Internet Music Services

Downloaded Breezes Through the Story of Napster

Okay, Illegal Downloads Probably Are Hurting the Music Industry

By Dan Moore This would have surprised me no matter who had turned it up, but there was a special irony in learning that illegal music downloads "aren't hurting the music industry" from a beleaguered print magazine's free-news arm: Illegal downloads aren't hurting the music industry, new study cla ... More >>

Why Does Spotify Keep Ripping People Off?

By Emily Lundquist Ten dollars a month is a small price to pay for practically every piece of recorded music except The Beatles. Which is why, late last year, I signed up for Spotify. Only two months in, however, I was out, and feeling like I'd been ripped off. Turns out I'm not the only one. See ... More >>

Does Spotify Mean the End of the iPod and Your Music Collection?

By Dan Moore When I bought my first iPod--this was the first iPod, when the scroll wheel actually spun around--it was a severe blow to my nerd-cred, which I guarded pretty jealously at the time. (It was the only cred I had.) Relying on iTunes and its untouchable database to maintain my MP3 collecti ... More >>

Three Other Reasons Why Sales Of Old Records Are Outpacing Sales Of New Ones

This week the news came out that sales of catalog albums outpaced those of new records during the first six months of 2012. Current (less than 18 months old) albums sold 73.9 million copies between January 2 and June 1, down from 82.8 million in the first six months of 2011; catalog albums sold 76.6 ... More >>

Lil B and Other Forward-Thinking Artists Do It Themselves

Off the cloud

100 & Single: fun., Gotye, M83, EDM, And The Beginning Of The Hot 100's Spotify Years

How do you know when you're at the dawn of a new pop era? It's not like someone sends a memo. Sure, occasionally there's a well-timed cultural event that offers a hint—the disastrous Altamont festival in December 1969, which signaled that the flower-power dream was over, or Comiskey Park's Di ... More >>

Let's Stay Together: The Messages Of Barack Obama's Re-Election Playlist

Yesterday, President Barack Obama's team released a Spotify playlist for his 2012 re-election campaign, announcing it via every form of social media imaginable. According to an announcement that accompanied the more traditional means of releasing political information—a leak—the playlist ... More >>

100 & Single: Adele's Focus-Grouped Chart-Topper And The Demise Of The "Deep Cut"

Remember the album cut—the track deep on a disc that fans knew best, that only cool radio stations would play? Like so many cherished things from before the iTunes era, it's essentially extinct. My evidence for this bold and seemingly facile statement isn't the steady, well-chronicled disappe ... More >>

New Music Resolutions for 2012

Time to change up this rut we're in, music lovers

100 & Single: Can Katy Perry Turn The States' Post-Christmas No. 1 Race Into Something UKrazy?

​Thanks to her husband, Katy Perry considers herself as an honorary Brit. But as the most frequent current inhabitant of the Billboard charts, she must wish we were all anglophiles. If only America had a Christmas No. 1 competition as rabid and media-fueled as Old Blighty's! Katy would have t ... More >>

100 & Single: How Digital Changed The Charts, From Gwen To GoonRock

Spotify's top tracks (left) and albums on Friday, July 15.​The headline-grabbing music story of the week isn't on the Billboard charts—it's the U.S. debut of Spotify. With the streaming-music service less than 48 hours old here, it's a bit too soon to analyze what songs are getting the m ... More >>

Spotify Launches In The States; Has Your Life Been Changed Yet?

The Top Tracks list is not nearly as twee as this "hi there" image would imply. ​After lots of whining from music-biz pundits and whinging from the "make music free for meeee" crowd, the Sweden-based streaming-music service Spotify launched today in the States. Those in search of invites to th ... More >>

Judy and Joseph Del Galdo, Mother and Son Team, Stole $16 Million, Splurged on iTunes

​Mother and son Judy, 66, and Joseph del Galdo, 46, have been charged with stealing more than $16 million from a textile business where Judy worked for over 20 years, according to the Manhattan DA's office. Judy forged the signature of the company's president on hundreds of checks that were de ... More >>

Pinback

The Civil Wars

Changes At eMusic: Def Jam In, Matador And Merge Out

Better go get this now.​If you want a one-URL "major" vs. "indie" battleground -- what defines and/or divides them, which lifestyle brand the discerning-legal-downloader demographic really prefers -- you could do far worse than eMusic, the excellent monthly-subscription MP3 service (which empl ... More >>

Even the New Gap Logo Hates the New MySpace Logo

​Amid an internet uproar about how bad the new Gap logo is -- and just after iTunes faced similar scrutiny for the updated iTunes 10 icon -- MySpace is getting in on the Any Press is Good Press action by releasing their own terrible new logo. TechCrunch describes it literally as "the word 'my' ... More >>

D-Grade Rap Star Possibly "Riding Dirty" with Newly Minted Baller-Status Michael Arrington, Other Nerds

​Remember rapper Chamillionaire ("Chameleon" "Millionaire"), who had that song about "Riding Dirty" that was less about unspeakable sex acts we'd probably rather not want to catch him in the middle of rather than the proposition of being pulled over by law enforcement officials with illicit ... More >>

Farewell Streaming Music Service Lala

​Lala, the streaming, cloud-based music service familiar to anyone who's googled a song in the last year or two, only to have a free Lala stream come back as the first result, is shutting down, reports Billboard. The service was bought by Apple in the waning months of 2009; after that, it was ... More >>

"There Is No Way To Overstate How Passionately Some People Hate This Record": In Praise of eMusic's Clear-Eyed Appraisal Of The R.E.M. Catalog

​ One fear, as fine digital purveyors like Rhapsody and eMusic expand and mutate and more frequently generate fine music criticism of their own, is that they'll shy away from, well, criticism -- as they are literally in the music business, they'll be loathe to talk trash even when trash-talk m ... More >>

Today Is the Day Fucked Up's "Do They Know It's Christmas" Cover Arrives

​The first and hopefully last time we'll spend a morning typing "Do They Know It's Christmas" into iTunes. Matador promises that the long awaited Band Aid cover, featuring what Fucked Up frontman Damian Abraham described to Pitchfork as "the best and the worst of the music industry," will hit ... More >>

How the Music Industry Died: Steve Knopper's Appetite for Self-Destruction

A Rolling Stone reporter charts the doomed path from Thriller to Internet-based horror

Macworld News Includes Scary Face Recognition

CNET live-blogged this morning's Macworld session in San Francisco. Global marketing VP Phil Schiller announced Apple's agreement with Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner Music to distribute copy-protection-free iTunes from those massive vendors, and flexible pricing on songs purchased from the service ... More >>

More Apocalyptic Discourse with Appetite for Self-Destruction scribe Steve Knopper

'If they're waiting for the next Thriller to come along and save everything, they're really, really misguided. I hope they've figured it out by now.' This week in the hopelessly antiquated print version of the Voice, I chat with veteran Rolling Stone editor/reporter Steve Knopper, whose new book ... More >>

Another Free iTunes Single of the Week: Stephen Colbert's "Another Christmas Song"

This Kayne/KAWS 808s Nonsense Should End

Another Free iTunes Single of the Week: Dark Captain Light Captain's "Jealous Enemies"

Muxtape Vs. iTunes Genius: Can Machines Replace A Good Mixtape?

Another Free iTunes Single of the Week: Ha-Ash's "Already Home (With Brandi Carlile)"

Another Free iTunes Single of the Week: The Republic Tigers' "Buildings and Mountains"

Why MySpace Music Won't Succeed

Rupert Murdoch's pride and joy is trying to go legit; mayhem may ensue, and success may not

Status Ain't Hood Podcast 27

Universal Records Fucks Up Bad

Metallica Finally Gives In to the iTunes Empire

Standing in the Shadow of iTunes

Three upstart local online music stores aim for their own niche markets

Burn Baby Burn

"Laffy Taffy" is the Number One Song in the Country

Never Ending Math Equation

After the court decision, file shares and mixtapes float on

The Supreme Court's Ruling on MGM v. Grokster: What It Is and What it Means for You

The new goods on file-sharing

How Much Is Music Worth?

Music subscription services may result in bargain binging

Meet John Doe

The RIAA runs its lawsuits as a volume business, and sometimes downloaders just gotta settle

iTunes, yr Tunes

Napster revives the freedom to explore, but will it dent Apple's now iconic market hegemony?

Pay To Play

The Pixies lead a mixed bag of Apple-only mini-albums

Fair Useless

Corporations vainly scheme to the beat of a different DRM

How Bad a Year?

Music biz recovery means suing and firing more people

Circling the Wagons

Why iTunes Won't Save the RIAA From Pirates, Downloads, Lost Product, and Ill Will

Rough Trade

Little Johnny and Big-Biz Music Duke It Out Over Peer-to-Peer Software

Napsternomics

The Pop Solution to Downloading

Keeping Up With the Napsters

At Pho, a Thousand E-mails a Month Track the Great Digital Debate