Amazon currently has over 3,000 songs available for download totally for free at their MP3 store. Most of the stuff is either old or independent, but there’s definitely a lot of good stuff to be had. The thing that interests me the most about this is how poor the advertising on this is. Finding that “free” page is kind of difficult, when Amazon should be plugging it left and right to try to attract customers. There are a few other bizarre things about these tracks, but for now just go grab yourself some free music.
Posted by Daniel on August 18th, 2008 in Business | 1 Comment »
The current leader of the retail-advertising-via-plasma-television market (do we have a better name for this yet?) appears to be RippleTV, an El Segundo-based company that has over 1500 locations nationwide, with the largest concentration of displays located here in Los Angeles.
While they certainly have more of the local market than Danoo, a competing company I have previously written about, their choice of locations is just such that I haven’t run into them as often. Until they invaded my favorite coffee shop.
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A good way to watch your company die is to bite the hand that feeds you. In order to protect my integrity as a lowly bit player in this industry, I will change the names of the offending parties to which I refer.
The Bleinstein Company, no stranger to disappointing revenue, now plumbs its reputation as a champion of independent cinema and the voices behind them in press releases for their DVD distributions banner, Third Rail Releasing (not an offending party). That reputation, however, was earned back when the Bleinsteins ran Bliramax. Now, with their chips relatively down and no Oscar prospects on the foreseeable horizon, they’re quick to regard their straight-to-DVD acquisitions as mere cash grabs, and Third Rail’s work as “a good way of differentiating between what we really believe in, and what has been for ancillary value.”
I am quick to respond.
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Last October, Radiohead gained a good amount of fame when they decided to release their album, In Rainbows, online for whatever price you felt it was worth — including $0.00 if that’s what you decided to put in. So effectively, you could download the entire new album in MP3 format, immediately, for free. So then, why in the world did millions of people opt to download it illegally via BitTorrent anyway?
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Posted by Daniel on August 12th, 2008 in Music | 2 Comments »
I love the iTunes Store. Well, most of the time.
The easiest way to buy music online can also be a massive headache if you’re one of the people out there who care about DRM. We already know that music purchased through iTunes is riddled with it, but what many people don’t know is that iTunes Plus — Apple’s pricier alternative to their DRM’d music — has a dirty little secret: Your personal information.
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