On a worldwide basis, King’s Candy Crush Saga leads the way on the Apple iOS app store in downloads, and Imangi’s Temple Run 2 is tops in the Google Play store. But when it comes to revenue, GungHo Online Entertainment’s Puzzle & Dragons has conquered all, according to March data from market research firm App Annie.

The results show the competitive market for mobile games is becoming a battle among the same players each month for the top rankings, with no clearly dominant company.

King’s match-3 puzzle game has steadily grown in downloads on iOS since its release in September 2012. Now it is No. 1 in the most-downloaded game on iOS, and it is No. 3 on Google Play. Candy Crush Saga was No. 4 in revenue on Google Play and No. 3 in revenue on iOS. The top five grossing iOS publishers in March were unchanged from February, with Supercell (maker of Clash of Clans) and GungHo Online at the top of the charts.

GungHo’s Puzzle & Dragons, meanwhile, is No. 1 on both iOS and Google Play for the month of March in terms of most revenue. That tells you that the game, which is particularly popular in the Japanese mobile game market, has been designed for maximum monetization. (I happen to know a chief executive who admitted spending $300 in the game.) Puzzle & Dragons has generated more than 10 million downloads to date in Japan alone.

Electronic Arts had the No. 1 spot on iOS in top downloads, but it did so with a total of 984 apps on the market. On Google Play, EA was No. 3, with 107 games on the market. On iOS, EA was No. 3 in monthly game revenue and it was No. 6 in monthly game revenue on Google Play. EA’s top downloadable game on iOS was Real Racing 3 at No. 2. And EA’s top grossing apps were The Simpsons: Tapped Out at No. 5 on iOS and Real Racing 3 at No. 7 on iOS. On Google Play, EA’s The Simpsons: Tapped Out was No. 6 in monthly revenue.

Rovio, saw its place move up four spots due to the strong downloads on iOS for its Angry Birds game and The Croods. Glu Games also jumped seven spots on iOS to No. 6. Rovio was the top publisher in downloads on Google Play in March.

One of the rare new players on the charts was Fingersoft, the Finnish startup that published Hill Climb Racing. Fingersoft hit No. 4 in top downloads on Google Play thanks to its release of Benji Bananas, an “endless swinging” game.

NHN has begun to climb the charts thanks to the strong performance of games published on its Line mobile messaging network in Japan. On Google Play, Asian game publishers have posted three games on the Kakao Talk mobile messaging network in South Korea.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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I guess time flies when you’re having fun.

After all those years, Apple’s iconic music service is still the largest music online music retailer, and in fact it’s the largest music retailer of any kind. As of February, the service has sold over 25 billion songs out of Apple’s 28 million-strong global catalog, and well over 435 million people have active iTunes accounts.

According to the NPD, eight out of 10 people who buy digital music have bought music from iTunes, and on an overall unit basis, iTunes owns 63 percent of the music download business.

On the cusp of a possible Apple digital streaming service, that dominance could continue for quite some time.

“Since the launch of Apple’s iTunes store, digital music downloads have become the dominant revenue source for the recorded music industry and iTunes continues to be the dominant retailer,” the NPD Group‘s Russ Crupnick said. “There’s a belief that consumers don’t need to buy music because of streaming options, when in fact streamers are much more likely than the average consumer to buy music downloads.”

The NPD surveyed 5,400 Internet users to build its digital music report, and while 38 percent of the sampling said that it is still important to own music, 41 percent of those who listen to Pandora and other free music-streaming platforms said the same thing. In addition, many of those streamers said they’ve bought songs because they discovered them on a streaming service or on the radio.

That’s important for Apple, because an iTunes streaming music service has been rumored for years, and just last week it appears that Apple and the number one music label in the world, Universal Music Group, came to terms on a streaming music payments agreement.

Though the number of American music listeners who buy music online has remained relatively unchanged, the amount they are spending has gone up about 6 percent since last year. That number could rise in 2013 if Apple does launch a streaming music service and it is well-integrated into an iTunes purchase capability.

photo credit: aagius via photopin cc

Apple is currently the largest music vendor in the world, having sold over 25 billion songs via iTunes as of February. Well over 435 million people have active iTunes user accounts, storing their credit card information with Apple, and Apple has over 28 million songs in its global catalog. In addition, there are probably well over half a billion Apple mobile devices – iPhones, iPads, and iPods — in the market today.

But, despite  rumors for well over two years that Apple is going to launch a streaming music service, and the fact that over 200 million people are using iTunes in the cloud, the music giant doesn’t have a streaming music product to compete with the likes of Spotify and Pandora.

Yet.

Today it looks like those rumors might finally come true, as Apple and the world’s largest record label, Universal Music Group, appear to be close to a streaming music agreement.

According to The Verge, Apple and Universal are just days away from an agreement. The stumbling block that has scuttled previous agreements is cost — Apple has been asking for a royalty payment schedule that’s about half of the 12 cents per 100 songs streaming music leader Pandora pays.

(Spotify apparently pays 35 cents, iHeartRadio pays 22 cents, and even at 12 cents, Pandora can’t seem to turn a profit.)

Apple wanted six cents per 100 songs, but apparently will not get it. It’s likely, however, that Apple’s size and market position has enabled it to drive a harder bargain than any existing music streaming business.

Last time rumors of an impending Apple streaming music service reached this level, Pandora stock took a nosedive. Today it’s down slightly again, but not nearly as severely, suggesting the bad news is already priced in, or that Pandora’s strong subscriber growth — topping 200 million registered users just days ago — is building a competitive hedge against any future Apple product.

I’ve asked Apple for comment, but it is unlikelyApple will say anything about negotiations that, while they may be close to complete, are not yet finished.

photo credit: Orange_Beard via photopin cc

Today we know Pandora as the Internet’s radio station that broadcasts over billion hours of music a month. But the company originally started life as a music kiosk service for record stores. And in between, it experienced a savage decade of near-death experiences.

“Pandora actually started as a company called Savage Beast Technologies,” Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy says in a new Total Disruption video. “The vision was to provide software to help people buy more music in music stores. Unfortunately, that was a dying business.”

Source: A Total Disruption

Joe Kennedy, Pandora CEO

Savage Beast struggled for three to four years, Kennedy says, without success, as the music industry transitioned in great pain and with great resistance to digital. Pandora also refocused on digital music, but the pivotal moment was the launch of the iPhone app store.

“We literally dropped everything we were doing,” Kennedy says. “And to this day, Pandora is the second most popular app in the iOS app store.”

The struggle wasn’t over — after four years in the music store business, it took a year to refocus on personalized music, delivered directly to music lovers via the web. The company’s first profitable quarter wasn’t for another five to six years after that — and Pandora had to advocate for laws relaxing music royalties to make it happen, as growing revenue doesn’t really matter if expenses grow faster.

As of today, Pandora has 150 million registered users in the U.S., with a third of them tuning into the service every single day, listening to over a billion hours of music every month.

But Pandora still faces a long road ahead, with possible encroachment into its business model from Apple, still challenging revenue numbers in spite of a growing subscriber count, and possible competition from Spotify.

Here’s the story:

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft executive Joe Belfiore showed off the company’s latest mobile operating system, Windows Phone 8, in front of a friendly audience at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium today. He was joined briefly by actress Jessica Alba and, at the end of the event, by Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, who hawked some of the latest phones and carriers with Windows Phone 8 devices.

Microsoft has been planning this rollout for a long time, and most of its major features are already well-known. But the company surprised us with a handful of cool new features.

Customizable lock screen

Windows has had customizable “live tiles” since Windows Phone 7, which can deliver snippets of custom data, such as calendar appointments and Facebook photos, directly to an app’s tile on your phone’s home screen. Now the company extends that customization to the phone’s lock screen too. Result: If an app supports it, you can customize your lock screen with information from that app. For example, in the new Facebook app for Windows Phone 8, you can have your lock screen display the latest photos from your friends.

Skype

Skype will be deeply integrated into Windows Phone 8, Belfiore promised. For instance, you’ll be able to receive chat notifications and Skype calls even when you don’t have the app open. The incoming Skype call screen looks similar to the one for regular phone calls, and you can even use the phone’s call-waiting features to switch between Skype and regular calls.

Pandora

Pandora has been one of the most glaring absences from the array of Windows Phone apps. Microsoft knows it needs to play catch up, fast. Getting Pandora onto Windows Phone 8 was a real coup — and as a bonus, Windows Phone Pandora will offer one year of cost-free, advertising-free music. It won’t be available until early 2013, however.

Kid’s Corner

Do your kids like to borrow your phone so they can play Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds? Mine too. The new Kid’s Corner feature lets you set up a special login screen just for your kids. It’s got larger, more colorful app tiles, and you can specify which apps, games, music, and videos show up there. To show off the feature, Belfiore’s three kids came onto the stage for one of the cutest tech demonstrations in the history of San Francisco tech demos. His five-year-old daughter bypassed the Kid’s Corner immediately and went straight to the regular homescreen — oops! But once she got to the right screen, she found Fruit Ninja right away.

“I love kid’s corner. I think it’s awesome,” said actress and entrepreneur Jessica Alba, who came onstage briefly to wow the roomful of mostly male nerds and to talk about how much she likes Windows Phone.

Data Sense

Windows Phone now includes a feature that compresses web page data while you’re browsing to make sure you don’t overuse your wireless data allotment. Belfiore said this will enable 45% more web browsing with the same amount of data. Data Sense also helps you find local Wi-Fi hotspots on a map and automatically switches you over to Wi-Fi whenever possible. In addition, when you get close to your carrier-imposed cap, you can have it restrict background data downloads to help you eke out an extra few days.

Rooms

Microsoft added a new feature to its People hub: The ability to create “Rooms” for groups of people. Rooms are collections of people, but also include a shared, private messaging string; a shared calendar; and shared notes. You can share calendars with iPhone users, but other features are WP8-only.

Voice notes in OneNote

Windows Phone’s note-taking application, OneNote, now includes a handy voice transcription tool. From anywhere in the OS, press and hold the Start button and say the word “Note.” It will record your voice, transcribe the audio to text, and save both to Skydrive.

Skydrive integration

Skydrive, Microsoft’s cloud-based storage service, is well-integrated into Windows Phone, just as it is in Windows 8. That means you can easily store photos, documents, and other data on your phone and access it from a PC or Windows 8 tablet (or vice versa). Skydrive automatically stores all photos you take indefinitely — unlike the 30-day limit that Apple’s iCloud imposes.

Xbox Music

Although Microsoft had announced it earlier, this is a cool feature worth highlighting: Windows Phone 8 can access all your music via the company’s Xbox Music service. Belfiore said Xbox Music now includes a library of 30 million tracks, any of which you can listen to from your phone or Windows 8 PC or tablet — or your Xbox.

“No other phone works this seamlessly across your phone, your PC, and your home entertainment system,” Belfiore said.

Photo: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

Pandora is a personalized online radio station. Tell it what you like, and it will create a playlist just for you, customized to your tastes. You can subscribe for free if you don’t mind a few ads, or you can pay to get the music without commercial interruption. If you particularly like a song or album, you can purchase it via various retailers.

That would seem to contrast strongly with Steve Jobs’ view of music. Jobs resisted the subscription model in favor of iTunes’ purchase model. Famous Jobs quotations include ”People want to own their music,” and ”The subscription model has failed so far,” and ”Never say never, but customers don’t seem to be interested in it.”

Of course, Jobs could also tell you that the sun was going to shine at midnight.

Pandora, which is primarily focused on the U.S., has spectacularly failed so far to make a viable business out of subscriptions and advertising, losing $1.8 million on $136 million in revenue last year and exceeding that loss by a factor of five in just the last quarter, despite growing revenue by 50 percent.

In other words, the we’ll-lose-money-on-each-transaction-but-make-it-up-on-volume model ain’t working.

Potentially, however, Apple would have a better shot at making it work, since many customers already have a payment relationship with iTunes and are used to buying music with Apple. In addition, Apple may believe that it’s time for the primary mode of music discovery to shift from terrestrial radio — still the king, with a 48 percent share — to online radio, while also making a preemptive move on YouTube, which 64 percent of teens use to listen to music.

Landing deals with the labels would help Apple retain its crown as the king of music purchase — and salve some of the pain of failing to acquire enough TV content to create a great online TV replacement.

photo credit: emanuela franchini via photo pin cc

ABC News Radio, the largest commercial radio news organization in the US,  is curating the content for Slacker. Listeners have access to a wide range of stories from expert sources. There are two primary channels, Men’s Life and Women’s Life, each featuring 12 categories. Many of the categories overlap, like Health & Fitness, Food & Drink, and Travel & Adventure, although the stories will differ for men and women. Other categories are gender specific, like Cars & Gear for men and Hair & Beauty for women.

“Since men and women often have different interests, our new Men’s Life and Women’s Life channels appeal to different sensibilities and styles,” said Steve Jones, vice president and general manager, ABC News Radio. “We curate this content to make it unique, but ultimately Slacker listeners drive their own experience, since they can skip stories within each channel just as they do now with songs.”

Examples of stories for men include “Night Vision”, a story told by an editor at Car and Driver magazine about his experience driving 48 miles to work in the morning without ever looking out of his car window. There is also a guide to complimenting a woman, as told by employees at Esquire magazine. On the female side, ladies can listen to US Weekly Fashion Director Sasha Charnin Morrison spill secrets of a celebrity stylist, or author Pauline Frommer (of Frommer’s Guidebooks) provide tips for solo women travelers.

Slacker has worked with ABC Radio since 2010, when they began promoting non-music content. It has also worked with ESPN Radio, American Public Media, and multiple comedy stations. The stories on the Lifestyle stations will be unique to Slacker, which differentiates it from other services like Stitcher that also offer customizable talk radio. As opposed to Pandora, which uses its genome to generate suggestions, Slacker’s stations are hosted and curated by artists, bands, DJs and experts. It has around 6 million active monthly listeners and 40 million registered users.

Since Spotify‘s U.S. launch a year ago, the startup has turned into one of the best streaming music services available today. And with the company’s transformation into a platform for music-focused apps, the service has gotten even better.

Spotify’s desktop and mobile applications give you access to a catalog of more than 16 million tracks. The company also has begun to offer Pandora-like radio that both free and paid users can access. But Spotify’s apps take the service a step further, fundamentally changing the experience of finding and listening to music.

As of this writing, 36 applications are accessible inside of Spotify’s desktop app, with big names like Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and The Guardian providing their own apps. These desktop apps change the music-listening experiencing by providing music discovery, music reviews, social listening, lyrics, and even dating. Spotify has said it also intends to bring third-party apps inside its mobile apps, but it hasn’t said when.

We’re sure the app platform will continue to expand, but for now we’ve made a list of our five favorite Spotify apps.

1. We Are Hunted

Whether or not you follow popular music charts from Billboard, iTunes, or other sources, it’s great to be able to access popular and emerging songs. We Are Hunted is sort of a “cool Billboard” that tracks emerging music through blogs, social media, message boards, and P2P networks. It uses a well-designed, visual interface that lets you scroll through 99 trending songs with corresponding artist thumbnails. If you’re feeling like being turned on by artists you’ve never heard of, there’s the “Emerging Chart” tab. Or if you want more conventional picks, there’s the “Mainstream Chart” tab. Additionally, the app has seven different genre playlists to cycle through. You can also use the app to create a playlist based on an artist you like.

2. Digster

While Spotify offers a relatively new Pandora-like radio function to create playlists, Digster takes the notion of playlist building further with curated playlists from across the spectrum of music. You can choose from hip-hop, classical, Motown, classic rock, and everything in-between and experience classic hits and songs you’ve never heard side-by-side with more ease than ever. You can also check out Share My Playlists for more playlist options.

3. TuneWiki

The TuneWiki app doesn’t redefine the nature of listening to music, but it certainly is one of the most practical and helpful Spotify apps. The service makes it possible to see lyrics synced up in real-time with whatever song you’re listening to, making it easier than ever to figure out what the heck they’re singing about. What’s also cool is that lyrics are crowd-sourced, so if a song’s lyrics seem wrong, you can change them just as if you were editing Wikipedia.

4. Soundrop

Soundrop is easily the most unusual app on this list because it’s the only one to receive VC funding. Yes, even Spotify apps can raise money, which is a sign that the platform is strong and growing. Soundrop creates a social listening experience with “rooms” in which you can listen to music. You can browse through various artist rooms (the picture above shows the one for Sigur Ros) and talk to people about the artist. While in the room, you can also add songs to the room’s playlist and vote up songs other people have suggested. The company says its nearly 7,000 rooms have played more than 60 million songs to date.

5. Pitchfork

While Pitchfork has many loud fans and equally loud critics, the Chicago-based site is still in many ways the Internet age’s Rolling Stone. It provides a spotlight (and copious amounts of hype) for emerging artists, and the site’s aspect of picking “the next big thing” translates well to Spotify. Not only does the app provide an easy way to read Pitchfork’s sometimes long-winded reviews, it makes it easy to find new music that’s already been curated weekly by a staff of music writers. Rolling Stone also has a Spotify app with similar functionality, but it doesn’t update its selections as often as Pitchfork does.

Take a look at our gallery of other awesome Spotify apps below and let us know what your favorites are in the comments.

Woman listening to radio photo: sebilden/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Sony, while mulling about in the shadow of Apple’s iPod and other reveals, announced its plan to launch a cloud-based music streaming service. The goal is to allow most Sony products to tap into the service and access Sony’s music library.

Sony is basically looking to compete with Apple’s iTunes platform through a different venue. iTunes has long focused on its devices and physical media — using CDs and owning actual, physical copies of songs — while Sony is attempting to bring its service to all its capable devices, including the workhorse jack-of-all-trades Playstation 3.

The service is called Qriocity — which may sound familiar, as it already exists as a video-on-demand service.

This isn’t Sony’s first foray into a music service — Apple and Sony already have some history competing for music sales over the Internet. Apple previously beat down on Sony’s Connect music service, which went dark in 2008.

Sony made the announcement at the IFA electronics show in Berlin. The service will reportedly pop up in Europe first, though no details on pricing or an exact release date have emerged yet.

[Photo: teresawer]