music

Apple: You can gab on that iPhone for eight hours

According to Apple, you can ditch your fears over the rumor that the iPhone has 45 minutes of talk time. The company announced Monday that the much-anticipated handset will ship with much better battery life than was expected when it was first announced in January. The iPhone will finally be released, as you probably already know, on Friday June 29.

The numbers from Apple? The company had initially anticipated that the iPhone battery would allow five hours of talk time (though rumors around the blogosphere suggested it was actually much less than that), but now Apple is boasting that it'… Read more

Logitech's Middleman

When I first saw the title of the Logitech Transporter, I immediately thought, wished, hoped it would be a device that let me travel through time. No.

The Logitech Transporter allows you to easily and seamlessly transmit audio from a PC, portable music player or the internet over a wireless network to speakers you connect to it. Even better, it works seamlessly with Pandora -- my favorite web audio source.

The Transporter is capable of transmitting just about any kind of audio, but it's tough to say just how well it works given the spotty performance of similar products.… Read more

Sony Ericsson releases plenty of accessories

Not content to rest easy after its announcement of a slew of new cell phones and a Bluetooth watch, Sony Ericsson has also announced several new accessories as well. They are all music-related in some way or another, starting off with the MDS-65 Music Desk Stand, which acts as a portable speaker of sorts for your Sony Walkman phone, and the MMR-70 FM transmitter for playing music on a nearby FM radio.

And what's a cell phone accessory announcement without a few headsets? The HBH-DS200 is the only stereo Bluetooth headset in the group, and it has a few … Read more

Digital music imitating open source?

Just read this in The Independent. I admit to never having listened (knowingly) to Ash, a Northern Ireland band, and the band's decision to move all new releases to the web probably won't change this. As in open source, the fact that someone releases their code as open source (or songs on the web) doesn't necessarily make them a good company/band. It just means they have the right licensing model, though perhaps no talent.

What I find interesting about Ash's decision is, however, just how closely the band's thinking mirrors much that we see in open source:

Frontman Tim Wheeler said that Ash... would be "dedicating ourselves wholly to the art of the single for the digital age." By abandoning traditional recording and publishing methods, Wheeler said fans would be able to download new music as soon as it was recorded.… Read more

FTC weighs in against BurnLounge

Beginning musicians tend to be big dreamers. And there are an awful lot of us--Guitar Center's got nearly 200 stores now taking in more than $450 million per quarter, and you know that most of those buyers are thinking, at least in the back of their mind, that they'll be the next Jimmy Page. Or Joe Strummer. Or Kurt Cobain.

As you might expect, this combination tends to draw a lot of, shall we say, questionable businesspeople to the music industry, particularly the lower reaches. Over the years, I've heard it all: unscrupulous managers, publicists and promoters … Read more

Sprint's playlist for Paris

As one might expect, I get a lot of press e-mails, and most of them fail to amuse me. That's not to say they're bad--many are quite useful and even interesting. Most of them are just not particularly funny. However, I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a chuckle out of one that I received this morning with the subject "Sprint's Pop 10 playlist." At first glance, it seemed innocuous enough, but then I got to the meat of the thing: the actual playlist. The title? Paris Hilton Goes to Jail...… Read more

EMI licenses DRM-free catalog to PassAlong Networks

The U.K.-based EMI Group continues its campaign to provide its digital music library free of DRM restrictions: it just announced that it has licensed the entire catalog to PassAlong Networks, which operates the StoreBlocks music retail technology used in online stores like F.Y.E. and BreakthruRadio.

The songs will be sold in MP3 format at a 320 kilobit rate--more than typical digital music bitrates of 128 to 192kb, and more than the 256kb premium songs offered by Apple's iTunes Store--but pricing has not yet been determined.

In April, EMI announced in conjunction with Apple that it … Read more

Pocketfuzz: Create your own ringtones, sort of

The field for Web applications geared at independent music acts is almost as saturated as, say, video-sharing sites and social networking portals. Consequently, the new ones emerging these days are typically very niche-specific--in other words, find a feature that MySpace doesn't offer, create a Web site for it, and make sure you offer embeddable widgets.

Like this one, PocketFuzz, which just launched its new Web site. Pocketfuzz aims to make it easier for independent artists to offer mobile downloads--specifically ringtones, but also wallpapers and text-message alerts--and profit from the sales. It's free for artists to join, so the … Read more

Report: Apple to sell iTunes songs through Bebo

The Financial Times reported Tuesday that Apple is poised to announce a deal in which it will sell iTunes store tracks through social-networking site Bebo. At first, it appears that this applies only to Bebo's 8.8 million users in the U.K. and Ireland, where the service is most popular, but the story hinted that it may expand to the rest of Bebo's 33 million-strong user base if successful.

According to the Financial Times article, any band or artist with a Bebo profile--there are approximately 500,000 of them--that's already part of the iTunes catalog will … Read more