Tag: apple
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Apple Podcasts Charts
It appears that Apple’s podcast charts are somewhat broken. Or specifically, they had been broken for a period of time over the weekend while Apple perhaps tried a new algorithm to rank podcasts. Behind the scenes we know that various bad actors have been attempting to game the system. In the same way that you…
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Facebook, Amazon and the Premier League
It’s nearly time for the money-go-round… sorry, merry-go-round, that is the Premier League rights auction for seasons 2019/20-2021/22. We’ve just started the second season of the current deal where Sky and BT between them have spent £5.1bn for the current round of rights. Recall that last time around, this represented a colossal 71% increase in…
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The End of Digital Downloads?
That’ll teach me for writing this too quickly. I based this on a Digital Music News report which was published Wednesday evening UK time. A few hours later, and ReCode was reporting that Apple is planning no such thing. Of course plans change all the time, and record labels can get angry. So who knows…
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Amazon Prime Music – Filling A Hole
Back over the summer, Amazon launched its Prime Music offering in the UK. Anybody who pays Amazon £79 a year, for it’s free next day delivery service, and video streaming service, now also has access to more than a million tracks and hundreds of playlists to stream via the web, Fire TV or a mobile…
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Google and Podcasts
This week we heard the first news that Google is starting to get into the podcast game. Recode had the first decent report on the move. Currently, Apple dominates podcasts. Indeed, the word “podcast” might seem to imply to casual listener, that listening to a podcast means having an actual “iPod” to listen to them…
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Apple, Spotify and a Binary Way of Selling Music
Apple Music is now up and running. If you have an iPhone, you’ll be pestered to update your device, and a new Music app will appear that on first open is desperate to give you a 90 day free trial of Apple’s Spotify-like experience. So I dusted off an iPod Touch (mainly bought to use…
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Apple Music
So now we finally know the details of Apple Music. I won’t go through all the details because every site on the planet has already done so, breathlessly live-blogging the full announcement. So go elsewhere for those. To be honest, as The Verge reports there are probably some sighs of relief around the rest of…
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Podcasts: The Android Problem
A piece on Digiday examines the undeniable fact that listening to podcasts is heavily skewed towards Apple’s products, despite there being significantly more Android devices in the market. Now we know that not all things are equal: iPhone owners spend more on average – probably not surprising because they tend to be more expensive devices,…
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Podcast Numbers – Does Serial Tell Us Anything?
In a world where there are so many metrics available, there’s often a curious shortage of figures in some parts of the tech industry where you’d like there to be. Amazon won’t tell you how many Kindles its sold. Netflix won’t say how many episodes of House of Cards it has streamed. And so on.…
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Payments and Data
When Tesco first introduced its Clubcard in 1995, it was to enable it to capture data on its customers. Most people who use loyalty cards realise this. In return for the retailer being able to tie specific sales to an individual, that individual earns some kind of loyalty points. It seems to be a win/win.…
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When Are Casio, Timex or Rolex Making a Smartwatch?
Another day, another over-excited consumer goods release. Most others use trade shows. Apple does its own thing. It works for them. Fine. I can’t comment on the phone updates as I’ve not really seen anything that interesting or novel in any phone I’ve seen announced recently. Certainly nothing to make me think that my Nexus…
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Podcasting – What Next?
Tomorrow evening, there’s a Radio Academy event taking place in London looking at podcasting. As I’ve written previously, you always feel that podcasting is the perennial bridesmaid and never the bride in the digital media, and digital audio world. I suppose I’ve been thinking a little more about it recently because one of my favourite…