Digital Media

Last week, a music site called BlueBeat made headlines by offering Beatles songs as free streams and 25 cent downloads. The Beatles are known for not making their songs legally available on iTunes or any other online forum, so observers rightly asked "how are they doing this legally?"

EMI, the record label that owns The Beatles' recordings, has a simple response: they're not doing this legally. But here's where the story gets very strange.

The legal reasoning in this case is straight out of "Alice in Wonderland."

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons (public domain illustration))

BlueBeat is owned by a company called Media Rights Technologies, which specializes in digital rights management technology. DRM is supposed to be used to prevent copyright infringement. But according to a 2007 blog post on HuffingtonPost.com by the company's founder, Hank Risan, MRT backed into this business after being--get this--targeted by the RIAA for copyright infringement.

As Risan explains in his post, he and a partner had posted a bunch of streaming-audio files to a Web site about the history of music. The RIAA issued a takedown notice, and the site took the streams down.

The streams had been protected by Windows Media DRM, but according to Risan, an update to the Media Player broke the DRM. In response to this flaw, Risan created MRT and built his own DRM system, which he claimed would be far more robust than the systems on the market at that time. Then, in 2007, MRT sent cease-and-desist letters to Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and RealNetworks, ordering them to use MRT's DRM technology instead of their own, on threat of legal action.

The legal reasoning was twisted--basically, MRT argued that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act should force these companies to use the most robust DRM technology available, even if that technology was created by somebody else. Predictably, nothing ever came of this demand.

MRT's legal reasoning is equally funny this time around, as Ars Technica reports. According to the report, MRT claims that it didn't post the exact Beatles recordings. Instead, it posted "psychoacoustic simulations," then added simple video content to them. This constitutes a new audiovisual work, and isn't covered by the existing copyrights, MRT argues. In fact, MRT even went so far as to apply for copyrights on the "new" works!

Perhaps this is all some kind of metacommentary on the frustrating inconsistency of U.S. copyright law, but I predict that MRT is going to be laughed out of court. In the meantime, if you want your Beatles music online, it's still available on BlueBeat as of the time I posted this. I didn't want to give the company a credit card to test the whether the downloads work, but the streams sound pretty close to perfect...especially considering that they're only psychoacoustic simulations.

Singer Pharrell, Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre pose with headphones from "beats by dr. dre" made by Monster Cable.

(Credit: Interscope Records)

A new alliance between hip-hop impresario Dr. Dre, Interscope Chairman Jimmy Iovine, and computer maker Hewlett-Packard aims to save digital music.

No, this is not an attempt to fix the record industry's business woes. The goal is to lift the sound quality of the too-often tinny tunes squeaking out of our ear buds, and it's an ambitious plan nonetheless. HP will release premium-priced laptops, headsets, and software featuring the "Beats by Dr. Dre" brand sometime this fall, music industry sources with knowledge of the offering told CNET News.

In an interview last week, Iovine declined to discuss HP or any other company that may be involved. He confirmed, however, that he and Dr. Dre are part of a plan to reconstruct the entire "digital music ecosystem" from the sound file to the computer and culminating with high-end headsets.

Iovine downplayed the potential for the group's efforts to compete with Apple. The man who discovered rapper Eminem, said he enjoys an excellent relationship with Apple CEO Steve Jobs. In addition, the partnership would love to join forces with Apple and other consumer electronics companies, according to a source close to the company. That said the plan has all the markings of an attempt to lure away those Apple fans who possess a discerning ear. Audiophiles have long lamented the dropoff in sound quality brought on by the onset of digital music.

"We have to fix the entire chain," Iovine told CNET News. "Our position is to go to all the sources and try to improve sound and educate people...We can't put anything weak in the line. Whoever puts out things that sound bad shouldn't be as cool as something that sounds great."

There's room for competitors to take on Apple by offering consumers better sound quality, according to Richard Shim, an analyst with research firm IDC. But he added that those who try it might struggle to move beyond the niche audiophile market.

"There is always an opening," Shim said. "The question is how do you take a doggy door and turn it into a garage door? How do you take something that has a small audience (the market for high quality sound) and push it out to the mainstream."

Studies by the NPD Group show that there are people willing to pay a premium for equipment and software that produce more lifelike music, said NPD analyst Russ Crupnick. But the research also indicates the majority of consumers are satisfied with their Apple earbuds and iTunes songs, which are now available at 256 kbps, he said.

"Listening habits have sort of changed," Crupnick said. "If I'm spending all my time on Facebook and listening to Dr. Dre's music in the background, it's not so important that it be the best."

For HP, the partnership with Dr. Dre is part of a recent marketing trend that has seen the company cozy up to celebrities.

"HP is working to be more visible with influencers and they've been tying themselves to celebrities," said Shim, who cited the collaboration between HP and fashion designer Vivienne Tam on a mini notebook that debuted in September 2008. "In this case, HP was able to charge a premium for a low-end product. This is unique for the PC industry. It's consistent with their marketing strategy."

PC makers are following the lead of the automobile industry by shaping their sales pitch around a consumer's lifestyle, according to Shim. "Up to now, it's all been about speeds and feeds and low costs," he said. "However, now their approach has to mature. They have to attach brand awareness and emotion as well as practical use to reach a greater part of the mainstream audience."

It's not tough to see how HP and Dr. Dre can help one another. HP will lend the "Beats by Dr. Dre" credibility among hard-core sound enthusiasts. In exchange, Dre, who has produced hit albums for Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and 50 Cent, transfers to HP laptops some of his street cred with a younger generation of music fans and computer buyers. Who can argue that Iovine and Dr. Dre don't know high quality sound?

For the music industry, promoting better-sounding tunes is a means to have greater say in how digital music is packaged and sold.

It's a way to take back some control and the big labels want to promote high-quality audio as a new specification. They want to come up with a single standard that sticks.

Iovine said that he and Dr. Dre's efforts are not based on any attempt to save the music industry.

"I just want our product to sound better," Iovine said. "The record business committed many, many mistakes in the last 10 years, and I'm right in there. One of them was letting its product get degraded. It's one thing to let it get stolen, it's another to allow it to be degraded because then you really don't have a chance...video games and TV quality are getting better and the quality of our work is getting lower. If that happens, then music will become disposable. That's something we can fix."

The gear produced by Dr. Dre and Iovine doesn't appear to come from some vanity project by would-be celebrity entrepreneurs. Dr. Dre and Iovine enlisted such artists as Pharrell, Will.i.am, and Gwen Stefani for coming up with the right sound and design of the Beats By Dr. Dre headphones, built by Monster Cable. Together they produced the "Tour" in-ear headphones that were rolled out last January and have since received critical success.

"Monster Cable's headphone collaboration with Dr. Dre, the Beats, surprised us with their musical prowess back in August," wrote Slashgear last December. "While celebrity endorsements tend toward the cheesy, and Monster's products toward the over-priced, we weren't expecting much; in actual fact, they proved impressively capable."

(Credit: Amazon.com)

Michael Jackson, who along with four of his brothers recorded his first hit songs as a child, continues to be a chart topper a day after his death.

On Friday, Jackson's music was attracting huge audiences at Apple's iTunes and Amazon.com. On iTunes, the Web's largest music service, 8 out of the top-10-selling albums for download were from Jackson, with a compilation album, "The Essential Michael Jackson" in the No. 1 spot.

Jackson held the same number of top-10 positions among iTunes music videos. Jackson's "Thriller" music video, one of the hallmarks of his career as well as the genre, was the top seller. Of the top-selling songs at iTunes, Jackson held 5 of the top 10 positions. At Amazon, 10 of the top 25 albums for download belonged to Jackson.

When it came to CDs, Jackson held 17 of the top 20 spots, including all of the top 10.

These are just a few of he ways that the size of the singer's celebrity is illuminated. Download sales skyrocket, scores of fans watch his YouTube music videos, news sites are nearly overwhelmed. Jackson was pronounced dead at 2:25 p.m. PT on Thursday after collapsing at a rental home in Los Angeles. According to numerous published reports, an autopsy was due to be performed Friday.

When news started to spread that the performer had collapsed, it drove a massive wave of people to the Web for details about his condition. The ensuing traffic crush nearly crippled several large media sites, according to Keynote Systems, which tracks site performance.

At Google's YouTube, fans flocked to view his music videos, such as "Thriller" and "Beat It," and the ensuing traffic appeared to bog down the streaming quality. It took me a half hour to watch the 13-minute "Thriller" video. Fans also began uploading their own videos to YouTube in honor of Jackson. The site is already hosting thousands of fan-produced YouTube clips reacting to the news of his death, according to Google, including vlogs and tribute dances.

At about 5:30 p.m. PT on Thursday, the "Thriller" video had been viewed just more than 37 million times and had about 105,000 comments. It's unclear how many times it had been watched or how many comments the video had before Jackson's death. But by late Friday morning, "Thriller" had accumulated 38,619,665 views, or more than 1.6 million since yesterday and 144,676 comments.

"I took a screenshot of the MJ YouTube Channel shortly after news broke about his death," YouTube spokesman Spencer Crooks said in an e-mail. "The channel views are up about 3 million. The channel subscribers are up nearly 50,000 and climbing. Most of the popular videos are up at least a million views. These are not exact numbers, as I took the screenshot after the news broke, and they are all still rising fast."