Early on quite a few glitches seemed to mark many consumers' experience with iTunes Plus files. In order to access the iTunes Plus…
search
On May 30, Apple officially launched iTunes Plus, billed as "DRM-free music tracks featuring high-quality 256kbps AAC encoding for audio quality virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings." The initial material available from the iTunes Plus section of the iTunes Media Store is, for the moment, limited to EMI artists, although other labels have announced pending deals with Apple. The "improved" songs sell for $1.29 rather than the standard 99¢.
ArkivMusic, one of the Web's leading sources for classical music recordings, has struck a deal that enables them to release on their own reissue label, ArkivCD, out-of-print titles from the extensive catalogues of EMI Classics, Virgin Classics, and Angel Records. The reissues are available "on demand," copied from actual out-of-print CD releases (not master tapes) without compression or enhancement, and are often accompanied by copies of the original liner notes.
Thomas Evered, General Manager and Senior Vice President of EMI Classics/Angel Records, heads the conglomerate's classical…
We were taking our morning constitutional around the Interwebs one day last week when we happened upon an article on Timesonline titled "Why Music Really Is Getting Louder". Oh boy, we thought, a mainstream outlet is catching on to the whole issue of dynamic compression—a subject we have inveighed against repeatedly over the years. (JA first preached that particular sermon back in 1999.)
But when we actually read the article by Adam Sherwin, "media consultant," we happened upon a sentence so ill-informed that our eyebrows nearly zoomed through our hairline (well, if we had a hairline,…
Scott Bahneman, CEO of MusicGiants, called earlier this week to announce what he called big news. "Actually," Bahneman said, "we're not going to issue an official press release—yet—but MusicGiants is going to offer Windows Media Audio (WMA) lossless music downloads without DRM.
"We'll do a press release when the parties we're working with are ready to make announcements, but our first DRM-free title will be Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full. Our HD releases aren't 256kbps files, they truly are 'true CD quality' at almost four times that bandwidth—up to 1100kbps."
You've always…
In his primer this week on compression, Wes Phillips mentions the now-ubiquitous use of "louderization" in CD production, which fills in the musical valleys and flattens the expressionistic hills to make a recording sound uniformly loud. Stereophile editor John Atkinson has long railed against this practice, so when Bob Reina asked John to record his new jazz quartet, Attention Screen, John felt that this would be the opportunity to put his money where his mouth was. He would record the band, which mixes electric instruments—guitar and bass guitar—with acoustic—piano and drums—as though it…
Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, Inc filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on June 11. The move was not entirely unexpected, since the company had indicated in May that it might be forced to file if it could not access additional funding.
A disappointing Q4 2006 performance, exacerbated by flat-screen price wars during the Christmas season (a period when Tweeter's share price dropped 32%), damaged the company, which had begun reorganizing the previous year. In March the company announced 650 layoffs (starting with 70 executive positions) and closed 49 stores—stores that were…
On June 15, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), US Chamber of Commerce, and the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy (CACP) announced an ambitious agenda to convince Congress and the White House to "transform the enforcement of U.S. intellectual property rights laws."
"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton said. "Add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft to fraud, to burglary, bank robbing, all of it costs the…
The 10th annual The Home Entertainment Show (T.H.E. Show), which will run January 7–10, 2008, concurrent with the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), has expanded its exhibit space to include both the completely renovated Alexis Park Resort Hotel and its neighbor, the St. Tropez Hotel. By using both venues, T.H.E. Show, in effect, throws down the gauntlet to CES, which last year abandoned its traditional high-end audio home at the Alexis Park and moved High-Performance Audio to the Venetian Hotel.
"We're building something special here," Richard Beers, president of T.H.E. Show, told…
When Fred Kaplan made his Stereophile debut with his review of the Rogue Audio Atlas power amplifier last March, our scheme was also to publish his writings on the music that fuels his soul, jazz. Starting this past weekend, you can find Fred's thoughts on recordings, concerts, musicians, and the music at http://blog.stereophile.com/fredkaplan.
A near neighbor of mine in Brooklyn, Fred's pedigree as a writer on audio is wide and deep: He was an audio reviewer and jazz critic for The Abso!ute Sound from 1984 to 2006, with something in every issue except for the three years (1992–95) when…
According to market research company NPD Group, in the first quarter of 2007, Apple's iTunes Store has overtaken Amazon.com and Target to become the US's third largest music retailer with 9.8% of all music sales. Apple counts 12 track sales as equivalent to one CD sale, meaning that the company is responsible for nearly 21 million of the quarter's 212 million CD sales.
Wal-Mart, with 15.8% market share, and Best Buy, with 13.8%, were the largest and second-largest music retailers this quarter. What's fascinating about these results is that none of these outlets represents what would have…