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Seattle Film + Music Blog

FOUR RECORD LABELS AT WORK ON THEIR OWN DIGITAL ALBUM TEMPLATES

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A.V. Club
Recently, Apple announced its efforts to come up with a new kind of digital album that would include music videos, liner notes and interactive features in one big bundle. (This sounds a lot like the old “enhanced CDs” that no one really cared about back in the late ’90s; but whatever.) Now the word is that Sony, Warner, Universal and EMI have been working on a similar project, and tried to bring Apple into their plans early on, only to learn that Apple was going its own way. The record label project has been dubbed “CMX,” while Apple’s is code-named “Cocktail.” Both are designed to move on-line buyers away from the one-song-at-a-time habit and get them back into albums as albums.

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APPLE ACCUSED OF STIFLING SPEECH ABOUT THE IPOD, IPHONE

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Wired
Apple’s demands to control completely the iPhone and iPod – and free speech about them — was met with legal resistance Monday when the Cupertino electronics concern was hit by a lawsuit challenging that presumption. The San Francisco federal court case concerns a wiki that last year removed a thread discussing integrating non-Apple software into the closely guarded iPhone and iPod. Virginia-based OdioWorks, the operator of the non-commercial wiki – BluWiki, removed the string amid threats of being sued by one of the world’s richest companies.

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APPLE MAKES ITUNES SWITCH

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Hollywood Reporter:
Apple is changing the way iTunes users can replace their existing iTunes songs to the new DRM-free versions. Initially, the only option available was to convert every iTunes-purchased file to the new sans-Fairplay version, for 30 cents a track, using the “Upgrade My Library” feature. On Thursday, Apple switched to a per track and/or per album model whereby users can chose which songs in their library they want to convert to DRM free versions.

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