According to a new new NYU research report – Does Chatter Matter? – user-generated content, including blogs and social networking sites, should be considered an important tool for promoting music and predicting sales. Researchers looked at the usefulness of user-generated content in predicting sales in the music industry. They tracked the changes in online chatter […]

Apple yesterday released the delayed “Take Two” interface for Apple TV. We’ve gone through the update process and tested it out, and here’s our thoughts on the new functionality and interface, with an emphasis on social media. The update process is painless. Navigate to Settings and choose Update Software, and Apple TV will take care […]

Looks like a normal alarm clock, right? Look closer, though – it’s an MP3 retro-style alarm clock. Open up the back and it’s got a USB cable to hook into your computer: The Thanko USB Retro MP3 Alarm Clock is officially compatible with Windows 2000/XP. No Mac support is mentioned. Compatible Sound Source: WAV/MP3 (up […]

Moby is offering a variety of unreleased tracks for you to use freely in your non-profit video projects at MobyGratis.com. this portion of moby.com, ‘film music’, is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short. to use the site you log […]

Music subscription services have, by and large, bombed. The idea of renting music hasn’t taken off and, even worse, customers have to worry about the services’ futures. The latest example of this comes with Yahoo’s subscription music service. On Monday, the company announced that it will discontinue its Yahoo Music Unlimited subscription service and has […]

Yesterday, when everybody was hyping the new ad-supported music service Qtrax, we said Qtrax was D.O.A. We noted that “Qtrax wants you to download software to watch ads to get DRM‚Äôd music that probably won‚Äôt work on your media player.” Not something that we really want to do. Others are starting to see through the […]

The net is abuzz with talk today about Qtrax, another service that promises free ad-supported music. The Qtrax service offers to let you use an ad-supported program to search for and download DRM’d music that you can play on a PC and on some media players. Unfortunately, it looks like Qtrax will be as dead […]

Amazon.com has announced plans for an international rollout of Amazon MP3, a DRM-free MP3 digital music store, in 2008. Amazon MP3 is currently the only retailer that the four major labels are allowing to offer customers DRM-free MP3s. As a result, it can offer over 3.3 million songs from more than 270,000 artists in DRM-free […]

The IFPI, an organization that represents the mainstream music industry worldwide, has released its take on the state of digital music 2008. According to the report, digital music is booming and the music industry is further along in the transition to digital than other industries. The industry appears to be more focused on P2P file […]

CNBC has an interesting interview with Steve Jobs, in which he confirms our take away from his MacWorld announcements: Apple is killing off the DVD: Don’t underestimate the power of the new iTunes movie rental service either. I asked Jobs whether this meant the format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD was over, with Apple the […]