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Related to Tankboy’s previous post about a ringtone topping the UK charts, comes this interesting forecast:

One-Third of Digital TVs Will be Cell Phones in 2010

via Mobile Content News

Mark Cuban says $5/Month—

The RIAA can no longer claim that students who are downloading music are costing them thousands of dollars each. They can?t claim much of anything actually. In essence, Yahoo just turned possession of a controlled music substance into a misdemeanor. Payable by a $5 per month fine.

Yahoo drops the music bomb, with the announcement of a $6.99/month subscription service. From the LA times—

Yahoo Music Unlimited is more like a cable TV service than a record store, letting subscribers play as much music as they wish for as long as they pay $6.99 a month or an annual subscription of $60.

The Yahoo service has over a million songs, employing Window’s Janus digital rights management. A subscription covers 3 PCs and 2 Janus-enabled portable devices. Subscribers can access their collections and stream music from anywhere.

Tracks can be purchased outright for 99?—79? for subscribers. Unlike other services, such as Napster, there is no premium for portability.

Postplay notes&mdash

Yahoo Messenger will be integrated into the application allowing subscribers to pass tracks back and forth via IM. Users of the service can also forward 30-second clips over IM to friends who do not subscribe.

A first look, from PostPlay.

Audio interview with VP/GM David Goldberg.

Indy, is a streaming music “discovery program”—

Indy uses an advanced collaborative filtering system to predict what kind of music you’ll enjoy hearing. As you rate songs, Indy finds out what you do and don’t like. It compares your preferences with the ratings of all the other Indy users. For example, if you rate a song highly, and another user also likes the same song, Indy guesses that you’d probably like other music that they enjoyed. As you rate more songs, Indy will gets better and better at picking songs that you’ll really enjoy.

Download Win
Download Mac

Submit your music here.

(via Unmediated)

The story begins at Boing Boing, where Chris Hoofnagle of EPIC notes some data for sale here. Further investigation/searching has led to the finger being tentatively pointed in the direction of eMusic, though they have denied it. The digging has also uncovered this data set for sale as well.

Description: This file contains individuals who have purchased an iPod MP3 player. Selects: more than 2.1 million total file, 3-month hotline, geography, income, age, gender, marital status, mail order buyer, magazine subscriber, computer owner, donor, ethnicity, religion, book buyer, credit card holder, homeowner, length of residence and age of child present

Infinity Broadcasting is converting it’s KYCY 1550 AM station in San Francisco to a (supposedly) listener-submitted Podcast format. Following the usual corporate media model, one suspects it’s only a matter of time before these allegedly grassroots broadcasts bring creative insights into the fascinating life work of Hillary Duff and Hoobastank. We’ll hold out hope, though.

From Reuters:

Two independent music promoters have sued Universal Music Group for $100 million, claiming the record company forced them to submit false invoices so Universal could recoup promotional costs from artists such as rapper Nelly.

Amazon has compiled it’s top 200 free music downloads in one easily-available list, available here. This Firefox plug-in will come in handy.

The House has passed the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 (HR167), legalizing technology like Clearplay, which removes/edits “objectionable” content from DVDs. In an obvious handout to placate the RI/MPAA lobbies, the legislation also makes using a video camera to record a film in a movie theater a federal crime with a maximum penalty of three years in prison for the first offense. Sharing a movie or a song before it’s “official” commercial release will get you up to 10 years.

According to Derek Slater, the folks that opened the “backdoor” of iTunes are a short step away from cracking part of Napster’s .wma DRM. The crack would enable:

…people to turn songs acquired through Napster Light (the a la carte service) and Premium (the non-portable subscription service) into unencrypted files.

Code available here, for anyone interested in checking it out.