Music

Your Pez dispenser plays MP3s?

An intrepid soul has designed a 512 MB MP3 player to go inside a Pez dispenser, and has finally gotten permission from Pez to produce and market it. The link (via Make Blog) is here, although the site seems to be only intermittently available.

Canada to tighten digital copyright law

Canada's administration announced today that it will introduce new legislation aimed at tailoring the country's copyright law toward the Net age. The country has been an outlier in the world, with courts ruling that file-swapping is legal, for example.

Specifically, the new proposals are aimed at implementing elements of the 1996 World Intellectual Property Organization treaties. Those are the agreements that led to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States, and which remain controversial among online libertarians.

The Canadian Recording Industry Association, which has lost a string of important copyright cases trying to track down file-swappers, … Read more

Online music's 2004 totals in

The Recording Industry Association of America's year-end music totals are in, along with the group's first full-year count of U.S. digital music sales. The results: about 139,400 digital singles sold, and about 4.5 million digital albums.

Being generous, that's about $184 million a year (at 99 cents per song, and $9.99 per album), or about 1.6 percent of the U.S. music industry's total revenues. Not a lot, but not shabby, either.

Seems that people are buying far more singles than full albums, too. That can't be good news for … Read more

Consumers blast music labels, Hollywood

A group of consumer organizations released a near-80 page survey today deeply critical of music labels and movie studios, as part of a political campaign they said would start in the courts and wind up in Congress.

The groups, including the Consumer Union and Consumer Federation of America, say record labels and movies studios are in a "piracy panic," and that the ongoing legal assault on file-swapping networks threatens free speech and consumer rights. By buying singles instead of $16 albums, the groups said music buyers might have seen as much as $1 billion in "consumer surplus&… Read more

What, Microsoft biased? Say it isn't so

Always eager to help the consumer though the perils of comparative shopping, Microsoft has compiled a helpful list of what to look for in a flash-based MP3 player. What's that you say? The list of things to avoid reads like the specs for Apple's new iPod Shuffle? Surely that's just a coincidence.

Microsoft helpfully advises consumers to make sure they're getting a display on their new MP3 player, in order to avoid confusion when an unfamiliar song comes up. It should have lots of extra features like voice recording, and should certainly have an FM radio … Read more

Rock on, Windows Media Player users

One of the great things about having Apple Computer's iTunes music jukebox at work is sharing music files with co-workers seamlessly over a LAN. Now this same feature is available for Microsoft fans, reports eHomeUpgrade, through a plug-in from On2.

Stop choking. Even if you don't know anyone who uses Windows Media Player now, you may in the near future if this subscription thing we've been hearing about takes off.

Magic music copy-stopper, take 2

CD copy-protection company SunnComm International is buying the assets of a U.K. music antipiracy company called Darknoise Technologies. Again.

This deal was first announced a year ago. Darknoise was working on technology aimed at blocking even the most old-fashioned version of music copying ?? putting a microphone up to a speaker and pushing record. The trick, as originally described, was to put inaudible sound inside digital audio files which could only be heard by the human ear if the song was re-recorded.

Apparently, it didn't work as advertised, or at least not yet. SunnComm said Monday that the first … Read more

Consumers groups to back P2P

A group of consumer heavyweights ?? the Consumers Union, the Consumers Federation of America, U.S. PIRG, and Free Press ?? say they'll release a major paper on peer to peer technology tomorrow. The idea is to fight back against "attacks on file-sharing networks" from the record labels and movie studios, and raise awareness of the consumer benefits of P2P, the groups say.

This will be unlikely to sway the Supreme Court, which will soon rule on the legal status of file-swapping software companies. But once the issue returns to Congress, having the traditional consumer groups backing P2P could … Read more

Subscription iTunes, anyone?

Apple Computer's iTunes music store shows no sign of slowing its growth, but it seems the subscription model touted by Napster, Virgin Digital, RealNetworks and others is getting some wind in its sails. The New York Times had complimentary things to say about Napster last week, and the Wall Street Journal's technology columnist Walter Mossberg was at least lukewarm on the idea, if not entirely on Napster's execution.

Steve Jobs has a history of denouncing his competitors' products, and then introducing his own versions a little later ?? often just before a technological idea tips from the margins … Read more