China Blocks Apple's ITunes, Amazon Over Tibet Songs
Chinese authorities appear to have blocked access to Apple's U.S. iTunes Music Store, following the release of the 20-song "Songs for Tibet - The Art of Peace" collection Wednesday.
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24.8.2008iTunes to Give Away 70 Million
Songs
Apple is teaming up with
Coca-Cola in Europe for a huge
iTunes giveaway, in which 70
million codes for free songs
will be distributed inside
packages from the soft drink
maker. The far majority of the
songs will be offered in the
United Kingdom, while 67,000
songs will be given away in
Germany...
betanews.com -
02.08.2006Sky Songs to take on iTunes
Satellite broadcaster Sky is to take on Apple's iTunes in the digital music marketplace, when it launches its new subscription-based music store
later this month. While users of the service will be limited to one album download a month, music streaming will be ad-free and unlimited. According
to the Press Association, the new service, called Sky Songs, will enable customers to download up to 1 album, or 10 songs, for a £6.49 a month
subscription fee. Although additional songs will cost 65p a track, the service will also allow ad-free streaming of music without any limitations.
The new service will also allow users to download songs for use on any MP3 player - something which iTunes does not allow.
Read full story.....
neowin.net -
12.10.2009ITunes access returns to China following block
After having lost complete access to iTunes for nearly a week, for reasons that may have had to do with the music store featuring an album supporting
Tibetan freedom, users in China report they can download music once again...
betanews.com -
26.08.2008Yahoo Music to offer refunds, what about MSN?
Yahoo Music is offering refunds to anyone who bought songs from the service. Is it time for MSN Music follow Yahoo's lead?
Yahoo
announced last week that it would no longer issue authorization keys for the digital rights management, or DRM, software on its songs. This meant that
anyone who bought songs from the service would still be able to hear their songs through its service but would be unable to move them to other devices
or computers.
This did not play well with Web users. Now Yahoo Music plans to issue refunds and is trying to go one step further. If a
customer would prefer music over a refund, Yahoo is looking for a way to give the customer copies of the purchased songs in the DRM-free MP3 format,
according to a Yahoo representative.
Read
full story.....
neowin.net -
30.07.2008Jobs: iTunes Songs to Stay at
99 Cents
Don't expect the price of
songs on iTunes to rise in the
near future, at least if Steve
Jobs has his way. Calling the
record labels
"greedy," Jobs said
Apple has no plans to up
prices. He mentioned that the
profit margins on digital
music are much higher than
conventional distribution...
betanews.com -
21.09.2005Nokia N91 Music Phone Pushed
to 2006
Nokia on Tuesday officially
said it was delaying the
much-anticipated N91 music
phone until the first quarter
of next year, citing the
desire to make the phone work
with as many music providers
as possible and hold thousands
of songs. Motorola's ROKR
iTunes phone can store up to
100 songs...
betanews.com -
21.09.2005Feel Free to Download 25 Million Songs - Legally
After a decade fighting to stop illegal file-sharing, the music industry will give fans today what they have always wanted: an unlimited supply of
free and legal songs. With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing
technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can
download to keep, free and with no limit on the number of tracks. The service has been endorsed by the very same record companies - including EMI,
Universal Music and Warner Music – that have chased file-sharers through the courts in a doomed attempt to prevent piracy. The gamble is that
fans will put up with a limited amount of advertising around the Qtrax website’s jukebox in return for authorised use of almost every song
available. The service will use the “peer-to-peer” network, which contains not just hit songs but rarities and live tracks from the
world’s leading artists.
Read full story.....
neowin.net -
28.01.2008AMZN, Pepsi To Give Away 1B Songs; Sony to Drop DRM?
Amazon and Pepsi are gearing up to give away 1 billion digital songs in a year-long "bottle-cap" promotion starting next February,
Billboard's Ed Christman
reports. (That's a lot of songs: For context, Apple has only sold 3 billion songs since 2003, and 1 billion in the first six months of this
year). More interesting is Ed's assertion that the giveaway, coupled with Wal-Mart online's insistence that record labels only provide it with music
in MP3 format, has Sony-BMG (SNE) thinking about ditching DRM/copy protection for its downloads.
Sony has been the most dogmatic
in its public proclamations about hanging on to DRM and copy protection, so it'd be a real surprise to see them drop DRM altogether. Ed says the
label "is now considering an MP3 test," but doesn't provide much more detail...
winbeta.org -
01.12.2007iTunes Sells Three Billionth Song
Apple said Tuesday that it had
surpassed three billion songs
downloaded from its iTunes
Music Store, further extending
its lead as the most popular
online digital music store.
Currently, iTunes contains
about five million songs, plus
about 550 television shows and
500 movies. It is also the
third biggest music store
overall, recently passing both
Amazon and Target in music
sales.
Apple
has sold a billion songs in a
little under seven months. It
took eleven months to get from
one to two billion, and
several years to sell the
first billion tracks. "We'd
like to thank all of our
customers who have contributed
to this incredible
milestone," said Eddy Cue,
Apple's vice president of
iTunes.
winbeta.org -
31.07.2007RIAA Piracy Trial Set to Begin Tuesday
The first piracy suit from RIAA to make it to trial starts Tuesday, with Jammie Thomas fighting accusations of sharing some 1,702 songs through the
Kazaa network.
Thomas is the first of the 26,000 sued by the organization to fight the charges. A large majority of those have
already settled out of court by paying a few thousand dollars. However, the Minnesota mother says she has done nothing wrong.
Lawyers for the woman say the record industry still has not solidly proven she shared the songs. RIAA begs to differ: in February 2005, contractor
SafeNet says it found her sharing songs under her account, and was able to download 26 pirated MP3s.
winbeta.org -
02.10.2007Apple releases iTunes 9
Today at Apple's "Let's rock and roll" event in San Francisco, they officially announced the updated iTunes, releasing version 9 today.
iTunes 9 comes with Genius Mixes, with more than 54 billion songs to choose from, helping consumers find new music that relates to current library.
Apple also announced Genius DJ built into iTunes 9 that seeks out songs and creates a playlist for endless possibilities, great for parties. iTunes 9
also improves syncing with devices, for your iPhone and iPod Touch. Users can sync by artists, playlists, genres, and more possibilities. Apple also
announced that iTunes now offers Home Sharing, allowing users to copy songs, movies, TV shows and more, for up to five computers around your house.
Read full story.....
neowin.net -
09.09.2009US student ordered to pay $675K fine to the RIAA
A PhD student at Boston University has been ordered to pay $675,000, split between four record labels, for sharing music over the internet. Joel
Tenenbaum, a 25 year old graduate student studying for a PhD in Physics, admitted using a variety of peer-to-peer software including Kazaa, iMesh and
Napster to download and distribute the 30 songs focused on in the case, and admitted that he had lied during his first deposition in September 2008
when he suggested that some songs had been downloaded to his computer by family members or friends. Evidence gathered using MediaSentry revealed that
Tenenbuam was sharing 800 songs from his computer in August 2004, according to Ars Technica.
Read full story.....
neowin.net -
02.08.2009Billboard: iTunes prices up, sales down
I could have told you this, though I am a little surprised that we've seen the results so fast. Despite iTunes having put the new tiered pricing into
effect just last week, Billboard is reporting that they've already seen sales drop on the higher-priced tunes. The iTunes Top 100 chart has 40
different songs with a new price of $1.29, and one day after the changes, those songs dropped an average of 5.3 places on the chart, while cheaper
songs moved up on average. And on the second day of the price change, ten of the tracks that saw their prices rise within 24 hours dropped a huge 12.4
chart positions on average.
Of course, we're talking only a matter of days here, and there are all kinds of things that could have
affected this average drop, lots of the tracks that became expensive were from a Rascal Flatts album, and it could be just that the album has lost
popularity bringing the average down. Don't forget that even though these sales figures may be dropping, they haven't dropped nearly enough to show
a loss of revenue (though fewer songs may be selling, they're still making more money).
But for those convinced that higher prices mean
lower sales numbers, these first few days of figures will seem to connect all of the right dots. We'll have to wait and see if the long-term effects
match up to the figures Billboard has seen so far.
jcxp.net -
14.04.2009Another exploit targets IE7 bug
Trend Micro has warned that attackers are already exploiting a bug in IE 7 that was patched by Microsoft in the Security update last week with
critical status. Trend Micro researchers have spotted a small-scale attack in the weekend that exploits an IE 7 flaw to install a spy software that
looks similar to the one that was sent to pro-Tibetan groups in January 2008. The malware XML_Dloadr.a is triggered when the user is tricked to open a
malicious Word document that arrives in spam and uploads stolen information on port 443 to a site in China which acts as the hacker's
command-and-control server.
Read full story.....
neowin.net -
18.02.2009Steve Jobs bullied Sony on Christmas Eve
When Apple announced at Mac World the new pricing tiers for iTunes and that all songs would be DRM free the users rejoiced. What was not so present
was how Apple managed to get all this done with record labels, as it turns out, Apple was playing hard ball. While at first this may seem like Steve
is fighting for the consumer; from the outside it clearly does, he got songs the way consumers want them, DRM free. All is good right? Unfortunately
the picture isn't quite as peachy.
Read full story.....
neowin.net -
03.02.2009RIAA wins key victory, accused file sharer must pay $220,000
A Minnesota woman must pay $220,000 to six of the top music labels after a federal jury found that she shared copyright music over the Internet.
Accused of sharing more than 1,700 songs, Jammie Thomas, 30, elected to fight it out in court with the recording industry instead of
settling for far less money.
Many of the 26,000 people who have been sued by the Recording Industry Assoc. of America (RIAA),
have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars. The jury ordered Thomas to pay $9,250 for 24 songs that the RIAA concentrated on. She was
initially accused of sharing 1,702 songs.
winbeta.org -
05.10.2007Apple hides account info in DRM-free music, too
With great power comes
great responsibility, and
apparently with DRM-free music
comes files embedded with
identifying information. Such
is the situation with Apple's
new DRM-free music: songs sold
without DRM still have a
user's full name and account
e-mail embedded in them, which
means that dropping that new
DRM-free song on your favorite
P2P network could come back to
bite you.
We started
examining the files this
morning and noticed our names
and e-mail addresses in the
files, and we've found
corroboration of the find at
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/05/30
/tuaw-tip-dont-torrent-that-so
ng/>TUAW, as well. But
there's more to the story:
Apple embeds your account
information in all songs sold
on the store, not just
DRM-free songs. Previously it
wasn't much of a big deal,
since no one could imagine
users sharing encrypted, DRMed
content.
But now
that DRM-free music from Apple
is on the loose, the hidden
data is more significant since
it could theoretically be used
to trace shared tunes back to
the original owner. It must
also be kept in mind that this
kind of information could be
spoofed...
winbeta.org -
31.05.2007China Blocks Apple's ITunes, Amazon Over Tibet Songs
Chinese authorities appear to have blocked access to Apple's U.S. iTunes Music Store, following the release of the 20-song "Songs for Tibet - The
Art of Peace" collection Wednesday. Users in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen confirmed that since as early as Wednesday morning, Beijing time, they
began receiving "unknown error" messages when they tried unsuccessfully to access the store. Although Apple does not operate an iTunes Store in
China, users may download free content such as podcasts, and those with U.S. credit cards may buy content from the U.S. store.
Although
Amazon.com remains available in China, its pages for both the "Songs for Tibet" CD and download page fail to load, returning: "The connection was
reset. The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading," the most common error message received for blocked sites.
neowin.net -
23.08.2008Starbucks to give away free iTunes songs
Starbucks Corp. plans to give away 50 million free digital songs to customers in all of its domestic coffee houses to promote a new wireless iTunes
music service that's about to debut in select markets.
From Oct. 2 to Nov. 7, baristas in the company's more than 10,000 U.S.
stores will hand out about 1.5 million "Song of the Day" cards each day. The cards can be redeemed at Apple Inc.'s online iTunes Store.
Thirty-seven artists with featured songs include Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell the first two to sign on with Starbucks' Hear Music label
along with Joss Stone, Dave Matthews, John Mayer, Annie Lennox and Band of Horses.
The first song will be Bob Dylan's "Joker
Man."
Also on Oct. 2, Starbucks will start selling iTunes digital release cards that allow a full album of music and bonus
material to be downloaded online. KT Tunstall's "Drastic Fantastic" and the soundtrack to the film "Into the Wild" with new music from Pearl Jam
frontman Eddie Vedder will be the first two featured albums, retailing for $14.99 and $11.99, respectively...
winbeta.org -
24.09.2007Dizzler Beta
Dizzler is an online media player that allows you to search and stream through millions of
songs, videos, radio stations from around the world, and games, in a legal and safe way. You can even create your own playlists and custom-design the
background to your player. After you design your own player, you can even paste it on your favorite social networking site. So if you want access to
millions of songs to instantly listen to, get your Dizzler player now. It´s free!
winbeta.org -
25.10.2007
