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

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

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]

AllofMp3 music downloading service illegal according to IFPI

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has accused the mp3 downloading service AllofMp3.com of not paying to artists.

In words of Lauri Rechardt, head of litigation at IFPI: “Downloading from AllofMP3.com is illegal in most countries, Allofmp3.com clearly operates outside the international standards for copyright law, established by the EU Copyright Directive and World Intellectual Property Organisation treaties”.

On the other side the rusian service protestes its innocence stating that they pay their fees subject to the Law of the Russian Federation and declare themselves not responsible for the actions of foreign users.