Adam Curry, most famous for his run as an MTV veejay a few years back, described how he prepares his radio program. He lives in The Netherlands and has a weekly show on a popular station. The only songs that get played are ones he can get through Morpheus. On the one hand, the record labels get nothing from him downloading the songs that way. On the other, the songwriters do get royalties because he downloads them with the express purpose of playing them on the radio.
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Longbets.com is a novel site that allows people to bet on happenings a few years or a few decades away. The amount of the bet goes to the charity of the winner’s choice. A number of industry visionaries have placed the first few bets.
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I had been a fan of the “Bush Is Dumb” page that I had found previously on Google. Now, someone else has kept this idea going with DubyaSpeak.com, a nice file of various George W. Bush quotes. Bush does have a unique sense for the English language.
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Slashdot gave a double dose of music goodness today, including a bunch of links to separate music stories. Especially interesting is the mention of Wilco, who released their new album on the Net (for free!) six months in advance of the CD’s release.
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An Indian company is offering music for download at Rs. 10 per song, which is about 20 cents. Something to understand is that 20 cents is more to them than it is to us. However, if the major labels were to offer ddownloads for $1 a song, you’d probably still get a lot of takers. That is assuming (probably wrongly) that they are offering the music in listener friendly formats.
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Netscape co-founder (currently at Loudcloud) spoke to the National Association of Broadcasters about how copy protection won’t work for digital media. I’d be curious to know how the NAB received these words, but I believe they are absolutely true and that the truth of it will come out within a few years.
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The RIAA is now taking on the role that the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has for software. It has fined a company $1 million for having MP3 files on a server that employees were sharing.
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A Texas TV station has put their Does It Work? series of articles online describing their experiences with various “As Seen On TV” products. All of the usual suspects, Oxi Clean, Epil Stop, etc. are there with test results.
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Microsoft is looking to protect audio files on portable players. Nobody learned anything from the software copy protection era of the late 80s. People don’t want that crap, as the market will likely show in a few years.
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The Hollywood Reporter writes about copy protection on Celine Dion’s new CD which can cause computers to crash. To Sony’s credit, the CD is apparently clearly labeled as not working in computers. I’m really not sure what they think they’re accomplishing with this, other than cheesing off a lot of customers.
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