Join the VAST fan club and get exclusive downloads including a whole album. It's nice to have an artist I actually like doing all the things I wish all artists would do like releasing albums of demos to combat bootleggers and selling his music online in MP3 format.

Would people be offended if I just said "you bought me this for Christmas" and give them a bill? ;p

If I'm to like Google for anything, it's the way they force legal issues out in the open.

Nice round up of Google Print links at O'Reilly Radar.

What is Google Print? A searchable archive of books. How is it different from a book store? It's easier. That's all Google does. They compile and index and make things easier to find.

Google Print has decided they'll index and scan all books and then ask publishers to opt out of the index. I'm with most people in thinking on the surface this seems evil, however it would be unlike Google to go for an opt-in service. Google is all about pushing those boundaries and forcing the issue. An opt-in service would be small and disappear quickly due to it's uselessness.

I think it's underestimated how useful it would be to have a searchable index of all books. Imagine being able to search for all books ever that have a character with your name? Or all books that mention Melbourne.

Sprint Nextel is offering a music download service direct to mobile phones [Slashdot].

So finally the kids can buy actual music for $X a pop instead of ringtones. I wouldn't mind seeing TV adverts for "buy this single by ringing this number" instead of "buy this crappy tonnerriffic 30 second snippet COVER SONG for $5".

The service offers the ability to get the song directly to your phone in addition to a high quality version that you can download to your PC. From the article: "The Sprint Music Store will enable subscribers of the third-largest mobile carrier to choose from 250,000 songs from all four major music labels and download them for $2.50 each using phones from either Samsung Electronics or Sanyo Electric."

iTunes sells 1m videos in less than 20 days [Slashdot]. It's everyone just trying it out, but I still think Apple has hit the nail on the head selling TV and music videos.

Some if someone would please open that lossless music store?

Based only on the fact it's Roman Dirge and that is has a sloth in it, I'm sure to enjoy "Samurai Sloth", due out in 2006.