Holidays are over ... now fulltime on tunesBag again!

The second half of August is traditionally the time when a lot of people are on holidays and it's hard to reach your business partners. This year I had the privilege to go to the European Forum Alpbach in Tyrol where politicians, scientists, artists and students meet in order to discuss the future of Europe / the EU and burning issues like the conflict in Georgia.
For me it was really interesting to listen/talk to people like the Russian Ambassador to the EU, the Czech Abassador to NATO, professors from the US or lobbyists in Brussels.

The major points raised in almost all discussion have been:

• Is it time for Europe to become a "hard power" (not only a "soft power")?
  The EU is already the largest economy in the world ...
  
• How to deal with the rising powers (China, Russia)?
  
• Energy consumption and climate change
• Better integration of immigrants
  

Additionally to the official program and all the receptions it was really interesting to talk to a lot of other students from all over the world, especially from the countries in the East including from Ukraine, Bulgaria, Serbia and Moldavia. We really had a lot of fun and I think hardly anyone went home without making a lof of new friends and bad liver values ;-).

Here's a picture of a part of the Styrian crew (more pictures can be found here, here and here).

On monday our team will be working on tunesBag full time again, so expect some nice stuff within the next few weeks ;-)

Blog moved to blog.tunesBag.com

We've moved the location of our blog to blog.tunesBag.com
Blogger.com should forward all requests to the old address automatically, but to be on the safe side, please update your feedreader RSS subscription URL.

We're founders of the week (Press Coverage / "Wirtschaftsblatt")

There is a nice story about tunesBag today in the Austrian newspaper "Wirtschaftsblatt" - our team has been named "Founders of the week"! The article covers our service idea, business model, legal questions and our vision. Click on the link below to read the full story (German).
Read the full article here

People prefer torrent to legal download sites - interesting results of a MCPS-PRS study

The Nine Inch Nails are doing it, Radiohead has done it and a lot of other artists are thinking about it - distributing the music for free on their websites. The US-market research company BigChampagne did some analysis on this new trend by order of the MCPS/PRS Alliance and the most interesting result is that people are preferring their known torrent sites to of the legal download pages of the artists.
In the case of the Radiohead album "In Rainbows" this behaviour to some extend was the result of an failed and complicated download progress but the general message is clear - people see sources like torrent trackers as a primary source of media items.
The study comes to the conclusion that online file sharing is and will be very popular and the music industry should face the fact that customers like to stay anonymous and go to ditigal venues where they feel comfortable. It's time to go where your customers already are!

Rock the Net - Musicians Support Network Neutrality

Net neutrality is an important thing - it means that all users have the free choice which programs to use, which content to access and which devices to use. This right is under constant threat - some governments / providers want to block certain programs (e.g. comcast / bittorrent), charge huge websites for the traffic or force the users to user certain devices.
An example for a better understanding: A provider gaining money from an own music services might think of blocking services like tunesBag or reducing your available bandwidth to use such services in order to promote the own service.

More than 900 artists have now joined the "Rock the net" campain:

Rock the Net is a nationwide coalition of musicians and labels that support net neutrality. We come together at this critical time to demonstrate to Congress and the FCC the music community's broad support for this principle. As musicians and entrepreneurs, we understand the importance of treating all websites equally -- from the busiest online music store to the smallest blog. We urge Congress to support network neutrality.

Show your support, sign the petition and take a look at the album well known supporters of this campain released (including artists like Aimee Mann, Bright Eyes or There might be Giants)
via myoon