80 dash 89 dot com

I can now read the Members only feed from Daring Fireball in Google Reader. Thanks John!

Tags:Daring Fireball, Google Reader

Yahoo! Finance
Apple® today announced that more than three billion songs have been purchased and downloaded from the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com). iTunes is the world’s most popular online music, TV and movie store featuring a catalog of over five million songs, 550 television shows and 500 movies. iTunes recently surpassed Amazon and Target to become the [...]

MSNBC.com:
Brian May is completing his doctorate in astrophysics, more than 30 years after he abandoned his studies to form the rock group Queen.

Tags:Music

Looks like we’re not getting a deal anytime soon. SoundExchange evidently wants DRM on internet radio streams in exchange for lower royalty rates. I don’t see where hijacking internet radio streams is a big problem, but as we all know the record companies have their own reality.

Tags:Music, Net Radio

Steve Gordon over at the The Register thinks that music companies should get a royalty on each iPod sold. Of course the assumption is that iPod owners are thieves and that the music companies should be able to recoup some of their losses by instituting a tax on consumer electronics.

Tags:iPod, Music

azcentral.com
Viacom Inc., owner of Paramount Pictures, is considering offering movie rentals through Apple Inc.’s iTunes online store, Chairman Sumner Redstone said.
Those things are being considered,” Redstone said today in an interview at the Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. Viacom spokesman Carl Folta and Apple spokesman Steve Dowling didn’t return phone calls [...]

Listening Post – Wired Blogs
At today’s Congressional hearing about the new rates for online radio that would essentially destroy it (as readers of this blog already know), SoundExchange, which was scheduled to receive the new royalty payments on Monday morning (since the enforcement date falls on a Sunday), made a startling statement.
The SoundExchange executive [Jon [...]

According to CNET News.com
A federal appeals court has declined to grant a petition by Webcasters to delay the onset of new royalty fees.
If they don’t come up with a compromise I suspect quite a few Internet radio stations will go off the air this Sunday.

Tags:Music, Radio

This morning on my Tivo Series 3 I got an update and I am now able to order and rent shows from Amazon Unbox from my TV. Prior to this update I would have to order it from the Amazon website and it would transfer it to my Tivo.

Tags:Tivo, Amazon Unbox

Times Online
Retail sales, for which figures have been compiled since 1969, the year that the Beatles’ Abbey Road album was released, have never fallen by so much, although there was a 9 per cent decline in 1982 before the arrival of the compact disc.

Tags:CD, iTunes, Music

Robert Cringley is claiming that come Christmas through a firmware update the iPhone will be upgraded to the 3G network, which is 3 to 5 times faster than the Edge network it’s on now. Everything I’ve read says this isn’t possible through a firmware update.

Tags:iPhone

No surprise here, but according to Walt Mossberg we’ll see a flash plugin for Safari in an upcoming software update for the iPhone.
Deals may be eminent for the iPhone in Europe.
Do some iPhones run hot? Joe Hutsko in describing his original iPhone “all but burned the skin on my hand.” He replaced his original [...]

New York Times
Album sales have continued their downward slide this year, but sales of digital tracks are up almost 50 percent over this time last year.
A total of 229.8 million albums were sold in the United States from Jan. 1 to July 1, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures released Wednesday. That is a 15 percent [...]

DVD Jon has found a way to hack the iPhone so you don’t have to activate it with AT&T. You lose the phone functionality and it’s a Windows only hack at the moment. So if you’re interested in a $600 Wi-fi enabled iPod this may be for you. I suspect in a future update this [...]

Hope everyone has a safe July 4th.

Bloomberg.com
Apple Inc. sells the new iPhone at more than double production costs, suggesting the new handset may be more profitable than rivals from Motorola Inc. and Nokia Oyj. The shares rose the most in six months to a record.
The most-expensive $599 model has component and manufacturing costs of $265.83, which translates into margins of more [...]

InformationWeek
Apple appears to be in a state of denial. The company reportedly told the San Francisco Chronicle that it is still in negotiations with Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group (UMG).
“We are still negotiating with Universal,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told Chronicle staff writer Ellen Lee. “Their music is still on iTunes and their not re-signing [...]

WSJ.com
Highlighting ongoing tension between the music industry and Apple Inc., Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group is set to notify the Cupertino, Calif. company that it is not renewing a long term contract to sell digital music downloads through the increasingly powerful iTunes Store, according to people familiar with the situation.
The move does not mean, however, [...]