Amazon Watermarking mp3's?

Yesterday some people started a buzz around some Amazon mp3's being "watermarked". Now, please, calm down: I know that talking about watermarked songs might be good to get some readers, after the discovery of iTunes watermarks on their DRM-free songs, but not everything can be considering watermarking...

Amazon sells plain and simple mp3's, directly ripped from CD's. That means that there are no watermarks in the sound, and since there's no way in the mp3 specification of watermarking a file in another way, the only information that Amazon could possibly add to the files is the ID3 info - simply editable by almost every mp3 player out there. And yes, some Amazon mp3's (surprisingly not all) have ID3 tags telling that they were purchased in Amazon, but there's no personal info there and there's really nothing wrong in those tags. To give you a comparison term, all songs bought at amiestreet.com come, in the Comments section, "This song was downloaded from AmieStreet.com". Simmilary, all songs downloaded from last.fm have in the Comments section "Free download from www.last.fm (http://www.last.fm/)".

It gives me more nerves knowing that every last.fm downloaded track comes bad tagged (every track is tagged as being the 1st of the album, even when the last.fm website knows it is not) than knowing that Amazon's mp3's come with full tags, including a comment saying the track was purchased there.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Quick links

Quick links for the day:

• I wonder where is this legal, but being able to capture Last.fm streams into propperly tagged mp3 files is sweet (TheLastRipper);
• Music to check out;
• More music to check out;
• The Portuguese petition against OOXML has surpassed the 1000 signatures;
• UK and Microsoft ignoring the existence of ODF;
• After all Amie.st is not that hot, I'll probably write about this later;
• My musical project has now all its tracks licensed with a Creative Commons license, and the latest CD is almost sold out.

Amie Street - happy birthday!

Today is the day we celebrate the 1st year of Amie Street. 21 days after its launch, I was already signed and addicted to their service. Amie Street is, at their own words, "a social network centered around the discovery of new music", but they are a lot more than that - as a matter of fact that's not a way I would describe them.

Amie Street is an online music store that sells DRM-free mp3's, each of them at a price that goes from 0 to 98 cents (or, in other words, from free to less expensive than with-DRM iTunes files). As I said last year, when I uploaded there my own music for sale,

So, what do these guys give of so new? As a matter of fact, their business is quite simple: artists give their music for free there, music is rated, the best rated songs move from free to costing money and getting more or less expensive depending on being more or less rated. To avoid bad ratings or people not caring about rating at all, they pay money for users that especulate well (telling that a band will start selling well and being right gives good money for the artist and for the raters).

So, where's the flaw? Well, people can simply not buy non-free music, so that since the moment a songs start costing money can be the moment that the song stops selling, until is free again. But comparing that to having the song forcefully free (like in those other services), well... I just guess that no artist has nothing to loose with this.

The only problem I see with this service until now it that it is way too buggy, and has a really small selection of music (yet). Considering that the site is still at it's "Alpha" state, I'm not really worried about it, tho.

In January I wondered if they would survive for long: I even posted some graphs back then, so here's another visits graph today:

Does "one year" means that they've made it? Well, it means that they've made it through the first year - but nothing more. They're removed the "alpha beta" tag, for instance, but that doesn't really mean that their website is stable or perfect - it surely isn't. Also, they have to do some serious thinking about their business model, if they want to keep up with the latest trends. In the "selling DRM-free music business" they'll have Amazon entering the space, in the "giving money to small artists business" they'll have ad-supported free solutions to care about, like the long-awaited reverbnation feature. Well, let's wait and see, next year I hope we're both still be here to talk about it.

Techcrunch is giving free music to celebrate Amie Street's birthday.

Happy birthday!