These ex-Generation X / Sigue Sigue Sputnik / The Clash dudes urge people to copy their music.
Allegedly you can download their music from their website but I couldn't find any MP3s on their site or a linked fan site.

BBC Story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4683875.stm

Band page:
http://www.carbonsiliconinc.com/home/default.aspx

"There are now over 230 music services online where consumers can purchase music"

...

"a variety of estimates indicate that digital downloads and subscription music will be a $1 billion business in the US by 2007 -- only four years from when the digital music sector was worth next to nothing."

...

230? i wasn't aware that there were already that many...
1 billion $ seems kind of low for 2007 considering that itunes alone currently has about 50 million downloads a month (thus 600 m per year), and rising.

"Apple shipped 1,182,000 Macintosh units and 6,155,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 35 percent growth in Macs and 616 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter."

pretty good, i'd say.
considering the different prices of ipods and macs that means that they make around 50% of their revenues with ipods now.

Apple once again jumps the hipness train:
Apple helps podcasters and podcastees to listen to and subscribe to podcasts with iTunes and gives a well meant manual on how to produce podcasts with GarageBand.
Splendid.

(note: forgot to save web links for the following news, i'm too lazy to dig those up, so - no links today, google them yourselves)

Gracenote, the main commercial database for identifying ripped CDs, has announced their 2 billionth entry into their database today.
That gives us an idea of how many titles and how much content there is out there.
A regular traditional music retailer can stock a few thousand CDs. iTunes US currently has around 1.5 million songs or roughly 100-150.000 CDs, which is a lot but apparently this is still just ONE TENTH of what Gracenote was able to identify, and THAT again is just a fraction of what really is out there on CD, and THAT again is again just a fraction because there are still quite a few vinyl records that never made it to CD. If we are looking at all music that has ever been put to a recording media I suppose we are dealing with 5-10 billion CDs or 50 - 100 billion songs. wow. iTunes has a long way to go.

tadaa...

gonna jump right into it - some current news to follow.