Itunes

Enter your email address on Southwest.com to get your custom iTunes download code. That page also has the entire list of artists and songs. Here's Something Beautiful from Trombone Shorty and Lenny Kravitz:    

Oh, America. You brutal, merciless fool. When it comes to "The Voice," you messed up, America. True, you cut someone who reached her peak weeks ago, but you also eliminated the twee princess who wrapped herself so tightly around our hearts. I'm not even going to beat around the bush here -- I'll leave the suspense and ratings-pandering to Carson Daly. Last night, America voted off Amanda Brown and Melanie Martinez. This means two things: One, that like Christina Aguilera, Adam Levine is now wholly out of the competition as well, and two, that America doesn't know a good thing if it beats them over the head with a tambourine, guitar and Cruella De Vil hairstyle.

Vivendi's Universal Music Group has reportedly refused to renew its contract with Apple Inc. to sell its music catalog on the iTunes Store. But you won't see Universal's artists vanish from the iTunes Store any time soon. They clearly need each other. For the past couple of years, the Big Four music companies - Universal, EMI, Sony BMG and Warner - have watched uneasily as Apple became an increasingly powerful player in the world of digital music. The iTunes Store has about 75 percent of the market for online music downloads.

While the Internet salivated over an album cover (an album that has produced one song that was both terrible and forgettable), the best rap album of 2011 — thus far — had been available for purchase two days before. Kendrick Lamar quietly dropped Section.80 on iTunes late Friday night, and to sleep on it would be mistake. The West Coast rapper has gained blog traction thanks to a dexterous flow, but it's how he uses it that really inspires. With each song, Lamar challenges himself to not only tell a story, but to also attack the beat in ways lesser rappers simply wouldn't consider.

Like a few zillion other customers, I happily log onto Apple's online music store from time to time to exchange a few dollars for a handful of album tracks - sometimes a whole album or two. I don't begrudge Apple a penny of the money I've spent through iTunes. My gripe is with digital rights management (DRM) - the industry's euphemism for copy protection. This is a digital lock that limits the devices on which I can play most iTunes music to a handful of computers and Apple's own iPod portable players.

After fighting with record labels over its everything-for-99-cents stance, Apple said yesterday that it would start offering different songs at different prices. Apple is the No. 1 music seller in the nation, so the fact that finally it is doing what capitalists everywhere always have done - charge more for, say, a hot new Lil Wayne track and less for an old tune by Yanni - is sure to ripple through the music industry and could give consumers more reasons to buy digital downloads. In the new iTunes pricing system, songs will cost either 69 cents, 99 cents or $1.29 each.

People visiting the iTunes Store customer feedback page have reported seeing references to a "RentalMovie" category, according to Forbes.com. This could well mean we'll see rental movies at the iTunes Store very soon. Usually slip-ups like this foreshadow a formal announcement from Apple within days. As far back as June, FT.com had reported that Apple was in talks with several major Hollywood studios about offering 30-day movie rentals for $2.99. The iTunes Store currently sells movies for $14.99.

Downloading music from the Internet has proven to be wildly successful. Unfortunately, much of that downloading has been illegal. Apple Computer has long been known for its innovation when it comes to its computers and software. Nowhere was that more evident than on its release of its iTunes Music Store service that offers the legal downloading of music to your computer. Since its beginning, it has continued to stand alone with its 99-cents-a-song sales model, its seamless integration into its iTunes music player software, and its copy-protection scheme that lets purchasers make copies of songs to CDs, mp3 players and other computers.

Apple announced this week that it has sold 3 billion songs from the iTunes Store, another impressive milestone for an arm of the company the primary purpose of which is to encourage sales of the far more profitable iPod. I could have purchased the 3 billionth song myself; I discovered to my absolute delight the other day that the iTunes Store carries a significant chunk of the material by a band legendary in the Baltimore area - Crack the Sky. The band never caught on nationally (a great injustice)

When Apple opened its online iTunes Music Store last month with 200,000 digital album tracks for sale at 99 cents each, the company said it expected to sell a million songs in its first month. Instead, customers downloaded a million tunes in the first week. That's an astounding figure, considering that Macs with the latest version of Apple's operating system - the only computers that can access the store - account for less than 1 percent of the nation's PCs. If I owned stock in a record company, I'd look at those numbers and wonder why the bozos at the top have spent so much energy over the past three years fighting online music instead of jumping in to sell it in a format that millions prefer.

Visit  http://www.spin.com/itunes  for a free 14 song iTunes download courtesy of their July edition: 1. Anna Calvi, "Blackout" 2. Centro-Matic, "Only in My Double Mind"  3. Country Mice, "Morning Son" 4. Dead Rider, "Mothers Meat" 5. Dels, "Trumpalump" 6. Eleanor Friedberger, "My Mistakes" 7. Frank Turner, "I Am Disappeared" 8. Givers, "Up Up Up" 9. John Maus, "Believer" 10. Little Dragon, "Nightlight" 11. Marissa Nadler,...

Enter your email address on Southwest.com to get your custom iTunes download code. That page also has the entire list of artists and songs. Here's Something Beautiful from Trombone Shorty and Lenny Kravitz:    

Another month, another 17 songs from SPIN Magazine. Visit SPIN.com/itunes to start your download via iTunes. The complete track list is below: Beady Eye: "The Roller" Cornershop: "Natch" Faust: "Herbststimmung" J Mascis: "Not Enough" JEFF The Brotherhood: "Diamond Way" Keren Ann: "My Name Is Trouble" Kurt Vile: "Jesus Fever" Morning Teleportation: "Expanding Anyway" Obits: "You Gotta Lose" ...

From the outside, Don Pedro's Musica Latina on Broadway looks like anything but a music store. You might guess it's a country-western emporium. Maybe even a secondhand sports-equipment store. Inside its display window, there are soccer balls, wool leopard-print comforters and dozens of sneaker boxes. But behind all that is where its real product lies: some 200,000 CDs from everywhere in Latin America. For years, Baltimore's ethnic music stores like this one were spared from the digital music revolution that consumed their American counterparts because of their deep catalogs.

When I first encountered iTunes, the wildly popular music app that allows fans to compile their own digital library, I was agog. After 20 years of amassing music, I had more than 4,000 albums, most of them stacked precariously in my basement. The more I used iTunes, the more slavish my devotion grew. If I wanted to play a particular song, I no longer had to go hunting through those stacks. I just clicked a button. If I wanted to make a mixed CD -- a process that had taken me hours, particularly in the cassette era -- I had only to create a new playlist.

Singer/songwriter Evan Taubenfeld was shopping at the mall when inspiration struck. Earlier this month, Taubenfeld kept hearing music from pop/country star Taylor Swift piped into stores, and, on the spur of the moment, decided to pen a holiday song about her. From start to finish, it took Taubenfeld, a Baltimore native who now lives in Los Angeles, an hour to write the song, which he called "Merry Swiftmas (Even Though I Celebrate Chanukah)."...

THERE'S ONE major problem with iTunes, Apple's online music store: It's addictive. Click, download. Click. Download. Click, download. Click -- oops, was that a credit card debit for $20 in my mailbox? Well, that's my problem, not Apple's. It's a bill I'm happy to pay because iTunes gave me a chance to browse through a broad selection of music, pick out the album tracks I wanted, and download them legally with only minimal copy restrictions. The Windows version of the iTunes store opened for business Oct. 24, six months after its debut for the Macintosh.

Although Steve Jobs announced in his keynote at the Macworld 2008 expo that 1,000 movies would be available for rental from the iTunes Store by the end of February, it didn't happen. In fact, the number of movies you can rent from iTunes is well below half that number. Last week I checked the "all rentals" box on the iTunes Store and got just 287 items, although a power search with the "Search movies available for rental" box checked turned up 436 films. Many in the blogosphere have hammered Apple for what some are calling a broken promise.

Singer/songwriter Evan Taubenfeld was shopping at the mall when inspiration struck. Earlier this month, Taubenfeld kept hearing music from pop/country star Taylor Swift piped into stores, and, on the spur of the moment, decided to pen a holiday song about her. From start to finish, it took Taubenfeld, a Baltimore native who now lives in Los Angeles, an hour to write the song, which he called "Merry Swiftmas (Even Though I Celebrate Chanukah)."...