Thursday, January 13, 2011
Spotify Makes an American Friend, Apple Sqeezes Verizon, RapidShare’s Rise to Top
of Web Traffic Chart Breeds Controversy
Spotify may be having a frustrating experience trying to negotiate with the Big Four, but the Swedish company is making headway with other prospective American business partners. This morning, we learn that
Shazam is adding Spotify to its list of post-ID recommendations by way of a “Play in Spotify,”
Digital Music News reports. But here’s the rub: This function will be relegated to premium, paying subscribers of both apps—initially, at least. Later this quarter, free versions of Shazam will support the option, but only in European countries where Spotify is available. The Spotify button will exist alongside other post-ID options, including
YouTube and
iTunes… After
Verizon Wireless starts selling
the
iPhone in February, the company may have to eat as much as $5 billion in subsidies over the following 12 months, the
N.Y. Post reports. The $5 billion hit, the high end of Wall Street estimates, is the difference between the $199 price charged to customers and the estimated $620
Apple charges Verizon times the estimated 15 million phones one analyst is predicting Verizon will sell in the first year. "Apple is good at pointing a gun at someone's head and saying, 'You want our stuff? Here are our terms,'"
Jack Gold of
Jack Gold Associates told the
Post…
RapidShare and similar online file-hosting services have overtaken
BitTorrent and traditional file-sharing networks in terms of web traffic, according to MarkMonitor, which concluded that Rapidshare’s more than 13 billion annual visitors make it the #1 sites for illegal downloads. Similar file host
Megaupload was a distant second, with 5 billion visitors, while file hosts
Hotfile,
4Shared and
Mediafire all made the top 100 most-visited sites globally—putting them ahead of headline-grabbing
The Pirate Bay, as
TorrentFreak pointed out. MarkMonitor’s spin made RapidShare very grumpy indeed, prompting the following statement: "The authors conclude that RapidShare has to be the biggest digital piracy site from looking at the number of page visits, totally ignoring the fact that millions of customers use the service for perfectly legitimate purposes." But the
MPAA saw the report quite differently: "The findings in the MarkMonitor report on online piracy and counterfeiting are a call to arms for both government and the private sector," the org asserted in a statement. "As the report demonstrates, a small number of rogue websites are generating mind-boggling traffic in pirated content."