A piece of music sounds normally sounds better when all the parts are played together. And Slovakian start-up Piano Media argues that, when it comes to paywalls, news publications are also better off when their strategies work in harmony.

Piano Media, founded in May 2011 by Tomáš Bella, former editor-in-chief of SME Online, the digital division of Slovakia's largest newspaper, has persuaded most of Slovakia's major media outlets to sign up to a single-payment system. This means that the country's major news sites share a paywall, and split the revenue between themselves - 40% goes to the news site where the reader bought his or her Piano subscription, 30% goes to the site where a reader is spending his or her time online and 30% goes to Piano Media itself. Its system makes the users' experiences easier by offering a simple pay plan and by reducing the feeling that readers are paying one company for content that they could get for free elsewhere.

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The Pearson group released official sales figures for The Financial Times today, showing a 34% rise in digital circulation in the first six months of this year, as Journalism.com reports.

This boost in digital sales comes primarily from iPad app downloads, which have apparently drawn in 230,000 new users.

However, it is not merely the iPad that has caused the FT's digital sector to grow. Access to online content via the free website registration process has also grown, having reached a total of 3.7 million subscribers, an increase of 49%.

Although Pearson's main source of income is from its educational publications and Penguin publishing, The Financial Times saw its operating profit reach £132 million for the first half of the year.

The Press Gazette reports that, according to the Pearson group, these results are proof that the paper can survive in an increasingly challenging market: "At the FT Group, the changes we have made to the business model and mix mean we are well placed to grow even in tough markets for print circulation and advertising. We expect digital subscriptions, now the engine of the FT Group's growth, to continue to build steadily".

Magazines will fare better than newspapers in the struggle to monetize digital content, according to a report released by Pricewaterhouse Coopers. The annual outlook on entertainment and media predicts that newspapers' digital subscriptions will not compensate for decreasing circulation revenues.

On Forbes.com, Jeff Bercovici breaks down the numbers. The report forecasts that initially, digital subscriptions will grow quickly. For the next five years, both magazines and newspapers will see their largest revenue gains in selling digital subscriptions. By 2015, PwC expects magazines to take in $611 million from digital editions (they took in about $4 million last year). Newspapers have a much stronger starting point, already racking in $150 million from digital subscriptions last year. However, PwC predicts their growth to reach only about $331 million in 2015, which would not cover the expected print sales decline.

The relationship between Apple and the publishing industry hasn't been the smoothest one, but the tech giant has taken steps towards publishers lately. For one, it is giving a more prominent place for newspapers and magazines in the upcoming iOS operating system, which was announced on Monday at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. IOS5 will include a feature called Newsstand, which will improve newspaper apps' exposure and present the user's newspaper app subscriptions in one location.

Yesterday, the press caught on the fact that Apple had quietly made changes to its much criticised in-app subscription guidelines. The most significant change related to app pricing. Mac Rumors was one of the first sites to report that Apple has now removed any specifications regarding pricing from the terms, allowing publishers to now set their prices freely. Previously, Apple had required that app subscriptions sold in the App Store had to be the "same price or less" with subscriptions the publisher offered outside the app.