Rockstars are notoriously hard to control. Think of Axl Rose or Kanye West. Legendary artists play by their own rules: showing up late to gigs, mouthing off to fans, or fighting record label execs for getting in the way of music. Which makes it especially odd that Apple, for its new music social network Ping, would…

Like many people, I activated Ping when Apple revealed it earlier this month, and then like many people I stopped using it. Where's the, um, social? Why is it saying I like all these Britney Spears remixes? Et cetera.

Dear music industry: go fuck yourself.

EMI global catalog chief Ernesto Schmitt confirms to the Financial Times what we suspected at the Rolling Stones-inflected iPod event: The Beatles won't be making their grand iTunes Music Store debut tomorrow.

I'd like to kiss whoever at Apple decided to do this: today's free iTunes "discovery download" is the first movement of avant-garde composer John Cage's 4'33", which is to say, it's 1:46 of nothing.

Back is the initially touted then disabled feature of Genius recommendations for movies and TV shows in iTunes 8.1, iLounge is reporting. It only works for official videos purchased or rented in the iTunes store (or transferred from a Blu-ray disc's digital copy), and seems to vary country-by-country.

Ars rounds up iPhone apps released by a bunch of crappy bands so I don't have to—they're tacky trail mixes of promo clips with links to buy stuff, but point to a scary trend.

The iTunes Pass is a baby-step toward the fabled iTunes all-you-can eat subscription: plonk down $18.99 to download everything new (including a new album) by a single artist for a limited time. But, Depeche Mode?