New New Musical Express - January 2008

The free music download site that promised to launch this week has been forced to admit it had no firm deals with major record companies.

Qtrax, it seems, didn't have the backing of the record industry - despite throwing a £500, 000 launch party in Cannes last weekend with the likes of James Blunt and LL Cool J in attendance.

The swaggering confidence with which the New York based firm launched the new site - filled with the promise of around 25 million free songs - belied the fact not one of the four major record labels had confirmed deals.

Qtrax admitted that "the ink hadn't dried" on their deals with EMI, Warner, Sony BMG and Universal but insisted that it hadn't misled fans.

Alan Klepfisz, Qtrax's chief executive told the Times today: "We are not idiots," he said."We wouldn't have launched the service in front of the whole music industry unless we had secured its backing. We feel we have been unfairly crucified because a competitor tried to damage us. Everyone is very upset."

The idea behind the site is that fans download music for free, and that advertising revenue pays the record labels.

What The Bloggers Say

TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld wasn't particularly impressed by Qtrax's marketing strategy: "In what may be the dumbest business move of the year so far, Qtrax announced its free music download service this weekend before bothering to sign contracts with three of the four major labels."

He is critical of the company's CEO: "The company's CEO, with a straight face, told an audience at a music conference in Cannes and members of the press that all the major labels had signed on. That was clearly a misrepresentation, possibly a fraudulent one. Hyping your product is one thing. Telling an outright lie is another."

And as for performance, Tom's Hardware isn't impressed: "It's not often that we put "sucks bad" in a title, but the beta Qtrax music player truly disappoints. After all the hype of allowing millions of freely playable songs, the so called "Songbird" beta program is excruciating slow, crashes often and doesn't even offer any music."

Source and more comments: Channel 4 News

http://www.qtrax.com/

The Times describes the news as "humiliating".

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has called for the European Union to force internet service providers (ISPs) to crack down on music piracy.

In its annual report the industry body said paid-for music downloads rose 40% last year but this was not enough to compensate for the ongoing "sharp decline" in CD sales.

It also estimated that for each song legally downloaded another 19 were illegally shared.

Chief executive and chairman John Kennedy said: "Copyright theft has been allowed to run rampant on their networks under the guise of technological development.

"ISPs have largely stood by, allowing a massive devaluation of copyrighted music. This in turn has prompted a crisis that has wide implications for the whole digital marketplace. The moment for EU legislation to be drawn up has arrived."

The Internet Service Providers Association said monitoring all data was unworkable.

"We do not support abuses of copyright and intellectual property theft," said a spokesman. "However, ISPs cannot monitor or record the type of information passed over their networks.

"ISPs are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope."

Source: Digital Spy

Last.fm has been nominated for the Best Website Award by NME. Other nominees in the category are Bebo, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.

Just browsing the nominations out of curiosity, you understand...

Full list at NME

I love this. Great modern pop.

The Ting Tings - Great DJ is due out as a single on 3 March.

Jan. 27, 2008--Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced that in 2008 the company will begin an international rollout of Amazon MP3, Amazon's DRM-free MP3 digital music store where every song is playable on virtually any digital music-capable device, including the PC, Mac(R), iPod(R), Zune(R), Zen(R), iPhone(TM), RAZR(TM), and BlackBerry(R). Amazon MP3 is the only retailer to offer customers DRM-free MP3s from all four major music labels as well as over 33,000 independent labels.

"We have received thousands of e-mails from Amazon customers around the world asking us when we will make Amazon MP3 available outside of the U.S. They can't wait to choose from the biggest selection of high-quality, low-priced DRM-free MP3 music downloads which play on virtually any music device they own today or will own in the future," said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President of Digital Music. "We are excited to tell those customers today that Amazon MP3 is going international this year."

Launched on Amazon.com in September 2007, Amazon MP3 offers Earth's Biggest Selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads, which now includes over 3.3 million songs from more than 270,000 artists. Every song and album in the Amazon MP3 music download store is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software and is encoded at 256 kbps to deliver high audio quality. Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device; organize their music using any music management application, such as iTunes(R) or Windows Media Player(TM); and burn songs to CDs for personal use.

Most songs available on Amazon MP3 are priced from 89 cents to 99 cents, with more than 1 million of the over 3.3 million songs priced at 89 cents. The top 100 bestselling songs are 89 cents, unless marked otherwise. Most albums are priced from $5.99 to $9.99. The top 100 bestselling albums are $8.99 or less, unless marked otherwise. Buying and downloading MP3s from Amazon MP3 is easy. Customers can purchase downloads using Amazon 1-Click shopping, and with the Amazon MP3 Downloader, seamlessly add their MP3s to their iTunes(R) or Windows Media Player(TM) libraries.

The company is not disclosing a specific launch timeline for individual Amazon international websites.

Source: Amazon.com News Releases

Following Radiohead's footsteps of thinking outside the industry box, Neil Young has decided to release his archives not on the antiquated compact disc, but rather, on a high definition interactive DVD and Blu-ray. Young, who has not been a proponent of the CD for this project because of its audio limitations, claims technology has caught up with the times, and unlike major record labels, Young has decided to embrace it.

The DVD package will allow users to experience articles and film clips from a song's given era, as well as, access lyric sheets, scores of unreleased studio tracks, and unseen concert footage. CD who? The tentative release date was February 19th, but will now be closer to October.

Source: Filter Magazine

If you liked that, you'll like this even more. I've only heard the 30 sec previews myself but that was enough to encourage me to tag the whole thing 'my gang 08' and hope to hear it soon in our radio. Fantastic stuff.

Tags: ambient, instrumental, experimental, electronic, piano, music to fall asleep to

Inlandish