If you've been thinking about turning your spare change into holiday cash, Coinstar is offering a generous deal right now.

If you don't mind substituting the cash for a gift card, you can make a 25 percent profit by pouring those extra pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters into a Coinstar machine.

That's a pretty nice way to stretch your holiday budget but, of course, there's fine print to the deal, which runs through Dec. 9.

Here's are the details:

In an update to its cloud music player Amazon has taken a direct shot at Apple's iTunes Match subscription. Both are priced at $25 per year, but Amazon's service offers 10 times more online storage than Apple's.

Apple rather quietly launched its new music cloud service iTunes Match on Monday.

Costing $25 per year, the cloud service is supposed to make every song in a subscriber's iTunes library available online.

Matched songs can then be streamed or downloaded. To sign up for the service, users must update to iTunes 10.5.1.

Some attempting to subscribe were thwarted by messages that said the service was unavailable due to demand and were asked to check back later. There are also a few reports of iTunes Match not recognizing some songs among a few other complaints.

Meanwhile, Google has been preparing for a launch of its own. An announcement is set for Wednesday where Bloomberg reports Google is launching its own music store.
 

If you've got music lovers on your holiday gift list, you'll want to check out this deal at Lowes Foods.

Right now, the grocery chain is offering a discounted deal on iTunes gift cards.

When you purchase a $25 iTunes card, you'll get a $5 coupon to spend at the grocery store. The coupon prints at the register.

That's the equivalent of a 20 percent discount.

The deal is good through Tuesday, Nov. 1.

A partial answer to what is wrong with America, read on for the App Store Official Charts for the week ending October 10, 2011.

Apple said today that its recently completed data center in Maiden will be one of three centers used to offer its new cloud service.

The service, called iCloud, will allow users to store the content on their Apple devices remotely and wirelessly access it from anywhere on multiple devices.

The Maiden facility, about 40 miles northwest of Charlotte in Catawba County, was specifically built to handle the data storage demands that are expected to be created by iCloud.

The service will be available this fall for free.

Any music purchased through Apple's iTunes service will be accessible through iCloud.

Apple also plans to offer an iTunes Match service for $24.99 a year that will allow user's to access other songs in their iTunes library from the cloud.

Scotty McCreery's first full week as a published recording artist has been a pretty good one.

The "American Idol" winner released his "I Love You This Big" single last week and it debuted at No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The single was also the third most popular digitally downloaded song, with 171,000 downloads in the first week.  
 

Apple said at its shareholders meeting today that it will use its new $1 billion data center in Maiden, N.C. to support the company's iTunes and MobileMe services, according to a report on the website AppleInsider.

Apple first announced plans in 2009 to build a data center in Maiden, about 40 miles northwest of Charlotte.

There has been wide speculation that the facility could be used to support a cloud-based version of iTunes.

Cloud computing is where a company stores data itself and allows customers to access it remotely from anywhere via the Internet.

Apple also said at its shareholder meeting that the Maiden facility will be the company's second data center after one located in Newark, Calif., according to AppleInsider's report.

To read AppleInsider's report go here.

Sony launched a music streaming service in a bid to boost sales of its consumer electronics and break Apple's dominance of the online music business.

You might think today is just another Tuesday, but it's a bit more momentous than that. Finally, after years and years of wrangling between various Apples, The Beatles catalog is on iTunes. As Ringo Starr summed up, "I am particularly glad to no longer be asked when the Beatles are coming to iTunes." Go forth and dig.

(Thanks, Aaron.)