Below The Beltway

It looks like the long-rumored deal between Apple and The Beatles may be reality:
Listening Post reported last week that Steve Jobs would soon announce the Beatles’ availability on the iTunes store, now, new details have emerged suggesting that in keeping with Jobs’ oft-professed love of the Fab Four, the Beatles catalog could become available in [...]

During his speech at MacWorld, where he announced the impending release of the iPhone, Steve Jobs made this statement about the ubiquity of iTunes which was actually pretty stunning:
Apple said iTunes has sold 2 billion songs. The iTunes movie section, with a collection of 250 films, has sold 1.3 million movies in its first four [...]

Steve Jobs unveils the Apple iPhone
Apple chief executive Steve Jobs confirmed yesterday that the company has created an iPod smart phone, a device that will make calls, surf the Internet, send and receive e-mail, and — naturally — play music and video downloaded from Apple’s iTunes Store
The iPhone — which should be available through Cingular [...]

The Cult of Mac blog at Wired argues that recent stories about the small amount of music purchased on iTunes miss the point:
iTunes does not exist to be the only way for people to buy music, TV shows or movies. It’s there to be a security blanket and a sampler. I don’t buy much off [...]

The Register reports that iTunes sales are “collapsing”:
The leading DRM digital download service, Apple’s iTunes, has experienced a collapse in sales revenues this year according to analyst company Forrester Research.
Secretive Apple doesn’t break out revenues from iTunes, but Forrester conducted an analysis of credit card transactions over a 27-month period. And this year’s numbers aren’t [...]

The New York Times has a short, but interesting article today about the how much iPod sales are driving traffic at Apple’s iTunes Music Store:
Apple?s ubiquitous iPod and its iTunes music store were intended to be a kind of perpetual motion machine, with iPods helping to sell iTunes and iTunes helping to sell iPods
Although both [...]

There’s almost nothing you can’t find on iTunes these days, but there are several gaping holes created by artists who have yet to sign on to Apple’s online music distribution system. One of the biggest is The Beatles, but that may be changing:
NEW YORK (Fortune) — Click on the iTunes music store and punch in [...]

The video content available for download at the iTunes Music Store continues to grow, with Warner Brothers now joining the party:
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group on Tuesday became the latest division of a major Hollywood studio to offer television shows, including the hit sitcom “Friends,” for sale on Apple Computer Inc’s [...]

Kevin Drum has a question for iPod users out there:
I have a question for all the iPod owners out there: Would you say that you mostly select specific songs (or albums or playlists) to listen to, or do you mostly set it on shuffle and let the iPod do the work
When I first got my [...]

The Washington Post has an article about the way that the market for music has changed now that more of it is being purchased online:
For years, old recordings have piled up in the archives at Verve Records, including beloved jazz tracks that had no market big enough to justify pressing new discs. But thanks to [...]