Catching up with my reading and come across a useful site – iheard, which is a specialized search engine for web based radio stations. Although can find your radio stations using the likes of Google and Yahoo – you do have to then filter out the noise. This does all of that for you.

The Charlatans have announced that they will make their next album a free download from the UK radio station XFM. Initially it will be just be a single released on Monday October 22 followed by the album early next year.

I would imagine that XFM have parted with a big pot of cash for the privilege, much in the same way as the Sunday Mail earlier in the year paid for the rights to give away the latest Prince album.

More information can be found at the XFM site here.

 Radiohead as previously blogged only recently allowed their albums to be purchased online as downloads. But now they’re free of a recording contract with EMI the next album (to be called In Rainbows) will be available almost on a donation basis.  You pay what you think the album is worth and they add a delivery(read download) cost on.  More about this – Digital Music News and at InRainbows.com.

TheIn Rainbows  website allows the pre-ordering of the album in both physical and digital formats.

With this innovation comes a price, the UK official charts company doubts whether the album will qualify for the album charts because of the way Radiohead have priced the album.

 Arjan Writes has a legal free download for M83 – worth checking out – go here :Free Download: M83 “Sister (Part II).

 Brian Brown has written an amusing little piece about the joys of the iPod on Crawdaddy – read it at – Link to Crawdaddy! – Synchronicity and the iPod

Amazon’s MP3 Service has been launched in its Beta from in the US – you can see the press statement here. The pricing looks very competitive and its MP3 so both DRM free and will load onto just about any personal player you could imagine.  The last finger up at Apple is the fact that they’ve got Universal signed up as well. I think Steve Jobs might have to keep a close eye on his tail feathers, I think this could hurt iTunes.

Only downside – no indication of the UK version of the store yet.

In a strange twist to the tale of legal battles with Pirate Bay, as a result of  a leak of emails from anti-piracy company Media Defender, Pirate Bay are seeking to have criminal case against a number of major record labels.  The leaked emails showed that they have been using illegal actions to disrupt  Pirate Bay including Denial Of Service attacks, spamming and hacking.

We’ve seen the reports of the RIAA on behalf of the record companies playing fast and lose, using its size and clout intimidate people – but it would seem that these organisations feel that it is acceptable for them to break the law, but not others.

More on the story can be found at Digital Music News.