Industry Views: Is even digital music ownership a thing of the past?

A recent report that surfaced in the Wall Street Journal indicates that Apple’s iTunes (the world’s largest record shop) is encountering a downturn in music & entertainment sales with a 13 – 14% decline from the start of this year. The irony is that this is probably because of a problem that Apple is in part responsible for creating: the ubiquity of smartphones and apps that let us stream music anywhere we are, from an almost limitless music library. In short we are moving away from digital forms of music and entertainment ownership, and replacing it with the subscription model. We …

Industry Views: Can Apple Pay finally make mobile payments mainstream?

The announcement that the new iPhones and Apple Watch feature the NFC powered Apple Pay under the hood has been in the making for some time. With some heavy-hitting partnerships revealed, this of course gets Apple in to the mobile payments space in a big way, both in store and online. Apple Pay sits neatly alongside the Passbook which groups loyalty cards with coupons and other retail items in a digital wallet. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is how Apple is working hard to differentiate itself from other payment services around consumer privacy. Unlike Google Wallet for example, …