So being that I actually have a life, not to mention a job, I was unable to camp out overnight outside of the local AT&T store to get a newly released 3G iPhone today. But maybe that’s a good thing, after all, the new software Apple lauched for all iPhone to coincide with the new release, doesn’t work:

NEW YORK (AP) - The launch of Apple Inc.’s much-anticipated new iPhone turned into an information-technology meltdown on Friday, as customers were unable to get their phones working.

“It’s such grief and aggravation,” said Frederick Smalls, an insurance broker in Whitman, Mass., after spending two hours on the phone with Apple and AT&T Inc., trying to get his new iPhone to work.

In stores, people waited at counters to get the phones activated, as lines built behind them. Many of the customers had already camped out for several hours in line to become among the first with the new phone, which updates the one launched a year ago by speeding up Internet access and adding a navigation chip.

A spokesman for AT&T, the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the U.S., said there was a global problem with Apple’s iTunes servers that prevented the phones from being fully activated in-store, as had been planned.

Instead, employees are telling buyers to go home and perform the last step by connecting their phones to their own computers, spokesman Michael Coe said.

However, the iTunes servers were equally hard to reach from home, leaving the phones unusable except for emergency calls.

The problem extended to owners of the previous iPhone model. A software update released for that phone on Friday morning required the phone to be reactivated through iTunes.

“It’s a mess,” said freelance photographer Giovanni Cipriano, who updated his first-generation iPhone only to find it unusable.

As far as I’m concerned, if you’re camping outside a store overnight to buy a fucking PHONE, you kind of deserve something like this. I mean, fuck, maybe I’ll just wait another year until they’re like $99.

The second iTunes festival will take place in London this July. Some confirmed headliners include James Blunt, N.E.R.D., Death Cab For Cutie, Pendulum, Feeder, Chaka Khan and The Zutons. More big name artists to be announced soon!

The festival had great success last year and will take place at Camden’s Koko this summer - which can hold 1,000 fans. The concert will be recorded to be sold on all iTunes stores worldwide. Free tickets will be available to contest winners and competitions will be held by London Media Partners.

From Wired.com:

By 2012, digital music is projected to account for 40 percent of music sold, according to InStat. If Apple holds onto its current market share, it will account for more than one-quarter of all music sales by its ninth birthday. Not bad for freeware.

“I’m very skeptical about whether iTunes can be unseated, because there’s not a lot of consumer pain there,” said Paul Resnikoff, editor of Digital Music News.

Digital Music News recently found that iTunes is installed on nearly 30 percent of all computers worldwide, making it the most widely installed music store application in the world.

When Apple snapped up a little music program called SoundJam MP back in 2000, no one predicted that the iTunes application it became would lead to a complete restructuring of the music industry.

If you’re lucky enough to be living in the UK, you might want to hold off on downloading Tokyo Police Club’s debut full-length album Elephant Shell from the iTunes Music Store, and wait for the bonus double disc that hit stores in the UK on May 5th.

The extra disc features remixes of Elephant Shell tracks from Field Music, Tom of Los Campesinos!, Dntel, the Good Life, and Flowers Forever. Those UK-only bonus tracks, meanwhile, include a new song– appropriately titled “New New Song”– and a cover of the Rentals’ “Friends of P” (!) pitchforkmedia.

(more…)

With the announcement that iTunes has become the #1 retailer of music in the USA and MySpace announcing its own online music store, the fact that anybody wants to buy Snocap is bewildering. But as announced earlier today, Imeem just bought the struggling digital music service company.

From Billboard:

Imeem itself is a customer of the service, using Snocap to identify tracks uploaded to the Imeem service by users to ensure content owners have allowed the full streaming of their music, as well as manage the ad-share revenue payments back to the appropriate label and artist each time a registered song is played via Imeem. Other customers include MySpace, which uses Snocap’s MyStores widget to let independent and unsigned artists sell individual tracks to fans via MySpace profiles.

Snocap has been struggling over the past year and was actively seeking a buyer. Although the registry contains more than 7 million tracks from all major labels, few services use the database and those that do are relatively minor in comparison to the market-leading iTunes music store. The once-hyped Mashboxx P2P service was supposed to be Snocap’s coming out party three years ago, but that service never launch, and likely never will.

The MyStores widget, meanwhile, never caught fire with the robust MySpace artist community. Many artists complained Snocap charged excessive per-track fees, which led to high-priced downloads to fans and leaving little left for the artist.

I mean, Snocap looked kinda cool on paper (or on screen, rather) — little independent bands could host a widget directly on their MySpace and fans could buy MP3s…but the service was only free to bands for the first year, and Snocap took a healthy percent of the sales, and I’m pretty the bands were obligated to stay on for another two years and pay Snocap for the privilege of gouging them…that’s why I never signed up for that shit. I call BULLSHIT on the Snocap model. Now it’s in Imeem’s court. Lemme know how that works out for ya…

Good luck Tom:

MySpace, the world’s largest social network Web site, said it has formed an online music venture with three major recording companies in a challenge to Apple Inc’s dominant iTunes Music Store. Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group have minority stakes in the new MySpace Music venture announced on Thursday. Financial terms were not disclosed.
MySpace Music will offer free music and video streaming supported by advertising, paid-for MP3 downloads, ringtones for cell phones, concert ticket sales and merchandise. Chris De Wolfe, chief executive of MySpace, said the launch date of the new service was “fluid” with commercial features being added to the site over the next three to four months. He said MySpace is in talks with more music industry partners to offer their services on MySpace Music.

In the meantime, Apple’s iTunes recently supplanted Wal-Mart as being America’s #1 music retailer, with 19% of the music sold in January.