I for one welcome our new musical overlord.

The bad news for MySpace, which essentially stays relevant due to bands, is that Apple has launched a social network as part of the latest version of its iTunes software.

Ping, as it is known, allows users to build networks of friends and professional musicians and lets users build playlists based on what friends are listening to.

Analysts said it represents a challenge to existing music-based social networks such as MySpace and LastFM.

“It’s a social network all about music,” said Steve Jobs, launching the application.

“We think this will be really popular very fast because 160 million people can switch it on today,” he said.

With that amount of people being able to access the technology straight away, Ping has potentially a user base nearly three times that of MySpace, which has stagnated at around 60 million.

The top men in Apple were keen to distance themselves from any Facebook comparisons.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told BBC News that Ping was not about taking audiences away from other networks.

“It sounds like a subset of Facebook, but Facebook is life and this is music.”

Jobs billed it as a new way to discover music.

Basically, the system will allow people to add a profile to their iTunes account and share top 10′s, playlists and favourite bands with their friends.

People using Google.com to look for a particular group or song will be served a link to the company's music store.

Un-named Google sources were pinned down for comment by the Wall Street Journal, though despite being guaranteed anonymity, they weren’t exactly forthcoming with that many juicy details. As the report on the matter says:

“It’s unclear whether (Google) has struck any deals with record labels so far. But Google has been stepping up conversations about offering new music services tied to phones running its Android operating system along with the broader Web, said people who have been briefed on the talks. The launch of Google’s download music store is still months away, these people said.”

The first phase of Google’s music service is expected to be a web store where users can buy and download tracks, music industry insiders told the WSJ. It will be tied directly to Google’s search engine, so that people using Google.com to look for a particular group or song will be served a link to the company’s music store.

The Google sources say that the download store would be an “interim” step toward what is expected to be a more ambitious cloud-based subscription service compatible with mobile phones built with Google’s Android software.

A cloud-based service would enable subscribers to stream music directly from the Internet to their mobile phones, so that users wouldn’t need to store music files on their devices.

All sounds good to us anyway, a major rival for iTunes would do them no harm and if any company can put pressure on Apple’s market domination in this space, it’s Google. For the pure entertainment value alone, let battle commence.

The anti-trust inquiry is in the early stages and the conversations have, according to the NY Times, “revolved broadly around the dynamics of selling music online.” Investigators were said had asked in particular about recent allegations that Apple used its dominant market position to persuade music labels to refuse to give Amazon.com exclusive access to music about to be released.

All these people spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the delicacy of the matter. In March, Billboard magazine reported that Amazon was asking music labels to give it the exclusive right to sell certain forthcoming songs for one day before they went on sale more widely. In exchange, Amazon promised to include those songs in a promotion called the “MP3 Daily Deal” on its website.

The magazine reported that representatives of iTunes were asking the labels not to participate in Amazon’s promotion, adding that Apple punished those that did by withdrawing marketing support for those songs on iTunes.

Apple is by far the largest seller of online music in the United States, with 69% of the market, according to data from the NPD Group, a marketing consultancy. Amazon’s MP3 store was in second place, with an 8% share. Apple is also the largest seller of music, with 26.7% of the overall market, up from 12% in 2007.

The inquiry is one of several by the federal government involving Apple. The Federal Trade Commission is moving ahead with a separate investigation of Apple’s rules for developers who create applications for the iPhone operating system, according to a person familiar with that discussion.

Representatives from Apple and Amazon declined to comment according to the NY Times while Gina Talamona, a deputy director at the Justice Department, also declined to comment.

Hard to tell what they're trying to signify, but it's a great shot.

The ‘three strikes’ rule was first discussed during the legal battle between Eircom and a number of publishers including Sony, EMI, universal and Warner, with labels pushing for a graduated response from Eircom. The case came just after Eircom advertisements appeared on the Pirate Bay’s homepage. In September of last year, Eircom agreed to block its users from visiting the Pirate Bay, and eventually drew up the graduated response system that’s come to be known as the three strikes rule.

According to the Irish Times, the scheme will run as a pilot for the next three months, during which Eircom has said that it will ‘process about 50 IP addresses a week.’ Those addresses are to be passed on to Eircom by IRMA, which is to employ the services of third party Dtecnet to find users who are actively sharing content.

One of the biggest questions for the moment has been to just to what extent this scheme will effect, if at all, those who are found to be downloading, but not passing on, copyrighted material… though given that so much filesharing is conducted via bittorrent, that question could well be something of a moot point.

The idea for the moment is that users who are found to be sharing copyrighted material will be notified by Eircom that there is filesharing being conducted through their network. If they continue, then on the third time they’re found to be sharing copyrighted material they’ll be disconnected for one week. If they continue beyond that, they’ll be disconnected for a full year.

It’ll be interesting to see whether or not the first round of warning precipitates customers moving their connections to other ISPs, if so then we wouldn’t be too surprised to see copyright groups go to those other ISPs and request that they take similar action.

A similar system has also been discussed for use in France across multiple internet service providers, though there’s been widespread opposition to the move.

This week's Apple logo has been brough to you by the number 1993

While the acquisition of LaLa.com had been pegged as an indicator of Apple’s first steps towards making iTunes a cloud-based music service of its own, it seems to be something the company has been slow to move on. Now though, Cnet is reporting that Apple has been engaged in discussions with major film publishers to try and get the rights to movies to accompany streaming TV shows and music.

It’s a very interesting move indeed, and one that certainly goes some way to moving users of Apple’s 3G enabled mobile devices into a world in which the amount of storage that they have on their device physically, something that may very well come to the fore once Apple releases the iPad and the App Store starts to house more content that closely resembles full-fledged desktop applications, rather than the smaller iPhone and iPod Touch style apps.

If nothing else, we’ll be very curious to see just when Apple moves some of its media services off devices and into an iTunes-cloud style service. Given that the iPad comes with the option of 3G-connectivity, it could well be the case that Apple is just waiting to see how the always-connected iPad does when it lands versus the cheaper wi-fi version.

Still, for iPhone users, this kind of service could well prove massively attractive, regardless of the massive detrimental effect it’ll have on battery life. Moreover, it’ll prove an interesting piece of competition for services like Spotify and Rhapsody, neither of which have managed to make themselves available in Ireland yet.

That said, Apple hasn’t managed to bring video content to our fine European shores at all yet, so it’s likely enough that we’ll not be seeing any new-fangled cloud-based media options anytime soon…

“As expected, the vast majority (85%) prefer that free content remain free. Yet there are opportunities to be found in the details. Indeed, when asked to focus on specific types of content, survey participants are more willing to at least consider paying for particular categories, especially if they have done so before,” noted the report.

TGDaily pointed out that the areas that consumers don’t mind paying for content are pretty much where they’re used to spending their change already – with more than 50% of respondents saying they would pay for online movies, music, or games.

Three-quarters of the 27,000 participants believe if they already subscribe to a newspaper, magazine, radio or television service they should be able to use its online content for free. And 71% said online content of any kind will have to “improve”  before they will pay for it.

Another interesting figure was that 62% said that once they’ve purchased content, it should be theirs to copy or share at will. The LA Times, a publication that would be very interested in the results on offer note that almost 50% of respondents would consider paying for online access to a magazine, while a little over 40% said they would pay for newspaper content on the web.

Most interestingly though, they note that “the thorny question remains: how to make that product worth paying for”?They refer to Wired’s recent potential effort on this score – their demonstration of how its magazine would run on a tablet computer – as one example of how content can become a little more dynamic. This follows Time Inc ‘s demo of a tablet version of Sports Illustrated  last Decemeber.

“Still,” adds the Times, “consensus on the pay question has been elusive across the industry”. Backing up the point, the Times refers to recent rumours that two factions within the New York Times are battling over what to charge for an iPad version of the paper. One group says the company should charge $20 to $30 per month for access to its content, while the other group thinks $10 per month is a fair price apparently.

In fairness, even after 27,000 responses in the Neilsen report no one at NY Times can even be sure if anyone will pay for it whatever they charge. Bet they all wish they were in market research eh.

YouTube does have its own music service...

Word comes via Cnet that Warner Music saw a massive spike in the number of unique visitors to its various different YouTube videos between over the course of December and January, with reports indicating that it had managed to more than double its traffic, seeing views around the 47 million mark in a month. Still, all might not be as well as it seems from that description…

Apparently, it seems that the massive boost in the number of viewers for the last month or so isn’t due to some massive upsurge in popularity of viewing music videos online, but rather the result of a change in the way YouTube reports those numbers. Apparently, there’s been a bit of a conflation, that sees YouTube reporting content put together by its users that features music from publishers as views of that music to publishers… which is fairly interesting.

The official word from YouTube is that,

“The latest ComScore report reflects a combination of evolving methodologies and different partners having deals around different kinds of content, including user-generated content and publishing.”

It’s certainly an interesting shift, and one that we imagine Warner will be very curious to get to the bottom of, considering the change essentially obscures the popularity of Warner’s own dedicated music channels on YouTube somewhat.

Still, it’s unlikely that the folks at Warner will throw the baby out with the bathwater over the unusual numbers, given the fact that YouTube is still sending the publisher a fairly pronounced amount of traffic and, presumably, money. It’ll be interesting to see just how well YouTube’s music service works out for publishers.

Transparent displays are both impressive and a little confusing...

For those who haven’t encountered the AMOLED arrangement, the image above should give some impression. Essentially, the display itself is transparent, meaning your desktop (or whatever else you happen to be watching) is not quite fully transparent, but still pretty hip nonetheless. Still, the technology will likely be more interesting in devices other than notebooks, so it’s curious to see that Samsung does have other devices in the works.

Indeed, according to reports from Plastic Electronics, the first device we can expect to see released boasting the semi-transparent AMOLED display technology is Samsung’s IceTouch media player. Before anyone gets too excited about the prospect, the IceTouch is an all-in-one style media player, and takes DVDs as well as boasting an FM radio, so we’re not quite at the point yet where your iPod will be replaced by a clear plastic device.

That said, it seems as though Samsung isn’t downplaying the importance of its new display tech; its VP of audio/video and digital imagine marketing, Reid Sullivan, boasted that the AMOLED would raise the bar for the next generation of portable devices.

It’s certainly an interesting development, though it seems like there may not be too many practical applications for semi-transparent displays. Still, if nothing else it does lead to a world in which a 50-inch TV needn’t necessarily obscure half of any room you happen to house it in, which is a pleasant change. Other than that, there’s always the possibility of more intuitive augmented reality interactions through mobile devices; rather than using a camera on the device, users could simply look through their mobile and see things behind it labelled on the device itself… simple enough, but quite nifty.

Face. Book.

It’s interesting stuff, especially given the fact that so many had pointed to Facebook as one service that could benefit hugely from the addition of an officially sanctioned music service. TechCrunch is reporting that, during its relatively brief life, the Facebook Music app responded in the same manner as other official Facebook apps, bringing you to a page marked Facebook.com/music if you clicked through it, though there was nothing on the page. The app has since gone missing, interestingly enough.

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It’d be interesting to see Facebook launch a music service, given the fact that it has somewhere in the region of 375 million regular users. That’s certainly enough traffic to see a music service used, especially one that got a little push from Facebook officially (as other music apps might not). Indeed, it could well succeed where Spotify has apparently had some trouble – the relatively simple gaining enough users part of the plan.

Indeed, the only real question is just what form we might see a Facebook Music styled service arrive in. It could well be the case that such a service would be similar to Spotify’s ad-supported model or one that sees Facebook’s strange currency (Facebook Credits) used for music “microtransactions.” Stranger still, it could simply be a subscription-based service.

It seems as though Apple is on a bit of a roll at the moment, with the world and its mother speculating on just what it is, could be or might one day build or offer through its existing services. While most of the buzz has been around the upcoming tablet offering, there’s also a lot around the iPhone’s rumoured new OS, the latest from the Wall Street Journal indicates something of a shift in the established iTunes model.

Indeed, it seems that, as part of its apparently all-but-confirmed tablet offering, Apple will be offering a cloud-based iTunes service. While there’s no indication for now of just what kind of an offering it might be, we’d suspect something that might allow users to access iTunes through a web-based interface. Indeed, the folks at TechCrunch seem entirely of the persuasion that what we’ll see is an introduction of some kind of open iTunes API, which could introduce buying music directly through other services, which is interesting.

We’ll be curious to see just where Apple’s recently snagged Lala.com fits into all this, but it’d be interesting to see Apple introduce a subscription-based service, which could run on a similar model to Spotify and Rhapsody, offering users unlimited streaming music for a monthly fee.

Of course, all of this is just rumour and hearsay for now, but we’d expect Apple to unveil a bundle of bits and pieces if and when it shows off its not-quite-confirmed tablet offering.

YouTube’s new service, which you can find fairly simply by heading over to YouTube.com/disco. For now, it all seems fairly straightforward, all you need to do is drop a name into the “Artist” box and YouTube works some kind of behind-the-scenes witchcraft and comes back to you with, on the right hand side, a list of songs to listen to by that artist. However, it’s the left hand side that’s really interesting.

The left hand side boasts, at its top, a simple enough video player, and, directly below it, a playlist, offering a range of music by similar artists. There’s no word yet on just how that list is generated, but we wouldn’t be too surprised to learn that it’s somehow based on the listening habits of users who enjoy perusing music on YouTube, a group that we suspect will likely grow with the introduction of the new music functionality.

If nothing else, it’s a very interesting turn for YouTube to take, and one that makes an awful lot of sense since the service managed to gain the rights legally offer copyrighted music in more regions. Of course, there’s no way of knowing how popular this service will get, but given the YouTube tie in, it seems likely that it’ll do very well indeed.

Perhaps most important when it comes to a free music service, there’s no advertising to those users who aren’t in the mood to pay a subscription, unlike services like Spotify (though for those of us in Ireland, there’s no ads in Spotify either). Still, curious stuff, we’re enjoying it here in the office though.

Ivor Novello, once sentenced to eight weeks in prison for misuse of petrol coupons

According to The Times, the awards ceremony will this year include a ‘Best Original Video Game Score’ category to acknowledge the growing sophistication in game soundtracks. “The Ivors has always sought to reflect the ever-changing world of songwriting and composing,” said Mark Fishlock, a member of the selection committee.

“The video games market has matured beyond recognition and big budget orchestral scores are regularly being commissioned. Writing music for games also requires a number of specialist skills compared with conventional film scoring, such as non-linear and multi-layered composition.”

Video game entries are now being accepted by the Novello committee, with any commercial release up for consideration ahead of the awards ceremony in May. Even ignoring the fact that both Jamiroquai and Keane have won these in the past this is still a fairly positive piece of news.

Probably not Alan Ellis in that costume, but you get the idea

However, a jury at Teesside Crown Court unanimously cleared the software engineer of a single charge of conspiracy to defraud. Ellis set up OiNK as a student in 2004 but by the time the police came knocking on his door in October 2007 authorities were suspicious of his dealings as his bank statements showed a tidy sum of £185,000 in his accounts.

The Daily Telegraph reports that officers also discovered that the site had 200,000 members, who had downloaded around 21 million music files. Ellis’ defence rested on the fact that the site didn’t host any music himself and that the cash in his accounts had nothing to do with defrauding artists of their hard earned money.

Instead, OiNK received money via the site because users were required to make a donation to be able to invite friends to join it. Giving evidence, Mr Ellis said: “I didn’t have an intention [in setting up the site]. I was furthering my skills as a programmer, as a software engineer. [It was] to better my skills for employability.”

The British Recorded Music Industry (BPI), the body which represents the country’s record labels, said it was disappointed by the verdict. It said in a statement: “This is a hugely disappointing verdict which is out of line with decisions made in similar cases around the world. The defendant made nearly £200,000 by exploiting other people’s work without permission. The case shows that artists and music companies need better protection.”

Ellis said he never intended to defraud copyright holders and that donations made by users were to cover the server’s rental costs. Any surplus of funds was intended for buying a server, he said. UK copyright laws are set to tighten over the coming year though, indeed the Ellis verdict came in the wake of a recent publication of an open letter from senior figures from the music, film and television industries supporting Lord Mandelson’s controversial plans to grant the government powers to change copyright law to tackle new forms of online piracy.

I'm baffled...

The vast majority of the news that comes out of CES does tend to be business and industry related, with relatively little to interest the more casual viewers… now though, it seems that Polaroid has decided to shake things up a bit by naming Lady Gaga as its new “creative director and inventor of specialty products.” Moreover, it seems as though it might not just be a bit of a grab for attention, with TomsHardware reporting that the announcement prompted a response from the woman herself that read,

“The Haus of Gaga has been developing prototypes in the vein of fashion/technology/photography innovation – blending the iconic history of Polaroid and instant film with the digital era – and we are excited to collaborate on these ventures with the Polaroid brand… Lifestyle, music, art, fashion: I am so excited to extend myself behind the scenes as a designed and to – as my father puts it – finally, have a real job.”

If nothing else, it’s certainly a move that will garner an awful lot of attention for Polaroid, though we’ll be very curious to see Lady Gaga’s level of involvement. Certainly, it’d be interesting to see word of a product launch coming from someone like Lady Gaga.

It’s hard not to wonder just how much this might influence other companies too… certainly there are personalities in the tech industry who attract a certain amount of media attention, Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer perhaps chief among them. Still, the idea of simply hiring someone already famed for idiosyncratic behaviour and boasting plenty of public recognition is an interesting one.

We’ll have to see how it works out for them.

It seems that rumours of a deal between Google and Spotify to coincide with what’s expected to be the official announcement of Google’s Nexus One handset later today could well have been premature, with Media Mverick pointing to one obvious problem that any such deal would have – there’s a distinct lack of music available to Spotify in the US.

Apparently, the issue comes from the fact that record companies in the US have already been burned by the promise of advertising supported free-music services, with subscription options available. Indeed, there has already been a raft of music services that have failed where Spotify aims to succeed… unfortunately, that’s unlikely if Spotify can’t come up with the goods to back its service in the US, which makes the whole process a bit chicken-and-egg.

For now, it seems that major publishers in the US aren’t really into Spotify at all, reducing the likelihood that the service will manage to gain any real traction there, to say nothing of any crossover with Google. Still, we’ll be curious to see, now that Apple has acquired LaLa.com, just what Google will be doing on the music front, if it chooses to continue down that road.

Of course, with all the criticism of Spotify’s business model floating around, the one thing that nobody seems to have pointed out so far is that plain-old radio is an advertising-based music model… seems to be going alright for them.

Last minute update: For those who missed it over Christmas, Spotify works in Ireland again. Isn’t life lovely?

Second update: Apparently Spotify is only working for some Irish users after Christmas. Anyone else been lucky?

We’re used to YouTube announcing these kinds of moves directly on its blog, but this time word comes from the Telegraph of the move to introduce more sports content to YouTube. Perhaps most interesting is the fact that it seems YouTube intends to create a dedicated sport section, which is something it seems to have resisted so far.

There’s already a fairly impressive amount of sports content on YouTube, if only because fans seem pleased to upload their preferred moments to the service, but the new move would see the service in a position to offer whole games, perhaps even live coverage of events, something that we imagine would provide YouTube with a fairly pronounced bit of extra traffic.

For now we imagine it’ll take a while for YouTube to properly integrate the whole service, but we imagine that once it’s done there’ll be a whole lot more desirable content on YouTube updated fairly regularly. It’ll be interesting to see just how much traffic YouTube sees out of the new deal, but it’ll certainly be reaching out and grabbing an audience it might not otherwise have been able to get anywhere near.

For now, you can read more details of the deal over at the Telegraph, where they’ve got a lot more from the official announcement of the upcoming sports content.

News of the leak comes from Mobile Reviews editor in chief, Eldar Murtazin, a man who’s proved time and again that he’s in a position to know these kinds of things ahead of time. Murtazin was fairly succinct about the whole affair, simply releasing the news via his Twitter with the very short and eminently quotable,

“Foxconn received order for next generation iPhone.”

This confirms previous comments from some App Store developers whose apps phone home about just what kind of device they’re being run on. Usually this helps to tell whether or not your app has been popular with iPod Touch or iPhone users, which can help target the app better.

Those apps recently began reporting that users were starting to play with them on an iPhone version simply marked 3,1. Given the fact that the iPhone 3G S is the most recently released phone and carries the mark 2,1 the speculation about the new phone has caused a bit of a buzz.

For now, we know next to nothing about the hardware except that Foxconn has already received orders for it, which means that production is already beginning to move. We’ll keep you updated as and when we learn more about the upcoming device.

The word from the folks over at Engadget is that we can expect Apple’s tablet to set us customers back something around the $1,000 mark, which usually translates into €1,000 somehow, but that’s something we’re starting to get fairly used to by now. The other really interesting part is the reason Amazon should probably start being scared of Apple…

It seems as though Apple has been talking to publishers about the potential for sales via iTunes of the usual music and apps, as well you might expect, but also about books… and that’s something that tread’s on Amazon’s Kindle’s toes more than just a little.

Perhaps most interesting though, is the word that Apple has already been talking to publishers about just how they’d divide the profit from books sold on the venture, with the analysts suggesting that the split will be a 70/30, with the 70% side going to publishers.

We’ll be curious to see how much of this is true when we get to March. If there’s still no official word of an Apple tablet by then, it’d seem most sensible to just give up on the whole thing, but the idea that Apple would try to fly directly in the face of Amazon’s Kindle is certainly an interesting one, especially given the vast difference in prices between the two divices.

TechCrunch is reporting that, towards the end of its event on realtime search, Google’s Marissa Mayer officially announced that the company would be showing results from both current social networking high-flyer Facebook and one-time industry leader MySpace. Of course, for now there’s all kinds of questions about just what Google had to do to get its hands on the data, but it seems as though just about everyone is willing to speculate on it being some vast amount of currency changing hands.

For now, we’re curious to see how it works out; the fact is that Facebook’s whole drive is behind connecting people who are friends, or at the very least know one another, in real life. That’s kind of the point. With the ability to search through Facebook streams, there comes one massive question… why? It seems that, because it’s inherently a little less public than services like Twitter, Facebook feeds are less likely to contain the same kinds of trending topics.

If nothing else that makes Facebook seem like it might well be a little less well suited to realtime searches than other services, but given the genuinely staggering audience that Facebook has managed to accrue, it’s not too surprising to see that being able to search through streams (even if it is only public streams) is something that’s started to become a bit of a big deal for Google; Facebook represents a massive proportion of the realtime web, and sooner or later people will want it to be searchable.

Regardless of whether or not anyone uses it, Facebook searching will be a bit of a realtime feather in Google’s hat. If you’d like to read more about the conditions under which Google’s realtime search in Facebook works, you should check out the TechCrunch article on it.

The word that Apple has managed to pick up LaLa (and apparently has managed to do so for a shockingly low sum, if rumours are to be believed) has come as something of a shock, given that the company had essentially been on something of a winning streak. LaLa had, in a month, become the service powering some fairly massive different entries to the web-based music department.

To begin with, LaLa managed Facebook’s music service, which allows users to buy music for one another using the increasingly useful Facebook “Credits” system, which is essentially the service’s virtual currency. Given Facebook’s ubiquity, it might well have been assumed that LaLa was doing very well indeed out of that situation, but clearly Facebook Credits are no more popular anywhere else than they are in Ireland.

Similarly, LaLa announced a deal last month with Google to provide streaming music to its Google Music Onebox service, which would see users searching for a particular song by any artist presented with an option inside the Google Search window itself to stream that song. Clearly, that deal has done no more to improve LaLa’s lot, or, if it has, it’s not quite been enough to ensure that the service would see profitability in the near-future… and so LaLa has fallen into Apple’s hands.

The question now is, with LaLa out of the way, which of the manifold and various music services out there will step up to the plate and pick up its business. We wouldn’t be too surprised to see something like Spotify or Pandora try to soak up the business, especially given the fact that they both already boast solid standalone apps.

We’ll also be curious to see just whether or not Apple intends to launch anything like the services offered by LaLa, or if it simply intends to close the doors, which seems something of a silly move, but would certainly go some way to protecting the practical monopoly iTunes often seems to have on music when it comes to digital distribution.

Regardless, you can read more over at Cnet, which has an awful lot more detail on the deal.

Microsoft’s own entry to the portable media player (PMP) market, originally simple called the Zune, proved to be a fairly solid piece of hardware, but never quite seemed to take off in the face of Apple’s iPod dominance. The more recent launch of the Zune HD hasn’t seen Microsoft’s marketshare increase substantially (in fact, it’s fallen to just two per cent), but the Zune HD is by a far a more impressive piece of hardware.

Now, word comes from The Financial Times that Microsoft is planning to launch its media based Zune services in Europe. Since a little before the launch of the Zune HD, Microsoft has been rebranding some of its media services, making the Zune name into something that is to be less and less associated with the Zune hardware itself and more and more more to do with Microsoft’s portable media strategy overall.

The big news now, and perhaps the most important for those of us who’ve been sitting on our hands and watching the whole Zune debacle unfold over time, is that Microsoft has now decided that it is to launch the Zune services (if not the device itself) in the UK, France, Germany and Australia, which means that we’ll actually be able to see what Microsoft’s Zune services are like.

Who knows, perhaps if its Zune services see enough uptake Microsoft might even consider releasing the hardware over here, though for now it’s keeping characteristically tight-lipped about the whole business. Indeed, it’s said that there are currently no plans for any further hardware in the Zune line.

This means you guys have longer to decide whether or not you’re up for a purchase, it’s a solid plan. This week’s special offers are pretty much all Apple products, from iPods to MacBooks.

We aim to be cheaper than the Irish Apple Store on pretty much all of the Apple products that we stock.

iPod Touch 64GB:

When Apple announced an event in September, many had expected to hear that the iPod Touch would be graced with an iPhone-style camera. While that turned out not to be the case, Apple instead showed off the third generation of the iPod Touch, which boasts a few fairly nifty features of its own.

Click through to see our page for the 64GB iPod Touch

Perhaps most impressive of those new features is the fact that the newest version of the Touch boasts increased capacity over its predecessors, scaling up from the previous max of 32GB to a new high of 64GB, which finally gives serious music fans the option to have a proper library on a flash-based device.

The other big bonus about the newest incarnation of the iPod Touch is that it boasts the same processor as the iPhone 3G S, meaning that it’s significantly more capable than on older models. This is good news to fans of Apple’s App Store and the vast number of games and media available from it. For many the iPod Touch is a nice way to get in on the App Store without needing to sink money into the contract you’d need to get the same from an iPhone. It makes a lot of sense in that respect.

The 64GB iPod Touch is €349.

If that feels like a little much, the 32GB Touch is €269, while the 8GB Touch is just €179.

MacBook Air:

Apple’s MacBook Air is probably as close as Apple is likely to get to releasing a netbook. It’s a slimmed down version of Apple’s Macbook Pro line and among the thinnest laptops available; it’s really a bit of a stunner.

Click through to see our page for Apple's MacBook Air

The MacBook Air boasts a 13.3” display, a 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB or RAM and a 120GB hard drive. It also boasts an Nvidia GeForce 9400 M, which gives it a little more bang in the graphics department than you might normally expect from a machine with the same form factor.

As well you might expect, the MacBook Air does cost a pretty penny at €1,319, but if you were to pick up the same machine from Ireland’s Apple Store you’d be expected to pay something closer to the €1,450 mark, which isn’t nearly as palatable.

This model ships with Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard (that’s 10.5), though Apple has recently launched its successor in the form of the wildly successful Snow Leopard. The nice thing is that Snow Leopard is only going to set you back €29 for an upgrade license, so you’re still saving around the €100 mark.

You can check out the MacBook Air’s product page for more information. It’s a devilishly attractive machine.

iPod Nano 16GB:

Apple’s iPod Nano turned out to be the device that got a camera when Apple was announcing the updates and refreshes to its product ranges in September. The 16GB Nano is a €159 and available in an array of different colours, including black, silver, purple, orange, pink and blue. That puts us at €10 cheaper than Apple.

They get bonus points for listening to Lisztomania. Click through for the product page

The new iPod Nano boasts a 0.3 Megapixel camera, which isn’t quite as much to write home about as some had expected, but it’s good enough for snapshots. It also boasts its own built in microphone and 16GB of flash memory, meaning that you can rely on it not to skip if you take it out jogging. Moreover, it weighs in at just 36g, so it’s pretty much negligible in terms of throwing it in a pocket when you’re on the way out of the house.

There’s not too much more to say about the iPod Nano except that you can view our full Nano range by clicking through to this page.

As said above, the 16GB iPod Nano is €159, while the 8GB Nano is just €135.

TechCrunch has put its nose to the ground and managed to ferret out some very interesting details indeed about the current state of the Skype founders’ new project, not least of which the fact that a LinkedIn search reveals just one staff member in the form of Malthe Sigurdsson, former Creative Director for Skype.

That’s not all though, Skype’s one time General Manager of Desktop Products Carter Adamson has been drafted to, which, as TechCrunch is quick to point out, seems to indicate that this service will differ from what we’ve seen from the likes of Google’s Music Onebox and Facebook’s music offering in that it will likely have its own application, rather than being purely browser based.

While it’s all very interesting, the fact is that there just doesn’t seem to be all that much to know about Rdio for the moment beyond what its staff has worked on in the past. That said, we can fairly reasonably conclude a few things about Rdio from just that, including the fact that it’s likely to appear as both as in-browser service and as a standalone application.

If nothing else, it seems as though Rdio might well launch as some kind of direct competition for the vastly successful Spotify, which is for the moment largely uncontested (given the fact that Spotify’s most direct would-be competitor is the US only, Real Media owned, Rhapsody).

We’re curious to see how well Rdio performs, given the fact that the team behind it clearly has experience of launching a web-based service with a great deal of success already. The fact that they’ve grabbed the domain, www.rd.io alone should stand them quite well.

According an interview with TechRadar, Bale is of the opinion that the MSN music model won’t be overlapping too much with Google and Spotify’s streaming music. He took the time in an interview to highlight the differences between Microsoft’s offering and the existing services, saying that MSN Music is,

“… a downloadable service within MSN Music with an invitation-only streaming service for several thousand people.” He continued to say that, “We’ve had partnerships with OD2 and then Nokia – but following changes to Nokia’s music strategy we needed a new partner.”

It’s interesting to learn from there that MSN Music is, in a kind of roundabout way, an extension of its “Zune services” which seem to be a way of capitalising on the somewhat positive impression the Zune has left people with without selling them the hardware.

In Bale’s own words again, “We’ve gone with an in-houe Zune back end from Microsoft but you shouldn’t read into it that this is a big strategic push tactical move for the company as a whole.”

It’s strange that he’d take the time to make sure he got that out, but it could well just be an attempt to separate the MSN Music (which is very likely a brand that Microsoft is hoping will develop and take off in its own right) from the Zune brand, which would certainly bring a certain combination of an installed user base and some derision. Moreover, the Zune is practically unheard of in Europe, while the MSN brand has quite high penetration here.

According to The Independent the results of the survey suggest that those guilty of infringing copyright by downloading music illegally spend an average of £77 (or €85) on music every year, while those who claim never to download music illegally spend around the £44 (or €48) mark. Moreover, the survey hit a wide audience, with 1,000 people aged between 16 and 50 responding.

It’s interesting to see the figures from respondents, though it seems very likely that the music industry and copyright holders will question these findings (and very likely the honesty of respondents). Still, its enough to make us question the recent policy shift to expose those guilty of repeated piracy to internet disconnection.

Still, this is more evidence for those who have been arguing that music piracy does, in its own strange way, help the music industry by allowing for music to reach a wider audience.

That said, we imagine it’s not all that likely that this news will change any copyright holders minds on the evils of music piracy. It’s far more likely that they’ll stay the course and continue with costly litigation and internet disconnection…

If you’re interested in reading about the survey in more detail then it’s well worth checking out The Independent’s piece on illegal music downloaders and how much they spend on music.

The above is by a Japanese band called Sour. I don’t know the whole back story to it, just that I like the video a lot and it always cheers me up. It’s well worth a watch. It’s a solid Friday pick-me-up.

Anyway, this week I had wanted to avoid getting too into the Halloween feel and stay with pretty much normal stuff as much as possible. That said, I’m not entirely without a bit of Halloween feeling, so these two are inspired by the fact that I really wish I could dress up as a storm trooper for Halloween and not make an absolute mess of it.

I have in the past considered Googling "my phone" but never quite done it.

This next one was passed to me in a mail earlier in the week, but I can’t remember who from, so if you know who it was then give me a shout and I’ll credit them at some stage

Well, that’s it from us for this week. Hopefully you guys have enjoyed both the blog over the course of the week and this post in particular. Have an excellent Halloween guys… and to those of you who would still spell it “Hallowe’en” you get a little bit of a commendation, even if spellcheck thinks it’s properly wrong

Have a great weekend guys. We’ll be back on Monday.

With Facebook and Google having recently teamed up with LaLa.com to offer their own digitally distributed music services for less than Apple’s iTunes and web-based but free (respectively), word that MSN and MySpace’s are in the early stages of discussions of a joint music venture is simultaneously interesting and unsurprising.

AllThingsDigital broke the story, reporting that MSN Music “consistently ranks substantially lower than other big online music properties in terms of traffic, while MySpace Music is always near the top.” Clearly, from MSN’s point of view it’s a bit of a dream marriage. Similarly, for the MySpace folks (for whom everything but music has been sliding for quite a while now) a marriage to MSN could provide a bit of an injection of interest.

For now, we’ll have to wait and see if Microsoft and News Corp manage to bring anything interesting to the digitally distributed music game. If nothing else, Facebook’s elegant integration of “gift points” for music is something that the service could well seek to emulate, but having so few users by comparison it would almost certainly be a less popular option.

It seems that any new offering from MySpace Music and MSN would need to offer something that neither Facebook nor Google can. For Europeans that would be fairly easy, in that LaLa.com doesn’t offer anything to Europe… Certainly it’d be an impressive grab for MSN and MySpace to offer a service here before either Google or Facebook can, but we’ll have to wait and see on it.

If you’re interested in more details in the fledgling operation, you should check out the AllThingsDigital report on it.

Facebook may well have truly staggering userbase, but it hasn’t actually been a profitable enterprise until quite recently. With that in mind, the fact that Facebook is adding the ability to buy music makes a lot of sense, but it’s wandering into an area that will see it up against dedicated services like iTunes, Spotify and Rhapsody.

Perhaps most interesting is the news that Facebook’s music service is to be powered by LaLa.com, who the observant among you will remember as the gang supplying the music behind Google’s upcoming music service, tentatively referred to as Google Audio, for now.

If nothing else, this gives Facebook users the option to buy and gift songs to friends, but it also offers the change to buy and then download DRM-free MP3s. It’s worth pointing out that a song will cost 9 of Facebook’s “credits,” with each credit costing 10 cents (US).

All of that combined means that Facebook’s music service boasts DRM-free downloadable music, at a price that undercuts Apple’s iTunes per-track cost, the ability to stream songs for 10 cents a pop and Facebook’s practical ubiquity. While the gift service might not look too popular now, it’s something that Facebook could certainly stand to take a chance on. Of course, most won’t be willing to pay the 10c to stream content, services like Spotify (where available) and even Last.fm will allow that for free.

We’d imagine LaLa.com is also, most pleased with this week’s news. There’s nothing like adding Google and Facebook to the list of people to whom you provide services

You can read the announcement from Facebook if you’re curious about the details of its upcoming service. For now, it’s only available in the US (as it seems, are all LaLa offerings) but with any luck we’ll see

Regardless of your stance on Bono (and we’re sure pretty much everyone has a stance on Bono), it’s interesting to see U2 streaming content live via YouTube. It’ll also be very interesting to see how much of a logistical headache it is to manage. The BBC is carrying the story, in which it notes that, according to the band’s manager, Paul McGuinness, the set was to have been filmed regardless, which means that it presents a perfect opportunity to extend the party beyond the stadium.”

It’s been confirmed that the content will be ad-supported, but for now we have no clear indication of just what form that advertising will take. While we’d like to imagine that there’ll just be the usual slider for Google ads, it seems far more likely that there’ll be something a little different, given the likelihood that this event will be a one-off view for most, where much of YouTube’s content sees repeat traffic.

Regardless, those who want to watch it can do so by hitting www.youtube.com/u2 at about 0330 on Monday. It’s as honest a use as any to put a bank holiday to

While for most the achievement of actually having run the 26.2 miles of a marathon might seem daunting enough in itself, but apparently the difference made by a portable media player has been judged to be enough to justify a disqualification.

According to TomsGuide, whole business was quite confused from the start, with the initial winner disqualified for accepting a drink from a friend during the race, but not before being declared the winner. After that upset, the top spot was awarded to Jennifer Goebel, though Goebel had only two days to enjoy the title before that too was stripped.

Goebel herself sums the mentality behind marathon running iPod use quite well, saying, “If you’re bored, it pumps you up a little it. Sometimes, on a long training run, I’ll bring it along for the last half hour. When I run marathons sometimes I carry it and never put it on.”

For the most part, that last statement is true even of the Lakefront Marathon, during which Goebel was observed only to have used her iPod between the 19th and 21st miles of the race. Apparently, any use is too much use though, and so Goebel has been stripped of her title. It’ll be interesting to see how much impact this has on future decisions, given the amount of fuss that’s been kicked up.