Label:Life

MusicGiants Inc. will launch a new music download service on Wednesday hoping to stand out from the crowded digital audio market by appealing to high-end at-home listeners, the company said.

“We’re highly focused on home audio. There’s a number of ways to get portable music and that market’s pretty full right now. We’re just going down a whole different road,” Scott Bahneman, CEO of closely held MusicGiants, told Reuters.

MusicGiants said it reached licensing deals with all the major music labels including EMI Group, Sony/BMG, Vivendi Universal and Warner Music Group for its commercial download service, which it says is the first to offer music files in Microsoft Corp’s Windows Media Audio “lossless” format.

Lossless files have up to 7 times the sound quality of music files on other commercial music services, it said.

More@reuters

The music industry, shaken by decreasing CD sales, is turning to a high-tech and legal version of the old “bootleg” concept of concert recordings.

The Instant Live unit of Clear Channel Entertainment’s Music Group, part of the Clear Channel Communications conglomerate, is one of the commercial ventures that have been experimenting with making instantly available CDs of live concerts, by mixing recordings on the spot and selling them to club-goers as they exit concerts. On Monday, Universal Music Group and Instant Live announced a partnership, and the concept of “instant bootlegs” is taking another step.

More@pcworld

LOS ANGELES – Virgin Records said Tuesday it would release the Rolling Stones’ latest album on a new encrypted flash memory card that will allow users to preview and buy locked tracks from four of the veteran rockers’ previous albums.

The memory card, dubbed Gruvi, is manufactured by Sunnyvale, Calif.based SanDisk Corp., and will be available in November at select U.S. stores for $39.95, SanDisk and the label said in a statement.

More@yahoo

Warning: This article contains language which younger readers are advised to avoid.

Radio 1 has been rapped for a foul-mouthed tirade on an early evening broadcast.

At the start of Most Punk, broadcast at 7pm on a Thursday night in June, show host Zane Lowe welcomed listeners with: “Hello ladies, boys and girls, I thought that you might like to know – in the spirit of punk rock – the following show includes, what we often refer to as language. So if, like me, you are offended by such words and phrases as: arse; bollocks; tit, wank; tit-wank; rotter; mother licker; mother sucker; mother fucker; twat; minge juice; bottler and of course bastard – then you might wish to turn over, or fuck off – thank you.”

Two listeners complained to Ofcom over the incident. The BBC maintained that the programme was preceded by a warning and that the “carefully considered” clip was designed to be “thought-provoking”.

More@digitalspy

Following the recent revelation that Public Enemy producer and all-round Hip Hop icon Hank Shocklee will be interviewing former TV presenter and self-proclaimed ‘Son of God’ David Icke on the subject of ‘The Spritual Qualities of Sound & Frequencie’ , the organizers of In The City 2005 can now reveal that another of the event’s keynote speakers, Tommy Silverman – CEO and founder of legendary Hip Hop label Tommy Boy Records – will also be taking a somewhat, ahem, unusual approach to his presentation.

Using mediums as part of a live presentation Mr Silverman aims to demonstrate to those attending how it is possible to divine whether a record is a hit or not by accessing the spirit world. He believes that a spiritual medium is just as good, if not better a technique for spotting a hit record than any other. So that’s what’s going to happen. Spiritual mediums will work with Tom as they listen to a record or two. The readings are real, the clairvoyance is accurate and if their akashic records can be accessed we may even find out which bands John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix are in currently….

More@itc2005

[The study of sound frequencies manifested physically is bonkers. Do a google for “cymatics”]

The Nokia 3250, Nokia’s newest music phone, grabbed the spotlight of Nokia Trends, an electronic music festival that took place in Berlin, Germany this weekend. This unique design twists to transform a traditional phone keypad into dedicated music keys. The Nokia 3250 stores up to 1 Gigabyte (750 songs) of high quality music and offers 10 hours of music play. In addition, consumers can take advantage of the Nokia 3250’s two-megapixel camera and smartphone capabilities. The triband GSM 900/1800/1900 model is expected to start shipping in the first quarter 2006 with an estimated retail price of 350 EUR before subsidies or taxes.

By twisting the Nokia 3250 keypad 180 degrees, consumers can toggle between the music controls and the traditional phone keypad. The music player of the Nokia 3250 supports a wide array of digital music formats such as MP3, WMA, M4A and AAC, making it easy to load and transfer music. Additionally, songs can be downloaded over-the-air while on the go and favourite songs can be set as ringtones.

More@Nokia

Tired of the politics attached to being part of a major label, Hanson started its own label and released an independent album, Underneath, in April of 2004.

Before the album’s release, the three brothers proclaimed that if this became a success, other artists would approach them in envy, hoping to find out how they thrived without being part of a major.

Almost a year and a half later, they are immensely satisfied. The album debuted at number one on the independent charts and 25 on Billboard, and has allowed them to tour across the world, something they hadn’t done in almost four years, since their previous release.

More@Andpop

The gloves are off in the battle between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and the music industry over the price of downloaded songs.

On Thursday, one of the music industry’s highest-profile executives responded publicly to Mr. Jobs’ charges, made earlier in the week, that they were “greedy” when they requested a price hike for downloaded songs.

At an investors’ conference in New York, Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. said the price of downloaded songs should vary depending on the popularity of the songs and the artists. He called Apple’s across-the-board $0.99-per-song charge unfair.

“There’s no content that I know of that does not have variable pricing,” said Mr. Bronfman at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia investor conference. “Not all songs are created equal—not all time periods are created equal. We want, and will insist upon having, variable pricing.”

More@Redherring

Warner Music Group Corp. said Monday it has licensed Viacom Inc.’s MTV Networks to use its recording artists’ music videos for creating wireless programming on mobile phones and other gadgets.

MTV Networks, which includes music video cable channels MTV, VH1 and CMT, already offers wireless video content based on the networks’ original slate of shows, but the multiyear deal with Warner marks the first time the networks have been cleared to incorporate music videos in their wireless offerings, said Van Toffler, president of MTV Networks Music Group and LOGO.

The agreement is the latest example of how record labels, battling declining CD sales in recent years, are hoping to squeeze new revenues from the emerging mobile music market, which has seen sales of ringtones and other short-form audio content grow steadily in recent years.

More@Businessweek

UK record companies’ trade association BPI today launched two new education and awareness initiatives in its battle against illegal filesharing.

A new copyright guide will take the anti-piracy message to the IT managers of the UK’s biggest companies and public sector organisations.

Meanwhile the BPI is also supporting a new software program which helps internet users identify whether their computer contains software which can be used for illegal filesharing and helps them audit the music and video content on their computers. (more…)