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(Credit: Slacker)

This week at CES, Slacker made good on its word and released a version of its mobile, streaming, Internet Radio app for BlackBerry.

Slacker Radio for BlackBerry, a free over-the-air download for BlackBerrys running version 4.3 and above, gratifies with crisp album art, intuitive navigation, and all the customized streaming stations you could want.

What impressed us most is Slacker's newly added feature--right now just for BlackBerry--that caches songs as they play, allowing you to essentially play back your stations offline. It only works if you've got a microSD card, mind you, but once you're set up, you'll be able to crank tunes in the background while e-mailing and otherwise futzing with your phone.

The only catch: the app currently works for U.S. customers only.

Ever since Amazon began selling digital music and offering lower prices than rival Apple, the suspicion by many iTunes fans is that the music industry was in cahoots with Amazon.

In the comments section of our scoop Monday on Apple's MacWorld announcement that it was doing away with copy-protection software and changing its pricing policy, many iTunes fans asserted the often repeated allegation that the four largest recording companies were giving Amazon a price break.

Not so, according to two of my music industry insiders with knowledge of the negotiations.

The suspicion has long been that the record labels want to help Amazon's fledgling music service compete against the Apple juggernaut. The labels have hoped that an iTunes alternative would emerge and dilute some of Apple's control over digital music sales. The reality is, say my sources, that Amazon, Wal-Mart and everybody else selling downloads is paying the same wholesale price as Apple.

"As long as a retailer pays the label's price they can sell songs for whatever they want," said one of the sources.

What this means is that Amazon, which offers many songs for 10 cents less than Apple's former standard price of 99 cents, has likely chosen to lose money on music sales, say the sources. It's generally believed that Apple's profit margin is just a few pennies per song.

Amazon's motivation is obvious. The company is battling the country's largest music retailer and the maker of the best selling music player. Amazon needs a competitive advantage.

That's going to be tougher to find now. Apple's announcement Tuesday that it will remove digital rights management from songs and offer more price flexibility, including the slashing of catalog titles or older music to 69 cents, is bad news for competitors--especially Amazon. Amazon representatives did not respond to an interview request.

I've been hard on iTunes recently for failing to provide customers with DRM-free music and over-the-air downloads. But the reasons to shop for music at any other Web store are quickly dwindling.

Amazon launched an MP3 store in September 2007 and tried to play up the fact that fans could get cheaper music at a higher quality and free of DRM?

While iTunes raised the price of hit songs 30 cents to ($1.29), catalog titles were reduced by 30 cents. And there are a lot more songs in the catalog category. Apple can now make the claim that iTunes is cheaper than Amazon on most songs.

At iTunes plus, music buyers can get DRM-free music at 256kpbs, the same quality that Amazon offers. And Apple took the extra step of enabling people to go back and scrub DRM from their existing libraries--although they must pay a 30-cent fee per song.

Let's face it, there's little to indicate that providing DRM-free music or offering songs for 10 cents less were competitive advantages anyway.

"This whole David and Goliath story has been a bit overblown," said Russ Crupnick, NPD's senior industry analyst. "What we've seen in the year we've been tracking Amazon is that there is very little overlap between (Amazon and Apple's customers). There is very little evidence that Amazon came in and cannibalized Apple's business."

Crupnick said that this appears to mean that to compete with iTunes, a store is going to have to offer more than discounted songs.

"I don't think price has been the issue so far," Crupnick said. "The reality is that Apple and Amazon are both providing good value. Apple has a very sticky customer base. They are using the iPod and iTunes. Even people who aren't buying music from iTunes use it to manage their libraries. What we've seen is for people who want to hear the latest Akon single, there isn't going to be much resistance to buy that track at $1.29. And at the lower end, Apple can start to do more bundling and packaging.

"Let me put this way," Crupnick continued, "if a dime would have made a difference, we would have seen a larger migration to Amazon a year ago."

So is Apple destined to continue to reign supreme over digital music?

The only potential competitor I can see possibly mounting a challenge is MySpace Music. I would say that the site founded by the top music labels and News Corp. represents the last hope that social networking is fertile ground for music sales.

What MySpace has going for it against Apple is the opportunity to market music to more than 100 million unique worldwide visitors, and a reputation as a music hub. The service also offers free song streams to PCs and will sell merchandise and concert tickets. The service bills itself as a one-stop shop for everything music.

Still, digital music stores are like banks. People are unlikely to switch unless they have an overwhelming reason. I don't consider myself an Apple fanboy in any way but there's nothing compelling enough out there for me to bother switching.

Sure, I wish iTunes was better at helping me to discover new music and I wish the sound quality was better, but for everyday tasks, such as managing my library and working with my iPhone, Apple is the clear winner.

From Nielsen Soundscan by way of the LA Weekly and Rolling Stone, here are the top 10 vinyl sellers in 2008. I've added the years they were originally released, and what I imagine was going through the mind of vinylphiles when they bought it.

I haven't seen that poster since high school.

10. Radiohead, OK Computer, 1997. Great production, trippy artwork looks great under the lava lamp.
9. Metallica, Death Magnetic, 2008. Maybe the vinyl version won't be overcompressed to death.
8. Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes, 2008. Pitchfork likes it, it must be good.
7. Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, 1973. Remember those posters?
6. Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, 1998. With the LP, I can pretend I was hip to this record when it originally came out.
5. Portishead, Third, 2008. See number 8.
4. B-52s, Funplex, 2008. Remember that all-night dance party we had back in '82?
3. Guns 'n' Roses, Chinese Democracy, 2008. This will be a collectors' item someday.
2. The Beatles, Abbey Road, 1969. Now I can replace the copy my daughter stole when she went off to college.
1. Radiohead, In Rainbows, 2008. I feel kind of guilty about paying one cent for the download.

Overall, vinyl accounted for a whopping 0.1 of all music sales last year! How long before preloaded microSD cards surpass vinyl to become the third-most-popular music format?

SanDisk's SlotMusic strategy puzzled me at first. I didn't understand why anybody would pay almost the same price as a CD for an easily misplaced microSD card with lower-quality audio. The release of the $19.99 SlotMusic player, which is basically an MP3 player capable of playing these cards, changed my opinion a little bit. But I suggested that the real strength would come in curated cards containing, for example, a selection of songs from the Billboard charts. Given that a regular album cost $14.99 on this format, I figured that a curated card for the same price would include 20 or 30, or maybe 100 songs.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CBS Interactive)

At CES this week, SanDisk surpassed my expectations with the new SlotRadio, a $39.99 MP3 player with a preloaded microSD card containing 1,000 songs. That's four cents a song, plus you get to keep the player, which is capable of playing the SlotMusic albums and other music contained on a microSD card, and also has an integrated FM tuner.

The first players will contain cards preloaded with Billboard chart hits, which is a fine place to start, but SlotRadio could get really interesting if SanDisk branches out beyond the mainstream. Imagine a collection of the year's top-rated albums by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, or Nic Harcourt. Or heck, go a little further and hire musicians to curate the collections: imagine Keith Richards' favorite blues songs, or an Alan Bishop collection. You might expect that music nuts--the kinds of people who care about Sublime Frequencies--wouldn't relinquish control of their playlists, but at four cents a song, I'd be happy to save myself the trouble of ripping or downloading 1,000 tracks and let somebody else drive for a while. As long as it's a driver I trust.

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

The numbers are grim, all right, but the music industry still sells hundreds of millions of CDs each year. That's a lot of discs, and sales of downloads won't surpass silver discs for a while.

According to some industry sources, as recently as 2006, CDs represented more than 80 percent of the music sold in the United States. A recent report projects that it won't be until 2012 that download sales surpass CD sales. So fess up. A lot of you are still buying discs, and I want to know who you are.

I'm doing more than my share, still averaging six or seven CDs a month (vs. less than one DVD/Blu-ray Disc a month). The media sees trends, so even though the trend is down, CDs are not out. Oh, and there's a lot more profit in selling physical media than downloads, so the record business is in no hurry to quit making discs.

Not that it matters to most people, but CDs sound better than most downloads, including ones free of digital rights management (DRM), or copyright protection software.

Got an iPod? Rip your CDs to Apple Lossless or WAV files, and get way better sound than iTunes downloads. Buy used CDs, and save even more money.

CDs can have gorgeous cover art and liner notes, which aren't always part of the download deal. Yeah, I've heard the news that LP sales doubled in 2008, but their sum still equals the teeniest fraction CD sales.

I'd love to hear from folks who regularly buy CDs.

Indie rock's bards of the border continue their remarkable hybrid: old Southwest dirges cross-bred with a particularly dark and brooding folk-pop. Few bands in the scene pull off such a natural dignity--or intimacy. "Absent Afternoon" is exclusive release for Threadless.com

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I tuned into Thursday's conversation between Microsoft's Robbie Bach and financial analysts at CES. Bach is the president of the company's Entertainment and Devices division, which includes Xbox, Windows Mobile, retail channel relationships, and most of the other fun stuff. It also includes the Zune, which, given its lack of financial impact on the company, didn't merit much of his time.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Toward the end however, one analyst (not identified on the recording) suggested that the company's foray into MP3 players had been a waste of time. Today, Microsoft talks about providing software and services on "three screens"--the PC, the TV, and mobile devices. So why did Microsoft make a foray into hardware, which alienated its device-maker partners (remember PlaysForSure?), and probably cost the company tens or hundreds of millions so far.

Bach insisted that music was a required component of the "three screen" experience, and that Microsoft had to be a leader rather than a mere technology provider in this space. If Microsoft hadn't built the Zune, it wouldn't have been able to create the Zune software and Marketplace, which have become pretty solid after a couple false starts. But he admitted that if the company were to enter the space again with perfect hindsight, it would do things differently.

How, exactly? He didn't say. But he did say that regardless of whether Microsoft had built its own MP3 player, it would have changed its relationship with every OEM and "caused just as much disruption." In other words, the Windows Media strategy wasn't working. Consumers didn't want a confusing array of devices and stores and formats and DRM schemes that didn't always work together. They didn't want to think about this stuff at all! They just wanted to rip their CDs, maybe buy a few tracks online, and take all this stuff with them.

My guess: PlaysForSure would have been just as dead. Microsoft would have created a new music brand, a new logo program, new hardware specs for the devices, new client software to replace the Media Player for syncing and library organization (like the Zune client), and a new store that could only be used with this new software and these new devices (like the Zune Marketplace). In other words, there still would have been a clean break between old and new. The only difference is that Microsoft wouldn't have manufactured and marketed the actual Zune devices, and consumers might have had a greater choice of hardware from the get-go. This might have led to quicker innovation--for instance, some forward-thinking OEM probably would have created a touch-screen "Zune" by now.

The only question: after the PlaysForSure debacle, who would have gone along? Which is probably why Microsoft built the Zune hardware in the first place.

Much has been said about Phil Schiller's keynote address at Macworld on Tuesday, where he announced that Apple has finally struck deals with all the major music labels, making songs sold via the iTunes Store free of digital rights management.

The crowd in attendance cheered joyfully when it heard the news, and millions of people across the globe were excited to finally know that all that crazy Apple copyright protection was finally behind them. Even Apple was excited to announce it, and the new pricing model--$0.69 and $1.29, depending on the song--seems to suit its fancy.

For years, we've been hearing about Apple's desire to make iTunes DRM-free. Steve Jobs even wrote a letter detailing his belief that DRM is bad for all of us--record labels included. And now, after years of waiting, Jobs and his minions have finally achieved their goal of eliminating it.

Does that necessarily mean that it's good for Apple, though? I don't think there's a simple answer.

London's latest band-of-the-moment takes a "more is more" approach, exploiting producer Ross Orton to mix multiple local obsessions: sweaty post-punk, tetchy synth stuff, and a sort of postmodern soul. The result is loud and garbled and guaranteed to instantly make you hipper.

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(Credit: CBS Interactive)

An iPhone is many things, but a massage therapist it is not.

However, if you're in a pinch, the lightweight application Massager may soothe you until your next appointment.

The application takes advantage of the iPhone's vibrating motor to create four patterns based on Swedish, Shiatsu, deep muscle, and relaxation massage. Starting and stopping the massage are easy enough to accomplish by tapping and untapping the corresponding button.

While you can manually increase the intensity of the vibes by putting some muscle behind the iPhone's flat face, it still won't come close to what a pronged handheld massager can do. After a few minutes, my wound-up shoulders remained just as tight.

Yet it might relax tension in you and yours, and at 99 cents, that's not a bad gamble.