Erik Staats

Microsoft announced that Universal Music will be receiving over $1 in royalties for each Zune sold. This is to offset the money Universal is supposedly losing due to pirating. Microsoft said that they may make similar deals with other media providers.

Universal will consider asking Apple for an iPod royalty when their contract is up next year. Good luck with that, Universal:)

This is an unfortunate precedent that hopefully won’t extend beyond the Zune. I don’t pirate music, so why should I have to pay? Of course, I don’t plan on buying a Zune either. Hopefully, such deals won’t get legislated like they were for DAT.
Microsoft strikes deal for music | CNET News.com

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In case you couldn’t tell from my posts and the Songbird hacking I’ve been doing, I’m a nerd. Check out my score:

How much of a nerd are you?

NerdTests.com - Lots of Fun for Geeks and Nerds!

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ExtremeTech has a nice review of our favorite media player, Songbird. My iPod extension even gets a mention. Woohoo!

Songbird: The Firefox of Media Players

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Apparently, there’s some work going on to integrate Amie Street with Songbird. I blogged a bit about Amie Street. They price songs by popularity. Pretty interesting to see them integrate with Songbird. I haven’t tried that out yet.
Blog » Better Integration for Songbird and Other Cool New Stuff - Amie St

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Cingular has announced that they’re going to offer music downloads for their customers. It will be partnering with Napster, Yahoo Music, XM Satellite Radio, and eMusic. This article has some interesting analysis of the mobile music market. IDG predits 54 million downloads by 2010.

Songs can cost two times or more than regular downloads over the internet plus a monthly charge for a data plan. I don’t see this lasting too long. With WiFi phones and mobile data plans, customers can theoretically use the same download services on their phones that they can use on their computers.

Presumably, the mobile operators will disable access to other services. I’m sure there will be hacks around that, and eventually the mobile operators will have to open the phones up to all services.
Cingular to jump onto mobile-music bandwagon | CNET News.com

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Apple has pushed the Japanese online music store Oricon out of the PC-based music download market. Despite a volume of 90,000 tunes a month, Oricon could not turn a profit.

What’s most interesting is that Oricon will remain in the mobile phone music download market. Apparently, in Japan, the mobile download market is quite a bit bigger than the PC-based music download market ($249M vs. $1.9B). In the overall market, the iTunes store holds onlly about a 5 percent market share.

Apple pushes Oricon to quit PC music downloads | CNET News.com

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My father recently got his Ph.D. in political science, writing a dissertation comparing the judicial systems in South America. He was appointed by the U.N. as a counsel to the Ecuador Supreme Court. Pretty cool!

Valdosta Daily Times - Professor counsels Ecuador’s top court

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I just found this blog about a media store called Cruxy integrating with Songbird. It looks like Cruxy provides lots of different media including music, videos, and still images. I haven’t heard of them before.

It looks like they have a wide variety of content from rock to cooking to comedy. They charge for most content but everything is DRM free. Pretty nifty!
Cruxy and Songbird at People With Ideas

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CNET has an interview with Monique Farantzos, DVD Jon’s business partner, discussing their FairPlay software. Apparently, they have something now that will allow online retailers to add FairPlay DRM to their content and have the iPod play it back. They have software in the works that will allow content bought from the iTunes store to play on non-iPod devices.

Breaking through Apple’s FairPlay | Newsmakers | CNET News.com

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DVD Jon has apparently reverse engineered Apple’s Fairplay DRM. According to this article, it will allow music from non-iTunes stores to play on iPods. I’m pretty sure iPods play MP3’s from other stores, so I’m not sure what the article means by that.

It appears that Jon’s company, Doubletwist, will license technology to allow other vendors to apply the Fairplay DRM to their content so they can provide the same copy protection as the iTunes store does. I wonder if this will be licensed to music stores or player applications. In the case of iTunes, the DRM is added in the iTunes application, not the store.

Hacker Unlocks Apple Music Download Protection - News by InformationWeek

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