eMusic, the world’s second-largest digital music service after iTunes, today announced that it has sold more than 200 million downloads since establishing its current subscription model in November 2003.
The total comprises music downloads sold in the U.S. and the E.U., where eMusic has been available in all 27 E.U. nations since September 2006. The company [...]

Apple confirmed the rumor we reported earlier, announcing that the iTunes Store had surpassed Wal-Mart to become the number one music retailer in the US.
“We launched iTunes less than five years ago, and it has now become the number one music retailer in the world,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes. “We are [...]

Apple Computer today announced that iTunes is now the number two music retailer in the United States, second only to Wal-Mart, based on the latest data from the NPD Group. Apple also disclosed that there are now over 50 million iTunes Store customers, who have bought over four billion songs (20 million songs sold on [...]

Good news for Apple: half of all music sold in the US will be digital in 2011.
Sales of digitally downloaded music will surpass physical CD sales in 2012, according to a new report by Forrester Research. Digital music sales will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23 percent over the next five years, [...]

Music subscription services have, by and large, bombed. The idea of renting music hasn’t taken off and, even worse, customers have to worry about the services’ futures.
The latest example of this comes with Yahoo’s subscription music service. On Monday, the company announced that it will discontinue its Yahoo Music Unlimited subscription service and has instead [...]

Yesterday, when everybody was hyping the new ad-supported music service Qtrax, we said Qtrax was D.O.A.
We noted that “Qtrax wants you to download software to watch ads to get DRM���d music that probably won���t work on your media player.” Not something that we really want to do.
Others are starting to see through the free music [...]

The net is abuzz with talk today about Qtrax, another service that promises free ad-supported music.
The Qtrax service offers to let you use an ad-supported program to search for and download DRM’d music that you can play on a PC and on some media players.
Unfortunately, it looks like Qtrax will be as dead on arrival [...]

Amazon.com has announced plans for an international rollout of Amazon MP3, a DRM-free MP3 digital music store, in 2008.
Amazon MP3 is currently the only retailer that the four major labels are allowing to offer customers DRM-free MP3s. As a result, it can offer over 3.3 million songs from more than 270,000 artists in DRM-free MP3 [...]

For a long time, people have thought that getting the music industry to switch to DRM-free MP3s for music downloads would open the doors to a consumer-friendly world of digital music competition.
Now it’s starting to look like the music industry wil use DRM-free MP3s to enforce their traditional monopoly on what you hear, what you [...]

CNet has an interesting interview with Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor on his recent experiment with Saul Williams’ debut CD, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust.
Reznor and Williams made NiggyTardust available as a free download, but also let you purchase a higher-quality version for a nominal fee. In the interview, Reznor talks about his [...]