A number of bands  including the likes of the Pet Shop Boys, New Young Pony Club and Digitalism have gone completely geek and are performing at a digital festival in the virtual world of Second Life. The festival called Second Fest is sponsored by the Guardian news paper and Intel comes complete with multiple stages and a substantial line up over three days.  Given the geek element, it isn’t too surprising that the artists appearing have a general electronica bias.

More information can be found on the Guardian site – http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondfest/.

 According to several sites, the Russian AllOfMP3 website that sold MP3 files for a few cents has shutdown, although whether this has been a result of the legal battles driven by the likes of the RIAA and the IFPI is not clear.  However a new site MP3Sparks has popped up which reportedly is essentially the same site. Currently the site appears to be down, but this may well be simply a network glitch or pure server pressure. Looking at aom3.org which is a forum about AllOfMP3 the close coupling suggests this is in fact the same people.

The interesting thing is that the domain change may not hide the activity, but is likely held by new organisations which means that all the legal proceedings will have to be restarted from scratch.  If this is anything like the Kazaa maneuverings a few years ago to try setup shell companies to frustrate legal processes then the IFPI are going to have some real headaches.

Articles:

• NME – Russian download site shut down
• Engadget – AllOfMP3.com shut down, replacement already launched