The Sword may not be your cup of tea, but no matter your musical predilections, the cover for their new album, Warp Riders (YES!) is pure awesome. Giant asteroids. Red gas clouds. A spaceship. Kanye – please copy this. [io9]
iTunes is running a big album sale at the moment. 53 of the latest albums “from your favourite artists” are available, with prices staring from $8.99. Except that there isn’t a single $8.99 album available. More »
This seems… backwards. If you want to buy OAR’s new album on Amazon, you’re going to end up paying 50 per cent more for a digital download than you would for a physical disc. More »
Who the hell is Richard Marx? Being another baby of Gizmodo, I’m sure I’ve still got a lot to learn about music, especially since I’m one of those kids who’s completely brainwashed by The Mouse.
The first music that I ever purchased was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie Soundtrack (on cassette).
It is astounding just how out of touch the music industry appears to be with the average consumer. When they’re not suing customers for copyright infringement, they’re trying to push another physical format down our throats – this time it’s albums on a USB stick.
The tech is known as DDA, and it comes with “online extras” to go with the physical product. Albums are identified by a card attached by a piece of string. On top of that, each stick comes with the proprietary DDA media player you’ll need to activate files from the USB, although the music can be transferred into iTunes easily and comes in both MP3 and WMA formats for your portable music player of choice.They’ll be available through HMV, Sanity and Virgin music stores. More »
SanDisk’s grand plan to revolutionise the music industry: selling individual albums preloaded onto SD cards, made by them, to be played on SD card players, made by them. The concept is definitely attractive in some ways. The tracks are 320Kbps, DRM-free MP3 files, the SD cards are reusable and the screenless slotMusic players costs next to nothing. Major label albums are priced at a competitive $US15, and can be played without the need for transfer from a computer, though you can load other SD cards with up to 16GB of music and play them, too.
I still prefer to buy CDs over purchasing on iTunes. Aside from the whole DRM and encoding issues that I can avoid by owning the CD, I also come from a time when having a physical collection meant something, and part of me refuses to let that go. I still remember nights spend reading through every word, every lyric in a CD booklet – knowing who each member of the band wanted to thank, which musicians guested on which tracks and who produced the album. iTunes just doesn’t give you that level of information.
But all of that may change in the near future, with MusicWeek reporting that Apple is planning on releasing an application in conjunction with Snow Patrol’s upcoming album that lets you interact with a digital booklet for the album on the iPhone or iPod Touch. After the Snow Patrol launch, it will be rolled out over other albums in the iTunes catalogue.
So will this digital booklet tempt me away from the old-fashioned CDs of yore? Not likely. But it will make the process of buying an album online a lot more appealing to a lot more people. I’m just not one of them.
[MusicWeek via TechCrunch] More »
Convicted murderer and future American Idol contestant Charles Manson has used the liberal Creative Commons license to release a new 16-track album from prison. The album, called, ironically, One Mind, is free to download at LimeWire. As an added bonus, the CC licence allows listeners to copy the tracks as much as they want and distribute them, so long as they don’t use them for commercial purposes-like starting a cult or something. Hear the man himself croon a killer tune after the jump at about the 1:15 mark.
