MagnetMix is a portal created by LimeWire that distributes legal content (audio, video, books and software) using MAGNET links—URI's that point to specific files on the Gnutella network. Besides LimeWire a few other Gnutella P2P clients also support MAGNET links: Bearshare, Xolox, Shareaza, TrustyFiles.

Via Digital Music News, we learned that MagnetMix has available exclusive content from Grammy award-winner Steve Winwood.

Now available on MagnetMix and brought to you by LimeWire, an 8-minute previously unreleased live version of "Dear Mr. Fantasy" in MP3 and MPEG format, as well as a behind the scenes look at Steve Winwood's rehearsal.

Make sure to check some other websites that publish MAGNET links:

• Bitzi, a collaborative guide to any and all files in circulation

• P2PFiles, a web-based search engine for resources on the Gnutella network

• Morle's Magnets, a blog featuring magnet links to interesting files

At the beginning of this month I visited the Streaming Media East conference here in NYC. One of the most interesting panels was the one moderated by DMN's Paul Resnikoff.

Called Digital Music: Subscription & Digital Download Services, the session had William Pence, CTO, Napster; Mark Mooradian, Senior Director of Strategic Planning & Business Development, MusicNet and Nishad Pai, Director, Business Development, MusicMatch. They talked about their services, DRM, licensing, future of streaming/dowloading, file-sharing, etc.

Worth watching.

University of Tulsa's professor John Hale and doctoral student Gavin W. Manes have been awarded U.S. Patent 6,732,180 for their method to prevent illegal downloading of music over the Internet. The idea behind is similar to what's being done for year by the RIAA: to flood P2P networks with decoy content appearing to be authentic.

The patent's abstract:

The invention's scanning processing component searches media sharing network communities for illegally shared proprietary media and its manufacturing processing component constructs decoy media files mimicking identified proprietary media.

The invention's share processing component associates media sharing network communities with shared media sets containing decoy media files, and its supervisory control processing component provides for system initialization and checking subprocesses which establish initial configurations, and reactive behavior of the invention in addition to monitoring the effectiveness of a decoy ratio interactively specified by a user of the invention.

That's the main conclusion from a new survey conducted by The Pew Internet & American Life Project with more than 2,700 musicians. Some other conclusions are:

• 67% say artists should have complete control over material they copyright and they say copyright laws do a good job of protecting artists.

• 83% have provided free samples of their work online and significant numbers say free downloading has helped them sell CDs and increase the crowds at concerts.

• Many musicians and songwriters do not think the RIAA campaign against free file sharing on the Internet will benefit them.

The musicians (a diverse group of both high-end and garage-band performers) clearly don't think the campaign against online music swappers by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) will help musicians and songwriters. However, the musicians are deeply divided in their views about the impact of online file-sharing on the music industry, and they have differing views on current copyright laws. The survey results, which will be shared this weekend at the Future of Music Coalition, are not claimed by Pew to be a truly representative view of all the music makers in America.

RIAA filed 477 new file-swapping suits bringing to nearly 2,500 the total number of people sued during the last eight months. Sixty-nine out the 477 lawsuits were targeted to college students from the following institutions: Brown University, Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Gonzaga University, Mansfield University, Michigan State University, Princeton University, Sacred Heart University, Texas A&M University, Trinity College in Connecticut, Trinity University in Texas, University of Kansas, University of Minnesota, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

The threat of being sued has changed the behavior of many web users. Most people I know have been very careful and have even stopped sharing files. In fact — according to a study just released — about 17 million users have stopped downloading music over the Internet. But there's a twist, more people that have never downloaded have started to do so, which brings an overall increase of file downloads.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project said that since last November despite fears more people are now downloading music since last November.

Nonetheless, the random telephone-based study conducted in February finds that 18 per cent of internet users say they now download music over the internet, an increase from 14 per cent in a pre-Christmas survey.

And the percentage of internet users who say they share their music, video and other files with others over the internet increased to 23 per cent in February, from 20 per cent in the November-December survey.

Have you changed your download behavior because you are afraid of the RIAA?

A survey conducted by JupiterResearch concluded that the ideal capacity for a digital music player is of storing 1,000 songs.

Ninety percent of consumers have no more than 1,000 songs on their PCs. And 77 percent responded to be interested in players with a capacity of 1,000 songs.

The 4GB hard drive included in Apple Computer's iPod Mini, and in MP3 players from some Apple rivals, holds roughly that number of songs. "Hard drive players with such large capacity for content go above and beyond not only the music that most consumers want on their portable music player, but also beyond the digital music that they own." Hard drive size isn't the only thing that matters to music lovers. When asked which features matter most, 55 percent listed a rechargeabl

I remember the 20 Mbytes hard drives many years ago. If anybody asked I would never think of storing multi-gigabyte files.

What about an informal survey? How many song files do you have? Comments are open.

One of the tactics most used by the RIAA to annoy stop file-sharers is to make available on P2P networks fake songs that have just 20 seconds of music followed by intense screeching noise. 

It didn't take too long until somebody decided to sample the noise to create 'real' music: the RIAA-mix. There are now some versions that include remixes of Aerosmith, 50 cent, Nirvana  and Sheryl Crow.

Philosophical stumper: in addition to providing mp3s and streaming audio, Chanel and Sherman are selling the CD. Now what if they get sued for selling the songs the RIAA wants us to download?

This should be worth checking out. StationRipper is a Windows app that enable users to record Shoutcast stations directly from the audio streams. It creates a single MP3 file for each song the station plays. It allows you to record up to 300 streams at one time.

StationRipper, based off of streamripper, records up to 300 simultaneous Shoutcast streams. Supports Track Separation, Scheduling, Memory Recording, play integration via Shoutcast.com, MP3 player access, easy rip restarts, and a music library manager.

It's not Tivo-like but I imagine that wouldn't be hard to create a feature like the 'season pass' or record suggestions based on previous rips.

Ipsos-Insight conducted a survey in which the results point to an increasing trend of movie downloads. According to the results, 20% of file sharers have downloaded a full length movie. Of those, with 10% have done it in the last 30 days.

The research also reveals that nearly two-fifths (38%) of downloaders have downloaded a music video from the Internet. Further, 15% of American downloaders acquired a digital video within the past 30 days.

Similar to digital full-length motion picture behaviors, 18- to 24-year-olds and 25- to 34-year-olds are the most likely to have ever downloaded an online digital video (49% and 43%, respectively). In addition, nearly half (45%) of all male American downloaders have taken part in this digital downloading activity.

Click here for the report charts (2 page PDF file).

The Napster brand got a lifetime extension once it became a legal online music service. But its past still haunts its original backers who could be liable of as much as $17 billion . 

Next Tuesday, music labels and publishers will face off against Bertelsmann AG in federal court in San Francisco over claims the German media company's 2000 investment in Napster kept the file-swapping service operating eight months longer than it would have done otherwise. The lawsuits claim the extra lease on life promoted wide-scale piracy and cost the music industry $17 billion in lost sales

Lawrence Lessig was online to discuss his book, "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity." There's a transcription of the online discussion at blogoehlert.

Takoma Park, Md.: Is it fair to call pervasive free availability of any copyrighted song anyone can think of a "gnat"? I appreciate your concerns but it seems to me that you're downplaying the impact of file-sharing on creative industries.

Lawrence Lessig: Is it fair? Well, what's the harm. In my book, I assumed there was a substantial harm, and the question I asked is: how might we minimize the harm while not destroying the internet or its potential. So I would push for different policies even assuming the gnat is a lion.

But since my book was published, there has been substantial work — by independent researchers, not paid by the content industry or anyone else — to suggest that there is no substantial harm from p2p sharing. More precisely, that when you add up all the effects (people exposed to new content which they buy, etc.), the effect of sharing is statistically indistinguishable from zero.

A study sponsored by the Gospel Music Association (GMA) found that evangelical songs are downloaded at nearly the same rate as mundane music is being pirated by 'non-Christians'. According to the survey only 10 percent of Christian teens considered music piracy to be morally wrong. Of those, 64 percent have engaged in downloading or CD burning anyway – virtually the same percentage as non-Christians.

These numbers come one year after the Christian Music Trade Association announced a program in partnership with GMA to harass 'educate' teens through instant messages.

Musicians say the piracy issue is particularly thorny for them to broach. Many fear being seen as greedy, the backlash faced by the heavy metal band Metallica when it sued Napster, once the most popular file-sharing software system.

"We can't be like Christina Aguilera and get all attitudy," said Jaci Velasquez, a platinum-selling singer originally from Texas. "We're supposed to be like Christ and turn the other cheek."

Right after our last post about mobile music download we found from Emily Turrettini about Chrysalis Mobile.

The recently launched Chrysalis Mobile business is to partner with Flytxt to provide the delivery platform for a variety of mobile music services, according to Mike Grenveill for 160characters.org.

"Using the Flytxt platform, Chrysalis Mobile will act as a service provider to media and retail partners - sourcing and hosting music content across a number of genres for delivery to their consumer audiences on demand via mobile devices. Chrysalis Mobile is working with the record industry around individual artist promotion and with partners to integrate mobile music with their existing consumer marketing strategies".

Mobile content initially delivered through the partnership will include:

• Ring Tones - Monophonic and Polyphonic Real Tunes -

• Mobile edits of actual songs

• Images and Other Artist Content

If the performance of the ringtone market is any indicator the mobile music download business will be huge. As worldwide ringtone sales have reached multi-billion dollar figures, some analysts are already talking about music download to be the next hit.

Already, companies like Eurotel Praha, Chaoticom and T-Mobile have started moving aggressively into the space. Current and next generation phones can easily handle storage and playback of downloaded tracks, just like a portable mp3 player…

... Martin Fabel, analyst at AT Kearney, says mobile downloads could account for 20-30% of music sales by 2006. Look for more development in the "remote control" downloading space as well (for lack of a better term), which allows users to download tracks from their mobile handsets into net-based music collections.