Apple, Music | featured news

When Apple launched its iTunes music store a decade ago amid the ashes of Napster, the music industry - reeling from the effects of online piracy - was anxious to see how the new music service would shake out....

Music streaming service Spotify makes its first moves in Latin America and Asia, amid rumours Apple may be preparing a similar product.

The answer to the trivia question will be: "Monkey Drums (Goskel Vancin Remix) by Chase Buch." That's the 25 billionth song purchased on iTunes....

Since its debut in 2001, iTunes has morphed from a standard music player into something larger and more complex. It's no longer just a music player -- it's also an App store, a music and movies store and a way to manage iPod, iPhone and iPad devices. In other words, iTunes has become a bloated, slow, unwieldy mess.

After past disappointments, Microsoft has paired its latest digital music offering with the Xbox and Windows as part of a broad set of bets to regain ground it has lost to Apple and other competitors.

Apple is in talks to license music for a custom-radio service similar to the popular one operated by Pandora Media, in what would be a bid by the hardware maker to expand its dominance in online music.

The reports are still flooding in over iTunes users finding their credit balances drained by hackers. Why hasn't Apple said a thing to assure customers it has things under control?

Steve Jobs’ appearance Monday at the Worldwide Developers Conference to introduce three new software products for Apple will be closely scrutinized by everyone from investors in the company’s stock to obsessed Apple fans who want to know how the King of Cupertino’s health is faring. Jobs, who went on medical leave in January, left chief operating officer Tim Cook in place to run things on a day-to-day basis. At the conference Monday, he (along with a team of Apple executives) will be introducing two new operating system software programs, as well as announcing iCloud, a widely anticipated service that lets users store content online.

Apple says people snapped up more than 450,000 copies of Beatles albums plus two million individual songs during the Fab Four's first week on sale through iTunes.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs finally got his Fab Four: On Tuesday, as anticipated, Apple's iTunes Music Store became the first online merchant to sell the Beatles' music.