Mp3 News

Virgin France Sued For Piracy

Virgin France has been sued for downloading Madonna’s Hung Up and offering it for resale after re-encoding the track with their own DRM.

France Telecom had the exclusive rights for a week to this track after paying €500,000 for it.

Virgin France declared to have “broken the exclusive agreement in the interest of consumers”

Tags: mp3 music digitalmusic

Music-based social network

Mog.com is a social networking site for music lovers, following the steps of MySpace.com, the new site launched on tuesday will expand into the music niche, “This is really exciting to people who want to see what other people are listening to and to people who want to show off their stuff.” MOG.com spokeswoman Dana Smith said.

[Read it from: News.com]

Tags: music socialnetworking myspace

Microsoft develops iPod rival

Microsoft is developing a music player that will compete with Apple’s iPod, it’s said that Microsoft could also be developing a digital music service that would compete with iTunes.

As of today there is not a date for the launch of the device.

[Read it from: News.com]

Tags: mp3 music mp3player mp3-player iPod iTunes digitalmusic

New Wi-Fi music player

MusicGremlin is the name of the new Wi-Fi music player and it allows you to buy music from the MusicGremlin Direct store from wherever you can access an 802.11 wireless connection.
The music player comes with 8GB storage size, which can store up to 2,000 MP3, WMA, or WMA DRM tracks.

[Read it from: News.com]

Tags: mp3 music mp3player mp3-player wifi digitalmusic

eMusic CEO: consumers are confused about DRM.

Hypebot offers today an exclusive interview with David Pakman, the CEO of eMusic on which he talks about the position of eMusic in the market, the music industry and DRM.

At this moment eMusic is the #2 online music service just behind iTunes with the big difference between them both being that mp3s at eMusic are DRM-free, about this DRM issue he said:
“Never in the history of recorded music has a popular music format been released that’s incompatible across vendors of playback devices.”

According to mr. Pakman DRM-protected mp3s causes confusion and dissatisfaction on the customers:

“You can see evidence of their dissatisfaction with this situation by examining the return rates of MP3 hardware players at retail – sometimes as high as 70%! Clearly, consumers are confused.”

Tags: mp3 music emusic musicindustry DRM iTunes

Tiscali suspends its music sharing jukebox service

The legal music sharing service by Tiscali has ceased operations while in an statement they accuse the European recording industry of “short-sightedness” for not “making any effort to understand either the basic needs or habits of music fans that choose to consume music via the internet, or the acts directly benefiting from this promotion”.

[Read it from: BBC News]

Tags: mp3 music

Acoustica CD/DVD Label Maker updated

Version 2.55 of Acoustica CD/DVD Label Maker has been released, now you can import data and backup CDs, to do so just insert a data or backup CD/DVD and then bring up the “Tracks Listing” and click “Read CD”. It will scan the CD or DVD and compile a list of files and folders. You can choose how many levels deep it goes and whether it shows folder and/or files. In addition, the software will create a summary which shows the number of files and folders and the range of dates found on the disc.

New iPod U2 Special Edition

The new iPod U2 Special Edition comes with 30GB of storage which means that it could store 7,500 songs, up to 25,000 photos, or up to 75 hours of video. It also comes with up to 14 hours of battery life, the price for this new iPod model is $329.

Technorati Tags: mp3 music iPod Apple u2 Bono

EMI catalog available in new legal P2P network

EMI has anounced that their music catalog will be available on Qtrax, a new ad-supported peer to peer music service.

“We think that any ad-supported model should be offered in a way that maintains, or even enhances the value of music, and we believe Qtrax does that by offering a good consumer experience and significant up-selling opportunities” said David Munns, chairman and CEO of EMI Music North America.

[Read it from: News.com]

Tags: mp3 music

Online mp3 storage: buy once, use anywhere, on anything

“Digital locker services” is the latest thing on digital downloads, what these services offer is basically a virtual space for their users to upload their files, not only mp3 but also ringtones, wallpapers or anything.

Once uploaded , these files are accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.

As said by Michael Corrales from Streamload: “The idea is to take the paradigm that’s been built offline in the iTunes, Rhapsody and Napster applications and move it onto the Web”

[Read it from: News.com]