Coachella has announced that its online audience increased by over 30 million people during this year’s festival, after 30,000 attendees registered to ‘live click’ around the site using RFID-enabled wristbands to check in and update their statuses on Facebook.

The technology was powered by Intellitix, which offers various RFID solutions for festivals, including access control, cashless payment systems and the reduction of counterfeit tickets.

Intellitix head Serge Grimaux told CMU: “Coachella is renowned for being a frontrunner in the festival industry, and using RFID technology to unite the festival community and the online networks of fans was truly a momentous occasion. The phenomenal response to the Live Click shows how important these new ways of connecting to social media will become”.

Well, we knew that since being let out of jail, but with no MegaUpload empire left to run, Kim ‘Dotcom’ Schmitz had been spending some time in Neil Finn’s studio in Auckland working on a debut album, and now a track has surfaced online, though it’s not clear whether it will appear on the final record. Possibly not, as, in fine hip hop tradition, it’s more of a diss track.

The subject of the recording is New Zealand politician John Banks, who has been in the news in his home country recently after it was revealed he received a NZ$50,000 donation to his campaign funds from the controversial MegaUpload founder.

Now that the MegaUpload enterprise and its directors face criminal charges in the US, Banks has been busy trying to distance himself from the donation, which was made towards his unsuccessful 2010 campaign to be re-elected as mayor of Auckland. The donation was seemingly made in two halves so that it was under the amount where the source of the money has to be declared.

Since Schmitz told reporters about his past financial support for Banks, the politician, now a member of the New Zealand parliament, has denied he knew that the Mega chief was behind the 50 grand donation in 2010, a claim that Schtmitz says is untrue.

The diss track, called ‘Amnesia’, includes a sound bite of Banks saying “I don’t know who gave me money, I can’t remember now”, a female vocalist singing “That politician got amnesia again”, and Schmtiz’s artistic collaborator Printz Board rapping “He’s the majority, so he’s all right, He is John Banks, he got the vote, and that’s why Key keeps him afloat, on his cabbage boat?”

The Key referred to is New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, while the last line refers to a statement made by Banks along the lines of “I did not come up the river in a cabbage boat”, which it’s thought basically means “I wasn’t born yesterday”, though most New Zealand journalists say they’ve never heard the somewhat bizarre idiom before either.

Dotcom himself does not appear in the new song, though it is thought he will rap on many of the tracks he is creating for the promised album. The US government continues to go through the motions, of course, to try and extradite Schmitz to face charges of copyright infringement, money laundering and racketeering in relation to his role in running MegaUpload. Meanwhile, you can, erm, enjoy ‘Amnesia’ here:

Various online commentators noted this weekend that Grooveshark’s presence on and link with Facebook has now been down for a week, leading to speculation the social network has cut the rogue streaming music service loose, possibly under pressure for the major record companies who are currently suing the Groovey digital firm.

It seems that Grooveshark’s official page and app have been deleted from the Facebook platform, and that users therefore can no longer automatically share listening data from the streaming site with the social network. Meanwhile, over on the Grooveshark site itself, you can no longer login using your Facebook identity. Users can manually link to tracks on Grooveshark via their Facebook timelines, but the automated hook ups that have poven so valuable to other streaming music services in terms of generating new traffic seem to have been shut off.

When Grooveshark first disappeared from Facebook at the end of April, the digital music service posted a message on its blog insisting an error had occurred. The blog post read: “Grooveshark’s Facebook app integration and our Facebook page were disabled by Facebook [last] Saturday afternoon. We believe they were disabled in error and we are in communication with Facebook to try to understand exactly what’s going on, so we hope to see a resolution to these problems soon”.

However, a week on, and with the issue not resolved, the ‘error’ explanation seems less likely (assuming, that is, that Grooveshark has a direct link with the social network – if the company is talking to Facebook’s online customer support, it could be 2020 before it hears anything back).

Grooveshark, of course, faces litigation from a plethora of rights owners, even though the US-based streaming platform does have deals in place with some artists and labels, and insists that its ‘users upload the music’ approach is legal under US copyright law, even if it results in a lot of unlicensed tracks appearing in its catalogues at anyone time.

Founder Sam Tarantino recently gave an interview to Evolver.fm in which he defending his company’s approach, insisting artists benefited from his platform even if over-demanding major record companies couldn’t see that. Though it’s unlikely Tarantino’s arguments will win over any of those labels or artists who increasingly see Grooveshark as the enemy. See what you think here.

ONErpm, a US digital firm that provides a ‘social commerce platform’, has announced new partnerships with music distributors INgrooves, Naxos and IRIS Distribution, which will see the three distribution firms offer the facility to their labels and artists to operate Facebook-based music stores utilising ONErpm’s technology. Music represented by the three distributors will also appear in ONErmp’s own online download store, which sells music in both MP3 and WAV formats.

ONErpm CEO Emmanuel Zunz told CMU: “Labels often face technical and legal barriers when selling their music directly on Facebook. By partnering with their distributors, we have overcome these hurdles so that labels can immediately start selling music on the world’s largest social network”.

Confirming their deal with ONErpm, INgrooves’ SVP & Managing Director Of International Alex Branson added: “We are impressed with ONErpm’s ability to provide our clients with the flexibility and ease of use to install an unlimited number of Facebook stores and manage everything from one place”.

Virgin Media has become the first British internet service provider to block access to invariably controversial file-sharing website The Pirate Bay. As previously reported, on Monday the High Court in London passed injunctions, at the request of record label trade body the BPI, ordering five ISPs to instigate blocks against the Bay, so that when their customers try to access the web service they instead see a notice alerting them to the fact said website is blocked for copyright reasons.

Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk and O2 have all also been ordered to block access to the Bay in the next few weeks, and an injunction ordering BT to do the same is expected to be issued in due course (BT asked for a few more weeks to respond). The injunctions followed a court ruling earlier this year that said that The Pirate Bay is liable for the copyright infringement it enables, even though no unlicensed content actually passes through its servers; and also utilised a precedent set in the Newzbin case last year, where a judge decided that, under existing copyright law, web-block injunctions could be obtained where infringing web services were based outside the jurisdiction of the English courts.

Virgin and Sky have generally been more helpful to content owners looking to crack down on file-sharing that other net firms, mainly because with their own subscription movie services they have a vested interest in combating online piracy once it’s films being illegally downloaded. BT and TalkTalk have generally been the most resistant to taking on any obligations to police infringing customers.

Confirming it had already instigated a Pirate Bay block, a spokesman for the Virgin cable TV and net firm told reporters: “Virgin Media has received an order from the courts requiring it to prevent access to The Pirate Bay in order to help protect against copyright infringement. As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders addressed to the company but strongly believes that changing consumer behaviour to tackle copyright infringement also needs compelling legal alternatives, such as our agreement with Spotify, to give consumers access to great content at the right price”.

Of course, as much previously noted, all web blocks are circumventable for anyone who knows what they are doing, and since the Bay blocks were announced earlier this week various web pages have appeared telling the less tech-savvy how they can still access the Pirate Bay service once piratebay.org takes them to a ‘stop nicking our content you bastards’ holding page. Meanwhile the extra media coverage the blocks secured the rogue file-sharing site apparently resulting in a significant uplift in traffic for the service.

Lobby groups which are pro-file-sharing and/or anti-copyright-enforcement (or, anti what they perceive to be heavy-handed enforcement), will point to the ease with which web-blocks can be circumvented by those in the know as a reason why injunctions of this kind should never be allowed, adding that the cost and supposed censorship risks such blocks cause outweigh the limited returns they deliver in terms of combating file-sharing. They might also add that if the rights owners licensed more digital services, and ensured their entire catalogues were available by already licensed platforms, and addressed pricing concerns, then more casual file-sharers would probably go legit anyway.

And, of course, some of those are valid arguments, and raise issues the music and movie industries still need to address. Though more pragmatic rights owners would probably argue that, while there will always be a community of file-sharers who will continue to file-share, the aim here is to encourage mainstream web-users to only use legit services, and the way to do that is to both make sure those services are brilliant, engaging and easy to use, but also to do what you can to make the unlicensed options an arse to use. Which is really what web-blocking is about.

Will.i.am reckons the music industry still has a long way to go when it comes to truly embracing the digital era, and should “marry music and science” for future success. Or at least that’s what Management Today is saying, quoting the Black Eyed Pea and ‘The Voice’ coach from a speech he gave at the Royal College Of Art’s Innovation Night in London earlier this week.

Apparently he said: “The music industry never had an appreciation for technology. We’re [only] going to work out how to make money once we marry music and science. Apple is worth $800 billion now – the music industry far less. Music helped define what that company is, but they made all the money”.

Yeah, thanks for that Will.

Sainsbury’s has launched a download service. It’ll sell MP3s. And give you nectar points when you buy. And promise to refund the difference if tracks go down in price after you’ve bought them. Fun times indeed.

Says the supermarket’s Head Of Entertainment (Online) Mark Bennett: “This launch of our new MP3 music service enables our customers across the UK to get digital music at great value. This is the first step in our expansion to offer digital entertainment alongside our existing range of CDs, games, film and books catalogue”.

Digital distributor TuneCore and direct-to-fan experts Topspin yesterday announced an alliance which will enable the two companies together to offer an end-to-end solution to artists and rights owners looking to get their music into all key digital stores and platforms, while also selling product direct to core fanbase.

The new partnership will see the two firms integrate their technologies later this year, seemingly enabling users to manage digital distribution and direct-to-fan transactions via one platform. Users of either of the two firm’s services who don’t currently have accounts with the other will also be offered discounts to encourage artists and rights owners to utilise the integrated service.

Topspin has announced a number of alliances of late, though most previous partnerships have been about integrating the company’s sell-through system into other content platforms, including YouTube and MTV.

US-based streaming music service Rdio has gone live in the UK and France, according to various reports. Well, I can confirm the former, as I’ve been listening to music via the web-based streaming platform all morning. French readers will have to go to rdio.com and check it out for themselves.

Like its competitors Spotify, Deezer, Rara.com and Sony’s Streaming Flim Flam, Rdio has been expanding rapidly around the world in recent months. It was thought a UK launch might happen in March when it was confirmed the digital firm had secured a licensing deal with PRS For Music to cover publishing rights in various European territories, but while the service did indeed go live in Germany, Spain and Portugal that month, the UK arrival didn’t occur.

Although no official announcement regards a UK launch has yet occurred, online chatter that the service was now available here began yesterday. Unlike Spotify there isn’t a free ad-funded option with Rdio, though a six day free trial is available for new users.

Ah, a Spotify development without a pointless press conference. Hurrah! Perhaps they are learning. Spotify has updated its iOS app so that it works on iPads as well as iPhones.

When the streaming service announced its recent press event in New York, which it turned out was to reveal a lacklustre sales transaction with Coke, many thought it would actually be used to announce the popular music platform was finally reaching the Apple tablet device. Spotify say that the new iOS upgrade also offers some extra functionality and fixes some past bugs that occasionally caused the app to crash. Of course the option of listening to music via Spotify on Apple mobile or tablet devices is only open to full ten pound a month subscribers.

Elsewhere in app land, We7 has also announced a major update to its free-to-use Pandora-style radio app, available on both iPhone and Android, which allows users to download tracks and themed ‘stations’ for offline listening, share their favourite stations via social networks, and rate tracks up and down so that the app can learn their musical tastes and deliver songs accordingly.

More appy news from streaming music land, and while Deezer hasn’t launched an app today, it has announced the release of an API which will enable other developers to build music-based apps that utilise the streaming firm’s system. And not only will app developers have access to Deezer technology and content via the API, if their apps result in any users signing up for an account with the streaming platform, the firm will pay the app maker a £9.99 finder’s fee. Two Deezer ‘hack days’ have been announced in Paris and Berlin on 15-17 May and 6-8 Jul respectively.

And finally from the busy CMU app desk this morning, app maker Mobile Roadie announced earlier this week the launch of two new products – an iPad app kit and mobile website kit – which enables content owners and brands to easily create apps for the Apple tablet or websites designed for consumption via a smartphone’s web browser. The tech firm already offers platforms to make it easy to create apps for iPhones and Android devices.

In an interesting side show to the ongoing digital royalties battle in the US record industry, Apple Inc is trying to block various bits of evidence it provided to an earlier trial, including a deposition by the late Steve Jobs, from being made public, or even shared with plaintiffs in newer similar cases.

As much previously reported, various heritage artists with pre-iTunes record contracts with major labels are suing for a bigger cut of the monies record companies receive from download stores. The record companies claim that downloads should be treated as record sales, but some artists say download revenues should actually be treated as licensing income. The distinction is key because most artists are due a much higher cut of licensing revenue than they are record sale money.

The highest profile case based on this dispute so far was between Eminem collaborators FBT Productions and Universal’s Interscope, relating to the producers’ cut of Slim Shady download sales. FBT won, and a court hearing is pending to decide how much more digital money the production outfit should be receiving.

While Universal insists the FBT case does not set a precedent, a stack of artists with similar contracts are now suing for a bigger cut of digital money, and all four majors are facing such lawsuits. The main litigation now being pursued against Universal on the digital royalties issue is being led by Rob Zombie and the Rick James estate, and their lawyers have demanded to see various bits of evidence presented in the FBT Productions case to help them prepare their arguments.

Amongst the key evidence they want to see is submissions made by Apple Inc, including the deposition from the firm’s founder Jobs. But the IT giant has hit out at the suggestion that evidence it provided for one case should be shared with lawyers involved in another, insisting that the information it submitted to the FBT court hearing included “highly confidential and proprietary trade secrets”, and that the company provided such information on the condition it would only be shared with a small number of key people involved in FBT v Interscope.

Indeed it turns out that when that information was shared with the court during the FBT hearings, the judge insisted that nearly everyone present leave the courtroom, including a bunch of Universal Music staffers, so that only the jury and some key legal types and court officials got to hear what Jobs had to say. Which makes you wonder what exactly the late Apple chief had to share.

Apple Inc is now using the fact the judge treated its submissions with such sensitivity in the FBT hearings as justification for not sharing any of that information with lawyers involved in new digital royalty cases now. It adds that attorneys for the Zombie/James team have not demonstrated that the Apple evidence is essential for their lawsuit, adding that the new litigation is too broadly worded for the IT firm’s previous submissions to be of use.

It remains to be seen if lawyers for Zombie et al continue to push for access to the Apple testimonies and, if so, whether anything within them will every actually be made public.

VEVO has announced a new partnership with digital distribution platform Ditto Music, giving thousands of independent and unsigned artists access to the platform throughout the US and Europe.

It opens up the option for smaller artists and labels to have a presence on the YouTube-powered video site, which began primarily as a home for major label content. As VEVO’s big thing is that it has only premium content and therefore can sell advertising at a higher rate than YouTube itself, presumably participating artists and labels can earn more via the VEVO site than a conventional YouTube presence.

VEVO’s president and CEO Rio Caraeff told CMU: “VEVO supports independent artists and we’re thrilled to team-up with Ditto Music to help new acts reach global music fans”.

CTO of Ditto Music Jay Kerr added: “We’re really proud to be able to offer this. VEVO is an incredible service and this means that a whole new wave of indie artists will be able to take advantage of video monetisation”.

More information from www.dittomusic.com

The High Court in London yesterday issued orders requiring five internet service providers to block their customers from accessing the always controversial file-sharing search service The Pirate Bay. The court orders were possible thanks to the precedent set in last year’s Newzbin case, and followed a court ruling earlier this year that confirmed that, under English copyright law, The Pirate Bay is itself liable for the copyright infringement it enables its users to actually commit.

As previously reported, while web-blocking injunctions have been issued on copyright grounds before in various places around the world, it wasn’t until last year such court orders were granted in the UK. When lobbying hard for new anti-piracy measures in the 2010 Digital Economy Act, the record industry proposed a system that would enable such injunctions but, while an outline of how such a system might work was included in the bill, the introduction of a three-strikes system to send warning letters to actual file-sharers was prioritised.

But the movie industry suspected that web-block injunctions, which force ISPs to block access to copyright infringing websites that are based outside the jurisdiction of the UK courts, were possible under existing copyright rules (if requiring a slightly more time consuming process), and proved that last year when they forced BT to block access to file-sharing site Newzbin. The BPI quickly followed by targeting The Pirate Bay. Ironically, of course, the three-strikes system that was prioritised by the DEA is yet to go live, and now looks unlikely to do so until 2014.

Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media will now have to stop their customers from accessing The Pirate Bay in the next few weeks. BT was included in the BPI’s injunction application, though it has asked for a little more time to consider its response, so that particular net firm won’t be forced to act on the Bay for a little while longer.

Of course web-blocks are always circumventable if you know what you are doing, and in the Netherlands, where an anti-piracy group secured web-block injunctions against two ISPs in relation to The Pirate Bay, said group then had to get another injunction to stop The Pirate Party from telling people how to dodge the blockade. But many rights owners reckon that more casual file-sharers won’t go to the effort of trying to access blocked sites, and that will be enough to have an impact in the fight against online piracy.

Welcoming yesterday’s web-block orders, the boss of record label trade body the BPI, Geoff Taylor, told CMU: “The High Court has confirmed that The Pirate Bay infringes copyright on a massive scale. Its operators line their pockets by commercially exploiting music and other creative works without paying a penny to the people who created them. This is wrong – musicians, sound engineers and video editors deserve to be paid for their work just like everyone else”.

He continued: “Sites like The Pirate Bay destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists. We urge anyone using The Pirate Bay to explore the many digital music services operating ethically and legally in the UK – especially those carrying the Music Matters trustmark”.

Web-blocking on copyright grounds is not without its critics, of course, and indeed such measures were at the heart of the SOPA and PIPA proposals that caused so much outrage in the US at the start of the year. Criticising the British Pirate Bay blocks yesterday, Jim Killock for the Open Rights Group told reporters: “Blocking The Pirate Bay is pointless and dangerous. It will fuel calls for further, wider and even more drastic internet censorship of many kinds, from pornography to extremism. Internet censorship is growing in scope and becoming easier. Yet it never has the effect desired. It simply turns criminals into heroes”.

Meanwhile Loz Kaye from The Pirate Party added: “Site blocking isn’t the solution to anything – it’s just censorship, and ineffective censorship at that. It’s laughably easy to circumvent; we’ve been running a Pirate Bay proxy for ages and there are many others out there. In the meantime, the public interest suffers, the big ISPs suffer because they have to censor the internet while their smaller rivals don’t, and artists suffer because they’ve lost a new and innovative platform”.

Back to the Digital Economy Act, and BPI boss Taylor has also been hitting out at the slow progress being made by the government in introducing the aforementioned three-strikes system. As previously reported, a rep for the Department Of Culture Media & Sport last week admitted at a Creative Coalition conference that the first round of warning letters are unlikely to be sent to suspected file-sharers until 2014, four years after the legislation that enabled such action was passed by parliament.

According to Music Week, speaking at the same conference last week, Taylor said: “It’s been two years now since the Digital Economy Act was passed and we’ve still not had a code published. We’re [now] waiting for the Communications Act green paper. What we need in there is measures that will require search engines, payment providers and all the other players in the internet ecosystem to play a responsible role in trying to make sure that people go to legal sites and not pirate sites”.

Good news for fans of complicated court-based copyright law debates, MP3 resale service ReDigi insists it is well resourced to fight the lawsuit being pursued against it by EMI.

As previously reported, ReDigi has been sued by the major label for providing a service that enables users to sell on their MP3s to third parties. ReDigi says that under US copyright law consumers should be able to resell MP3s in the same way they can resell CDs. EMI argues that the principle which applies to CDs does not apply to digital music. The judge who heard initial arguments on the case reckons it’s complicated, but should make for a “fascinating” court hearing.

So, expect lots of debating about the intricacies of US copyright law, some of which could impact on the wider cloud storage sector – assuming the case gets to court.

There has been speculation that start-up ReDigi, which is believed to have raised about half a million in finance, might not be able to afford to fight such a complicated legal battle. Some have noted that it wouldn’t be the first time a big company unhappy with a start-up’s business model had successfully put that start-up out of business by landing it in the middle of messy and expensive litigation – Universal’s legal fight against Veoh being an interesting case to study.

We reported yesterday that one of the lawyers working on the ReDigi case had told the courts he was stepping back from it, and Digital Music News noted that in his submission Ray Beckerman said he had a ‘retaining lien’ with his former client, which basically means the company owes him money. Some wondered whether this meant the predictions ReDigi might run out of cash before getting to court were coming true.

But the tech firm insists that is not the case, pointing out that it has hired the services of a new law firm as it prepares for its big court battle with EMI’s Capitol division. Assuming the courts approve the switch in legal representation, Meister Seelig & Fein LLP will fight ReDigi’s side in court. MSF, the tech firm says, has “resources, experience and expertise in copyright and music industry matters [that] make it especially well suited for its representation of ReDigi in this high-profile case”.

Confirming the appointment of new legal reps, ReDigi founder and CEO John Ossenmacher told CMU: “ReDigi has made a decision to bring in additional expertise in its litigation with Capitol. We are very pleased to have Meister Seelig & Fein in place to take the lead in this very important matter for ReDigi and the future of consumers’ digital rights. Meister Seelig brings the substantial resources of the firm’s entertainment, IP and litigation practices to bear as the case gears up for the hearing to take place later this year”.

Meanwhile the MSF lawyer who will lead the defence, Gary Adelman, added: “Our firm is excited to represent ReDigi in the Capitol Records litigation. ReDigi is a company that stands for the legal dissemination of music and they offer a proactive solution to piracy, which benefits the consumer, the artist and the record companies”.

The first batch of 100 albums from late DJ John Peel’s 65,000 strong record collection will be made available to browse online today, with another 100 records due to be uploaded each week for the next six months – meaning 2600 will be available in the archive by October.

As previously reported, the project is being overseen by The John Peel Centre For Creative Arts, an arts centre in Suffolk established in the late great Radio 1 DJ’s memory. The plan is to scan in the artwork of the 25,000 vinyl LPs and 40,000 singles in Peel’s record collection, and add the DJ’s personal notes and other useful information to each record. Actual recordings won’t be included for licensing reasons, though links to streaming services will be provided where possible and it’s hoped that music from the Peel Session archives will also be made available via the online project, which is backed by Peel’s widow Sheila Ravenscroft and funded by the Arts Council.

Ravenscroft told The Guardian: “There’ll be information about the record sleeve, front and back, all the information about the record itself, as well as whether John rated the album or not. I think people are going to be very interested as to what’s in the collection. They will be amused and intrigued by it”.

You can find the archive via this link.

MegaUpload founder Kim ‘Dotcom’ Schmitz has won back in the region of $750,000 worth of his fortune after a court hearing in New Zealand.

The boss of the controversial file-transfer business is currently facing extradition from New Zealand to the US, of course, where he faces charges of money laundering, racketeering and copyright infringement in relation to the Mega enterprise. His multi-million dollar fortune was seized by the New Zealand authorities at the request of the Americans when he and several other Mega execs were arrested back in January.

It subsequently emerged that the New Zealand police had secured the wrong kind of warrant before raiding Schmitz’s home which, the tech man’s lawyers argued, made the whole operation illegal, and meant their client should get all his stuff back.

In a court hearing about Schmitz’s belongings last week, the New Zealand High Court said that a bank account containing just over $300,000 should be unfrozen, and a $250,000 Mercedes should be returned. The defendant’s wife will also get money to fund her living expenses out of Schmitz’s fortune, and the use of a Toyota Vellfire.

However, the majority of Schmitz’s assets will remain out of bounds while the criminal case against the Mega chief goes through the motions. And a bulk of the money made available to Schmitz last week will likely go on legal fees, with criminal proceedings to prepare for in both New Zealand and the US, not to mention the prospect of various civil claims by copyright owners, mainly in the States.

Though, as also previously reported, legal reps for Schmitz and the other Mega execs, none of whom are currently in the US, are confident that they can successfully fight off America’s extradition attempts, mainly because the core copyright charges against their clients do not command a high enough jail term in America to justify extradition. Criminal charges linked to the Mega company itself are hard to formally press, because the firm didn’t have a corporate base within the USA.

It was thought the extradition hearing for Schmitz et al would take place in August, though some local media in New Zealand are now pointing towards a September court date.

Speculation that controversial MP3 resale service ReDigi wouldn’t be able to afford to fight its legal battle with EMI is starting to ring true, after lawyers working for the digital start-up filed a motion to withdraw from the case last week.

As previously reported, ReDigi is a website that enables music fans to sell unwanted MP3s on to third parties. The founders of the company say reselling MP3s is no different than reselling CDs, a practice protected under American copyright law by the so called ‘first sale doctrine’. The tech firm adds that its technology verifies the source of the digital file being sold and ensures the original is deleted from the seller’s computer after sale.

But even if you buy the idea that the ReDigi system is really capable of ensuring an MP3 put up for sale came from a legitimate source, and that the seller deletes their copy after sale (which seems unlikely, but whatever), the American record industry argues that the ‘first sale doctrine’ does not apply, because when a CD is exchanged no actual copying takes place, whereas a digital exchange requires new mechanical copies to be made without a licence.

While both sides think their arguments are strong, when EMI – the record company actually suing over this – pushed for a summary judgement in February, the judge hearing the case ruled that the debate was too complicated for a judgement to be made without a full trial. He added that the dispute at the heart of this case was a “fascinating issue” that “raises a lot of technological and statutory” points.

So, well done ReDigi for proving the law wasn’t as clear on this issue as EMI originally claimed, though, as we noted in February, a court hearing that will cover “lots of issues”, as Judge Richard Sullivan predicts it will, sounds expensive for a start-up that has only raised, to our knowledge, half a million in capital, and which will struggle to find new investment while this lawsuit hangs over it.

According to Digital Music News, last week ReDigi attorney Ray Beckerman filed a motion to exit the case and hand things over to another firm. There are, of course, various reasons why the lawyer might choose to do that, but most commentators noted that Beckerman’s filings stated that the lawyer had a ‘retaining lien’ with his former client, which basically means he is owed money and can exercise the right to keep hold of paperwork relating to the case until bills are settled.

That, in turn, has led to speculation that ReDigi is running out of money, which is no fun at all when you have a big complicated court case upcoming, and a fledgling business to develop at the same time. Although neither Beckerman nor ReDigi have commented, some now wonder if this case will ever go to court.

If it doesn’t, that will piss off some in the tech community – partly because no one likes it when big companies put start-ups out of business simply by landing them with a bit of litigation they can’t afford to defend, and partly because, while the MP3 resale thing may be a non-starter, it’s thought the ReDigi case, if it gets to court, might also test some copyright principles relating to the wider cloud-storage and file-transfer marketplace.

Spotify will later this year launch a new service in the US along the lines of Pandora, according to Bloomberg, though it’s not clear if that would operate within the Spotify player – as a main function or optional app – or whether the interactive radio set up would be a standalone platform. Spotify hasn’t yet commented on the rumours at all, but Bloomberg is citing two sources as saying the streaming music firm is already talking to its content partners about the plans.

Pandora, of course, plays a personalised playlist based on any one individual user’s chosen artist, and enables users to rate, skip and block tracks. But it doesn’t provide the full on-demand functionality of Spotify, which enables users to access tracks, albums and playlists created by themselves or others on demand at anytime (subject to some limitations for free users in some territories).

Some reckon that Pandora-style services, with less interactivity, actually have more mainstream potential, with more casual music fans (which is most people) being put off by too much functionality. And British streaming service We7 said just that when it removed total-interactivity from its free-to-use option last year.

Pandora-style set ups are also cheaper to run, because generally rights owners charge less when a user has less control. Plus in many territories the operators of such platforms can licence both recording and publishing rights via collecting societies. Spotify-style platforms can only licence publishing rights (the money due to songwriters and publishers) via the collective licensing system, while sound recording rights must be licensed directly from the record companies, who will generally make more demands in terms of equity, up-front payments and ongoing royalty fees.

That means that a Pandora-style service would be more cost effective for Spotify in the freemium space. These days the ad-funded Spotify free service is run primarily as a sales tool to persuade music fans to upgrade to a proper subscription, with both the digital firm and its content partners taking a hit.

Original plans to make the freemium version a viable business in its own right seem to have been dropped, though restrictions put on the free option in Europe (to reduce costs and make paid-for options more attractive) have been reduced in some countries, and are still to be applied in the US. Going the Pandora-style route for Spotify Free might look attractive for both the streaming service and its content partners, though Pandora itself has always resisted launching outside the States, claiming royalty rates demanded by non-US collecting societies are too high to make their platform viable.

Opinion is divided on how Pandora, which floated on the stock market last year, is doing, though with a self-declared registered user-base of 150 million, of which 50 million were active in the last month, the twelve year old digital firm has much, much bigger reach than Spotify and, indeed, the current biggest player in the fully on-demand streaming music space in the US, Rhapsody.

TuneCore has reached an agreement with Amazon, and artists represented by the US-based digital distributor will now return to the online retailer’s MP3 store in Europe.

As previously reported, music distributed by TuneCore disappeared off Amazon MP3 in Europe in late January after the retail firm failed to renew its licensing deal with the distributor. TuneCore claimed that there had been problems with getting payments from Amazon under its previous agreement with the retailer, and that it was insisting those issues be addressed before signing a new deal. Despite accusing the web giant of “heavy handed tactics”, TuneCore bosses always said they were confident issues could be addressed.

And seemingly they have been, though details of the new agreement between the distributor and Amazon MP3 store, and how they addressed past problems, are not clear. Archive content represented by TuneCore will reappear on Amazon over the next month, while new releases will go live on schedule.

A tech company called Chirpify has announced it has secured $1.3 million in funding, as it launches a new platform that will enable rights owners to sell digital content via Twitter.

The new platform makes it possible to do SMS-style transactions over the micro-blogging platform. A seller simply tweets info about their product with a Chirpify link, interested buyers then just tweet back BUY, their account is charged (via PayPal), and they get a DM with a link to whatever they have bought.

According to The Next Web, in pilots the return tweet usually contained a voucher redeemable for a physical product, though Chirpify has just added an extra function so that artists and labels can provide a link to a bit of digital content in the return DM. Simple – assuming security issues have been covered by the start-up.

Amongst those who reckon the Twitter payment platform has potential are Voyager Capital and individual investors Ryan Holmes (HootSuite CEO), Andy Liu (BuddyTV CEO) and Rudy Gadre (former Facebook exec), who have all reportedly contributed to the $1.3 million funding round.