Nokia’s new subscription-based upgrade to its popular free-to-stream mobile music service, Nokia Music+, is now available in South Africa for R25 a month. For the R25 real music fans get a number of enhancements. This further cements Nokia’s great service offering on their Windows Phone based devices.

For even greater music enjoyment, Nokia Music+ provides increased control over the listening experience – at a cost noticeably lower than many third party services – and adds the following additional features to the existing free Nokia Music offering: (more…)

Nokia today announced Nokia Music+, a new subscription-based upgrade to its free-to-stream mobile music service, offering a range of additional features for a low monthly fee. It will be rolling out as an optional update to the existing service in Q1 2013. The existing Nokia Music service will continue to be available free of charge, with no advertisements, registration or subscription to Nokia Lumia owners.

Nokia Music users create their own mixes or stream from playlists curated by an expert team of musicologists and international artists. Mixes can also be saved for offline playback.

For €4 per month, Nokia Music+ adds additional features: (more…)

Finally, the day South African Apple fans have waited for has arrived. After 9 long years of being available in first world countries, South Africans can now buy legal music from iTunes, using their South African credit cards.

Apple has made it clear that they will also focus on local artists, and the initial featured screens seem to support that. We ran a few talented South African artists through the search engine, and the results seem pretty good. Unfortunately we also found a few less talented ones as well.

Songs are available in rand pricing (a switch which occured about a month ago). We will be trying out the new service today, but we are particularly interested to see if iTunes Match will also be available to us. iTunes Match works like this – you have your music library (which you might have gotten very various sources, they do not all have to be purchased through iTunes), and then Apple goes and scans your library. Once Apple has these tracks it matches it to their massive iTunes catalogue, and then makes that catalogue available to your from any of your other authorized machines with iTunes, and all your authorized iOS devices like iPod, iPhone and iPad. Effectively this makes your entire music catalogue (legal or not) – available everywhere.

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For the first time digital music sold more than actual physical store sales of music, according to the latest results by Nielsen and Billboard. Digital Sales jumped by 8.4% to take 50.3% of the market. Physical sales dipped by 5%. Here are some interesting facts about this year in digital music sales:

• For the first time, digital music sales are larger than physical sales; accounting for 50.3% of all music purchases in 2011.
• Digital track sales set a new record with 1.27 billion sales in 2011; an increase of 100 million sales (8.4%) over 2010.
• Digital album sales exceeded 100 million for the first time with a new all-time high of 103.1 million sales (up from 86.3 million in 2010); an increase of nearly 20%.

• Digital album sales accounted for nearly 1 out of every 3 album purchases (31%) in 2011; compared to 26% in 2010, 20% in 2009, 15% in 2008, 10% in 2007 and 5.5% in 2006.
• Nearly all digital album genres had a positive year in 2011; except for Soundtracks which were down just over 2% compared to 2010.
• For the last week of 2011 (week ending 1/1/2012), digital album sales set a new high with sales of 3.5 million

Clearly people were eager to download even more music during the festive season, or maybe a lot of people needed to fill up their new music player or phone with some songs. Adele’s 21 was the year’s top selling album, and is also the best selling digital album of all time.

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Every year in September Apple has its music focussed event which normally focusses on new iPods, but occasionally Apple also releases interesting new devices as well…

Now if we look at the invite for the event its a guitar with a Apple shaped hole behind the strings, so clearly Apple is sticking to the music theme this year. But this might also hint towards Apple’s iLife suite which has the Garageband app. Its been 18 months since iLife ’09 was released. The typical release date for past releases of iLife was in January at the Macworld conference, but since Apple does not go to Macworld anymore, an announcement for a new version of iLife might be very possible.

Captain Obvious will also tell you that new iPods are on the way. Updates to the current iPod might look something like this I reckon:

iPod Classic: All evidence suggests that the hard drive based iPod is on the way out. With all of Apple’s focus on touch based interfaces, it would be very strange of Apple to keep selling the Classic. But there is a sizable number of people out there with massive music libraries that want it all in their pockets. So if Apple drops the iPod Classic, expect some outcry.

iPod Nano: There are currently pictures out there from case suppliers that suggest that Apple might be changing the Nano a lot. Expect a small clip like device, almost like the second generation iPod Shuffle. Bizarrely this device will use a 3 inch touch screen.

I am somewhat skeptical of this, and I guess I would have to see how one would pull off a touch based interface on such a small screen that actually works well. I am instead hoping for a smaller sized iPod Touch shaped device.

iPod Touch: My opinion is that the iPod touch and Classic would be fused into one product. I reckon the iPod touch might change its name to simply “iPod”. Looking at the iPhone 4 its easy enough to predict what we might see. Expect higher resolution Retina displays, front facing cameras for using Facetime calls and a more iPhone like design scheme that uses matte steel and black steel.

iPod Shuffle: In the past year, the Shuffle was the dud of the iPod lineup. Without a decent control scheme, I expect Apple to shift to another design. Or alternatively, if the rumors of a much smaller iPod Nano is to believed, it might be entirely possible that the Shuffle can be scrapped altogether.

One more thing: New AppleTV (or iTV). I expect a more simplified version of Apple TV to arrive soon. Current rumors suggest an iOS based interface, smaller on board storage and an much lower price. I have no idea how they would implement iOS on a screen without a decent control scheme though. Maybe a Wiimote like pointer?

The big what if for me: When is iPad users getting iOS4? Apple told us that we can expect it Fall 2010. Well – its that time Apple. Problem is that there has been no public beta of 4.1 for iPad. Therefore I expect at least the announcement of the iPad iOS Beta program to start. Call it iOS 4.1, iOS 4.2, heck, call iPadFixed, just give us some feedback Apple. But I don’t want to get off on a rant here – you can read my current issues with the iPad here.

But its only a day until we will know how wrong I am…