Bob Caswell

Apple has issued a press release about becoming the number two (behind Wal-Mart) music retailer in the U.S. Best Buy used to have that spot, but music downloads seem to be catching on. Well, that and CD sales are declining rapidly.

Apple claims that 50 million customers have bought over 4 billion songs with 20 million sold on Christmas day alone. That’s impressive even if digital music purchases have yet to offset the decline in CD sales.

Continue Reading »

Amazon today has announced plans to take its DRM-free MP3 music store to countries beyond the United States. In the U.S., at least, Amazon MP3 is already the online music store of choice.

It’s hard to compete with the largest library (3.3 million songs from 270,000 artists) of restriction free music, much of which is priced lower than the going rate of $0.99/track. And it integrates seamlessly with iTunes (or other desktop music applications) plus works with pretty much any digital music player available.

Continue Reading »

Hot on the heels of the Last.Fm announcement that you can stream any song up to three times for free, Yahoo rumors are brewing again. According to two record company executives wishing to remain anonymous, Yahoo is in talks with major record labels about offering DRM-free (unprotected) MP3s either for sale or for free supported by ads. Either way, Yahoo wants to launch the new service this year sometime.

This news could be even more interesting when juxtaposed with what Yahoo Music’s VP of Product Development Ian Rogers hinted at a couple weeks ago. Namely, big news revolving around dramatic changes in Yahoo’s music model. He said, “We’re in the process of redefining what Yahoo! Music is, and making it the Music destination in Yahoo!’s successful image.”

Continue Reading »

Just a few days after our coverage of DRM-free music options for 2008 comes news of Sony BMG now offering its music on Amazon restriction-free. Sony BMG represents artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Foo Fighters, Santana, and Justin Timberlake. And this makes Amazon the first online music store to offer DRM-free songs from all four major labels: Sony BMG, Warner, EMI, and Universal Music.

Continue Reading »

Last year around this same time I wrote on the then current companies killing DRM (Digital Rights Management, music with restrictions). Coincidentally, this year has the month of January giving us even more news on the battle-for-unrestricted-music front.

Here’s the latest news about music within the context of Amazon, Napster, Sony, and Yahoo:

Continue Reading »

Hot on the heels of news of Apple soon offering rental movies via iTunes, Amazon has some even better news (in my opinion). Another sign that DRM (Digital Rights Management, music with restrictions) is on its way out: Amazon MP3 now offers DRM-free MP3s from Warner Music Group’s catalog.

This makes Amazon’s MP3 download store the first to offer DRM-free music from Warner Music and brings Amazon’s library up to 2.9 million songs, all without restrictions. And Warner’s catalog includes some of the most popular artists: Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Madonna, Green Day, Red Hot Chili Peppers, etc.

Continue Reading »

The Wall Street Journal has the scoop on the latest Google news. Google is hoping to offer consumers a new way to store and access files online. The search giant is working on a service that would let you store essentially all of your files online (documents, music, photos, videos, etc.).

I already do this with Mozy for free. But Mozy works more as a backup that I generally access only when I need to restore files. Google wants to simplify the process of transferring and opening files such that you would actually be using your online files actively.

Continue Reading »

Radiohead has decided to respond to the previous coverage of their social experiment of offering their album online at a name-your-own price. According to a study (by a third party, comScore), only 38% of downloaders paid something while the 62% majority paid nothing. And of those paying, most paid less than $4. While it was fun to speculate on what this could mean for the music industry, turns out any speculation was based on more speculation (comScore’s). Here’s what Radiohead had to say:

Continue Reading »