800,000 free mp3s & counting

Enjoy while it lasts:

http://beemp3.com/

As the music industry slowly slides from being doomed to dead, sites like BeeMp3 really hammer home the point that consumer value in music has dropped to a big fat zero. Not just in terms of piracy, but bloggers uploading tracks everywhere and firms like Apple & Universal essentially giving mp3s away in order to promote other products (namely in the shape of mobile handsets). Radiohead no doubt gave their last album away in exchange for a larger concert audience.

And in case beemp3 has been shut down by the RIAA by the time you read this, there is always...

deleted<

Anyway... :)

The arrest of site owner & subsequent death of popular file sharing forum OiNK only served to, well, do nothing in fact apart from inconvenice a few people for a week or so until a new site was established. Plus slightly less blatant sites such as Hype Machine stream new music hosted on a thousand blogs 24 hours a day (and with minor knowledge of HTML you can save most of these files to your hard-drive).

The real head-f*ck question is: Why is it so easy to get free music everywhere and such a pain in the ass to buy it?! I really do buy a lot of music, but I have to deal with shitty store interfaces, DRM protection, file formats I don't want, region restrictions (ARGH!) and trawling from one store to the next just to pick some new music for the week.

I hope the film industry is watching. Buying a legal DVD from HMV and putting it into my $30000 Apple Mac computer then being told I can't watch the movie due to different DVD & drive regions is just bullshit (and yes, I use VLC and no there is not a firmware update for my DVD drive).