Radiohead goes digital, but no iTunes (for now)

One of the last remaining digital holdouts has come online, but not in the place that most holdouts appear in the digital world. Radiohead's back catalog is finally available for digital download. But unlike fellow late arrivals Metallica and John Lennon, Radiohead won't be available on Apple's vaunted iTunes Music Store--at least not yet.

Instead, UK digital download giant 7digital struck a deal with EMI, Radiohead's former label, and is thus the first online service to sell Radiohead's catalog, which includes all six Radiohead studio albums and the live album I Might Be Wrong, for approximately $14 apiece.

Only the full albums are available, not individual track downloads, per the band's wishes, a position that has prevented iTunes from landing Radiohead's catalog, as the band prefers to sell full albums, not individual songs. Radiohead does have a handful of songs on iTunes that were included on various soundtracks or compilations. The catalog also will be sold without any DRM protection, which falls in line with EMI's broader effort to sell DRM-free music.

Last July, Clark Benson, CEO of industry research firm the Almighty Institute of Music Retail told Rolling Stone, "Radiohead, by their next release, will probably come to some terms with iTunes."

Warner selling James Blunt album on MySpace

Through a deal with Scocap, MySpace has allowed bands to sell MP3s of their music for most of 2007, but to date, the MyStore has largely been restricted to indie bands. But Warner Music Group has decided to sell the new album from pop singer James Blunt on his MySpace page. Fans will also be able to listen to Blunt's new album, titled All the Lost Souls, in its entirety on his MySpace page. The Blunt album is available in a DRM-free format that will play on Apple's ubiquitous iPod portable media player. Buyers will also receive a CD version in the mail.

The "CD + iPod version" sale of the Blunt album is powered by Lala.com, which recently changed its business model to sell downloads. But WMG CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. is not yet ready to put DRM to rest. In a keynote speech at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference this week, he said, "DRM is here to stay, whether it's here to stay on every business model in the music business is open to question."

New Zunes coming next month?

While Apple's announcement earlier this month of a new batch of iPods has stolen most of the MP3 player thunder, Microsoft hasn't updated its Zune player, save for a few new colors, in almost a year since it first debuted last November. But according to the Zune Scene blog and several other gadget sites, two new devices sporting the code names Draco and Scorpio are on the way in mid-October.

The new Zunes reportedly will feature a new navigation wheel dubbed a "squircle," as well as some kind of update to the device's Wi-Fi feature that may include a direct connection to the Zune Marketplace store. In addition, a flash-based player is on the way in an effort to compete with the popular iPod Nano. The new, smaller, flash Zune (the Draco) will be hitting shelves in pink, red, black, or army green colors, with 4GB and 8GB storage capacities.

P2P cop's e-mail leak online

The group on whom the music and movie industries have relied upon in recent years to combat online piracy has found itself the victim of hackers. MediaDefender, a company that works for record labels and movie studios to fight file-sharing piracy of their content, saw its private e-mails and personal data leaked online over the weekend.

A group called "Media Defender-Defenders" took responsibility for posting the e-mails onto the Internet, stating: "By releasing these e-mails, we hope to secure the privacy and personal integrity of all peer-to-peer users."

According to the e-mails, the company was also developing a fake file-sharing hub called MiiVii.com, which would have allowed downloads but reported users' IP addresses and activity back to the company. The correspondence also refers to a feature that could turn users' computers into zombie machines that seeded file-sharing networks with bogus files.

The e-mails also included some personal data, including employee home phone numbers and social security numbers, along with private e-mails with clients.

In one case, a Universal Music executive asked if there was any data showing the music industry's lawsuits were reducing file-sharing activity from addresses ending in .edu -- namely, colleges and universities. An e-mail showed that MediaDefender CEO Randy Saaf forwarded the message to five employees with the note: "Take a moment to laugh to yourselves."

Long-delayed SpiralFrog launches

Web siteSpiralFrog, the long-delayed, advertising-supported music service, finally launched this week, offering free music and video rentals in exchange for ad views. The service launches with a catalog of about 800,000 songs, from major label Universal Music Group to independents licensed through services, including IODA and INgrooves.

The launch comes nine months after its initial attempt, when CEO Robin Kent and several members of its management team left when its planned December debut passed without a launch.

Song downloads, which are delivered in the Windows Media format and are therefore not compatible with the iPod, take approximately 90 seconds, during which time SpiralFrog users are served an ad. Registered users must also renew their free subscription every 30 days to keep downloading music and every 60 days to keep listening to files they have downloaded.