Pandora.com made the decision to stop streaming music to users who are not living in the United States. To be able to do this they implemented a script that checks the IP address of every user connecting to the server and if that IP happens to be located outside of the United Stats of America you will not be able to connect to the streaming client anymore. Pandora already updated their FAQ section to reflect this changes, here is what the entry said:
The Pirate Bay introduces Playble
You can’t say that the guys from the Pirate Bay are full of ideas and surprises. Their latest project is called Playble, a website that offers free music to the visitors while still paying the artists directly. This is the biggest difference to the dominating music portals such as iTunes that do not pay the artists but the record labels who in turn pay their artists. This concept eliminates the need for a man in the middle who collects the money and distributes it to the artists.
NiN upload some of their songs to the Piratebay
NiN – Nine Inch Nails – added a new announcement on their website stating: “As a reward for stealing Year Zero, We’ve prepared the next batch of multitrack audio files for you to download”. Beneath the announcement are links to three of their songs, Capital G, My Violent Heart and Me, I’m not in Garageband / Logic Format for the Macintosh and a generic format for other applications. The interesting aspect of the generic format is that the links are actually torrent files that point to the Piratebay.
New Trend: Raise Music Prices by offering DRM Free Music
Now if that is not a clever idea. Force DRM on the users for several years with a pricing scheme straight out of hell and then use a huge publicity machine to make the customers believe that DRM free music is the future raising prices once more. If you thought that everything would be good now that many labels decided to offer drm free music albums as well you could not be more wrong. What is happening now is that the Music Industry once again fools the customers by offering overpriced products.
Selling music on iTunes
Tunecore online service offers an incredible opportunity for everyone who is creating music. You can use Tunecore to upload your music to their site and publish it at well known online music stores such as Apple iTunes, eMusic, Sony Connect or Rhapsody. It is possible to upload single songs, albums, cover art and everything else that is related to the music. Tunecore gets non exclusive rights to submit the songs and albums to the stores that you selected and to collect the money from the music sales earnings. They have no other rights on the songs such as merchandise rights or master recording copyrights.
DRM Free Songs come to iTunes
Apple and Emi announced today that the entire digital repertoire from Emi music can be purchased at Apples iTunes store without DRM. The songs will be offered at a higher quality which means an encoding quality of 256 Kbps instead of the usual 128 Kbps. There is however one downside: The DRM free songs cost $1.29 per song instead of the usual price of $0.99 per song. I’m a little bit concerned about the 30% increase which can not be explained rationally I think. Albums on the other side will not change in prices at all which makes the single song price increase a mystery to me.
Code Signing of Windows Vista bypassed
Microsoft added resource heavy DRM processes to Windows Vista in a move to “please” the content industry. I can’t think of another reason why they would add this kind of mechanisms if there would not be some kind of agreement between them and the content industry. Microsoft would have made such a big impact if Vista would not enforce digital rights management protections on content. The system would probably be more stable, faster and more resource friendly. Well, Microsoft decided to ensure that not only the needs of the consumers but also those of the content owners would be supported which makes me wonder which consumer would actually be pro DRM.
