Below The Beltway

Take, for example, the story of the 9 year old girl who sent a letter to Apple only to get a cease-and-desist letter in return:
CBS 13) Like any nine-year-old, Shea O’Gorman spends a lot of time listening to her iPod Nano. So much so, that when her third grade class started learning about writing letters […]

Apple has a major announced scheduled this week and, as usual, the media is already doing a lot of free advertising:
When Apple said it was going to make an announcement at the Moscone Center in San Francisco next week, it triggered an elaborate and familiar guessing game.
Could it be the iPhone Nano, the subject of […]

Apparently, they aren’t going to allow any new content on Apples iTunes Store:
The dispute between Apple and NBC Universal over the pricing of videos on iTunes grew more heated yesterday as Apple announced that it would not add any new episodes of NBC television shows to the online store’s inventory.
Among the fall shows NBC Universal […]

A fascinating article in today’s New York Times about what goes in to making an iPod:
The retail value of the 30-gigabyte video iPod that the authors examined was $299. The most expensive component in it was the hard drive, which was manufactured by Toshiba and costs about $73. The next most costly components were […]

Apple’s iTunes Store has passed Amazon and Target to become the third-biggest music retailer in the nation:
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Apple Inc.’s iTunes online store was the third-largest overall music retailer in the United States, leapfrogging ahead of Amazon.com and Target Corp. in units sold, a market research firm said Friday.
ITunes had a 9.8 percent […]

Today, Apple announced that it had sold 100 million iPods since the product was first introduced:
CUPERTINO, California?April 9, 2007?Apple? today announced that the 100 millionth iPod? has been sold, making the iPod the fastest selling music player in history. The first iPod was sold five and a half years ago, in November 2001, and […]

Forget iTunes, more songs are downloaded from peer-to-peer networks:
In 2006, the number of households with PCs that downloaded at least one song using free peer-to-peer software, like Limewire or BitTorrent, grew a modest 7.2 percent, reaching 14.9 million, according to figures released by the NPD Group, a market-research firm.
Meanwhile, the number of PC households that […]

Today, Apple and record producer EMI announced a deal that will make almost all of EMI’s catalog available on iTunes without copy protection:
LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - EMI, the world’s third largest music company, said on Monday it was making its music available online without a key anti-piracy measure in a deal with Apple Inc. to […]

Sales of compact discs took another dramatic plunge in the first three months of 2007:

In a dramatic acceleration of the seven-year sales decline that has battered the music industry, compact-disc sales for the first three months of this year plunged 20% from a year earlier, the latest sign of the seismic shift in the way […]

Steve Jobs has posted an open letter to the music industry in which he calls for an end to anti-piracy controls on digital music sold online:
Apple chief executive Steve Jobs yesterday called on record companies to let online music stores sell digital music files without anti-piracy controls, an idea that some analysts say has merit.
“This […]