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 […]

For a long time, people have thought that getting the music industry to switch to DRM-free MP3s for music downloads would open the doors to a consumer-friendly world of digital music competition. Now it’s starting to look like the music industry wil use DRM-free MP3s to enforce their traditional monopoly on what you hear, what […]

Napster has joined the ranks of companies trying to compete with Apple’s iTunes by offering MP3 music downloads. The file format change will apply only to single tracks and album purchases, according tothe company. Tracks downloaded as part of the company’s music subscription service will continue to be DRM’d. “The ubiquity and cross-platform compatibility of […]

Despite the issues many tech-savvy music fans have with digital rights management and encrypted media files, it looks like the future of digital music will be based on closed, proprietary systems. Apple’s iTunes/iPod combination has rapidly risen to dominance, a fact that has caused both the music industry and other portable media player vendors a […]

It didn’t take long for the latest version of iTunes’ encry option to get hacked again. QTFairUse 2.3, a tool for removing digital rights management encryption in order to allow traditional fair use of audio tracks, has been released. The new version can be used to strip the DRM from files downloaded with iTunes 7. […]

UK’s City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has introduced a new podcast, the CBSO Podcast, making it the first major ensemble in the world to launch a regular podcast, according to organizers. The free 30-minute monthly podcast, hosted by music broadcaster Tommy Pearson, includes the latest CBSO news, interviews and discussions with musicians and conductors as […]

eMusic today launched its service in Europe, becoming the first digital music service available throughout the entire European Union. eMusic will offer music lovers in all 25 EU member nations a catalogue of 1.7 million tracks in the universally compatible MP3 format, which works on every digital music hardware and software device including iPods. ‚ÄúThe […]

Apple today introduced the new iPod. While the new iPod features a larger hard drive and brighter screen than earlier models, it doesn’t have the touch-sensitive widescreen display many had anticipated, making it an evolutionary update rather than a revolutionary one. The new iPod features a 60 percent brighter and more vibrant 2.5-inch color display. […]

Apple today introduced the new iPod shuffle, now the world‚Äôs smallest digital music player with Apple‚Äôs shuffle feature. Nearly half the size of the original, the new iPod shuffle is just half a cubic inch in volume, weighs just half an ounce and features an aluminum design and a built-in clip which makes it the […]