iTunes rival: AmazonMP3 growing with 22% of online music downloads

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iTunes has been the king of digital music downloads for the past ten years, but the latest numbers show Amazon slowly gaining ground. The NPD Group is out with its 4Q digital music downloads numbers and AmazonMP3 held 22 percent of the paid music market. While that’s considerably lower than Apple’s 63 percent market share,… Read More…

Microsoft amps up Xbox Music app with performance improvements, cloud syncing

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The updates are flowing for Microsoft. Just a day after releasing fixes for its Windows 8 Mail, Calendar and People apps, the Xbox team today announced some improvements to the Xbox Music app. Updates include performance enhancements for Windows RT devices, the ability to add and sync songs from your library to the cloud and… Read More…

GeekWire Radio: iTunes Match, Google Music and Tunebox take tracks to the cloud

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This week on the GeekWire radio show and podcast, we break down the latest developments in online music — including Google Music and iTunes Match — with the help of Phil Kast, the Seattle entrepreneur behind the new app Tunebox for the iPhone. That’s after our weekly news roundup, in which we debate whether the… Read More…

Microsoft in hot water over Amy Winehouse tweet, but is backlash really fair?

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A tweet by Microsoft UK caused an uproar today by suggesting its followers remember the late singer Amy Winehouse by downloading her “Back to Black” album on the company’s Zune music service. The company was roundly criticized for trying to capitalize commercially on the singer’s death, and in a follow-up tweet Microsoft apologized to anyone who… Read More…

Apple’s iCloud: Photo Stream is slick, iTunes Match is a half-step

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For all the buzz about Apple offering its own cloud-based music service, the part of the company’s iCloud announcement today that resonated most with me was Photo Stream. The service will automatically grab photos taken on iOS devices or imported to a user’s Mac — or Windows PC — sync them up to the online… Read More…

Android users not playing around: Games scarce among most popular apps

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The world of Apple’s  iTunes App Store is dominated by games. Of the top 10 free apps as currently listed, six are games (Oldschool Blocks, Fragger, 7 Little Words, Skee-Ball, Zentomino, and NinJump). Of course, many of these are so-called, “free-to-play,” meaning that there is additional content or levels available that costs money, but the… Read More…

The Beatles help boost digital music sales, but is it a one-time surge?

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If there were one song from The Beatles that represented the state of the music industry in 2011, it would likely be “Help!” Revenues have been slumping for years as the industry grapples with new digital distribution models. But has the industry started to bounce off the bottom? The Beatles themselves may have just provided… Read More…

RealNetworks plans new digital photo and video utilities, too

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Turns out RealNetworks isn’t just getting into the business of cleaning up iTunes music libraries. The digital media pioneer, trying to turn around its broader business, also plans new photo and video tools as part of its effort to reinvent itself for the age of cloud computing. The new $39 “Rinse” music cleanup program from… Read More…

RealNetworks plans new ‘Rinse’ clean-up tool for iTunes

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RealNetworks has developed a new program called Rinse for cleaning up and organizing Apple iTunes libraries on Windows PCs and Macs — automatically adding album artwork, fixing song names, organizing music libraries by genre, and finding and removing duplicate tracks. The official Rinse product site touts the software as “smarter than other programs,” including iTunes… Read More…