music

Care to take a stab at guessing this one? I'll give you a hint: it's fabulous news. As you may have gathered from Sony's abandonment of SonicStage, the company is giving its Connect music store the ax as well. Considering the new Walkmans are now PlaysForSure devices capable of playing both purchased and subscription WMAs--and they support unprotected AACs purchased from iTunes--it only makes sense to get rid of the faltering (and horrifically designed) store. For my part, I'm pleased as punch by the death of SonicStage and Connect. Yes, I'm a little bit sadistic...… Read more

Apple can breathe a sigh of relief as word came on Thursday that Sony plans to close its music store, Connect, sometime after March 2008.

Apple's iTunes, was never actually threatened by Sony's misguided download service, of course. The company's attempt to compete in the digital music market was from the start marked by glitchy software and disinterested consumers.

Sony claims the reason it scrapped Connect is that the company has "widened its digital music environment" to support Windows Media. But the story of how Connect was doomed from the start is well chronicled.

The … Read more

Should Allofmp3.com reappear, as the controversial online music store has promised, it likely will doom its country's chances of joining the World Trade Organization this year.

"We remain committed to helping Russia make it into the WTO," said Sean Spicer, a spokesman for the U.S. Trade Representative, the group that negotiates International trade agreements on behalf of the nation. "In order to make that happen though, they have to honor the commitments that they've made especially in the area of intellectual property rights."

If that wasn't clear enough, Spicer was more … Read more

UPDATE: A few minutes after I first published this post, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band announced a tour for 2007. I've removed him from the running because (a.) he has no tourdates scheduled for 2008 and (b.) for this experiment in predictive markets to be interesting and valuable, I feel that it has to run for more than a few hours.

Although the recording industry's in the doldrums, the concert business has been pretty good of late.

The Rolling Stones just wrapped up its two-year-long Bigger Bang tour. The tour started in fall 2005, and a … Read more

In a move that further shapes its image as an MTV-like pop-culture hub as well as a social network, News Corp.'s MySpace.com has announced that it will be sponsoring a concert tour this fall.

Appropriately called the MySpace Music Tour, the series of shows will kick off October 16 in Seattle and will host more than 30 performances before winding down in Las Vegas around Thanksgiving.

The headlining acts for the tour will be two artists who have built up large followings on the social-networking site--geeky pop band Hellogoodbye and emo act Say Anything.

The tour will also … Read more

Nokia shot to center stage of cell phone land today by unveiling a gallery of new handsets and services at an event in London. We can't get across the pond to cover the news in person (though we did get a very short preview of the handsets last week), but we'll bring you the highlights here. Be sure to click through to read more details on each announcement. Or if you prefer pretty pictures, take a gander at our slide show.

North America finally will get its own version of the powerful Nokia N95. Though it looks just … Read more

Crave has made no secret of its love for Nokia's Xpress Music phones. And what's not to love? Both the 5300 and the 5700 are fun, stylish handsets that offer excellent features and superior performance. In fact, our biggest disappointment was that Nokia seemed to be dragging its feet in introducing more Xpress Music models.

So you can imagine that were excited to learn that our wishes had been fulfilled. Today in London, Nokia unveiled two new 5310 and 5610 Xpress Music phones. Though they take a different design approach, the phones offer similar high-end multimedia and connectivity … Read more

Along with announcing a brand-new lineup of handsets, Nokia is also venturing into the brave new world of Internet services. It's called Ovi, which is "door" in Finnish, and it signifies Ovi's open access to existing social networks like MySpace, Flickr, and Facebook right from a compatible Nokia phone. But the big news here is that Ovi will also be a gateway to Nokia's newly launched Internet services, which include the Nokia Music Store, Nokia Maps, and N-Gage games. Though Ovi can work on any personal computer, it is really designed for the mobile experience. … Read more

MediaMaster is one of many companies worth keeping an eye on, mainly for the potential of having your entire music library available anywhere you go, as long as you've got an Internet connection. Their Facebook app, which went live just a few weeks ago, is a prime example of a great use of the service.

The app lets you set up a huge playlist of music, and serve it up right on your profile in a miniplayer. Anyone who comes by your profile can then get the full quality versions of the tracks streamed in whatever order you set … Read more