The New York Post is reporting that Amazon’s long-delayed digital-music store–which will carry MP3s that are free of copy protection–may, in fact, launch sometime during the week of Sept. 17, although given the project’s lengthy delays up to this point, it also may not. The Post piece also has details on pricing and which labels won’t be participating:
• Kanye and 50 Cent brought the battle of Sept. 11 a little bit early, only to have the new Britney song make the Googlers wild. • And meanwhile, Kenny Chesney’s fans partied on. • The iTunes graphic equalizer: Can it be perfectly calibrated, or is flat where it’s at? More »
ArkivMusic’s pretty amazing business model: Repressing out-of-print classical CDs on-demand. (It currently has made about 3,700 titles available to consumers.) More »
Ed. note: While the BitTerrorists were downloading the leaks of Graduation and Curtis yesterday, the other contender in the battle for mid-September album-chart supremacy was throwing a sorta-beach party, complete with sandless “sand pit,” in New York City. We sent writer Tobey Grumet Segal to Kenny Chesney’s show at Madison Square Garden, and she got to know the Kenny faithful.
As announced back in June, Sony will phase out its SonyConnect music store between now and next spring; the company is migrating its users to a new, Windows Media-based store that will work with its forthcoming Walkman video players, which are somehow not being called Watchmen. More »
So it looks like the record labels will apparently negotiate with the terrorists after all. But only in China, where apparently “almost 100% of music downloaded from the Net is stolen” according to this Business Week story, thanks to Baidu.com, a search engine that’s kicking Yahoo and Google’s asses thanks to its ability to ferret out free MP3s. (The fact that I don’t comprehend Chinese, and the fact that I don’t want/need any spy- or malware on my laptop, has prevented me from checking out the claim by clicking links on Baidu willy-nilly.) EMI, however, has recently made a pact with this illegal-download-intermediary devil:
Jess’ not-so-secret admiration for Brad Paisley will no doubt have its flames fanned on Nov. 7, when the Country Music Association Awards air; Paisley and George Strait lead the pack with five nominations each. More »
A Florida cop recently proved (once again) how silly law enforcement officials can sound when they start talking about popular entertainment, taking us back to the glory days of “Cop Killer” and putting his foot in his mouth after a rash of robberies turned him into an impromptu social critic:
Nah Right’s got a new Lupe Fiasco track from the upcoming The Cool, which Eskay assures us is “not the first single.” More »
A recent Great White show, broken down by the numbers: “10 young groupie daughters who looked 17-going-on-1989,” three air-drummers, and one actual drummer who “looked like Estelle Getty from Golden Girls having a stroke.” More »
