Social Music websites seem to be released by the dozen each day and it becomes harder to distinguish between good and great sites. FineTune is a site that looks good at first glance but feels great shortly after you have been playing around with it a little bit.

FineTune can be described as a website that offers users the ability to create custom radio streams or listen to playlists created by other users of the service. You do not need to register to listen to other playlists but you do need to register if you want to create your own playlists that you want to listen to.

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The RIAA is still trying to convince authorities, providers and the general public that file sharing has a devastating effect on music sales despite recent scientific studies that disapprove the theory. A leaked letter that became public recently is showing that the RIAA is trying to gain the cooperation of internet service providers by outlining how it would like the ISPs to react.

While the service provider would have to disclose the real name of a client only in court the new procedure would speed up the entire process for the RIAA. The provider would send out a letter from the RIAA to the alleged file sharer. If the recipient of that letter would contact the RIAA afterwards they would have the match and could negotiate a settlement eliminating the lawsuit.

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There are so many great websites out there that offer music from talented artists for free. I really find it hard to believe that so many users still decide to buy mainstream music Cd’s that are copy protected or download drm infested music that can’t be played in many devices and that could pose problems if the company that sold you the music goes bankrupt.

The Epitonic website looks strange at first glance and might make inexperienced users nervous. There is no clear center that catches the users attention in the first seconds and many could leave the site because of this before they find out that they are missing a great opportunity.

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It becomes more and more obvious that the claims of the music industry that p2p downloads would result in tremendous losses because of missing music sales have no justification whatsoever. Ars Technica is citing a story which was published in the Journal of Political Economy.

Entitled “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis,” the study matched an extensive sample of music downloads to American music sales data in order to search for causality between illicit downloading and album sales. Analyzing data from the final four months of 2002, the researchers estimated that P2P affected no more than 0.7% of sales in that timeframe.

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Found this little hack over at tech recipes. I’m always astonishes how websites secure the mp3 files that they host. How is it possible that a respected website links to the files directly ? Here is how the thing works:

1. Visit radioblogclub.com and search for a song or artist.
2. Click on the blue Play icon on the left side of every song
3. Copy and paste the  Blog this track code into the address bar of your browser
4. Remove everything before http and replace %20 with a space, %3A with “:” and %2F with “/”
5. Remove everything behind .rbs and hit return
6. The song should download and all that is left to do is replace the .rbs extension with mp3

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