RIAA Stamps Out Facebook Audio

Much like a giant squid with a harpoon through its belly, the RIAA continues to thrash about in an attempt to crush anything within tentacle range that seems a threat to the safety of ‘the industry’. The lastest entity to feel its wrath is Facebook; more specifically, an Audio sharing application developed for the social networking platform that allowed users to upload and share mp3 files…

Within a week, the audio sharing application (Audio) was downloaded over 700,000 times by Facebook users. According to a recent report by Entertainment Media Research (in conjunction with media lawyers, Olswang) 65% of teenagers using social media networks have music embedded in their profile pages. Of the 1,700 people surveyed, 43% admit that they are downloading tracks illegally. Faced with these figures, the obvious course of action is to block mp3 sharing on social networking sites.

On a more positive note, I came across this information through Gerd Leonhard’s blog, who is a self-proclaimed “music and media futurist”. It is good to have another music technology resource to add to the list, particularly one which covers “the convergence zones of music, entertainment and technology.” The link to Gerd’s site was obtained via an interesting post by Fluxx over at SEOmoz on the subject of music consumption.