Interesting news/reviews/deals from the portable audio market
A number of Sony BMG artists have been added to the Australian iTMS: remember that when the Australian branch of the iTMS launched on October 25, it didn’t have any tracks from the Sony BMG catalog. Now “select artists include Oasis, Franz Ferdinand, Pearl Jam, Kelly Clarkson, Avril Lavigne, and more” —that’s a start.
Also read: [...]
Everybody loves lists, right? Thanks to The Age’s article [via], we’ve got a bunch of data on the Australian MP3 player market. Here we go:
more than 400k Australians may be buying an MP3 player during the holiday season
more than 6 out of 10 MP3 players sold are iPods → more than 8 out of 10 [...]
iTMS Australia is live: officially expected to launch tomorrow. Tunes cost $1.69 AUS, videos $3.39. Sony BMG hasn’t licensed their catalog—remember the problems we had reported early last month. UPDATE: ThinkSecret has got a few more details on the launch and the available content.
According to Forbes, Apple still hasn’t struck a deal with two major label for distributing their catalogues in the soon-to-launch australian branch of the iTunes Music Store. Warner Music Group and Sony BMG, the same two companies that are not in the iTMS Japan deal, want variable pricing on the tunes, but Apple’s successful strategy [...]