Interesting news/reviews/deals from the portable audio market
If you have a broken iPod sitting in your desk drawer buried under your old school
pictures and baseball game stubs, you may want to sell it to this company. The will accept iPods and iPhones, and from anywhere in the world. In any condition as well. New, broken, old and damaged.
What do they do [...]
Sony BMG, EMI, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, Arista Records and Capitol Records, sue AllofMp3.com for 1.65 Trillion (USD). They estimate that AllofMp3.com has 11 million copyright infringement violations. With a $150,000.00 price tag per violation, they are suing for more money than Bill Gates can shake a Zune at. Full story here.
Amie Street provides a new model for selling DRM-free music: among several novel ideas, the most innovative one has all songs starting from the very tempting price of 0c (as in: FREE) and going upwards according to their popularity (max. price that can be reached is $0.98).
From the TechCrunch writeup: “Songs uploaded by artists fluctuate [...]
The 2nd largest music e-tailer in the US (11% vs the iTMS’ 88%) is making its debut in the European continent. eMusic, which sells independent label music in the plain ol’ DRM-free MP3 format, is selling three types of monthly subscriptions:
eMusic Basic: 40 song downloads per month / €12.99 per month / £8.99 per month
eMusic [...]
→ 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 [...]
Whoever made this, “mad propz” as they say. FairUse4WM is a tool that strips WindowsMedia DRM 10 and 11 (not DRM 9)—it surfaced first on Engadget. This is the kind of protection that the tracks you listen through subscription services (Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music Unlimited, Napster, etc.) come with. The app looks easy to use and [...]
3tunes automatically records the songs Pandora plays for you and saves them in the format of artist – title.mp3. We’re obviously talking about transcoded tracks here, but it’s a nice way to grow your collection and maybe listen to that track a couple of times more before you decide you really like it and go [...]
BusinessWeek runs a piece on Tim Schaaff, Sony’s Senior VP of Software Development: the man who left Apple to undertake a huge task—make Sony’s software work. That means bringing the various departments closer, giving more power to software developers and keeping a low profile so as not to collide with the rather autonomous hardware engineers.
Review: [...]
Music swapping through the mail: La la Media plans to set up a platform where users pay $1.49 to swap compact discs with each other (a buck goes to La la Media and the rest covers shipping). Expect to hear from RIAA’s lawyers soon. Michael Arrington has a bit more. [via]
Rundfunker, the WLAN radio: scans [...]
(Don’t you just love our descriptive titles?) Songbird was released a few days ago. It’s an open-source iTunes-like-looking media player, based on Firefox. It doesn’t lock you when it comes to choosing a digital music store as it can handle both DRM and non-DRM stores fine. You can also use it browse sites that carry [...]