Mike Hales

Among the slew of announcements by Microsoft, MSN Music is perhas the biggest one for music companies: the MSN Muisc store has been formally launched, here…it has added a bunch of new content, added music news, added audiobooks, ringtones, videos, Billboard charts etc… It has also launched music stores in Austria, the Netherlands, Spain and […]

(US) Media Centers On Parade; Content Partners Announced: PC makers, working with Microsoft, set course for consumers’ living rooms on Tuesday, launching a slew of new Media Center PCs. Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, Sony and Toshiba all introduced their latest Media Center PCs, wrapped around Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center 2005 operating system. The latest version […]

With the Supreme Court’s rejection of its appeal, the recording industry Tuesday suffered a setback in its bid to force Internet service providers to turn over the names of possible music copyright violators. The high court rejected the appeal from the Recording Industry Association of America Inc. without comment. The decision let stand a lower […]

Yet more evidence that Kazaa – once the undispute champion of filesharing – is fast falling down the ranks. P2P monitoring firm BayTSP has released a report showing that eDonkey has now taken over from Kazaa as the biggest filesharing network, with an average of 2.5 million users online every day compared to 2.4 million […]

Whichever way you look at it the latest survey of online music behaviour from NPD Group makes for worrying reading. The headline stats are that whilst legal downloading is down in the US, unlicensed file sharing is back up again. The number of consumers paying for downloads fell to nearly one million users per month […]