Tag archive: music downloads

Walmart has issued a memo to all music licensing partners and informed them that the digital music store at “mp3.walmart.com” will be shutting down on August 28, 2011. All music content will no longer be available for download and users are urged to download DRM-free tracks before becoming unavailable. After the store closes up, tracks containing DRM will still be supported and will continue to work as the DRM servers are being kept… Read More

Chinese Internet giant Baidu has announce it will begin paying royalties on every piece of music downloaded from its site, after years of being criticized as acting for a haven for file-sharers and music pirates who are distributing music and other media in violation of copyright. Baidu will make payments to the Music Copyright Society of China—loosely equivalent to ASCAP or BMI in the United States—who will in turn be responsible… Read More

Back in 2009, online music market BlueBeat made headlines by offering Beatles songs for sale for prices as low as $0.25 a track—long before the Beatles finally succumbed to the lure of online music sales and let their music be sold via Apple's iTunes. A court order (followed by an injunction) took Beatles music off BlueBeat in short order, but the record labels concerned over BlueBeat's activities—EMI, Capital, and… Read More

Illegal music downloading hit an all-time high this year in the UK, a new report from the British Recorded Music Industry (BPI) has announced. And as a direct correlation — it suggests — the British music industry’s growth has stalled. The report found that 75 percent of all downloaded music in the region is pirated, and in the past six months, consumers using P2P networks increased 7 percent. All this, in spite of the numerous legal… Read More

We definitely mocked Apple’s overblown Beatles build up a little (can you blame us? We’re anticipating news alerts if Steve Jobs runs out of shampoo), but the numbers don’t lie. In the first week since the Beatles anthology has been available for download on iTunes, Apple has sold over two million songs and more than 450,000 albums by the band. “Abbey Road” took first place for US iTunes digital album sales, “Here Comes the Sun” was the most… Read More

We'd announce our top ten reasons why we love U2 front-man Bono, but as he recently declared in his OP-ED column in the New York Times we have been a little “over-indulgent” with top ten lists in 2009. But, considering this didn’t stop Bono from proceeding into his own list of top ten “ideas” for the next ten years, we feel no shame sharing at least one from our Bono-loving list. Reason number one why we love Bono: the man is quite the… Read More

A music service that plans to offer free song downloads said Monday that China's largest search engine will send users to the service in a deal that could cut online music piracy. The free service, Qtrax, has licensing deals with all the major recording companies and their publishing units. The company plans to fund its royalty payments to artists and the music industry through advertising. Qtrax launches Thursday in Australia and New… Read More

“James Keyes said selling digital content, including music, could provide a good growth opportunity as sales of portable gadgets such as Apple Computer Inc.'s Customers should be able to walk into a 7-Eleven store to burn their favorite songs onto a CD or download content onto their portable music player, Keyes told a Merrill Lynch retailing and consumer products industry conference here. 7-Eleven, which operates or franchises about… Read More