You may remember back in early July when Universal Music Group (UMG) head Doug Morris decided not to renew a 2-year contract with iTunes, and instead provides content month-to-month on an “at will” basis. Reason particulars were not initially cited but generally revolved around how Jobs and iTunes put restrictions on how UMG could market their music.

It sounds like Jobs is far from hearing the last of Morris and Universal Music. According to a report today in BusinessWeek, the company is gearing up to launch an iTunes competing service of their own to be named “Total Music”. Morris and company isn’t looking into this venture lightly either. Aside from his own company Morris has also convinced BMG Music to join in, and is already having talks with Warner Music Group. Together the three companies music giants would have control of over 70% of all the music sold in the U.S., with Apple iTunes currently holding control of over 70% of the music sold online in the U.S.

The solo work of George Harrison has now been added to iTunes making him the last of each of the Beatles to be available through the site, preceded by Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Ringo Star. Unfortunately the Beatles as a group are still not available on iTunes, just the solo work of each artist separately with no word of any Beatles albums as of yet.

Starbucks along with Apple iTunes has announced that they will be giving away 50 million iTunes songs at Starbucks locations to help promote the mobile iTunes store and Starbucks’ Now Playing service. On October 2 the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store will launch with a service provided in Starbucks locations which will display the current song playing through the Apple iPhone in the stores and allow users to buy and download the song without paying any hotspot fees.

In the additional promotion announced today which will run from October 2 through November 7, Starbucks locations will be giving away “Song of the Day” cards that can be redeemed that the iTunes store for a free song download (selected by Starbucks). The coffee company is planning on giving away 1.5 million downloads per day to total more than 50 million songs, so the odds of you getting one when stopping through a Starbucks next month are not too shabby.

iTunes now has the available ringtones for the Apple iPhone turned on where users can choose from over 500,000 tracks that bear a special “ringtone” symbol next to them and make their own custom ringtone. The interface allows users to choose the section of the song they want and add some “mix”, such as looping, fading and selecting the section of the song.

All this comes for just $1.98 for each $0.99 song because remember, owning the track alone isn’t quite enough, you must pay for it again to use it as a ringtone. Happy Tuesday.

Along with all the cool new stuff announced by Apple today the company also unveiled a new upcoming, wireless music download service called the iTunes Wi-Fi Music store.

The Wi-Fi Music store allows owners of the iPhone or the iPod touch to access and download over six million different songs through any Wi-Fi hotspot directly to their mobile device through a new iTunes button.

Steve Jobs and Apple announced today that they will have a new version of iTunes which will be released tonight that supports ringtones for the iPhone.

The new version of iTunes will have a little “bell” icon next to the songs that can be created into a ringtone (about 500,000 initially) and will let you select your own, up to 30 second excerpt from the song to create your ringtone.

NBC was an early-adopter of Apple iTunes, being the second major company back in 2005 to sign on with Apple to provide video content for the download service. Now, a short two years later NBC has announced its intentions to end their relationship with Apple and discontinue providing content for iTunes citing that they are unhappy with iTunes pricing policy and piracy control, or lack thereof.

NBC has over 1500 hours of TV and movies currently on iTunes, and according to a NYT report the two companies are in negotiations which may mean that NBC could be doing a little bit of muscle-flexing might not really upset enough yet to want to pull all of its content.

Apple iTunes has finally begun offering something that the folks in the UK have been anticipating for some time – iTunes video. The Cupertino-based company recently signed a deal with a number of studios including ABC, the Disney Channel, MTV, Nickelodeon and Paramount Comedy to bring video content to the mammoth online media downloading site.

Prior to this move, UK users of iTunes where only able to download trailers and some music videos. Now they’re being treated to video content from 28 different shows such as TV episodes of Lost, 24, South Park, Ugly Betty and That 70′s show. Apple says that they plan to expand this selection and continue to add more programming content. The episodes are currently going for £1.89 each.

Apple also confirmed that there’s an upcoming special event on …

Apple has announced that 16 solo works by John Lennon through EMI are now available for download through iTunes. These songs will also be offered as part of the iTunes Plus program where you can pay an extra 30 cents to get the songs DRM-free and at 256 kbps AAC encoding.

“John would have loved the fact that his music will now be available in a format suited to a new generation of listeners,” said Yoko Ono in the Apple press release

Lennon marks the second of the Beatles artists to allow iTunes to sell their solo albums after Paul McCartney, and rumors have it that talks between Apple and the widow of George Harrison are in the works as well. Apple so far has had no luck however with bringing Ringo Star or the collective Beatles …

According to a report just last month Apple became the third largest retailer of music in the U.S. beating out Amazon.com and trailing only the likes of Wal-mart and Best Buy. Now Apple has announced that its overall sales have reached an incredible 3 billion songs with the last holiday season undoubtedly being a large contributor to this number.

This number consists of songs only, mind you, and doesn’t include any videos. And with Apple’s 100 million plus iPods in the market the recent launch of the iPhone and improving technology for media downloading this trend doesn’t appear to be slowing down for any music vendor, much less Apple.

Reuters

Amidst all the excitement of the successful iPhone launch by Apple last week, the company was hit with a blow from Universal Music Group when they decided to not renew their 2-year contract to provide music for iTunes.

The reason for the decision was not clear, but labels have had issues in the past with Apple setting a single price for all songs or albums, and the single-song purchase ability has cut into sales where previously with purchasing a CD, consumers were required to buy the whole album. The decision by Apple to offer DRM-free songs could also potentially be an issue with UMG.

The songs on iTunes from UMG include tracks from popular artists such as Shania Twain, Bon Jovi, Elton John, Method Man, Tupac Shakur, Aaliyah, Jay-Z, Mariah Carey, Eminem, Dr. Dre, Diana Ross, Reba McEntire, Luciano Pavarotti, …

Apple has added a few new pages to their site about the upcoming June 29th launch of the iPhone, one of which has some steps to get yourself ready for the ownership of an iPhone.

The page shows information that for the most part has been already released, including the launch date along with information on the integration of the iPhone and its feature functionalities. The page gets your ready to setup your new phone with contacts, email, calendar items and media such as photos, video and music that you can synch up with your iTunes account.

Oh, and by the way; about that iTunes account. You’re going to need one. The last paragraph mentions that in order to set up your iPhone you will need to set up an account at Apple’s iTunes store. So, if you’re planning …

It looks like Apple did get the EMI catalog out by the end of the month, but barely. Today Apple launched iTunes Plus along with the iTunes 7.2 version release, which is now offering DRM-free music downloads.

For now the songs that are available without the DRM restrictions or only from EMI’s catalog (excluding the Beatles, but including Paul McCartney), but hopefully more labels will follow suit in the near future. The songs cost slightly more without the DRM at a price of $1.29 each, and any existing songs that you previously purchased for $.99 can be upgraded for $.30 if they are from EMI. Songs purchased for this higher price have no restrictions on what MP3 player, the number of MP3 players or the number of computers that the song can be transferred to. Once you buy it, just …

Remember back in the beginning of April when Apple announced that it would be offering a DRM-free catalog from EMI in May? Well May is almost over and we haven’t seen it yet, but the French site MacBidouille (translated) has a source that’s saying the catalog is only a few days away and could be available by the end of the month.

When the catalog does roll out on iTunes, the music from EMI (aside from the Beatles songs) will be available with no Fairplay DRM restricting the number of computers or MP3 players the music can be transferred to. It will also be recorded at a higher bit rate, which according to the report may be part of the reason that the release is taking so long. The only small catch with this deal …

Whoa… In the midst of Apple dropping their DRM with some labels and DVD codes being cracked, from out of nowhere comes a crack for the DRM on downloaded music from iTunes.

The creators of QTFairUse6 have made a way to rid your iTunes downloaded music of that pesky DRM and do with it as you wish, but of course this only works for the current version of iTunes (7.1.1), and unfortunately it only works for Windows.

No doubt by now Apple is working on the next version of iTunes to plug this hole so you’ll have to take advantage before the next upgrade, and Mac users will have to wait a little longer to see if something comes their way soon. Check it out:

hymn via Cruchgear