According to Digital Music News a legal battle between one of Harvard Law’s top professors Charles Nesson has be ducked by the RIAA but has resulted in the professor contributing to another case that the RIAA have against an individual. The contribution to the case is a counter claim that says the RIAA have abused processes across state and federal jurisdictions.

It would appear that sooner or later Nesson and the RIAA will end up in court, and given the RIAA’s history and current appeals against them relating to how they identified and proved file sharing the prospects dont look too pleasant for the organisation.

 Engadget have picked up on this lovely limited edition box set of Beatles music. which comes with specially logo’d iPod. The irony is that the Beatles catalog isn’t available on iTunes so you’ll probably have to rip all the CDs in the set yourself.

Popjustice have a neat little article about the fact that most high street retailers have now abandoned stocking singles (that is of the CD variety for old readers).  This situation has been brought on my both technological progress i.e. web, downloads, MP3 etc but as I’ve said the the past also the likes of the BMI who limited the number of tracks for it to qualify in the charts, the cheap option of getting remixes or simply instrumental versions to fill the space and son on.  All very sad, although such a thought according to Popjustice now puts me in the category as vinyl elitists – I suppose my musical snobbery was going to get called out eventually.

So what constitutes a single now?  As popjustice asks, can it be any track on any official download site, how about songs released virally? Should illegal downloads count,?

Will we see seens like this in another 5 years?

The Eels are making a live EP freely available for a limited period through their website  (http://www.eelstheband.com/), direct link here.  The EP is only available until 28th October 2008.  The EP with four tracks includes:

1. Fresh Feeling
2. Packng Blankets
3. Jeannie’s Diary
4. Climbing To The Moon

The site is also promoting special limited edition copies of the Eels’ last studio album Blinking Lights and Other Revelations.

 Sound Blog has got a great little blog entry which also links to an article on CNET here. Essentially it argues that being an Audiophile is not about having the biggest and best HiFi, but a state of mind.

According to the NME, the figures for last years sales experiment with In Rainbows.  Despite all the criticism from the likes of Paul McGuinness (U2’s manager) it turns out that the download approach generated more income than Radiohead’s previous album Hail To The Thief.  The report indicates that a large proportion of people didn’t pay anything for the album, but enough did to make a difference.  I’m sure that critics will attribute to issues such as the effort made to promote the album (Radiohead’s last for EMI), how good or bad the Hail to The Thief was and so forth.

It will be interesting to see if the model is picked up by more artists (other than Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails) given these new figures.