Divvycast today announced free podcast hosting for bands and musicians.

The free service offers 50 MB data storage and 5 GB per month bandwidth.

The new free level joins Divvycast’s existing 3 subscription tiers, which start at $9.95 per month for 1GB data storage and 50GB per month bandwidth.

spodradio, a radio and podcast hub for mobiles, today announced $10 million of Series B funding from Benchmark Capital Europe and Baytech Venture Capital. The funds will be used to accelerate spodradio’s expansion into international markets and help develop new services.

spodradio enables the mobile phone to be used as a music device with “a total radio experience anywhere and anytime”, including live interactive radio, podcasts, personalized radio and on-demand radio services.

American Public Media, the nation’s second largest producer and distributor of public radio programs, has announded that it is expanding its podcast offerings.

Beginning October 17, American Public Media is making the following full programs available as podcasts: Marketplace, Marketplace Money, Word for Word and American RadioWorks documentaries. The Splendid Table will be offered as a podcast in November.

One more reason YouTube as you know it is dead: YouTube cut deals with the major music labels shortly before closing their deal with Google, giving the music industry ownership stakes in YouTube in exchange for video and music licensing deals.

YouTube quietly cut deals with three of the four major RIAA member companies – Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music, and the Warner Music Group – to give them stakes in YouTube as part of video- and music-licensing deals.

The music companies collectively stand to receive as much as $50 million from these arrangements, according to reports. Details of the deal have not been announced yet.

via MarketWatch

Over 40 podcasting seminars are scheduled for the International Podcasting Expo, an online expo being held October 20-22.

Anyone with an Internet connection can attend, and participants may download all event recordings. Keynote speakers include Elisabeth Lewin of Podcasting News, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress, Andy Wibbels of BlogWild. Other speakers include Eric Olson of Feedburner, Steven Stewart of Nokia, George Smyth, Association of Music Podcasting and many others. Celebrity guests include Joyce and Uchenna Agu, winners of the Amazing Race, Season 7.

Two seminar tracks (Beginner and Advanced) will be staggered on the half hour, with each seminar lasting 1 hour.

Listening to iPods at unsafe volumes for as little as 5 minutes a day can cause hearing loss.

Researchers Brian Fligor and Cory Portnuff estimate that a typical person could safely listen to an iPod for 4.6 hours at 70 percent of full volume using the supplied earphones without greatly increasing the risk of hearing loss.

However, listening to an iPod at full volume for more than 5 minutes per day, they say, could increase the risk of hearing loss in a typical person. These guidelines apply in general to other music players, such as the Sandisk Sansa and the Creative Zen Micro, which they found to produce similar volume levels.

In a separate study, researchers found that only 6% of iPod users listening in quiet environments turned their iPods up to unsafe levels. When in noisy environments, though, a full 80% listened at dangerous levels. When they used an “in-the-ear” earphone designed to block out background noise, only 20 percent exceeded sound levels considered to be risky.

It looks like the “wild west” days of video sharing may be over.

YouTube as you know it is dead. The company plans to remove all videos that infringe on music industry copyrights, and is working with music companies to promote ad-supported distribution of music videos.

Now the music industry is going after other video sharing sites to either force them into similar deals, or shut them down.

Universal Music has announced that it’s suing two video-sharing websites in the US. The firm has accused both Grouper and Bolt of allowing “mass infringement” of copyright by letting users swap videos that feature unlicensed Universal music.

Universal wants damages of up to $150,000 for each video distributed on the websites without permission.

McAfee, a maker of computer anti-virus products, today announced it has released a new version of McAfee Stinger that targets two Windows-based threats that are still being identified on video iPod and MP3 devices.

McAfee Stinger is a free standalone utility tool that can detect and remove specific viruses, including the W32/RJump.worm, also named RJump.worm and the W32/QQPass.worm, also named QQPass.worm.

The W32/RJump.worm, which was discovered June 20, 2006, recently reappeared on video iPod devices released by Apple late September.

Apple issued a warning on Tuesday that some of its iPods are infected with a Windows virus.

According to Apple, some video iPods made after Sept. 12 included the RavMonE virus. The virus affects only Windows computers.

According to Apple, the iPod nano, iPod shuffle and Mac OS X are not affected, and all Video iPods now shipping are virus free.

In a unusual PR move, Apple is trying to blame their manufacturing problem on Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

“As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it,” said Apple.

Legislation aimed at legalizing copying your music to iPods and other portable media players appears to be going nowhere. According to reports, four months of work has resulted in a 29-page draft bill that doesn’t fix the issue.

“If the law is enacted in its current form, we will have to call it ‘the Little iPod Inquiry that Couldn’t’,” said Kim Weatherall, executive director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute.

“It appears the people in the copyright law branch who drafted this legislation do not have iPods. I guess we should have given them MP3 players so they could get used to the technology they were drafting for.”