Search Results for: House Of Protection

It has finally come to this: labels are simply giving their music away. A new Web site named SpiralFrog.com allows visitors – with label approval – to download music free of charge. It launched Monday in the U.S. and Canada after a beta-testing period. The fine site features more than 800,000 tracks and 3,500 music videos, and promises hundreds of thousands more soon. It makes money through advertising, rather than by the 99-cent downloads popularized by Apple’s iTunes. The service, founded by Joe Mohen, pays record companies part of its advertising revenue. Thus far, Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, the… Read more »

Some of the world’s biggest names in music were all about Saving Our Selves this weekend. SOS, of course, referring to the campaign being touted Saturday across the globe at the seven-continent, 24-hour Live Earth concert extravaganza, a worldwide shout-out to individuals, political leaders, corporations and every other entity capable of helping put a stop to the environmental scourge that is global warming. In a partnership with Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection and other U.S.-based and international organizations, Live 8 executive producer Kevin Wall put together a bill that included the Police, Madonna, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica,… Read more »

With freedom comes responsibility. While fans and some critics cheered iTunes’ Friday roll-out of iTunes Plus – which offers songs from the EMI catalog sans digital rights management but at a premium price – you can bet that Apple wouldn’t give up DRM without getting something in return, and that something is information about you. Just days after the new downloads became available on iTunes, tech bloggers began furiously jumping on what seemed like a security system that embeds the customer’s name and Apple I.D./e-mail address in the purchased tracks. While Apple deferred comment on the matter, experts downplayed the… Read more »

Every day, the roughly one million people who visit the iTunes Store home page are presented with several dozen albums, TV shows and movie downloads to consider buying — out of the four million such goods the Apple site offers. This prime promotion is analogous to a CD being displayed at the checkout stands of all 940 Best Buy stores or featured on the front page of Target’s ad circular. How do bands get these boosts? Who decides whether Arcade Fire is plugged at the top of the iTunes site — or whether Nickelback gets no mention? Apple has jettisoned… Read more »

Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl flash lasted less than three seconds, but the impact continues to ripple through Viacom, the media giant that broadcast the game. Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, right-wing radio commentators and outraged citizens are calling for stricter decency standards – and the artists and executives who make a living from edgy music, performances and videos are in retreat. MTV in particular, which produced the Super Bowl halftime show, is in the midst of a wide-scale re-evaluation of its musical, news and dramatic content. Within a week of the game, MTV – no stranger to criticism, most recently… Read more »

Pop legend Michael Jackson on Monday slammed a new bill that seeks prison time for file-swappers, arguing that music fans are the ones who drive the success of the music industry. “I am speechless about the idea of putting music fans in jail for downloading music. It is wrong to illegally download, but the answer cannot be jail,” Jackson said in response to legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives Wednesday by John Conyers (D.-Mich.) and Howard Berman (D.-Calif.) that would make illegal file swapping a felony. The Authors, Consumer and Computer Owners Protection and Security Act of 2003… Read more »

Nearly two years after it sued Napster into submission, the recording industry has discovered it’s not enough to try to beat Internet music purveyors whose digital distribution techniques allow copyright violations. It also has to join them. To discourage piracy, the multibillion-dollar industry has in recent months moved beyond lawsuits against file-swapping services. It has employed hacker tactics to flood such sites with bogus files and even taken to suing students who created mini-Napsters on college networks. At the same time, however, the music labels have finally embraced the very online distribution model many had long resisted, one that analysts… Read more »

Hollywood and Silicon Valley carried their battle over Internet piracy to Capitol Hill on Thursday, debating the need for technology to prevent the illegal trading of movies and television shows online. The entertainment industry told lawmakers that without copy protection the threat of extensive piracy will force the industry to move its best programming to pay services such as cable and satellite TV. “Over-the-air television as we know it today will be a thing of the past,” said Fritz Attaway, an executive vice president with the Motion Picture Association of America. He testified before the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on… Read more »

Six retail record store chains ? hurting from competition from CD burning, online music and large discount stores ? are teaming to offer consumers digital music downloads in their stores and over the Internet. The stores have formed a joint venture called Echo that will provide technology and allow them to offer individual tracks for downloading to portable devices and computers. The stores are Best Buy, Tower Records, Virgin Entertainment Group, Wherehouse Music, Hastings Entertainment Inc. and Trans World Entertainment Corp., operator of FYE, Strawberries and Coconuts stores. “We’re trying to make digital music work in a mass market way,… Read more »

“The Osbournes” becomes a reality show in the bleakest sense this season, as Ozzy and the kids cope with matriarch Sharon Osbourne’s colon cancer. Yet as the second batch of episodes begins Tuesday, MTV also is trying to maintain the wackiness that made the series the network’s biggest hit. The heavy-metal rocker, his wife and two of their three children are very different people than they were when they opened their home to us a year ago – and opened the floodgates to a slew of copycats. They still spew plenty of profanities for the censors to bleep out. And… Read more »