Mike McGuire

MySpace launched its online music service named, not surprisingly, MySpace Music on Thursday. The News Corporation-owned social network pulled back the curtain on a portal that will allow MySpace users to build an infinite number of playlists of major- and independent-label songs of ad-supported streams while also enabling direct purchases of songs from Amazon’s MP3 [...]

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With Google dropping its first Android-based phone, the G1, on the market today, the galaxy’s search giant almost made the online music/mobile music market a bit more interesting by preloading Amazon’s MP3 download store software onto the device.  But today’s press reports leave me thinking that this is barely a music-capable mobile phone.
G1 users will be able to start [...]

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In hopes of giving the physical format-upgrade cycle one last spin – not to mention maybe increasing the standard unit price the majority of consumers pay for prerecorded music to anything more than $.99/song — all four major music labels have banded together with SanDisk to announce“slotMusic” an effort to build consumer interest in the [...]

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OK, look, I’ve been one of those analysts covering the media industry — especially the music industry and to some degree various “moving picture” companies — who has exhorted incumbent media to embrace digital technology, experiment with it. 
But people (and here I’m speaking to the folks toiling away at the intersection of media and online technology) me [...]

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Napster, a name that once used to strike fear in the hearts of music industry executives but of late seemed to bring up the rear of the online music market in terms of users and revenues, will be purchased by BestBuy for $121million.
Napster 2.0, as company backers named it when the service launched in [...]

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