After last week’s blunder which lead to U2′s new album being leaked online, Spotify have now landed the rights to stream the album a week in advance of it’s release in the UK.
No doubt this is a reaction to the leak, and it would be interesting to see if it would deter any would-be pirates.
U2′s upcoming album, due to be released on March 3rd, has already been leaked all over the internet after a mistake by Universal’s Australians branch.
U2 is a staunchly anti-piracy and pro-DRM group that advocates greater controls to ban individuals that download pirated material, and have accused ISPs that continue to ignore copyright theft of being facilitators themselves.
You can now download it as DRM-free 320kbps MP3s, although why you would want to listen to their dribble is another matter.
Amazon has quietly launched their MP3 store in the UK, a great alternatives to iTunes for a legal way to download DRM-free music.
Looks like they have lots of albums for only £3 each too.
Apple has reduced their iTunes Plus DRM-free track prices from $1.29 to $0.99, and expanded iTunes Plus to include more indie labels.
The UK iTunes Store is still selling iTunes Plus tracks at 99p compared to 79p for regular tracks. And no word about when the big labels are joining though.
Freshers week, the seven day partying extravaganza that university students relish. Any freshers week worth going to will end with a huge party with a great live band. Three years ago the University of Nottingham freshers week ended with GLC performing their satirical hip-hop. It was a fitting end to a superb week.
This year, the band featured was The Twang. I asked a few people about them; most recognised the name but couldn’t name any songs. This is despite being voted second on The BBC’s Sound of 2007 poll.
I went with slight trepidation — I mean, they were the big band at the end of the freshers week, surely the organisers would select a great band that would make people sit up and take notice?
The night ended with me leaving early and wanting my money back.
The Twang have to be one the worst live act I’ve seen for a long time, including some unsigned acts I’ve seen at local clubs. They played their two big singles, Wide Awake and Either Way which people kinda recognised. Then they just started playing one generic indie rock song after another, each so similar in style and structure that I wouldn’t have been able to tell one from the other. No character, no style and no passion.
You could see the lack of harmony with their audience, especially when the main dance floor basically thinned out to the core group of inebriated punters who probably didn’t even know who they were seeing. There was a distinct lack of atmosphere to the room, and when they finally left the stage I felt relief that a DJ would be taking over and playing some tracks I might actually enjoy listening to.
I have to admit that I’m not indie rock’s greatest advocate, I feel the genre has become far too stylised and short-sighted. But there are still bands that are able to break the mould and create something truly original (The Killers’s Hot Fuss album springs to mind), but the Twang really need to up their game if they want to stand out from the mediocrity.
A former employee of Allofmp3 has confirmed that it has been shut down by the Russian authorities. However a new site Mp3Sparks.com has been setup by the Moscow company that is legal under Russian law, using many of the same arguments advanced in support of allofmp3.com
.
My account and it’s balance and history has been automatically transferred over to Mp3Sparks.com already, and it seems I can top up my balance on it too.
Includes support for “iTunes Plus”, the new DRM-free music in the iTunes Store. However, it doesn’t look like they’ve added the DRM-free tracks to the store just yet.
BBC:
CD-Wow says it will continue to sell cheap CDs and may appeal the ruling. “I fear what is happening is an attempt to use the combined brute force of the record industry to force the retailers and, in turn, our clients, to keep lining the pockets of the fat cat executives,” said Mr Wesslen. “It shouldn’t matter whether we are buying from an official distributor in the UK, Europe or the Far East, what is important is that we are buying legitimate products from the record companies themselves.”
EMI and Apple have officially announced that all of EMI’s music that it sells on the iTunes Store will be DRM-free at the slightly inflated price of $1.29, up from $0.99 (no UK pricing announced yet). However high-fidelity fans will appreciate the bump upto 256kbps for the AAC formatted music, up from 128kbps, and will galdly pay the price hike just for the increased quality.
The Wall Street Journal has confirmed that Monday’s big media event with Steve Jobs and EMI will be about selling significant amounts
of EMI’s catalogue that’s sold through Apple iTunes Store without DRM.
Steve Jobs’ open letter to the big four music companies
:
Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.
What would Steve Jobs say if Universal wanted ransom money?
- Jobs
- How about you take one of those white Zunes and you turn it brown, Doug.
- Doug (Universal)
- Pardon?
- Apple Attorney
- Mr. Jobs is suggesting that you take a white Microsoft Zune 30 gigabyte digital music player and insert it into your rectum.
Microsoft have set the price of the Zune to $249.99, rejecting the $99 idea mentioned previously.
And they’re even saying they don’t make money with selling the Zune, even though Apple makes a healthy profit on a compariable product.
We had to look at what was in the market and offer a competitive price,” said Scott Erickson, Microsoft’s senior director of product marketing for Zune. “We’re not going to be profitable this holiday but the Zune project is a multiyear strategy.”
It has been recently speculated that Microsoft may price the Zune at $99 to undercut Apple’s iPod and take a serious chunk out of Apple’s market dominance as quickly as possible. After that, they can then rely on revenue from their subscription based music store and regain the loss from subsidising the Zune.
While this may be their policy on the Xbox, I think it’s unlikely that Microsoft would subsidise their player to that extent without some kind of subscription tie in, either restricting the Zune’s capabilities or just disabling the player until it can be confirmed that the owner has bought a year or two long subscription and activated their Zune. The subscription wouldn’t be essential to fully enjoying using the Zune, unlike Xbox Live being a bit part of the fun in playing the Xbox.
The U2 iPod is back for an encore, lets see how many people pay extra for an ugly colour scheme just ‘coz Steve Jobs likes that band.
If you’ve ever wondered what I have in my collection of movies, music, books and games, then wonder no more, and head on over to my Media Library! Powered by Delicious Library and DeliciWeb.
The BBC seems to have managed to mistake a taxi driver for an internet music specilist.
According to Mr Kewney, the stage manager said: “To be honest, I did think it couldn’t be you. I mean, I’ve seen your picture on your website, and he didn’t look like you. So I asked him who he was, and he said, ‘Guy Kewney’ and I said, ‘Are you really Guy Kewney?’ and he said, ‘Yes’.� #
Update: I now have a copy of the interview, you can see it below. It also turns out that he wasn’t a taxi driver, but rather a person seeking employment at the BBC.
Dear Apple,
I am a proud iPod owner, my current model being the 4G iPod 20GB. It’s pretty good, it’s physical size is nice, the screen is clear and the battery life lasts for quite a while. If you want to tempt me to upgrade, please include the following features:
Best regards,
Weiran.
