napster

Rhapsody completes acquisition of the music service, which in a former iteration frustrated the music industry and helped change the landscape of digital music.

Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Digital Media.

With so much attention paid to the new generation of music subscription offerings, Spotify, Rdio and Mog, it appears that the last generation, Napster and Rhapsody, decided the best course of action was to join forces in bitterness at the fact no one mentions either of them any more.

The Gnutella-based download client LimeWire has ceased all its operations after a U.S. federal judge granted a request from the RIAA.

Limewire was ordered to disable all functionalities in the current application to prevent users from sharing copyrighted material.

The verdict is expected to have an unprecedented impact on the P2P file-sharing landscape.

A few months ago the RIAA asked a New York District Court to shut down the world’s most installed file-sharing application, LimeWire.

Guardian: "Consider the remarkable statement from Alanis Morissette's attorney at the Future of Music Conference: 97% of the artists signed to a major label before Napster earned $600 or less a year from it."

The file-sharing, copyright and piracy debate continues to burn just as aggressively today as it did with the dawn of Napster.

When compared to the seemingly endless wars of words over religion, however, it's only just begun, but the opposing sides in both debates seem equally polarized.

Well, it looks like Hollywood is going to keep betting against basic economics. A new report has come out suggesting that the latest generation of kids are perfectly happy to pay for digital content.

The report suggests that it's just the slightly older generation -- "the Napster generation" -- that isn't interested in paying for content.

We still can't quite understand Hollywood's crusade against RealNetworks over its RealDVD offering. The software presented a way for DVD owners to backup their DVDs.

It didn't allow for distribution -- unlike pretty much every other ripping software. In fact, Real basically put a new DRM around each backup copy.

Personally, this seemed to make the product less useful, but the MPAA still sued RealNetworks for daring to let people backup their movies, and amazingly won nearly every aspect of the lawsuit.

David Levine has a post up looking at Metallica's revenue streams last year.

Apparently, the band made the vast majority of its money from concert revenue -- bringing in $22.8 million. It made $1.6 million from album sales.

As Levine notes:

Hmmm...think it would make a lot of difference to the world if they lost the $1.6 million from the albums?

Brendan Scott’s Weblog: "Don Dodge, a former VP of product development at Napster maps out what happened to the company, how they pleaded with the music industry to provide a better solution to them ... and how the music industry had put itself in such a position as to be literally unable to act in its own best interests, or the interests of its artists."

Wired: "A small group of programmers plans to breathe new life into the Napster-spawned OpenNap protocol that was designed to help dejected music fans share files using similar technology after the official Napster servers blinked off."