E-Commerce News: Music

The Music Industry's $2 Million Can of Worms

Sunday - June 21, 2009

The $1.92 million verdict against a Minnesota woman accused of sharing 24 songs over the Internet could ratchet up the pressure on other defendants to settle with the recording industry -- if the big fine can withstand an appeal. "Normally in our American legal system, we say the punishment should fit the crime," said Ken Port, director of the Intellectual Property Institute at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. "Now she's being ordered to pay, in some ways, an incomprehensible amount of damages."

Port has closely watched the recording industry's case against Jammie Thomas-Rasset, 32, of Brainerd and wrote a brief that helped persuade the judge in her first trial in 2007 to grant her the retrial that ended Thursday. [More...]

RIAA Beats Minnesota Mom to the Tune of $1.92 Million

Friday - June 19, 2009

Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the Minnesota mom who has been at the center of the RIAA's legal battle against music piracy, has been found liable for illegal file-sharing in the retrial of Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset. She now faces a $1.92 million penalty, or $80,000 for each of 24 songs she made available online through the Kazaa file-sharing network. [More...]

Virgin Serves Up MP3 Buffet

Tuesday - June 16, 2009

Virgin Media, the cable TV operator owned by entrepreneur Richard Branson, launched a new kind of music download subscription service Monday with Universal, the world's largest music company. The service, described by the companies as a world first, will allow Virgin Media's broadband customers in Britain to stream and download as many songs and albums as they like from Universal's catalog for a fee. [More...]

Spain's Music Piracy Battle: Is Building the Ship as Bad as Plundering the Booty?

Saturday - June 13, 2009

Pablo Soto's story may be every computer whiz kid's dream -- or nightmare. After leaving school at 16 to support his family, he managed to eke out a living doing what he loves most: designing computer programs. Then in 2001, the Madrid native launched Blubster, one of the world's most popular peer-to-peer Internet file-sharing programs of recent years. [More...]

TuneUp: An iTunes Librarian, Archivist and Concierge

Monday - June 8, 2009

Gabriel Adiv is a music lover. Like many music lovers who manage their digital music in iTunes, he once bemoaned how labor-intensive that could be. Unlike many music lovers, though, he decided to do something about it. Adiv, with his sidekick Raza Zaidi, founded San Francisco-based TuneUp Media in 2007, and a year later, their company introduced an iTunes plug-in by the same name. [More...]

Spotify Mobile App Plays Tunes Even When the Stream Runs Dry

Thursday - May 28, 2009

Stockholm-based Spotify is still trying to navigate a maze of licensing obstacles before it can launch a U.S. version of its much-hyped desktop streaming music application. Yet its developers showed how they've been keeping busy Wednesday with an Android smartphone app demonstration during the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. [More...]

Napster's New Plan: Slash Prices, Stream Music, Survive

Tuesday - May 19, 2009

Napster's choice of a headphone-wearing cat for its logo has turned out to be quite appropriate. The grand-tabby of all digital music services enters its second decade apparently intent on using up every one of a feline's nine lives, with the latest reincarnation coming Monday in the form of a new business model. [More...]

Warner Music Blames Digital Partners for Slow Q2

Friday - May 8, 2009

Warner Music Group Chief Executive Officer Edgar Bronfman criticized digital music efforts Thursday, as the recording label reported online sales growth slowed and losses widened, and it wrote down investments in two Internet startups. Warner said digital music sales in the second quarter through March grew 7 percent to $166 million, far slower than the 48 percent growth posted a year ago. [More...]

The Pirate Bay Fights Back With Appeal Charging Judicial Bias

Thursday - April 23, 2009

The music and entertainment industry didn't even have a week to fully savor its victory against the four proprietors of The Pirate Bay before they filed an appeal. Though the move was expected, the grounds for the appeal may have caught the plaintiffs by surprise. The Pirate Bay contends that the judge hearing the case, Tomas Norstrom, should have disqualified himself due to a conflict of interest. [More...]

YouTube, Universal Hook Up for Music Video Site

Friday - April 10, 2009

Google's YouTube and Universal Music Group are partnering to launch Vevo, a music video vehicle featuring UMG's videos. The site will launch in the coming months. Few details have been provided about the launch; however, both companies will share in the revenues, and additional deals with other music labels are being negotiated, the companies said. [More...]

An Xserve Lift, an iTunes Shift and a Gift Card Grift

Friday - April 10, 2009

Most of Apple's core products have seen some sort of refresh since last September, and it appears there aren't a whole lot left to update any time soon. Most recently, Apple unleashed Intel's Nehalem processors in its Xserve server line, which doubled the performance ... so, that's cool, but definitely cool for a limited audience of professional business users. [More...]

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