zed equals zee

Catching up on the miscellany of music and tech happenings around the Interwebs…

‘Pirates’ are the biggest music buyers. A new study out of a business school in Norway suggests that people who downloaded music off P2P services bought ten times more music legally (downloads and CDs) than their non-P2P-using counterparts. This corroborates a 2006 Canadian study that found the same thing. Needless to say, record companies are disputing the findings. [via Ars Technica]

New turntable outputs MP3s directly to USB. Vinyl-lovers, rejoice! Denon’s new DP-200USB turntable (pictured) outputs MP3s directly to a USB thumbdrive, and the included software analyses the first 15 seconds of each song to match against the Gracenote database and automatically get the metadata. [via Cool Hunting]

How to find music on Twitter: If you’re a dedicated Twitter user and music lover, Wired has a terrific roundup of all the different music services that interface with the microblogging service. But I think the single best piece of advice is this, “[O]nce you find a like-minded fan on the network, you can follow their feed.”

Help build better music recommenders by rating playlists! Luke Barrington, a researcher at UCSD, is soliciting the help of people like you to evaluate playlists generating by a variety of means (like artist similarity vs tag similarity). You’re presented with a ‘seed song’ and two short playlists which  you can listen to, and then you can decide which one fits the initial song better. It’s fun and you get help scientists out. Take the survey here. [via Music Machinery]

22 000 words of EULA to put an iTunes song on your iPhone. I saw this in a tweet by Cory Doctorow (“Informed consent my ass.”), and did a bit of digging. Jason Schultz is the director of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley, and was at the Federal Trade Commission’s conference on DRM in Seattle last week. A deputy director of the FTC warned the industry that they need to stop hiding restrictions in the unreadable fine print of end-user licensing agreements.

MP3: AC Newman – Take On Me (A-Ha cover)