Official Ares Free Download

The price of downloading music legally is getting lower and lower, and for online music stores, it is only going to get tougher for them to generate revenue and keep themselves afloat.

Amazon recently announced an affiliate program offering 20% of the cost of music downloads to affiliates (which will drop to 10%) after January 1, 2008. With tracks from Amazon costing as little as 89 cents to download, industry analysts are starting to wonder how money can be made form such a service.

It was also announced recently that Apple will reduce the price of its DRM-free iTunes Plus songs to 99 cents, suggesting that Apple is already worried about the threat Amazon is posing.

This price battle will continue until there are simply no more prices to be cut and companies actually lose money with each song they sell for users to download. What this will lead to is online music stores having to exploit other methods of making money.

What’s next for digital music?

Music fans have been reacting skeptically to the announcement that Universal Music Group (UMG) is planning on launching its own iTunes killer, Total Music. UMG is stepping up and making its claim on digital music downloads, but many are asking if we really need a service like Total Music for our downloads.

CEO of Vivendi Universal SA (UMG’s parent company) Jean-Bernard Levy said recently that he was frustrated with how little money UMG makes with every song purchased from iTunes (29 cents, or one third — which seems perfectly reasonable to most people).

UMG is obviously trying to make more money launching this service, as if fans needed another reason to dislike record companies. UMG will offer free music, subsidized by an increase in the cost of MP3 players.

It seems that the music industry is once again failing to give anything to music fans, which is a major reason why people are continually turning to P2P filesharing sites to download music from.

Music fans around the world are fighting back against Digital Rights Management (DRM) music files. DRM is a way of limiting access to an MP3 file, so users can only use the file on a limited number of computers, play it in limited places or copy it to CD a limited number of times.

This technology has been in part responsible for the massive increase in the usage of P2P filesharing software such as Limewire and Ares.

Ares is popular because it is open source, meaning that the source code is made available to the public and users don’t have to worry about malware or spyware.

Downloading music using software like Ares is free and what you get will often be of an equal quality to the DRM-tainted files that can be purchased from Apple’s iTunes store.

Other ways to get around DRM-tainted files include using DRM-stripping software such as myFairTunes7. The message is clear: people don’t want DRM with their music files.

Jammie Thomas, the American mother who was subjected to the RIAA’s wrath in a willful copyright infringement verdict last week and ordered to pay $222,000.00 in fines, plans to appeal the decision.

Thomas, with her attorney Brian Toder, appeared on CNN to announce her decision to appeal. The appeal will be based on jury instruction no. 15 which, according to ArsTechnica.

told the jurors that they could find Thomas liable for copyright infringement if she made the recordings available over a file-sharing network, ‘regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown.’

The contentious question now is whether the act of making a file available over a P2P filesharing network — as was the case in Thomas’ trial — can properly be described as ‘distribution’ under the Copyright Act. This is something that lawyers will still argue over and there appears to have been no final decision made yet.

The verdict may be overturned, but that would just place the parties in the same position they were in before the case. With the RIAA’s reputation they will most likely pursue this to the bitter end. Either way it seems that Ms. Thomas is in for a rough ride over the next few months.

Kylie Monogue is following a recent trend set by Radiohead in shunning media organisations in favour of giving the power back where it belongs: to the fans.

Radiohead recently made the big — and very brave — decision to release their latest album In Rainbows online, and to charge only as much for it as the fans wanted to pay. You think it’s worth nothing? So be it, the band say. We think this is a stroke of marketing genius; more than that, it is a very clear message to the large media companies that their time in the traditional role of agent and marketer are terminally numbered.

Comeback queen and Pop-princess Kylie is releasing her new single online — available for download — a full week before its record store release. She is, according to reports, eager to join stars embracing the digital revolution that is killing CD sales.

This is yet another high-profile blow to the Big Four Cartel that still seemingly refuse to acknowledge the industry is changing around them. If they do not become more nimble, fluid and open minded then they will be unable to move with it. Businesses that do not move with their markets — and more so those that attempt to hold it back from this inevitable movement — will eventually fail. The winners will be the innovators — Ares, Kylie, Radiohead et al — that took advantage of the change.

Apple’s iTunes service is rumoured to be working on a service allowing users to download and rent movies, so says Zeropaid. This addition to the standard iTunes service, expected to be launched as early as this Autumn, would allow a 30-day rental of your favourite films for as little as $3 — around the same as a video from Blockbuster Video.Why is this any better than Blockbuster video or, for instance, Netflix? Well you don’t have to return the movie, for one. Any downsides? You can watch your movie on your computer, telephone, or ipod, just not that nice big living-room television set that you’ve got. Additionally, the large download might be a problem for those of us with slightly lethargic internet connections, meaning a movie in the post — or a trip down to a traditional video store, shock! Horror! – might actually be quicker and a lot more convenient.

We still think it fills a gap in the market, though. Being able to watch the movie on your iPod or iPhone is a huge bonus — imagine being able to keep the kids quiet on long car journeys. Imagine being able to keep yourself quiet when commuting to work, for example. It’s an excellent idea and we can see it being really rather popular.

Zeropaid opines that this is a true ‘on-demand’ service in every sense. We disagree: we very much doubt the Zeropaid staff will be downloading the Lord of the Rings Trilogy while on the train. Nevertheless it’s nearly on demand, and that’s what we think they meant.

The UK — official ‘big brother’ nanny state of the world — has recently passed laws that make it a crime to refuse to decrypt data when requested by the authorities, says ArsTechnica. Individuals who are in position of the cryptographic keys required for the decryption process face up to five years in jail if they refuse to assist.

The law also forces individuals to stay quiet about any role they had to play in decrypting data — has your personal data held by your lawyer or banker being decrypted, allowing the police to view all your personal and financial details? You’ll never know unless the police tell you.

The law is covered under Part 3, Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. The five-year term only affects cases where terrorism is involved, with other offences resulting in ‘only’ two years in The Big House. The law will apply to data stationed in the UK on UK-based computers or servers; the government cannot intercept any encrypted materials as they traverse the internet via the UK.

The solution to anyone who wants to keep their sensitive data out of the reach of the UK government, then, is to house it outside the government’s jurisdiction, and download it as and when required. This may be the solution for individuals such as international bankers who have a fear of their or their clients’ anonymity being exposed either legitimately or illegitimately by police officials.

It will be interesting to see how much more ‘protection’ the UK government can provide under the auspices of preventing terrorism, of course, before the people smell a rat. This UK citizen notes that the latest twist in this anti-freedom of speech saga has not been picked up by the national media, so will go largely unnoticed.

In an unprecedented move, UK-based band Radiohead are offering their new album online — without the backing of any record companies — with fans paying as much or as little as they like, says Zero Paid.

Fans can log onto the site and ‘buy’ the download. The price paid is specified by the downloader; a 45p (~1$) credit card processing fee is added onto whatever price they deem appropriate. Is this a brave move, a stupid move, or one that simply spans all boundaries of genius.

Definitely it’s a brave move; the royalties that would be paid by a large producer for an album by the obscenely popular Radiohead would be astronomical. They’re setting themselves up for a financial fall, here, as many people will be more than happy to pay 1p for the album. Which leads to the next question: is the move a stupid one?

Undoubtedly not. They may lose money on album sales… although possibly not, too. Many more people will buy the download than would otherwise buy a CD of the album, and a massive increase in sales means a massive increase in revenue. Plus which they don’t have a record company to pay, distributors or marketers (this news is as ‘viral’ as it gets). When you consider that artist’s royalties accounts for about £1.36 of an £11.61 album, the numbers start to make sense.

The band will also gain a huge number of listeners that they would not otherwise have. From these additional listeners come people who will purchase their back-catalogue; people who want to pay lots of money for their sell-out gigs, and people who want all sorts of other merchandise. The marketing for the band itself may be worth it alone.

Further, as album downloads are tracked for the UK charts, expect to see Radiohead at number 1 for a long, long time.

This is a very interesting move in the industry, and one which may well see it changed, if not turned on its head. Record producers should be very worried.

In a tough blow to those who have ‘unlocked’ their iPhone hardware to make it compatible with unofficial carriers, and to those who have ‘cracked’ software to make it work on their shiny new piece of kit, Apple revealed a software upgrade that will make hacked phones ‘permanently inoperable’. Apple released several warnings that this would be the case and they appear to be intending to follow through with their threat, P2P net tells us.

Apple’s new hardware was the subject of techie’s attentions from the start; they hoped to release the phone from the draconian prices charged by Apple’s ‘official’ carrier. They also wanted software that wasn’t currently officially available. After some ingenious but ultimately doomed late night cracking sessions, the iPhone was cracked.

Apple’s portent of doom came to fruition, however, and those cracked iPhones may soon be worthless: users may see their phones freeze up entirely. Whoops. Some users have reportedly had their phones ‘bricked’ — made as useful as a building material — already. There is, naturally, a great drive in the community to rectify this situation for those that have lost out — and no doubt there will be so modicum of success — but will this just mean more fruitless toiling? Are those hacked iPhones ultimately doomed?

pple’s increasingly strict attitude towards ‘unofficial’ use of its products started a few months ago when it started to introduce DRM protection into music sold through its iTunes store; this introduction was, ostensibly, to prevent ‘illegal’ online filesharing.

here will this end? Clearly this is a battle between the techies on both side of the iPhone. Apple have the funding and the inside knowledge, but the users have the numbers and the drive. Could be interesting.