Nine Inch Nails is offering its latest CD, Ghosts I, as a free download from its site. The collection is a teaser to promote their Ghosts I-IV, a new collection of instrumental tracks.

The official download requires email registration at the site to get a download link. You can also download the collection officially via BitTorrent.
The download includes

• DRM-free MP3s, encoded with LAME at 320kbps
• A 40-page pdf book about the release
• A digital extras pack with wallpapers, icons, etc

The entire collection can be downloaded for $5, or you can order a $10 2 CD set and other deluxe and limited edition versions.

Here’s what NIN’s Trent Reznor has to say about the release:

iPhones are great for listening to music – you can rip and copy over your CDs, you can get music off of iTunes and you can subscribe to one of the many free music podcasts.

But iPhones aren’t just for listening to music. There’s a growing number of applications for jailbroken iPhones that let you create music.

Five Free iPhone Music Applications

MooCowMusic Drummer is a virtual drum pad for the iPhone:

Drummer can also be used with a custom sample set:

MooCowMusic’s Piano, formerly called iAno, can be used as a virtual piano or synth:

What does $4.5 million and the help of a superdope homeboy from the Oaktown get you these days?

Not much, if the just-out-of-beta Dancejam is any indication.

Dancejam is a YouTube clone that focuses on urban dance. The site lets you view videos of people doing various types of dance, rate the videos and upload your own. The Dancejam video player offers a few features that are designed specifically for learning dance steps – slow-mo and 5-second rewind buttons.

It doesn’t have a lot of things that you expect from a video site, though:

• You can’t adjust the volume of videos in Dancejam’s player.
• You can’t embed videos in other sites.
• There’s not much content. We counted a little over 500 videos, and many of these are duplicates.
• There’s no audience of users on the site. There are currently only about 1,000 users and few are active. As a result, the most viewed video currently only has 879 views.

Dancejam looks DOA. It doesn’t offer standard features that you expect from a video site. And, while it targets a niche with with the potential for broad audience appeal, it doesn’t offer dancers a reason to use the site instead of YouTube.

The challenges facing Dancejam are ones that will face any niche video site. If a site doesn’t offer some really compelling, unique features, there’s no reasons to prefer it over YouTube, which offers a mature platform and active member base, or just publishing on your own site.

Content delivery network Limelight’s legal problems won’t affect PodShow, says PodShow founder and podcasting pioneer Adam Curry:

We have spoken with LimeLight management and they have assured us they will not go ‘dark’. They have been a good partner to us, we trust them and stand by their word and their excellent service.

As with any well planned media infrastructure, PodShow’s platform is completely CDN agnostic. We can use any CDN without any interruption to our service and I would presume most companies that use a CDN for delivery would never allow themselves to be locked in to any one provider for any type of service.

In my personal opinion this story is being overhyped in the ‘twitter-verse’. These things usually end up in some form of settlement long before there’s any danger of ‘darkness’

Both Elisabeth (Podcasting News publisher) and I are Macheads and iPod freaks. We’re iPhone early adopters and have been advocating podcasting and new media platforms for music for years.

But, we’ve still got a vinyl music collection around, a couple of turntables and a little parallel universe of analog music that we still love.

So, country music artist Shelby Lynne’s essay on Vinyl vs iPod over at Huffington Post rings a chord:

I grew up listening to….vinyl. I have discovered that having a vinyl collection is so much cooler than having an iPod. Now, I have an iPod and I admit they are genius especially for travel and convenience. But they aren‚Äôt really any fun.

I don’t call up my friends and say “Hey why don’t y’all come over and bring your computers and let’s have a party”? Hell no! I say bring pot, wine and vinyl.

That’s sexy. It’s really a great excuse to get together and listen to music. Everybody takes a turn looking through the collection and it’s interesting to see what each person plays. The vinyl way is just me. I think if if we all listen to more music together, it really doesn’t matter how we do it.

Music will save us all just like it always has. We feed our souls with it. Vinyl just creates a little more discussion for us. You get to look at the covers, the liner notes, sometimes the lyrics are included. Plus you can roll a doobie on it. That’s hard on an iPod.

I‚Äôm not much of a country music fan, but you can‚Äôt argue with the fact that there’s a wonderful tactile sense to vinyl that hasn’t been duplicated in the world of digital music, and that hasn’t been replaced, either.

Akamai Technologies, which provides technology for the distribution of digital media like podcasts, announced that a jury returned a verdict today in its lawsuit against Limelight Networks. The judgement found that Limelight was infringing on Akamai’s content delivery patent. As a result, the jury awarded Akamai a staggering $45,526,946 in damages, plus interest.

The verdict, which came at the end of a three-week trial in Boston, stemmed from a 2006 lawsuit filed by Akamai. The jury found that Limelight infringed all four of the claims that Akamai had asserted in its Internet content delivery patent, issued in the name of Akamai founders Tom Leighton and the late Daniel Lewin (no relation to the PodcastingNews Lewins).

The jury rejected Limelight’s defense that Akamai’s patent was invalid.

“Today’s ruling recognizes the strength of Akamai’s patent portfolio and is a tangible reflection of our resolve to vigorously defend the Company’s intellectual property,” said Melanie Haratunian, senior vice president and general counsel of Akamai.

Akamai intends to ask the Court to issue a permanent injunction prohibiting Limelight from continuing to sell infringing services. It is unclear whether Limelight could continue operations if it does in fact have to pay the $45 million damage award.

Representatives of Limelight said separately they were “disappointed” with the ruling and “strongly believe” it did not infringe the patent.

Podcasting network representatives were quick to comment (via Twitter) on their own companies’ strengths and immunity to any prospective service outages which might be caused if Limelight were to cease operations.

A prison in the Philippines is using podcasting to share information about the jailhouse “paradise”.

The Bureau of Jail Management and Penology in Bonuan Gueset, Dagupan City, The Philippines, is now podcasting, a first among jails in the Philippines. The goal of the podcast is to disseminate information on the activities of and their projects via the Internet.

The podcast was created with the help of an inmate that wanted to use his time in jail productively. The inmate helped put together the prison’s home page and podcast at Googlepages.

By offering a podcast, the prison hopes to let busy people and the visually impaired keep up with the prison’s activities.

According to the prison, “Bilangguan man ay paraiso din sa patakarang maka Diyos at makatao (A prison is also a paradise with Godly and human policies).”

via ABS-CBN Interactive

Video blogger Sarah Meyers (Pop 17) caught up with Steve Chen, one of YouTube’s founders, recently, and got a scoop on YouTube live video.

The company plans to have a YouTube live video streaming service this year:

“We‚Äôll do it this year,” said Chen. “Live video is just something that we‚Äôve always wanted to do, we‚Äôve never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually do it this year.”

While there are a variety of services that offer live Internet video streaming, none has yet managed to drive mainstream adoption. A YouTube offering could change that overnight.

via InsideOnlineVideo

In anticipation of the upcoming release of the soundtrack album from the popular NBC Universal TV show ‚ÄúHeroes‚Äù, the program’s executive producer and director Allan Arkush has created a series of five music video podcasts that will be available exclusively from the Zune Marketplace.

Each video short features “Heroes” footage set to select tracks from the album. Nada Surf’s “Weightless” provides the soundtrack to the first video, which debuts today on the Zune Marketplace and MSN. Four additional music video podcasts will be published on Zune Marketplace between now and the soundtrack album’s release on March 18.

The podcasts will feature new releases ‚ÄúHe’s Frank‚Äù by Brighton Port Authority featuring Iggy Pop, ‚ÄúNot Now But Soon‚Äù by Imogen Heap and ‚ÄúKeeping My Composure‚Äù by The Chemical Brothers featuring Spank Rock, as well as ‚ÄúMan In The Long Black Coat‚Äù by Bob Dylan.

“This podcast series is part of our plan to make more original content available via Zune Marketplace,” said Richard Winn, director of entertainment development for Zune.

The direct link to the podcast is here.

Sessions from last fall’s Podcast and New Media Expo (PNME) continue to be released via Gigavox Media’s Podcast Academy site. The latest session is of interest to any podcaster who wants or needs to include music in their episodes. “Music Licensing for Podcasts and New Media” covers a lot of ground in under an hour. (And I can’t stress strongly enough how important it is to at least listen and consider some of the issues brought up in this podcast.)

Panelists include Personal Life Media‘s Tim Bratton (formerly of the Rhapsody music service), podcaster and attorney Colette Vogele (co author of the Creative Commons’ Podcasting Legal Guide), Kevin Arnold (also formerly of Rhapsody, presently IODA/Promonet), and (Peermusic) Jonathan Kehl.

The discussion begins with a basic explanation of the four different types of music licensing rights (performance, mechanical, master use, synchronization rights) and defines copyright and legal terms podcasters should know and understand. Colette Vogele gives a sobering view of what can happen if you don’t “play” by the copyright rules. Podsafe and indie music alternatives are discussed, as well.

The audio of the session is available here.