Top Stories
Google to Get Into Music?
After iTunes acquired and promptly shut down Lala, many expected an announcement that iTunes would migrate to the cloud with Apple’s latest music event. Since that failed to happen the attention has now shifted to Google, who is rumored to be quietly building a service to compete with the current King of Mp3. The product is expected to utilize the cloud, and like Lala will allow everyone to stream each song once for free. Purportedly the killer service is sharing of playlists, which combined with the one free stream could be a killer feature. But can Google put together a package attractive enough for labels to switch teams from iTunes to Google? We’ll believe it when we see it.
Has the iPad Killed Notebooks?
Last week Fortune published an article on decline of the the notebook market and with the announcement of the iPad. The article points out that since January, retail sales of notebook computers have gone from 35% growth to -4% growth. Big retailers are even noticing a trend– Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn even stated in the Wall Street Journal that ” internal estimates showed that the iPad had cannibalized sales from laptop PCs by as much as 50 percent.” Since publication Dunn redacted his comment and Best Buy released a statement, but the aftershock of the iPad on the current computer market (and the rapidly developing tablet one) is too large to be ignored.
App Store Sales to Overtake iTunes sales?
Since its release in September of 2008, the Apple app store has enjoyed wild success. But a recent report by Aysmco shows that in terms of total downloads, the App store has totaled the same sales in 2.2 years that took iTunes 5 years to accomplish. By this estimate, app downloads will overtake song downloads by the end of the year.
