Songbeat, isoHunt, and Hexagon.

“Why should I pay for music when it’s available for free everywhere anyway? This is the question everyone is asking themselves today” says Claudio Fritz-Vietta CEO of Songbeat.

P2P software has become the main reason why some people share Mr. Fritz-Vietta’s sentiment, and last week introduced us to two more headaches for the music industry.

PART 1: The Streaming Music Business – How Sustainable Is It?

With some artists claiming they would “rather be raped by The Pirate Bay” than have Spotify streaming their music and pay a pittance – what is the sustainability of streaming music services? TMV drills down and analyses the three key elements to a sustainable streaming future; content owners, streaming services and advertisers in three separate [...]

O Tenenbaum, O Tenenbaum

Last week, the digital world watched with great interest as Joel Tenenbaum, a 25 year-old Physics graduate student at Boston University went on trial for copyright infringement; a suit filed personally against Mr. Tenenbaum by the RIAA, a suit that, by week’s end, he ultimately lost. A guilty verdict was handed down, along with a $675,000 judgment, or $22,500 per song, for illegally distributing 30 songs via KaZaA.

Filesharing (Anarchy) In The UK

A recently released Music Ally/The Leading Question survey reports that the overall percentage of regular file sharers in the UK has dropped 5% from December 2007 to January 2009. Or at least those who admit to file sharing. Yet the percentage of music fans that have ever file-shared has increased from 28% to 31% over the same time period.

UK Downloaders Going Legit (or just getting older)

A recent survey has raised the prospect of an increasingly legal download market in the not-so-distant future. For the first time in 5 years, a majority 51% of respondents to The Digital Music Report 2008 claimed to be getting their music via legal sources such as iTunes, 7Digital, MySpace Music, Nokia and eMusic. The survey [...]