News written by Petteri Pyyny (November, 2004)

Microsoft's MSN Music has launched a service that allows users to download music freely from independent artists. The service is a joint venture with GarageBand.com who bought the old MP3.com's music catalog after CNET acquired the legendaric site and shut down its artist promotion service last year.

At first stage, the selection available via MSN Music will be simply the selection of the former MP3.com's, but it will be later boosted by tracks directly from GarageBand.com's own selections.

Source: AP via Seattle Post-Intelligencer

According to Japanese newspaper Nihon Keizai, Apple's iTunes music service is set to launch in Japan in March 2005.

However, it seems that negotiations with Japanese record labels, especially those ones representing the major global record labels in the country, have been difficult. The labels are rather unwilling to participate with Apple's upcoming Japanese service, as the paper quotes that iTunes Japan aims to have a music catalog of mere 100,000 tracks -- compared to almost a million available in most markets where iTunes is available. Apparently the music catalog's focus would be on Japanese music.

Source: Reuters

After years of waiting on the sidelines, the Movie Picture Association of America finally followed the RIAA's path and launched its full-blown attack against the American P2P users yesterday.

The organization that represents all major Hollywood movie studios declined to comment on how many individuals it had sued, but according to the reports at least 22 people have been sued in Denver and another 18 in St. Louis. Some reports suggest that also users in New York and Philadelphia were targeted. According to News24, at least four of the users sued in St. Louis were in possession of just one pirated movie each.

When asked about the scale of the attack, MPAA's director of worldwide anti-piracy operations, John Malcolm, said "It doesn't matter if it's 10 lawsuits or 500 lawsuits. The idea here is that there is no safe harbour."

So, it seems that movie studios have noticed how well the music industry's strategy of sueing your potential customers has worked and have decided to drag a couple of more teenagers to court. MPAA hasn't given any indication if it is prepared to settle the cases out of court or if it wants to go through the whole court process in order to set an example for other P2P users sharing movies.

World's second largest record label, Universal Music Group (part of Vivendi), has agreed to license its entire music catalog to a small start-up that aims to provide online music purchasing mechanisms to the P2P world. The first service about to use the technology is expected to launch in January.

The company that runs the technology is called Snocap and the first P2P service set to use the technology is called Mashboxx. To make things bit more interesting, the man behind the Snocap is quite familiar one -- Shawn Fanning, the guy who built the first-ever P2P application, Napster that launched the whole P2P hysteria and has caused many sleepless night to record label executives over the last five years.

And, just to define the Universal's apparent change of hearts bit further, the man behind the Mashboxx -- Snocap's first client -- is the former president of Grokster, Wayne Rosso. So, basically two of the best-known P2P advocates making business together with the world's second largest record label..

The Snocap's service basically provides users a way to distribute legal material over P2P networks and also allows them to purchase tracks from Universal's catalog of 150,000 tracks. But, in my opinion, by shooting itself to a leg, Universal has insisted not to allow Snocap's service to be used in any P2P application that allows distribution of illegal music files. Without such decision, Snocap's service could be bolted on Kazaa, etc apps and when user is about to start downloading a track from the P2P network, the service would offer him/her a way to purchase the track legally instead of downloading it from the P2P. But as Universal doesn't want to see that kind of hybrid to appear in the marketplace, it seems that Mashboxx is simply going to compete against iTunes and other online music retailers. However, as the details are bit blurry so far, everything said related to the upcoming service is simply speculative.

Grokster, one of the best-known P2P services (at least one of the best-known by the RIAA & co), has taken yet another step in its path to make its P2P service to please the record labels by teaming up with a start-up called Mercora to provide an artist-specific webcasting service via its P2P client.

The new service, dubbed as Grokster Radio, provides almost an on-demand music service, but not quite -- the reasoning being most likely that by providing an artist-specific "radio stations" rather than outright on-demand streaming service, the joint operation can be covered under the current Net's webcasting royalty rules rather than negotiating a separate, one-off license with the record labels.

According to Mercora, it has been paying its webcasting license fees to the copyright owners' royalty collecting agency, SoundExchange, for the last six months. But despite paying its royalty fees, it seems that labels aren't exactly happy with the Mercora's business model, as SoundExchange has announced that it is investigating Mercora's business model closely to see whether it can use the webcasting royalty mechanism at all.

The deal doesn't obviously change the fact that Grokster still operates a full-blown P2P service and has beaten the RIAA in district and appeals court -- and seems to be headed to Supreme Court. But it shows how eager the P2P companies are to play "fair" -- many P2P operators have tried to license material from labels in the past, without much success.

The French Competition Court handed a victory to Apple is an important lawsuit filed against it by its competitor, VirginMega (a joint venture between the British Virgin and French Lagardere). VirginMega had sued Apple over its decision not to license its FairPlay DRM technology to third party companies.

Basically, by providing a licensing mechanism, other online music stores could also sell DRM-locked files that could be played in Apple's iPod portable players. DRM is a piece of technology that limits the media file's use to certain devices (or to certain timeline, etc) -- like in Apple's case, the songs purchased from iTunes are locked with the FairPlay DRM technology that is only playable by iTunes software on Windows or Mac or with iPod. As iPod is by far the most popular portable audio player on the market right now, it is understandable that other online music retailers would like to get their offering to be compatible with the player.

However, the court's decision was also a victory for one of the Apple's rivals -- Real. Under the European Union competition legislation, the dominant market player can't block others from accessing to a technology that is "indispensable". Now, what does that has to do with RealNetworks? Well, court found that a software released by Real, called Harmony, users of Real's online music store can transfer their Real-DRM-locked files into FairPlay-locked files and thus play them with iPods. But Apple doesn't exactly like the idea of Harmony, and has accused Real of cracking their DRM system in order to develop the product. But, now, under the court decision, Apple can't block tools like Harmony, because the moment they do so, their practice violates the ruling and court might force them to officially licence the FairPlay to other companies.

AOL's contiuing cost-cutting, declining membership figures and changes in its corporate attitude over the years seem to have finally put a permanent stop to one of the world's most popular software programs, WinAMP. After the recent shakups, the resigning of Justin Frankel and the general lack of support from AOL, it seems now that the story of Nullsoft is finally over.

The software company, bought by AOL back in 1999 for $100M, now has just three employees to continue the development of Nullsoft's products that include WinAMP, ShoutCast and NSIS. The last major version of WinAMP was released back in December when WinAMP v5.0 was released.

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Japanese consumer electronics company Pioneer has, according to Nikkei Business Daily, managed to develop an optical disc that holds 500GB of data each side, making it 20 times bigger than the basic single-layer versions of "next generation" optical discs that are based on blue laser (including Blu-Ray and HD-DVD).

The new technology is apparently based on ultraviolet laser, which has shorter wavelength than the blue laser does, thus making it possible to store data much more efficiently on the disc.

Source: The Inquirer

Europe's largest supermarket chain, British Tesco launched its own online digital music store today in the UK. Aiming at slightly more "demanding" userbase with higher-than-rivals audio quality (at least in terms of bitrate), the retailer tries to lure iTunes users to switch to its own service. Considering Tesco's massive marketing muscle and the fact that it seems that it can turn anything profitable, it seems likely that Tesco might manage to grab certain significant portion of UK's digital music sales.

But as Tesco has decided to use Microsoft's WMA format, it can't really benefit from the iPod fever that is going on all over the world right now -- iPods wont play WMA files, just like WMA-capable players wont play tracks from iTunes.

Tesco's pricing is similar to most of the competing services in the UK -- each track will cost £0.79 and albums cost £7.99. The service itself is provided to Tesco by Cable & Wireless. Tracks can be burned on to a CD three times and transferred to three different players.

Source: Guardian

Microsoft responded quickly to Apple's recent European expansion for its iTunes service by launching its own online music service MSN Music in eight European countries.

MSN Music is now available also to users in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Netherlands, Austria and Spain. That puts MSN Music ahead of iTunes in four countries -- Switzerland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark -- as none of these countries are currently supported by iTunes (which is partly due the fact that none of them use euro as their currency). Tracks from MSN Music will cost between 0.99 euros and 1.29 euros each, whereas iTunes' tracks cost 0.99 euros each.

MSN Music's expansion to Europe was executed similarly to the service's existing presence in the UK -- via several partners. Swedish CDON.com is the Microsoft's MSN Music partner and retail channel in Nordic countries, while British OD2 will handle the operations in other four new countries. The service is available either via MSN's local portals or by using Microsoft's latest Windows Media Player 10.

Source: Reuters