January's newspaper sales figures will no doubt make interesting reading, after the wrapping has come off the nation's festive pile of iPads. It's hard for anybody to be definitive, but some analysts estimate that 1m will be found under the Christmas tree – which, in turn, will have an impact on the amount of newspapers bought on Boxing Day and in the weeks thereafter. And for an industry still reliant on print for its revenues (but online for its future) that will pose a fresh challenge at a time when advertising is slowing up.

November's ABC data suggests that, if anything, the decline of printed newspaper sales is accelerating, with annual declines in UK and Ireland sales ranging from 6.6% (the Telegraph) to 18% (the Independent) at the top end. Red tops headed south at similar rates – the Sun, for example, is down to 2.6m UK and Irish sales in November compared with 2.86m a year before. It is enough to make the music industry look good, with one major label boss calculates that the market is down about 5% so far this year, a figure that would be worse if sales of the freakishly successful Adele were excluded.

Drunks leaning together, though, can achieve all sorts of positive results, which is why Spotify's new apps system is, at first glance, interesting. Like Facebook before it, Spotify – a music subscription site – has opened up its service so that publishers and other content providers can supply their editorial in its system. Check out the Spotify beta app, and you'll see the music-words integration is neat.

Reviews from Rolling Stone, for example, come with the relevant track listing (yes, there's a Guardian app, but we don't do product placement around here). So what the reviews do is flesh out Spotify, which badly needs editorial to provide some context for the music. That should help develop subscription numbers beyond the existing 2.5m, and cheer those who find themselves wanting to read while tuning in on a computer because, well, these days doing one thing at a time is never enough.

Whether it will do much for the providers of the written word remains to be seen, though. Spotify – unlike Facebook – doesn't share ad or subscription income with app providers, who Spotify says provide their content for free in return for "access to our large and fast-growing user base". That said, there may be value to free marketing and a single click back to the mother website.

What is true is that it has to be worth seeding editorial in new environments, because you never know where digital readers might be hanging out. So, in the light of what we learned about the summer riots, that might be a case for news broadcasting on BlackBerry Messenger. If only it were possible for media groups to integrate their reviews with Amazon, say, to provide an alternative to the customer reviews that may well not turn out to be as independent as one might like. Or if there was a site that collected the last seven days' television programmes, regardless of broadcaster, on to which newspaper TV reviews could be linked. There might have been such a site too; except the competition authorities held back the BBC-ITV-C4 Kangaroo project on the launch pad.

Hmm. Well, anyway, while duffed-up music majors did agree to license all their content to one company, other media industries seem to struggle with pooling their content for profit. Some newspapers like paywalls; others, such as the Guardian, don't. Everybody operates in isolation when readers can simply click from article to article, from (if Facebook's greatest hits of 2011 are anything to go by) the BBC on the size of the world's population to the Sun on a poo-tattoo. Sharing and spreading content makes good sense – bringing it together, though, might make more.