From September, all new Sony Pictures Blu-ray discs will support MovieIQ, a service which grabs IMDB-esque data from the Internet to show during playback. How BD-Live hadn’t already been used to do something like this, I have no idea. More »
Sony Ericsson’s partnering up with Gracenote to provide an even better TrackID-like service called Mobile Music 2.0. Available on the Sony Ericsson W910 and K850 (both shipping Q4 2007), Mobile Music can use Gracenote’s DB to search for artist name, track, album, or lyrics, and download songs from Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow service or your provider’s music store.
Other cool features are the continuation of TrackID, mood analysis on the tracks (SensMe), image transfering, podcast loading, and Shake Control, which lets you shake your phone when you want to randomly play a track. – Jason Chen More »
Ty Roberts, CTO of Gracenote—the company that runs CDDB, among other endeavors—said at a conference on DRM this week that record labels are “about to cave in the next six months” when it comes to DRM and downloads, giving credence to Jobs’ claim that half of iTunes tracks will be available DRM-free by the end of the year. At the same time, he’s not sure that it “would be a good thing for the digital content industry in the long term.”
Paul Jessop, CTO of the RIAA, told Ars after the talk that the labels could “all fold tomorrow, [or]they could all hold out.” We’re glad that that’s sorted out. Nonetheless, the pressure’s on—from consumers, from Apple, and recently, from EMI, so holding out’s looking less and less feasible if the labels want to get their product out there and into our ears. – Matt Buchanan
Exec: Music labels “about to cave in the next six months” on DRM [Ars Technica] Image via Flickr
Gracenote and Yahoo just announced a partnership that could bring legal (and accurate) lyrics to the digital world. The deal initially includes North American rights to about 400,000 songs, from all of the biggest publishers: EMI Music Publishing, Warner/Chappell Music, Bertelsmann AG’s BMG Music Publishing, Vivendi’s Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing (which Reuters points out is jointly owned by Sony Corp. and Michael Jackson) and online publisher peermusic.
Well glory be. It’s about time somebody made a deal like this, because when I want lyrics, I go to the Web, but usually I’m confined to a dicey site that ends in .ru. Given the sorry state of lyrics on line these days, when I find my song, I always need to fact-check it for blatant, sometimes hilarious errors (see Steve Miller Band’s “Big Old Jed and the Rhino” and other gems at The Archive of Misheard Lyrics). The reason isn’t that I am eager to “steal” access to the lyrics. It’s that, being a digital music consumer, I no longer get lyrics free with my purchase. In the big transition, the lyrics that used to be printed in every CD booklet somehow disappeared. (We love you, Steve, but you know this is your fault!)
So far so good, but read on for the moment of skepticism you knew was coming.
