Interesting news/reviews/deals from the portable audio market
A number of Sony BMG artists have been added to the Australian iTMS: remember that when the Australian branch of the iTMS launched on October 25, it didn’t have any tracks from the Sony BMG catalog. Now “select artists include Oasis, Franz Ferdinand, Pearl Jam, Kelly Clarkson, Avril Lavigne, and more” —that’s a start.
Also read: [...]
File-Sharing winners and losers of 2005: good wrap-up; BitTorrent, Apple (those MP3s end up in iPods) and the open-source P2P apps make the winners list. The RIAA (so much money wasted on lawsuits), Sony BMG (cf. rootkit), KaZaA (had to close down), and Grokster (forced to shut down too) are sitting on the opposite [...]
Sony BMG, desperate to be done with the rootkit fiasco as quickly as possible, settled the consolidated class-action lawsuit filed by angry customer a couple of months ago. Customers who bought XCP-infected CDs will be given a $7.50 cash award and a free album download, for each disc. Good news for those who bought MediaMax-infected [...]
iTMS Australia is live: officially expected to launch tomorrow. Tunes cost $1.69 AUS, videos $3.39. Sony BMG hasn’t licensed their catalog—remember the problems we had reported early last month. UPDATE: ThinkSecret has got a few more details on the launch and the available content.
According to Forbes, Apple still hasn’t struck a deal with two major label for distributing their catalogues in the soon-to-launch australian branch of the iTunes Music Store. Warner Music Group and Sony BMG, the same two companies that are not in the iTMS Japan deal, want variable pricing on the tunes, but Apple’s successful strategy [...]