Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Apple’s iTunes To Incorporate Podcasting Features
Months after the ubiquitous iPod portable media player and its companion software iTunes enabled a phenomenon known as podcasting, Apple Computer has decided to formally embrace the podcasting world in a new version of its platform.
In a presentation at the Wall Street Journal’s technology conference this week, Apple CEO Steve Jobs previewed an upcoming version of iTunes that will serve as an aggregator and distributor of podcasts. iTunes users will be able to download Apple-approved podcasts through the iTunes service for free and then sync them to their iPods for portable playback.
Up to now, podcast listeners had to either manually download MP3 links of their chosen programs and manually add them to their iTunes playlists or use third-party software, such as iPodder, to grab the files from RSS feeds and import them into their iTunes or Windows Media playlists.
Friday, May 13, 2005
CD Review: Dierks Bentley, “Modern Day Drifter” (Capitol)
Dierk’s Bentley’s sophomore effort finds him revisiting a lot of the stylistic ground that he covered on his debut, yet he manages to prove that this particular well isn’t dry yet.
Bentley spent much of 2004 on the road with George Strait and Kenney Chesney, and plenty of ”Modern Day Drifter” feels crafted with live performance in front of those same types of audiences in mind. This is warm-weather music written with country music’s two strongest constituencies in mind: the party crowd and the heartstrings crowd.
On the party side, “Cab of My Truck” gallops out of the gate like a sequel to Bentley’s big-splash debut, “What Was I Thinkin’.” “Truck” and “Lot of Leaving” bring a Garth-like kinetic energy to the proceedings.
Yahoo Music Engine Adds Open-Source Twist With Open Plugin Development
Yahoo’s move into the music etail portal space this week fascinated technology-watchers and rattled competitors. As the dust on the announcement settles, Yahoo is making a public--and seemingly welcome--gesture to the open-source community to contribute to the service with the unveiling of a dedicated plugin development blog.
Noted in Yahoo developer Jeremy Zawodny’s blog, the plugin dev blog is a clearing house of widgets divided into two buckets: Those that alter the behavior of the YME application (which, like Napster or Rhapsody, must be downloaded and installed on the client system to access the YME music library) and those that change the behavior of a web browser to integrate data calls to the YME service via a public API.
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Yahoo Music Engine Squeezes Competitors
The announcement of the Yahoo! Music Engine portal and its low-ball price points sent the stock prices of competitors into a tailspin on Wednesday (5/11).
Yahoo!, Inc. unveiled its music retail portal, dubbed the Yahoo! Music Engine, on Tuesday evening. The service is a subscription-based music streaming service that allows users the option to purchase tracks at a small premium.
The service will launch with prices of $6.99 monthly and $4.99 a month if purchased as a year-long contract. Both of the service’s primary competitors, Napster and Real Networks’ Rhapsody, charge $14.95 a month for a similar product offering.