The Great Geek Manual News

Out with the old, and in with the new, Rhapsody has introduced an alternative to its WMA and RAX file formats. Starting today, Rhapsody will sell its entire catalog of 5 million tracks in the MP3 format - something that music stores should have done from the beginning. However, there’s a mighty presence to overcome, the Apple iPod.

With an iron clad grip that has yet to be shaken, Apple’s iTunes has dominated the online music store market. It has overtaken Wal-Mart as the primary music retailer in the United States, and the remaining digital stores such as Napster and Rhapsody have struggled to retain their relevance.

The major problem of the smaller digital retailers is interoperability. Rhapsody, until today’s announcement, only supported the RAX and WMA formats. Do you know someone with a portable RAX player? What about a WMA player? You could purchase a Zune with WMA support, but in an Apple dominated world, the Zune is lonely player with few friends. The portable music market is dominated by the iPod and its kin, the iPhone and the iTouch. Unfortunately for the rest of the digital music store market, the iPod doesn’t support RAX or WMA - but it gladly accepts MP3s. In fact, the end user can store hundreds, if not thousands of MP3s. But not RAX files and certainly not those dirty WMA files from Microsoft. With a near iPod domination of the MP3 player market, smaller retailers have found it next to impossible to compete with iTunes - let alone P2P.

This situation has pushed the smaller retailers into a corner, leaving them with little choice but to acquiesce. Starting today, Rhapsody is taking a big gamble by supporting DRM-free MP3s. Their entire catalog, according to Rhapsody’s press release, will be DRM-free and available in the MP3 format.

“Beginning today, consumers can purchase MP3 music from Rhapsody and its partners that is free of the digital rights management (DRM) software that restricts how and where people can play their music. Any song or album purchased at www.rhapsody.com/mp3 can be played on any MP3 player, even an Apple iPod.”

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Source: Slyck

Digital music seller Rhapsody is launching a $50 million marketing assault on Apple’s iTunes, offering songs online and via partners including Yahoo Inc and Verizon Wireless, Rhapsody said on Monday.

The songs will be sold in MP3 format, which means users of the Rhapsody service will be able to play them on iPods.

Before now Rhapsody, jointly owned by Real Networks Inc and Viacom Inc’s MTV Networks, had focused on a subscription service, allowing unlimited song streaming for $13 to $15 a month, rather than selling downloads.

But Rhapsody Vice President Neil Smith said the fact the service has not been compatible with Apple Inc’s top-selling iPod digital player has limited Rhapsody’s reach.

“We’re no longer competing with the iPod,” Smith said. “We’re embracing it.”

Rhapsody also will be the music store back-end to MTV’s music Web sites and iLike, one of the most widely used music applications on social networking site Facebook.

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Source: Reuters

It’s too bad George Carlin died this week, as the prickly comedian’s scathing wit would be perfect for the current debate over whether AM/FM radio should pay money to the artists whose music it plays. It sounds like a simple question, but billions of dollars are at stake, and neither side looks interested in taking anything resembling the “high road.” How else to explain the fact that cans of herring are being sent through the mail and foreign ducks with suitcases are appearing in newspapers?

While radio currently pays the songwriters who pen the music and lyrics, it doesn’t have to pay the performers; by contrast, satellite radio and Internet radio have to pay both groups. As music label revenues have declined, labels and artists have naturally turned to what they see as a huge potential revenue source. The two bills under consideration in Congress would make all forms of broadcasting liable for public performance fees, but broadcasters militantly insist that they provide crucial promotional support for artists and should be able to keep spinning discs without paying.

The spat between artists and record labels on one side and broadcasters on the other has exploded into the open recently as Congress has taken up a piece of legislation that would force radio to start paying artists for music. At a House subcommittee hearing this morning, HR 4789 was marked up and passed on to the full committee for a vote, while S 2500 waits for action on the Senate side.

“Today’s vote comes as a complete nonsurprise, given the House IP Subcommittee’s history of support for the RIAA-backed tax on local radio stations,” said the National Association of Broadcasters after the vote. “Despite today’s action, there remains broad bipartisan resistance to the RIAA tax from members of Congress who question whether a punitive fee on America’s hometown radio stations should be used to bail out the failing business model of foreign-owned record labels.”

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Source: Ars Technica

English soul and R&B singer-songwriter Joss Stone thinks sharing music online is “brilliant”.

In an interview after a show in Argentina, she said she loves music, but hates the the music industry. Most artists are, she declared, “brainwashed by the industry” and, “encouraged people to share her music,” says TorrentFreak, quoting Internet.

“After the show a reporter asked her what she thinks of piracy, and people who download her songs,” says the story, and, “Her response baffled the reporter,” it states, going on she told him.

“Yeah, I love it. I think it’s brilliant and I’ll tell you why. Music should be shared. The only part about music that I dislike is the business that is attached to it. Now, if music is free, then there is no business, there is just music. So, I like it, I think that we should share. It’s ok, if one person buys it, it’s totally cool, burn it up, share it with your friends, I don’t care. I don’t care how you hear it as long as you hear it.”

Source: P2P Net

The music industry is suffering, and it’s all because of those darn fans. Er, what? It turns out that KISS member Gene Simmons believes exactly that. He claims that piracy is to blame for the industry’s woes, and KISS is apparently taking its ball and going home until the situation gets under control.

“The record industry is dead. It’s six feet underground and unfortunately the fans have done this,” Simmons said, according to AOL News. “They’ve decided to download and file share. There is no record industry around so we’re going to wait until everybody settles down and becomes civilized. As soon as the record industry pops its head up we’ll record new material.”

It’s never a smart move to blame your loyal and devoted fans for the injustices of the world, but Simmons seems to think that his fans (unlike everyone else’s) would rather steal from the band than continue paying for music they enjoy. Simmons also thinks bands that encourage the public to download their music for free (such as Radiohead with its famed In Rainbows experiment) are only making the situation worse, despite the fact that Radiohead has made a nice chunk of change from the In Rainbows release so far.

Simmons’ latest comments come just over six months after his previous rant about the music industry, wherein he told Billboard, “Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid’s face should have been sued off the face of the earth.” At that time, he blamed the record industry for letting foxes into the henhouse (presumably by allowing DRM-free music to be sold online, or perhaps any music at all to be sold online). “Doesn’t affect me. But imagine being a new band with dreams of getting on stage and putting out your own record. Forget it,” he said.

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Source: Ars Technica

Japan’s Cultural Affairs Agency has proposed adding a fee to the price of Apple iPods and other digital music and video devices to partially compensate rights holders for revenues lost to piracy.

The proposal represents an extension of an existing program that adds the fee to the price of blank recordable media and products such as MiniDisc recorders. Consumers end up paying an additional few tens of yens (tens of U.S. cents) for media under the scheme that started in 1992.

The agency, which is part of Japan’s central government, wants this expanded to music players and video recorders based on hard-disk drives, an agency spokesman said on customary condition on anonymity. It’s not clear how much extra the fee would add to the price of hardware.

However the iPod and other music players are primarily devices for music playback, not music recording, so their potential role in piracy isn’t as clear as that of a MiniDisc recorder or video recorder.

The proposal will likely be formed into a report that will feed into a planned Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology proposal to amend Japan’s copyright law. If everything goes to schedule the amended copyright law would come into effect in 2010 but the proposal’s inclusion in the amendment to the copyright law is not automatic and could be shelved or changed prior to its inclusion.

Source: PC World via Yahoo! News

After experimenting with free BitTorrent distribution on their last album, ‘Ghosts’, The Nine Inch Nails are today releasing their latest single ‘Echoplex’ for free, to tens of millions of Facebook users. Also, everyone should check out NIN.com tomorrow - apparently a “surprise” awaits.

In March, the Nine Inch Nails released their album ‘Ghosts’ under a non-commercial Creative Commons license, meaning that it can be shared freely. The band confirmed that they had uploaded the album themselves to sites like The Pirate Bay, Waffles.fm and What.cd. This is of course great news for BitTorrent fans, and a move which did the Nails’ image no harm at all.

Fans of the Nails will be delighted to hear that the free music vibe is going to get a fresh boost today. According to a report, a brand new track from the band entitled “Echoplex”, is now available for free download to millions of Facebook users.

Trent Reznor, the frontman of Nine Inch Nails has always been pro-filesharing and admits to downloading music using BitTorrent and was a member and supporter of the shuttered OiNK tracker.

For those without a Facebook account, no doubt there will be a copy of ‘Echoplex’ on your nearest BitTorrent tracker soon but make sure you check out the information included with the release. Apparently, those visiting www.nin.com, on May 5 are in for a surprise…..

Source: Torrent Freak

A federal court on Wednesday established a formula for determining the Internet royalties owed to thousands of music composers, writers and publishers by three major online services - Yahoo Inc., AOL and RealNetworks Inc. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers hailed the decision, estimating the guidelines could yield as much as $100 million in payments covering a seven-year period ending in 2009.

The trade group, known as ASCAP, had contended that its 320,000 members weren’t being properly compensated for musical works that helped drive traffic and increase revenue for Yahoo, Time Warner Inc.’s AOL and RealNetworks.

Wednesday’s ruling, issued by a federal judge in New York, doesn’t affect the royalties owed to record companies. A representative for the Digital Media Association, a trade group representing the Internet services, declined to comment on the ruling late Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge William Conner’s 153-page decision didn’t specify the total amount owed to the ASCAP members, but he provided an example on how the formula would apply to the music royalties owed by AOL and Yahoo for 2006. Under the formula endorsed by Conner, AOL owed 2006 fees of $5.95 million and Yahoo owed $6.76 million. That’s far more than AOL and Yahoo envisioned. New York-based AOL had proposed paying just $632,879 in 2006 royalties while Sunnyvale-based Yahoo had proposed paying $889,402 in 2006 licensing fees, according to court documents. Conner’s 2006 estimates were slightly less than what ASCAP had sought from the Internet services. The group wanted $7.83 million from AOL and $7.38 million from Yahoo to cover the 2006 royalties, according to court documents.

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Source: The Associated Press

It was a pivotal moment for the music industry which many thought sounded the death knell for recorded music sales, but Radiohead won’t be repeating its initiative to let fans pay what they want for their downloads, The English rock band’s frontman said Tuesday.

“I think it was a one-off response to a particular situation,” Thom Yorke said of the band’s decision last October to let viewers pay what they wanted for digital downloads of the new album “In Rainbows.”

“Yes. It was a one-off in terms of a story. It was one of those things where we were in the position of everyone asking us what we were going to do. I don’t think it would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again. It was a moment in time,” Yorke told the Hollywood Reporter.

Radiohead’s decision to allow fans to pay into the online equivalent of an honesty box for the album came shortly after it walked away from troubled record label EMI, sparking acres of comment about the future direction of the music industry and the dwindling revenue pot from CD sales.

The band has remained quiet about whether the experiment was a success, with many fans thought to have downloaded the album without paying anything at all. “In Rainbows” was later released conventionally as a CD, and topped the U.S. and U.K. charts.

The groundbreaking move towards potentially free music has been adopted by a number of artists including Prince and Nine Inch Nails. Most recently fellow English rockers Coldplay said Monday that they would give away its new single “Violet Hill” free of charge, resulting in the group’s Web site crashing the next day due to demand.

Source: Reuters

News Corp’s MySpace, the world’s largest social network Web site, said it has formed an online music venture with three major recording companies in a challenge to Apple Inc’s dominant iTunes Music Store.

Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group have minority stakes in the new MySpace Music venture announced on Thursday. Financial terms were not disclosed.

MySpace Music will offer free music and video streaming supported by advertising, paid-for MP3 downloads, ringtones for cell phones, concert ticket sales and merchandise.

Chris De Wolfe, chief executive of MySpace, said the launch date of the new service was “fluid” with commercial features being added to the site over the next three to four months. He said MySpace is in talks with more music industry partners to offer their services on MySpace Music.

“We’re talking to all the big ticketing companies as well as the small ones,” De Wolfe told Reuters in an interview. He declined comment on EMI, the fourth big music company, which is not in the initial deal.

MySpace will integrate its 5 million artist profile pages with a range of new commercial services in a “360-degree” offering for the 30 million music fans who use the site.

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Source: Reuters

Apple is in discussions with the big music companies about a radical new business model that would give customers free access to its entire iTunes music library in exchange for paying a premium for its iPod and iPhone devices.

The “all you can eat” model, a replica of Nokia’s “comes with music” deal with Universal Music last December, could provide the struggling recorded music industry with a much-needed fillip, and drive demand for a new generation of Apple’s hardware.

Apple would not comment on the plan, but executives familiar with the negotiations said they hinged on a dispute over the price the computer maker would be willing to pay for access to the labels’ libraries.

Nokia is understood to be offering almost $80 per handset to music industry partners, to be divided according to their share of the market. However, Apple has so far offered only about $20 per device, two executives said. “It’s who blinks first, and whether or not anyone does blink,” one executive said.

Detailed market research has shown strong appetite among consumers for deals bundling music in with the cost of the device, or in exchange for a monthly subscription, executives said.

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Source: The Financial Times

R.E.M. have announced that they will debut their forthcoming album on the iLike internet application used on social networking site Facebook. The American band will release Accelerate as a stream available for sharing on March 24 - a week before the album hits shop shelves.

They are the first major music act to debut a full album using the iLike application – a widget used widely on Facebook, but also on iTunes and other social networking applications. All 11 tracks will be available to listen to (but not to download), and an online-only video of the band discussing the album will compliment the package.

Frontman Michael Stipe told music website billboard.com that the band made the decision to debut their 14th studio album online because the music industry has changed.

“I think you can either go with it or sit back and watch it happen, and I would rather be out on the field than in the bleachers,” he said.

“It was one of those ideas that was presented to us and it seemed like a good one so we ran for it.”

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Source: TimesOnline

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails made headlines again this week as he released his new, four-part instrumental album Ghosts I-IV, at a variety of price points, including a $300 super-deluxe package. He’s also giving away Ghosts I at no charge, even throwing the tracks up on The Pirate Bay for anyone to download. And it appears to be working quite well for Reznor, who has managed to sell all 2,500 copies of his $300 package without major label backing or much in the way of splashy marketing. If Reznor’s earlier experiments in digital distribution failed to recoup their costs, he’s clearly learned his lesson: grossing $750,000 in the space of three days isn’t a bad haul for any businessperson.

Reznor was disappointed by an earlier experiment in which he released the music of his friend Saul Williams. That album was available online either for free or for $5 (for a higher-quality version). Under 20 percent of downloaders paid up, and Reznor complained that he couldn’t even cover his costs for producing the album.

With Ghosts, Reznor had some obvious advantages. NiN is a better-known brand with a devoted following, and Reznor’s strategy of using multiple price points made his music easily accessible to fans. Those who wished to pay nothing could download a free version of Ghosts I. For $5, a digital version of all four albums was available, and for only $10, fans could get all the music on CD along with an immediate digital download. $75 and $300 deluxe versions were also made available and include things like a Blu-ray disc, a DVD of the multitrack audio files from the project, videos, deluxe packaging, and more.

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Source: Ars Technica