Music

iTunes had long been the only kid in town as Apple-imposed rules of the game prohibited third-party storefronts of any kind on iOS devices. Bowing to government regulators, Apple last year relaxed its strict policy pertaining to third-party stores and enabled subscriptions. This paved the way for music apps from Spotify and Shazam that have recently become available on the iOS platform. Now, another major subscription-based music service is about to hit the App Store.

According to reports, consumer electronics giant Sony is bringing its Music Unlimited service to owners of Apple’s mobile devices. For either $4 or $10 a month, Music Unlimited subscribers will be able to stream music onto their iPads, iPhones and iPod touches sometime this quarter. The first tier gets you the ability to stream music from your own personal library and the other enables unlimited streaming from Sony’s catalog of 15 million songs. Similar to Spotify, you will be able to cache songs and playlists when offline.

Sony’s logic behind this move reflects Apple’s approach…

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUa4IAQetTk]

Here’s a fun iPad game for the whole (Partridge) family.

Rockmate turns your iPad into a complete music studio easy and super fun to use. You can compose, record and play songs with up to 4 Rock players on one single iPad. Rockmate is easy to play with smart chords progressions, sounds great with separated guitar effects and in-house produced audio samples and is also fully customizable with multiple drums and keyboard styles.

Rockmate is ready to rock ! Your guitars are always well tuned, no need to carry your drum kit or to patch your keyboard. A smart metronome and a real-time looper will assist you in composing and recording your songs. That you can share by email or in your iTunes sharing folder.

We want as many people as possible to experience Rockmate. So we have decided to make Rockmate available for one week (From 14 to 21 december 2011) at the introductory price of $0.99. Regular price $3.99.

(iTunes $.99)

For those who are after something in the professional realm, a new App called Shredder was released today…
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TidySongs, a popular iTunes organization application, has taken a look at around one million iTunes libraries over the last two years and has reported their findings.

• The number of songs in an average customer’s iTunes library is 7,160.
• The average number of songs missing album artwork is 4,230
• The average number of songs in an iTunes library missing the name of the artist is 490.
• The average number of songs missing track or year information is 1,984.
• The average number of duplicate songs is 814.