Apple working to bring back the popularity of music albums

Apple is on track to deliver its long-rumored iTablet before the holidays, according the Financial Times.

At the same time, the Cupertino is working with major record labels to counter the digital trend of  acquiring music by individual songs, not the more profitable albums as people did during the era of CDs and records, the paper reports. The plan, code-named “Cocktail,”  is to include rich interactive booklets and other features with albums.

“It’s about recreating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork while you listened to the music,”  the paper quoted an unidentified executive. The companies are looking for a September launch, according to the FT.

Meanwhile, Apple is hoping to release a new device that will also trigger interest anew in albums. The touch-screen tablet PC will have as much as a 10-inch screen, the paper reports.


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  • Think of this pitch this way:

    Steve Jobs: “Book and Music industry. You are getting commoditized because you have no differentiated platform for extending/re-inventing your product for the online age. We just so happen to have a set of tools that have proven compelling to the tune of 1.5B downloads, field-tested across 65K apps and with a current footprint of 46M devices.”

    Music/Book Industry: “There is no way we can re-create that value proposition, and we already see the writing on the wall with Amazon. If they are successful, they will be telling us how much money we can make or worse, go direct to writers and musicians, and design us out of the equation. How do we get started?”

    This is the consummate 1+1=3 for a segment that is otherwise facing a 1+1=<2 future.

    For more fodder on this one, check out:

    Old Media, New Media and Where the Rubber Meets the Road