The iTunes Store is a digital media store operated by Apple Inc. It opened on April 28, 2003, as a result of Steve Jobs' push to open a digital marketplace for music. As of April 2020, iTunes offered 60 million songs, 2.2 million apps, 25,000 TV shows, and 65,000 films. When it opened, it was the only legal digital catalog of music to offer songs from all five major record labels.
A digital music store is a business that sells digital audio files of music recordings over the Internet. Customers gain ownership of a license to use the files, in contrast to a music streaming service, where they listen to recordings without gaining ownership. Customers pay either for each recording or on a subscription basis. Online music stores generally also offer partial streaming previews of songs, with some songs even available for full length listening. They typically show a picture of the album art or of the performer or band for each song. Some online music stores also sell recorded speech files, such as podcasts, and video files of movies.
AllOfMP3, MP3Sparks and MemphisMembers are brands of online music store that were operated by Mediaservices, Inc., a company founded in 2000 in Moscow, Russia. The stores formerly sold music encoded in standard, non-protected audio formats at a significantly lower cost than other online music stores. In 2008, the original AllOfMp3 site was replaced by a blog.
eMusic is an online music and audiobook store that operates by subscription. In exchange for a monthly subscription eMusic users can download a fixed number of MP3 tracks per month. eMusic was established in 1998, is headquartered in New York City with an office in London, and is owned by TriPlay.
A music download is the digital transfer of music via the Internet into a device capable of decoding and playing it, such as a personal computer, portable media player, MP3 player or smartphone. This term encompasses both legal downloads and downloads of copyrighted material without permission or legal payment. According to a Nielsen report, downloadable music accounted for 55.9 percent of all music sales in the US in 2012. By the beginning of 2011, Apple's iTunes Store alone made US$1.1 billion of revenue in the first quarter of its fiscal year. Music downloads are typically encoded with modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) audio data compression, particularly the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format used by iTunes as well as the MP3 audio coding format.
TuneTribe was a digital music download store that offers content from major record labels, independents and unsigned artists. It is unknown when the site became defunct.
An Internet radio device, also called network music player is a hardware device that is capable of receiving and playing streamed media from either Internet radio stations or a home network.
SoundClick is a music-based social community. Songs can be streamed, downloaded in MP3 format, sold through the store, or licensed to others. SoundClick compiles daily charts for various genres, based on undisclosed factors. The social-network offers profile pages with friends networking, photo, video, blogs, and user stations.
SpiralFrog was a very early music streaming service based in New York City that launched in the United States and Canada on September 17, 2007. SpiralFrog offered free and legal music downloads, all supported by advertising, and was the largest site of its kind in North America. On March 19, 2009, SpiralFrog terminated operations due to loan recalls. While SpiralFrog was not successful in the end, it nonetheless helped shaped the digital music industry shift from the purchase to streaming models, and its ultimate revenue recovery
Zune is a discontinued software program that was developed by Microsoft for Windows that functions as a full media player, library, media streaming server, mobile device management, and interface for the discontinued Zune Marketplace. The software is used to sync with all devices with Zune functionality including the Zune 4, 8, 16, 30, 80, 120, Zune HD, Windows Phone 7, and Microsoft Kin. Zune devices work exclusively with the Zune software, which applies many design principles of Microsoft's Metro design language.
Digital music stores sell copies of digital audio, for example in MP3 and WAV file formats. Unlike music streaming services, which typically charge a monthly subscription fee to stream digital audio, digital music stores download songs to the customer's hard disk drive of their device. The customer will have the copy of the song permanently on their disk, provided the track is not deleted by the customer, the disk does not get physically damaged, or suffers from being corrupted. Major examples of digital music stores include iTunes Store, Amazon Music, Bandcamp and 7digital.
Amazon Music is a music streaming platform and Digital music store operated by Amazon. As of January 2020, the service had 55 million subscribers.
inMusic was a Canadian music news portal and an online music store. The music store had over 2 million tracks in English and French from various genres. Samples of 30 seconds for each song were offered at no charge. Purchases and downloads could be transferred to a CD or compatible digital music device.
Jamendo is a Luxembourg-based music website and an open community of independent artists and music lovers. A subsidiary of Belgian company Llama Group, and Independent Management Entity (IME) since 2019.
In the first decade of the 21st century, the rise of digital media on the internet and computers as a central and primary means to record, distribute, store, and play music caused widespread economic changes in the music industry. The rise of digital media with high-speed internet access fundamentally changed the relationships between artists, record companies, promoters, retail music stores, the technology industry, and consumers. The rise of digital music consumption options contributed to several fundamental changes in consumption. One significant change in the music industry was the remarkable decline of conventional album sales on CD and vinyl. With the à la carte sales models increasing in popularity, consumers no longer downloaded entire albums but rather chose single songs.
Moontaxi Media Inc. was the first company in Canada to offer online music subscription services backed by licensing deals with major record labels in April 2002. In October 2003, the company would be the first to offer licensed music for sale in a digital format through its online store at Puretracks.com. Apple would launch its iTunes Music Store in Canada a year later in December 2004.
Google Play Music was a music and podcast streaming service and an online music locker operated by Google as part of its Google Play line of services. The service was announced on May 10, 2011; after a six-month, invitation-only beta period, it was publicly launched on November 16, 2011, and shut down in December 2020.
TechZone is one of the largest aggregators, publishers and distributors of entertainment content on mobile in India. With Exclusive rights to one of the largest library of music and video titles, Techzone is the largest player in providing Bollywood content on mobile and also captures majority of the Tamil markets. With exclusive content rights for top brands such as Times Music, 9XMedia, UTV, Radio City, MTV, and more. Techzone also dominates the international music market on mobile in India and captures majority of it. It powers more than two-thirds of all Mobile Digital Entertainment content in India and internationally, and run the short code 56060 across all operators in India.
