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I didn't start using a mobile device to rock me some of that sweet, sweet sissy bounce until I got my Android smart phone last year. I figured I'd need such a device to do justice to the music. Little did I know I could have done it with grandma's candlestick telephone.

According to an article in Scientific American published in July of 1892, the "théâtrophone" system had been use in Paris for two years at the time. You could listen from your home or from telephones in various public locations to popular concerts. In an early form of RSS, you could even subscribe!

There's an interesting chart making its way around the Net this morning comparing the number of iTunes app downloads to the total downloads of songs. The surprising reveal is that it shows apps are being downloaded much more rapidly than songs. In only 2.2 years, the iTunes App Store has reached the same total downloads as the iTunes Music Store did after five years. And before the year is out, the two curves on the chart will be around the same height - 13 billion downloads each.

Why is this happening? Why are apps becoming more popular than music?

If the rumors are true, then something is afoot in the Apple music camp. According to a recent article in Bloomberg, Apple is in talks to acquire online music service Lala. If a sale is finalized between the two companies, a number of new music monetization models can emerge and with Apple holding the supply chain from devices to players to downloads, a streaming music component may prove devastating to others.

If I see another screencast using the iMovie default songs, I'm going to go nuts. Music sets the tone for how you want others to perceive your company and choosing a generic soundtrack is like branding yourself boring. In the past, videographers were forced to work with lawyers to gain appropriate licenses for samples. Thanks to the Free Music Archive and a number of other services, we're free to use original songs while still maintaining the rights to attribution. This morning's launch of the Free Music Archive's guest curation series further expands on this environment of collaboration.

Apple today announced that a total of 2 billion apps have now been downloaded from the App Store. There are now over 85,000 apps in the store, up from 65,000 on July 14, and the number of developers has grown from 100,000 in July to around 125,000 today. iPhone and iPod touch users now download close to 6.6 million apps every day and this number continues to grow.

Opera today announced that the latest version of its browser, Opera 10, was downloaded 10 million times during the first week after its release. On its first day of release, Opera registered around 2 million downloads, up from 580,000 when the company released Opera 9 in 2006. Opera 10 launched to generally positive reviews and the company is already working on the next iteration of Opera 10, which will include Opera Unite, a web server and a number of web services that users will host on their own desktops.

When Radiohead keyboardist / guitarist Jonny Greenwood shrugs off the issue of audio fidelity, indie musicians should take note. Given that Radiohead is perhaps one of the biggest proponents of alternative music monetization, it's ironic that Greenwood is discrediting one of the industry's key price differentiators. Musicians with tracks on iTunes, Amazon and DIY stores like Bandcamp have often chosen to price MP3s at lower rates while higher quality recordings have fetched more per track. In a recent article with The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones, Greenwood admits there is little reason for the MP3 generation to look for a higher quality experience.

Radiohead's frontman Thom Yorke announced that the band will no longer release full-length studio albums and instead focus on downloadable singles. In response, Fast Company's Kit Eaton, declared that the concept of albums is still alive and simply evolving. Part of that evolution is Apple's Cocktail interactive album effort. He argues that albums maintain their purpose to communicate musical themes, "the same way that a curated collection of a painter's works does". Nevertheless, it may be that in some cases, the album will thrive for the exact opposite reasons.

Early in 2008, Google, in cooperation with Chinese online music service Top100.cn, started a free music download service in China. Today, Google took the beta label off this service and also announced deals with the four largest music labels (EMI, Sony, Warner, and Universal). According to a report from Reuters, the service currently offers about 350,000 songs, but thanks to these new deals with the record labels, this number will soon increase to about 1.1 million songs.

Fairtilizer isn't a record company - it's a new music company. What's the difference? A record company is about owning the rights to music and establishes an employer/employee relationship with the artists. A music company, on the other hand, is about having artists establish a relationship with a service. At Fairtilizer, they believe the services they provide will establish them as the "music company" of the future.

This week, Fairtilizer has launched the first part of their new distribution platform: an embeddable player which allows indie artists to share their music anywhere on the net from web sites to blogs to social networks.