I Own My Music

It seems that there is a lot of news regarding music downloads from China for some reason. While it has little impact on Western consumers, it is interesting to see how the Chinese are doing their thing, especially in the wake of all the Internet censorship that goes on there.

Google recently launched a new search engine for China that allows Chinese consumers to search for free legal music downloads. The service will be supported by ad revenue.

Hold on. A Google search engine for free music downloads? Why hasn’t something like this surfaced in the US or the UK? The music industry in China has apparently been suffering at the hands of illegal music downloads, but so has the rest of the world.

This is definitely an interesting attempt to curb downloading copyrighted material because it takes the initiative away from the people and places an emphasis on major corporations providing free music for consumers.

Apple’s iTunes has long been the world’s top service for buying legal music downloads. Solidifying that claim this week is the news that iTunes is still the top provider of music sales in the US.

In the first six months of this year, iTunes has managed to fend off competition from the likes of Wal-Mart and Best Buy, who came in second and third spots respectively. The stats were based on sales of albums (or bundles of 12 tracks).

Amazon’s music service for music downloads made some headway, moving up to fourth place. Target took the fifth spot.

All the signs seem to point towards iTunes’ dominance of legal music downloads continuing to the foreseeable future with the decline of CD sales and the popularity of MP3s. Amazon has done well this year because it offers CDs and also a dedicated MP3-download service.

Yahoo! music will close the doors on its music-download store on September 30, taking its DRM keys with it. This means that any music downloads bought from Yahoo! won’t be able to be played on any other computer than the one they were downloaded to.

Yahoo! has come up with the odd solution of burning the files to CD and then ripping them back onto your computer.

This is certainly a roundabout way of getting your value for money on music downloads bought from Yahoo! It’s similar to when Microsoft rolled out its Zune and shut down its own store for music downloads.

This is a clear indication of how sucky DRM music is. Hopefully DRM will soon be a thing of the past as it is nothing but a headache for the end user. For all the time and money spent creating DRM files, it appears to have largely been a waste of resources.

BskyB in the UK recently signed a major deal with Universal Music to launch a new music service. Sky, one of the fastest-growing ISPs in the UK, is one of the first ISPs to really try and make a go of making money from music downloads.

The new deal gives Sky full access to Universal’s back catalog, which is no small archive. Sky has got quite a deal out of the music giant, with the two companies joining together to bring something new in the form of a subscription-based music service that comes with a set number of DRM-free downloads.

It sounds very cool, right? It will be interesting to see how this pans out. The other three of the Big 4 have yet to jump on board, but this is a bold move by an ISP.

There is still no word on whether Universal will send letter to Sky subscribers to “educate” them about why filesharing is a bad way to get free music downloads, as Virgin recently started doing.

The price and launch date for the new service have yet to be revealed.

A while ago, we heard that Apple had planned to cut the cost of legal music downloads through its iTunes store. Well, so much for that, as Apple has cancelled those plans already.

Music downloads bought by UK music fans were set to have their prices slashed to even up the playing fields with what people pay for iTunes music around Europe. The British public was understandably very excited by this news. However, Apple has now come out and said that the music downloads will stay at 79p per file.

Steve Jobs was very vocal about how important it was to level out the cost of legal music downloads across Europe. The trouble is that the value of the euro is rising against the trusty British pound and so there isn’t all that much difference in the cost of a tune from an iTunes Euro store and the UK store anymore.

It’s no longer necessary to cut the cost of the UK’s legal music downloads. It’s a shame for UK music fans, but based on the reasons why the change was to occur in the first place, it’s understandable that the plans have been scrapped.

BitTorrent service Mininova has rolled out a new feature that will make downloading files a little easier. The features allows people to download files to a home computer from any remote computer. Sounds cool, right? You can do this by using Mininova’s new bookmarking system.

You subscribe to an RSS feed on your local computer and it will download as long as you have it running. RSS feeds can also be shared with friends and family.

If all this sounds a bit confusing, you can check out the Mininova blog for a detailed walkthrough of how to use the new function.

We’re big fans of Mininova. There are links to heaps of free music downloads through the service and the library of links is pretty comprehensive. It’s good to see Mininova not sitting on its hands and actually adding to its service. We welcome change.

7digital.com, an online digital music store, has said that sales of DRM-free music from major record labels such as EMI and Warner have surged by about 300% since they were first introduced.

7digital.com now plays second fiddle in the UK only to Apple’s iTunes store. The store for legal music downloads saw sales for the year ending in June skyrocket 300%. DRM-free MP3s are the future of music and have proved infinitely more popular than restricted WMA files.

Many Internet users aren’t keen on Apple’s AAC files and so are turning to stores such as 7digital.com for their music downloads.

About 80% of the legal music downloads available in the 7digital.com store are DRM-free. MP3 downloads are perhaps the future of the music industry and, let’s face it, restricted music files are nothing but a pain in the ass.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has come under fire after the announcement that it is teaming up with Virgin Media to send warning letters to people who use filesharing services, such as Ares.

There was a BBC article about the issue that suggested that Virgin Media is more concerned about the music industry than it is about its customers. The article went on to say that such a move only really highlights the fact that Virgin is monitoring its customers’ Internet usage.

A rep from BPI responded to the BBC article by saying that action must be taken against illegal music downloading in order for licensed music services to make any money.

It’s a typical case of the filesharing community versus the music industry. The only difference here is that the filesharing community is represented by someone in a powerful position, namely a BBC author.

We had no idea that Fergal “Teenage Kicks” Sharkey had a blog, but he does, over at the Guardian website. Fantastic. In his latest post, Sharkey says that a recent survey of 14-to-24-year-olds in the UK revealed that 63% use filesharing services to download music.

Those surveyed said that they love music and that they do still like CDs. More than 80% who use filesharing services said they would be interested in legal filesharing services.

Even if such a filesharing service were created, more than half of those surveyed said they would still buy CDs. Fergal Sharkey sees the solution to all of this in subscription-based filesharing models. He may have a point here.

Fergal Sharkey seems to be one of a select group of musicians in tune with the way the music industry is heading. It’s refreshing to read a balanced and insightful opinion on filesharing and music downloads from someone who has a powerful voice.

Good job, Fergal.

Comcast’s recent attempts at reconciliation with the filesharing crowd have been hindered somewhat this week after three fresh lawsuits were filed against the company. This time, the lawsuits allege that Comcast deliberately misled customers by advertising completely unrestricted access to all of the Internet.

This is the latest in a series of complaints against Comcast, which has been accused of blocking traffic to BitTorrent services. It was confirmed that Comcast had been restricting BitTorrent traffic, but then after continually denying the allegations, Comcast came out and announced that it was partnering up with BitTorrent to ensure that traffic to BitTorrent was not hampered.

The latest complaints are attacking Comcast for not outlining that it would meddle with any traffic and not informing customers of its actions. The customers who have filed the complaints basically think that they paid for a service that wasn’t delivered.

We’ll keep you updated with case as we hear more about it.