Does embattled music streaming site imeem think it can take on iTunes? For the most part, nearly every streaming song on the site has a download button which links to both iTunes and the Amazon MP3 store. But it is quietly testing its own music download store which bypasses iTunes and Amazon and sells MP3s directly. For instance, this is the case with some Sub Pop artists, such as Iron and Wine and The Shins. When you hit the download button on songs for those artists, a window pops up showing the album where that song came from with with the option to download the entire album or any individual song for $0.99. You can then pay imeem directly by credit card or Paypal and download the song to your computer.

(Screenshots after the jump).

We’ve been a bit baffled by the system Apple has in place when it comes to ratings for applications in the App Store. Is it allowing apps with nudity? Not allowing them? Allowing them with a 17+ rating? We’ve talked to some developers willing to break their NDAs because they think the App Store approval process in general is messed up, and would like to see Apple do a better job handling it. So here’s how the ratings system currently works for the App Store.

The Ratings

When you go to submit your app through iTunes Connect, one of the steps takes you to a ratings matrix that you must fill out. This contains 10 questions listed under “Apple Content Descriptions.” For each of the 10 questions you must say “None”, “Infrequent/Mild”, or “Frequent/Intense.” Depending on what answer you give for each of these, the rating of your app in the upper right corner will change. These ratings go from “4+” to “9+” to “12+” to “17+” to “No Rating.”

That last one is key. If your app gets the “No Rating” label, a warning written in red appears underneath it stating that: “This content will not be sold via iTunes.” So what triggers such a rating? Well, not a lot. Basically, it comes down to the final two questions in the 10 question matrix. Let’s run through them in descending order:

If Twitter is good for one thing, it is for promoting whatever it is you have to sell. Some of the best self-promoters out there are rappers, and they’ve taken to Twitter just like every other type of celebrity. Just as Twitter can drive traffic to Websites, it can also drive music sales on iTunes.

On a panel at the 140 Characters Conference yesterday, Xavier Jernigan (@xjernigan, the director of digital marketing at Universal Motown Republic, described how Twitter help put one of his new artists, Asher Roth (@asherroth), on the map. Roth released his first album, Asleep In the Bread Aisle, on iTunes on April 20, a Monday. The night before he Tweeted out to his followers (he currently has 69,566) that the album would be on iTunes. And then he Tweeted out a short link which opened up to the album page in iTunes. With no other marketing, the album rose to become the No. 1 digital album for the week. Since then, it has sold about 100,000 copies. Update: As people point out in comments, Roth’s own team did a lot of groundwork before the album hit. Nevertheless, Twitter did play an important role in turning that early interest into iTunes sales.

Right before the launch of the Palm Pre, the press was buzzing about a feature that had remained quiet until that time: That the Palm Pre can sync with iTunes. This is a key feature at least in theory as the Pre is seen as the biggest competitor to Apple’s iPhone to date. It stands to reason that Palm may have wanted to keep the feature under wraps until the launch neared, so Apple couldn’t neutralize it. Which it seems is exactly what they’re getting ready to do.

In a rather odd update on the support area of its site today, Apple has an entry titled: iTunes: About unsupported third-party digital media players. While it never explicitly mentions the Pre, or any other device, it doesn’t take an Apple Store Genius to figure out what it means. Here’s the full text of the article:

You may not realize it yet, but the App Store is broken.

I spent this week at Apple’s WWDC conference in San Francisco talking to quite a few iPhone app developers. One thing that struck me was just how many of them shared the exact same concern with the App Store: App discovery.

By now, you’ve likely heard some of the success stories from the App Store (Apple does what it can to promote these at just about every event it holds pertaining to the iPhone now). But for each of those, there are also a ton of developers who work hard on apps only to watch them fall by the wayside. Apple’s greatest strength with the store — the fact that there are now 50,000 + apps — is also turning into its weakness with many developers. And if it doesn’t adapt the store to its huge growth, those developers might start looking at other platforms.

The problem is that while early on, it was pretty easy for small-time developers to make an app and get it noticed in the store, now with 50,000 apps, we’re getting to the point where you need to do something else to promote your apps. That’s good news for big time development studios like EA, which can throw marketing money at the problem. But for some smaller developers — some of which are just one person — that’s simply not an option. But there is one potential solution, and it’s one Apple already has built-in to iTunes: Genius recommendations.

Well, it finally happened. Apple just delivered its 1 Billionth application download from the App Store, which currently features over 25,000 apps (35,000 by one estimate) built by thousands of developers. The significance of the milestone (besides just the 1 billion mark) is that it’s taken only nine months from when the App Store launched on iTunes to hit 1 billion paid and unpaid downloads.

Last summer, Apple sold one million 3G iPhones worldwide across 21 countries in the first 3 days on sale. During that same time, iPhone users made 10 million app downloads from the then newly launched iTunes App Store.

The count was at 200 million in early December, and the App Store hit 500 million downloads by January 19th. It took Apple six months to reach the first 500 million downloads. It would take Apple only 95 days to get another 500 billion downloads. By March, 2009, it was at 800 million. We started keeping track via Apple’s billion-app countdown at around 928,077,779. Apple also offered us a fleeting glimpse of the most popular apps ever, something the company only did once before.

Of the major companies that announced their earnings yesterday, two of them, AT&T and Apple, beat Wall Street estimates largely thanks to a single product: The iPhone. We’re approaching the two year birthday of the device, and it still remains one of the hottest items out there. Ladies and gentleman, the state of the iPhone is strong.

Yes, Apple actually sold fewer iPhones this quarter than the previous two quarters, but that was coming off of the always-hot holiday shopping quarter, and the one before that was when the iPhone 3G was still relatively new on the scene. All told, Apple has sold 21 million iPhones since its launch. Perhaps just a drop in the bucket compared to overall Nokia sales, but remember, Apple was not in the mobile business at all before 2007. And aside from just sales figures, in the past two years, it has revolutionized the industry. That is, of course, a cliche. But in this case, it’s true.

With all of the online video services now offering much of the same (sometimes lousy) content, the new differentiating factor seems to be high definition quality. Microsoft has been there for a while (with videos over Xbox Live), as has Apple (over the Apple TV), and now Amazon is joining the gang.

The new HD option for Amazon Video On Demand is available starting today for some 500 movies and television shows. And the HD content will work with the set-top boxes Amazon streams to including the Roku and TiVo Series 3 devices. In addition, Amazon is launching On Demand on select Panasonic televisions today as well.

In a golf tournament, it can be advantageous to putt after another player because you learn the contours of the path to the hole. In a similar way, you’d think Hollywood would have learned from the rough path the music industry took in transitioning to the world of digital distribution over the web. Unfortunately, it looks to be on the verge of missing the putt as well.

On the surface, it seems like Hollywood is doing a better job of getting consumers to use their approved methods for transferring content over the web — but the reality is that it’s a mess. And the only reason piracy isn’t so rampant in the US is that our broadband speeds, for the most part, suck.

Sure, there are a lot of channels to get films legally over the web. iTunes, Xbox Live, Amazon, Netflix and Hulu are all doing a fairly good job at making the content they’re given, accessible. Unfortunately, it’s the content that’s the problem. If you go to any of those services looking for a specific movie, there’s a very good chance that it won’t be available. And that can be true even if it was available on the service in the past. It’s a nightmare.

Comcast has reached the 11-billion views milestone for its On Demand video services since the launch of the feature 6 years ago. The cable operator threw out some interesting factoids to help measure the magnitude of its milestone.

Comcast points out that 11 billion views is nearly two times the total number of music downloads (6 billion) sold on iTunes since its launch six years ago. The company adds that 11 billion views is four times the total number of Big Macs sold in the US (3 billion) over the same time period and 30 times the total number of Harry Potter books sold around the world (375 million copies). Yeah, it’s a lot. But it less than how many videos are watched on the Web in a single month (that number reached 11 billion last April). And it is still a fraction of how many movies and TV shows Comcast cable customers watch on the other 300 channels they get with their monthly subscription.

Thenew iTunes pricing scheme is set for an April 7 launch, says the Los Angeles Times. They do good work over there. Apple hasn’t revealed this date publicly, but April 7 is supposedly what Cupertino is telling record labels. Remember: prices now top out at $1.29 for popular songs. Think Britney Spears—she’s still popular, right?—Lady Gaga, anything with Auto Tune, etc. This country, I swear. (Although, let the record show, I do like Taylor Swift, which makes me a complete hypocrite and a half-idiot. And I’m not even talking about, “Wow, she’s hot,” I actually mean I enjoy her music.)

Noel Hartshorn is a 37 year old Wales (UK) based iPhone developer, working in partnership with illustrator Dennis Harrison.

Formerly a contract technical writer, Noel became one of the many casualties of the global economic crisis. With the IT contract market in decline, and with a lot more time on his hands than anticipated, Noel decided to take the plunge into iPhone development. This is his story.

(Editor’s note: the app they developed is called i-Doodz. Noel decided not to include the name of, nor the link to the app in this piece, but we add it because it deserves some credit at least)

We don’t write about every iPhone application that we come across (there are other sites doing a great job at that), but sometimes we just have to. For instance, IDrive, which specializes in backup solutions, has a neat application dubbed IDrive Lite that allows you to backup, share and restore all your iPhone contacts completely free of charge if you’ve updated your iPhone software to 2.0.

Especially for business users, tools like this can come in quite handy. Once the app is installed on your iPhone, you can tap the ‘Backup’ button and the tool will automatically save your contact information to ‘the cloud’ i.e. IDrive servers. No signups required. You can easily restore contacts as well without overwriting people you’ve added after your last backup. Finally, the sharing functionality is rather nice; it lets you share information with other contacts in your address book by sending them an SMS with an import key for them to use.

Indie music download subscription service eMusic is getting an overhaul. Individual artist an dalbum pages already have more of an AJaxy feel and incorporate YouTube videos and Flickr photos. On Friday, its homepage switched over to a new design centered around a new recommendation engine powered by MediaUnbound. Now, when you sign in as a member, you are presented with a grid of “Music You’ll Love” made up of personalized recommendations. You can also sort by “New Arrivals,” which tries to give you new music that you will like, as well as standard “Best Sellers” and “New and Noteworthy” albums selected by eMusic’s editorial staff.

Helping members find new music they will love is the key to eMusic’s business, and it needs to do a better job. eMusic has 400,000 paying subscribers who have downloaded 250 million songs since 2003. Members can download anywhere from 30 to 75 tracks a month before they have to start paying on a per track basis. Once people stop finding new music they want, they are more likely to cancel their subscriptions. Better recommendations would reduce that churn.

Will the music subscription business ever grow beyond its current niche? It looks increasingly doubtful. Today, eMusic announced that since it launched its current music subscription service in 2003, customers have downloaded 250 million songs. Apple’s iTunes, by comparison, has sold more than 5 billion songs since it opened the iTunes Store in April, 2003. That makes eMusic one twentieth the size of iTunes.

The way eMusic works is you pay a subscription of between $12 and $20 a month and then you can download 30 to 75 songs a month and keep them. You can also purchase songs above those limits, starting at $0.25 a track. eMusic has a catalog of 4.5 million songs, and is particularly strong in independent music. It currently has 400,000 subscribers, and the company expects to make $70 million in revenues this year.

For most people, watching Web video is predominantly a streamed experience on your computer. But an important and substantial portion of Web video is still downloaded to be watched later, or transferred to a different screen (usually an iPod, but sometimes a flat-screen TV). The problem with downloads is that they don’t fit neatly into the advertising model that rules most other Web video.

Earlier today at the Beet.TV Online Video Summit (which I co-moderated with Cnet’s Dan Farber and Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser), blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack revealed that his company has found a way to dynamically insert ads from DoubleClick into video downloads on iTunes and elsewhere.

The Copyright Royalty Board has set rates that companies like Apple and Amazon must pay music publishers for each digital track they sell. And the rates, drum roll please, . . are the same as they were before: 9 cents per song. So everyone can breathe easy. iTunes won’t shut down! (Not that it ever was going to shut down, but it was a good story).

Faced with an industry in transition, with new rules being written every day, the three-judge panel opted to do nothing. And maybe that was the prudent thing to do. But by setting these rates for the next five years, the Copyright Royalty Board missed an opportunity to help put the entire digital music industry on a more rational footing. As I argued yesterday, instead of a per-track fee, the Copyright Royalty Board should have set rates as a percentage of digital music revenues. That way, the whole industry could have grown together.

Until all music becomes free, at least.

Memo to the Copyright Royalty Board: a bigger pie fills more bellies. Tomorrow, the three-judge panel that sets rates on music copyright fees is scheduled to announce new rates on digital music downloads for the next five years. The fees, which go to music publishers (the actual owners of the copyright to each song), are currently set at 9 cents per track. Music publishers want to raise that to 15 cents per track. Apple has vaguely threatened that it might have to shut down iTunes if the new rates go into effect (yeah, right).

Apple still controls about 85 percent of the digital download market, but these fees are also being paid by Amazon, Rhapsody, MySpace Music and others. The music publishers (who are often the artists themselves) want to future-proof their cut of the action and thus want to lock in as high a rate as possible. Apple and the record labels are arguing that the rates should be changed from a flat fee per song to a percentage of revenues. Apple wants to pay 6 percent of revenues, while the labels are suggesting 8 percent. Since, in the case of iTunes, this percentage would come out of the current 99 cents charged for each track, it actually amounts to a reduction in per track fees (6 cents and 8 cents respectively).

NBC had a huge week thanks to the financial troubles being experienced on Wall Street and its new relationship with Apple.

CNBC.com was the chosen destination for investors and businesspeople alike this week as the instability on Wall Street led to the site’s largest audience ever. For the first time in its history, CNBC.com served 1 million unique visitors on Monday and racked up 14.6 million page views — a 26 percent gain over the site’s previous high, according to its internal data.

Tiny Fey and the hoopla surrounding Vice-Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin can be thanked for giving NBC.com its most-watched viral video of all time. According to the company, it bested previous favorites, “D— in a Box” and “Lazy Sunday,” and even beat out copies uploaded to YouTube.