Amazon today released a series of APIs as part of its new Amazon Mobile Payments Service that allow developers to build mobile payments into their applications, and to tie them to Amazon’s 1-Click payment option. For developers this gives them a way to let consumers buy things on their mobile phones without going through an arduous credit card entry process. This is a big move for Amazon as it brings it into direct competition with PayPal’s mobile checkout offering, as well as newer platforms such as iTunes and Google’s Checkout service. Continue »

Nine out of 10 Americans don’t listen to music on their cell phones, according to a Forrester Research note released today on “The Future Of Music On Cell Phones.” The report gives a bunch of reasons for this, but all the conclusions are bad news for carriers. First, digital music isn’t a viable revenue stream for them (and, in fact, carriers’ attempts to monetize music gets the blame for Americans giving on-device music the cold shoulder). Second, Americans enjoy streaming music services, such as Pandora, that eat up a lot of bandwidth on carriers’ 3G networks. Continue »

Internet service providers are beginning to focus on upstream speeds as subscribers change their online behavior from consuming web content to producing it. I’ve written how upstream demand is on the rise thanks to online storage services, video uploads and file sharing, but for people to truly pay attention to their upstream speeds, someone needs to build products that get everyday consumers to experience true pipe envy. Continue »

When it comes to buying content, consumers prefer to pick a bundle rather than buy à la carte, Daniel Taylor, a GigaOM Pro analyst, argues over at NewTeeVee. To bolster his argument, he used the example of paying for cable, rather than individual channels (even though folks are still agitating for à la carte pricing) and he discounts Apple’s impact on album sales as consumers buy only singles through iTunes. Instead, he focuses on the fact that most of a consumer’s household income goes toward buying bundled services rather than individual media products: Continue »

The Apple rumor mill never stops. This week, the Financial Times is claiming that Apple is working hand-in-hand with record labels to redesign how it sells music albums on its iTunes store. According to the FT’s sources, Apple is working with EMI, Sony, Warner and Universal on a project code-named “Cocktail.” The goal is to provide a more interactive album-purchasing experience, one that is distinctly different from that of buying just one song, by “bundling liner notes and video clips with the music.” Users would have an interactive “book,” presumably built into iTunes, including photos, lyric sheets and liner notes. But will such inclusions spur record sales? Having lyrics built into a track might save a trip to one of the billions of lyric sites on the Net, but shouldn’t that stuff be included anyway?

Sites like Last.FM make music listening more interactive, letting you share what you’re listening to with friends — but with iTunes and the iPod having 70 percent market share in the U.S., the killer app for any social music service would be full iTunes integration. Continue »

The Times this week, in a story about a new line of “stylishly designed” electronics from Memorex targeted at women, asks if women are getting the gadgets they deserve. I would answer no. Women (and really everyone) deserve gadgets that are easy to use. And a hot pink, handbag-shaped iPod speaker dock from Memorex wouldn’t change the fact that I have to spend hours tweaking my home network or updating my iTunes software in order to set up a music playlist for a party. Continue »

One of Apple’s great successes this decade has been its ability to unite the cell phone, the portable MP3 player and the music store in one ingenious handheld device, the iPhone. As new applications arise that allow on-demand streaming music on non-Apple phones such as those powered by Google’s Android operating system, however, Apple’s great strength and longstanding investment in music may become a crucial vulnerability that will force the company to make difficult choices in years to come.

This week, European streaming music service Spotify demonstrated its Android app, which features on-demand streams of songs the user doesn’t own, as well as an offline synchronization and caching function that allows a listener to enjoy a song on the go, regardless of whether the phone is connected to a data network at that moment. That’s dangerously close to owning a song, and speculation is already rife that Apple won’t accept Spotify’s planned iPhone app because it’s too much of a threat to Apple’s iTunes music store. Continue »