It has recently come to light that there were other companies with their eye on MySpace, before it was scooped up by Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. It seems Google was also considering it, but didn’t go after it because it will essentially kill it’s AdSense business. Think about it, if they purchased a content site, with more hits per day then god him/her-self (s/he’s got his/her own homepage it seems), they would be a direct competitor to every single one of their content partners that use AdSense to pay for their site.
Read the 2nd hand report here, as told by an anonymous Google employee.
spotted on digg.com

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Defective By Design, whom I introduced in an earlier post, has a new campaign. Call the RIAA and tell them what you think of them, DRM, and why they just need to cut it out. Below is the list pulled from the DBD site. If you make the calls, join the site, and report back the results.

MySpace can make you big. Fast. Suppossedly this is how the Artic Monkeys did it. This was also lauded by the Jupiter Research report I tore apart recently. And now it’s worked for Hope against Hope. There’s just one problem… The band is fake.

Hope against Hope was a sham-rock/indie band “with no talent whatsoever” made up by british magazine Q. Their intention was to expose the Rupert Murdoch-owned site for what it is… just another method for Big Music to hype crap music.

What’s even funnier is that in just 4 weeks they fooled Alan McGee, the guy who broke Oasis, into offering them a gig at his famed Death Disco club night. “Shoot me an email and I’ll sort you out with a gig” said his myspace message. Talk about drinking the kool-aid.

Read the whole article on the Guardian Unlimited site, as the article tidily devolves into a history of other bands and the PR that tried to pull one over on us.

Brings new meaning to “The Great Rock ‘N Roll Swindle”, doesn’t it?

digg this story

The above cartoon was made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit, ACLU-for-the-internet organization. It’s a characterization of Big Entertainment as Super Villains, fighting fair use and crippling gadgets in a single bound. It’s sad because it’s true.