All Entries in the "Online" Category
Buzz makes it easy to share a little too much
I love the openness of Americans. It’s endearing, although it can mean listening to an extraordinary amount of information about someone for a first meeting. This can be uncomfortable when the conversation seems to have no context for such openness. In these encounters, it becomes clear that, unlike Brits, many Americans value sharing over privacy.
Facebook [...]
Will A Revamped Attitude Make Users Reconsider MySpace?
First reported by TechCrunch and later confirmed by Billboard, MySpace’s new slogan is “Discover and be Discovered”. The strategy was reportedly revealed to employees during a meeting last week at the Los Angeles HQ. The meeting, attended by some 600 employees as well as being broadcast to other offices, was most likely a move to [...]
Copyright Is So Damn Annoying!
This week Pandora announced over $50 million in annual revenues. This was, for many, big news. Even bigger news was the announcement last month that they were profitable in the 4th quarter of 2009, and tracking full-year profitability in 2010. But the information that seemed to rub many industry critics the wrong way was the [...]
Musicblogocide 2010: How Doing Right Can Come Off So Wrong
This past week has been an abomination in PR for Google, starting with privacy upheaval in terms of Google Buzz’s automatic stalking…err following feature that added people you frequently IM and email without consent. Then came news that Google blog service Blogger deleted six of the biggest music blogs on its service, including their [...]
Australian Court: ISPS are NOT Liable For File-Sharing – Despite Reports That Music Will Save Them Millions In Customer Churn
So my home country’s judiciary in Australia has seemingly dealt a large blow to the content industry in terms of ISPs not taking responsibility for their customer’s illegal activity. Despite “three strikes” laws being formed in other markets including, New Zealand, UK and France it appears they’ve been let of the hook down under.
34 film [...]
R-O-C-K In The USA—ISP’S START SINGING ALONG
We all know that the industry is all hands on deck to pressure ISP’s into policing their content. Just a couple of weeks ago rock star bloviator Bono took to the op-ed section of the New York Times to lambast ISP’s as “rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the [...]
“The Google Tax”: Can Cultural Pluralism Be Saved By The Advertising Algorithm?
This past week has been focusing on France, one of the most controversial and aggressive governments in terms of music piracy. First, the Three-Strikes HADOPI Law that was supposed to come to fruition on 1st January was reported to experience setbacks in terms of the country’s privacy watchdog. The Commission nationale de l’informatique et des [...]
Killing In The Name…Is This The Downward Spiral of “Monopolostic Pop”?
As you’ve no doubt heard the facebook campaign started by music fans Jon and Tracey Morter has been successful. Rage Against The Machines aptly titled “Killing In The Name” is the official UK number Christmas Single. So a viral campaign started by real music fans finally topples the X Factor monopoly for the previous four [...]
Music Biz Warns: Piracy Is Not Just About P2P
You could shut down all the P2P BitTorrent trackers in the world but web pirates would still find other ways to share files directly with each other.
At least, that’s the warning from the British Phonographic Institute which, in a survey conducted by Harris Interactive, found that, while P2P BitTorrent sharing in the UK is stabilising, [...]
Vevo – Another Failed Venture or A Virtual Video Goldmine?
There has been a lot of press lately surrounding the new Vevo site, due to launch today, but what is it all about exactly? Here we will give you everything you need to know about this new service. Vevo is a project between Google, Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Abu Dhabi Media Company for [...]







Peter Sunde, one of the founders and former spokesperson of BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay, recently debuted a new venture…one that will actually make content owners money instead of bleeding them dry. The project is in the form of a service, called Flattr (get it, like flattering?) that aims to...


Everyone is now well familiar with the story of Spiral Frog and how it buried the ad-supported download model. Reasons given for this are numerous, ranging from reports of blatant mismanagement to non-compatibility with iPods to consumer resistance to being force fed a 60 or 90 second commercial before the...