Following Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ remarks on iTunes pricing yesterday, an anonymous record label executive told MTV that there’s a simple explantion for Jobs wanting to keep the prices at 99 cents: “It helps him sell iPods. When he started iTunes, he broke through that psychological barrier that consumers had and made a lot of dough doing it, but it seems like he has a monopoly and he’s become the Wal-Mart of the Internet, and he wants to retain that monopoly.”
CNET has a report on the growing number of couples who are turning to iPods to handle the music at their wedding receptions. “What could be easier?” says Lori Leibovich, editor of IndieBride.com. “You bring it, you program it, it sounds great. It doesn’t surprise me at all that more people are doing it.”
Business 2.0 reports that Creative Technology plans to shift its marketing focus from its MP3 players to its PC sound card line. “Creative made lots of noise last November, when it unveiled two new MP3 players that it predicted would help it take 40 percent of the global market this year. But, analysts say, despite spending about $100 million to promote its MuVo and Zen models, the company’s market share is still around 10 percent (compared with Apple’s 70)… Tellingly, Creative has begun shifting its promotional efforts toward its new line of sound cards.” [via MDN]
In yet another bad review for the Motorola ROKR, Fortune’s Peter Lewis writes: “The most inexcusable failing of the ROKR is that for all the anticipation, many of its features do not work as advertised. Doesn’t anybody test these things before selling them to the public? The ROKR software is sluggish and clunky, and transferring songs into the ROKR’s memory is so slow—even on a dual-processor Apple Power Mac G5—that I was almost glad of the 100-song limit.”
