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

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

You have to hand it to Apple, with the new iTunes 7 for Mac and PC, they have just released what is without a doubt the best entertainment management system on the planet. This is a major upgrade, the most significant release of iTunes for some time and has many new features.

One of the new features that is truly brilliant, is the addition of 'Coverflow' which was a stand alone application which Apple bought the rights to. It allows you to browse your CD collection by album covers, in a three dimensional array. Apple have also added the feature to do the same for your books and movies as well.

Other new features include a revamped menu system, which separates the library into categories of Music, Movies, TV Shows etc, to simply library browsing. But, without a doubt the most requested feature they have added is that iTunes will now retrieve album covers. Before you get too excited about that though, remember you have to have an iTunes Store account to be able to use his feature, which you can do at no charge it must be said. So all in all, Apple have released a superb application which together with a Mac mini or iMac, provides you with a killer home entertainment solution.

Tags: Music