Lala.com gives digital music another try

First a CD-trading site, then a free Web-based music browser, lala.com is being born again. The site is relaunching Tuesday as a hybrid, offering the digital download functionality of iTunes and the free music streaming of MySpace Music without the ads.

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Digital Music Sales Up Worldwide

Record companies' revenue from digital music sales rose 40 percent to $2.9 billion over the past year, but the growth is still failing to cover losses from collapse of international CD sales, the music industry's global trade body said Thursday.

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Google Key to Latest ITunes Challenge

Add gBox Inc. to the growing list of online music services hoping to chip away at iTunes's dominance.

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UMG Testing Sale of Unrestricted Tracks

Universal Music Group said Thursday it will sell digital music from artists such as Sting, 50 Cent and Stevie Wonder without the customary copy-protection technology for a limited time.

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Online Music Sales Doubled in 2006

Global online music sales nearly doubled in 2006 to about $2 billion, or 10 percent of all sales, but failed to compensate for an overall decline in sales of CDs, the global music industry trade body said Wednesday.

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Toy Makers Attach Products to IPod Craze

After bemoaning the emergence of the iPod as children's latest must-have toy, toy makers are now looking at the digital musical player as their own marketing strategy.

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Imagine a music app with instant access to any song you wanted to hear. Imagine creating a playlist from those songs and quickly, easily sharing it with friends. Such an app does exist, it's called Spotify, and it could change music forever.

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We've noticed that pretty much every single new and innovative digital music startup that pops up eventually gets sued by the record labels. The labels seem to view this as a part of basic negotiations -- and, in fact, many of the lawsuits have ended in partnership/equity deals.

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"I'm very excited about this," Bono told Mr. Cross about the RIM deal. "Research In Motion is going to give us what Apple wouldn't — access to their labs and their people so we can do something really spectacular."

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Left in dire straits by downloading, the music industry is in desperate need of retuning.

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David Ring, executive vice president of business development for Universal Music Group's digital arm, said at the EconMusic Conference that the recording industry simply can't sustain itself from download sales alone.

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Instead of its usual strategy of pinning scofflaws and wringing them through the court system, the RIAA will shift the burden to ISPs.

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Royalty Disagreement May See Apple Close Down ITunes

A ruling on record industry royalties due later today could push Apple towards a decision to close the iTunes store. Today America's Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) are meeting to settle an appeal that could mean the end for Apple iTunes.

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The music industry is struggling to gain a foot-hold in the battle with online piracy. The options available for music lovers to grow their music collection digitally is tremendous and free.

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WebbAlert: "Money for nothing... are the chicks free? The British version of the RIAA wants to add an extra tax to MP3 players. They say since people love music enough to transfer their CDs to their MP3 players, that makes it more valuable...

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If you're like me, you enjoy listening to good music and dislike spending money. So I find the concept of a free online mixtapes pretty damned irresistible.

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Nine Inch Nails Releases New Album Using Radiohead's Model, but With an Upgrade

Nine Inch Nails (NIN) is now a big time rogue band - since its contract with Interscope expired in October - with a cult following and in what some have likened to a Radiohead-esque move, have released their latest album Ghosts I-IV, on their official website only.

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Nearly half of all teenagers bought no compact discs in 2007, accelerating the music industry's painful transition from CDs to digital downloads, according to a report released Tuesday.

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Five hundred top members of the music business gathered today in New York to hear that "music 1.0 is dead." Ted Cohen, a former EMI exec who used the phrase, opened the Digital Music Forum East by pleading with the industry to be wildly creative with new business models but not t …

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Analyzing the impact of In Rainbows on the music industry and the potential ramifications for the future of digital music.

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Reading last weeks billboard, something interesting popped out at me. The song Low Rider by Flo Rida sold 467,000 units in a single week. There were 27 digital singles that sold more than 100k units in that week.

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With three of the big four music labels abandoning DRM, that leaves Sony as the big holdout. That's right, the same company that brought you the Sony rootkit scandal is also the last of the major labels to repent and abandon their DRMed ways.

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"Consumers want flexibility with respect to what they can do with music once they purchase it, and we want them to have that flexibility," says the label's Senior VP of Digital Strategy, Michael Nash.

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The music business has been in decline for the last seven years. CDs are not selling in the numbers they used to, which is a worry for the record industry as well as retailers.

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The British alternative rockers' EMI catalog remains a notable omission from the world's leading download store because of the band's assertion that its albums remain complete.

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Morris insists there wasn't a thing he or anyone else could have done differently. "There's no one in the record company that's a technologist," Morris explains. "That's a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn't.

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