When I was a "kid", I remember you could go to a rock concert and see a top-of-the-charts band for as little as $15.00. There weren't CDs back then, but you could buy a record or cassette album for around $8.00. My peers at the time had no ethical problems with making "party tapes" that compiled music from all their favorite albums. They would give them to their friends, who would in turn make copies to give to their friends. When we heard a band we really, really liked - we actually went out and bought the album. Those were the days.

In the digital age, that typical kid behavior can now land you in court and cost you thousands of dollars. As illustrated by the Sony Rootkit fiasco, consumers are beginning to get a taste of the Digital Rights Management software being slipped onto the latest batch of CDs that keep you from "ripping" the song to your iPod.

Consumers have seen the future of DRM... and are beginning to realize that it SUCKS!

If you haven't heard of it already, the Free Sound Project has 10,000 sounds (and growing) available for your use under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License.

The sounds can be searched using attributes like "sounds like" and downloaded for use in your music or multimedia production. They also encourage others to upload their unique samples (in other words, not your sample of someone else's song) to the database and make them available to others.

The Free Sound Project is hosted at the University Pompeu Fabra in Catalonia, Spain and is an incredible sound resource for your projects.

For a fine selection of commercial sample sound CD sets, check out the collection over at Zounds: Computer Sample CDs.

Joel Spolsky has nailed it right on the head in his commentary about why the record industry wants to charge more for some songs over others. I wish I would've written it. The logic of it is inescapable, if you ask me. (You did, didn't you?)

This is it in a nutshell (from the article):

"Now, the reason the music recording industry wants different prices has nothing to do with making a premium on the best songs. What they really want is a system they can manipulate to send signals about what songs are worth, and thus what songs you should buy. I assure you that when really bad songs come out, as long as they're new and the recording industry wants to promote those songs, they'll charge the full $2.49 or whatever it is to send a fake signal that the songs are better than they really are. It's the same reason we've had to put up with crappy radio for the last few decades: the music industry promotes what they want to promote, whether it's good or bad, and the main reason they want to promote something is because that's a bargaining chip they can use in their negotiations with artists."

And, BINGO was his name-oh!

There you go... and here I was all this time thinking it was just about the money. It's about control. Dig it.

Click here to read the article at JoelOnSoftware.com.

A fascinating article at the BBC tells the story of Bill Bundock. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease and his wife watched him ride the slow spiral of withdrawal that plagues people with this ailment.

But, that all changed when they started to attend a local singing group aimed at helping people with dementia. He didn't initially join in... after a while, though, he began to sing along. His wife says he became more like his old self.

Clive Ballard, director of research at the Alzheimer's Society and Professor of Age Related Diseases at King's College, London, said singing and rhythm, even listening to a metronome, has been shown to help people with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. He says that the brain speech center is different from the area of the brain that processes music. This enables people who loose their speech to still be able to enjoy listening to music.

Click here to read the article at BBC News website.

Ok, so which is it? I surf over to Digg.com and find an article that claims CD sales are being hurt by Orwellian DRM technology. People are mad when they buy a CD and it won't play on their computer. So, I'll buy that...

On the other hand, I check out CNet's music news and discover that Sony is not being hurt at all by the whole "rootkit saga"...

It all just stinks to me. Sounds like a media conspiracy of Art Bellian proportions.

It would seem that simply applying a piece of tape to the outside edge of any DRM enabled CD completely defeats the system. You can then pop the disk into a PC and skip right to the music.

DRM doesn't work... and never will. The only option the labels have is apparently to lobby congress to pass laws forcing PC manufacturers to include built-in DRM technology. That way, you can be charged whenever you try to rip a song off a CD you purchased.

It is like I said in an earlier comment... the record and movie industries will not be happy until they can charge you every single time you listen to a song or watch a movie. With a pro-rated fee based on "partial" plays.

Greed... I wonder if we can get that classified as a disease. Then the Feds could subsidize the behavior like they do everything else.

Click here to read the article at Vunet.com.

Related: The RIAA says that installing root kits is "no biggie." Clueless, they are, truly clueless. Click here to read about it.

And, last but not least, the big old state of Texas has sued Song BMG music claiming that their rootkit illegally installed spyware on people's computers. Click here to read about it at KWTX.com. Gotta love that!

If you're a history buff regarding old recordings, you'll love this site...

The Department of Special Collections at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) Davidson Library has placed over 5000 recordings online that were taken from old "Edison Cylinders". The recordings date from the 1890s to the 1920s.

They were restored using state-of-the-art equipment and are available in the MP3 format. They are also available to stream.

For the real afficionado, you can download the raw, uncompressed file and do what you want with it.

Mash-up remixes, anyone? Anyone?

Click here to visit the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at UCSB and fire up your sample editor.

It would appear that earlier versions of Apple's iTunes v6 software for Windows contains a security flaw that could allow someone to take over your computer across the Internet.

The flaw allows hackers to run whatever code they want to run remotely, once they have infiltrated your system. It is not yet known whether this flaw affects the same iTunes version running under the Mac OS. Tests are underway.

Click here to read the report at CNet.