Customers loathe and despise DRM. What’s a marketer to do? Advertise products as “DRM-free” when they’re nothing of the sort! After Sony and Nokia comes MySpace. Their “DRM-free” service involves music that can only be played over the Internet while you’re sitting at the computer on their web page having your eyes gouged out by the tasteful graphic design they’re famous for. I look forward to their explanations to Trading Standards if they try selling this one in the UK. I also look forward to the MySpace equivalent of these.

DAS BUNKER, British Phonographic Industry, Wednesday (NNGadget) — Sony-Ericsson has announced PlayNow Plus, a new plan for unlimited “DRM-free” music downloads on phones.

“Pay, er, PlayNow Plus is completely unlimited, covers all major labels, no DRM, get all you want any time you like,” said spokesdroid Mobile Salestwat. “This is the biggest deal in mobile music ever! Of course, it’ll only play on your phone, for the duration of the contract, all songs then disappearing. Well, just a little DRM. Honest.”

(more at the other site)

“That’s how things are done these days,” says drummer Lars Ulrich. “Also, there’s the novelty of anyone wanting to listen to a Metallica album.”

Of course, the real alternative to the iPod is a cheap Chinese MP3 player labeled “MP4″ (a blatant lie you wish the MPEG LA would bother wielding their considerable trademark dicks concerning). They’re cheap, they play music, they’re cheap and they’re cheap. Dreadful interface firmware — I got mine free from a friend who wanted to smash it to bits with a toffee hammer — but you can change that. There’s no gadget someone won’t hack.

The Edsel of music players, its very name signifying miserable failure, has broken the heart of even its greatest fan.

As slushpiles go, the stuff on Jamendo is surprisingly not an excretory avalanche of hopelessly stunted clueless ambition devoid of talent. In the bleepy shit, I was quite pleased by Warforge, EndZeit-Effekt and particularly Philos Deploys. The gimmick is that it’s all under one of the Creative Commons licences and artists get some cash from ads and donations. Somehow it hasn’t decayed into the last refuge of the musical bedroom masturbator. I urge you to check it out before it sucks.

(Before the Internet, only music industry professionals got their faces shoved in just how many bad records are released. Why do you think so many come to hate music? The worst musical slushpiles are songwriter competitions — worse than band demos because they don’t require the lifewaster to get anyone else to agree. “All unsolicited demo recordings to be submitted on SDHC or CompactFlash card of 8GB or over. Extreme III or better, please.”)

There’s cultural preservation, and then there’s the K-Tel blog. “A place for those K-Tel style classics.”

As reported in a few places (including The Register), Universal are making 43,000 tracks available for online purchase - US$0.99 a track, around US$10 an album.

The gist is that it’ll be using the Liquid Audio system, which is proprietary, Windows-only and DRM-friendly.

(more…)

After bringing suit in late May, the RIAA and NMPA have just obtained their dream settlement against Audiogalaxy: a strict opt-in system, where only approved tracks can be shared, and of course a huge wad of cash.

The suit against Streamcast over Morpheus is still pending.

Meanwhile, users looking for a spyware-free client for one of the remaining peer-to-peer networks might find what they’re looking for at Clean Clients, which offers de-loused versions of Grokster, KaZaA, Bearshare, Morpheus, Limewire and SongSpy. (And Audiogalaxy, for now-historical interest.)

Update: We hear tell the RIAA are apparently planning to sue someone over Gnutella … if they can find who to sue. Of course, suing the current developers (who are not the original developers) won’t do a thing to stop a fully open protocol with an open-source reference implementation available.

Kuro5hin has a nice history of Audiogalaxy up, written by one of AG’s programming team. Also talks about the RIAA suit in some detail.

(Kuro5hin has some good stuff. Read it.)

The recording industry is yet again offering a downloadable music service consumers can’t use - no MP3s, songs not transferable to portable music players and downloads that are no longer playable if the user’s subscription lapses.

Analysts consider the products of Musicnet (BMG/EMI/Warner) and Pressplay (Sony/Universal) unmarketable - the companies having failed to meet consumer expectations due to excessive paranoia and prices.

See also analysis from InternetNews and especially from MP3 Newswire. “Let’s just say that governments have bigger worries than chasing Napster clones right now.”

The point of this exercise in futility, from Velvet Rope poster ‘Thousandaire’:

“I worked for one of the majors, and it was a supposedly “tech savvy” label (that’s all I will say publicly about where I worked). Nobody in their new media division believed that the download programs would work, they viewed it as “we want to show that there is a dollar value on a download to establish damages.” The attempts to build systems can be viewed as a way to prove damages when suing other download services. (i.e. “you have 50,000,000 members, and that is cheating us out of $500,000,000 a month that they would otherwise be paying if you weren’t around). Heck, the labels made a business model out of suing the likes of MP3.com out of existence.”

That sounds alarmingly plausible. “These MP3s had a street value of one million billion zillion dollars …”