The figures released today and reported by the BBC show that overall CD album sales were down 13% on 2010′s figures to 86.2 million discs.  The figures also showed that the sales of digital albums climbed 24% to a total of 26.6 million in the same period.  The BPI said that the decline in album sales was the result of piracy, and they went on to blame the British government for not doing enough to tackle it.

Now you can’t compare one percentage with another as both will have begun from a different base, so let’s do some maths.  A sales drop of 13% would have made 2010′s CD album sales a total of 99.1 million and a rise of 24% in digital album sales would have made for total sales in 2010 of 21.4 million.  This would make total album sales in 2010 120.5 million.

The BPI are claiming however that total album sales in 2011 of 112.8 which is only slightly down on the previous year is all due to piracy.  Technically the BPI are correct but only in so far as overall sales are down.  Banging their drum about piracy being the cause when online digital sales rose by a quarter (which frankly is a huge sales leap in any industry) just goes to show how behind the times the music and movie industries really are.

People having to tighten their budgets, or finding new ways to buy and consume their music is a much more likely explanation for the sales drop.  The BBC said…

“People now buy the individual songs they like rather than buying the whole album because they like a single,” said Philip Buxton, an independent digital media consultant.  “So they might buy the single and then use services like Spotify and Lastfm to listen to the other tracks and are then much more selective about what they purchase.  “The implication for the record industry is that they need to embrace this new model rather than fight it.”

This reported 6% drop in overall sales will be seen by many as a smokescreen created by major multi-nationals who are feeling their pockets squeezed when they’re not fully embracing the new ways that people want to consume their music and video.  It’s similar to the banks claiming to be hard done by after being bailed out by taxpayers worldwide, just ask the Occupy Wall Street protesters how they feel about that!

The BPI’s Chief Executive, Geoff Taylor told the BBC “While other countries take positive steps to protect their creative sector, our government is taking too long to act on piracy, while weakening copyright to the benefit of the US tech giants.”

Ultimately though SOPA has brought the whole issue of piracy and copyright theft back into the public consciousness and it’s unlikely that the general public worldwide will be sympathetic.  I may be wrong and you might disagree with me, but it’s widely considered that the music and video industries are failing to keep up with the demands of consumers.

What are your views on this?  Do you think that the music and movie companies are delivering content in the way that suits you best?

Because of this switch, I thought I should give a bit of an update on where Banshee is now as a multi-media player. What are the nifty features that will easily win over the hearts of the Rhythmbox faithful? Let’s take a look.

Banshee features

Outside of the standard media-player features, you will find the following in Banshee:

• Cover art.
• BPM detection.
• Play youtube videos within Banshee.
• Subscribe to podcasts.
• Fix broken metadata.
• Context pane.

And much more. There are so many great features to this media player, you might be wondering what stopped you from using it before?

BPM

There are plenty of user-types that require Beats Per Minute (BPM) detection. DeeJays and fitness instructors are two groups that come to mind. When you play a song in Banshee the BPM is not auto-detected. You actually have to tell Banshee to detect the BPM. How is that done? Follow these steps:

1. 

   Figure 1

   Right click on a track and select  Edit Track Information.

2. Click on the Extra tab (see Figure 1).
3. Click the Detect button.
4. Click the Play button (next to the Detection button).
5. Very shortly after the song starts playing the BPM will show up and you can click Save.

If the BPM is not detected, you can also manually detect the BPM by clicking the Play button and then clicking the Tap button to the beat of the music and the BPM will be set.

Adding podcasts

Although this feature isn’t very intuitive at first, once you know how, the task is incredibly simple. Banshee has built in Miro which is a great place to find podcasts. So to add a podcast follow these steps:

1. Click on the Miro link in the left nav.
2. Navigate through Miro until you find a podcast you want to subscribe to.
3. When you find a podcast you like, click the ADD FEED TO YOUR SIDEBAR button.
4. From the left nav click on the Podcast button.
5. Navigate to the podcast you want to listen to and double click on it.

If you have a specific URL for a podcast you want to add you can do the following:

1. Click on the Podcast button in the left nav.
2. Click Add Podcast button in the upper right corner of the window.
3. Copy the URL in the resulting window and select how you want the podcast to be downloaded.

Context pane

This pane is incredibly useful in discovering new music (or information about the band/track you are currently playing). To view this pane click View > Context Pane. The Context Pane will allow you to see (based on the track/disk you are playing):

1. Last.fm recommendations.
2. Wikipedia information about the artist.
3. Related youtube videos.

Final thoughts

Like I said, at first I was skeptical about the switch to Banshee. But after using it for a few weeks I have discovered that Banshee is, in fact, a much richer experience than is Rhythmbox. Give Banshee a go and I think you will agree.

In a statement, MediaCAT’s barrister, Tim Ludbrook read a statement from solicitor Andrew Crossley that said “I have ceased my work…I have been subject to criminal attack. My e-mails have been hacked. I have had death threats and bomb threats.” according to a report by the BBC.  ”It has caused immense hassle to me and my family,” he added.

ACS: Law was the firm at the centre of a hacking scandal back on September 2010 when thousands of its emails were exposed showing the people who were being accused of downloading pornographic movies for free.  Consumer groups have said that ACS: Law were sending thousands of letters to innocent people and some ISPs refused to hand over details of their customers.

Judge Birss, the same judge who ruled on the case in December said “I want to tell you that I am not happy. I am getting the impression with every twist and turn since I started looking at these cases that there is a desire to avoid any judicial scrutiny.”  This follows accusations that ACS: Law have been seeking to extract money from people without ever having any intention of taking them to court.  These accusations intensified when it was discovered that ACS: Law was pocketing 65% of the money collected.

Mr Ludbrook said “It has always been my intention to litigate and, but for the fact that I have ceased this work, my intention was to litigate forcefully in these 27 cases.”  It has emerged however that another law firm, GCB Ltd has now begun sending similar letters, including to one person who had received a letter from ACS: Law saying they would be taking no further action against them.

According to the BBC…

Judge Birss said he was considering banning MediaCAT from sending any more such letters until the issues raised by the cases had been resolved.  The judge was keen to find out what the relationship was between GCB and ACS: Law, something Mr Crossley sought to clarify in his statement.  He said that he had no connection with GCB Ltd beyond the fact that the founders of the firm had previously been employed at ACS: Law.

Barrister Guy Tritton [acting on behalf of the accused] questioned the nature of the letters sent by ACS: Law, asking why it described MediaCAT as a “copyright protection society,” – a title that he said was “misleading”.

This has raised serious questions about whether an IP address could be used to positively identify a person who has downloaded illegal content.  Many have said that lawyers are attempting to exploit the legal system and the lack of technical knowledge of judges.  Judge Birss is expected to deliver his judgement on the case later this week and we’ll bring you the story as it happens.

The top three websites were RapidShare.com, Megavideo.com and Megaupload.com which between them generated more than 21 billion visits.

The study was commissioned by the US Chamber of Commerce to identify trends and rogue websites.  Mark Mulligan of research firm Forrester was cautious though, saying that the number of visits did not  necessarily equate to the number of downloads.

RapidShare has come under fire from the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) which blames the site of carrying huge volumes of pirates content.  The website is based in Switzerland though which has made it difficult for US companies to deal with.

The number of hits are very high indeed, but these figures must not be used in an alarmist way, which is what organisations such as the RIAA are bound to do.  If you look at the hits for most websites, the majority of those are for the front page only and people do not search any deeper.  This, I would imagine, will also be the case for  file sharing websites.  There will also be indexing taking place that could count as visits.

Thus the actual problem of file-sharing won’t be anywhere near as bad as these figures suggest.  We can expect the music and movie industries to attempt to pass the full 53 billion figure off as a “good estimate” of how many files are shared every year.  We can thus expect more fallout from this research in the coming months.

Pithos is a native Pandora client for the GNOME desktop. It is easy to install, has a user-friendly GUI, and won’t drag your machine into the murky waters. Let’s take a look at how to install and use this client so you can start your new year out rockin’.

Before you begin, you will need to have a Pandora account. Once you have a Pandora account you will be able to manage your stations from within Pithos (so need to bother adding/removing stations from within the Pandora site.)  In fact, it’s actually easier to manager your stations from within Pithos than it is from within the site.

Installation

Pithos is not found in the standard repositories, so you have to add the Pithos repository. Adding the repository is simple. Open up a terminal window and issue the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kevin-mehall/pithos-daily
sudo apt-get update

Once you have the repository in place, you can then install the application. This is done with the following command:

sudo apt-get install pithos

Once the application is installed you will find it located in Applications > Sound and Video.

Usage

Figure 1

When you first start up Pithos you will be required to authenticate to your Pandora account. Once you do this Pithos will download your current list (or the default list) of stations associated with your account and open up the main window (see Figure 1). You can change the channel you want to listen to simply by clicking the channel drop-down and selecting the desired channel.

Figure 2

To create new channels to enjoy click on the Preferences button (the gear with the drop-down arrow) and select Manage Stations. In this new window (see Figure 2) click the Add Station button and then enter the name of an artist. You will then be presented by a number of choices to select from. Choose the correct artist and click OK. That artist will be added to your station list.

You can also include each station in your QuickMix list. The QuickMix list is like a shuffle for Pandora. Select which stations you want to include in your QuickMix and then, from the Station drop-down (in the main window), select QuickMix to get a mix of music from all of your stations.

Other features

One of the nicer features of Pithos is the inclusion of a notification icon. From this icon you can left-click and quickly “Love”, skip, play, pause, “Ban”, or “Tired” a currently playing song and you can quickly quit Pithos.

Pithos also includes:

• Cover Art.
• Notification popup with song info.
• Launching pandora.com song info/station page.
• Reconnecting when pandora session times out
• Media Key support
• Proxy support
• Last.fm scrobbling

Final thoughts

At last Linux has a worthy client for the enormously popular Pandora Music service. Make this your go-to application for Music listening in Linux and you won’t be sorry.

Now the firm has been dealt a further blow with a judge rejecting their attempts to have the cases settled without trial, according to PC Pro.

ACS Law said that the defendants had operated, “at the time of the identified infringement an Internet connection router that was not secured either adequately or at all, so as to enable another to carry out an act of copyright infringement of the claimant’s Work via the Internet connection of the defendant.”

This was in breach of the 1988 Copyright Designs and Patents Act according to the firm, but Judge Birss had a different opinion and instead ruled that ”The plea that ‘allowing’ others to infringe is itself an act restricted by s16 (1)(a) and 17 of the 1988 Act is simply wrong.”

While this itself does not set a precedent as the case was only heard in a county court it is very important and could have repercussions around the world if upheld in higher courts.  The assumption that people can and are aware of the security requirements for wi-fi wireless networks, and that they must be aiding and abetting illegal file-sharers simply by not having a password on their router is a weak one and it’s good that it’s been tested in this way.

ACS Law have been abusing the popularity of home wireless routers to press for the assumption that everyone who ownes one therefore understands it and knows exactly how to use it. 

The judge summed up by stating that “The term used by those sections of the Act is ‘authorising’ and the difference may be very important if the allegation is about unauthorised use of an Internet router by third parties.”

We’ll let you know how this story unfolds in 2011 at gHacks.

The act was one fo the last  actions of the UK’s Labour government before the general election last may that saw them thrown out by British voters in favour of a Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition.  It was controversial legislation that many felt was rushed through parliament without proper scrutiny.

The act allows for the disconnection of persisten illegal file sharers from the Internet, and rights for copyright holders to block websites sharing illegal content.

Critics including TalkTalk said that the new law would potentially criminalise the innocent who, due to the complexity of computers and network security, may not be aware of someone else in their property sharing files and who may accidentally leave their wireless network open to abuse by others.

Under thelegislation, persisten file sharers would be placed on a blacklist, a copy of which could be shared with copyright owners.

The current government has the right to repeal any previous legislation and, during the election campaign, deputy prime minister Nick Clegg said that the Digital Economy Act “badly needs to be repealed”.

Despite this the coalition told the BBC it has no plans to repeal it.

“The Digital Economy Act sets out to protect our creative economy from the continued threat of online copyright infringement, which industry estimates costs the creative industries, including creators, £400m per year,” read a statement from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.

“We believe measures are consistent with EU legislation and that there are enough safeguards in place to protect the rights of consumers and ISPs and will continue to work on implementing them.”

Similar to Apples iTunes music store, the Ubuntu Music store will allow the user to purchase music right from their desktop – and do it from within a single application. That application? As of this writing it is Rhythmbox. This was no small feat as an entire web browser engine has to be engineered into Rhythmbox. But from the latest releases, it is happening.

First look

Figure 1

I am currently using an updated version of the Ubuntu 10.4 Alpha release (now you can download the Beta-1 of 10.4 which I would recommend over the Alpha 3). If I fire up Rythmbox I immediately notice something new (see Figure 1).  Take a look in the left pane. You will see the Ubuntu logo. If you click on that logo you immediately see the text “The Ubuntu One Music Store is coming soon!”.

What does this mean?

First and foremost it means that Apple will no longer have one of the only integrated music stores. This is good for those of us who simply do not want to use iTunes or any of the Apple hardware (thanks to DRM). Now people will have a choice. Even better this most likely will mean that users will be able to add music from the Ubuntu One Music Store onto just about any device. You purchase a song from Ubuntu One and place that single song on every portable device you have. How nice is that?

But there are other implications that go deeper than this. If Ubuntu doesn’t offer up that same webkit tool for other music players they are going to make some enemies. As of right now it is impossible to pin down one single multimedia player that rules Linux. Is it Banshee, Rhythmbox, Amarok? Who really knows. It would be smart of Ubuntu to integrate this same kit into the big three players so that all distributions and desktops can enjoy the same experience. After all, KDE fans don’t necessarily want to install the GNOME libraries in order to run Rhythmbox. So it would be wise of Ubuntu to include all three.

This also means there is one less obstacle for the user to adopt Linux. I still know users who refuse to adopt Linux because of iTunes. This will no longer be an issue. Of course I don’t think we will be seeing Ubuntu One Music Store gift cards in Target any time soon. This also brings up the issue of pricing. Apple recently changed their price levels for music (being strong-armed by the RIAA no doubt). How will the Ubuntu One Store compete? Will they follow the Amazon tactic or will they be in step with Apple? Following in the footsteps of Amazon will go a long way to catch and retain users.

Final thoughts

The upcoming release of Ubuntu 10.4 should be a serious milestone for Linux. The inclusion of the Ubuntu One Music Store is big and will, I hope, help to bring new users over to Linux. But they will have to know about this major step forward. So help spread the word!

Easy Tag is an open source application available for Linux and Windows that allows you edit tags for the following file types:

• MP3
• MP2
• MP4/AAC
• FLAC
• Ogg Vorbis
• MusePack
• Monkey’s Audio
• WavPack

And what’s best about Easy Tag is that you most likely won’t have to manually edit all of those files.

Simple installation

You will find Easy Tag in your distribution repository, so you can fire up Synaptic, search for “easytag” (no quotes), select the package for installation, and click Apply to install.  Or, if you prefer command line, you could install with a command like yum install easytag. Once installed, you will find Easy Tag in your Audio (or Sound and Video) menu.

How Easy Tag works for you

Figure 1

There are two painless ways Easy Tag can be used: Automatic tag recognition and CDDB search. Althought it might be tempting to use the automatic tag recognition, the best, and most reliable method is using the CDDB choice. So when you fire up Easy Tag (and after it searches through your music library) you will see that it lists all of your music in the middle pane (see Figure 1).  What you see, in Figure 1, is a section of files with incorrect tags. You know a file has an incorrect tag if it is listed in red. Now let’s fix those tracks.

The best way to do this is to select an entire

Figure 2

album of tracks. Although it looks like all of the tracks for the Rush album Signals are correct, there is something amiss. So I will highlight all of those tracks and right click the selections. From the right click menu select CDDB search. When the new window opens (see Figure 2) select the correct listing and then click Apply. It will seem as if nothing has happened, but something has. Click the Close button. Now you have to save the changes. Go the the File menu and select Save. A small window will appear for each change you are about to make (See figure 2). Click Yes for each change (unless you check the “Repeat action…” checkbox).

When the save is complete you can go back to the track listings and see that those files are no longer listed in red. Their tags are now correct.

Figure 3

If your CDDB search comes up with no results, then you might have to reconfigure the server Easy Tag uses. To do this to go Settings > Preferences and then click the CD Database tag (see Figure 3).  You can change the server settings for automatic and manual searches. When I changed mine to freedb.freedb.org, all of my troubles went away.

Final thoughts

Use Easy Tag to clean up your music collection tags. Not only does this make a tedious task simpler, it keeps your music collection clean so that music players can easily read and display the tags for your music files.

Amazon.com not only has an outstanding collection of digital downloads in their music section (as covered by Martin in his insightful article “Amazon DRM Free MP3 Store“), they offer a completely cross-platform tool to make this process simple. The Amazon MP3 Downloader is a very simple (as well as required) tool that enables you to purchase music from Amazon.com and use it at your leisure. And since the files are DRM-free, you aren’t limited to putting them on one device and only one device. Instead you can download your music, burn it on to CD, copy it to your device, copy it to your friends device…what have you.

But in order to take advantage of this service, you MUST have the MP3 downloader installed. That’s where this tutorial comes into play. Here you will see how to install and use the Amazon MP3 Downloader on your Linux box.

Getting and installing

Point your browser to the download page and download the proper file for your distribution. As of this writing you have the choice of files for the following distributions:

• Ubuntu 8.10/9.04
• Debian 5
• Fedora 10
• OpenSuSE 11

Yes, Amazon is a bit behind the times, but you can get around this (at least on Ubuntu 9.10). Below you will find the steps to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader on Ubuntu 9.10.

Download the .deb file for Ubuntu.

Open up a terminal window and issue the command (from within the directory the file was saved) sudo dpkg -i amazonmp3.deb.

You will see a bunch of errors that will end with the warning: Errors were encountered while processing: amazonmp3.

• Issue the command sudo synaptic.
• You will get a warning that you have 1 broken package.
• Go to the Edit menu and select Fix Broken Packages.
• Click Apply in the new window.
• Close Synaptic when the packages have been fixed.

Using Amazon MP3 Downloader

There are two ways you can use the downloader. The first is to start up the application by clicking on Internet submenu of the Applications menu. From within this menu click on the Amazon MP3 Downloader entry.

When you first launch it your default web browser will start up with a “congratulations” page informing you that the Downloader will launch the next time you download a song from Amazon.com. You also will get the chance to download a free song. When you click on the button (on Amazon.com) to download a free song you will taken to the Amazon.com login page. Log in and then you will have the chance to download your free song.  Go ahead and download your free song.

What you will download is an .amz file that links to your download. Your browser, by default, will ask you what to do with the file. Go ahead and let the Amazon MP3 Downloader open that file and the download will being.

But where did that file go? The Downloader will, by default, download all files to ~/Music/Amazon MP3/. If you open up that directory (after you download your file) you will see the sub-directory containing your new download.

Figure 1

Another way to use the Downloader is to open up the tool and click the

Configuring the Downloader

There aren’t many options in the Downloader’s preference window.  From within that window you can click the button “Shop Amazon MP3 Store”. This will automatically open your default browser to the store.

In order to configure the tool click on the File menu and then select Preferences. From within this window you can configure the following:

• Download directory.
• Automatically check for updates.
• Proxy settings.

And that’s it. But what more would you need to configure for such a simple tool? The only option I always change, by default, is the Download Directory. I tend to change this to the directory used by my multimedia player so I don’t always have to add the new media to the player when I download something. Of course, in order to have this work you have to have your media player set up to automatically scan for new files.

Final thoughts

If you are a Linux user, and a purchaser of digital music, you should do yourself a favor and give the Amazon MP3 Downloader a try. If for another other reason, all Linux users should give it a go in order to show support for Amazon’s support for Linux.

The reason for Google is that they are only number two in the search engine market in China. Baidu is first there and offering music downloads as well albeit without a similar deal. The reason why the Music Industry agreed to the deal is simple: Money. The majority of Chinese do not pay for music but download it from the Internet. And so it was decided that sharing some advertising revenue with Google is better than fighting illegal music downloads.

Google is restricting file downloads to Chinese users according to Mashable who were the first to publish the story. The search interface on the other hand is available for everyone.

Definitely an interesting progression especially for Chinese users who can now download music legally while everyone else in the world cannot.

One grouse that people might have is if they purchased a song or album online only to discover that another store was offering the same track for a lesser price. That’s where the Mp3StoreGuide can be a real boon. The brainchild of the Mp3Tunes creators, the site is basically a way to check online store prices and find out which store if offering the best rate.

Stores are grouped into three categories; those that carry major labels, minor labels, and stores offering subscription services. Each store has information like average price, song bitrate, country of service, whether the store offers free tracks, etc. Mp3StoreGuide offers users the option of searching each site individually or doing a comparison search.

To test the website, I did a search using both popular and indie artists. A search of U2’s ‘New Years Day’ yielded 67 results while a search for ‘Heaven’ by Hail Social threw up 25 results of which some results were of other songs. Not bad, if I might say so.

For buyers of music online, Mp3StoreGuide is a gem. It’s fast, easy to use, and gives results. The bonus is that the site displays only DRM-free song results. Moreover, the source code is freely available to users who might want to modify it to suit their tastes.

What do you think of the Mp3StoreGuide? Do you like it? How do you think the site can be improved? Let me know in the comments.

Torrentvalley is different from other BitTorrent services in that it’s not a file tracker like Pirate Bay. Instead, it’s a torrent indexer. That means Torrentvalley does not host any torrents itself. Rather, it acts like a search engine and attempts to locate the torrent across different trackers.

Another interesting fact is that Torrentvalley’s servers are located in Bulgaria, a country not particularly noted for targeting file-sharers. Unfortunately, that hasn’t lasted very long. Acting on the advice of the Bulgarian Association of Music Producers (BAMP), the Cyber Crime Unit raided Torrentvalley’s premises and shut down its servers.

The charge laid against Torrentvalley was copyright infringement. To quote Ina Kileva, the executive director of BAMP: “Torrentvalley was a major international source of copyright infringing material. This site was a gate towards more than 5 000 torrent-trackers from all over the world. The decisive action by the authorities shows that Bulgaria is no haven for copyright abuse in Internet and makes efforts to protect the rights of those involved in the creative industries.”

Torrentvalley certainly wasn’t the largest BitTorrent network out there. They had about 150,000 registered users but a fair number of people probably used the indexing service without registering. This does reinforce the fact that the authorities are always on the lookout for those that share copyrighted content.

Have you ever used Torrentvalley.com? What do you think about the site being shut down? Who do you think the next target will be? Let me know in the comments.

Now imagine this scenario: what if you paid a yearly or monthly fee to an online store and in return you could download an unlimited number of songs. Not only that but these songs would be DRM-free so you only need to download a song once and you can play it anywhere you want and burn it to a CD multiple times.

A service like this is in the works from a site called Datz Music Lounge. Datz claims to offer unlimited music downloads in mp3 format for just 100 Pounds a year. That works out to around $160, based on the current exchange rate. As far as offers go, this sounds pretty good.

It’s not all hunky dory though. For starters, you need to be a United Kingdom resident to use the service. Other caveats are that you’ll have to have a special USB drive with the Datz software on it plus the software will work only on Windows for now. In addition, the site is currently only offering music from the Warner Music Group and EMI catalogues.

While on the surface of things it appears as if this is a win-win situation, I wonder how many people would be willing to pony up such a big amount as an advance payment. Also, with the plethora of free music sources available, does someone really need to buy music?

What do you think of the Datz Music Lounge concept? Are you in favor or against these kinds of services? How much money do you normally spend on purchasing music? Let me know in the comments.
Via Mediamemo

Amazon also shows associated artists which are useful because once you start following links you can be on there all day discovering new artists.

Wikipedia is great for finding out the background and biography of bands and Last.Fm is sometimes useful as well. I know it should be the most useful of all, but for me personally it rarely recommends anything that I a) either haven’t heard before or b) like.

This week Amazon and IMBD joined forces and launched the oh-so catchy SoundUnwound online database for music (trying typing that in the address bar fast). Oh and it’s a beta, but that’s a given right?

What I like about it is the fact it’s dedicated music database, it’s hardly original but it differentiates itself from Wikipedia somewhat. It’s still editable by anyone and includes a number of other interactive and fairly cool features such as the discography timelines for artists below.

The sit also has the safeguard in place of all edits made by users first being approved by Amazon employees. I think this is a good idea as long as it’s prompt.

From having a bit of look around however there isn’t a huge amount here not already available on other sites like AMG or Amazon’s main site itself. In fact the best thing about Amazon was even included on UnwoundSound – the user reviews.

I have absolutely 0% interest in reading someone’s “shout-out” to the Beatles, but I would like to read their review of them.

Incidentally someone needs to invent some ‘genre-standards’ for music. Frankly as they are right now they’re useless, if we could decide on a specific set of genres and then use them across all music software and databases perhaps they could actually be useful.

Enter Cloud Speakers, a music business news aggregation site that offers more than a slightly unusual layout and choice of color. Cloud Speakers displays music business news on their pages. It has a vast database of artists and labels which can be followed on page, by email or RSS news feed.

They collect news, reviews, audio and video and make it available on their website. The user can filter the four main categories, if he is only interested in reviews he can only display those. The audio category is a very appealing category on the website. Users can play the music that is listed in that category. The frontpage of Cloud Speakers is offering an mp3 player that is showing and playing the latest mp3 as well. (A similar feature is available on individual artists pages)

A source is provided next to each news item to read the complete news article or review on the original website. Although there are a few reasons why using Cloud Speakers might be a good idea there are some that stick out. The first is that it is possible to follow artists by RSS news feed or email update. That’s indeed a nice feature if you are a hot blooded fan and crave for news on your favorite artists.

The second is music discovery. It is possible to play music on the website which might give a user the opportunity to find new artists that he likes.

It is interesting to note that Cloud Speakers is missing many of the social news portals features like commenting on news, rating music or making friends. That’s a refreshing change for some users while others will probably miss those features dearly.

The internet has made it very easy to get access to music. You can stop by the innumerable music blogs, online radio stations, etc. for your daily fix. Plus, you can transfer music to your mp3 player or hard drive so that you can take your music with you.

The internet has also raised an ugly monster in the form of DRM or digital rights management. Users who want to support the record industry often find themselves having to fork out a hefty sum for songs that are crippled so that you cannot listen to them on more than one device.

That’s why sites like RCRDLBL are a breath of fresh air. The site, whose name is ‘Record Label’ without the vowels offers up a plethora of legal alternatives for music lovers. The best part? Their music is completely free.

RCRD LBL is actually a collection of music blogs and online record labels. It’s been formed to give artists a platform to display their music and allow listeners a money-free audio experience. RCRD LBL encourages people to download music from their site and share them with friends.

All the music on the site is DRM-free so you can transfer it to your iPod, CDs, cell phone etc. Artists are paid by the ad sponsorships on the site so you don’t have to pay anything for songs. While anyone can download songs off the site, only registered users can get music updates, post comments, etc.

RCRD LBL is extremely gracious about sharing music. They have widgets you can use to post tracks from the site onto your own blog or website. RCRD LBL is also available on Twitter and carry regular podcasts. In addition, every artist has their own RSS feed so you can keep track of your favorite artist’s goings on. You can also submit your own music directly to them if you’d like it to be included on the site.

Most of the artists here are emerging talents and those that are signed to small or independent labels. There are also some big names like Moby. I found a lot of artists I’d heard before as well as new ones. Overall, RCRD LBL is a great place to scout for upcoming musicians and basically discover music you might not have heard otherwise.

What do you think of RCRD LBL? Do you enjoy listening to music online? What other legal, DRM-free, music sites do you know of? Let me know in the comments.

Muxtape provided a great way to upload mp3 songs to their website creating a mixtape like song collection on the website. It had some limits like a maximum song size of 10 Megabytes and only one mixtape per account but what made it great was the ability to share the mixtape with friends.

The music collection was publicly accessible which was probably the main reason the RIAA stepped in although I cannot find a difference between listening to music on a website and listening to music on Radio or Youtube.

If you open Muxtape right now you notice only one sentence and no way to access any of the services of the website: “Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.”

Before you go ahead and make use of the methods described in this article I would like to remind you that those methods are legal in some countries but not all. You still have to check if it’s ok in your country before you download 1000+ songs a day using the methods listed below.

The chance that you get caught ranges from slim (Music Search Engines) to virtually impossible (Internet Radio) though and is way below the chance of getting caught trading music in P2P networks.

The methods are listed alphabetically and I only described a few services and programs to download music. If you do some research you will find many more applications and services.

Free Music:

Free music has a bad reputation on the Internet. That is undeserved and can be mostly attributed to spam and malicious software. If you look around a bit you find massive amounts of free music that can be downloaded to the local hard drive.

Jamendo is surely one of the top locations for free music on the Internet. Jamendo is currently offering more than 11000 albums on their website. Direct download and Bittorrent downloads are available and the whole site concept deserves a larger userbase than they currently have. It pretty much works after an “if you like the artist visit his website and buy some merch or CDs” system.

Jamendo is not the only way to get your free share of music. I have collected a large list of possibilities called the music list some time ago. Most if the websites and services are still in existence these days.

Internet Radio:

That’s probably one of the easiest ways to download music from the Internet. Thousands of Internet Radio stations cater to the music listening taste of almost everyone. From metal over gospel to christian, there is a good chance that you find a station that is playing exactly the music that you like.

One of the best tools for recording Internet Radio is Streamripper in combination with its frontend Stripper in my opinion.

That’s a combo for super-easy recordings of multiple Internet Radio streams at once. The advantage of this method is that it runs automatic after pressing the start recording button. Just sit down and relax while the software programs download song after song to your hard drive.

Another advantage is that you pick the stations which means that you can include factors like bitrate in the selection process. Each station plays usually between 15-20 songs per hours. That’s between 360 to 480 per Internet Radio station and day. Imagine recording multiple stations simultaneously. The only real limit is your Internet connection.

Streamripper tries to save songs correctly if the Internet Radio Station sends those information. You end up with music that uses the song and artist as the name and some proper tags.

A great directory to start looking for interesting Internet Radio Stations is the Shoutcast directory.

Music Communities:

Music communities, like Last.fm and partially also MySpace, offer a vast amount of music that can be listened to online. They also lack direct download features but the usual tools work pretty well to download music from those websites.

The Last Ripper is for example an excellent tool to Save Last.fm music. Grab++ and Download Helper should also work wonders on most sites.

It is usually not a problem to download the songs. If nothing helps a direct audio recording tool like Audacity does the trick. That tool can record all sounds that the user can hear, a last resort so to speak.

Music Search Engines:

Music Search Engines like SeeqPod or MP3zy crawl the Internet for audio related content which gets added to their vast database. The results are presented like any other search on regular search engines like Google with the difference that they can be played directly in the browser window.

They usually do not offer ways to download the music that can be played directly. It is however usually not a problem to download the streams that are offered directly to the computer. A good combination is using the software Grab++ which is part of Orbit Downloader, a free download manager that supports downloading from many media sites directly.

Youtube:

If you search on Youtube for artists, albums or songs you will most likely find a video with music that you are looking for. After that it is only a matter of downloading the Youtube video and ripping the audio from it.

The combination of Download Helper, a Firefox extension that can download videos from Youtube and many other video websites, and Audio Extractor does the trick.

Just load the downloaded Youtube videos into Audio Extractor, select an output format and wait until the audio has been extracted. The only problem of that method is the audio quality which differs tremendously.

Last week, Martin posted about how Yahoo was planning to shut down its Yahoo! Music store on 30^th September, 2008. The store would take its DRM servers offline on this date, in effect stranding all those people who had paid money for DRM-labeled music.

Apparently, Yahoo have realized the foolishness of their decision and the impact it will have on present and future customers of their services. They are now offering refunds to the people who bought music from the store. Another option being considered is to replace customers’ music with DRM-free MP3 versions of those same songs.

In addition, Yahoo! will transfer customers to the RealNetwork’s-owned Rhapsody service. This is for those people who have a subscription to the service. All these are far better than Yahoo!’s original suggestion that consumers burn the tracks to a CD and then rip that CD to get DRM-free versions of their tracks.

Yet again, problems have cropped up because of DRM. If the music from the store was DRM-free, shutting down the servers wouldn’t have affected anyone. Thanks to DRM, not only is Yahoo! going to lose a lot of its revenue but also lots of people are going to be inconvenienced.

I for one am waiting to see just how much Yahoo! will have to refund its customers. And whether Microsoft is going to follow its example. The real winner in all this is probably Rhapsody, who’s subscriber base will increase just like that. Let’s see what’s next on the DRM agenda, which seems to be falling apart. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.