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 to be”. Right, slightly misguided there as to why the ‘kids’ are no longer buying singles, but this USB doesn’t sound so bad until you find out they want to charge £4.99 for the pleasure. Yes, that’s right – 5 FUCKING QUID, Just in case you forgot what that looks like, here’s a picture:

Now I possibly wouldn’t even mind forking out a fiver if I knew that I would be able to buy my Justice/UNKLE/DaftPunk/Fill-in-as-appropriate branded USB single, take it home, dump the contents contained therein onto my PC or laptop and use the now empty key to store documents and other data as I see fit. I very easily imagine it appealing to the kids who care about ‘cool’, it lets people know you like the band and it serves a function – like a band t-shirt. But you just know that these major label guys are so fucking stupid on DRM that they’re never going to let that happen. Idiots.

More on Paste

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 means for Janus enabled players, how this will actually function and whether or not this will be happening in the European market at the same time as the U.S. is not yet clear.

via Betanews

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 are actually splitting ad revenue from Sony BMG artists pages with the major record label.

This is a pretty extraordinary development considering the non-payment of royalties was a huge sticking point for the major record labels. Since the dawn of web 2.0 they’ve spent most of their time enraged at the glut internet companies who’ve built up a huge user base (and even bigger company valuations) off the back of  infringements on their copyright. They have nonetheless been a hell of a lot more successful at getting money out of Youtube, MySpace, Last.fm et al than the proportionally less well represented independent sector.

The majors now get royalty payments from the majority of the companies listed above for anytracks that get played, but they do not get a percentage of revenue from ads, what strikes me as surprising is that if MySpace are willing to concede this kind of ground to Sony BMG, every other major record label will be sure to follow suit.

More on Yahoo! News 

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 would see them approaching mobile phone manufacturers and Microsoft with the suggestion of asking them to pay a subscription fee per phone/mp3 player sold in order to have the end user be able to access music for free (for them anyway). The idea is that having such a service would stimulate sales for their hardware.

Unfortunately I know very little about the details of how such a deal would be worked out but I think Mr Morris is dreaming if he thinks he can pull this off at the quoted rate of $5 per month per handset. Not only that, but the idea that a phone manufacturer is going to subsidize a music subscription service indefinitely is so ridiculous it makes me want to piss my pants. No car manufacturer sells you a car and tells you they’ll refill it with petrol for you for free once a month every month in order to make you buy it. It’s commercial suicide. If this is such a good idea then why haven’t the networks agreed to subsidize the new MusicStation service by Omnifone (which this new service is a total rip off of by the way?

Business Week

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 what you pay for,” Rogers expressed during an executive presentation last week at Digital Music Forum in Los Angeles.  “I won’t spend another dime paying engineers to build false control, making listening to music harder for music lovers. I will put all of my energy into making it easier and making the experience better.”

He went on to explain that he doesn’t feel the subscription model will work and blames labels and content owners for the ridiculous access restrictions they put on their music: “Yahoo didn’t want to go through all these steps,” Rogers explained. “The licensing dictated it.”

Story on Digital Music News

Read Ian Rogers very entertaining and insightful blog here

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 the arse to run but is unstable to boot, particularly compared to the rock solid Apple OSX and the upcoming Leopard OS.

I have no idea whether or not this is true but someone told me in the middle of a booze up that Leopard is being written using around 3 million lines of code compared to Vista’s 50 million+. If anyone can shed any light on this it would be greatly appreciated.

Please read Don’s article here

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 into non-DRM and there is no equivalent of iTunes producer for labels who want to upload their music direct to Amazon.

What’s interesting about all this is that Universal are using Amazon as a yard stick to decide whether or not DRM-free hurts overall digital sales. Once this is proved not to be the case we will hopefully soon see the day when all the majors switch over to DRM free.

Meanwhile Virgin have just announced they are shutting down their download and subscription store. MusicNet did another woeful job in burying a great brand in the digital space and getting lots of cash in return.

Full story on MSN

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 you that ads kill the experience of listening to music. Turns out that just having Universal artists (which they had to pay a sizable advance in order to secure) simply isn’t enough to keep a demanding customer base’s attention for long. I really can’t see this one working out.

Full story at Last 100

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 know whether its good or pants …I suspect the latter.

Full story on Billboard