Hi everyone, I posted an episode to my podcast, Kinky Star Radio Show.

Click this link to check it out:
Kinky Star Radio Show 23-04-2008

- Kinky Star

Hi everyone, I posted an episode to my podcast, Kinky Star Radio Show.

Click this link to check it out:
Kinky Star Radio Show 12-03-08

- Kinky Star

Breaking news, guys. Like, b-r-e-a-k-i-n-g. You may have heard about that stunt Radiohead pulled last week, giving away their music for whatever you feel it’s worth. Well now the pundits are out and have declared DRM dead. Or something!

But seriously, this Wired column opines that, now with DRM-free music everywhere it’s likely that music subscription services will be the victim. Reason being, if all of your MP3s are DRM-free, it opens the door for upstart companies that specialize in online jukeboxes. One such service, MP3tunes, searches users’ hard drives for DRM-free MP3s then automatically uploads them to its servers. You’re then able to listen to the music anywhere there’s an Internet connection. Why pay for something when you get it for free? I’m pretty sure that’s Generation Y’s motto.

Dying DRM Means More Freedom for Music Fans [Wired]

Blogged with Flock

Poughkeepsie, NY startup Mixaloo wants to make the experience of purchasing music online more social and rewarding, both emotionally and financially.

The company is taking a phenomenon - the mixtape - that has spanned several decades and media formats - 8 tracks, audio cassettes, CDs, and MP3 players - and bringing it to the web.

As a Mixaloo user, you can create playlists of music from all the major record labels, including Warner, Universal, EMI, and Sony. You can then share these playlists with friends via email, or you can embed playlist widgets into your website, blog, personalized homepage, or social networking profile. Mixaloo widgets are powered by Clearspring and can be added to your various online properties with a few clicks of the button (we’ve embedded one below).

To make a mix is free, but your friends will need to pay for the whole mix if they want to hear more than 30-second preview clips. The songs are 99 cents each (good) and protected by Windows Media DRM (very bad). The DRM protection is definitely this service’s biggest downside and could cripple Mixaloo’s potential until the major labels embrace DRM-free music. The company may throw advertisements into the mix at some point to make up for some of the lost revenue (I’ve got to stop it with these puns).

Mixaloo isn’t depending on user sociability to spread their widgets and entice customers to buy music from them. They’re harnessing the power of green by offering to split the profit from each sale 50-50 with mixtape creators. The company estimates that profits are 20-40 cents per track on average, so split that in half to get your per-track profit rate. We should be getting anywhere between $1.30 and $2.60 for each sale of the mix below (buy buy buy!). In addition to earning money that is paid out through PayPal each month, you will collect one point for every track sold. These points can be redeemed at a Mixaloo merchandise store that offers items such as t-shirts, speaker sets, and even cars.

While Mixaloo is currently in private beta, the company has provided us with 1,000 invitations to give our readers. To redeem yours, go here and enter “techcrunch” into the “TechCrunch Code” box.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Poor J Allard. The one cool guy at Microsoft—he’s the one who brought us the original Xbox—is trying so hard with the Zune. But he’s no match for Steve Jobs.

Redmond’s answer to the iPod has been a relative flop so far. The 1.2 million Zunes sold since it launched a year ago amounts to less than three percent of the number of iPods sold during the same time (which is more than 40 million), and only about one percent of the 110 million iPods sold since 2001. So Allard is trying again with a revamped Zune that looks even more like the iPod, and comes in new flash-memory versions. That’s so nano of him. But what, no Zune phone? No sexy iTouch? Allard is still trying to catch up to where Apple was a year ago.

At least he is getting rid of the Zune brown (a color only a UPS delivery man could love). The wireless syncing with your computer sounds nice. And the Zune music store will soon offer one million DRM-free songs—yay! But if you share them with someone else the other person can still only play them three times. That’s Microsoft for you. They put the DRM in “DRM-free” music.

And to try to make the kids care about a second-class device that, well, no one cares about, Allard had his biggest brainstorm yet. The Zune, you see, is not just another MP3 player. It’s a social network! That’s where this whole Zune Social thing comes in. I just hope that this is not Microsoft’s answer to Facebook in case the investment deal doesn’t go through.

Zune Social is a social network for the one percent of the digital music player-owning population that have a Zune or will ever have a Zune so that they can share their playlists and samples of the songs on their Zunes. Hmm. Well, gee, I can already share the playlists of the songs on my iPod with services like Last.fm and Anywhere.fm. Or I can create my own playlists on imeem, where anyone else in the world can go to listen to every song on my playlist in its entirety for free, with the blessings of the music labels to boot. Even Apple is getting into the social music scene with My iTunes widgets that show off the songs you’ve bought. With so many other, more popular options out there in both hardware and online music services, who is going to bother to go to the Zune Social—other than Bill Gates and J Allard?

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

I’m probably in the crowd

Let’s chat about the Zune Social, Microsoft’s music-centric social networking (Isn’t “social networking” redundant? When are you “anti-social networking”…) deal. Before we get too far along, know that you don’t actually need a Zune to participate in Zune Social. It’s like this: when you play a song on your PC, the title-artist-whatever information is uploaded to Zune Social. Here, all of your supposed friends (and maybe complete strangers, I’m not quite sure) can see what music you’re into. In my case, they’ll think I’m an eastern bloc drag queen since I pretty much exclusively listen to progressive house. If they like it, they’re only one click away from buying the song, provided it’s on the Zune Marketplace.

And that’s pretty much all we know so far. It sounds neat enough, I’m just not sure if I want my friends to know all of my music habits. I mean, it’s not like I go to the Abercrombie Web site and audio hijack the songs while writing sports columns for the NYU newspaper. ‘Cause I don’t.

Hands On with Zune 2 [Wired Gadget Lab]

You are a thief. How does that make you feel?

The big record labels are getting brazen. Really brazen. Today marks the opening of the first trial between the RIAA and a person it says illegally downloaded music. The problem for the RIAA is this person, and by person I mean damned hero, has decided to fight back. The RIAA has acted like a bully in most cases it’s pursued so far, so it’s great to see someone taking a stand.

But what’s coming out of the trial is more important than the trial itself. In testimony before the court, Jennifer Pariser, the top litigator for the Sony-BMG Music Group, was asked if she thought the act of copying a song off a CD a consumer owns should be allowed, which is how most of us get our music onto our Zunes or iPods. Her answer is nothing short of astounding. She state, under oath, that “when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.”

There you go, sportsfans, you’re now all dirty little thieves. Every single one of you. So are your friends, colleagues, lovers, and probably your parents as well. At least according to Sony-BMG.

Sony BMG’s chief anti-piracy lawyer: “Copying” music you own is “stealing” [Ars]

Filesharing verkort populariteit en helpt indie-labels

Volgens een studie in Management Science zorgt filesharing voor het verkorten van de doorlooptijd van albums in de Amerikaanse Billboard Top 100. Nummers van onafhankelijke muzieklabels zouden er echter baat bij hebben. Voor het onderzoek, waarover Ars Technica bericht, werd gemeten hoe lang albums in de hitparade staan gedurende verschillende periodes. Een belangrijk tijdsvak is bijvoorbeeld …

Platenlabels leggen geld toe op rechtszaken Riaa

Wat velen al hadden gedacht blijkt waar te zijn: de processen die de Riaa sinds vier jaar tegen filesharers voert, kosten de organisatie alleen maar geld. Deze onhulling werd gedaan door een advocaat van Sony BMG.De advocaat, Jennifer Pariser, werd ondervraagd door de verdediger van Jammie Thomas, die momenteel in de Amerikaanse staat Minnesota terechtstaat wegens filesharing. Deze zaak is uni…

technorati tags:music2.0