The Regional Court of Hamburg has ruled in favor of German collecting society GEMA, which had requested that the court issue an order prohibiting file-hosting service rapidshare.com from making around 5,000 music tracks available on the Internet. The court fined Rapidshare €24 million ($33.5 million). "The judgment states that the hosting service itself is now responsible for making sure that none of the music tracks concerned are distributed via its platform in the future. This means that the copyright holder ...

0 Comments

EU regulators ordered 24 music societies across Europe to modify or ditch their agreements that bar music services from selling or broadcasting music across borders, forcing those services to set up individual storefronts for each of the EU's member states that may or may not carry all the same content. Also struck down: members must be allowed to switch to another society. Musicians are allowed now to join any society in Europe, not just in their own country. This does ...

0 Comments

Prices Jan 2009: http://Boomkat.com 99 p = $1.43 http://bleep.com €1.35 = $1.87 http://beatport.com €1.99 = $2.75 Was on May 2008 (Dollar having a "good day" at 1.55): http://Boomkat.com 99 p = $1.95 http://bleep.com €1.35 = $2.09 http://beatport.com €1.99 = 3.09 Boomkat, in my opinion is the by far the most pleasant place to shop since you really learn a lot about artists and its the best looking to spend time on. Good techno selection, great dubstep selection, great electro, "future ...

0 Comments

This is a model that I suggested and supported many years ago. There are many hurdles. Qtrax is having a go at it now. Its a windows/(mac-coming march 18th) P2P application with a built in web browser. It only shows files from labels that qtrax has licensing agreements with. Initially it uses the Gnutella network. It converts the files into an proprietary audio format 'MPQ', adds a windows DRM layer and plays the music only from within the application. It ...

0 Comments

At the same time, Last.fm is launching an unprecedented "Artist Royalty" arrangement, whereby those artists not signed with a label who choose to upload their music to Last.fm will receive payment, directly from Last.fm, every time one of their tracks is played. Glad to hear it: our friends at Last.fm are doing quite well. btw. I wouldn't say "unprecedented" because Imeem already does this royalty sharing. So does Napster actually. I make small steady royalty money from Napster, but its ...

0 Comments