In what can only be described as yet another nail in the coffins of the record companies, Nine Inch Nails have made their new CD 'The Slip' available to download for free from the band's website. They have also made it available in four different formats: MP3, Apple Lossless, FLAC and WAVE 24/96. All that is required is that you provide them with your email address which they claim will not be used for spam, and for those old school guys that do not want to download, the band intends to make a vinyl and CD release sometime in July.

As their website says, the band see's this is a way of giving something back to their legion of fans: "As a thank you to our fans for your continued support, we are giving away the new Nine Inch Nails album one hundred percent free, exclusively via nin.com."

The band are clearly delighted with their decision and are even urging downloaders to share the free music with as many people as possible: "We encourage you to share it with your friends, post it on your blog, play it on your podcast, give it to strangers, etc."

Tags: Music

Here is a surprise: The number two digital music retailer Amazon was given DRM free tracks from all of the four major record labels, so it is logical to expect it would be the first real rival to the total domination of music sales by Apple's iTunes music service.

Not only do Amazon's numbers pale when compared to iTunes, it is a mere 10 percent of Amazon's users who are iTunes defectors, even though all of its DRM free tracks will play on the iPod.

All of which means Amazon isn't poaching from Apple's dedicated fan base. Clearly they are attracting people who mostly avoided iTunes in the first place.

Audiophile music label Chesky Records has joined forces with other recording labels to offer high resolution music for download online! The companies press release says, "As you probably know, with record stores closing it has become increasingly difficult to find quality music. For several years, we have been developing a better way to deliver great sounding records to serious music lovers, and would like to personally extend an invitation to test drive the latest evolution in high-definition music."

All of the music on offer is available through HDtracks and allows for music downloads in CD-quality AIFF (the native CD format) and FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), as well as 320 kbps MP3. In the near future, select titles will be offered as DVD-Audio quality 24-bit/96kHz. Thankfully, all files available for download are DRM (Digital Rights Management) free, so you can play them in virtually any audio file player.

We tip our hat to Chesky for this initiative as it brings us one step closer to the being able to buy our music in the format we would like, without DRM. The more companies that do this, the more accepted it will be that people WILL buy online DRM free music un-compressed when it it offered!

With rumours suggesting that Music Giants will soon be offering their content DRM free, all they need to do now is realise that not everyone uses a PC and Internet Explorer (which their site is limited to) and we will be yet another step closer.

Tags: Music

The rumour mill is running hot with talk that there'll be an announcement in the next week, launching the 'MySpace Music Store', where people will be able to legitimately access music from a complete range of all the major music companies.

This has the potential to be the biggest threat to iTunes dominance yet. Where all others has failed because of a poor distribution model or just downright lousy user interface, MySpace could succeed for one simple reason: regardless of it's possible flaws, it has a truly massive captive audience.

Few people realise the size of the social media web sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Each of these sites receive as much web traffic as Google! It will be interesting to watch if this does come to fruition, stay tuned!

Tags: Music