News

Sort By: Post DateTitle Publish Date

Download Duels

Stereophile readers may wonder why we regularly report on a low-fi music distribution service like iTunes. The reason is simple: What becomes popular in the mass market today, is what audiophiles will have to squeeze high-end music out of tomorrow.

Download War Far From Over

It has been an interesting week on the download battlefront. On Friday, online file-sharing service BearShare announced that it was shutting down its business. The P2P company, along with its operators Free Peers, Inc., agreed to the terms of a $30 million settlement with the recording industry. As part of the settlement, Free Peers agreed not to start any other unlicensed music services, and the company has agreed to sell BearShare's technology, rights, domain name, and user data to iMesh, Inc.

Downloading Increases

Downloading audio files, whether through a paid music service or not, continues to grow as a means to accumulate music in the US. According to a recent Ipsos-Insight study, as of April 2003, nearly one-third of the general US population aged 12 or older has downloaded a music or MP3 file from the Internet. This translates into roughly 65 million downloaders.

Downloads Get Respect

Dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, the music industry may finally be settling into an uneasy acceptance that its market and business model have changed. Only two months after the successful launch of Apple's iTunes Music Store, Billboardhttp://www.billboard.com">Billboard; magazine announced that it would begin accounting for downloads in its weekly music rankings.

Downloads Up, CD Sales Down among College Students

Music sales over the past two years have increased almost everywhere except near college campuses, according to a recent study undertaken by Reciprocal">http://www.reciprocal.com/">Reciprocal, Inc., a digital-rights management company. The first quarter of 2000 showed a 12% rise in overall music sales compared to the same period in 1998—except at stores located within five miles of a college campus. Reciprocal reached its conclusions based on figures supplied by sales-tracking organization Soundscan">http://wallofsound.go.com/charts/index.html/">Soundscan, Inc.

Downtown Music Gallery Offers Offbeat Discs

The musical road less traveled leads to places like New York's Downtown">http://www.dtmgallery.com/">Downtown Music Gallery. If your taste in music lies somewhere outside the marketing-demographic bell curve, DTMG has tunes for you: live tunes, recorded tunes, strange tunes, bargain tunes. There's something for almost everyone at recently launched www.dtmgallery.com---from Classical to Klezmer to Progressive Jazz to World Music to Absolutely Uncategorizable.

Dr. John at HE2006

The Home Entertainment 2006 Show, June 1–4, 2006 in Los Angeles at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel, has announced a special benefit concert to support the Elf Foundation, a non-profit charity that creates Rooms of Magic—private entertainment theaters in children's hospitals that bring the enchantment of uplifting music and film to seriously ill children around the country. A portion of the concert admission will go to the Elf Foundation to support its wonderful work.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement