So, it’s safe to say that Apple’s iTunes stays winning!
Case in point.
Last night, Jamaican power vocalist Tessane Chin won NBC‘s singing competition The Voice. To determine the winner, the show calculated audience votes– via phone, online and text – and iTunes sales over the course of six weeks of live performances. If any of those performances ended up in the top 10 on the iTunes singles chart, they will earn the artist an extra bonus, multiplying the iTunes votes for that song by five.
It’s brilliant because in addition to chokeholding those kid hackers who thought it would be funny to use phone hacking devices to keep mediocre performer Sanjaya in the American Idol competition & screw up real talented one, this mechanism forces audiences to vote with their pocketbook – while at the same time establishing whether the singer would be commercially viable. Sucks for tweens and teens who have limited budgets. Oh well.
Chin’s performance Monday night of “I Have Nothing” , brilliant cover of the popular Whitney Houston Song, shot to #1 on the iTunes download chart overnight, surpassing established artists songs also on the market like Ke$ha & Rihanna.
Wow, iTunes, wow!
Add that success to this week’s record breaking 800,000+ downloads of Beyonce‘s 5th solo studio album available EXCLUSIVELY via iTunes
And also this week, pursuant to a contentious royalties and copyright law suit, the Beatles often bootlegged songs were released also EXCLUSIVELY via iTunes.
According to CNN:
The surviving recordings became a liability for the record label, because their copyright on unreleased material ends on January 1, 2014. Independent labels could legally sell compilations of rejected versions of Beatles hits. Releasing them now gives Apple another 20 years’ protection under a recent change in European law.
Ok. Cool. Yall go on ahead and work that out…
but this fight also means $40 for 57 previously unreleased songs would be a WONDERFUL Christmas present for any Beatles Fan. Wheeeeeeee!!!!
Just when you thought streaming radio Rdio, Spotify, Pandoa, iHeartRadio, Slacker, BlipFM and app Soundcloud, et al had totally killed iTunes, here comes Apple saying:
NO NO NO!!! not so fast!
Jay Jay Ghatt is also editor at Techyaya.com, founder of the JayJayGhatt.com and JayJayGhatt.com where she teaches online creators how to navigate digital entrepreneurship and offers Do-It-For-You Blogging Service. She manages her lifestyle sites BellyitchBlog, Jenebaspeaks and JJBraids.com and is the founder of BlackWomenTech.com 200 Black Women in Tech On Twitter. Her biz podcast 10 Minute Podcast is available on iTunes and Player.fm. Follow her on Twitter at @Jenebaspeaks. Buy her templates over at her legal and business templates on Etsy shop!
