Good! I guess the generally negative press and a big fat thumbs down from consumers in general had something to do with it. Or, maybe — maybe — it had at least provisionally planned to do something like this for a while and was just seeing what it could get away with first.

Either way, this is something of a milestone: Every single major record label in the United States is now delivering at least some of their catalog through a digital download system with no device restrictions at all.

Even a couple of years ago that would have been unthinkable, but I suspect it’s about the only way left to fly at this point. The reasons are pretty plain:

DRM causes more problems than it solves.

It’s not just that every implementation of it turns out to be something you can work around in some fashion; it’s that all too often it creates an impractical hassle for a perfectly legitimate consumer. Treating the consumer pre-emptively like a thief does nothing to endear them and slows the adoption of the very technologies you’re trying to sell.

The best anti-piracy strategy is a good pricing strategy.

A friend of mine had a discussion about this just the other day. With Amazon and eMusic and Napster and all the rest selling licensed, high-quality tracks for a buck a pop, there’s no earthly reason for a legit consumer to go onto a P2P network and trawl for someone else’s potentially dodgy rips.

There’s that much less money to spend in general, so it helps to be able to spend it that much more wisely.

It’s more economical to buy the one or two songs off an album that you know you actually want to hear, instead of dropping $12 or up on a CD that won’t get a full end-to-end workout. Unless you’re buying the CD used, of course.

Since used CD sales aren’t tracked very consistently, it’s hard to say what portion of total music sales is taken up by used CDs, but I’m guessing it’s been on the up-and-up since places like Amazon made it all the easier to get them in the first place.

There’s still some experimenting to be done, I think, with how to price things. Amazon’s pricing is around $8 to $9 an album (with a discount for a whole album’s worth of tracks); eMusic is a flat monthly fee for a fixed number of tracks regardless of length, with discounts as you spend more money upfront.

Both plans have their merits and either one is better in my mind than scratching around to see if maybe someone has the song you want in their shared directory.

Watch this video. Seriously. It’s truly amazing.

First he sings backwards while the video is playing forward in real time, then about 1:19 into the video, it reverses speed to reveal the song:

Taken from the YouTube video page:

This took a heck of a lot of work, and is dedicated to those who told me I have too much time on my hands in my 200 impressions video – this goes to prove you right! Wait… oh well.

I would have to agree, this guy has a lot of time on his hands but I really enjoyed this little diddy. Thanks OneManSho!

Side note for the fanboys, Macs are PC’s too – Personal Computer’s. Maybe I should have said Mac verses Windows? Arrrg!

The report also tries to claim that Mac owners are buying more CDs than their PC brethren, but the figures are so close – 32% against 28% – it seems statistically insignificant.

The difference between 50 and 16, though, is big.

Who knows why? Are Mac people more honest? Higher earning? Or are they just too stupid to work out BitTorrent?

Input is via a standard 3.5mm jack, and the set comes bundled with a USB charger and AC adapter: fully charged you’ll get up to eight hours listening time.

I have a hard time believing this kind of sound delivery will give anything like the fidelity of normal headphones, but it won’t batter your eardrums quite so much.

Apparently when Popular Mechanics tested the kit, the reviewer noted that the bass feel is much more speaker-like: “both intense and felt through your entire body”.

Now if you want to really rattle your bones, turn your volume up to 11 (insert Spinal Tap reference) and Cum On Feel The Noize:

Don’t you just love the smell of metal in the morning? \m/

The speakers are six and a half feet tall.

The pair weighs in at $19,000 USD, and each cabinet has 12 subwoofers at the back and a combination of eight mid range and seven tweeters at the front.

I almost fell asleep reading the specifications.

Like all high end audio gadgets, there is plenty of nonsense to get any audiophile excited: “spherical enclosure technology”,”carbon fiber” and my personal favorite: “rear-firing 4 inch drivers”.

I almost want to try these out, if only for the perverse pleasure of hooking such monsters up to a tiny Apple iPod Shuffle.

The mega-retailer is mandating that suppliers provide MP3 versions of everything, according to Billboard. Most have already complied, its article suggests, with Sony BMG the predictable holdout.

Let us forget for a moment that Wal-Mart’s online music store is a joke. When Wal-Mart tells content publishers to jump, they don’t ask how high: they just do it. No-one wants to be taken off that particular shelf.

Named The World’s Smallest Percision Electric Guitar, the thing is 1/6 the size of a standard example and is just over two feet long. It has a full complement of 20 frets.

For a laugh, read the marketing blatherskite:

Its injection-molded high-impact polymer composite body is filled with billions of tiny air bubbles that reproduce the cellular structure of wood, giving the guitar the same resonant properties of hardwoods used in standard-sized guitars without the expansion and contraction associated with wood.

I think he’s saying it’s made of plastic.

AT&T customers will have a choice of downloading five tracks a month for $7.49 with the Napster Mobile Five-Track Pack plan or purchasing songs for $2 each without the plan.

Napster Mobile will come with a feature that sends a music track to a mobile device wirelessly and at the same time makes a duplicate copy available for download to a PC.

AT&T claims it is the only wireless carrier in the United States that will let customers buy full-track songs wirelessly from both Napster, a mainstream nationwide provider of digital music, and eMusic, the largest retailer of independent music.

The carrier was the first to offer the iPhone, which has a built-in iPod for listening to music and watching video. iPhone customers can purchase music from Apple’s iTunes store.

As a comparison, songs on iTunes cost 99 cents each. Apple last week slashed prices on copy-protection-free songs from $1.29 to 99 cents.

The new Napster 4.0 sees the company ditching its desktop application in favor of an browser-based client in an effort to expand its market.

That should be good news for Mac and Linux users who have, until 4.0, been locked out of Napster’s Windows-only model.

Napster’s service will remain subscription-based, with prices at $10 to $15 a month. You can still listen to samples for free, but you’ll only get 30 seconds worth.

The new web-based player sits in a pop-up window and behaves more or less like clients from Last.fm or Pandora.

The web-based client means you can access your music from a wider range of devices — at the very least you can fire it up from any computer.

Christopher Allen, chief operating officer at Napster, tells Reuters:

“with this new platform Napster can easily be integrated into consumer electronics devices or integrated into other Web sites such as social networking sites.”

Is Napster headed for your Facebook page? Certainly sounds like it, though no further details have been announced.

Napster claims around 770,000 subscribers, but lags far behind industry leader iTunes and with Amazon now in the digital downloads game, the market is increasingly crowded.

Napster tries to offer the best of both worlds — allowing streaming audio in the new web-client and subscription-based downloads but clearly most people seem to prefer the iTunes/Amazon buy-single-tracks model.

Now it is selling the Self Tuning Guitar, which actually has servo motors on the headstock to turn the tuning heads.

The Powertune system, developed over 10 years by German company Tronical, uses a set of piezo-electric pickups to determine the pitch of each string.

These are separate from the regular guitar pickups, which rely on the string vibrating in a magnetic field to cause a current.

The information for the pickups then goes off to the computer brain, which sends its instructions up the strings to the tuning pegs.

The system comes pre-calibrated for concert pitch, but you can tune one string yourself and have the guitar set itself around that.

Best of all, the Powertune can store custom tunings, from alternative open-string tunings for slide guitar to, well, anything you like.

A quick flick of the knob between songs will switch smoothly between them. The rig is an add-on for existing guitars, and will cost $900.00 USD.

And of course, guitar purists are already whining that “real” musicians should be able to tune their own instruments.