Busy Week for Online Audio Companies

Aimster decided to push a few more buttons over at the RIAA this week, as they launced their own subscription service, dubbed "Club Aimster". The service claims better connection and download times than you would get without subscribing. Something tells me Aimster's lawsuit stack will soon be getting a bit higher, and according to this Wired article, "AbovePeer (who runs Aimster) filed a lawsuit in New York's Northern District court asking for a judgment on the legality of its network. The RIAA fired back with two separate lawsuits filed in New York's Southern District." On a side note, I just can't help but have an icky feeling when going to the site, as Aimster's spokeswoman, Johnny Deep's 16-year old daughter Madeline, flaunts her stuff in a bikini and has cooing quotes like "Come on in ... I really waaanntt you to join...please?" I feel dirty just cutting and pasting that in.

Also this week national radio conglomerate FullAudio announced that they will be launching a music subscription service in January that will directly compete with the record labels own subscription services, MusicNet and pressplay. The major difference is that the new service will let individual Clear Channel stations create genre-specific services targeted to its listeners, but it looks like the music will still be tethered to the users computers. Since the RIAA has recently had the anti-trust finger pointed at it, FullAudio will most likely be given the licenses that it will need to broadcast the majority of the labels catalogs.

And in somewhat related news, Wired is also reporting that Liquid Audio is fighting off takeover attempts by investors trying to shut it down and split the cash. I can remember a representative from Liquid Audio coming up to my college during a music industry convention about five years ago, and thinking to myself "why the heck would I want to download this player, and then try to find songs that were in the Liquid Audio format to play?" I didn't realize back then that they were more of a digital rights service, but even that would require customers to download yet another player to play yet another proprietary format. Funny thing is I was looking for any job back then, luckily they turned me down ;)