Get 770 Free Songs From Amazon

So the pirates lost today (The Pirate Bay Pirates, not the Pittsburgh Pirates, who will probably lose as well), but that doesn't mean you can't still get free music. And what if you could get that free music legally, as well? "The Other MP3 Store" Amazon has 770 tracks available for free download according to CNet. Choices range from the obscure to the famous, but why not start the weekend with some free, fresh music...

Here you go... Go wild.

How the Music Industry Just Killed Itself. Again.

Yes, iTunes changed its pricing on April 7th, and no, no one's very happy about it. Now as other music retailers like Amazon have followed suit, it's becoming clear(er) that the labels are behind this latest pricing change.

Music is their product, and they are free to price it as they wish. Consumers are then also free to weigh whether a 30% increase in a product's price is worth it, or whether their time is better spent searching for the song by other means.

Ironically though, it seems like having tiered pricing may have created a new headache, especially for the artists. Billboard has done some preliminary research, and it looks like in general, tracks on the top 100 chart priced at $1.29 have fallen in rank, while a majority of $.99 tracks have moved up. 

What does it tell us? It means beyond musical sensibility, beyond the art behind the music, consumers are looking at the cold hard cost of buying a track. No artist should have to wonder whether it was a lack of public interest, or the pricing decision of the record label that led a track to fail or succeed. Just look at the app store to see how the price of apps has been driven lower, potentially at the cost of losing quality apps at a higher price point.

The industry has created a slippery slope, in which in six months time, we could see the charts dominated by those (now rare) $.69 cent tracks. When getting to #1 is more about the price of the track than the viability of the music, the industry loses. The end game is free tracks, and while that will be great for consumers, the record label execs can start packing their boxes now.

Macgirl's Media pick of the week 4/11/09

This week my pick is a throwback to a simpler time. (ok, a time in history that I didn't actually experience, but it looked nice in American Dreams...)

If you haven't already, head over to iTunes and download something, anything,  by Raphael Saadiq.  His 2008 release, The Way I See It, has been on constant rotation in my iPod since it first came out.  It has a great mix of soul and motown, with a modern updated feel.  I LOVE this album.  Check it out, you'll find some old-school music vibes are a great compliment to your edgy music mix.

And Now, Some Stats For The Pirates

It may come as a shock to the law-abiding reader, but some people choose to get their media by more nefarious means. This week the Hollywood Reporter took a look at the most pirated TV shows of the week.

The winner (or loser, depending on how you look at it) was Heroes, with 1.76 million downloads, just beating out Lost with 1.7 million downloads. It would be interesting to see how those numbers compare to the number of times those shows were purchased on iTunes over the same period. The stats come from a company called ShowInsider. It sort of begs the question though: if you know how many copies of a specific file are being downloaded, shouldn't you be able to stop it?

Rounding out the top ten were: "House," "24," "The Big Bang Theory," "How I Met Your Mother," "South Park," "Family Guy," "Gossip Girl," and "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles". The Hollywood Reporter plans on making this a new weekly feature. We will not.

iTunes' Grey Screen of Death

On the assignment board here at TDL, it looked like a good way to spend an hour: I planned on watching Southland on iTunes, and write about it being available on iTunes ahead of its TV debut (tonight). But that's when it happened: The iTunes Grey Screen of Death: iGSOD. The computer I chose to watch the new release on is an original MacPro attached to a DVI monitor. And guess what? along with reports of issues playing content on dvi monitors on new Macs with DisplayPorts, It turns out a firmware upgrade from two years ago could be the culprit keeping MacPro users from watching HD movies/TV (interestingly, clips downloaded pre 8.1 play fine.)

Oh well, I guess I'll just watch it on TV. You know, that big screen in the living room that digital downloads could make obsolete if it wasn't for silly issues like this.