Is $10, or the price of a few Starbucks lattes, really too much to pay for an album? Is $10 really too much to support musicians well enough they'll want to record more music? I still play LPs I bought when I was a teenager, and I can't think of anything else I still use from that part of my life. Those records are, if anything, more valuable to me now then they were then. I'm old enough to remember when record companies were freaking out about kids making cassette copies of albums, but producer and engineer … Read more

Sean Parker's Airtime not ready for prime time

NEW YORK--To launch his new start-up, Sean Parker should have spent less of his billions on celebrity guests and more of it on fixing his technology.

Parker and Shawn Fanning, his ol' partner from the Napster days, today unveiled Airtime, a Web video chat service designed to take up where Chatroulette left off. The launch event was a glitch-filled disaster -- or a marketing coup by Parker.

As he addressed a crowd of journalists and celebrities, Parker's attempt to demonstrate the service was foiled at every turn. Numerous attempts to connect with celebrities via the Web service failed. Not … Read more

Sean Parker's Airtime video chat service launches

NEW YORK -- After months of hype, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning's latest venture, a video chat service called Airtime, launched today.

Airtime has been described as an evolved version of Chatroulette, a video service that randomly matched up people for chatting. The new venture matches people with common interests and social connections in video chat sessions.

It is the latest undertaking from the co-founders of Napster, which helped revolutionize how music was obtained over the Internet. While Napster ultimately faded away, it fundamentally changed how the music industry operated and viewed online content. Parker and Fanning are hoping … Read more

Nicki Minaj dumps Twitter account to protest Web piracy

A decade after Metallica took on Napster, rapper Nicki Minaj has launched a silent protest against Web piracy.

"Like seriously, it's but so much a person can take," Minaj wrote Sunday on Twitter just prior to closing down her account, telling fans "Good f---ing bye," according to numerous reports.

The tantrum came after Minaj accused fan site NickiDaily.com of leaking several songs from her new album, "Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded," online. Minaj, whose first album, "Pink Friday," was considered a major commercial success last year, risks inviting the wrath of … Read more

Black Keys drummer: Musicians can't trust Sean Parker

Sean Parker is an enemy of music artists.

That's according to Patrick Carney, drummer of the rock band The Black Keys. Carney offered his opinion of Parker during an interview with radio station WGRD.

"He's an ass----," Carney told the station. "That guy has $2 billion that he made from figuring out ways to steal royalties from artists, and that's the bottom line. You can't really trust anybody like that."

Parker is an investor in Spotify and Facebook, but his connection to Spotify is presumably only one part of why Carney finds … Read more

Parker, Fanning: Napster was still better than what we have now

AUSTIN, Texas--Despite the success of Spotify and its competitors, music sharing still hasn't caught up to what Napster offered before being neutered by the courts, that service's founders, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, said today.

During a on-stage discussion at South by Southwest here, Parker and Fanning argued that though new technologies and licensing models finally allow music lovers to legally access and discover vast collections of songs online, even the best new services are still philosophically behind what Napster originally offered its users.

Parker, who appeared earlier this week alongside former U.S. vice president Al Gore … Read more

As expected, Turntable.fm licenses songs from major labels

Turntable.fm, the music-sharing service that took music fans by storm last summer, has signed licensing agreements with all four of the top recording companies.

Last week, CNET reported that the company was very near to becoming a licensed operation. Turntable.fm is a little bit Napster and a little bit online radio. Users can become DJs and share music within virtual "rooms."

Billy Chasen, the company's founder, made the announcement at the South by Southwest conference. According to a report in Billboard, Chasen gave some credit to the labels for making the deals.

"Our model … Read more

Al Gore with Sean Parker at SXSW: 'Occupy democracy!'

AUSTIN, Texas--Former U.S. vice president Al Gore and Facebook's founding president Sean Parker argued passionately today that online communities must use the powerful tools at their disposal to save American democracy.

At South by Southwest (SXSW) here, Gore and Parker took the stage to tell an adoring crowd of several thousand that though they should be proud of the mass Internet activism that derailed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), there is still a huge amount of work to be done if Americans want to keep special interests from perpetually forcing their agendas down society's throat.

Fortunately, … Read more