We posted the following comment over at the Radio Marketing Nexus blog in response to their post calling us Haters of Radio:
music
Radio Self-Fulfills Self-Aggrandizing Prophecy
By 3.27.06
- “A new survey from radio marketers Mercury asked 1,000 people, if a new iPod and an HD Radio receiver were the same price, which would they prefer. As seen in the graphs… the majority chose HD Radio, citing that a radio is simply easier to use than an iPod.”
YouTube Scares the Dickies off of Record Industries
By 3.24.06
The music industry is getting ready to work itself into a lather over the salvation for modern human society, YouTube.
Conquer Amazon.com Pricenoia
By 3.23.06
Michelle Slatalla suffers from a shopping disease. It’s called pricenoia. The characteristic symptom is a pang of doubt every time she’s about to press Click-to-Buy on Amazon.com:
Record Industry Should Throw Piracy a Party
By 3.23.06
Surprise! Downloading doesn’t hurt record sales. Double Surprise! The information comes from a study commissioned by the record industry (albeit, Canadian).
Study Finds File Sharing Is Good For Music Industry
By 3.20.06
The Canadian Record Industry association have done some research and concluded that file sharers are great for business. According to their study, file sharers buy more music than the average customer and try the vast majority of songs they eventually buy.
More Free: Free iTunes Blog
By 3.15.06
Like we said earlier today, we absolutely love free. Complaints start when we start paying, when we enter a contract with a company and — time and time again, almost invariably — they forget about our contracts and start lumping us up in with the faceless aggregate. But there’s no lapsed service, no patronizing Customer Service exchanges when things are free — free is consumerist utopia.
All the Free iTunes Songs You Can Stuff in Your Pants
By 3.3.06
Get one free song from the iTunes store. Repeat over and over to stock up your library. Get on it now because who knows how long it will last.
DOJ Smacks Subpoenas Down On Music Industry
By 3.3.06
Surprise, surprise. The Department of Justice has started issuing subpoenas against the music industry, including Sony BMG and Warner, for price fixing and collusion. Since it’s a sloppy Reuters brief we’re linking to here, mainly consisting of a list of the companies involved, here’s a blockquote with the summary gyst:
Best-Buy and Indie Labels Sucker-Punch Small Record Stores
By 2.23.06
pop record shops, with a coterie of indie labels as accomplices…
Artistshare Allows Customers To Fund Musical Process
By 2.9.06
If the RIAA is wondering if there’s an alternative to suing every teenager or credulous granny who even twitches in the direction of an mpeg codec, they should check out Artistshare. Artistshare is a cool alternative music business model in which fans support the creative process of musicians financially, in exchange for an inside view of the artistic process, a personal connection with the musician, a bunch of cool swag and the satisfaction of allowing an artist to fulfill their vision without bowing to the arbitrary whims of record industry sleaze cats.
SonySuit.com Covers Sony Rootkit Settlement Details
By 2.7.06
Just in case you purchased a Sony CD “protected” by the rootkit DRM and want to claim your $7.50 worth of mp3s, SonySuit.com has all the available details on registering to take part. We’re still particularly interested in the precedent being set here by Sony: they have gone on record stating that $7.50 is the price of two full albums of digital music. And a few mp3s to have your computer’s security compromised still seems like a pretty crappy deal. But it’s better than nothing and every person taking part in the class action suit is helping send a message to companies trying to implement similarly sleazy DRM schemes. So go check it out, if you’ve still got that Celine Dion receipt in your wallet.
Consumers Speak: Half.com Reseller Issues
By 1.10.06
Reader Paul writes with this story of buying from a third-party through Half.com:
I’ve had no bad experiences buying from Half.com in the past, so when I spotted a great deal on two rare CDs I’ve been coveting, right in time for a nice birthday present to myself, I pounced. I noticed that the seller, tenone, was here in my home town, so first I emailed him/her to ask if I could pick up the CDs in person to save on shipping. When there was no response after a day or so, I just coughed up the postage and placed the order online anyway. He/she was a Power Seller or whatever. That was mid-October.
Capitol Records Cripples Coldplay CD with DRM
By 1.4.06
Coldplay’s latest CD, X&Y, has been hobbled by so much DRM that a lawyer would practically have to lick the monolith at the end of 2001 to be able to figure out how someone could legally play it. This time, though, it’s Capitol Records, as Sony BMG are still on Spyware Settlement Siesta.
Serial Killers of Suing: How the RIAA Finds Its Victims
By 12.30.05
There’s a fascinating story over on p2pnet describing exactly the legal process the RIAA is using to blanket sue tens of thousands of people.
Ear Bud Headphones Causing Deafness
By 12.29.05
Apparently, ear bud style headphones are causing people in their early twenties to suffer the sort of hearing impairment that typically afflicts codgery octogenarians with bronze hearing conches sticking out of their ears.
Gray Tuesday: Green Day Mash Ups for Free
By 12.13.05
Bundled rootkits and spyware are just the latest valid reason to stop buying music CDs from big labels, but they still don’t trump the primary: No better value than free. But ignoring that, here’s another: Record companies want to make not-for-profit remixes of music illegal. We’re as up in armchairs about that as anybody, but we still think our first colon-infested sentence has more punch, because free trumps all.
