It looks like Q-Trax might be dead before it starts. This is a disappointment as I truly believe it could have been a service that was good for the music industry, artists and consumers. In a comment to my article Peter J made some good points about the impact to GNC if its content was available for free (i.e. without GNC advertising) through another source. If this happened it would indeed reduce the return to Todd as the people that consumed the content elsewhere would not come to GNC to see it.
Sony could not help but hear the commentary on its decision to release DRM free music in the worst way possible, just about every media outlet and blog panned them severely. Less than a week later they have announced they will be also releasing DRM free tracks on Amazon.com. If I was Best Buy, Target and other retailers I would be a bit annoyed (to say the least). It is a better move by Sony though.
I hope everyone that was celebrating holidays had a great time. With 42C heat New Years in Melbourne was as much an endurance event as a celebration (110F for the unmetricated). The music industry did not enjoy a Merry Christmas with revenues down 20% over the last holiday season. The reasons for this will surprise no-one. A move to online
And realise that fighting your customers is not good for business. Warner Brothers now joins EMI and a limited Universal in recognising that the goal of a company should be to make their product easy for customers to use, and allow them to use it as much as they can. Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman claims the music industry was wrong to start a fight with consumers.
A story from a week or so ago in Forbes talks about how the new Radiohead album is being extensively pirated. Seems ironic for an album that you can legally get for free would need to be pirated, especially not at volume of an estimated 500,000 downloads.
Their is significant speculation that EMI is going to announce at 1pm in London that they are going to be allowing a significant portion of their catalog to be distributed DRM free.
In short a music lover who has spent $20,000 in purchased music over a lifetime recently purchased some music online that was wrapped in DRM. Two hours later he is so fed up he is ready to violate the law. Read this and tell me that DRM has not hurt the music industry. consumerist.com
In what can only be described as a stunning turn of events it appears that Russia has agreed to shutdown AllofMP3.com as of this writing the site was still up and online. I am sure that many will be disappointed if the site indeed gets shutdown. The question I have is where will it re-surface next? But I think everyone knew that the sites days were numbered. [TechCrunch]
Don't get to excited the folks at Google are rolling out music search, not an actual store but they have formed partnerships with several of the major online music stores and will have additional information available about bands the album etc. [ZDnet] Thanks to Jim for the Link
I have always wanted an inexpensive source to buy royalty free sound loops, if you have ever priced sound loops you will realize that the price tag usually starts around $100.00 per CD disk. Which is quite a bit rich for my blood. I was able to get my hands on a DVD by MAGIX that has 1120 royalty free
How many of you are locked into buying Music from Apple because you have a lot of money invested in music from them that is locked down and legally keeps you from moving it to another device. Personally I have a iPod and a IRIVER so what happens when I want to take the music I have purchased legally on
I am not surprised that classic labels are crying about the great public service the BBC has just completed in allowing people to download the Beethoven's symphonies. They should be thanking the BBC. Because how many people do you know that would pay to download them. I think the more exposure people get to classical music will in turn drive