HiFi Blog: digital audio goodness

→ MySpace to launch a music store too: based on Snocap, all unsigned artists (currently estimated to be around the ~3M mark) will have the option to set up online storefronts on their profile pages and sell their music in DRM-free format, at a price of their liking (MySpace and Snocap will be taking a cut).

Snocap is Shawn Fanning’s (Napster) company—it seems it has turned from a tool to identify content on P2P networks to a distribution mechanism for selling music. NewsCorp, the parent company of MySpace may get a minority position in Snocap as part of the deal, according to the WSJ. [via]

→ SpiralFrog to offer free, ad-supported music downloads: for now they’ve only got Universal on their side, but they’re courting the other majors too. Q:* What does “ad-supported” mean? *A:

Users of SpiralFrog will have to sit through advertisements, and will be prevented by special software from making copies of the songs they download or from sharing them with other people. They will have to revisit the SpiralFrog web site monthly to keep access to the music they download. And the songs will be encoded in Microsoft’s WMA format, meaning they will not work on Apple iPod portable music players.

According to their ‘About’ page, the service will debut in December 2006. [via]

→ Samsung to launch its own music service: it’s based on MusicNet (think Yahoo!, Urge and MusicGremlin) and is coming this year in UK/Germany/France (with the rest of Europe and Asia to follow). [via]

Quick thoughts

Of all three, Samsung’s effort will most likely come and go with nobody noticing and SpiralFrog’s venture will draw the interest of some people who may use it for a while, before realizing that having to deal with advertisements in order to get some music is lame, and go back to torrents/Soulseek/etc.

MySpace will probably succeed, but don’t quote me on that since I still can’t get what the fuss is about regarding this MySpace thing.