While it isn't quite clear what the specifics of Sony's DRM scheme will look like, the company did announce that it will use Adobe's Content Server to power its DRM solution. Adobe's server relies on a proprietary DRM solution. EPub is a very flexible format and allows developers to put a DRM-wrapper around eBooks. Publishers won't have to wrap DRM around their offerings. However, it is unlikely that a lot of book publishers (who are just as fearful of piracy as most music executives) will be able to resist this. In effect, this gives Adobe a lot of power in the eBook industry, as our friends at TeleRead point out in more detail.

Opening up the Store

Still, Sony should be lauded for adopting the ePub format and making its eBook store compatible with more devices from more manufacturers. All of Sony's eReaders, including the first-generation PRS-500, will be able to read these books, but what is far more important is that users will not be locked into having to buy a Sony device just to make use of the Sony eBook store. In addition, as other publishers adopt this format, Sony's own Reader will also be able to access books from a wider variety of stores.

Sony is clearly taking the eBook market very seriously. Just last week, it brought the prices for most of the books in its store down to $9.99 and announced two new eBook readers that look very promising.

Will Amazon React?

The question now, of course, is how Amazon will react to this. Amazon's Kindle ecosystem is almost completely closed - starting with the proprietary eBook format up to the Kindle's inability to display ePub-formatted books. In the press release, Steve Haber, the president of Sony's Digital Reading Business Division, argues that ePub is "quickly becoming the de facto standard for eBooks." If that is indeed the case, Amazon will have to adapt quickly if it doesn't want to be left behind.

2008 Year in Review

In case you missed our 2008 Year in Review series in December, here's a re-cap of the posts we did -- and you can find these and other top stories in our Best of ReadWriteWeb page.

• Best LittleCo of 2008 & Most Promising for 2009
• Best BigCo of 2008
• RWW Live Special: 2008 Year in Review (RWW Live is our regular podcast show: subscribe in iTunes)
• Top 100 Products of 2008

The Top 100 Products of 2008 was comprised of the following 10 lists:

• Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 International Products of 2008
• Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
• Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Real World Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 Digital Lifestyle Products of 2008
• Top 10 Alternative Search Engines of 2008
• Top 10 Web Platforms of 2008

That was 2008, let's now turn our attention to 2009...

2009 Web Predictions

At the beginning of the new year, we posted our annual predictions post, in which the ReadWriteWeb authors look forward to what 2009 might bring in the world of Web technology and new media.

check out our predictions for '09 and please contribute your own in the comments to that post.

iTunes Goes DRM Free

The first week of January is Macworld time. While this year's conference had no major product announcements, Apple announced that by the end of this quarter, all 10 million songs available on iTunes will be DRM free [Digital Rights Management]. As of today, 8 million songs will be DRM free, with the other 2 million done by end of Q1 09. This is long overdue, especially considering that Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to the music industry in February 2007 asking them to abolish DRM. Since that time, many of Apple's key competitors have gone DRM free or have significantly loosened the restrictions - Amazon in September 07, Rhapsody in June 08, Yahoo Music in July 08, and Walmart in October 08, to mention just some. So it's great to see the market leader in online music, Apple, actively killing off DRM too.

Also from Macworld: Apple's iWork Goes (Partly) Online

Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accounts Hacked

The start of 2009 brought a major security scare for one of 2008's top web products, Twitter. Days after a wave of phishing attacks fooled thousands of Twitter users, another security hole was found. Obama's account, unused since election day, sent out an affiliate link to a survey with a gas card prize, Fox News said that "Bill O'Reily is gay" and Britney Spears' account made a lewd post about her anatomy. Rick Sanchez, the Twitter loving CNN anchor, says he's "high on crack and might not be coming into work today." Twitter eventually said that the issue had been resolved, but that users should change their passwords.

Did Google Just Expose Semantic Data in Search Results?

In what appears to us to be a new addition to many Google search results pages, queries about birth dates, family connections and other information are now being responded to with explicitly semantic structured information. Who is Bill Clinton's wife? What's the capital city of Oregon? What is Britney Spears' mother's name? The answers to these and other factual questions are now displayed above natural search results in Google and the information is structured in the traditional subject-predicate-object format, or "triples," of semantic web parlance.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• TaxACT lets you file your taxes online.
• Babylon is the world's leading dictionary and translation software.
• Strands provides real-time recommendations of products.
• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• DEMO09 is the launchpad for emerging technology.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

RWW Jobwire

January Kicks Off With Cool Hires in Tech

The economy is depressing but there's no shortage of cool new individual hires in tech to report already this year. Mozilla, Dell, AOL Sports and some of our favorite startups have picked up new engineers and executives this week. The biggest tech job news of the New Year, though, may be that Lifehacker's long time editor Gina Trapani announced yesterday that she's leaving her position.

Check out some of the young year's first highlights in tech hiring as reported by our site Jobwire below. Jobwire is sponsored by VisualCV, which is a service for job seekers. Jobwire reports on 10 to 15 completed new hires in tech and new media every weekday.

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEWEB'S JOBWIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

Web Trends

RWW Live: Running a Startup in a Down Economy

In the first RWW Live of 2009, we tackled an issue that is of vital importance to all startups right now - how to navigate through the choppy waters of the current economy. The ReadWriteWeb authors were joined by entrepreneurs from BrightKite and Zoho, two startups that were recognized by ReadWriteWeb in our annual end of the year awards: Zoho won 'Best Little Co' and BrightKite won 'Most Promising Little Co'. In the podcast they had some excellent advice for startups, which you can listen to below and read about in our post-show round-up.

Download MP3

Brave New World: More Digital, Less Physical

Alex Iskold writes: "Yesterday, I was with my wife in the L'Occitane store. The shelves were filled with fragrances, soaps, lotions: all sorts of handcrafted beauty products. It occured to me while looking at the labels that I have no idea how these products were made. I am reasonably versed in chemistry, but the process of manufacturing perfume is not something I know anything about.

In general, I am just not good with physical things, because I am a software person. I've always been fascinated by people who can easily make sense of physical objects, because for me it takes a lot of effort even to put together children's toys. My brain is wired differently, to see patterns in software, not in hardware. But most people are the other way around."

Report: Apple Dominates the Mobile Web

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Enterprise

Report: Cloud-Based Email Cheapest Option for Most Companies

A new report from Forrester presents a cost analysis of cloud-based email systems in enterprises, such as Google Apps or Yahoo!'s Zimbra. In the report, Forrester argues that cloud-based email services are cheaper than running email on-premise for all companies with less than 15,000 employees. What's more, Google Apps is significantly cheaper than both on-premise solutions and other cloud-based email services - even for very large enterprises. This could spell trouble for Microsoft, as we explain in this post.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Below we summarize and follow up on the 10 most-read stories on ReadWriteWeb in the month of September. These aren't necessarily the best stories, but they are the most popular. We hope you enjoy this little trip down short-term memory lane. Do these posts already feel like old news to you, our hyper savvy readers?

Google released its own browser at the start of this month and at launch the software had some really egregious claims in the End User License Agreement. An anonymous commenter pointed out in our previous coverage of Chrome that Google claimed to have rights to all the information you send through their browser to reuse for promotional purposes! Google quickly backed down and removed the clause, though we questioned in a later post (It's Time for a New Terms of Service Regime) why such conditions were a part of the default "boilerplate" licenses for all Google services.

This post was discovered by readers from a wide variety of sources, including the Official Google Blog, which called us eagle eyed for catching the section of the license in question. In truth, it wasn't us that caught it, it was one of our anonymous readers, and we weren't the first blog to write about it either - we later noticed that Ina Fried at CNet found it first.

9. Five Ways to Use Social Media to Reach People Who Don't Use Social Media

I wrote this post myself, after giving a presentation to the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network where several people in the audience said that they were concerned their target constituencies weren't using social networks, microblogging and blogs. Could those technologies be useful anyway? We listed five techniques we've found to be effective.

More than 100 other blogs linked to this post in posts of their own, including particularly active conversations at Brazen Careerist (Social Media Is Difficult, Like Intimacy) and StreamXy (The Success System that Never Fails).

8. Top Digg User Zaibatsu Banned - Reactions from Both Zaibatsu and Digg Management

Digg cleaned house this month, closing the accounts of scores of people it accused of cheating the system. Founding editor Richard MacManus covered this story for RWW. One of those users kicked off the site was the popular user Reg Saddler, or Zaibatsu, the person with the 3rd most submissions to hit the front page of all time. Digg said the last straw was Zaibatsu's submission of a page that claimed to have lascivious pictures of a female Digg user on it and actually was a sales page for some product - both of which are violations of the Digg Terms of Service. Zaibatsu offered his own defense but in the end said in comments that he's since decided to "cash in" after all and do the types of things he's been wrongly accused of doing.

For an in depth look at the charming characters like Zaibatsu that make up and surround many top Digg users see our earlier post MrBabyMan: Digg Users Revolt, Against the One Pure Man at the Top. Our coverage of Zaibatsu's expulsion got a whole lot of readers from Digg.

7. Google to Offer its Own Browser: Chrome

On the first of September, we wrote about Google's new browser that would be released the next day. The company mailed out some fantastic comic book style explanations of their plans and we linked to a slide show of those books in my post. There were a lot of questions that came up that day: what about Google's relationship with Firefox? Would Chrome ever go mainstream? Would another browser make web development more difficult?

The idea behind Chrome was to build a browser that was mean for running applications, not just viewing web pages. We think that's a great idea and apparently a substantial percentage of our readers do as well. 6.5% of you visited ReadWriteWeb using Chrome in the first week it was available, in the past 3 weeks that number hasn't grown but it's only fell to 6.2%. We expect that percentage to grow substantially when a Mac version of Chrome is available.

6. Walmart Gives Consumers Number 1 Reason Why DRM is Not The Answer

This weekend Corvida wrote about Walmart's decision to shut down its DRM server and either eat or tie to a single computer the music it sold its own customers. The post was huge on Digg, where conversation was heated in comments. We put the comments people left on that story at Digg in a Wordle.net tag cloud below, just to give you a taste of what that community thought about the post and news.

5. Cartoon: Anything You Tweet Can and Will Be Used Against You

Rob Cottingham's weekly cartoon midmonth was very popular with readers - we'll let you click through for yourself to see it.

According to YackTrack, 30 people Twittered a link to the cartoon out to their circle of friends. Among that group was Spanish poet and political blogger Jaun de Bravo, who said "No todo es tuiteable." We didn't know that was the Spanish word for Twitter!

4. Podcaster Developer Uses Little-Known "Ad Hoc" Mode To Distribute Banned iPhone App

Sarah Perez dove into the mid-month debate about development on the iPhone platform with an in-depth post about a renegade app that used a back door to distribute an app outside the official App store. It was an app that let phone users listen to podcasts without subscribing to them in iTunes, which Apple wasn't very excited about.

The post was submitted to Digg by a Washington state high school student named Zak M. Zak's been on Digg for more than a year now and has had 40 submissions hit the front page. Almost 40% of his front page submissions have been in the past 2 weeks, since sending up Sarah's post on this iPhone app! All we're saying is that Zak's on fire and maybe his success with Sarah's awesome post has something to do with that. Only joking! We offer our most humble thanks to anyone who summarizes and submits our posts well to Digg.

Jason Ankeny at FierceDeveloper wrote just yesterday that Apple has now closed the loophole and the app that Sarah wrote about has been kicked off the platform. The developer, Alex Sokirynsky, says he's headed for Google's Android platform.

3. Rumor: EBay Trying to Sell StumbleUpon

In the middle of the month TechCrunch did the kind of investigative work that, let's face it, no one in the tech blogosphere does better. They unearthed efforts by eBay to sell off social discovery site StumbleUpon. Our own Frederic Lardinois wrote up the rumor and speculated, as did Silicon Alley Insider, that selling off Skype would be an even better idea.

Our post was a huge hit on StumbleUpon, as we presume most other posts were on this topic.

2. Top 10 Apps Worth Jailbreaking Your iPhone to Get

On the first weekend of the month, Corvida wrote a monster post arguing that there were iPhone apps outside of the thousands of approved ones that were so good they were worth nullifying your phone's warranty for.

Think the iPhone is just for Mac lovers? This was the 2nd most read story on ReadWriteWeb for the whole month and almost 80% of our site visitors use Windows. People love the iPhone, almost everyone does. (60% of the RWW writing staff, however, do not own an iPhone.)

And the #1 most-read story on RWW for the month of September was...

1. Serious Security Flaw in Google Chrome

On the day that Chrome came out, September 2nd, Frederic Lardinois wrote about a big security hole in the new Google browser. Tens of thousands of people wanted to know what it the security flaw was - perhaps for their protection and perhaps to gawk at the shortcomings in software from the otherwise triumphant Google.

To be honest, it seems in retrospect like an odd story to be the hottest story here for the whole month. That's the facts, though.

Ryan Narraine, a security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab, wrote the first report on the flaw at ZDNet but after a fairly extensive hunt we can't see any follow up from ZDNet or anyone else about whether the flaw has been fixed. A fair number of people argued that it wasn't even a flaw as it required a user to choose to run an executable. As Frederic pointed out in his point, the "flaw" depends on a lot of social engineering. Many commenters all around the web responded simply that it was too early to trust a brand new browser on its first day online.

Conclusion:

Last month was a big one for the web. As is often the case, the topics our readers came for the most were ones concerning control. That's one way to interpret them, at least. Could Chrome wrestle control over the browsing experience away from IE and Firefox? Could it put users more in control as a more appropriate tool to use in an era of applications, beyond web pages? DRM and the closed Apple iPhone store were the subject of multiple control control stories as well.

Some of our favorite posts from last month that didn't make the top 10 list but that we wish had include User Experience, Learning from the Pros, Sarah Perez's 3 part Scannable World series and Richard MacManus's write up of a report finding that 70% of businesses now allow social media use at work.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by ReadWriteWeb in the past month to read these stories. We appreciate your ongoing support and engagement in discussion.

Image credit on water photo above, Seventh Sense by Flickr user woodleywonderworks.

While the options are appreciated, a certain restriction that comes with the music files is not. To help music labels combat piracy, digital music providers such as iTunes and Yahoo introduced DRM restricted music files to consumers. Today, Wal-Mart has given consumers the number 1 reason as to why DRM was the worst thing ever.

Customers of Wal-Mart's digital music service will be in for a big shock very soon, just as Yahoo Music customers were. Wal-Mart has announced that they will shut down their DRM servers on October 9th. What does this mean for Wal-Mart digital music buyers?

If you have purchased protected WMA music files from our site prior to Feb 2008, we strongly recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you will be able to access them from any personal computer.

Beginning October 9, we will no longer be able to assist with digital rights management issues for protected WMA files purchased from Walmart.com. If you do not back up your files before this date, you will no longer be able to transfer your songs to other computers or access your songs after changing or reinstalling your operating system or in the event of a system crash. Your music and video collections will still play on the originally authorized computer.

DRM restrictions ties all of your songs to your computer. To sum things up, customers will now have to back-up all of their downloads or risk losing them all. Because of the DRM restrictions on these files, you won't be able to transfer their music anywhere else. If you were to reinstall your operating system or simply purchase a new computer, Wal-Mart's shutdown of their DRM server would prevent you from taking your music somewhere else.

Talk About a Waste of Money

We're hoping Wal-Mart will do the right thing and refund customers a portion of the money spent, as Yahoo did when Yahoo Music shutdown. While the gaming community has been able to teach gaming publishers a lesson about DRM, we don't think anyone can provide a solution for the situation that Wal-Mart customers are going through.Will DRM-free music matter to consumers now?

Pirates Still Don't Care

While this is probably a smart move by Electronic Arts, it is important to realize that these protests were not just triggered by the details of the DRM scheme, but by the fact that the game was DRMed to begin with. If you downloaded a pirated version of the game, you never had to think about the DRM anyway because your cracked copy was always DRM free. In the end, schemes like this do nothing to deter piracy and only punish legitimate buyers. Pirates will always find a way around these schemes anyway.

A major problem that plagued the release of Spore was the inclusion of a DRM system. This has caused multiple reviews of Spore to be disappointing for Electronic Arts (EA), the developing and publishing company of Spore. If EA hoped the problem would go away, it hasn't. Fans and "pirates" have taken things one step further to make Spore one of the most pirated games ever.

The DRM system included in Spore has caused an outrage in the gaming community. We stated in our review of the game that the DRM system would have to go if Spore wanted to succeed. Apparently, consumers of the game seem to feel the same way. As of today, Spore has been downloaded over 500,000 times on various bittorrent sites and doesn't look to be slowing down. The first 300,000 downloads of Spore happened after just one day of the game being released. These pirated versions of Spore remove the DRM system that users encounter when installing the game. While it's not uncommon for popular games to hit those type of numbers on P2P sites, it's unusual for it to happen so quickly. Currently, the game has been the most popular download all week on The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular and controversial bittorrent sites around.

DRM is Not the Answer

The Sims 2 currently holds the record for the most pirated game. Pirates and disappointed fans are looking to change that. According to the TorrentFreak blog,

[Spore's] download rate exceeds that of any other pirated game in history, and in a week or two from now it will be the most pirated game ever on BitTorrent.

Spore is still one of the worst rated games on Amazon. Since its release it has been given a rating of only 1 star by more than 50% of its reviewers. The majority of these ratings address problems with the DRM system. DRM is not the answer and continues to provoke "pirates" to release what publishers should have given to customers from the beginning.

There's no doubt that Spore would've been pirated regardless of the DRM system. However, users of P2P networks are now encouraging others to pirate the game in order to teach EA a lesson. A commenter on the Pirate Bay known as "deathkitten" stated,

"You have the power to make this the most pirated game ever, to give corporate bastards a virtual punch in the face."

Just Burn a CD

As we reported last week, Yahoo was already advising its customers to circumvent its own DRM system by just burning copies of their songs onto audio CDs and then ripping them back onto their computers as DRM-free MP3s. Apparently, though, not all customers were satisfied with this solution, though given the new solution, enterprising customers could also, of course, now burn their songs to CDs and still ask for their money back from Yahoo.

Costly Precedent

Yahoo is setting a (costly) precedent here for other music services than run into similar problems.  When MSN Music shut down, it was originally going to take its licensing servers offline within a year, but because of customer complaints, it is keeping them online until the end of 2011. MSN Music is not planning on returning any money to its customers, though.

Yahoo! now encourages customers to burn their music files to CDs. That may not be a terribly onerous requirement, but the point is that when you purchased a license for songs, everyone really meant it when they said this might not last forever.

As Jon Healey wrote on his LA TImes digital media blog, both Microsoft and Sony have tried to shutter their music services without providing ongoing support for already purchased material. Both faced a substantial consumer backlash. Sony extended their support through the end of this year and Microsoft did so for 3 more years. Healey suspects that too few people ever bought music from Yahoo! to create that kind of backlash and doesn't seem to think it's a big deal any way. Given that Yahoo! may be the most trafficked company on the web, we find this hard to agree with.

We think this is an instructive tale about technology, rights to user data and DRM - which is sure to rear its head again if content industries are unable to find more effective monetization strategies.

Here's the email Yahoo! Music sent out to customers last night:

The Yahoo! Music Store, along with the ability to purchase and download single songs and albums, will no longer be available as of September 30, 2008.

Songs and albums that were purchased through the Yahoo! Music Unlimited Store are protected by a digital rights management system that requires a valid license key before they can be played on your computer.

After the Store closes, Yahoo! will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for music purchased from Yahoo! Music Unlimited, and Yahoo! will no longer be able to authorize song playback on additional computers.

After September 30, 2008, you will not be able to transfer songs to unauthorized computers or re-license these songs after changing operating systems. Please note that your purchased tracks will generally continue to play on your existing authorized computers unless there is a change to the computer's operating system.

For any user who purchased tracks through Yahoo! Music Unlimited, we highly recommend that you back up the purchased tracks to an audio CD before the closing of the Store on September 30, 2008. Backing up your music to an audio CD will allow you to copy the music back to your computer again if the license keys for your original music files cannot be retrieved.

For further information on the closing of the Yahoo! Music Store, please refer to the Frequently Asked Questions or contact Customer Care.

Stay tuned! While the Yahoo! Music Unlimited Store will no longer be available, Yahoo! Music has partnered with Rhapsody so you can still purchase your favorite tracks. Plus, Yahoo! Music will continue to offer users a complete online music experience with the largest collection of music videos, Internet radio, exclusive artist features, music news, and more!

Thank you for using Yahoo! Music.

The Yahoo! Music team

Real Networks' Rhapsody music service, which had only been a subscription service so far, is joining into the every expanding fray of music services selling DRM-free MP3 files. Real has signed deals with Universal, Sony BMG, Warner, and EMI to sell songs at $.99 cents a song and $9.99 per album.

By embracing DRM-free MP3s as its format of choice, Rhapsody is driving yet another nail in the coffin of DRM'd music.

While Rhapsody's subscription service will remain DRM'd for the foreseeable future, opening up an MP3 based store makes sense for Real if it wants to expand its market to owners of Apple's popular iPod, which is incompatible with Real's DRM scheme for its subscription service. Also, selling single MP3s has turned out to be a very popular way for many users to buy their music, while subscription based services always lagged behind in popular appeal.

Rhapsody will face competition from a host of similar services, most prominently Apple's iTunes, and Amazon's MP3 store. While Apple is still the dominant player in the market, Amazon's offering has found a loyal following lately by offering a slightly cheaper product at an often higher quality than Apple's DRM-free iTunes Plus. Walmart and Napster also just started offering DRM-free music earlier this year, but haven't really made a ditch into Amazon's or Apple's market share yet.

Given that most online music stores sell more or less the same songs (with maybe the exception of eMusic), price and convenience are pretty much the only ways for them to differentiate themselves from the competition. Rhapsody is hoping to set itself apart by offering users the ability to listen to 25 full-length previews a month instead of the standard 30 second clips other services offer. If this will be enough for users to start embracing yet another music service remains to be seen.

There is nothing particularly revolutionary about Rhapsody's offering, but, if anything, the fact that they are offering DRM-free MP3s now is a good sign for where the music market is heading. And with having both Verizon's and MTV's marketing behind it, Rhapsody might very well succeed where others have failed so far.

Free Music

I elbowed in between elder bloggers Tim O'Reilly and Dan Farber in the interview to ask what Young thought of Trent Reznor's giving away free music and RadioHead's saying they aren't going to do so anymore. At first I thought he wasn't going to give me anything good, saying: "The recording business is going somewhere but I don't care about that, I try to remove myself from the business part. The artistic part of me tries to. The world will work it out."

He went on though to point out that his project Living With War always was and still is fully listenable for free on his website. It delivered a message he wanted to get out, he said. His thoughts about the content included in his giant life collection? Blu-ray may be riddled with DRM but Young doesn't think that will be an issue.

"Ten Blu-ray disks doesn't lend itself to P2P," he pointed out. "They [the fans] are going to do that anyway - people are going to copy all this music. We don't have to deal with that. All we're doing is supplying the mother-lode, trying to give them quality whether they want it or not. You can degrade it as far as you want, we just don't want our name on it."

More than just indifference, Young was downright enthusiastic. "It's up to the masses to distribute it however they want," he said. "The laws don't matter at that point. People sharing music in their bedrooms is the new radio." Go Neil!

MP3s Sound Like Shit

Wonder how Young feels about the ongoing debate over the impact of the MP3 format on sound quality? He's pretty clear on it.

[When it first came out] "digital music sounded like shit," he said in the interview. "It was no fun to listen to turned up. Instead of water poured on you it was like being attacked with ice picks. [His recordings on Blu-ray] are like snowflakes."

"I don't listen to music, it's in my head. Putting on headphones is like hell for me. I can hear an mp3 from a half mile away because the air has a chance to make it sound natural."

Young said that MP3 was convenient - but that it's like a vision of paradise that's only inches deep and slams you in the face when you try to walk into it. "I'm a music guy, a sound guy - I went through hell in the 80's," he said. "Now we're coming close, climbing up the quality wall. I make all my music analog, when a new format comes along I will dump all my music to it." Would he advise other musicians to do the same? He said that wasn't realistic. "I'm too rich and elitist, most people can't afford the machines [for analog recording] and the people to take care of them." Young says he's been hoarding tape for a long time, sometimes recording over content that didn't work out.

Finding Freaky Scientists on the Internet

Young spent much of the interview talking about his work building an electric car that users don't have to plug-in to a wall. The end of roadside refueling is his ultimate goal. He and Tim O'Reilly discussed the plans in some length and it was fun to listen to. Nothing else Young talked about is nearly as important. It's also not very relevant to RWW, except for his thoughts on how the web has assisted his work on the car.

"The internet is a fantastic place to find science experiments," he said. "That's my favorite thing about the internet. People who are kooks in their garages - the tools are here for us to look to the edge of the scientific world. You can seek them out and tell them if you think their ideas will work. You can tell them you'd like to connect them with other scientists in other parts of the world and if the work succeeds or fails you'll put them in a movie about the project."

That's not a perspective I've heard about the web before, and I like it.

Neil Young was a personable, intelligent and well spoken interview subject. I'll remember getting the chance to interview him fondly for the rest of my life.

If you enjoyed this post, please click here to digg it!

Disclosure: Sun is a client of my personal consultancy and paid my travel expenses to JavaOne.

It's true that MySpace owes much of its success to its popularity with musicians, and the service could certainly be a game changer. Search for almost any major musical act in Google and you're almost certain to find three things on the first page of results: the artist's official page, the artist's wikipedia page, and the artist's MySpace page. With it's position as the current generation's MTV, the potential for MySpace to serve as a serious hub for music sales is believable. And as we noted in February, chief rival Facebook has a long way to go to catch up with MySpace in the area of music.

But MySpace doesn't just cater to the major acts -- much of the appeal of the social network is in the ability to connect directly with local, long tail acts. That's where its true roots lie. As Matt Rosoff writes on CNET's Crossfade blog, "major label acts are a small part of the MySpace experience... MySpace is the ultimate long tail site for musicians, where bar bands and small-town heroes can appear in the same context as the biggest bands in the world."

What we're looking for next from MySpace is to extend the functionality of their music store to every musical act using the site. That would certainly be a game changer and would make it easier for small acts to build awareness and cultivate their "true fans." In essence, it would make it simple for any small band to put out their work on the web's label: MySpace.

If Apple can't persuade all four majors to license their catalogs for DRM-free paid-for downloads, and even Amazon, seen as the company most likely to rescue the music industry away from the grip of Apple, is only able to do so on a trial basis (with regards to Universal and Sony BMG at least), then what chance does Qtrax have with an almost completely new and unproven model.

To put this into even greater perspective, both SpiralFrog (see last100's review) and We7, two services that have offered ad-supported music downloads for significantly longer, are only able to offer a catalog of around half a million tracks each of a million and a half million tracks, respectively. Why? Because the labels are far from convinced that advertising dollars can ever replace revenue from paid-for downloads or CD sales.

In a followup post today, last100 scored an exclusive interesting Q&A with We7 CEO Steve Purdham. UK-based We7, backed by Peter Gabriel, enables users to download free MP3s that have a short (and targeted) audio advert embedded at the start of each track. The ads then auto-expire after four weeks of listening, allowing users to re-download the same tracks ad-free.

Purdham talks on a range of issues including the company's mission, DRM, resistance by the major labels, new business models and We7's competitors.

On the major labels reluctance to embrace ad-supported music downloads, Purdham says the reason is "simple:"

"They are worried that if they leave the iTunes model, the revenues they get will be diminished. So out of 79p they get, say, 46p and they are worried that ad [supported models] will net a lot less. However, there is a realization that in a world where for every track sold by iTunes... 10 tracks are downloaded illegally with no payment, so the real track revenue is 4.6p. Ad funded models need to show they are additive on the whole or scale to make the total cash available higher than before."

And asked whether Qtrax's service is too good to be true, Purdham comments:

"Well let's just say the reports seem to suggest so, which is a shame as I want to see more ad models appear and then the winners are the ones that execute well. The strange situation with Qtrax, and Spiralfrog last year, do nothing for the cause. There are many big questions that are hanging over Qtrax which needn't have been there but I hope they don't destroy the opportunity for the rest of us."

You can read the rest of the interview over at last100, and don't forget to subscribe to the RSS feed to get the latest digital lifestyle news and analysis.

A 2005 study by INDICARE (pdf), revealed that in Europe that over 60% of digital music consumers had never heard of DRM. Just 13% had any real notion of what DRM was. Certainly, with the media attention given to digital rights management over the past couple of years, consumer attitudes might have changed, but even among a presumably tech-savvy audience, such as at the blog Mashable, a recent unscientific poll indicated that 36% of users wouldn't let the presence DRM affect their music buying decisions. If we can assume that Mashable's audience is generally more tech-savvy than the standard digital music consumer, then we can probably assume that a greater percentage of the general public doesn't let DRM influence their purchasing decisions.

Yet 7Digital specifically attributes the 2007 sales growth to "the removal of DRM and availability of high-quality 320kbps format MP3 tracks." And though Amazon has not released specific sales figures from its DRM-free MP3 store, CEO Jeff Bezos said in October that Amazon was "....very happy with the early results that we're seeing. We're getting terrific feedback from customers. Everybody loves the DRM free format, so selling MP3s is very successful for us..."

So it would appear that customers are indeed responding to DRM-free music in a positive way -- or they are just responding to viable alternatives to iTunes. Either way, the results should be good for the consumer, whether they actually care or not.

Yesterday, we heard that Warner Music Group had teamed up with Amazon to offer its entire catalog DRM-free. They joined Universal music and EMI music, as well as 33,000 independent labels in pushing Amazon's catalog to 2.9 million tracks. That's still well short of Apple's 6 million or so tracks offered via iTunes, but Apple's DRM-free selection comes only from EMI. Warner and Universal have chosen so far to deal just with Amazon.

Amazon is starting to feel like a real threat to Apple's monopoly on the music download biz. They seem to have the cooperation of the music industry in offering DRM-free tracks, and their lower pricing (generally $.89-.99 per track) already forced Apple to lower its own DRM-free prices earlier this year.

Further, Amazon's MP3 store soft launched in September and has had little advertising. So far it has gained about a 3% share of the total market (more according to other reports) -- measly compared to Apple's iTunes -- but in just over a month, Amazon and Pepsi are planning a large Superbowl promotion to give away 1 billion free songs via the service. According to Billboard, when Pepsi offered 100 million free tracks via iTunes in 2004, just 5 million were ultimately redeemed over the 5 month promotion period. But since then, digital music has grown 416%, so it's a safe bet tht this promotion will be more successful. Could the Superbowl be a coming out party for Amazon in the music download business?

Additionally, Apple faces more competition in the digital media player market. Microsoft's Zune.net web site reportedly saw a 299% jump in traffic on Christmas day. Granted, Apple's iTune's store page still received 6 times the traffic, but the Zune.net numbers might be indicative of a strong holiday season for Microsoft's player.

Apple's iPod line still holds about a 70% market share (March), but that is down from over 90% just a couple of years ago. Better offerings from Microsoft, Sandisk, and other competitors are certainly putting a dent in the iPod's commanding position in the MP3 player market, albeit a small one.

Why Apple Will Continue to Rule the Digital Music Landscape

Even though it looks like a confluence of recent events is finally pointing to a weakening in Apple's digial music strangehold, the reality is that there still remains a long, long uphill battle for Amazon, Microsoft, and the rest. Further, in order to really take down Apple, both Amazon and Microsoft (or Sandisk, Creative, etc.) need to succeed. Apple has opened two fronts in this battle, iTunes and iPod, and in order to take them down, you have to beat them on both.

Too many people are already ingrained in the iTunes+iPod experience, and for many of them, DRM doesn't matter. They buy tracks on iTunes and put them on their iPods. As long as iPods control the player market, iTunes will control the download market. And let's not forget that Apple sells about 2 million DRM-free tracks of its own, so it has hardly sat on the sidelines while competitors have added copy protection-less tracks to their offerings.

Until the music player market shifts dramatically away from iPod dominance, DRM-free tracks will generally matter less to the majority of the MP3-buying public, who just won't be affected since they are using iPods. Once that happens, though, then all things being equal selection-wise (i.e., assuming the major labels working with Amazon eventually work with Apple as well to sell DRM-free tracks) and price-wise (which it is already), it likely comes down to buying experience.

The most intriguing prospect for that shift? The potential for an Amazon digital media player. Amazon began selling hardware late in 2007 with the release of the Kindle e-book reader, so perhaps an Amazon media player isn't so far-fetched. It would replicate the vertical integration of the iPod and iTunes store that has been a major part of Apple's rise to control over the industry.

Then again, as TheStreet.com points out, "with iPod satisfaction rates running at over a staggering 90%, and competitors like Microsoft failing to dent its market share, an Amazon-made device would likely struggle to dislodge Apple."

Conclusion

Eventually, Apple might lose some of its grip on the music download and media player industry. But while Amazon and Microsoft take baby steps in competing with Apple, the Cupertino, CA-based company is not standing still. Microsoft made positive changes to its Zune, but Apple released the iPod Touch (and updated the rest of the iPod line), plus signed distribution deals with Starbucks to deliver iTunes tracks over wifi in-store. Amazon signed two more major labels onto its MP3 download store, but Apple is already expanding into video rentals (i.e., onto Amazon's turf to compete with their Unbox service).

It seems likely that Apple's dominating position over the music download and media player markets will continue for at least a few years. What do you think? Is there and end to the iPod/iTunes monopoly in sight? Does Amazon, Microsoft, or some other company have what it takes to take on Apple? Let us know in the comments.