cmx

Peter Kafka at All Things Digital reported Thursday that Apple is planning to make a major announcement the week of September 7, and that was a big scoop.

But much of the substance of Apple's announcement--at least as it relates to music--is old news, according to multiple music industry sources. Last month, the Financial Times broke the story that Apple is working on the next-generation album cover, code named Cocktail.

Whatever else Apple intends to announce at the still not officially announced event, expect Cocktail to be part of it. An Apple spokesman declined to comment on Friday.

It … Read more

It was a bigger deal a few years ago: stick a popular music CD in your computer and you'd be greeted by a Flash application containing some music videos and maybe some desktop wallpapers. To some, it was a bonus to having a CD.

Mostly though, the applications were a giant pain in the seating equipment, forcing music fans everywhere to learn what the hell "disable auto-run" meant. Now, imagine that, only with all your songs contained in the same application as well. From what we understand, this is the crux of a new proposal from the think-tanks at the world's largest four record labels.

Known internally as CMX, it will be a music-distribution format--essentially a single download containing all album tracks, the artwork, liner notes, some music videos and whatever else they've got lying around the office--that the labels hope will rekindle the love of buying entire albums, rather than picking the four good songs from whatever A-lister's latest release.

The perks of established artists As a standalone product, CMX could suffer a tragic fate reserved solely for products launched on the back of these very A-listers. In fact, the Times even outs U2 as a possible beneficiary of the new medium, whose next album could spearhead a CMX "soft launch."

Good job, because it'll need the money U2 has behind them to enlist the developer, designer, coder, and distributor elite to produce and peddle the unusual, paid-for downloads fans are going to be encouraged to want. But that's only one part of the potential problem. … Read more

Reading through Greg Sandoval's detailed reporting of SpiralFrog's demise, I once again found myself wondering--as I did many times during the late 1990s dot-com boom and subsequent bust--how anybody could possibly have thought this was a good idea. Ad-supported music downloads that are incompatible with the iPod, the device that basically created the MP3 player market? Who would possibly buy such a thing? SpiralFrog seemed like such an obvious nonstarter, I wrote about it once in 2007 and never wasted time revisiting it. But investors were spending serious sums of money on it, right up until the end. … Read more