CES 2009: Sansa slotRadio – 1000 "hand-picked" songs, you'll hate 95% of em

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I’m developing a bit of a love/hate relationship with Sandisk. They swing wildly from releasing great, innovative stuff, to wasting plastic on awful products. Unfortunately slotRadio falls into the latter category.

Sansa slotRadio is an MP3 player that comes with 1000 songs pre-loaded. It’s essentially a music player for people who’ve got absolutely no interest in what music playing, as long as there’s something in the background. The songs come on a Sandisk microSD card, but they’re tied to the card with DRM, so you can’t do anything else with them. If you work your way through the thousand, then you can buy 1,000 more for $40 (£26).

My advice? Save your cash and stick to Last.fm. In the meantime, go check out our other CES coverage here.

(via PC Mag)

Radiohead sneak on up the charts as all Nude's stems count in the Billboard Hot 100

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Ooooo sneaky, sneaky Radiohead. Not last week but the week before, we brought you the news that the forward thinking Oxfordshire band had released their latest single, “Nude”, for you to download and remix.

And that’s exactly what they did, splitting the the track into its five component stems for people to play with, but here’s where it gets a little sticky. Because each stem was a separate download from iTunes, it meant that each one counted towards Nude’s chart position as well as the sales of the complete single itself. So, in a way, it appears to be five times more popular than it actually has been and as a result has charted in the Billboard Hot 100 as a hotshot at No.37…

CES 2008: Don Was talks digital music at Billboard Digital Music Live

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One of the events happening within CES is the Billboard Digital Music Live summit, which sees a bunch of music industry executives getting together to chew the fat about digital music: opportunities, threats, ways to screw Steve Jobs over. You know the kind of thing.

First speaker in the afternoon is music industry legend Don Was, who’s an artist and producer, and also active in the digital area, looking at advertising-funded music on his own site, My Damn Channel, giving away MP3s supported by advertising.