Digital music has come a long way. From just one or two portals, the present scenario has an innumerable catalog of stores offering music completely legally and at a reasonable price. Digital music is not without its pitfalls though, most notably DRM. Still, most online stores now offer DRM-free music, which is great news. One [...]

Categories: Music Industry, Online Services, Open Source

Currently, if you want to purchase music legally, you can use a variety of online music stores from big companies like Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, etc. The modus operandi of these sites is pretty much the same. You can either buy an individual song or pay for the entire album. Now imagine this scenario: what if [...]

Categories: Music Industry, Online Services, Windows

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 [...]

Categories: Entertainment, Music Industry

I’m not that much of a gamer these days. My game-playing skills are restricted to Solitaire and an occasional online game. But in the early 90s, games fascinated me. My introduction to gaming came with Prince of Persia, followed by Super Mario, Commander Keen, etc. So when I read about the Good Old Games site, [...]

Categories: Entertainment, Games

There is undoubtedly a trend of releasing music albums for free / for donations / for what individuals are willing to pay on the Internet. The last months were full of stories about bands like Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails who managed to create lots of publicity by using these new distribution methods that would [...]

Categories: Music and Video, Music Industry, The Web

I always wondered which company would be able to compete with Apple’s iTunes store and only a handful companies came to my mind. Besides Microsoft and eBay Amazon came to my mind. They are a established brand and I do not know a single person who does not have an Amazon account already.

Categories: Music and Video, The Web

Many users were quite happy when Apple announced that they would be selling drm free music at their iTunes online store. It would finally be possible to make one purchase and be able to play the music in your car, mp3 player, computer and other devices. Prices for the drm free music were set higher than for music with drm which did not get the bad feedback that I expected it to get.

Categories: Music and Video, Music Industry

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.

Categories: Music Industry, The Web

The free social music networking site Jamendo announced today that they have distributed more than one million downloads of albums that are freely available using bittorrent technology. Only albums that have been fully distributed have been counted or as they put it: “this figure is the minimum indicative number of the total of complete albums we have distributed so far”. This is a huge success for sites that believe that drm free music sites can and will succeed in the long run. Jamendo has an incredible download rate of more than 200000 albums every month and the figure is increasing with each passing month.

Categories: Cool, Online Services, The Web