Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Today, MySpace unveils the all-new MySpace Music alongside new BFFs: EMI Music, SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group (NYSE:WMG), and Sony ATV/ Music Publishing. 

Users can do all the playlist making, swapping, downloading, streaming, etc. to their hearts’ desires.  Expect to be enticed by MySpace Music partners McDonald’s, Sony Pictures, State Farm, and Toyota.  We can expect free downloads from Mickey D’s, State Farm playlists and Toyota Tuesdays where anything can happen.

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Nokia is poised to release its new “Comes With Music” phones on October 17th in Britain.  The phones will come with a subscription music service that will allow users to keep any song they obtain through it for 12 months.  The service will come with every phone, with nothing mentioned about payment.  So far, three major studios have signed on for the project: Universal, Sony BMG and Warner Music Group.  Seems like a fairly good push to start with.

According to the Reuters reports, the music companies are hoping this will diminish the popularity of Apple’s iTunes Music Store.  I don’t see why, but music publishers don’t seem to really like Apple too much lately.  Maybe they don’t like making slightly less money?  iTunes is the biggest music seller out there at the moment (well, in America at least, not too sure about worldwide), but this Nokia subscription plan may take a bit away from that.  If the iPhone and other lower-end phones have shown anything, it’s that people don’t mind listening to music on cellphones.

There are a few problems with the service that can be a bit off a turn-off with the service, though…

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Our sister site Gamertell has spotted an interesting freebie at Target retail stores. The chain is putting out a Speed Racer-themed gift card that comes with a 60+ MB USB 2.0 Flash drive built right in. It is one of those gift cards you fill with money to give to someone else, so it’s essentially free if you happen to forget to fill it before you take it home. (*wink*)

The Flash drive is preloaded with 50 MB of promotional files including the usual wallpapers, printable coupons, movie files and a videogame cheat code for the upcoming release of May 6, 2008, release of Speed Racer: The Videogame. You can, of course, keep or delete the files as you wish and simple have a nifty fat credit card sized Flash drive with a Speed Racer skin.

Read [Gamertell]

National Geographic has announced that they will be joining the ranks of those who are now Blu-ray exclusive. This is certainly no surprise that National Geographic would make this decision as they are a subdivision of Warner. It does however continue the sad march to the dead pool for HD DVD. Of the Warner subsidiaries only BBC continues to holdout for non-exclusivity. The first title to be released as a Blu-ray exclusive will be the April release of Sharkwater which should get an official announcement in the next few weeks.

Read [Blu-ray.com]

If you are a heavy user of high-speed Internet, your happy days of peer-to-peer downloading might soon be over. Time Warner Cable, currently the second largest U.S. cable operator, plans to shift from the standard flat fee to a usage-based billing scheme.

The Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas are the chosen guinea pigs for the first trial run. The test is slated later this year but the terms had not been set yet.

Since video downloading and streaming are very popular nowadays, the cable operator claims this is a strategy to minimize network congestion. Moreover, it assured the public that its impact is very minimal for only 5% of all customers are considered heavy users. In fact, this new billing scheme is claimed to be very favorable for the majority of light users.

Other cable companies are quietly observing the results of this new pricing test. If proven effective without much hullabaloo, this could entice other players to adopt this scheme and abandon flat fee pricing totally.

Read [Reuters]

Are you ready for another exciting press conference?  We’re definately excited to see what they have in store for us.

The press conference starts out with Barry M. Meyer, Chairman of Warner taking the stage.  He begins by talking about the format war and how it’s bad for business because retailers don’t want to stock 2 SKUs for the same content.  Meyer announces that he thinks Warner has the perfect solution for the issue at hand, the Total HD disc.

Presidents of Warner Kevin Tsujahara and Ron Sanders hop up on stage and start giving some background about the market.  2.5 million HD DVD devices coming to the market. 6.2 million Blu-ray devices coming as well - 9 million including current devices.

The new optical media is called Total Hi Def - and they’re abbreviating it T HD.  They did demos with a T HD version of Superman in a Blu-ray player, an HD DVD player, and LG’s new combo player.

In Q/A, they covered the following:

• Both sides have full HD DVD and Blu-ray capacities, dual layer on both discs.
• Cost of production is unknown
• No retail price as of this time
• Newline and HBO are the only ones to announce support so far
• No licensing fees need to be paid to Warner for the technology - only to Blu-ray and HD DVD

Top photo courtesy Engadget.

The country infamous for pirating feature films before they even hit theaters is getting Superman Returns on DVD early this year. Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is trying to combat pirating by providing a specially encrypted Mandarin-language DVD to Chinese retail outlets 2 months before other countries.  The Chinese single-disc edition will cost 14 yuan (US$1.75) and the two-disc special edition will be available for 22 yuan (US$2.75), about twice the price of a pirated DVD. The US release is scheduled for Nov. 28 and will cost $28.98 and $34.99, respectively. As a comparison, a Big Mac in China costs only 10.5 yuan (US$1.31). Apparently a Big Mac costs nearly the same price as one DVD.

Read [Home media retailing]

Ever since the original Napster was shut down, we’ve been waiting for the record industry to open their eyes to change.  They’ve made an attempt with iTunes, but what people really want is free music!  SpiralFrog.com has teamed up with Universal Music Group to offer such a service - with a twist.  According to Marshall over at TechCrunch, in order for your free music to stay active, you need to visit SpiralFrog’s website at least once a month.  If they’re smart and list all of the music on the website - and I presume they will - this will not be too much of an inconvenience at all. 

The company has quite the executive lineup as well.  They’ve got the former CEO of Universal Mccann (advertising firm), a 12 year Microsoft executive, and their board of directors is made up of big-wigs from around the recording industry (even the RIAA).  According to the Financial Times, SpiralFrog is also in talks with Warner, EMI and Sony-BMG for similar deals.

The music service will offer a desktop downloader for Windows Media files, that can be listened to on one PC and two portable devices...and unfortunately, at this time it doesn’t look like there will be any support for iPods.

Call us skeptics, but we’re not thinking this thing is going to take off.  If you’re going to offer a free service, then get rid of the DRM and make us download straight from the ad supported site.  It may sound bad, but at least it’s another step in the right direction.

Visit SpiralFrog

Read [TechCrunch]