Starbucks Corp. announced last Friday that they would be offering customers a chance to create and buy CDs with songs chosen from a digital music library while they sip their grande lattes inside the café. The new project spawned out of Starbuck’s new partnership with Hewlett-Packard Co. The new service will debut on Tuesday in a Santa Monica, California Starbucks and will expand into 2,500 Starbucks cafes over the next 2 years.

No band has taken (or perhaps deserved) more fan criticism for their stance on peer to peer file sharing than Metallica. In a move starting in April and clearly designed to restore some of the band’s lost good faith with its most hardcore fans, Metallica will now record and sell live versions of each of their concerts for $9.95 in MP3 formats and $12.95 for FLAC files.

The RIAA may have just hired the former head of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau (ATF) to continue to aggressively attack music piracy but today consumer’s rights to privacy were protected by a federal appeals court who struck down a ruling ordering internet service providers (ISPs) to identify users sharing files on the internet. Written by Chief Judge Douglas Ginsburg for a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the decision was a legal win for Verizon and other Internet service providers. A lower court had ruled that Verizon had to comply with a subpoena from the RIAA, seeking the identity of a subscriber to its Internet service who was downloading files via peer-to-peer services like the Gnutella network. Now that consumers have legal options for downloading music, millions have flocked to the new Napster, Apple’s iTunes and other sites that charge per download. Congress is ...

In a move designed to heal the wounds caused by the music business suing their youngest and most important customers, reports surfaced today that Penn State University would be offering a music downloading service to their students on their campus computers and servers. It is reported by CNN and CNET to be the new Napster which is a far different downloading system than the original Napster with the most notable change being that customers need to pay per song just like Apple’s iTunes and other commercial download sites. More details on the deal are expected when the president of Penn State and executives from Roxio, the new parent company of Napster, make a formal announcement on Thursday in Anaheim, California.

For years the RIAA has been playing the bad cop in the good cop-bad cop relationship it has with the music industry but yesterday the RIAA transformed itself into Dirty Harry by suing 261 active file swappers. Reportedly the people sued are file swappers with over 1000 copywritten songs in their shared folder which allows others to download the songs without paying for them. This aggressive move by the RIAA comes the same day that Apple announced its 10,000,000th pay-download from its outrageously successful iTunes store-software which was launched a mere four months ago. Up until just recently, there have been no viable consumer pay-per-download sites which drove consumers who were looking to acquire music online to sites like Napster and other peer-to-peer networks such as Gnutella. Now with a reborn legitimate Napster (owned by Roxio), a successful iTunes from Apple and a promising BuyMusic.com all on the market, consumers now have a legal and effective ...