On the news front a little band fronted by a man named Trent Reznor has announced their new album release date. That’s right on April, 17 Nine Inch Nails (or as we like to refer to them here, NIN) will be releasing their new full-length entitled Year Zero. You can find out more at http://yearzero.nin.com/.
Also, wacky (and quite petite we may add) songstress Bjork has reportedly announced a tentative release date for her new album – or so reports Pitchfork. The website only has this to offer however 7.OX.XX which means absolutely nothing to us especially cause those silly Europeans put the day and date in the opposite order.
Regardless of all the ambiguity a few things are for sure and that’s that she’ll be playing a slew of Festivals including as a headliner at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark July 5-8th.
And finally Steve Jobs, Chief Executive of Apple, posted a letter on that companies site calling on the music and movie industries to drop the Digital Rights Management (DRM). The system acts as a blocking device that inhibits Apple iTunes downloads from being played on any other manufacturer's products.
This topic is of increasing concern to other companies trying to enter the market. Jobs makes a good point when stating that for the most part DRM has little effect on music pirating.
‘Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. Its hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future.’
