Music industry continues to do stupid shit

Due to upcoming changes in the UK chart rules, the 29th of October will see the widespread selling of singles on USB keys. This move according to Brian Rose (Commercial Director at Universal UK) is aimed at “12 to 24 year olds, who no longer believe that the CD is as cool as it used [...]

Napster to drop stand alone app for web based store

Napster U.S. announced yesterday that it plans to drop it’s standalone application subscription model in favour of a new web based subscription model.
Christopher Allen, Chief Operating Officer at Napster, said, “With this new platform, Napster can easily be integrated into consumer electronics devices or integrated into other Web sites such as social networking sites.”
What this [...]

Has Sony BMG/MySpace deal just opened up the flood gates?

In addition to the deal announced with Honda this day last week, Sony BMG have just announced that they’ve set up an ad supported deal with MySpace. The interesting point here is that unlike the deal with Honda who were essentially paying Sony to have a bit of stardust rub off on their car, MySpace [...]

Universal looks to phone manufacturers to make money

The most powerful music exec in the world – Doug Morris – has been rallying troops from not just his own but all music majors to try and stem the flow of power away from iTunes. Sony BMG seems to be on board already and Warner are close to following suit on a move that [...]

Yahoo Music Chief tells is like it is

I read this on Digital Music News two days ago but didn’t report on it then, I’ve come across it again and it makes bloody good sense so here is Ian Rogers (Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo Music) talking about his frustrations with content owners (read: music majors): “In the end you get [...]

DRM is killing Vista

The always interesting Don Reisinger has written an article on CNet news decrying the state of Windows Vista and its in-built draconian DRM and licensing scheme which ends up ‘picking on the wrong people’. He goes on to say that Windows should just put Vista to bed altogether as it’s not only a pain in [...]

Amazon enters digital jungle

Amazon.com entered into the digital music retail space today with 2.3 million tracks to sell on its U.S. store. It has ove 2.3 million tracks available which is quite a bit short of the 4.5 million that iTunes currently stocks, reason being that Warner and Sony BMG haven’t as yet decided to take the plunge [...]

Spiral Frog gets Kiss of Death

Never one for over dramatic headlines of course but here is a review of the Spiral Frog ad-funded free download store and first impressions are – as suspected – not very good. I find it incredible that anyone would think that this model is viable when any focus group of 14-30 year olds will tell [...]

Spiralfrog launched into small pond

The free ad based music download service SpiralFrog has now launched relatively quietly when compared to the huge amount of fuss that was made when they announced their deal with Universal this time last year. Unfortunately the service is only available in the U.S. but our U.S. cousins will take a look and let us [...]