While the RIAA sues its customers, and blames filesharing for the decrease in record sales, a coalition of seven independent Swedish record labels explores alternatives that make use of the Internet and filesharing technology.
The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the biggest and most popular in the United States. For the fourth year in a row, SXSW has released a DRM-less collection of songs that – thanks to Greg Hewgill – can now be downloaded for free via BitTorrent.
Dependent Records, an independent record label from Germany recently decided to shut its doors and upload all its albums onto The Pirate Bay. Interestingly, a year ago the the CEO of the label mentioned piracy as one of the main reasons why they decided to quit.
The IFPI recently published their latest digital music report. Amongst their claims “illegal downloading” outperforms legal downloading by a ratio of 20:1, and that because of this, the recording industry has lost US$3.7 billion. Picking apart these ideas reveal that they may be very misleading.
WeStream is a new applet that allows you to listen to individual music tracks, streamed from .torrent files. The applet is developed by BitLet, has a great interface, and is compatible with all Java-enabled browsers.
For the last four years people have been downloading the latest albums of their favorite artists, blissfully unaware that they have been modified. From The Pirate Bay to OiNK, downloaders have been getting unique versions, unavailable in the shops, all thanks to The Overdub Tampering Committee.
After the CRIA forced Demonoid to block access to Canadian users, four recording labels have turned their attention to two other BitTorrent trackers hosted in Canada, issuing them with Cease and Desists. At least one intends to stand and fight.
In the aftermath of the recent demonoid turmoil, “A former music buyer” posted an open letter to the CRIA – an impressive summary of what’s wrong with the music industry and how they alienate their customers. The RIAA and the CRIA have to rethink their business models, closing down p2p sites does not solve the problem.
The Russian government has closed down AllofMP3 and those who are trying to access its sister site, MP3Sparks, or another replacement may be disappointed that the site also seems to have disappeared. But never fear, those Russians have plenty of alternatives. We take a look at some of them.
Jamendo just added a great new feature to their site that makes it easier to discover new music from their collection of over 2500 free music albums. It’s like a remix of the Digg Swarm and Pandora, incuding free BitTorrent downloads.
A judge in Spain has dismissed a case against a man who downloaded and shared copyrighted music on the Internet. It was dismissed on the grounds that the man’s intent wasn’t to make money.
