Apple’s announcements at Macworld may have lacked some of the flair and sizzle that CEO Steve Jobs usually brought to his keynote, but there was one announcement that, arguably, will wind up changing the playing field considerably. That announcement is the news of DRM-free sales from all of the major music labels through iTunes, and the addition of variable pricing. As rumored during the run up to Macworld, the world’s largest online music store will soon start selling songs for 69 cents, 99 cents or $1.29 each. The only question now, as Peter Kafka notes in a post at MediaMemo, is whether anyone will care or not — and whether it will help to fix any of the music industry’s systemic problems.

(read the rest of this post at GigaOm)

The Recording Industry Association of America, which has spent the past five years suing tens of thousands of individual file-sharers for copyright infringement, has apparently decided to change tactics, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal (hopefully this one is a little more reliable than the recent story about Google’s views on net neutrality). The good news is that they are going to stop suing 13-year-olds and retired war veterans and single mothers for downloading music. The bad news is that their new plan involves cutting sneaky backroom deals with Internet service providers to take a so-called “three strikes” approach: They let the ISP know when they think you’ve been sharing copyrighted material, and the provider agrees to send you an email warning; the second time, you get a letter; do it again and your Internet access gets cut off.

(read the rest of this post at GigaOm)

The legendary British Australian rock band AC/DC is one of the few holdouts when it comes to selling music through the iTunes record store, a stand the group has taken in part because it refuses to sell individual songs as singles — “We don’t make singles, we make albums,” says guitarist Angus Young — and Apple won’t let the band restrict its iTunes sales to just albums. That’s why its new album, Black Ice, is exclusively being sold through Wal-Mart stores, and it may also have something to do with the fact that the record has been topping the BitTorrent download charts as well.

According to TorrentFreak, just five days after the album was leaked on BitTorrent it had already been downloaded 400,000 times. Download-tracking firm Big Champagne said that in the first week it was available (the leak occurred on October 7, and the official release was on October 20) it was being downloaded about 100,000 times a day. If that rate continued — and there’s no reason to think that it hasn’t — then the album was downloaded more than a million times before it went on sale.

Has that affected physical sales of the record? There are only a couple of days worth of statistics to go on, and those are estimates, but it doesn’t appear to have hurt CD sales through Wal-Mart. According to Billboard magazine, sources said that close to 200,000 copies of Black Ice sold on the first day alone, and music-industry tip sheet Hits Daily Double said that based on first and second-day sales, the album could sell as many as 800,000 copies in its first week. That would make the record the biggest seller for record label Sony BMG in more than two years.

Demand for AC/DC’s music no doubt has something to do with the fact that the band — which has sold more albums than anyone but The Beatles — hasn’t released a new record in about eight years. But it’s interesting to see that almost a million illegal downloads of Black Ice doesn’t seem to have hampered sales of the physical product at all.

Since Lala’s newly-relaunched music service includes a “music locker” feature that is virtually identical to one that Michael Robertson pioneered with MyMP3 back in 2000 — only to ultimately be sued into oblivion by the RIAA — I emailed him to get his thoughts on what the company is doing, and how things have (or haven’t) changed since he first launched MP3.com. Here’s what he said in response:

“I really admire what Lala is trying to do. Their user interface is nice and concept as you pointed out is one I championed in 2000. The world has changed dramatically since I did my.mp3 in 2000, but sadly the labels have not. My belief back then was that users should have rights to move their own music around. Music lovers want the music everywhere on any device. This means you must support an open API instead of locking users to a single service. This means you must support downloads not just streaming.

Lala is loaded with crippling restrictions which the labels force on them which limit its usefulness (but that’s no fault of their own). e.g If you buy a song from Lala it is automaticaly put into your locker but goes to solitary confinement. You can never, ever download it again. It is locked with server side DRM. If you’re at work when you bought it and need the song at home you’re out of luck. If you want to listen to the song on your mobile phone while in the dentist chair (which I did today) too bad. Consumers are still treated like criminals.

Music in the cloud is a concept who’s time has come but any solution needs to honor the consumer’s right to listen to their music anywhere they want. It needs to work with all computers, home devices, and mobile devices. It needs to offer download and streaming because it will be a decade or more before we all have ubiquitous wireless broadband at a small flat fee. It’s imperative that the system have an API open to every device manufacturer and developer so users don’t find their music trapped with one company or one set of devices.”

Michael is currently embroiled in another music industry lawsuit over an online music service he launched called MP3Tunes.com, which also offers a music-locker feature and was eventually sued by EMI (CNET has more on that suit here). Music-industry gadfly Bob Lefsetz has a take on Lala as well, in his own inimitable style.

Sometimes — in fact, most of the time — it seems as though the music industry has changed very little since the early days of Napster and the invention of the mp3 file. Lawsuits still shut down Web-based music services and tie people up in court, record labels still primarily ignore the potential of the Internet, and so on. But at least one thing has changed: the idea of an online music locker where you can store songs seems to be something to promote, rather than something to sue into oblivion. It’s one of the main features of the newly-relaunched Lala service.

This feature, as Harry notes at Technologizer, happens to be exactly the same as a service that Michael Robertson used to offer way back when, known as MyMp3.com. Users could simply have the service scan a compact disc and then the songs would be unlocked online, so that they could be listened to anywhere there was Internet access. It was a great service, and like Harry I was pretty sad to see it get shut down after a lawsuit from the RIAA (Michael has since tried to create a similar service at mp3tunes.com, which is also being sued by EMI).

Now, apparently, the four major record labels see the wisdom of such a service, and have licensed their music to Lala for that purpose. In addition to the locker function, the site also seems to be setting a new low in pricing: downloads are as little as $7.49 for an album — with streaming included — and you can stream any song for just 10 cents (although as Brad Stone notes, sites like iMeem and Last.fm offer streaming for free).

Is the new Lala the next revolution in online music? It looks to have at least one compelling feature that no one else is offering, which is a good start. I’m trying the service out, and I’ll let you know what I think. Stan Schroeder at Mashable says that he doesn’t like Lala’s business model much, primarily because it’s too restrictive.