scary halloween sounds

Filed under: Music

The Onion’s AV club went digging for the anti top-list, and came up with the “least essential albums of 2006.” It’s a pretty heady selection, which the AV club april music in this fashion, “Every year produces great music and a nearly equal amount of terrible music. Then there’s the not-so-creamy middle, the albums that have no real reason to exist, but nonetheless find their way to music-store shelves.”

The list includes totally inessential favorites like The Cars (without just about everyone who was once in The Cars), DMC (Which is Run-DMC without Reverend Run and after the death of Jam Master Jay), John Corbett (uh, don’t you act? Poorly but, still.. don’t you act?), and the kicker, an exercise album from NBC’s “The Biggest Loser”

If you’ve bought any of these albums in the previous year, the Society for the Prevention of the Death of Actual Music (the S.P.D.A.M) asks that you report to your nearest internment camp for musical re-education, immediately. That is all.

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Filed under: News, RIAA, IFPI, BPI

It’s back again. The seemingly never-ending speculation about AllofMp3 and its entanglement with Russia’s desire to join the World Trade Organization. This time there’s some evidence of the validity of those free mp3 and a little bit of light shed on when AllofMp3 might be gone for good.

A document released by the US trade representative to Russia clearly spells out that AllofMp3 has been and still remains a concern for US trade officials, and lays out a time-line within which Russia is expected to act against the rouge music download site.

According to PC Magazine, “Russia said it would act by June 1, 2007 to take action and prevent rights societies from taking action without consent of the rights holders themselves; AllofMP3.com claims it holds licenses from the Russian Licensing Societies, including the Federation of Rights Holders for Collective Management of Copyright with Respect to the Use of Musical Works in Interactive Regime (FAIR) and the Russian Organization on Collective Management of Rights of Authors and Other Right Holders in Multimedia, Digital Networks & Visual Arts (ROMS).”

We’ve heard claims like this before. Frankly, it’s a little disconcerting that VISA seems to have more control over international piracy rings than the Russian authorities. We first declared AllofMp3 to be a walking dead-man back in February of 2005. Almost two years on it remains the Energizer Bunny of international piracy, selling tunes for pennies and allegedly forwarding payments to the Russian ROMS royalty overseers, who’ve been uncooperative with the record labels and have no authority to grant the licenses on which AllofMp3 bases its legal standing.

So, now you have it on good authority, AllofMp3 will be no more as of 6/1/2007. We swear. Kinda. Well, most likely. We think.

[via PC Mag]

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Filed under: News, General, Napster, eMusic

Cingular is set to launch a non-OTA music service for its mobile phones. Details are a bit sketch but, the new Cingular service will be vastly different than that of its mobile phone market competitors. Users will be able to download from three competing web services, Napster, Yahoo! Music and eMusic and transfer those tracks to their Cingular handset of choice via cable connection to a PC (Uh, wasn’t 3G supposed to make all these wires go away? Bluetooth? Wi-Fi?)

Cingular’s system breaks the mold set by other mobile operator backed services which have attempted to dive deep into your wallet while failing to mention that most handsets will happily play the Mp3’s you already own. It may be a bit old school but, Cingular’s service sounds like a good deal for end users, as opposed to a magic tool for removing dollars from customer’s wallets.

I’ve been pretty anti-mp3 phone in the past, and that hasn’t april music I’m still unconvinced that you’ll get anything more than a substandard version of phone, mp3 player or both when you attempt to mix the two together in one device. For certain, it’s not as easy a recipe as peanut butter and chocolate. If you remove the crazy types of restrictions that most mobile providers use to hijack your wallet, a slightly sub par mp3 player/phone wouldn’t be a bad alternative to say, owning a “nice” PMP and a smaller ultra portable class player.

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