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Filed under: Internet, News

New York state may begin taxing music downloads

The Taxman
New York, the state that brought us taxes on items bought over the internet is at it again. This time governor David Paterson is considering a 4% tax on music and other digital media downloads.

To be fair, times are tight and Paterson is also proposing raising taxes on soda, cable and satellite TV, gas, cigars, beer, and movie and sports tickets in order to balance the state budget. But at a time when residents finances are at least as tight as the state's, I imagine these proposals won't be very popular in New York.

Amazon, Overstock.com and other retailers are already fighting New York's internet sales tax in court. Something tells me Amazon and other companies that sell digital music and movies to New York citizens aren't going to take the new tax proposal sitting down.

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Apple

Apple takes the #1 music retailer spot from Wal-Mart, or does it?

iTunes #1?
There's a rumor floating around this morning that Apple has surpassed Wal-Mart to become the top music retailer in the US. Ars Technica reports that Apple has sent a memo to employees showing the results of an NPD MusicWatch survey in January. There's just one problem. In February, Apple publicly stated that it was now the number two music seller in the US.

As Engadget points out, there may have been a spike in January because a whole bunch of people picked up new iPods and iPod gift cards for the holidays in Decemeber. Suffice it to say, if Apple was really the top music retailer in the country right now, they wouldn't be passing around an internal memo. They'd be sending out press releases with pictures of Steve Jobs stepping on a smiley face with blood poring out of its nose. Wait, smiley faces don't usually have noses, do they?

We're fairly certain that digital music will surpass physical media sales one day. That day just doesn't happen to be today.

Update: Nope, apparently that day is today. Apple has issued a press release stating that NPD's numbers show the company was the top music retailer in January and March.

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Apple

iTunes hits number 2 on the charts

iTunes
In case you didn't get the message, the format wars are over. No, not HD-DVD v. Blu-Ray, but physical media versus digital media. Whether you get your music or video on discs or online, the truth is, the folks who preferred analog recordings on vinyl lost their war long ago. If you need any further proof, check this out: Apple's iTunes Store now sells more music than any other retailer in the US except for Wal-Mart.

How much music are we talking about? Apple has sold over 4 billion songs to over 50 million customers.

While Apple's press release mentions the fact that you can also buy and rent movies from iTunes, noticeably absent are any major video milestones. While we're pretty confident that video downloads will be as popular as music downloads any day now, Apple doesn't dominate the field yet. In fact, nobody does at the moment. There's still no good place to go for all of your movie ant TV show needs, aside from The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent trackers.

[via TUAW]

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Video

AMD Live! Explorer beta: Browser for desktop and online media

AMD Live! Explorer
Chip maker AMD has released a beta version of a new media browser for Windows computers. AMD Live! Explorer requires a machine with an AMD processor to run, and you need a pretty speedy one at that. But the software is available as a free download, so we won't complain. Much.

AMD Live! Explorer provides you with yet another way to view photos, music, and movies stored on your computer. You browse your images and saved video files using either a thumbnail view, or a "Live!" view which is basically a fancy visualization similar to what you'd see if you were browsing online images using the Piclens add-on for Firefox. If you have a TV tuner and Windows Media Center on your PC, you can also watch live and recorded TV shows.

You can also download several AMD Live! Applications from within Live! Explorer, including a tool for transferring recorded TV shows to a portable device, and another tool that synchronizes your iTunes and Windows Media Player libraries.

[via TechnoSpot]

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