit how many times a track can be copied. MySpace is hoping to set itself apart from iTunes even further by allowing its users to create an unlimited number
Users in the U.S. can also purchase the digital rights management-free MP3 music downloads using MySpace’s e-commerce feature. Users can download and buy MP3s on all digital music devices, including Apple’s iPod.

Apple could shut down iTunes, the largest online music distributor, if a ruling expected tomorrow forces the company to pay more to music makers for each downloaded track. The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) in Washington DC will decide whether to grant the request of American music publishers to increase royalty rates on songs bought from online stores like iTunes.
The National Music Publishers’ Association, which represents the interests of music makers and songwriters in the US, want rates to be increased 9 cents to 15 cents, which represents a 66 per cent rise.
Apple has vehemently opposed the move. In a statement to the ruling body last year, the company threatened to shut down iTunes rather than raise the price of songs in order to afford the higher royalty rates.

Apple has repeatedly made it clear that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not continue to operate iTunes if it were no longer possible to do so profitably.

Piper Jaffray estimates that Apple will sell 2.4 billion songs this year, giving it an 85% share of the digital music market. So it’s hard to imagine Apple closing iTunes and abandoning millions of customers worldwide who own iPods and rely on the online store to download music.

Apple has inked a deal with Pure Play Music, an organization that represents independentand unsigned musical artists, to distribute its music through iTunes. Pure Play’s entire catalog of 1.5 million tracks will soon be available through the popular music store, offering up another avenue for indie artists to sell their music online.

iTunes is offering Pure Play a little extra boost by giving the group its own drop-down category on the main landing screen, which should help those unsigned artists get a leg up on other bands. This isn’t the first distribution deal that is putting unsigned and indie artists on iTunes. There are a number of other companies, such as Tunecore and CD Baby put their music on iTunes.

Apple’s mobile iTunes store will soon face competition from Amazon’s MP3 store. Amazon announced that the Amazon MP3 music store will be pre-loaded on the T-Mobile G1 / HTC Dream, the world’s first phone based on Google Android. T-Mobile G1 users can search, download, buy and play music from Amazon MP3, which offers over 6 million DRM-free MP3 songs from all four major music labels and thousands of independent labels.

Amazon’s MP3 store only sells DRM-free tunes, or tracks that are not locked by digital rights in management antipiracy software Most of the tracks sold by Apple’s iTunes feature DRM protection. Amazon also undercuts Apple’s iTunes pricing, selling the store’s 100 best-selling songs for 89 cents. All tracks on iTunes cost 99 cents each.

Apple’s iTunes is a locked-down service that will only let you play your songs on Apple devices. Not so with Amazon’s DRM-free store will let you download songs online or now, on the G1, and let you take that song to any other device you wish, even if you want too add it to your iTunes library, even your iPod.

It has been less than two weeks since Apple and NBC buried the hatchet and that is a good thing for NBC as iTune users flock to downloading their favorite NBC shows. Apple says that NBC shows have been downloaded over 1 million times since they returned to the iTunes store on September 9.

The remarkable thing about the traffic that NBC has drawn from iTunes is that much of the fall TV season has yet to premiere. About 30 percent of the top-selling episodes and season passes on iTunes are now made up of shows produced by NBC. Many of those 1 million iTunes downloads are probably thanks to Apple and NBC offering a number of HD shows for free over the last week and a half.