About 70 percent of the apps available today through the App Store are either free or less than $5, according to an analysis of 552 applications performed by PinchMedia.

Of the 552 total, they counted 135 free apps. Apps for sale ranged in price from 99 cents to $69.99. The most common price points were:

• 99 cents (85 apps)
• $9.99 (82 apps)
• $4.99 (62 apps)

They have a nice bar graph at their site, and plan to keep the data fresh as new apps are added to the App Store.

[Via Craig Hockenberry]

Pretend you're a struggling musician. How much money would you rather take home for each track sold? £0.70 or £0.005? Not even a close contest, is it? Jacqui Cheng of Infinite Loop writes about a huge disparity between UK music services. iTunes just totally pwns the competition when it comes to artist and label payments. Cheng links to this Macworld story which suggests that iTunes is doing a far better job of getting money to artists than many other online music stores. If I were a struggling UK musician (as opposed to a person who can merely carry a tune in a bucket, or perhaps two buckets) I know where I'd spend my marketing dollars and which service I'd be promoting the hell out of.

If you visit the iTunes store on a regular basis, you'll know that the iTunes home page is jam packed with shiny happy banners. These ads highlight just a few dozen of the songs, albums, TV shows, and movies available to iTunes shoppers. And to have a product blessed by front-page placement is practically a guaranteed jump in sales. An album featured on the iTunes home page may sell five times more copies in a week than it will in a month without that promotion according to a recent Wall Street Journal Online article by Nick Wingfield and Ethan Smith. So who gets on the front page and how?

It's not what you'd expect. According to the article, Apple doesn't sell their promotional spots to recording companies outright. Instead, they trade visibility for exclusive song access, discount pricing and access to stars for things like interviews and celebrity playlists. There's a lot of back-room dealing going on with lots of shiny happy money at stake but there's also simple passionate music-love. If Apple's team loves you and loves your music, new unknown musicians can get a huge boost through the iTunes store.

Thanks Mike

Online video sales may take in about a third of a billion dollars this year. Sony wants in on the action. According to today's Financial Times, Sony is making plans to enter the video download market, specifically to provide content for its existing 20 million plus PSP installed base.

Amazon's movie download service, as well as video content providers like MovieLink and CinemaNow have pretty much been resounding failures. So what will Sony do differently? For one, they intend to distribute their movies in a memory-stick friendly form, storing up to 10 feature films on a 4GB stick. For another, they won't require any hardware upgrades to the existing equipment in order to purchase and play movies.

I'm pretty unclear about how they intend to manage their digital rights with this setup. And 10 movies on 4GB sounds over-compressed. A two-hour iTunes movie is about a gigabyte in length. 400MB sounds more like what you'd expect coming out of iSquint or Handbrake. It would, of course, be lovely if their content would play back on the iPod as well as the PSP, but I'm not holding my breath.