Last year, it seemed like every piece of digital media ever would be available on the iTunes store. Now, not so much.

This season, Apple can no longer call itself the poor man’s TiVo. NBC ended its partnership with the iTunes store, opting to create its own video sharing site and sell through Amazon.

(NBC pulled down its YouTube station yesterday, implying that Hulu might launch soon.)

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So much that it's willing to give its new album, "Rainbows," away for free in a pay-what-you-want model than sell off individual tracks on the iTunes store. [BrooklynVegan]

While NBC is desperate to escape the iTunes store's chokehold, Fox is completely dependent on it. The network can’t even give its shows away without help from Apple.

The season premier episodes of seven of Fox’s shows will be available for free on the iTunes store. NBC episodes will be free all season via NBC Direct, but the format is not convertible to iPods.

These are your choices: Bones on your iPod or Crossing Jordan on your computer. Maybe it’s time to read a book.

[LAT]

It seemed like just yesterday that NBC announced its partnership with Amazon's Unbox. Of course, it wasn't so long ago that NBC started talking about its own video site, Hulu, and left the iTunes store. But now NBC has a new rock solid business plan for distributing its shows online: making their episodes free.

Users can now download shows for free from NBC Direct, but the episodes will have ads and automatically disappear from users' hard drives in a week. For now, this service is only available to PC users and the episodes are not transferable to iPods. NBC isn’t exactly giving up on its paid distribution service with Unbox, but as the Times knows, the only original content people are willing to pay for online is porn.

What the hell Hulu actually is remains a mystery. But by next week, NBC should have a new service that forgets about Hulu, disregards iPod users and cheats the Apple Store.

…Which totally has everything to do with escalating tensions (between NBC and Apple) caused by "piracy concerns" and nothing whatsoever to do with NBC/News Corp.'s brand-new super secret video site, Hulu.

Does anyone remember The Fader? Unfortunately, we bet only about six of you raised your hands. Though it has been one of the most emulated and distinctive music magazines, focusing not only on artists and albums but the lifestyles and attitudes of the musically obsessed, Fader has sort of faded away from public consciousness.

Taking pride its urban funk roots, if Nylon lives in Nolita, The Fader lives in a Bushwick warehouse with a crazy spin table. Yet despite (or due to?) its hipster chic, consumers have been jumping on Fader's party train less and less. So, the mag decided to take the Internet. By offering its summer issue for free on iTunes, Fader hopes to pull in the extra readership, to pull advertisers, and keep the mag alive.

According to publisher Andy Cohn, it's the first time an entire magazine has been distributed over iTunes, which will feature the issue in its "New and Notable" podcasts section. Given The Fader's relatively small circulation of 87,500, it could prove a substantial extension of the title's reach. "We want to use it as an opportunity to expose The Fader to as many people as possible," Cohn said … Depending how popular the download proves, The Fader might sell future issues on iTunes, said Cohn. "We're going to just see the kind of response that we get and take it one day at a time moving forward."

Hey, whatever, we're cool with that. As long as they don't start giving away free issues to Facebook members.

iPages [Jeff Bercovici, WWD]

Back in the halcyon days of our youth, we had the glory days which were Napster. It was fun, easy, and it allowed us to acquire more useless music, soundbites, jingles, and remixes than we had any reason to need. We downloaded everything we could get our grubby little hands on — until the morbid day when “our friend” was kicked off Napster by Dr. Dre after downloading "I just wanna fuck".

Shortly after this incident, however, the lovable Napster itself went under. In 2003 Napster re-emerged as a legal subscription only music service, but nothing could stand up to the iTunes juggernaut. Today's news of the rumored Google/Napster union is the first real indication that a regime change may be afoot.

According to the New York Post, rather than starting its own music service (an idea that has been floating around for a while), Google is possibly looking to buy out Napster. (Perhaps Bear Sterns can chance its double-secret code name now.)

According to sources within the music industry, Google has been pushing to align with Napster — rather than build its own online music store — a sign that Google sees subscription services, rather than the individual download model that Apple's iTunes is built on, as the future of digital music.

Though there is little known beyond this, it has already boosted the downward-spiraling Napster service. And, unfortunately for Apple, this bite out of their biz is a bit of a change from Google’s earlier reports:

"We aren't building out a music store," [Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google] said. "We are getting people to the iTunes store" and others.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out, but we do know pissing off the The Steve Jobs is almost as risky as publishing pics of Jennifer Aniston nekked.

PLAY FOR NAPSTER [Tim Arango and Sam Gustin, New York Post]
Google whistles a new tune [Elinor Mills, CNet]