The Social

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

One of Apple's smaller announcements at Wednesday's music-focused event was that you'll be able to share your deepest iTunes hopes and dreams through Facebook and Twitter.

Well, more specifically, you'll have "Share on Facebook" and "Share on Twitter" options in a drop-down menu on album purchase pages in the iTunes Store to broadcast which music in which you're interested.

Basically, this means that you can show off your music taste or attempt to convince friends to buy albums for you. The links in Twitter tweets and Facebook posts will likely go straight to the option to purchase the album, potentially driving up sales.

An example of what you can get when you 'Share on Twitter.'

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

This is a pretty standard practice likely accomplished through implementation of the social sites' APIs rather than a formal partnership--the latter of which was probably required when Apple brought Facebook Connect to the iPhoto desktop software.

The more interesting part? It looks like this officially proves that an extremely dubious set of screenshots that hit the Web last month--showing buttons for Facebook, Twitter, and social-music site Last.fm integrated directly into the iTunes app--are indeed fake.

Disclosure: Last.fm is owned by CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News.

We knew the music of the Beatles was coming to the MTV video game Rock Band, but now we have a release date: September 9, 2009. That's when you'll be able to get The Beatles: Rock Band, a new edition of the game for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii consoles. You can start working on your bad "lonely hearts club band" puns now.

The game itself will retail for $59.99 in the U.S.; there will also be a $99.99 version that comes with Beatles-inspired guitar controllers, and a $249.99 "special edition" bundle. I'm guessing that one comes with a walrus.

The date is awfully cute, considering the Beatles' formally self-titled "White Album" contains that song called "Revolution 9," which consists largely of a repetition of the phrase "number nine, number nine, number nine." Conspiracy theorists say that if you play it backward it sounds like "turn me on, dead man" and is hence one of the clues that adds up to reveal that Paul McCartney died and was replaced by a lookalike early in the band's career.

But here's something else for conspiracy theorists of a different variety. September 9, 2009, happens to be a Wednesday in early September, and Apple has historically held iPod-related announcements on Tuesdays in early September. If you want to be mega-speculative, consider that there could be an announcement that week that in addition to Rock Band, the Beatles would finally be coming to iTunes. The band's catalog is currently not legally available for digital download.

There have been legal issues and general animosity for years between Apple Inc. and Apple Corps, the publisher of the Beatles' music. When record label EMI, which owns the rights to the Beatles catalog, inked a deal with Apple to make its catalog available on iTunes without DRM, buzz circulated that the Beatles could be added to the digital-media emporium soon. It's been almost two years, and no Fab Four yet. Late last year, ex-Beatle Paul McCartney said that talks had stalled. There's no real gauge on where things stand now.

But I guess you could just try playing a Steve Jobs keynote backward and see what hidden messages surface.

(Credit: HBO)

It's official: as reported yesterday, Apple has inked a deal with HBO to sell episodes of the premium-cable network's original programming in its iTunes Store. You can now use Apple's digital-retail hub to purchase episodes of The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Deadwood, The Wire, Rome, and Flight of the Conchords.

Right now, all six seasons of Sex and the City are available for purchase, as a promotion for the spin-off movie opening at the end of May. But iTunes currently offers only the first seasons of the other shows, as well as The Sopranos' final season. (Flight of the Conchords has only had one season so far.)

A number of popular HBO shows, like the entertainment industry comedy Entourage, are not available for sale.

This is the first time that Apple has agreed to variable pricing in the iTunes Store. Sex and the City, Flight of the Conchords, and The Wire are priced at the standard iTunes $1.99, but The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Rome sell for $2.99.

The Zune hearts content, but how many people heart the Zune?

(Credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft may be putting together an "entertainment marketplace" tentatively named Zune VideoX, ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reported Wednesday. In other words, it's yet another digital content store trying to take a bite out of Apple's iTunes.

Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Devices and Entertainment eHome division, is reportedly spearheading the project. But it goes without saying that as with any of these "iTunes killers" that seem to pop up like mushrooms after rain, well, it's going to be an uphill battle even for Redmond.

Creating a solid digital download store is something that Microsoft has tried repeatedly, and hasn't gotten right yet. Its Zune Marketplace hasn't exactly been a resounding success. There has also been chatter about something called "eLive," a marketplace of digital download content--music, video, games--for Zune digital media players, Windows-based PCs, Xbox gaming consoles, and Windows Mobile smartphones.

"eLive was renamed and recrafted to Zune VideoX," a source told Foley, "and the eLive vision scaled down to focus on Zune." Really? That's too bad. The Xbox has been a much more resounding success than the Zune, and it already has the successful Xbox Live Marketplace as a starting point.

That said, there's reportedly a third-generation Zune coming next year. And on another note, can somebody please outlaw the term "iTunes killer?"

AllFacebook blogger Nick O'Neill wrote on Friday that an "extremely reliable anonymous source" had told him that Facebook is working on an in-house rival to Apple's mighty iTunes Store. According to O'Neill, the company is in the process of looking for an executive to head this division--his source allegedly knew about the whole deal because of an acquaintance interviewing for the position--and is already meeting with record labels.

It's unclear whether this would be strictly a music store or whether it might extend to other forms of media, like TV shows and movies.

This is very much a rumor, but it would make sense from several different standpoints: first, the fact that Apple's iTunes Store is potentially at its weakest point in months due to controversy over digital rights management as well as disputes between Apple and the entertainment industry that have led to several big players like NBC Universal pulling out of the digital-media hub altogether.

Second, it's no secret that the future of Facebook's profitability is hazy, considering how much of the site's revenue relies on an advertising contract with Microsoft that expires in 2011. Plenty of analysts and critics have said that the Mark Zuckerberg-founded company is going to need to find an innovative way to make money.

But on the flip side, starting a digital download store would be a massive operation for a company that has heretofore been strictly a social-networking service--even one that's as hot as Facebook is now. Currently, the company's only e-commerce operation is the one-dollar "virtual gift" service that it's operated since February. Additionally, the digital download market is already getting saturated with new entrants eager to take on Apple's weaknesses. The new Amazon.com MP3 store, for example, has been described as a worthy competitor.

Not to mention the fact that, as O'Neill notes, the developers and companies responsible for Facebook's myriad third-party music applications won't be too happy if the site that provided their software platform created an in-house competitor. But something tells me that won't stop Zuckerberg & Co.