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Nokia’s music bundle Comes With Hoover-shaped liabilities
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Andrew Orlowski
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Nokia faces a crippling financial bill for its strategy of bundling free music with handsets, which will give users unlimited song downloads with Nokia phones. The world’s biggest label, Universal Music, joined the “Comes With Music” initiative at launch last December, and Sony BMG joined last week. The Register has learned that Nokia must pay…
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Man discovers his net wasn’t neutered
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Andrew Orlowski
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We have very little idea of how a hysteria can grip sensible, rational people – until it strikes. After Orson Welles’s War Of The Worlds radio broadcast, the public reported sightings of Martians. According to urban legend, a farmer’s water tower was peppered with small arms fire, in the belief that it was a Martian…
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Futurist’s music widget goes titsup 2.0
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Andrew Orlowski
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Music’s best-known “futurist” has admitted his latest business idea has flopped and the service will close. Gerd Leonard of “Music 2.0” fame, who popularised the phrase “music flows like water”, has discovered that on the internet, revenue flows like set cement. His company Sonific, which allows bloggers to embed a widget that plays music, will…
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Earth to Ofcom: They’re our airwaves. Give us them back
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Andrew Orlowski
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Sometimes Ofcom, Britain’s media and telecomms uber-regulator, likes to agonise in public whether Britain needs a media and telecomms uber-regulator. It must feel like a stag night in SE1, as the executives fly in expensive blue-sky wonks and consultants, and Ofcom gets quite giddy with itself at the prospect of a world without Ofcom. Then…
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Billy Bragg: Why should songwriters starve so others get rich?
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Andrew Orlowski
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Billy Bragg interviewed. With audio, it’s all here.…
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Anti-trust looms over major labels legal blitz
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Andrew Orlowski
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Serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson is embroiled in a legal fight against the recording business – and not for the first time. His MP3Tunes locker service has raised the ire of EMI in a case that continues this week. But isn’t it weird, he asks, how the Big Four divvy up the litigation against music start-ups…