Downloads For Free! Legally! Finally!

What up what up...music can finally be downloaded FOR FREE without the implications of an expensive legal battle for every song you download illegally. Spiralfrog.com launched today, the first ad supported free music site. Basically Spiralfrog takes the money they get from advertisers on their site, and gives a portion of it back to a music company to pay for the royalties/other legal fees associated with letting people download their songs (genius). Right now the site is backed by Universal music, and has an initial offering of about 700,000 songs... (How many can you fit on an iPod, again?)

Anyway, I think the idea's pretty sweet and it will be interesting to see how many people catch onto free downloading fever. I guess talks are in the works for a similar site called Qtrax, which will have the support of all four major music players (Universal, BMI, EMI, and Sony BMG) and be able to offer a catalog starting with about 30 million songs. I think Spiralfrog is just the beginning of a beautiful era of free music for all..

Read more @ AdAge ...

Women's World Cup News!

Nike has been touting the US Women's National Soccer Team as the "Greatest Team You've Never Heard Of" in its recent television ads, but maybe this title really belongs to the North Korean team that held the highly favored Americans to a tie this morning...

I didn't actually watch the game (though I am told three diehards were up at 5 am watching it in my living room), but by the looks of the highlights and final score, either the US had a bad day, or N. Korea is steppin' up to be a great team in this World Cup.

I don't want to sound like too much of a patriot, but I think the US will bounce back. They've got to. Because if we're talking futbol, the women are the only chance of our country bringing home a Cup in the near future.

Startin' it up again?

I haven't posted in a long time but I was checking out the Cool Hunting blog and found something that I wanted to pass along to my large reader base (being my mother, brother, and maybe one roommate). It's Now Play It, basically a site that allows you to download video tutorials of how to play popular songs on the guitar. It not only tells you the chords, but then gives an image of the chord's tab so you can scrutinize it for hours, and if you're like me, still play it incorrectly. And some of the videos are even taught by the talent themselves - I checked out the preview for the KT Tunstall tutorial and found that she is not only a great songstress, but a lovely teacher.

So check it out if you have some free time. And like to fiddle around with a guitar.

That's it for now, I guess we'll see if the posts keep a-comin'.