I’m a long time XM Radio customer, starting over five years ago with a $9.95/month plan. Since the merger with Sirius, I’ve seen my plan increase to $12.95/month. A few days ago I received an “Important Information About Your XM” email from XM Radio saying that my monthly rate will increase by $1.98/month for a “U.S. Music Royalty Fee.” (I guess they didn’t make it $2.00 because they thought I would notice the increase.) So, now it will cost almost $15/month for a service that has increased 50% over the past five years. This is after the merger with Sirius that was going to make the service more affordable for everyone.
I have been a consumer of Amazon MP3's for at least two years. Probably longer. I choose to buy music through the Amazon MP3 downloader above almost anything else. One simple reason: no DRM. Amazon MP3's can be downloaded for great prices, and they can then be burned to a CD, moved to an MP3 player, transferred to another computer,
I just saw a cool open source product to freshen up an old mp3 player from Rockbox. It is a firmware product to improve the user experience if your outdated player needs a kick and it is free of course. It supports a lot of Apple’s players obviously but also does not leave out the less popular players which is
It seems like the RIAA is unstoppable in its crusade to sue music lovers into oblivion. They are using the courts to get their way with ridiculous judgments being handed out. A single illegal downloaded song can cost a person thousands. The RIAA really does not want to go to trial; they hope to scare people into paying up when
A lot of people are saying that Best Buys' purchase of Napster was a bad idea. I disagree. This actually might be a great thing for Best Buy and it might just put Napster back on the map. And it's really not the same as Blockbuster - Circuit City deal. First of all, forget what Napster did in the past
I don’t know how Pandora works. I just know it does. Pandora is an online music service I’m sure most of you have heard of if not used. I started using it last year and I absolutely love it. It learns what you like as you use it. You pick a single song or artist when starting up and it
A recent article in Businessweek discusses how Dell plans to make a second play into the MP3 space based on its recently acquired Zing software and the ex Apple iPod executive, Tim Bucher, that came with it. The strategy that they are taking looks to drive the MP3 player market right into Dell's sweet spot, but the question is going