“…Amazon announced earlier today that their Amazon MP3 store will become internationally available starting this year, dealing making the Seattle-based company even more of a contender against Apple’s iTunes.”

Listen up, boys and girls. If you are only selling your music in iTunes and maybe some of the lesser ones like Rhapsody and AOL Music, you should pay close attention to Amazon MP3. It will take a while but it could be the one to knock iTunes off its perch. If you are still not distributed digitally or looking into digital distribution of your music, you might as well not be in the music industry. It’s more work for less money, but that’s the reality of it right now.

I saw and pointed to this earlier in the year, but it came into my stream of consciousness again and is worth watching and pondering once again. Kudos to Adam Curry.

Amazon.com Inc. launched its digital download music store today with nearly 2.3 million songs, all sans copy protection. Songs cost 89 cents to 99 cents each and albums sell for $5.99 to $9.99. Universal Music Group and EMI Music Publishing will sell their tracks on Amazon, as will thousands of independent labels. Here is the New York Times feature on this development.

I did a quick search using “Hawaiian” as a keyword, and it returned 1,336 results. A lot of them were old-time recordings. Keali‘i Reichel’s Ke‘alaokamaile is in there ($6.99 for the entire CD!), but nothing else. None of Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole’s releases in there as downloads, but the store does conveniently show that you can still buy it on plastic. A number of Mākaha Sons releases are in there. I’ll do some more digging tomorrow.

[ From RollingStone.com ] “Record sales are tanking, and there’s no hope in sight: How it all went wrong…”

Here is one of the recording industry’s proposed solutions. As if terrestrial radio wasn’t in enough trouble as it is.

Learn about the legal and business aspects of the music business, including an overview of: intellectual property law; industry contracts; digital music issues; and how Act 221 and Act 88 can help artists and Hawaii’s music industry.

This course is taught by prominent entertainment industry attorney Willian G. Meyer, III, who represents many of Hawaii’s top recording artists, record labels, distributors, and entertainment companies. May 12, 9:00am – 12:00pm, Windward Campus, Hale Kuhina 107. For more information contact the Office of Continuing & Community Education, 235-7433.

According to Wire’s Listening Post, two U.S. representatives introduced a bill today called “The Internet Radio Equality Act,” which would reverse the Copyright Royalty Board ruling which could still effectively drive many Internet radio stations off of the net.

Last month I pointed to a story about a ruling that could mean the death of a lot of popular webcasts. Well, it has taken a very popular and pioneering Hawaiian music program, Internet Radio Hawai‘i, off the air. More will undoubtably follow.

This and my previous link to the Online Guitar Archive being forced online shows how the industry is again trying to consolidate it’s grip on music, how you find it, buy it, and consume it. Independent webcasters have the choice of finding a business model that will provide enough revenue for them to pay the higher rates or simply shut down. The end result will be that the industry will have greater influence over what gets heard and where, something that it enjoyed to a greater degree before the advent of webcasting and podcasting. My guess is  that the industry will go after podcasters next, however, with resources like the Podsafe Music Network available there are other places for podcasters to turn for music (and many of them do anyway).

Mahalo to the ever-vigilant Auntie Maria for the pointer.

Doctor Trey covers an issue that was the talk of the net today – Apple and EMI announced the availability of DRM-free copies of EMI’s entire catalog (“Digital Rights Management” is in the eyes of the industry, “copy protection” in the eyes of the consumer). The deal – you get a higher quality, DRM/Copy Protection-free copies of the audio for a 30 cent per-song premium. I’d have to think about it.

This feature on the previously mentioned Wired Listening Post site talks about how the Online Guitar Archive, or (OLGA) received a “cease and desist” letter from the Music Publishers Association and National Music Publishers Association last August. OLGA was a guitar tablature (an easy-to-learn system of notation for guitarists) archive where you could find help in learning thousands of songs. The archive has been off-line, however, there was an announcement on the MXTabs site regarding an ageement with the Harry Fox Agency to allow for sharing of guitar tabs on their site. Owners of copyrighted songs, however, must give their permission for the tabs to appear. Implications for Hawaiian music? You betcha.

I found a very nice blog feed for issues regarding copyright and technology at Wired.com. I highly recommend it for people interested in these issues.

Here’s an insightful story from TechDirt (via Scripting News): “…in the industry’s desperate need to charge for every single use, they’re effectively killing off yet another wonderful promotional vehicle.”

According to the New York Times, the major record labels are moving closer to releasing music on the Internet with no copying restrictions — a step they once vowed never to take.

It’s one of those “good news, bad news” situations. Online music sales have doubled, but they fail to make up for the steep decline in physical CD sales.

After two years of hesitancy, the music industry is finally taking its first steps toward embracing podcasting, according to the Wall Street Journal. Hallelujah!

The recording industry group has filed 8,000 new lawsuits in 17 countries, bringing the total number of suits it has filed outside the U.S. to 13,000, the IFPI announced Tuesday. That’s on top of about 18,000 lawsuits already filed in U.S.

“MySpace.com will soon enable members of the popular online social networking hub to sell downloads of their original music directly through MySpace Web pages, company executives said Friday.”

This could mark the beginning of the biggest development in the sale of digital audio downloads since iTunes Music Store launched, IMHO, and is a potential nightmare for labels and other online retailers. Stay tuned.

HawaiiNews.com offers a more critical assessment of the OC Tunes/BurnLounge arrangement. It include a surprising quote from a music promoter who also happens to work for Oceanic. I recall Lanai talking about BurnLounge and its program at the HARA general membership meeting last year, and I got the same feeling about it – Amway for music. Still, I thought about signing up Nahenahe just to try it out – until I heard it was Windows-only.

This feature in the Star-Bulletin talks about a new partnership between Oceanic Time Warner Cable and online music retailer BurnLounge. OC Tunes claims to have the most “island music” of any online retailer. I would love to see actual figures on that, but have to admit that there are still many Hawai‘i bands who have not made it into the only online service I use, iTunes. And I will continue to do so until BurnLounge gets its act together and supports Macintosh. Even that probably would not get me to switch – look at the list of steps you have to follow to download songs a burn a CD and the title of the document. While most young folks wouldn’t have difficulty with it, I can’t imagine my mother being able to buy online music like this. Fortunately I converted her to Mac and she’s happy as a clam with iTunes and her iPod. Regardless, it is great the Hawai‘i people are involved and making a concerted effort to get Hawai‘i music in there.

P.S. I should note that it is not really BurnLounge’s fault that there is no Mac support – it is their dependence on Windows Media Player. WMP for Mac didn’t support the DRM (Digital Rights Management) system as it does on Windows machines. I don’t believe WMP is even being developed for Mac anymore, though there is a plugin for QuickTime now that allows you to play Windows Media files. I doubt Apple would ever support WMP’s DRM as it could potentially cut into iTunes Music Store sales, but who knows. Stranger things have happened.

Some long-time Internet music holdouts like Bob Seger and Metallica finally sell to online fans. Now only a few remaining big-name musical acts are still resisting digital download sales, including the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Garth Brooks, Radiohead and Kid Rock.

It seems that LimeWire may go the way of the original Napster and Kazaa. A coalition of major recording companies sued the operators of the file-sharing program LimeWire for copyright infringement Friday, claiming the firm encourages users to trade music without permission. [ From Yahoo News ]

[ From the New York Times ] Amazon.com has moved slowly and deliberately in developing their plan to take on Apple and iTunes. It includes Amazon branded devices and possibly giving away the playback hardware to sell music.

Are the methods of major labels going the way of the dinosaur? According to this article from the New York Times, everybody is hurting, but perhaps the independent labels are hurting less.

Mahalo to Bernie Goldbach for the pointer.