MusicNet

Supreme Court won't block antitrust suit against labels

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided that a lawsuit, filed by a group of online music buyers who allege the four largest record companies conspired nearly a decade ago to fix prices of songs sold online, can now move forward.

The high court on Monday declined to hear an appeal by the labels--Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI Group--to block the suit, according to reports by Bloomberg and Reuters. Instead, the decision by a federal appeals court that the plaintiffs had supplied enough evidence to sue the labels will stand.

The lawsuit by … Read more

Week in review: Apple harvests iPods, Apple TV

Apple has refreshed its iPod line and unveiled a new version of Apple TV.

During Apple's annual music-focused event in San Francisco, CEO Steve Jobs took the wraps off three new iPods: an iPod Shuffle that ditches the previous no-button style in returning to a more classic look; a smaller iPod Nano that now has a touch screen but can no longer play video; and a thinner iPod Touch that has most of the features first introduced on the iPhone 4.

Apple announced iTunes 10, available immediately, which comes with a new logo and a social music service called Ping … Read more

Pandora to Congress: Vote now, we're running out of time

The congressional vote regarding royalty fees for Internet radio has been moved at the last minute to 11 a.m. EDT Saturday, according to Pandora, one of the start-ups that has been pushing for this vote in the wake of pressure from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB).

"It has to happen tomorrow," Pandora chief technology officer Tom Conrad said in an interview with CNET News on Friday night. The start-up has put up a blog post encouraging fans and users to call their congressional representatives through the night to support the cause. "The timing issue that'… Read more

The recording industry should thank Apple

This month's Wired feature on Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris--which was posted online--has received a lot of commentary, most of it damning Morris as representative of a clueless and mortally wounded industry. The following quote, in which Morris talks about the dawn of the MP3 era, has drawn particular interest:

"There's no one in the record company that's a technologist. That's a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn't. They just didn't know what to do." He goes on to explain that he … Read more

Samsung store in Europe

When Microsoft released its Zune player-store-software combination, it effectively drove a stake into the heart of PlaysForSure, the company's logo program that identifies Windows Media-based online stores and the players that work with those stores. Sure, Microsoft still claims that it's equally committed to both initiatives, but PlaysForSure partners have a right to be concerned that their technology partner is competing directly against them.

Samsung was one of Microsoft's most steadfast digital media partners: it released one of the earliest Portable Media Centers (portable audio-video devices based on Windows Mobile software, which beat the video iPod to … Read more