Peter Gabriel is a busy man, quietly helping music in the world of technology, with his work with OD2 (On Demand 2), We7 and now Bowers & Wilkins music club.  Bowers & Wilkins are a audiophile speaker manufacturer and wither Peter have indicated that sharing music using MP3s results in a loss of quality.  So they have set up a music club through which you can buy high quality music recordings (in the Apple’s loss less audio file format as used in the recording studio) recorded at Peter’s state of the art Real World recording studios.  Although not explicitly stated, the indications are from the website’s information is that the music is DRM free. The club costs £33.95 per year for which you get a free album to download  every month.  You don’t get to choose the artist or album, but initial indications that the artists involved so far are both interesting and diverse in styles so within a year you should get to hear a couple of albums that will appeal to your musical palate, unless you’re exclusively a Spice Girls and Sugababes fan. So far albums have been recorded with blues artist Little Axe (aka Skip MacDonald), Grindhouse and Gwyneth Herbert.

  I cam across a new free service called Chilirec.  It allows your to select and record Internet radio stations for later playback.  Currently there are 300 or so stations although none of the major names appear for example BBC, KCRW and so on.  As a solution it has some exciting potential, and could if it takes off have some interesting affects on podcasting (i.e. you record your favourite programmes for time shifted listening without first having to download or accept any download quality restrictions.

It does however raise all sorts of interesting copyright issues, which probably explains why the major stations are absent from the available list as it would attract the big money lawyers.