Over the weekend a storm in a teacup raged over Techcrunch’s claim that Last.fm had given data to the RIAA to allow the music industry body to identify which users of the service had been listening to illegally obtained copies of the new U2 album ahead of release.
Remember I wrote about how Sony had badly [...]
It seems that whenever a great, internet-based music service comes along that captures the public’s imagination it’s not long before it disappears again thanks for music industry short-sightedness. Muxtape was music/tech darling of last year, allowing people to create mixtapes of online music to share with others. In August it was closed down while it [...]
Tonight I feel like I have a huge weight taken off my mind. Over the past few days I’ve been engaged in an exercise of Zen-like realignment. Yes, I’ve been tidying up my email inbox. That might not sound particularly significant but then you don’t know quite how disorganised my inbox was!
I’ve been a Gmail [...]
Nearly a year after they launched it in the USA, Amazon finally launched the UK version of their MP3 store at the start of December. When the store launched in the States it gained lots of press coverage thanks to the fact that a major retailer was selling DRM-free MP3s of mainstream music for the [...]
Back when version 8 of Apple’s iTunes software was about to launch a couple of months back there were rumours of it featuring a new social recommendation system. At the time, my imagination was filled with ideas of users swapping recommendations, the ability to listen to streaming music from other people’s collections and the sharing [...]
The online music retail market is slowly catching up with what its customers have wanted for years. While the iTunes Music Store leads sales with its relatively low-quality, DRM-encumbered files, many customers have for a long time been asking for an open subscription model. Under this scheme, you would pay a regular amount to gain [...]
Back in 2005 Myspace became the most important tool for bands to get themselves noticed online. The huge mainstream uptake of the service meant there was a ready audience of potential fans for eager unsigned acts to tap into.
The good times didn’t last though. It didn’t take long for fatigue to set in amongst Myspace’s [...]
I’ve been thinking about launching a 14sandwiches podcast for a few weeks now. It needed the right format though. After all, me talking non-stop would be rather boring. So, when the chance to interview UK hip-hop’s brightest star, Sway, came up it seemed like the perfect excuse to put those podcast plans into action.
Sway has [...]
Is this the first song to be commissioned via Twitter? A couple of weeks ago Manchester-based music blogger Justhipper posted a message on Twitter saying:
“Dear Twitter musicians. For my birthday, can somebody write me a bleepy electronic song about robotic pigs driving flying cars?”
Quite why she wanted that particular subject matter I have no idea. However, [...]
Kevin Rose may have been stirring things up among Apple rumour-mongers today but a more interesting rumour was doing the rounds earlier in the week. The suggestion, resurrected from a few months ago, was that Apple would soon launch a subscription plan for iTunes music downloads.
Such a move would certainly be welcome. The idea of [...]
