Merry Christmas! Jingle Bells with Coldplay and Simon Pegg
Here’s a little video I found on Coldplay’s site. I love Simon Pegg, and Coldplay, so this short little diddy is (fun)^2. Enjoy, and Merry Christmas!
Free Viva La Vida Remix On Coldplay.com
As a Christmas gift, Coldplay’s offering the Thin White Duke remix of Viva La Vida on their website. You can grab it here for free through January 4th.
Social Networking Sites Abandon Ship On Music Apps
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Just a few days after MySpace disabled the Project Playlist app, Facebook decided to do the same.
For those that aren’t as familiar with Project Playlist, it’s a web application that lets you create, share and manage music you enjoy. After creating a playlist of your favorite songs, you can then embed your playlist onto any site; most notably MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, hi5 etc. Project Playlist boasts “the largest music search engine on the net” and the “most popular music widget in the world”, according to their site…
Well now Project Playlist has found itself in a decent amount of trouble with the RIAA.
Video Games Will Save Us?
The NPD Group just released an article reviewing music sales in the third quarter of 2008 with some surprising finds:
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1) Legal downloads are growing faster than illegal downloads. The amount of music shared via legal methods grew by 29%, where as growth in illegal music downloads via P2P networks rose by 23%. When you think of how many people are using P2P services to pirate music, that 23% is scary; but if this trend continues, we’ll see the gap between legal and illegal music sharing close. Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD, remarked:
“The industry has managed to constrain the number of people who are file sharing, but the expanded use of services such as Bit Torrent enable entrenched P2P users to download a growing number of files.”
That would actually be good news. For piracy to decline we need less people pirating, not less files to pirate…
RIAA to Abandon Mass Lawsuits
I just found this article in the Wall Street Journal.
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A quick look at album sales in the U.S. shows that they have been dropping consistently since 2004.It looks like the RIAA is abandoning mass lawsuits in favor of a new structure for combating illegal file sharing. I think that it’s a good call since the current practice of suing individuals was clearly not working on a large scale. The chances of getting sued were too slim for people to be scared out of sharing, and there was still never a way to say difinitively that the person being sued was the person who was file sharing anyway. Consider open wireless networks. The RIAA would have to seize computers to prove that the shared files were even taken by the person in question, and to my knowledge, that never happened. The anonymity of the internet must be combated before people think that their actions need to change. Offloading a lot of that hunting workload to the ISPs, which the RIAA plans to do in this new plan, will help bring more file sharers to the RIAA’s attention. What they do with that huge influx of new culprits has yet to be seen, as there will still be no way to prove that the holder of the ISP plan was the one file sharing. Do the ISPs then pin responsibility for network security on the customer? The RIAA plan is to issue several warnings to copyright violators provided to them by ISPs, as well as throttle their net speed as punishment…
What, or perhaps WHO, is Flickr Music?
Don’t think for a second that this is the same flickr, because it’s totally bogus. I’m calling this one out, so hold me to that in a few months when the real flickr shuts this site down.
Some people have been asking about what the deal is with FlickrMusic.com. What they offer is a way to download as much music as you want, with access to millions of songs, movies, games and tv shows for a very low subscription cost. The “Lifetime Unlimited Access” costs $29.40, 3 years of access is $27.00 (or $0.75/month), and 1 year of access is $18.00 (or $1.50/month).
As the adage goes, if it’s too good to be true…
First Sale Doctrine and Used MP3 Sales
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I found this article on ArsTechnica and it’s a good follow up to my post on bopaboo, the used mp3 store.
It unveils a few more details that I didn’t know about in my initial post, including the application of the first sale doctrine in a digital media world. The first sale doctrine was initially drafted in 1908 and essentially said that the purchaser of a good is entitled to sell it without permission of the original owner, publisher, or copyright holder as long as no additional copies are made.
Major Labels in Favor of P2P… Sort of…
Back in March of this year, Warner Music Group brought on digital music guru Jim Griffin to consult on how to combat illegal file sharing and recoup some revenue from an ever depleting amount of CD sales.
Easy way to compare MP3 store prices
DowloadShopper.com lets you compare the prices of the Amazon, iTunes, and WalMart music download stores. You can then click a link to purchase the song from the selected retailer. I tried it out and it works, but I’m still likely to roll with Amazon for the specials they put out daily. The interface could use [...]
Used MP3 Store?
Seriously? Bopaboo.com is a website where you can buy and sell USED mp3s. I can see the good intent behind it, and why somebody thought it would work, but it seems pretty ridiculous in practice. Buying and selling works with everything else we own because most things we own are physical items that you can [...]
Music Industry Should Embrace Illegal File Sharing
It doesn’t look like illegal file sharing is going anywhere, so what should the new music distribution model look like? Here are a few lessons learned from Radiohead’s “pay what you want” experiment with In Rainbows.
Amazon VS iTunes
You’ll notice my Wax Picks usually link up to AmazonMP3 instead of iTunes. Here are the top 5 reasons I like the Amazon MP3 store more than iTunes.
Colbert Humbles Kanye
There is only one way to stop Kanye West’s arrogance, and that’s with Stephen’s arrogance. For those of you that missed this, get caught up on your funny right here.
