Music Industry join forces to stop free downloads in China
First we had Napster giving away free music, then we had bands like Nine Inch Nails and Kutless give away free music, but it looks like China has been doing this all along. Forbes magazine is reporting that the music industry is trying to put a face on online piracy in China.
Leading international and Chinese record companies joined hands yesterday to announce an unprecedented alliance to take on baidu.com, (looks like Google.com) China’s dominant search engine. The industry alliance blames baidu.com for facilitating more than half of the digital music piracy in China (the world’s largest Internet market by number of users) and by one estimate as much as 80%. International heavyweights like Universal Music, EMI and Warner-Chappell are joining in the fight. Read more
Metallica + Warner Brothers = Big bucket o’ fail
Note: Some of the links in this story go to sites that may use… salty language. Consider yourself warned.
So, the internet has a long, elephantine, memory. Now, the guys in Metallica and their label are finding out just how long that memory can be. It appears that Lars and the boys want to cash in on some of the success of other visionaries (Radiohead and NIN) and hop on the digital download bandwagon. The biggest problem is (Aside from the fact that they seem to have forgotten the part where they ticked off pretty much everyone at the time) that they’re doing it WRONG!
Never mind what I think of Metallica or their music, I’m not getting into that here… this is about the business decisions the band is making, pure and simple. Read more
FREE Downhere “Wide Eyed And Mystified” download
We’ve quickly become BIG fans of Downhere and now you’ll have your chance to become a fan too. Their record company Centricity Music has partnered with musicchristian.com to offer a free download of “Wide Eyed And Mystified” during the month of June.
The 13 musically diverse songs that comprise “Wide-Eyed And Mystified” have, as their unifying center, not only a hard-won sonic identity that comes through the band’s years of playing as a unit, but a deeper cohesion drawn from the web of relationships. Rooted in love for Christ, this connection extends from the band to the circle of people closest to them, and outward to the hundreds of churches they serve each year in ministry. Read more
Psssst… Free music from Kutless
Hey! Free (as in speech) music available for you, just head over to http://www.exclusivekutless.com/ and you can download The Feeling, the latest from the upcoming disc To Know That You’re Alive, which is set to drop on June 24th. So, go get it already!
Oh, and here’s a video… enjoy.
Apparently, being on a label really slowed Trent Reznor down
For the second time in as many months, Trent Reznor, Mr. Nine Inch Nails (NIN) himself, has decided to grace the internet with, wait for it…. free music. As Sterogum put it, He just can’t stop giving stuff away. His new compilation, as we can’t really call them discs anymore when they’re a bunch of tracks you download and calling it a zip file just doesn’t seem right, called The Slip is a full length work of 10 songs.
Continuing to buck the system after the wildly successful (financially anyway) Ghosts project, Trent released this compilation as a way to say Thank You to all his fans. Not a bad way to say thanks, actually, and since there’s a tour planned, I’m sure it’ll put a few more butts in seats for him down the road as well.
From Trent: Read more
How much would you pay for free music?
Jim Griffin, Warner Brothers new web strategist is either a really, really smart man, or an escapee from the asylum. His proposal, in a nutshell, is to charge everyone with an Internet account $5.00 per month as a music tax. (Yea, I know, it’s not really a tax because the government isn’t collecting it, but it’s still a tax - You’ll see why below).
