The Beatles Have Already Sold More Than 5 Million Songs on iTunes

Two months after making their iTunes debut, The Beatles are setting some significant records in the digital music realm.

iTunes representatives say more than 5 million tracks and more than 1 million albums by the Fab Four have been sold worldwide. As Entertainment Weekly notes, 2 million of those songs and 450,000 albums sold in the first week alone. The Associated Press reports that the current best-selling Beatles album in the U.S. is Abbey Road, while the top song is “Here Comes the Sun.”

The Beatles’ music finally appeared on iTunes this past November after a decades-long dispute that prevented the catalog from being sold via the music service. Now, all 13 of the band’s remastered studio albums appear on the site, along with the “Past Masters” set and the “Red” (1962-1966) and “Blue” (1967-1970) compilations.

Meanwhile, even though The Beatles’ music is still popular in the form of digital files, the band’s works also continue to thrive in old-school formats. As Consequence of Sound points out, Nielsen SoundScan reports indicate that in 2010, Abbey Road was the best-selling album — on vinyl — for the second year in a row.

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New Storefront Coming for Tablet-Based Magazines [REPORT]

After some disappointing initial sales, magazine publishers are looking to offer their own digital storefront for tablet-based magazines, just as Apple is set to announce a subscription model for tablet and iPad-based magazines, according to two separate reports.

According to The Wall Street Journal [subscription required], Next Issue Media, a joint venture between five media companies, will launch a service for distributing digital publications on tablets. The story quotes Morgan Guenther, NIM’s chief executive, who adds that NIM will likely go live with two titles from its four magazine owners — Conde Nast, Hearst Corp and Meredith Corp — by the summer.

The offerings could include versions of newspapers from News Corp, the fifth member of the consortium. The service will initially be Android-based, but eventually will be platform-agnostic. The main benefit to publishers, according to the article, is that they would be able to recognize current print subscribers and offer them special deals.

Meanwhile, Adweek reports that Apple is close to announcing a magazine subscription model for the iPad. The story quotes an unnamed publishing executive who says, “People are pretty confident” that Apple and magazine publishers have ironed out an agreement. Until now, iPad-based magazines had only been available as single copies.

The move comes as publishers report weak end-of-the-year sales for the iPad editions of their magazines. Vanity Fair, for instance, sold 8,700 digital editions of its November issue, down from 10,500 for its August issue. Wired’s digital edition sales fell from 100,000 in June to 22,500 in October and November. The lack of a subscription option in the App Store is often cited as a cause for their collective decline.

Since single-copy prices of $3 to $4 are seen as a barrier, the notion of a “Hulu for magazines” has been bandied about for some time. One sticking point is that magazine publishers want to handle subscription and pricing themselves, without going through iTunes.

Image courtesy of Digital Trends

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Search for the Next “Levi’s Girl” Kicks Off on Facebook

After a successful campaign last summer, Levi’s is once again turning to Facebook to find the next online face and voice of Levi’s womenswear, a.k.a “Levi’s Girl.”

This time, the search has been extended to the UK as well as the U.S. Interested individuals are asked to submit a short video detailing why they should be chosen for the role, which involves engaging with Levi’s fan base on Facebook and Twitter on a day-to-day basis. To qualify, videos must be submitted via the retailer’s Facebook Page by February 2.

From the video submissions, Levi’s will select five candidates for a public voting round between February 16 and 23, which will test each candidate’s ability to mobilize her personal network on her behalf. It’s a clever strategy that is sure to win Levi’s many more Facebook “Likes”, whilst giving existing fans a hand in the selection process.

The winner will be announced on March 7 and receive a six-month paid position at Levi’s San Francisco headquarters to work alongside the more permanently situated “Levi’s Guy.”

What do you think of the contest? Have you ever competed in something to win a job?

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Ted Williams Gives Kraft a Short-Term Boost

While there’s some question about whether Ted Williams’ sudden fame has been good for him, it looks like it was at least good for Kraft in the short term.

YouTubeYouTube reports that a new Kraft Macaroni & Cheese commercial voiced by Williams got 901,000 views this month, a huge jump over the usual number of views for other Kraft videos on the site.

Williams’s rise to fame has been dizzyingly quick. A video of Williams on the Columbus Dispatch’s website earlier this month went viral the day after it was shot. By January 5, the video had received more than 5 million views, thanks to the Reddit community, which took up the cause of the homeless man with the golden voice. By January 6, Kraft announced that Williams would do a voiceover for a Macaroni & Cheese spot. On January 12, at the urging of Dr. Phil, Williams decided to enter rehab.

Though Kraft clearly got attention for featuring Williams in the commercial, Rob Frankel, a Los Angeles-based branding expert says this is a short-term gain for Kraft and agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky that will not do much for the brand. “It’s clearly another one of those opportunistic stunts by creatively bankrupt agencies who jump on any trend they think can take them to the top of a TwitterTwitter trend,” says Frankel, who adds that the use of a celebrity in an ad ties the brand to that celeb’s foibles. Says Frankel: “Witness O.J. Simpson, Tiger Woods, Anita Bryant, Kobe Bryant — most celebrities are prone to failings, taking their endorsements along with them.”

Here are YouTube’s numbers:

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Promise's SmartStor Zero NAS streamer dumbs down DLNA for the iPad (hands-on)

CES 2011 might be over but we've still got a few gee-bees of data to get through before calling it quits. One nugget of unpublished glory is this SmartStor Zero NAS from Promise Technology. Now hold on... just because it's a DLNA 1.5 compliant Network Attached Storage device doesn't mean that it's complicated to use. Hell, even iOS users can join the DLNA streaming and media transfer party even though Apple is one of only a few major manufacturers missing from the alliance. Promise has purposely dumbed down this particular 1TB or 2TB NAS to make it suitable for use in any home where a "zero configuration" storage and media streamer is the priority. That's most households, come to think of it. Promise's Billy Harrison gave us a walkthrough of the highlights including a live demonstration of the free (for a limited time) SmartStor Fusion Stream app running on an iPad (and soon Android and Windows Phone 7 devices). Compared to many DLNA streamers that we've seen this one was dead simple to use and even allowed us to upload / download music, video, and photographs to / from the SmartStor Zero. Of course, other devices that support native DLNA upload and DLNA download (like the Droid X) will work right out of the box. Fusion Stream also supports media multitasking right inside the app. But hey, don't take our word for it, watch Bill lay down the truth after the break.

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iPad 2 to Have SD Card Slot & Qualcomm Chip [RUMOR]

More details are surfacing about the next generation of iPhone and iPad, including that both devices will feature Qualcomm chipsets and that the iPad 2 will have an SD card slot.

The Verizon iPhone 4 utilizes a Qualcomm chipset instead of the Infereon version used in the AT&T/GSM iPhone in order to connect to Verizon’s CDMA network. However, Engadget reports that the Verizon iPhone 4 is just the first of many Apple devices that will use Qualcomm as its primary chipset.

Both the iPhone 5 and the iPad 2 will utilize a dual CDMA/GSM chipset from Qualcomm, assuring that both devices work on Verizon and AT&T simultaneously. There won’t be a need for two different versions of the same device.

According to Engadget‘s sources, the new iPad will be slimmer and sleeker, but will retain its 10-inch screen. It will have two cameras (something that we’ve often heard) and a “super high resolution” screen much like the Retina Display in the iPhone 4, though it won’t have the same pixel density.

The most surprising revelation though is that the iPad 2 will have an SD card slot built into the device. And contrary to previous reports, it will not have a USB port. Still, the ability to load and unload media and documents via a traditional SD card is a surprising but welcomed addition. The iPad is on track for an April release, once again in line with previous reports.

There is no word about what new additions will be made to the iPhone 5, but it is going once again be a complete redesign of the device. It will run on Apple’s A5 multi-core CPU. One thing it won’t have is support for 4G LTE connections, though.

While we have to classify all of this information as unconfirmed rumors, all of this information lines up with previous leaks and reports about Apple’s upcoming 2011 line of iOS devices. We want to stress though that Apple still has a few months before the release of either device, so they could easily change designs or features before their eventual releases.

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