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I’m really digging the fact that two bands who’ve brought great joy to my life have new albums coming out soon: Weezer and Coldplay.

Weezer’s album is entitled “Weezer (Red).”

Coldplay’s alnum is entitled “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends.”

Napster has launched what they call “the world’s biggest” DRM-free MP3 download store.  They tout a catalog of more than 6 million songs with pricing similar to that of iTunes-  $0.99 songs and $9.95 albums.

Somehow I find the quote from Chris Gorog, Napster chief executive, a bit hard to believe (especially considering their entire buiness has been based on DRM subscriptions):  “We’re now moving from under the DRM cloud, now consumers can use Napster with any device.”

Of course he then follows it up with: “We believe ultimately that consumers will be moving to an unlimited music model.”

According to Saul Hansell at the New York Times today, Apple is set to launch some new iPhone music initiatives and to redefine Ringbacks as “Answer Tones.”

The post quotes one label executive as saying “They want a big launch in June.”  Sounds like WWDC to me.  I guess we’ll have to wait and see if the advent of Answer Tones and over the air downloadable music usher in new pricing models.

Somehow my iTunes arrows got changed back to default- clicking takes you to an iTunes Music Store search.  I prefer to change the iTunes arrows to point to my local
library.  Of course, you can always hold down “option” to modify this behavior, but I like to just grab my bluetooth mouse and forget the keyboard when navigating from my couch.

To change iTunes arrows to local:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES

At long last, iTunes will begin to sell movies same day as the physical DVD release.  With Fox, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal, Sony Pictures, Lionsgate and New Line on board, Apple is clearly aiming for rival Walmart after having recently surpassed them in music sales.

Previously, Apple’s releases have been available 30-45 days later than DVD releases- presumably to avoid sales cannibalization.

Apple is celebrating iTunes’ 5th birthday today with a look back on all the great things that the service has brought us.

Great piece on the evolution of video game music over at NPR. 

Maybe I don’t feel so guilty now after adding both Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. soundtracks to my iTunes library.

Last fall, Starbucks announced a “Song of the Day” promo giving away more than 50 million free songs via iTunes download card.  This event coincided with the Starbucks iPhone/iTunes “Now Playing” service. 

The “Song of the Day” promo ran for more than 30 days in more than 10,000 Starbucks locations.  According to data released by Starbucks today, the promo only saw 6 million songs downloaded- an 8% redemption rate.

I don’t know about you, but I know I had a few cards that I never redeemed- it will be interesting to see how well the next venture fares.

I’ve seen dozens of videos showing people around the world playing the Super Mario theme song.  But, this is the first original one I’ve seen in a long time:

Super Mario Theme Played with RC Car and Bottles

Great trick to start up Mac screen sharing remotely via Terminal from MacOSXHints.

The screen sharing system component uses launchd to monitor its state. This means that enabling and disabling the feature as simple as adding a file in /Library/Preferences.

cd /Library/Preferences
echo -n enabled > com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd

To disable, simply delete the file.