ReadWriteWeb

We already knew that Mozilla had a record breaking day on June 17th when Firefox 3 was downloaded close to 8 million times, despite the download site not working for at least part of the morning. Now, Mozilla has announced that Firefox 3 has indeed made it into the Guinness Book of World Records with 8,002,530 downloads. Mozilla had set itself a goal of only 5 million downloads.

Firefox has already surpassed the 5 million download mark it set out to meet in its first 24 hours. As I write this, the browser just passed the 7 million download mark for its version 3.0 software, and with over 6800 downloads per minute (and rising) is on track to do 8 million or more by 1pm ET (24 hours since the download went live). Whether that's a record is hard to say, but it's very impressive nonetheless. Are you using Firefox 3? Do you plan to upgrade?

There was an article over the weekend in the New York Times about new tactics Warner Brothers is planning to boost flagging DVD sales. Warner plans to release direct-to-DVD companion films alongside new releases in the future, in an attempt to build buzz for the later DVD release of the main feature. What they really should be doing, is to ditch the traditional DVD model altogether, and take a look at some of the things alt rocker Trent Reznor has done over the past few months.

It was just a couple of months ago that Nine Inch Nails released part of their new album for free on BitTorrent and via their web site. The rest of the album, the band sold as a $5 download, a $10 double CD, and pricier "deluxe" packages. Doing this, the band reportedly pulled in $750,000 in the first three days. Yesterday, NIN released a new single free on Facebook with the promise of a "surprise" today on their web site. That surprise? Their entire new album, The Slip, is available as a free download on nin.com and streaming on iLike.

In an effort to promote the latest book in the Star Wars "Legacy of the Force" series, starting at 9am tomorrow (Tuesday, April 29), Del Ray will give out book one Betrayal for free as an audio book, eBook, and PDF download. Betrayal, which was a New York Times Bestseller, is the first book in the series and the free download will be available for two weeks until May 13, when the ninth and final book, Invicible, is released. This is an interesting marketing tactic from Del Ray, which is emulating popular music acts.

It's getting trendy these for top-tier musical artists to buck the music labels and release their albums as free or cheap downloads via the Internet or some other means. The latest to do so is Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails, which today uploaded part one of its new four part album Ghosts I-IV to BitTorrent sites (you can grab it here). The free piece encompasses the first 9 tracks of the 36 track instrumental effort which was recorded over a 10 week period.

With the high profile launch this week of Qtrax, a free and legal P2P music offering (ReadWriteWeb coverage), ad-supported music downloads are very much in the spotlight, and as always RWW network blog last100 has its finger on the pulse, with great news coverage and analysis of the week that was in digital music, including an exclusive interview with the CEO of a large ad-supported music web site.

The music industry is in desperate need of new models and an interesting one got some financial support today. We7 announced today that it's raised $6 million from Peter Gabriel and Spark Ventures.

The UK site offers DRM-free MP3 downloads with super-short ads preceding each song - for the first 4 weeks after download. Once a month you can select 20 tracks to remove the ad clips from, any additional ad removal will cost 20 pence (about 39 cents) per song.