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.

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

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.

The site has been set-up by European distributor CD Projekt, to make it possible for people to purchase games from the 80s and 90s, which includes many classics. Games will cost between $5.99 and $9.99. At this price, you will get games that play on both old and new computers, without any hardware issues. Another big plus: all games are totally DRM-free.

Considering newer games are terribly expensive, paying 5 bucks for a game is a great catch. You can purchase a game for almost the same price as a cup of coffee. Since it’s DRM-free, there’s no limit on how many computers you can install it on. GOG has already signed up with publishers like Codemasters and Interplay and I’m pretty sure more publishers and distributors are going to follow suit.

The site hasn’t yet started offering any games for purchase. If you are interested, a closed public beta will begin on 1st August, which you can sign up for. Otherwise, you can wait till the site is launched in September and then check it out.

I’m interested in how many of you would be willing to buy games from GOG.com. Also, what are your thoughts on sites offering DRM-free games? Would you prefer classic games over the over-priced games currently available? Let me know in the comments.

Pennywise is the latest band to release a music album for free. Their album Reason to Believe is available at Myspace at a bitrate of 320 kbit/s including the pdf booklet and jpg cover. All that needs to be done is to add the user Textango as a friend at Myspace who will send a message that includes the download link. The music is DRM free.

Textango seems to be a mobile music distributor according to Wikipedia. Pennywise is a Punk-Rock band in case you have not heard of them before, comparable to Bad Religion in many aspects.

The album Reason to Believe will also be sold in stores in Europe and America.

With the right strategy and advertisement they could build a service that would be able to compete with iTunes. Before I go on I would like to add that I personally think that all services are inferior to P2P even with the risks involved but it will be a long time before the Music Industry will acknowledge this.

Back to Amazon. To compete they have to do better than iTunes otherwise not many users would want to make the switch to Amazon considering Apple’s coolness factor with the kids and nerds.

Amazon tries to achieve this by offering DRM free albums that have a maximum price of $9.99 while most are sold for $4.99 to $8.99 compared to Apple’s price of $9.99. Some albums are even priced lower than this. The cheapest that I was able to find was priced at $0.99.

The license agreement grants the user the right to copy, burn, store and transfer the music downloaded for private use not mentioning any maximum number of computers or devices that you can transfer the music to. Every song can be listened to for thirty seconds before deciding whether to purchase it.

I did make a test purchase of course and have to say that the speed is excellent. I paid $0.89 for Smells Like Teen Spirit from Nirvana. The song is using 256 Kbps and has all the mp3 tags needed as well as cover art included. Amazon does store a song Id in the mp3 tags.

Visiting the site again it told me that I had purchased that song already at today’s date.

Amazon does offer a download manager that users could use to download the songs but this is not a must. I decided to download the song without the download manager. I suppose it could be a good idea if you do download a lot of albums from Amazon.

The download manager can automatically add the songs to iTunes or Windows Media Player when the download finishes.

The only real problem that I see at the moment is that the amount of songs that are offered is inferior to Apple’s catalogue. Several major labels are not represented yet at Amazon’s Mp3 store. This should be a top priority for Amazon.

Users should compare prices between iTunes and Amazon Mp3 if the album or song is available at both stores and most likely the Amazon store will be cheaper if the song is available there.

Read More:

Amazon MP3 Beta

The possibility to download drm free music is live and several websites examined the new files that were downloaded after a purchase has been made. As Arstechica puts it: “We started examining the files this morning and noticed our names and e-mail addresses in the files”. This information is however stored in all songs that are downloaded from the iTunes store, not only in the drm free songs.

While it has not been a real concern before it could become one now. I don’t think that a lot of users will purchase music at the iTunes store and then add it to their p2p folder to share it with the world. The professional groups that release mp3 albums get their albums before store release and spread it world wide in a matter of minutes which means that they will not use the iTunes store to get hold of the music.

Someone who purchases the music will probably share some of the songs with close friends but definitely not spread it beyond that. It could be that some that lack the technical knowledge will move the music from the store into a folder that is shared in a p2p network.

What I want to say is this. It is highly unlikely that a lot of users will spread the drm free music into p2p networks. My concern is that other users might get hold of the songs and spread them. What if someone hacks your computer or finds your mp3 player and adds them to his p2p shared folder ?

Will you be responsible if millions of users share songs with your name in them ?

Music Videos can also be purchased DRM free with no change in price. If you did purchase EMI songs on iTunes before you can upgrade the existing song to the DRM free version for $0.30 per song. This is definitely a step in the right direction, the only thing that really bothers me is the increased price for single tracks which surely is reasoned by EMI with losses due to people spreading the songs more freely around the net.

Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group, said, “Our goal is to give consumers the best possible digital music experience. By providing DRM-free downloads, we aim to address the lack of interoperability which is frustrating for many music fans. We believe that offering consumers the opportunity to buy higher quality tracks and listen to them on the device or platform of their choice will boost sales of digital music.”

This is absolutely a step in the right direction and the other major music labels will surely follow the lead if EMI will be reporting better growth rates that can be attributed to DRM free downloads. Time to get rid of DRM altogether, are you listening MPAA ?

The most successful album on Jamendo has been downloaded more than 11000 times which is a huge success for the artists that decided to upload their work to Jamendo. Users can listen to and download more than 2800 albums at Jamendo using streams and the bittorrent network. If you are looking for free music you should definetely visit Jamendo and start listening to some of the tracks suggested there. Below is a short sample of my favorite songs that can be listened to and downloaded at Jamendo. (I’m into Electronica at the moment)

Movies are downloaded using the EZTakes download manager which downloads and unlocks the movies after the download is finished. The movie is separated into different parts to get faster transfer rates and unlocking simply means that the parts are merged and the VIDEO_TS folder is created. You may burn the movie using the build in dvd burner or an external tool like Nero Burning Rom. You may select the viewer of your choice to view the DVD from within the download manager or simply point your DVD viewer to the Video_TS folder of the downloaded DVD.

Speaking about download rates. I first downloaded a free DVD movie from their site and received the 1 gigabyte movie in less than 20 minutes. The average download speed was more than 8 Mbits. You can try and download the free movie as well to test your connection to their service and take a look at the download manager as well.

It is basically not only a download manager but also a program that lets you burn and move movies to different locations on your hard drive. It even comes equipped with a build in site browser. The download manager is clever enough to let you move files if you run out of hard drive space. I suggest to edit the download preferences to increase the speed to fastest and raise the number of threads from 3 to 5 for maximum speed.

My first movie that I purchased had a average transfer rate of 13.5 Mbit almost maxing my 16 Mbit connection. I did purchase several movies to find out about the service that regular customers would get and download rates were always around 13 Mbit.

The most important aspect of a movie store are of course the movies that are available for download. You will not find the latest blockbusters at EZTakes but a very good selection of cult and classic movies. Movies like The old man and the sea with Anthony Quinn, Oliver Twist or the Junglebook are well worth watching.

The majority of movies dates a while back but you find the occasional movie from the last years. Supersize me would be one for instance. EZTakes has a strong selection of documentaries, lots about the DaVinci Code for instance and sports. You find Fitness, Wrestling and Martial Arts movies there. Just take a look at the movie index or select one of the categories from the left menu.

EZTakes is however not only about movies. It is also a way to express your opinion about DRM. If you purchase movies at sites that infest the movies with DRM you accept DRM. They see that customers buy the movies anyway and continue to provide movies with DRM that can’t be played on all computers and standalone players.

If you download movies from EZTakes you clearly state that you do not like DRM and that you will only give your money to services that offer DRM free media files. I’m not saying that you should go to their website and download all the movies to support them but if you find some that are interesting enough you should prefer EZTakes over other services that use DRM.

Prices for movies vary a lot and I think that some movies are overpriced; They vary between $1.99 to $24.99. The majority of movies has a price tag of $9.99 or lower though and you find some pretty good ones for the bargain price of $1.99.

Their latest stunt ? New royalty fees for Internet Radio stations. The price per performance rose from $0.0007 in 2006 to $0.0011 in 2007 which is a mighty increase. This means that radio stations have to pay $0.0011 per song that has a listener. This does not seem much but if you do some basic math you soon find out that this is indeed to much for many small radio stations.

Let us assume that a radio station plays 20 songs in an hour. This would mean that they would pay 0.0011 * 20 each hour multiplied by the number of listeners per hour. A station with only 100 listeners would have to pay $2.2 per hour, $52,8 per day and $19272 per year. Keep in mind that this are only the costs for the rights to play the songs, this does not cover bandwidth and other expenses.

The costs per performance are going to be raised to $0.0014 in 2008 and $0.0018 in 2009. The site Save Internet Radio states that over-the-air stations do not pay such a fee for performance rights.

I could continue writing about other things but thankfully a blog called the Wandering Student has expressed everything that I wanted to write down. Pay him a visit and read what he has to say, it is well worth the time.

So, what is the consequence of the boycott ? I will not purchase music that is published by a member of the RIAA. This includes online sales, eBay and all other forms. I will support local bands, independent bands, DRM and RIAA free websites, free internet radio stations and every other possibility that supports independent music.