iLounge

“ITunes, the leader of the digital music services pack, has a catalog of over 700,000 songs—but that’s not nearly enough for Apple. To maintain its lead, the company is on a hunt to find exclusive music, everything from out-of-print singles in music company vaults to songs that have never been pressed onto a CD and even recordings from the estates of deceased artists. [...]

And if anyone can get the labels to open the vaults, Jobs can, analysts said.

‘What Jobs is saying is, ‘We’d be happy to take all this content that is rotting away in warehouses and turn it into a new revenue source for you,’ said Barry Ritholtz, a market strategist with Maxim Group, a money-management firm. ‘It’s probably a bit much to say Jobs is saving the music industry, but he’s showing them the way into the digital age. They have been stumbling around drunk in the dark.’”

“When Apple releases its “iPod mini” digital music player in international markets this summer, thousands of people in the U.K. will already have them.

Dozens of sellers in the U.S. are offering the diminutive devices for sale on the British eBay online auction site at a big markup on the $249 list price.

For years, European buyers have been breaking down traditional retail distribution channels by using online auction sites to buy small electronics goods for lower prices than available locally.”

“Forget the $200 iPod bag from Gucci; it’s for cheapskates.

The ultimate iPod accessory is Fendi’s Juke Box, a $1,500 carrying case for transporting multiple iPods.

The bag, unveiled by the Italian fashion house at a catwalk show in Milan, is a rectangular gilded purse about the size of a bread bin. It is lined with multicolored cloth and incorporates a pocket for holding up to a dozen iPods

‘It’s a hot gadget right now, and these designers don’t want to miss the boat,’ said Janet Ozzard, executive editor of Style.com, the online home of Vogue and W.”

“‘They are a point of differentiation for the individual and they’re almost a status symbol,’ said Tim Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies. ‘Because of the colors and its small size, it really is an expression of personality.’

Phil Leigh, an analyst at Inside Digital Media, says: ‘Even though those white ear buds aren’t really that great, people want to wear them with an iPod so others know that they’re carrying an iPod’”

“Apple Computer has won a patent for the interface of its iTunes music software, underscoring the growing importance of the multimedia business for the company.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued Apple a patent for its media player software interface on May 4, along with several other features of the company’s high-profile products. Other parts of the iTunes software, including the ability to stream songs over a network to another copy of the program, had been the subject of earlier patents.”

“The PlayFair free software project is back online, with both the maintainer of the project and the hosting service willing to face a legal challenge from Apple.

Apple last month shut down the free software project, which enables advanced audio coding (AAC) files downloaded from Apple iTunes to be played on platforms that Apple does not support. It does that by stripping the Digital Rights Management (DRM) mechanism from a song, provided the key for playing the song is available.

The project has been renamed Hymn, according to Anand Babu, the maintainer of the project. It is being hosted on two sites (http://playfair.org/ and http://hymn-project.org) by a U.S. hosting service provider. Babu said last month that the project would be hosted outside the U.S.”

“The Apple of my wife’s eye is a pink iPod mini. Nothing else for Mother’s Day would do. I was elated at her request. No painful tours of snooty jewelry stores. Just a quick stop at the big box electronics store and a $249 charge. I figured it would be the easiest Mother’s Day ever. I figured wrong.

Here’s what I learned about this business card-sized digital jukebox that stores up to 1,000 songs:

If you want to be assaulted by a humiliating burst of laughter, go to Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA or even Apple Computer’s own stores and ask for an iPod mini. Tell them you want it in pink and insist that you need it now. [...]

But you cannot buy one. You can only put your name on a six-week waiting list.”

“Apple’s new iPod mini, which debuted in January, has been a hot seller at online retailer Amazon.com in the days leading up to Mother’s Day this Sunday.

‘We’ve been selling out of the iPod mini as soon as we get them,’ Frank Sadowski, vice president of consumer electronics at Amazon.com (AMZN: Research, Estimates) told CNN/Money, though he declined to divulge sales figures for the product.