I Own My Music

We were hoping and praying it wouldn’t happen, but it did. Keane’s experiment to offer one of the band’s tracks for free music download has proved to be a success. Hot on heels of Coldplay, who did the exact same thing and were hot on the heels of Nine Inch Nails, who were hot on the heels of Radiohead… where were we? Ah yes, Keane came up with the novel idea of offering one of their songs for href=”http://www.aresvista.com/news/jammie-thomas-filesharing-case-may-be-thrown-out/”>free music download.

Normally this wouldn’t …

Shifting the emphasis from students to universities, it’s come out that schools and unis in America could lose funding if they do not police their students in an attempt to crackdown on filesharing and downloading copyrighted material.

The US Senate and House of Representatives announced that funding will be cut to institutions that the entertainment industry claims are not doing their part in supplying the names and ads of students suspected of downloading copyright material.

This is BS because it gives the music industry …

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 …

There has been a tonne of pressure put on UK ISPs recently with regards to filesharing and cracking down on illegal music downloads. As if all the negative publicity wasn’t enough, it has now been revealed that the top three ISPs in the UK are responsible for 65% of the UK’s filesharing.

There are about six million people in the UK who partake in filesharing activities. The three main ISPs in question are Virgin Media, BT and the Carphone Warehouse. This news comes …

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 …

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! …

One filesharing user being sued by the RIAA has turned the system on its head by admitting to the charges presented, only to then challenge those very same laws that have led to her being charged.

Denise Barker stands accused of sharing the unholy sum of eight songs on filesharing network Kazaa. If found guilty, she could be fined up to $1.2 million. We hope they are good songs to warrant such a high price tag.

Denise took the huge risk of not settling out …

More filesharing news related to the Dark Knight today. Warner Bros somehow managed to keep the Dark Knight off filesharing networks for 38 hours after the movie’s release. Though that may not seem like a huge amount of time, Warner Bros says it was enough to protect ticket sales on the first week of the movie’s launch.

With the movie doing so well over its opening weekend, you have to think there’s some truth to this. By delaying the movie being leaked onto filesharing …

Following on from Virgin teaming up with the BPI to bother its subscribers with letters warning them for using filesharing services to get illegal music downloads, six more ISPs have joined up with the UK government and will send 1,000 letter a week to filesharing subscribers.

The ISPs will also help to develop and promote legal music downloads. There’s no word on exactly what these letters will say and what implications receiving one might have.

It may be that this is the first step towards …

Anyone heard of BuckCherry? We certainly haven’t. Despite having a really rubbish name for a band, BuckCherry are apparently quite popular, so much so a track from their latest album recently leaked onto BitTorrent.

That’s one track, not even the whole album. BuckCherry are so distraught that one of their tracks has been released to millions of people that they’ve issued a press release through their record company. The track “Too Drunk…” from their forthcoming album Black Butterfly was leaked before its …