Nokia announces on 1 July 2008 that they have added Warner Music Group to their Comes With Music offering. That's three of the big four labels signed up, with EMI still in licensing talks.

The idea behind Comes With Music-which is expected to launch in the second half of 2008-is pretty simple: buy a Nokia device that Comes With Music, and you'll be able to download as much music as you can for an entire year at no extra cost. When the year is up, the music will be yours to keep.

Of course, the music does have one problem: it comes with DRM, too. That's to be expected for a sweet deal like this. It remains to be seen how easy it will be to move that content to your computer for backup purposes and whether or not you will be permitted to burn it to a CD.

That's a bit of a mouthfull... I couldn't think of a better way to put it. With all the UK government meetings with the music industry, a new plan has come up. It's a plan many people have wanted, yet few expected to ever happen. You will pay a bit extra for your broadband service per month, and you'll be allowed to access as much as you like on a legal P2P based download service. This can't be anything but a good idea and here at Digital Music Future we are very happy about it, perhaps the industry is indeed finally embracing p2p.

The FBI should really, really have better things to do than try and find out why some tracks from an album that has been being made for almost 10 years. The outspoken Axl Rose however, has decided otherwise, and has gone to them about the Kevin Skwerl leak of 9 tracks prior to the albums release.

I know piracy and leaks are bad; but why does the FBI have to deal with it?

256kbps high quality music?
No DRM?
Cheaper than iTunes Plus?

Are those your criteria for online music? Then perhaps Rhapsody is for you. From Real Networks, this could well be the next king of online music.

They are so confident in their serivce that they are going to give away $10 credit to the first 100,000 signups, enough to buy an album for free!

Try it. Please try it.

A senior official from one of the UKs leading ISPs has said that the government has basically put a gun to the head of them to force them to reduce the levels of music piracy that occurs. They are now locked in talks with music companies on possible solutions to the ever growing piracy problem; but honestly, without invading their users privacy significantly, how are they supposed to stop pirated content being shared?

Perhaps they are thinking of going the "three strikes and your out" way the french have recently gone to attept to combat piracy?

Amazon pushed themselves very nicely into the digital music game last year, and licenced music from all the major labels, to be provided DRM free at a high quality. This won them an incrediable amount of praise and many suggest it is what caused iTunes to roll out the "iTunes Plus" service for drm-free files.

Well, Amazon have been meeting with UK labels, so it is very likely that this service is set to expand to great britian. Hopefully it will continue around the world thereafter; iTunes needs a good worldwide competitor.

As much as it is now being outclassed in someways (the lack of DRM on other sites being the key one), iTunes will always be the big player in digital music, and if we are honest, it's the thing that kickstarted the idea of legal digital downloads. It's a big achievement to run for 5 years in the web biz, and an even bigger one to have had 5 billion song downloads... just try to comprehend that, it's a giant number!

If we break it down, it works out to: 27397 tracks a day, 1141 tracks an hour, and 19 tracks every single minute. That's a phenominal amount if you consider that in the first few years the concept was not widespread and thus distorts the average.

Congrats, iTunes.