As regular readers know, The Digital Music Weblog is retiring as of today. The blog will continue to exist as a searchable archive. Grant and Gordon, who have written so splendidly in this space, are staying in the network.

Whenever we make a change, there is some disappointment among readers, and sadness for everyone -- including those of us involved in decision-making. We take it all seriously; nothing about this is capricious. TDMW has lived close to our hearts, and especially close to mine.

This blog was my starting point at WIN (read this if you're interested). It was a little tough to let it go when I was hired by AOL, but Grant, Gordon (Tommy Perkins and Sharky Laguna before them) have done an amazing job carrying onward the blog's relentless examinations of the RIAA's colossal machinations and the opportunistic maneuvers of the indie music scene. And it's tough now to move the blog into retirement.

It's important to point out that a blog retirement is not a blog failure. Here at Weblogs, Inc. we are continually honing our network to be the best content engine for readers and bloggers both. In part, that means figuring out how to divide our resources that, sadly, are not infinite. We have changed tremendously in the last three years, expanding wildly at the start into a sort of bulk publishing model, then refining and contracting somewhat into a leaner machine. We have more bloggers than ever before, and fewer blogs than a year ago. That means a dazzling concentration of minds and voices in our chosen fields of publication. A good example is Grant Robertson's ferocious blogging at Download Squad, his new home.

I speak for everyone on the Weblogs, Inc. team when I give the greatest appreciation to our amazing bloggers, who wake up every single day thinking, "What will I dig up today?" Professional blogging is unlike any other freelance writing gig, in both its relentless schedule and editorial freedom. I am always proud of our team, and frequently awed.

Finally, thanks to everyone who took an interest in The Digital Music Weblog, both casual visitors and dedicated readers.

This video is flying around, for good reason: it is a priceless interview clip in which the BBC pulled Guy Kewney's driver onto the set by mistake, and questioned him about the Apple/Apple lawsuit. The poor guy's initial shock quickly gives way to the most astonishing aspect of this episode, which is the cool-under-fire manner in which this gent pulls himself together and responds gamely to the questions. I want to tell you, this man's quasi-coherent, faux-expert answers are, to me, the equal of the buzzword-stuffed, self-righteous cluelessness issued by real pundits. It's fantastically entertaining, and the apparent buy-in from the interviewer is desperately revealing of the "expert industry."

MusicGiants is a premium online distribution service that features lossless and near-lossless file quality. Of course, so does the quasi-legal AllofMP3.com, but let's not go down that route. MusicGiants provides a glossy computer client, which, when running to a home theater system, furnishes a sort of "Music for Rich Dummies" experience. MusicGiants is for audiophiles who don't want to rip and burn, and for whom portability and file-size convenience are less important than great sound quality.

As such, MusicGiants is really best suited to non-computer deployment. That seems to be the thinking behind the new alliance between the service and the iHome MultiCenter media server from Audio Design Associates. (PDF brochureware here.) I've got to say, though, that this rack-mounted device looks like pro studio gear, and is definitely not designed for bookshelf placement. I'm uncertain Whether MusicGiants has found a perfect partnering match here. [via e-mailed contact]

An anonymous individual has launched an anti-DRM site called "I Hate DRM," which thankfully is less personal ranting against the inconveniences of copy-protection, and more a research blog. In the site's context, all sorts of DRM come under scathing examination, not just music DRM. Games, Acrobat files, and movies all come under withering attack. This person has also dug up some valuable cirumvention how-to material.

SteveJobs stood on stage in the much-anticipated "Fun New Products" presentation, and introduced two music-related items: Leather iPod cases and a portable speaker unit with built-in iPod docking station. Clearly, Apple is fed up with conceding the lifestyle accessory market, and is attempting to make a splash with pricey, premium products. The snug, Italian-leather cases will lighten your wallet by 99 dollars. The boombox will set you back $350. In the latter case, the test is in the sound--no point criticizing the product, as many are doing in this exceptionally hostile comment section, until you hear the thing. Of course ... how good can it sound when it will almost always be playing highly compressed music?

I wouldn't call it a cry for revolution, but it's rare for a person of  David Goldberg's stature (he's a VP and General manager of Yahoo! Music) to question the value of DRM so explicitly and publicly. Goldberg was speaking at iHollywood's Music 2.0 conference, and Yahoo! Music's Ian Rogers was listening and taking notes as his boss's boss addressed the room. See Ian's post in the Yahoo! Music blog for a link to the presentation slides and Ian's summary. Goldberg pointed to eMusic as a model of non-DRM success, and pointed out that DRM adds no value to consumers. Years-old points, to be sure, but it's all about who says them, and who is listening. [Thanks, Ian]

UPDATE from Ian: his blog post, linked above, is being vetted and there's a posting delay. Try again around 3pm EST.

Yahoo! pushed out an upgrade of its Music Engine client late Monday night, as announced in a revealing and sometimes hilarious post by lead developer Ian Rogers on the Yahoo! Music Blog. The upgrade is significant; reading the specs I expected a jump from 1.0 to 1.5, but Ian and his team made a modest leap to 1.1.

Among the most important improvements:

• Scratch playlist: The list of stuff playing now replaces the old Now Playing window, and the new list persists as you navigate around. You always have access to what you're hearing. This single improvement would, by itself, be worth an upgrade.
• Media server!: Innovation city. Y!ME now incorporates a software media server that connects with Roku and other home music networking devices, so you can stream Y!ME playlists and in-house stations to your stereo(s) throughout the house. Un-freakin'-believable. Who else is doing this?
• Improvements in the catalog, cosmetic design, resource footprint, and customer service responses. Y! Music Unlimited is bigger; the Music Engine client is smaller; customer service is more helpful.

Overall, the program has become more granular, with an emphasis on direct access. You keep what you've selected on your screen more easily. The program remembers where you left off when you surf to a different panel, and returns you to it. CD burning is a more fluid drag-and-drop affair that no longer requires a built playlist.

The old program does not force an upgrade. Launch it here. Launch it today. Most definitely worth it. Congrats to the Y!ME team.

Techdirt reports via Moco News that Warner Music is considering introducing a new mobile musicproduct  category: SMS Tones, which play unique sound/video clips when a text message is received. Brother. I understand being drunk on ringtones, but this seems like an unlikely stretch. First, texting is rapid; who wants an elaborate audio signal with each incoming snippet? Second: video?! Third: how much is this going to cost? Techdirt cynically supposes that the music/mobile companies will conspire to charge more than ringtones. Nothing would be a surprise.

Howard Stringer's much-publicized remarks about Rootgate, issued at CES, are so clueless as to amount nearly to a denial of reality. "Clearly the perception out there is that we shouldn't be doing too much of that copy protection stuff." Actually, that's not the main perception, though I wish it were. The main perception is that major media companies shouldn't be putting spyware-infected discs into international distribution, inviting the global hacking underground to target its customers' computers. The company isn't just dealing with negative feedback about DRM--it is facing class-action and even criminal lawsuits. As Techdirt notes, that's a little different.

But here's where Stringer seems to be improvising wildly: "...protecting the artist's right is not something that should be automatically dismissed by the push-and-pull generation." I'm sorry--the what? Did he say the push-and-pull generation? Is this a sexual reference? Does he mean the rip-and-burn generation? The point-and-click generation? All right, I'll cut the man some slack; I know what he means. He means the on-demand generation, and it's not a generational phenomenon. It's an on-demand marketplace across many demographics, and if Howard Stringer has trouble accepting that reality, then Sony is even more doomed than it already was. It's not that DRM conflicts with what the marketplace wants; DRM conflicts with what the marketplace already has. Stringer needs to get away from the microphones, visit the men's room, do a little pushing and pulling, enjoy a cathartic release, and approach his job with a cleared head.

Built to fail? I've speculated on that possibility before, but who knows. There was never much doubt that such a lame, arbitrarily limited device would fail, though, and so it has. Techdirt reports that the phone has disappeared from the Cingular site, and last week Motorola introduced a second-generation ROKR E2 (why the heck didn't they separate the product by giving it a different name?) that works with the new iRadio service.

Ian Rogers at Yahoo! announced that Y! has acquired Webjay, an open-standard music playlisting company. This fits right in with Yahoo! Music Engine's commitment to XSPF, the extensible playlist format, which was developed at Yahoo! in collaboration with Webjay's Lucas Gonze. On its own, Webjay has been creating playlist-sharing interfaces in which users can string together media from legit sources all over the Internet and share the sounds. Ian makes this merger sound like a heavenly and productive match; it is definitely Web 2.0-ish, and seems to further Yahoo!'s commitment to flexible user experience.

Engadget did the play-by-play from Macworld, and though much of Steve Jobs's presentation was devoted to non-musical Mac issues, he did lead off with some iPod and iTMS statistics.

• Apple sold 14-million iPods in Q4, 2005. That's over a hundred every minute.
• iTunes has sold over 850-million tracks, and the countdown is on for 1-billion. Jobs quoted Apple's market share in online music sales at 83 percent. It's unclear to me how that number is computed, and how subscription services compete in marketshare metrics.
• iTMS has sold over 8-million videos since that portion of the store launched in October.

Jobs introduced an iPod accessory: a remote control that adds an FM tuner. The remote is a nice idea. The tuner, of course, is an innovation years behind the times, but welcome nonetheless.

This isn't so much about digital music, I admit, but I live in a devoted NPR household and this item is too interesting to pass up. It also, perhaps, speaks to the inefficiency of the broadcast model.

The Detroit MPR station (WDET-FM) held its normal fall fund-raiser that ended in October. On December 13 the station discontinued a bunch of locally-produced music shows and put syndicated talk programs in their place. No doubt the station expected some heated feedback. It probably did not expect a class action lawsuit, but that's what it got. A Web site has been set up and a protest rally is scheduled for Friday of this week.

An ugly rumor that is perhaps characteristic of Verizon Wireless's business style has surfaced via PCSintel. That site reports that the announced Verizon VCast mobile music-downloading service disables MP3 playback capability in one of the supported phones, the LG VX8100. I have an 8100, and this tactic, if true, wouldn't surprise me. MP3 support was difficult to realize when the phone was new, requiring an operating system update before MP3 tracks imported via the miniSD card would work. Even then, Verizon disgusted many users by refusing to allow onboard MP3s to be assigned as ringtones. Verizon forces users to purchase ringtones from its providers.

In the case of VCast, the speculation is that Verizon partner Microsoft insisted on a WMA-only service, so the phone's new OS will convert MP3s to WMAs. Yech. If true, this strategy makes less sense than the ringtone restriction: users who import their own collections to the phone might also want to download through VCast--the two functions are motivated differently. One does not impair the other, or damage the other's prospects.

Man, theis proprietary, locked-down, endlessly tethered approach to music does nothing more than damn the content owners and service providers to continual failure. If this MP3 failure restriction turns out to be real, the only smart response is boycott.

My 13-year-old niece got a bunch of iTunes gift cards for Christmas, and I guess a lot of other kids (of all ages) did, too. 20-million downloads were sold in the week ending january 1, exploding through the roof of previous sales records. the total for 2005 is 352-million purchased downloads. That's a little more than the estimated 250-million unlicensed P2P downloads every week. But what I find frustrating about sales statistics is that we never learn about the number of songs streamed in Rhapsody, Napster, Yahoo! Music Unlimited-- not to mention the number of downloads from eMusic. In other words, subscription action is completely unrepresented. And since many observers (including this one) believe that subscription services represent the future of digital music, the spotlight is shining in the wrong corner.