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UK musician Billy Bragg is furious at attempts by major labels and the music industry groups they dominate to prevent file-sharing, saying they don’t understand musicians, don’t understand fans, and don’t get the new age.

On suing file-sharers, he was incensed, “You know who the pirates are?” he thundered during the closing moments of EconMusic yesterday. “The pirates are our fans, when you sue our fans, you drive our fans away,” he yelled, arguing that the industry must change if it has any chance of survival.

What really annoys Bragg is that music labels demand the lion’s share of income from new start-ups and music services, “That’s my income stream you’re pissing with,” he exclaimed, urging labels to pay a higher percentage to artists in the digital age.
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What this is about is in the title - the focus of Rose’s notions is on ways in which Apple can make iTunes more socially-connected…
iTunes 9 Ideas

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Fresh research from StrategyEye Digital Media suggests the digital media industry will continue rapid growth despite prevaililng economic gloom - but warns interest in virtual worlds like Second Life and mobile TV solutions is waning.

The recent success of the iPhone’s App Store is an example of the increasing popularity of mobile among traditional and new media companies within their digital media strategy. 56% of all companies surveyed intend to incorporate mobile device applications in the next 12 months, while 49% intend to incorporate mobile web portals as part of their digital media strategy.
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Recall the heady days of music retail when enthusiasts lorded over their record shops, teaching music fans what was hot and what was not, and offering educated recommendations to people seeking out new song sensations? Well, now you can run a similar breed of shop, using the all-new People’s Music Store.

People’s Music Store - just recently emerged out of beta - is a service that lets music fans create their own music store for their website or blog. This is a real store, selling real music online, with the people behind the service sorting out rights, permissions and payments.

All a user need to is register for the service and then spend some time populating their store with whatever music they are keen to sell.
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Electronic Arts Europe is launching its first casual game on Facebook to test the popularity of gaming on social networks.

The company has made word game Word Whomp Dash available on Facebook, hoping to match the success of Scrabulous, which had over 2.5million users before legal action on the part of Hasbro and Mattel scuppered everybody’s party.

Now it seems EA is looking to see just how much success its Facebook social play has in order to decide whether to make more games available through the service.

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Social music-focused networking service, Last.fm, saw site traffic climb 62 per cent and activity climb 208 per cent across the past year.

According to the latest comScore Media Metrix report (July 2008, U.S. Data), Last.fm has experienced a 20% increase in unique visitors and a 36% increase in total minutes in the United States. 

Additionally, Last.fm saw a dramatic 208% year-over-year increase in total minutes spent on the site and a 62% increase in unique visitors, corresponding to a 90% increase in visitor engagement.
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Location-based services and social networks seem to be emerging as this year’s buzz words. In trying to dream up some musical angles to the application of such technologies, I found myself pondering geo-tagging.

Geo-tagging, if you’ve not heard of it, is technology which lets you connect data to a geographic position - so, for example, some images of a place you went to on holiday that you upload and make available to others using, for example, Flickr or Google Maps. Usually this involves images, though video is becoming more popular.
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Research firm ABI Research predicts that the developing location-based mobile social networking industry will turn into a $3.3 billion market worldwide by 2013. We think intelligent pervasive music networking will increase that opportunity.

We have the info here,

Begins: The recent emergence of location-based mobile social networking services offered by providers such as GyPSii, Pelago and Loopt is revolutionizing social networking by allowing users to share real-life experiences via geo-tagged user-generated multimedia content, exchange recommendations about places, identify nearby friends and set up ad hoc face to face meetings.

After the break:
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eMusic today implemented the social discovery and Web 2.0 features of its independent music retail website, in hope of taking more chunks from the low interaction offered by the world’s largest music store, iTunes.
The service confirmed reports earlier this week that it planned to implement a host of new Web 2.0 features. These are designed to offer eMusic customers more musical context than any other site by pulling in relevant content from around the web and allowing them to share their finds with their friends on major social networks, bookmarking sites and blogs.
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