Tagged: unlimitedmusicnetworks

The ambitious ad-supported music service Qtrax has announced a deal with its second major label: Sony. As part of the deal, Qtrax will offer Sony's digital music catalog for free to those who install its music downloading client. As with Qtrax's deals with EMI and Universal , Sony only agreed to license its regular digital music catalog, consisting of the same music it has already licensed to digital music stores like iTunes and free, ad-supported sources such as imeem and SpiralFrog. Qtrax's ultimate goal, however, is to go far beyond that, [...]

The ambitious ad-supported music service Qtrax has announced a deal with its second major label: Sony. As part of the deal, Qtrax will offer Sony's digital music catalog for free to those who install its music downloading client. As with Qtrax's deals with EMI and Universal , Sony only agreed to license its regular digital music catalog, consisting of the same music it has already licensed to digital music stores like iTunes and free, ad-supported sources such as SpiralFrog (updated -- see below). Qtrax's ultimate goal, however, is to go far [...]

The ambitious ad-supported music service Qtrax has announced a deal with its second major label: Sony. As part of the deal, Qtrax will offer Sony's digital music catalog for free to those who install its music downloading client. As with Qtrax's deals with EMI and Universal , Sony only agreed to license its regular digital music catalog, consisting of the same music it has already licensed to digital music stores like iTunes and free, ad-supported sources such as SpiralFrog (updated - see below). Qtrax's ultimate goal, however, is to go far beyond that, [...]

Although peer-to-peer networks are as legal as e-mail, much of their traffic involves the distribution of copyrighted music without protection. Qtrax has long sought permission to offer a peer-to-peer-style network by leveraging Usenet as a secondary back-end for its centralized music service. Until today, it had succeeded only in licensing the official catalogs of EMI and Universal Music Group for US users -- not including the "gray area" music that's available on file sharing networks. Today represents another baby step forward in the long march of Qtrax , "the world's first free and legal peer-to-peer music [...]

The file sharing software Limewire, with "80 to 100 million reasonably regular users," is one of the biggest forces in music distribution and still faces a lawsuit from multiple record labels. But now that the majors have made deals with MySpace, YouTube and other content networks, Lime Wire hopes to offer the sort of licensed P2P service that the original Napster could have become. One move in this direction is a new personalization feature that lets people share music and other content only with specific friends. "Lime Wire was started, unbelievably, about eight years ago [...]

The internet was supposed to level the playing field between signed and unsigned artists, giving each a way to reach fans without middlemen or kingmakers. And we might get there still. But judging from the major labels' equity stakes in MySpace Music (not to mention imeem and LaLa among others), music's future as a free economy could actually turn out more restrictive than its past, until these sites figure out how to compensate artists of every stripe fairly. The core of the problem, say MySpace Music's [...]

The millions of needles in imeem's haystack of music, videos and people just became easier to find, thanks to a new design that highlights imeem-programmed content, offers a customized discovery page for each user and bundles everything on the site that relates to a specific artist onto a single page. "What we've been working on for the past several month is a site-wide redesign," imeem head of marketing and business development Steve Jang told Wired.com. "It's been focused on solving a problem that we faced as we started to grow in traffic and started to install all [...]

MySpace Music, slated for a midnight launch on Wednesday night with a greatly increased catalog of songs from all four of the world's major labels, will allow users to stream songs on-demand, import them into an infinite number of playlists for free in return for encountering advertisements, and purchase them from Amazon's MP3 store without leaving the site MySpace says it chose this path because other models out there overly restrict music. "With DRM-protected a la carte files and tethered subscription files you've got a constrained system -- the content is constrained, it's [...]