Opening Olympic Ceremony Hits Million-Mark on BitTorrent
Videos of the opening ceremony at the Olympics in Beijing have been downloaded more than one million times on BitTorrent, according to one estimate surfacing Tuesday. BitTorrent-focused journal TorrentFreak reported the tally, citing a sample of BitTorrent trackers.
The most popular version of the ceremony is an HD-quality, 5GB file, a large download that flexes the distribution capabilities that BitTorrent offers. An iPod-formatted version also topped the list. The ceremony was widely available across television networks worldwide, and watched by more than one billion people across the globe, according to various estimates.
Lotta Apps: Apple Scores 60 Million iPhone App Downloads
Apple has now sold 60 million applications for its iPhone, an accomplishment that comes just one month after the second-generation device hit the market. The App Store has produced sales of roughly $30 million, or $1 million daily, of which Apple takes a payout of 30 percent. "This thing's going to crest at half-a-billion soon," Steve Jobs told the Wall Street Journal, referring to an annual run-rate. "I've never seen anything like this in my career for software."
A large number of the Apps are free, though the combination of free and paid is rustling some cash. On the free side, beneficiaries include Pandora, a free application that quickly became a favorite among early iPhone buyers. Other gratis apps, including Tap Tap Revenge, have also stirred excitement. The music-focused game, developed by Tapulous, awards users for tapping and shaking their iPhones to the beat.
Digital Music Provider Aims To Compete In Social Media Market
WaTunes.com, a leading digital content provider that helps music artists, record labels, and distributors sell their music on iTunes has announced its plans to enter the social media market with their new site WaTunes 2 scheduled to launch on September 1st of this year.
WaTunes 2 is a social media distribution service that provides not only digital services for music artists to sell their music on iTunes, but also welcomes the fans to listen to free music from the WaTunes 2 catalog, rate & comment their favorite albums, meet new friends, and download music on iTunes.
Kids discover music the new old-fashioned way
According to a report by the NPD Group, "Kids & Digital Content," 70% of kids in the "tween" age bracket (ages 9 through 14) are downloading digital music in an average month. A separate report from NPD estimates that while one million consumers dropped out of the CD buyer market in 2007, it was younger consumers who led that exodus. According to the report, 48% of U.S. teens did not purchase a single CD in 2007, compared to 38% in 2006.
But while both tweens and teens are moving online -- along with the rest of consumers -- to buy and acquire their music, they are still heavily influenced by the same sources that have always influenced them -- their peers, their parents and the media. The difference is that these influences are moving online, as well.
Along with the mainstream social networks Facebook and MySpace that kids and teens in the U.S. most commonly use to communicate with their friends online, there are a number of other social music sites that are being used to make music recommendations and suggestions -- Last.fm, Pandora, iLike and Imeem, just to name a few. Earlier this month, another competitor in the social music space, social.fm, announced that it was folding. And with shakeups still ongoing in the online music industry, it is yet to be seen which sites will be long-term winners in the social music space.
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from digitalmusicnews.com , The Industry Standard, and Webnewswire.com]