Musicians Plug Upgrades to Flat-Sounding Digital

Free All Music is innovative, but still might not work

(NEWSER) - A new site thinks it has the answer the music industry’s woes: Free All Music will allow users to download a high-quality mp3 with no copy restrictions in exchange for watching a 15-second video ad of their choosing. The site then takes a user’s handle and uses it to produce another ad, for third-party sites, that announces what the user downloaded and who sponsored it. Users may download 15 mp3s a month—and perhaps more if Free All Music eventually sells more sponsorships. More»

(NEWSER) - CD sales plunged more than 20% in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year, and online music sales didn't come close to making up the difference. Closing stores, weak albums, and over a billion songs shared illegally every month combined to deliver the sharpest downturn yet to the slumping music industry. More»

He performed for National Press Club in 1971

(NEWSER) - One of the final live performances by Louis Armstrong will be released to the public for the first time. The recording is of a concert on January 28, 1971, at the National Press Club in Washington. The legendary trumpeter was a featured act at the concert, held less than six months before his death, reports AP . The new album will be titled Red Beans and Rice-ly Yours: Satchmo at the National Press Club. You can hear a snippet of him performing "Hello Dolly" via this Washington Post link. Details on the CD or digital download are here . More»

CDs showcase Fab Four as they were meant to be heard

(NEWSER) - The Beatles just got better: every one of their original albums and a batch of collected singles has been remastered, boosting the quality to the level “the Beatles themselves would have heard and intended,” writes Matt Hurwitz in the Washington Post. The stereo CDs remind us that the Beatles were a “rock band”: these recordings pack a punch not heard on the older discs. More»

(NEWSER) - In honor of Woodstock—which happened 40 years ago this weekend—and the “seminal documentary” that captured it, John Farr shares his list of the 10 best rock concert/performance films—all of which are “meant to be played loud,” he writes on the Huffington Post. “So crank it!”

• A Hard Day's Night (1964): “The disarming charisma and spontaneous energy of the Beatles made no traditional plot necessary. It was sufficient to portray a day in the life of the world's most talked about rock band.”