Kane Kramer, an inventor by trade, came up with a gadget and music distribution service almost eerily similar to the iPod-iTunes relationship that predates it by three decades. The guy predicted details down to DRM and flash memory’s dominance.
RIM’s signing up with 7Digital to bring a 6 million track library to BlackBerry phones starting September. The service will hit in “UK, US, Canada, France, Italy, Germany and Spain,” and will be priced at the standard $US0.99 track and $US9.99 album model. [TGDaily via Electronista]
Giz reader and champion Craiglist peruser Andrew F. happened across a job posting from Napster, asking for a software engineer with experience in “Mac/iPhone OS X Development.” Such a posting might not normally be worth getting too excited over—after all, everyone’s making iPhone apps nowadays—but Napster just launched a new, cheap unlimited streaming service last month. Five bucks a month for instant access to seven million songs (plus downloads) is a solid deal as is; throw in an iPhone client and it’d be a great one. [Craigslist—Thanks, Andrew!]
When Best Buy gobbled up Napster, Adam wondered what they could possibly do to make their expensive new liability relevant again. The answer? Go cheap. Very cheap.
Humans have been writing music for at least as long as we’ve been recording history. It was storing it that took a little more time. Here are all the ways we’ve done it to date:
Now that Apple is slowly and quietly switching all its freshly DRM-free tracks to a popularity-based variable pricing scheme, we almost didn’t notice that Walmart and Amazon have taken the same step.
When we called the new iTunes tiered price scheme “Popular Songs Cost More Money” pricing, we had no idea how accurate that was: It’s here, but I’ve yet to find a single $US0.69 track. UPDATED.
