PUBLIC MARKS from multilinko with tag music

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson has an excellent writeup on the rise of eMusic and how they're suceeding despite their unwillingness to hop on the DRM bandwagon.

Canadian musicians are rising up against p2p lawsuits, statutory damages, DRM and anti-circumvention legislation. They've started a new group called the Canadian Music Creators Coalition.

Digital Rights Management, to repeat my argument, is not about stopping piracy, but about shutting down fair use. The aim of shutting down fair use is simple: the copyright owners want to nickel and dime users.

AllofMP3 has released a beta of its latest desktop music library and download tool allTunes. Although the name is an obvious play on iTunes, those farmiliar with AllOFMP3 will know that they are infamous for extremely cheap, high quality and quasi-legal music downloads on the web. allTunes is a windows desktop or smartphone interface to the AllOFMP3 library, allowing users to find and download high quality music easily.

eMusic, the digital music distribution service with a focus on independent fans and labels, announced Tuesday a number of exclusive new personalization features for its users. ... ChoiceStream technology uses a specific algorithm that combines user ratings and downloads with the attributes of music to make recommendations based on prior choices, according to David Pakman, president and CEO of eMusic.

I wrote an article about living without the music industry a month ago. In this article I added some good sites that offered free musik downloads. Lots of people replied to this article and added more sites that they used to get free music. Free, meaning free of charges and free to download without breaking the law.

Buying and using digital music is a far from easy decision today - there are various competing and incompatible formats, stores and players out there in the market, primarily Apple (AAC + iTunes + iPod), Windows (WMA + various stores + WMA-compatible players), and Sony (Atrac3 + Connect.com + Walkman). How do you then ensure that the music and player you buy today will not be incompatible with your player, online store or the OS?

DesignTechnica has a comparison of the leading online music stores. With the variety of services available they only concentrated on several top ones. Conclusion? 'If you simply want to download music from the charts, then Yahoo and Wal-Mart are your cheapest options. For your MP3 player, there are several options, with Yahoo the best of all. If you're an iPod owner... then you're stuck with iTunes.'

TORONTO (CP) - The Canadian Recording Industry Association is calling on Ottawa to make sure Canada's copyright law is up to par after an Australian court ruled popular file-swapping network Kazaa was illegal. "The law that is currently on the books - that's enforced - is so antiquated that the net result has been, (that) despite all of our best efforts, Canada's become a piracy haven," association president Graham Henderson said in an interview Monday. "We have lobbied for years . . . to get those laws up to date so we're in line with everyone in the world - and I mean everyone else."

With the recent launch of Yahoo's music store, the options for listening to and purchasing digital music got even more interesting. Yahoo offers cut-rate pricing, but how does it stack up to other services? Here's a guide.

Canadians who share music files on the Internet can now be sued by the record industry, but it will not be an easy process, according to legal experts. A Canadian Federal Court of Appeal's decision, released Thursday afternoon, upheld a ruling last year denying the recording industry's demand that Internet Service Providers be forced to reveal the identities of 29 people that the Canadian Recording Industry Association had identified as major downloaders. But the appeals decision is being interpreted as a win by both sides in the music download debate, since it left the door open to future suits when the judge indicated copyright law must still be respected.