A recent report by the NPD Group shows that Apple iTunes has moved into the 3rd position for music retailers in the U.S., beating Amazon.com out of the #3 spot.

The report surveyed 40,000 people to find that in the first quarter Apple carried a 10% market share trailing Wal-Mart with a 15.8% and Best Buy with 13.8%. Both Wal-Mart and Best Buy sell a majority of their music as physical CD’s, but the study also noted a decline in CD sales while digital music sales overall continues to rise.

Even …

This computer-based DJ system looks cool, if for no other reason, because it has a whole lot of dials and switches and lights all over it. In fact it has a nice advanced MIDI control surface of mixer and player controls with over 76 different buttons, sliders and knobs, two scratch wheels and one touchpad. It also has LED volume and progress meters for easy monitoring.

The Torq Xponent is designed to be an all inclusive package of hardware and software that’s compatible with Mac’s and PC’s which allows …

It looks like our estimate of thousands of downloads of Apple’s Safari web browser for Windows was a little bit on the conservative side. Apple has confirmed that there was over 1 million downloads of the browser withing 48 hours of its release last Monday. While this may sound impressive for most companies this product has a lot to live up to, even in cross-over world of PC’s since it’s iTunes sibling has had over 500 million downloads for use on Windows machines.

Safari as a …

The Voiis Mini Pocket Messenger phone is one of those sweet looking pieces of sexy hardware that looks like it belongs on the Discovery spaceship seen in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”.

It connects with your PC via Bluetooth tech and then lets you have wireless Skype, Windows Media Player, iTunes, MSN Messenger fun while you stand within a 100 meter range of the base. It also has a built-in microphone, headphones, a 1.2-inch color display and a 3.5mm headphone slot in case you want to plug in your own choice of sonic …

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 …

The rumor of Apple looking into offering an online video rental service to download movies was confirmed by a number of sources according to Reuters, although Hollywood executives did not find the rumored terms of the service quite as cool as we did.

Some sources felt there was no rush to get into this type of download rental service, but of course selling music through Apple with iTunes seemed to work out pretty well. Others questioned the rental rate of $2.99 per movie for 30 …

The Financial Times has just reported that Apple has been in talks with major movie studios about launching an online movie rental service. Currently Apple allows users to download movies through iTunes to own, but only has agreements with Disney and Paramount as most studios have been reluctant due to the hit the service could have on regular DVD sales.

Studios may be less hesitant with an online download rental service since it’s less likely that it would affect the sale of DVDs. The rental term …

MacRumors has gotten their hands on some scans of an iPhone Sales Training Workbook with some interesting details about the upcoming iPhone release from Apple at the end of this month.

The looks like it could be legitimate and shows 13 scanned pages of functional information about the iPhone as well as some canned responses for reps to use when encountered with questions that are anticipated to be common. One of these canned comments (titled “Overcoming Objections”) has a standard response to the lack of GPS capabilities in the iPhone, …

EMI Music has finally fallen in line and taken a big swig of the YouTube/Google kool-aid along with peers Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner by making an agreement with the mammoth video sharing site to show “approved” EMI content. EMI may have ben the last of the “big 4″ to make a deal with YouTube since they were recently consumed with being the first to launch a DRM-free music catalog with Apple.

With the agreement, EMI is able to get compensated for it’s videos that are shown …

Now that iTunes Plus has launched with their higher quality songs you’ll want to be able to share your music and videos on something other than you computer and a $15 set of speakers. SendStation, the same company that brought you the iPod Dock Extender, has just made that a little easier with the PocketDock AV iPod adapter.

The PocketDock AV consists of two parts. The first is a small dock that connects to any iPod that has a dock connector on it. The other is …

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 …

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 …

Apple has announced that its iPhone has gotten the green light from the FCC to go ahead with a planned June launch according to Apple spokesperson Natalie Kerris, despite false rumors that the product will be delayed.

The iPhone was announced by Apple back in January by CEO Steve Jobs at the annual MacWorld conference. Very shortly after the announcement Apple was met with some resistance to the new mobile product due to legal issues with Cisco which after a …

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 …

Apple today announced the sale of the 100 millionth iPod since its inception over 5 years ago in November of 2001. Apple has introduced 10 different iPod models over the years, including the shuffle, the nano, the mini and 5 revisions of the standard iPod. The iPod music player along with iTunes have played a very large part in transforming how people obtain and listen to music.

The iPod has also sparked an industry of seemingly countless accessories for the iPod player; over 4000 accessories by Apples count which the Brick can attest …