Tag Archives: MP3

Vodafone has claimed that it has 450,000 music subscribers to its unlimited subscription music service (the biggest in Europe?) Sadly there is no way to compare this to Nokias Comes With Music service so it is hard to know if this figure is impressive or not.

From mocoNews- “No single kind of digital service is going to save the music business on its own, but every little helps. Doing its bit, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) came to the Midem music-biz event having totted up the number of paying customers it has for unlimited subscription music – the model that offers perhaps the most likely salvation…

The result: 450,000 around Europe. That makes it the continent’s biggest subscription music operator, it claimed (Spotify has just over 250,000, it said during the conference, and is looking to provide its service to mobile carriers). Voda attracted 100,000 music subscribers in December alone, it said at the event in Cannes.

The telco first started offering unlimited, DRM’ed music downloads for £1.99, via subscription-music vendor Omnifone’s MusicStation service, in September 2007, so has been in the game a relatively long time, but it’s recently started concentrating again on a la carte downloads, striking deals with major labels to remove DRM. That allows is to offer a bundle of 10 MP3s a month to consumers – an offering that labels have made standard to many retailers.”

MP3 is of course the format of choice for digital music at this time, but plans are afoot to bring something new to the party. The MusicDNA format will supposedly provide “lyrics, videos, artwork and blog posts, which will continually be updated, as well as the music.”

From the BBC- “It has been created by Norwegian developer Dagfinn Bach, who worked on the first MP3 player in 1993.

And its investors include German researcher Karlheinz Brandenburg, who is credited with inventing the MP3.

British record company Beggars Group, whose labels are home to Vampire Weekend, MIA and The Strokes, has signed up to use MusicDNA, as has US label Tommy Boy.

But no major labels are currently on board and the MusicDNA files are likely to be more expensive than current music downloads.

It will also be in competition with Apple’s iTunes LP, which gives users added content including bonus tracks, lyrics and video interviews.”

Here’s an interesting article at Times Online which suggests that younger people prefer the tinnier sound of digital music to analogue which people over a certain age seem to prefer. I always presumed that a good MP3 player was perfectly acceptable, until I heard my friend’s stereo system playing vinyl (over £5,000′s worth)- the difference was incredible!

“Many people complain that pop music was better in the good old days. Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen are poor substitutes for the Beatles and Bob Dylan, the argument goes.

Older fans also insist that songs heard through iPods just don’t rock as they used to, compared with the clarity of CDs and the crackling charm of vinyl.

Research has shown, however, that today’s iPod generation prefers the tinnier and flatter sound of digital music, just as previous generations preferred the grainier sounds of vinyl. Computers have made music so easy to obtain that the young no longer appreciate high fidelity, it seems.

The theory has been developed by Jonathan Berger, Professor of Music at Stanford University, California. For the past eight years his students have taken part in an experiment in which they listen to songs in a variety of different forms, including MP3s, a standard format for digital music. “I found not only that MP3s were not thought of as low quality, but over time there was a rise in preference for MP3s,” Professor Berger said.”