Future of Napster seen as bleak after Middlehoff's Bertelsmann resignation
A business-school professor, Napster insiders and music industry commentators are all predicting that the once-supreme file sharing service may face a bleak future after the ouster of Bertelsmann CEO...
View ArticlePressplay to offer 120 "burnable" songs/year for $1.50/song
Pressplay, the Sony-Vivendi joint venture, will reportedly offer unlimited "cripped" MP3 downloads for $179.40 per year, according to CNET News's John Borland -- but there's still a limit on the number...
View ArticleReport: Music downloading could add $2B to label revenues
A new Forrester Research study says it is the economy that is really hurting the record label's business right now -- and the study estimates that legal downloading could generate $2 billion in new...
View ArticleReal Networks hires arch rival's former "content" czar
Real Networks, the scrappy competitor to Microsoft's Windows Media Player software, has hired the former head of MSNBC -- Microsoft's joint-venture news service. Merrill Brown will be in charge of...
View ArticleLabels now blaming Internet for 7% drop in CD sales
The recording industry trade group says CD sales are dropping and -- despite some surveys to the contrary -- it is blaming illegal Internet downloading. Supporters of downloading say the labels can...
View ArticleNapster shuts down after Bertelsmann bailout denied
Napster Inc. officially shut down last night after a bankruptcy judge blocked the sale of the company that revolutionized music-swapping to Bertelsmann AG. See a The Washington Post story. The Boston...
View ArticleJupiter study says royalties may webcasting music a money-looser
Lisa Bowman of CNET News writes that Jupiter Research said royalty fees could bankrupt Web radio stations by forcing them to pay more to play songs than they could ever make up in advertising...
View ArticlePent up consumer demand awaits reasonably priced online music?
Although estimates are that fewer than 100,000 people have joined legal music-download services, write Simon Avery quotes experts as saying there is huge pent-up demand for simple, reasonably priced...
View ArticleKaZaa now lets consumers filter out bogus files
File-swapping service Kazaa's new software allows people to rate files so that corrupt or false files will quickly collect ratings poor enough to warn people away from downloading them. That's just one...
View ArticleFans are starting to gravitate to paid online music services?
The New York Times' Neil Strauss surveyed some former die-hard file-swapping fans who now say they are becoming grudgingly happy with paid online music services back by labels. Why? Selection and ease...
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