Changes Is Good

Earlier this week the IFPI, a global music lobbing organization best known for being less effective and more costly then the RIAA, dropped its membership dues in order to keep label partners from jumping ship. The organization charges ungodly sums of money to the labels to get marginal democracies to seize peoples CD burners. [...]

The good folks at Mashable have picked-up the story on what has to be the best set-up for a prank ever. It appears that the domain IFPI.com has fallen into the hands of the merry swashbuckling crew at The Pirate Bay. The domain IFPI.org still goes to the older IFPI site, belonging to International Federation [...]

It seems that after months of slow economic starvation AllofMP3.com is finally no more. Over the last few years the IFPI and RIAA have mounted a sustained assault on the site, which followed the letter of Russian law, but sold music in a format (MP3) and for a price (cheap as hell) that the dying [...]

Our Russian friends over at ALLofMP3.com are showing the kind of staying power that would make Lexington Steel proud. Despite being perpetually attacked by the bulldogs of the copyright industries ALLofMP3.com continues to evolve their offering and enhance their site. While checking out their latest upgrades I came across a rather incongruous image on the [...]

This amazing bit of news was forwarded by Fred Benenson of Free Culture @ NYU. It’s amazing news and a critical development for the online music space. You can get more information at the RARA site and I’ve duplicated their message in full below without commentary:
From: Press Contact <respectartistaudience@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 31, 2007 [...]

A central tenet of the RIAA/IFPI terror campaign against file downloading has been that file downloading causes the industry to loose billion of dollars a year. This point is hotly debated by many who point out that downloading is more like sampling then buying and has probably resulted in net growth for the industry. [...]

Earlier this week the Chief Evangelical Officer of Apple Computers Inc., Steve Jobs, channeled the spirit of Ronald Regan (media moguls tear down these digital walls) and wrote an open letter (read my post here) aimed at the music barron’s in their Bling’d-out offices. In it he basically says that DRM sucks, iPods rock and [...]

The good folks at the IFPI released a report (pdf) today which pegged the size of the digital music industry at $2 billion. This is double the size it was in 2005 and while thats great news, but still doesnt cover the homaging in the rest of the industry. Music sales are expected to continue [...]