Apple buys Hulu to kill it and position iTunes against Netflix: report

by Johnny Major

Apple will buy Hulu and fold it into its current iTunes Store platform in order to make a run at industry powerhouse Netflix while also erasing existing leverage the television studios and networks have against Apple in current iTunes Store negotiations, if current reports are accurate. Apple has long struggled to breathe life into its iTunes TV show offerings along the lines of its widely popular iTunes music sales, which dominate the industry. In contrast, Apple’s television offerings are overpriced for purchase, offer shockingly short viewing windows for rentals, suffer from far too many current and classic TV shows being missing, and are not overwhelmingly popular in terms of consumer participation. Hulu, a free service which wedges television ads into digital airings of television shows, was created by the television networks themselves at a time when they feared Apple could gain the kind of leverage in the TV industry which it has spent the past several years enjoying in the music industry. Apple, for its part, has long attempted to sell the public on the idea of paying to watch television shows online with no ads. Making Hulu go away could kill multiple birds with one stone and offer Apple multiple options in terms of how Hulu gets folded into iTunes as well as the niche Apple TV product. And it all comes at time when Netflix is busy offending its user base by significantly raising prices.

Opportunity knocks

Apple TV could be a mainstream product if it offered DVR recording functionality, but instead it’s a little-understood set top box which asks customers to pay $99 simply to be able to watch their iTunes purchases on their television sets. That double cost whammy has left AppleTV strictly in the niche category. Now there’s talk, however, that Apple may bypass the box concept by selling its own line of Apple branded televisions with Apple TV functionality built in. These could be Apple’s own in-house specially designed televisions, or they could merely be those of an existing TV manufacturer with an Apple logo and and Apple TV tuner built in. Either way, it positions Apple to finally turn its iTunes Store television (and movie) offerings into something more than a sideshow to iTunes music sales. But Hulu and Netflix will stand in the way of that goal, as Netflix has a massive entrenched user base and Hulu is free. Hulu is also struggling mightily, as it’s not uncommon to watch a popular television show episode on the service and be treated to nothing but public service ads during the breaks, which means Hulu couldn’t sell any of the ad space. Hulu is likely looking for buyers, and so the Apple buyout report from BusinessWeek isn’t a surprise. But if so, where does Apple go from there?

To charge or not to charge

Apple could go one or both of two ways with a Hulu acquisition. Forget the silly Hulu brand name, cruddy website and lame apps. They’d be gone, with hulu.com eventually if not immediately auto-forwarding to an iTunes link. But Apple could use the existing Hulu contracts to offer the same television shows for free on an ad-supported basis. Or it could use its existing iTunes contracts to continue selling shows ad-free while also offering a free ad-supported version. Such a move would offer a choice to consumers who either feel that they don’t want to waste time with ads or don’t want to waste money by paying for TV episodes. Everyone would be theoretically happy. Well, almost everyone. With Apple having decided that the era of the optical disc is already over and having removed internal CD and DVD drives from its MacBook Air laptops, Apple will not launch a DVD mail-out service to compete with Netflix. However, with the transition from disc to online underway, Apple might not miss a beat as it focuses on TV and movie offerings which are either streamed or downloaded (depending on the customer’s home internet speed) and carry the iTunes brand rather than the Hulu brand.

Foot in the door

As with all other studio negotiations, Apple has an automatic foot in the door with Apple CEO Steve Jobs being the chairman of Disney and being able strike distribution deals for Disney and Pixar movies, along with ABC and Disney Channel television series, at all. But in acquiring Hulu, the failing service which the other studios collectively created in order to gain leverage against Apple, the “computer” company suddenly acquires a stunning amount of potential power within both the television and film industries. Such a move would also keep Hulu out of the hands of increasingly bitter rival Google, which already owns YouTube and appears intent on entering every market in which Apple already competes. The buyout almost makes too much sense not to do it, even if it does mean that Apple could essentially be buying Hulu to shut it down and merely fold the scrapped parts into its existing iTunes Store. It would be a far more substantial move than when Apple acquired the dying niche music subscription service Lala (at Lala’s request) for the specific purpose of bringing the company’s engineers on board and killing off Lala’s failed music subscription efforts, which Apple has never believed have any mainstream appeal (and the overwhelming dominance of the iTunes Store in the music market would seem to bear this out). But with Apple finding much less success in its attempts to sell or rent television shows to the public, acquiring a bigger fish like Hulu would allow Apple to incorporate television subscriptions, television episode rentals, television episode sales, and free ad-supported television shows all into iTunes, Apple TV, and and any plans it has for Apple televisions. That is, of course, if Apple wants to go there.

Beatles dominate iTunes at level not seen since Michael Jackson death

Those wondering whether The Beatles catalog would still sell well upon surfacing in the iTunes Store seven-plus years after the store launched now have their answer: there are, at the time of this posting, three Beatles records in the top ten on the iTunes album charts including Abbey Road at number six, the White Album at number eight, and Sgt. Pepper’s at number nine. It’s a level of simultaneous domination not seen since the day Michael Jackson died. Of course in that instance his death triggered a sales revolution which pushed nine of this albums into the top ten, never before seen on any music sales chart and likely never to be seen again.

Just as Michael Jackson’s albums didn’t permanently dominate the charts after his passing, don’t expect the Beatles albums to remain quite so dominant by, say, this time next week. Seven years of pent up demand, during which folks could only get Beatles music onto their iPod by buying the CD and ripping it or by acquiring digital copies illicitly, is clearly being expressed through an explosion of sales out of the gate, which will level off before too long. But the notion that Beatles music had been held out of the iTunes Store too many years to have a sales impact were clearly proven wrong for a day.

Late Beatles iTunes arrival still trumps Zeppelin, others

The Beatles arrival in iTunes is about two thousand days too late and at least a dollar short in terms of the impact it’ll have now compared to the impact it could have had seven or even four years ago. But it’s nonetheless the biggest thing to happen to the iTunes Music Store (we’ll leave other forms of iTunes content out of this conversation) since the day the store launched for Mac and Windows back in 2003.

There have been big arrivals in the interim. Considering the niche-y popularity of the store in its early days, relatively few will even recall that modern heavyweights like Dave Matthews Band and Red Hot Chili Peppers were latecomers after having initially declined to participate. The biggest single late arrival was probably Led Zeppelin, considered one of the five most influential bands in history on almost anyone’s list. But atop those same lists you’ll find almost uniformly the same two words: The Beatles.

Sure, it’s too late to have the impact it would have once had. But with the original launch of the iTunes Store being the number one biggest story in the history of digital music, the arrival of The Beatles in said store still has enough impact to qualify as a distant second.

Wait for Beatles iTunes has been a Long and Winding (Abbey) Road

The Beatles are coming to iTunes tomorrow. Sure. And after Michael Vick gets out of jail, he’ll become one of the top quarterbacks in the league. Oh wait, that did happen, didn’t it? But the Beatles have threatened to come to iTunes so many times over the years that it’s difficult to believe it until it actually happens.

A few years ago Apple held an event so seemingly Beatles-leaning that it was actually called “The Beat Goes On” – and it seemed assured that either Paul McCartney or Ringo Starr when Steve Jobs announced that the event’s musical guest had flown all the way in from the UK. Then the guest turned out to be fellow Brit singer KT Tunstall, whom we love around here but she was almost certainly a member of the Beatles.

In hindsight the event probably was supposed to be a Beatles iTunes launch which fell through. But that just goes to show how close the Beatles iTunes thing has come to happening without actually happening. When we can download Abbey Road from iTunes, we’ll believe it. Butuntil then, color us skeptical.

Beatles iTunes will anger tech geeks, please mainstream

The Beatles are coming to iTunes tomorrow, a mere seven years after the iTunes Store first launched, according to multiple reports. The move will be hated by technology geeks who were instead hoping for a geek-oriented iTunes fantasy such as music rentals or music subscriptions, but the Beatles move will otherwise be met with a positive reaction by the mainstream. The question, then, is just how large that positive reaction will be.

The Beatles are, by nearly any objective measure, the most popular and influential band in music history. Their impact is so great in fact that when the iTunes Store first launched in 2003, many observers predicted it wouldn’t succeed specifically because the Beatles catalog was missing. That turned out to be incorrect as iTunes now outsells CD retailers. The arrival of The Beatles in 2010 won’t have nearly the kind of impact on iTunes that it would have had several years ago, so the remaining question is just what kind of impact it will have. The number of aging adults who now buy from iTunes, combined with the number of teenagers who consider themselves to be Beatles fans, means that the addition will be met with some degree of smiles from the mainstream.

Geeks, meanwhile, will be deeply disappointed by the announcement. Not that they have anything against The Beatles, it’s just that the mere addition of high profile popular content to iTunes is nearly geeky enough for their tastes.

Apple iTunes Event: iPad iTunes magazine+newspaper subscriptions

Beyond Apple’s declaration that tomorrow’s announcement/event/webcast/whatever it is will have an iTunes focus, the company hasn’t given any clue what the product or service might be, nor is there any clear-cut leading candidate. But rather than tossing around left-field ideas that are missing from Apple’s iTunes strategy for the good reason that they’re not sound ideas to begin with (music subscriptions and so on), a more fruitful approach is to look at the pieces of the the puzzle that are missing from Apple’s existing iTunes strategy. And with the iPad such an obvious device for content consumption, the fact that Apple still offers no official method for publishers to get their magazines or newspapers onto the iPad or even iPhone is perhaps the most glaring hole in the entire equation.

Apple’s magazine and newspaper strategy for the iPad up until now has consisted of nothing more than allowing publishers to build an app if they want, with no real guidance as to how they should be going about it. ePub good, Adobe bad, has been about Apple has been willing to say on the subject. iTunes already has a massive subscription section, but it’s only for podcasts. And while you can run a PDF of your magazine issue through iTunes via podcast subscription (that’s how Beatweek Magazine has been doing it since 2007, for the record), it’s far too do-it-yourself and hands-off to fit into Apple’s plans long term. But if Apple ever finally gets around to launching an officially sanctioned magazine and newspaper stand within the iTunes Store, either tied into the app method of delivery or as its own beast, now that would be something to write home about. It would change the face of newspapers and magazines forever, effectively bringing and end to the “print” portion of print publications even more quickly, and at least in the longview, would in fact be a day in publishing history which would never be forgotten by those who consume magazines and newspapers, this living up to Apple’s tagline for tomorrow.

Greyson Chance interview: Waiting Outside The Lines, debut album

Singer-songwriter Greyson Chance made his national television performance debut on The Ellen Show earlier this year – at the age of twelve. He’s since been working on his forthcoming debut album, and the now-thirteen year old has just released the lead single from it. The song, entitled Waiting Outside The Lines, sees its debut today in iTunes as well as in a live performance on The Ellen Show where it all started for him.

The Oklahoma native took time today out of one of the busiest days of his life to chat with Beatweek about his new single, the ways in which his newfound stardom have (and haven’t) changed his life, why he’s one of the few Twitter stars who actually follows hundreds of thousands of his followers back, what he would do to get on Glee, and the progress he’s making towards his eventual album release which will come a little down the road.

Tell me about Waiting Outside The Lines.

It’s a very important song to me. The meaning of the song is really saying that you can get past something in your life, an emotional breakdown you can get past it. So the main purpose of the song is for my fans, so they can listen to the song when they’re late at night and they’re feeling their lowest low, and when they listen to the song, realize that it’s gonna get better and they can overcome this problem.

You write your own songs, right?

Yes, but actually this one I did not write. You know how it works. You get songs emailed to you and all that stuff. But I heard this song, and I’m really specific about what I don’t write, because I want to make sure that it still stays true to me. When I first heard the song, I was listening to the lyrics and I was just so into the song, and I was like ah, I have to do that. That’s so incredible. This is a song that means so much to me, so I’m just really happy that today is the day.

When you performed the song on Ellen today, about halfway through the song you stepped away from the piano and you came front and center, just singing vocals. Is that something we’ll see more of from you, where you’re not always behind the piano?

Definitely. I think it’s really important to show a different side, and I think because I’m not gonna always be able to be on the piano. I’m really excited.

It’s been about six months since the first time you were on Ellen, and you’re just now bringing out your first commercial single. It seems like you’ve decided not to rush things, you’d rather take your time and get it right.

There were a lot of different versions of the song, actually, and one of them we had an actual version. But everyone was like, you know, this is a thing that you can’t rush. It’s kind of like a table. You can put three legs on it, but it’s not gonna be standing up because it’s only three legs. So we wanted to take our time with this one to make sure it was perfect. It was a pretty long time, but I’m just excited that it’s here.
With this rush of fame and exposure, when you go back home and there’s moments where you go out to dinner with your family or you hang with your friends, are you still able to do that normally or are too many people recognizing you or interrupting?

Oh no, I can definitely do that. It’s really great. The best thing about this whole thing is when I go out and people just kind of want to shake my hand. I just find that so incredible because they just want to say hello, and I find that really, really cool. I still can go out and go with my friends. I don’t have that problem yet (laughs).

You’ve dealt with quite a lot of industry people over the past few months. Are there people who try to treat you like a little kid and treat you different, or are people generally giving you the same kind of respect that they would give to an emerging artist who’s ten years older than you?

Sometimes I get treated like a kid, but I have the best team behind me and I have the best label in the world. Everybody is just so kind and so awesome. I think at first it was kind of like that because nobody really knew me, but now everyone is just so kind, so nice. Everybody respects everybody.

You tweeted about John Lennon on his birthday. Did the Beatles influence come from your parents, or was that something you sought out on your own?

It’s actually come from my own. I think John Lennon is one of the best writers ever to step on the planet. He’s just so passionate about his work, and the poetry that he puts in his songs is just incredible.

You’ve got a lot of big names in your corner. Not just Ellen, but Lady GaGa has shown support for you, Perez Hilton says nice things about you. How important is to to have those kinds of heavyweights in your corner?

It feels really good, and actually Perez has become such an amazing friend, actually. I’ve gotten to meet him a couple of times. He’s really cool, one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. He’s a really cool guy and I like to stay in touch with him on Twitter.

You’ve been quite adamant about bringing the anti-bullying campaign to the forefront. Why is that an important issue to you?

It’s an epidemic that we really need to get rid of. We’re losing teenage lives from this. Everybody’s been bullied, and it’s one of the most horrible things that can happen. I feel for the kids that have been bullied, and I actually wrote a song just recently called Purple Sky. It really needs to be stopped. I mean we’re losing lives.

You’ve identified yourself as a Glee fan. If you had the chance to be on the show, I take it you would jump on it?

Oh yeah. I would jump off cliffs for that (laughs). It’s an amazing show, and I love how they’re taking pop music but making it theatrical and they’re doing these classic Broadway numbers that are just so classical but they’re making them fun and they’re making them really cool. I think they’re doing a very good thing in music right now.

You have about 250,000 followers on Twitter, and you follow 150,000 of them back. I think you may be following the most people of anyone on all of Twitter. Why do you do it that way?

I think the most important thing is because I know what it feels like to be followed by somebody. You get that happy feeling. If people are going to be willing to follow me, I should follow them back. I follow 150,000 but I need to follow 100,000 more because it’s not everybody. I feel for the people that want to be followed back, so it’s the least I can do.

That allows people on Twitter to direct message you. Do you get a lot of fan messages through DM?

Yes, and I like to read those. And I like to reply too. I love talking to my fans. They’re incredible.

How far along are you as far as the album?

I think we have a pretty good amount of stuff almost completed. It’s kind of like a hurry up and wait thing (laughs). We’re getting along.

Is there anything you can say, without getting in trouble, in terms of when the album might possibly come out?

It will be early 2011.

Have you had a favorite studio moment so far?

The last studio I was in, I was at the Record Plant in LA. The studio that we were in had a basketball court. And so after we would get done recording takes, we would go and play Horse.

interview by Bill Palmer

Greyson-Official.com • iTunes • Twitter • Facebook

Apple iTunes streaming music rental service talk surfaces again, just won’t die

It’s not an over-generalization to say that Apple is the only significantly successful company in the history of digital music, and the rest are all either niches or failures. It’s also plain fact that Apple is the one to use a “you pay for it, you own it” music store model, while the failing/failed efforts have centered around some kind of music rental/streaming/subscription/cloud which no one outside the geekdom has any interest in or ever will. But because technology headlines are written by geeks, the “Apple is minutes away from launching a music rental service” headlines persist to this day.

The latest is from the NY Post, which claims that Apple is meeting with record labels as we speak to launch such a music rental service. These same rumors are floated by headline-writing geeks pretty much every time Apple is about to make a product announcement of any kind, and indeed even when Apple doesn’t have any press events on the horizon. Nevermind that there are no mainstream music rental services, because every company that tries such a model goes out of business; the geeks want Apple to launch one anyway. Nevermind that the only reason Apple acquired failed music streaming service Lala last year was because Lala approached Apple about a chump-change buyout, and Apple saw it as an easy way of hiring some digital music engineers; the geeks insisted that Apple bought failed Lala so it could launch its own failed music rental service.

Plenty of aspects of digital commerce are still open to debate as to which models will work and which ones won’t. However, digital music is not one of them. History has shown that the mainstream wants to own its music if it’s going to pay money for music at all, and that the public has no appetite or trust for pay-for music rental services. If anything, streaming music services like Pandora have been moderately successful because they’re free; it could be argued that the only reason MySpace still has any relevance in music (even after losing relevance as a social network) is that it offers free full-song streaming from major artists. But the fact that these services have to be free just to be popular is also the reason why they go out of business.

That still hasn’t stopped geek after geek from positing that because Apple is so popular right now, it and it alone could get away with launching a music rental service. Of course, the geeks’ argument here is essentially that even though music rentals are a concept that will never, ever be accepted by anyone but geeks, Apple should launch one anyway. Just for the geeks’ sake. Even though no one else would want it. Even though it would lose money. Even though those among the mainstream who did try it out, just because it was from Apple, would hate it and feel cheated once their music went poof after they stopped paying the monthly fee.

The seven year long saga in which geeks have begged for an iTunes music rental service and/or demanded one, while falsely claiming that one was coming in the hopes of it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, is eerily similar to the first seven years of the iMac era. While the public had no trouble accepting the iMac’s all-in-one design, geeks spent years having a collective meltdown over the fact that the monitor was built into the computer, and spent those same seven years embarrassing themselves by begging for (and falsely claiming the impending existence of) a headless iMac. Finally, Apple gave them what they’d been screaming for, just to shut them up and silence the needless bad press which was coming from “Mac geeks” who just couldn’t control themselves. And to the surprise of absolutely no one but the geeks, the “headless iMac” known as the Mac mini has been a poor seller which has had no effect on the market other than to confuse mainstream users.

It’s possible that, even with Apple having proven that music sales are the present and future of digital music, and even with the music rental model having been proven to be an abject failure, Apple might throw the geeks a bone – again – just to shut them up. Such a service would go absolutely nowhere in terms of mainstream success, but that’s never been relevant to the geeks, who have long wanted Apple to forsake needs and desires the other 99% of users for the sake of catering to them and solely them. After all, it’s the way in which nearly every other “consumer” technology company does business.

Linkin Park interview: inside their blueprint-burning new album

The biggest band of the past decade has blown up its blueprint. Again. Something in the DNA of the six-piece outfit known as Linkin Park seemingly compels them to burn their own sound to the ground and start from scratch with each new album, a pattern which has never been quite so evident as with new release A Thousand Suns, which represents uncharted sonic and conceptual territory even for them. “There might be a misconception that this album is a commentary on what we think of our past albums,” says bassist Dave ‘Phoenix’ Farrell. “It’s not that.”

Still, the album sees the band tinkering with its patented formula of combining rock, rap and other styles of music in the kind of way that no one else had previously thought to. So, then, what drives Linkin Park to keep gambling with its own success? “That aspect is what makes being in a band fun for me, and when you’re in the studio, my head is not usually trying to wrap itself around ‘Will people like this?’”

As a measure of how untraditional A Thousand Suns is, while nine of the fifteen tracks have a standard length ranging from three to five minutes each, five other tracks are less than two minutes long. But rather than being an attempt at shaking things up, it’s more a representation of how the material naturally developed. “A song like Blackout, even from its earliest incarnation, always was in three movements and it was just a process of trying to figure out how to make those individual movements best fit that whole song. And the end of it, it turns into a four minute or six minute song,” says Phoenix.

“And then at the same time there’s always these little things that we’re doing where it’s more of a fragment or more of an idea, and maybe that turns into a shorter, thirty or forty second thing that is working to keep the album moving from front to end.”

In other words, the eighteen ethereal seconds of track four interlude Empty Spaces is how you get from the peppy potential single Burning In The Skies to the gritty When They Come For Me without losing flow. It’s all about creating and experience where in “if you get a chance, you can sit down with it and listen to it from front to back, kind of get a really well rounded three dimensional experience with it in the same way that it used to be back in the seventies, sixties.”

The emphasis on making a fluid yet varied album put the band, which still has to operate within the boundaries of the music business to some extent, in a quandary. “One of the biggest pressures or tensions on this record was trying to figure out what we were gonna do as far as the first single,” says Phoenix. “Chester and I were even joking, obviously it was never anything more than a joke, but we were joking about like, what if we just released this record as one giant MP3?”

As it turned out, it was the next to last (and longest) track on the album, The Catalyst, which was ultimately sent to radio, as it was “a great indication to our fans that it was gonna be a different type of record.“

The fact that the lead single just happened to fit best in the fourteenth slot on the album, rather than being positioned closer to the front of it, is yet one more unconventional fact of life for A Thousand Suns: “At the end of that process, we didn’t want to necessarily mess with the track order.”

As further evidence of the chances that the band has taken with the record, the rollicking five-plus minutes that make up The Catalyst flow directly into an acoustic ballad called The Messenger to close things out.

If history is any indication, the risks taken in the name of moving forward will pay off for Linkin Park with their new release, just as they always have. But even Linkin Park’s overwhelming popularity over the past decade doesn’t in itself entirely explain why the band has found a level of popularity within social media which has otherwise been reserved strictly for individuals, not bands.

The handful of entities to have crossed the ten million fan mark on Facebook can be counted on ones fingers, and thus far include the likes of Lady GaGa, Barack Obama, Eminem, Michael Jackson – we’ve come to learn that something in human nature compels users to be far more likely to click the “like” button for an individual than for a group. And yet Linkin Park finds itself comfortably in that tiny club with twelve million fans in its own right, more than doubling that of any other contemporary band, and even comfortably outpacing The Beatles.

So, aside from being wildly popular as a band to begin with, just what is Linkin Park doing right within social media?

“The short answer is I don’t really know,“ Phoenix admits, “but I can make hopefully some educated guesses. I think a big part of it is our fanbase is pretty awesome, and the community aspect of Linkin Park fans kind of lends itself really well to the internet. They have this interconnectivity and this web that works out perfectly with the internet.”

But there’s more to it than that. The band members, who are of an age where they didn’t get their first real taste of the internet’s potential until they were finishing high school, were nonetheless able to pinpoint the internet early on as being a way of connecting with potential fans. “When we were first starting out, we were finding people online that were interested in our music and talking to them. This was way before Hybrid Theory came out, way before anything, and we were just kind of finding people all over the U.S. through the internet who had some sort of interest either in our music or in other bands that were doing different things. After we found them we’d ask them if they wanted to try and help us get the word out or whatever, all of this being done online.”

He’s talking about way early on. “At the end of that process, we would send them a cassette. So it was this total fluxpoint of using all this technology, but it was still at that stage where it wasn’t really ready to send MP3′s or do anything else online. We were still actually sending out these demo cassette tapes.”

And it’s not just about Facebook in particular, as Apple set its sights on the band when the company decided to recently launch its own “Ping” social network within iTunes. “We got a chance to meet with them early on, before they went with it, just to be able to potentially be included in that,” says Phoenix of the fact that Linkin Park was one of the handful of artists to be featured in Ping at the moment of launch. “I know that they’re planning on continuing to grow that, and I think it could be really cool. I think it could be just a further way for us to be able to stay in contact directly with our fans.” Not surprisingly, the band has already racked up more than a quarter million followers in the network’s first two weeks of existence.

One of Ping’s early features gives fans the option to announce to their friends that they’ll be attending a band’s concert, which leads back to the question of just what Linkin Park’s shows are going to look like as they gear up to tour in support of the unconventional A Thousand Suns. The band’s live performance of The Catalyst this past Sunday night at Griffith Park Observatory as part of the MTV VMA awards offered an early hint, but Phoenix says there’s plenty more where that came from.

“This tour for us, it’s the first time we’ve really had a good chunk of time on the front end to really be able to transition what we wanted to do with the album itself,” he says. “Not only on the musical aspect of what we’re gonna be doing, but we’re lucky enough that for the last maybe eighteen months we had an artist team, basically, creating visual content for the album packaging, everything, the merch, all the way down to the video content that you’ll see at the live show. The goal of creating this is everything you see will kind of play off of one another and help round out that immersive world that the album is intended to be.”

“I think the live show is gonna be great for fans to be able to see that bridge from the old music to the newer music, and at the same time to kind of have your experience with the record rounded out even more with the visuals that will come with it.”

And as if to emphasize that the new direction of the new material isn’t meant to step on the toes of Linkin Park’s previous work, “it’s also fun to go back and find new ways to reinterpret the older stuff, and really work it all together.”

interview by Bill Palmer

LinkinPark.com • iTunes • Twitter • Facebook

app review: Canabalt for iPhone

Canabalt is a game that will conjure up memories of watching Jason Bourne running on rooftops, smashing through windows and narrowly making enormous leaps. Thankfully, there is no real danger to be faced, but its rapid pace and bite size game play will have you wondering if your last attempt was truly your best. Its 8-bit like, grey and black colored visuals are deceptive, as it engages you backed by a soundtrack, reminiscent of a Ratatat song, you cannot get out of your head.

Canabalt is simple on paper: you run from left to right nonstop, leap from rooftop to rooftop (a few crumbling under your feet), with speed being your friend and foe. Trouble is also found in the form of boxes in your path that attempt to slow you down; their malevolent purpose being to make your leaps for safety that much more challenging. As you reach Sonic the Hedgehog like speeds, you realize that you may overshoot your landings or crash into the side of buildings.

The game’s charm comes from not only its visual simplicity or its soundtrack but in the way you actually play it. As your in-game avatar runs faster and faster you realize that all it takes to play is one finger, and that is a great achievement. There is no need for annoying, and clunky onscreen joysticks to distract from the game. Your one finger tapping on the screen controls your character’s jump as he builds speed.

In future updates or iterations of Canabalt it would be great to have more varied courses instead of the just one. Also, besides a scoreboard there are no other options to challenge your friends, which is disappointing (I dream for multiplayer challenges someday). Overall, this is another solid iPhone game that will have you coming back, especially with your trusty headphones.

rating: four stars out of five • App Store link

review by Bagner Estrada

app review: Twitter for iPad

Twitter for iPad recently launched! The official Twitter app was updated to be a universal app, working both on the iPhone and iPad. At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much bells and whistles, but once you figure out all the little hidden secrets, you’ll definitely love the new user interface.

When you first launch the app, you have a left panel with links to your Timeline, Mentions, Lists, Messages, Profile and Search. On the right side is your timeline of tweets. If you’re holding the iPad in landscape mode, the tweets only take up the center area of the screen. You might think that it’s wasting a lot of space the first time you see it. But try tapping on a tweet. The tweet will expand and create a new panel to the right of the timeline. The edge this app has over other iPad Twitter apps is the built-in browser that will display webpages, videos, and photos linked in tweets without closing the app. Having content display in-lined makes the Twitter user experience flow much more seamlessly. If you tapped a tweet that was part of a conversation, the tweets will also be grouped together in a new panel. This makes keeping up with conversations much easier!

As you click on tweets, new panels will appear to the right. You can swipe to slide through the panels to bring up more content. I find this to be an ingenious way to use the space of the iPad. A lot of content is displayed at one time and getting to specific data is as easy as a tap away.

Tips for getting the most out of the Twitter app:

Pinch a tweet and it’ll expand. I find it much easier to use two fingers (one on each hand) and drag out (mimicking a pinch movement). Some of the tweets are one-liners, so the tabs are pretty narrow. If you find a long tweet, it’s much easier to pinch.

Another tip is to use two fingers and drag down on a tweet. This displays the conversation (@replies) in a panel below. I thought this was a very clever way to display tweets. Be sure to keep both fingers on the tweet though. Once you let go, it’ll quickly roll-up like window shades!

If you have an iPhone, you may be interested in our walk-though of Twitter for the iPhone.

Download the Twitter iPhone/iPad app for free now.

More Screenshots

Viewing @replies and a follower’s profile.

The interface for replying and sending a tweet.

New Katy Perry single pushes her previous album back up the charts

Despite the release of its title track this week, Katy Perry’s new album Teenage Dream won’t be available for another month. But with Teenage Dream (the single) and California Gurls currently battling each other for singles chart dominance in iTunes, another Perry release has also unexpectedly found its way up the digital charts: her debut album One Of The Boys, released back in summer 2008, has suddenly climbed to the number five position overall on the iTunes album charts. The resurgence of Katy’s earlier work, which featured songs such as “Hot n Cold” and “Waking Up In Vegas” is also no doubt being helped by its temporary price reduction to $6.99. But if Perry’s cache is such that her now two-year-old debut album can climb all the way back up to number five, it leaves little doubt that Teenage Dream (the album) will easily debut at number one overall when it’s released on August 24th.

Ed Kowalczyk of LIVE releases solo album Alive today

Ed Kowalczyk, former lead singer of the multi million-selling band LIVE, has released his solo album Alive today in iTunes and elsewhere. Upon first listen, the sound of Kowalczyk’s new album appears to be more closely analogous to 1991′s Mental Jewelry than anything else in LIVE’s back catalog. While the release of the solo album won’t do anything to help the future prospects for LIVE, which suffered from a nasty public split last year, fans of the band will likely be glad to hear new Kowalczyk material one way or the other. The iTunes link for Alive is right here.

Christina Perri ballad “Jar of Hearts” dances into iTunes top ten

Christina Perri’s song “Jar of Hearts” has found its way into the top ten on the iTunes pop singles chart on a day in which most people buying the song had never even heard of the singer-songwriter until her song was featured last night on So You Think You Can Dance. The piano-driven ballad is epic and we expect much more to come from her.

In the mean time, who is Christina Perri? The twenty-three year old Philadelphia native is an unsigned musician who resides in Los Angeles and just happens to be the kid sister of former Shinedown guitarist Nick Perri. From what we’re told, when Christina isn’t making music, she’s an employee at a cafe in Beverly Hills – but we’re guessing not for much longer, if “Jar of Hearts” is any indication.

GeekBeat.tv first episode debuts starring Cali Lewis

The debut episode of GeekBeat.tv, the new tech oriented video podcast show starring Cali Lewis, has just been released. Lewis was previously the host of the popular long running (and now apparently defunct) show GeekBrief, with the new show GeekBeat having a similar format. Shortly after Cali announced her new show, it surged to the number one spot in the iTunes podcast directory; the various available formats of the show now occupy the number four, six and seven spots in iTunes. The inaugural episode of GeekBeat.tv, along with subscription options, is right here.

iPhone iOS 4 update: things you surprisingly can’t do while installing

Today I clicked the “update” button to install the new iOS 4 on my iPhone, then headed to the grocery store – without my iPhone. Today, leaving the house without your phone is considered a bit of a risk: what if someone is trying to reach you with important news? What if your car breaks down? Funny how ten years ago, heading out the door without a cellphone was considered a normal, safe practice. And it’s not that the stores are any less safer or that the odds of breaking down on the way there are any greater; it’s just that the technological advancements in our society have raised the bar such that we now feel a degree of unsafe if we’re out on the road for any length of time without a phone in our pocket.

When I got home from the grocery store, my iOS 4 install was still finishing up and so my iPhone wasn’t available. No worries, it’s mealtime anyway, so I tossed my dinner into the oven and went to set the timer on my iPhone – nope, couldn’t do that either. Do I still have a standard kitchen timer atop my oven? No, that went by the wayside once I had a phone with an effortlessly usable digital countdown timer. So it’s yet another instance in which I rely on my iPhone in a small, mundane, routine manner without even realizing it. While I was waiting for my food to finish cooking I wanted to listen to some music, but I realized that with my iPhone and my iTunes tied up with the major iOS4 install, I couldn’t do that either. I guess I’ll go watch some television in the mean time. Good thing I haven’t already gotten rid of my old fashioned TV remote control, even though there is in fact an app for that too…

app review: Bistromath

Everyone has encountered this problem at least once in their lifetime: you go out for a meal with a couple of friends, and when the check comes, some people try to skimp away by paying less than what they actually owe, or everyone doesn’t know how to find out how to split the check, and on top of it, there’s tax and tip involved! Well, now with the Bistromath app for the iPhone, these types of scenarios are eliminated.

When the app first launches, the screen will be titled “Checks” and be blank. Good, that’s what you want. When you’re ready to add a new ‘check’ into the app, hit that friendly + button in the top right corner.

The first thing that you enter is the price of the items (called Dishes in the app), and as you enter the price you’ll see options to target that price to yourself or you can add a guest on the check. Once the price is entered, the Dishes screen will show it as “Your Main” (Or ____’s Main, etc) with an icon of a chicken. Don’t worry, if this item is selected, it will bring up an Edit screen, where you can edit the Price, Description, Icon (Drink, Side, Main, Dessert, and Alcohol), and if this item is shared, there is also a Split Cost section where you can add guests (make sure you’ve entered their name before on the previous screen to have the app remember it). If this is the wrong dish, it can also be deleted. You will have to repeat this for everything that was ordered.

The last part of the check would be the “Plus tax and __% tip” that will be found at the bottom of the Dishes screen. Tapping this will bring you to the final part of the check and it’s the screen that breaks everything down into terms that everyone can understand. There are fields for automatically calculated subtotal, sales tax, total bill, and tip. Beneath this, there will be a screen that shows exactly how much everyone owes, with this number including tax and tip, so that it’s even and fair across the board.

If someone else has an iPhone and the app, you can enable wireless editing. I was unable to try this for the review since not everyone I go out with has an iPhone. I did however, try the ‘email receipt’ option, which sends an email to all recipients with the breakdown of the total receipt. In the app it will display on some fancy receipt paper imagery, however when I look at it in Gmail, it seems to be in text only. Whichever the case may be, it’s nice to be able to email the breakdowns to anyone that may argue against you when it comes to paying the bill.

There are no additions needed in this app, it seems to be perfect the way it is for what it does.

rating: five stars out of five • App Store Link

Lee DeWyze U2 Beautiful Day debuts in iTunes behind just Katy Perry

Lee DeWyze’s first post-Idol single has been released in iTunes, and it’s already soaring up the pop singles chart. Lee’s studio rendition of Beautiful Day, the U2 song which he performed on Idol this Tuesday night, is now selling for $1.29 after having been available as a pre-order earlier in the day. So far the song has been rated by 760 purchasers for an average of four and a half stars out of five. The DeWyze single has debuted at number on the iTunes pop chart, behind only Katy Perry’s California Gurls. Interestingly, Lee’s “winner single” had been getting significantly outsold by Crystal’s single earlier today when they were both available as unnamed pre-orders, but now that both songs have been released, Lee’s song is significantly outselling Crystal’s song. In any case, Lee’s song is right here and Crystal’s song is right here.

Crystal Bowersox [no longer] outselling Lee DeWyze on iTunes charts today

American Idol voters had their say last night when they awarded Lee DeWyze the title over Crystal Bowersox, but iTunes buyers are painting a different picture this morning as Crystal’s“winner single” is at number two on the iTunes album charts while Lee’s winner single is at number six on the same chart. Both songs are being sold as pre-orders for the same $1.29 price and are both expected to be released on Saturday May 29th, making for a rare Saturday iTunes release. It’s not clear why the singles are being classified as “albums” in the charts, as they are listed as only containing one song each; perhaps it’s due to the lack of a song title associated with each. According to what was announced on Tuesday’s final performance episode, Crystal’s “winner single” (which is apparently still being released even though she didn’t win) is Patty Griffin’s “Up To The Mountain (MLK song)” while Lee’s is “Beautiful Day” by U2.

Sandwiched between the Crystal Bowersox and Lee DeWyze releases on the iTunes album chart are new releases from Stone Temple Pilots and the Black Keys along with the Sex and the City 2 soundtrack. It’s worth pointing out that the iTunes sales charts fluctuate several times per day.

Update: the two official singles have been released, and interestingly, Lee is now outselling Crystal.

Lee DeWyze to release debut album October 26th, pre-orderable now

iTunes has made Idol winner Lee DeWyze’s debut album available for pre-order, with an expected release date of October 26th, 2010, according to the online music service. While not technically his debut album, as DeWyze released two previous independent records before Idol, his first post-American Idol album will be widely regarded as his “debut” nonetheless. iTunes is pre-selling Lee’s album for $11.99, listing it simple as “Debut Album” – and while no information has been given about any of its contents for the obvious reason that it hasn’t been made yet, the album is already at #27 on the iTunes pop albums chart, where it’s competing with albums that are available today. Lee DeWyze’s debut album pre-order page in iTunes is right here.

Next Page »