Culture and Society

The Dixie Chicks have made a clever political move, buying, I mean supporting their own section of the Rock the Vote site and starting a registration and education campaign called “Chicks Rock, Chicks Vote!” (of course the Chicks don’t exactly “rock,” but “Chicks Pop, Chicks Vote!” doesn’t have the same …

Online music poobah par excellence Brad Hill, author of The Digial Songstream, reviews the new BuyMusic.com service: REVIEW: BuyMusic.com Online music store operated by Buy.com SUMMARY: The first of many iTunes Store clones for Windows, BuyMusic is rough, clumsy, and disregards all competition except iTunes. Compares unfavorably to pre-iTunes services …

Are Boston College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology the only schools around with a modicum of nads? These other schools seem to be falling all over themselves to kiss RIAA sphincter. BC and MIT, on the other hand, tell the RIAA to piss off: The schools said the subpoenas, …

BuyMusic.com, which opens with a seductive female voice purring “get loaded,” offers PC owners digital pay music service: Although online retailer BuyMusic.com will offer more than 300,000 songs from the five major recording labels, users of the service will not necessarily have the freedom afforded customers of Apple’s iTunes service. …

We recently mentioned software that finds, chops and recombines parts of spoken word into odd pastiches. Now a Northeast Ohio contrarian has assembled a collection of TV and radio ads “remixed” to subvert their original message: The commercial’s banjo melody is instantly familiar, but the words are different. “Armour hot …

Our buds at Amazon are creating a searchable database of thousands of nonfiction books: Executives at Amazon.com are negotiating with several of the largest book publishers about an ambitious and expensive plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction, according …

ReplayTV caves to content industry: new model will drop two key features – it will no longer be able to skip entire commercials automatically, or send recorded programming over the Internet. Sonicblue Inc., the former owner of ReplayTV, was considered the company in the digital video recording industry that most …

Apple’s Wozniak is doing it for the children and dogs: The co-founder of Apple Computer, Stephen Wozniak, recalls that it began with a series of lost dogs – a runaway husky, a roving Shar-Pei, a wayward bichon frisé. The problem led inexorably to a Wozniak solution: wireless location-monitoring technology that …

Copyright has to be radically changed to reflect the realities of the brave new digital world. You may not like it, but the only way to compensate creators, to give the average creator the incentive to continue to create, is some form of copyright tax, as I have mentioned many …

Jon Pareles looks at the status of albums in the download age: The pop album made its way through the 20th century by staying adaptable, transforming itself from analog grooves to digital bits. But can the notion of an album – a collection of songs sold as a single unit, …