iLounge

“Sony Music, home to such artists as Beyonce Knowles and Bruce Springsteen, said Monday it plans to introduce new CD technology in Germany that prevents users from copying songs to file-sharing sites, but allows them to make copies for their personal use. [...]

To copy the music to the Sony portable player, the technology requires an extra step to copy the files to a separate program to transfer the music to the portable player.

At this point, music can be transferred only to Sony portable players, although Sony executives note that Apple Computer’s popular iTunes service works the same way with the Apple-branded iPod.”

“Not to be upstaged by Apple, Roxio chairman and chief executive officer Chris Gorog challenged Apple’s statistics and told TechNewsWorld his company will be chipping away at Apple’s market share with a powerful marketing campaign already underway.

“We expect as soon as we get the word out to consumers that Napster is back, it will significantly impact our growth,” Gorog said in an exclusive interview with TechNewsWorld. “We would also expect to be taking away market share from Apple on a weekly basis.”“

“Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, has told the music industry it expects to unveil an online music store this month, The Post has learned.

The company is still finalizing deals with the five major music companies and has told music industry executives it could launch the service by Nov. 15. If it doesn’t meet that date, the company hopes to launch the service by Thanksgiving, sources say.”

“MTV Networks is preparing to launch a music download service with plans to go up against Apple’s iTunes and other competitors, said MTV chief Tom Freston Monday.

Freston, who addressed investors at the Harris Nesbitt Gerard Playtime conference, said the as-yet-unnamed service would debut within the first half of next year, but gave few details.”

“Now that Apple’s iTunes Music Store (iTMS) does Windows and Napster has bee rehabilitated, more people are starting to change their music-buying focus moving from old-school CDs to new-generation digital formats like AAC (Advance Audio Coding) and WMA (Windows Media Audio)

However, the onset of legal music download services has brought a new issue front and center: sound quality. The bit rate of an iTMS AAC file is 128 kilobits per second (kbps)—just a fraction of the 1,411 kbps “uncompressed” standard used for CD, WAV and AIFF files.”

“Whether listeners like it or not, record labels, including major players like BMG and Arista Records, are now making moves to rein in how their CDs are played and used.  Unfettered CDs have been on the shelves for almost two decades, and some industry observers note that changing how they work at this late stage could be a recipe for trouble with consumers. [...]

One major drawback of the restricted disks, however, is non-compatibility with the Apple iPod. Since the new discs are based on SunnComm’s MediaMax, which itself is rooted in Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) applications, the brochure leaves it up to iPod owners to read between the lines, explaining only, “It will play on any device that supports Windows Media DRM.”

“‘We have a bunch of very comparable services each with their own natural constituencies, and the ability to market to their constituencies is what will determine their success,’ said Josh Bernoff, a Forrester Research analyst.

Early bets on front-runners so far are going to Napster, Apple and MusicMatch—Napster for its deep brand recognition from its freewheeling song-swapping days, MusicMatch for its built-in connection to the widely used Windows Media Player, and Apple for its seamless integration with its popular iPod portable music player.”

“We at Go-Kart Records want to make it perfectly clear that the RIAA does not represent the views of all record labels. So, we are putting our music where our mouth is to prove a point. We believe that if you like the music you hear you will support it by going to shows, telling your friends, and buying the bands CDs. With this in mind, we are allowing people to download some of our current releases at NO charge. In other words, we are essentially GIVING these albums away! Click Here to Learn More

We feel that only by embracing technology can we gain from it, and that a battle like the one that the RIAA is fighting can simply not be won. To read a more in depth article about why we feel the RIAA is wrong please Click here and please send this email and/or the open letter to the RIAA to as many people as you can. Only by educating each other can we hope to take advantage of the technical innovations and not run scared from them.”

“With its relaunch on Thursday, Napster, the most notorious name in music downloads, will collide with the hottest music player on the market, the iPod.

That’s because music downloaded from Napster will not be playable on Apple’s insanely popular iPod. The newly legal Napster service and the iPod use incompatible file formats.”

“A research paper highlighting security weaknesses in a popular internet file-sharing network has raised concerns that innocent users could in theory be wrongly accused of sharing copyrighted music. [...]

It describes various techniques that could be used to make it appear to a third party on the Gnutella network as if an innocent user is hosting or searching for copyrighted files. It also describes methods for tricking users into inadvertently downloading copyrighted files so that they actually host these files.”

“Apple’s strategy at the moment seems sound. Adam Engst, publisher of Mac community newsletter TidBITS, told the E-Commerce Times that with more than 1 million iPods sold since the device was introduced, Apple likely is enjoying a significant profit margin. Moreover, the iPod marketing strategy shows the company is moving in the direction of consumer electronics while still leveraging its many millions of Mac users as an initial target market.

‘And just as with the iTunes Music Store, the iPod is simply better done than most of the competitors—better interface, better integration, better industrial design and so on,’ Engst added. ‘If Apple can repeat that win in other areas that bridge the gap between computers and consumer electronics, they could be highly successful, even without gaining much market share on the computer side.’”

“MusicMatch, the software company best known for its popular music player, on Monday launched a pay-as-you-download music service, the latest entrant in the increasingly heated market for online music.

Offering a library of more than 200,000 songs at 99 cents each, the MusicMatch service will allow computer users to buy and download music with few restrictions, a model pioneered by Apple Computer Inc.‘s (AAPL)  iTunes Music Store in May.”

“MusicMatch CEO Dennis Mudd calls his 99-cents-a-song service a ‘breakthrough,’ because he acquired liberal usage rules similar to those in Apple’s acclaimed iTunes Music Store: Buyers can burn songs and transfer them to portable devices as often as they want. [...]

MusicMatch is the first Windows-based service to obtain looser licensing terms. ‘We held off launching until we could get these rules,” Mudd says. “If you make it too hard on users, they’ll just go to Kazaa.’”

“They’ve used this announcement to lay down the gauntlet to HP, Apple and to some extent Sony,’ said Tim Bajarin, president of the Creative Strategies consulting firm. ‘Everything that Dell’s doing right now is extremely calculated.’ [...]

Apple fired off a dismissive statement about Dell’s entry into the digital music business.

‘It appears that Dell is re-branding one of the second-tier music services that will be announced soon, just like they are re-branding Creative’s MP3 player. There is little original here,’ Apple’s statement said.”