Any creative commons supporter has known it for a long time now. Digital Rights Managed music sells worse than rights free, says LA Times.
Read here.

Apple had its 500 millionth download. Sales doubled in the first half of the year.
Whadayasay. Who's buying all that music?

Germany has had its share of discussions whether a quota for local artists in radio playlists would help, um, culture.
This is a very interesting article about Venezuela where a similar model showed astonishing results.

(via Boycott RIAA)

Not exactly music related, but in my opinion the Slingbox might turn out to be a disruptive technology for the whole media industry.

Engadget did a long interview with the CEO of Sling Media, read it here.

Despite all RIAA attempts the number of P2P users seems to be rising steadily. In fact, it has more than doubled since the RIAA filed their first lawsuits against P2P users in Sep 2003 (in sharp contrast to RIAA claims that their campaign has been successful).

DMN has an article and numbers:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/results?title=BigChampagne

Yeah, i know, I'm late.
The ".mp3" extension turned 10 on July 14th.

An interesting bit of information: Back then a major point of critique was that the MP3 encoding technology was thought to be too complex.
I guess that teaches us not to underestimate the speed at which technology evolves...

Read all about it:
http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/pub_rel/presse/2005/mp3/index.html