The weekend saw the long-rumored sale of Yahoo's paid music service go through. Rhapsody America, a RealNetworks and MTV joint venture, purchased Yahoo Music Unlimited for an undisclosed fee, paidContent.org reports. Word has it Yahoo plans to supplant the service with a free, ad-supported service. To that end, it has purchased the maker of FoxyTunes, a plugin for the Firefox browser which searches for music online.

Jakob Lodwick's brief, one-sided spat with fellow Web-music entrepreneur Peter Rojas was just a warm-up act. Lodwick has announced his new project, Normative. We'll make this short, since Lodwick squanders endless words on a heart-wrenching tale of the music industry's slide and his efforts to purchase normative.com from a cybersquatter.

What's the value of the spoken word? $300 million, according to Amazon.com, which just purchased the leading digital audiobook reseller, Audible.com. The amount is a premium of more than 20 percent on yesterday's closing price. The purchase of Audible, which just celebrated its 10th anniversary, shows that Amazon is serious about digital content. Amazon has sold Audible's audio downloads since May 2000, and the purchase is a natural fit as Amazon offers more content via digital delivery. But what does it mean for the consumer?

Ousted Vimeo founder/CEO Jakob Lodwick has fallen into Tumblr-blogged obscurity. Without a scantily clad photo of Jakob and Julia every morning, why should we continue to care about his budding musical exploits? Lodwick must have gotten the memo, for he's taken on fellow nerd-hottie hipster entrepreneur Peter Rojas in an attempt to stay relevant. Lodwick (and everyone else) can't figure out what's so great about Rojas's Web-music thing, RCRD LBL. "They combined the worst way to discover music (genres) with the worst way to organize Web content (tag clouds)." Them's fighting words! At least he has one good point: the only people who think any of this crazy music 2.0 nonsense is a good idea are founders of music websites and their friends. (Photo of Jakob Lodwick by Jesse Winter) Update: Lodwick deleted the post. Luckily, we have a copy.

Free P2P music service Qtrax launched at Cannes yesterday with the support of all four major labels: Warner, Universal, EMI and Sony BMG. Or so Qtrax claimed in its announcement, a star-laden extravaganza which reportedly cost $1 million. But Silicon Alley Insider reports that Warner, Universal, EMI, and Sony are only in negotiations with Qtrax and have not settled on final terms.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry — that's the RIAA for the rest of the world — says illegal music downloads outnumbered legal ones 20 to 1 in 2007. The music-industry association also expects CD sales, which dropped 11 percent between 2005 and 2006, to drop further in 2007. To the industry, this means we should all support measures like the one recently proposed by French President Nicholas Sarkozy.

Record company sources told the AP Yahoo wants to offer DRM-free MP3s for sale or for free via an ad-supported service. Thank you, in-the-know record executives! Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo Music, publicly said much the same thing back in October.

Stuck coding PHP for Facebook when all you really want in life is to belt out tunes to an adoring crowd? Don't take it out on your users, indentured code monkeys — dream big! That's what geek rocker Jonathan Coulton did. "I actually meant to become a famous musician when I first moved to New York after college, but just sort of forgot about it and got a software job instead," Coulton told interviewer Ben Gold.

The Motion Picture Association of America lifted the veil off its clever prank today. Since 2005 it's been labeling college students with their fancy high-speed networks as thieving music pirates. It commissioned a study that blamed undergrads for 44 percent of the industry's claimed losses due to file sharing. Turns out the number's a lot closer to 15 percent. Too bad they didn't catch that prior to crafting the "keep Napster on life-support" education bill that would force universities to police their networks and buy paid subscriptions for their students. (Photo by Kris Krüg)

CBS has unearthed a novel idea for growing the U.S. audience of Last.fm, the U.K.-based music website cum social network it purchased last May. It's going to try promoting it. In the Stateside push, the network is offering free, streaming music from the four major music labels and a bevy of independent artists. The ad-supported network bills itself as "redesigning the online music economy": It will pay artists per play. That explains why it's agreed to all sorts of icky streaming restrictions, such as limiting songs to three plays per user. It's a mutually agreeable term where CBS doesn't end up pissing off the music industry, which provide the songs it plays on its many conventional radio stations, nor does the music industry end up slighting CBS, an important promotional partner. Lost in all the tradeoffs: The interests of the very listeners CBS hopes to attract.

Record label EMI will lay off 2,000 and shift its focus toward digital music, private equity investor and company topper Guy Hands told the Financial Times. Hands said the music industry operates on fallacies with origins in "the phenomenon of the 1990s and the CD" and as a result, companies like EMI are hemorrhaging cash. EMI, for instance, spends $50 million a year destroying unsold CDs. Guess whose model Hands said the industry should follow to turn itself around?

Jonathan Todd, the commission's antitrust spokesman, states:

Can you legally create MP3s from your CD collection, or not? That's all we want to know. News has circulated since early December that the recording industry believes it is illegal to rip your music library . The genesis of this waas an RIAA lawsuit against a chap for tossing ripped files into his Kazaa sharing folder — not, mind you, for actually ripping the files off a CD. We ridiculed the Washington Post for making this mistake, and were prepared to laugh derisively when it ran a correction. But a Wired blogger argues, at length — 745 agonizing words — that the RIAA still thinks CD ripping is illegal. Here are the 100 most essential words.

Pandora, an excellent music-recommendation site, will stop serving international users starting next Tuesday because of the "lack of a viable license structure for internet radio streaming in other countries," according to Pandora founder Tim Westergren. "We have been told to sign these totally unworkable license rates or switch off, non-negotiable."

According to Silicon Alley Insider, Yahoo may be looking to sell its music subscription service. The move makes sense: Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo Music, declared in October that he was done inconveniencing users with the digital restrictions labels required for online music subscriptions. Subscriptions simply haven't materialized as the profitable business model for artists, labels, and services alike that many had imagined. Freeing itself of the failed model will allow Yahoo to focus on free, ad-supported music. The only problem now is dumping the old service.

Sensing the changing tide of digital music, Napster will start selling unprotected MP3s this spring. The sale of albums and individual tracks comes in addition to its current subscription offerings. The more surprising news is that Napster is still in business at all.

Sony BMG has revealed its post-Timberlake MP3 plans. Beginning on January 15, big-box retailers like Best Buy and Target will carry gift cards similar to the fluorescent iTunes vouchers popping up in grocery checkouts. Unlike the Apple certificates, these don't have a dollar amount attached to them, good for any music. Instead Sony, gazing unhappily at the 14 percent drop in CD sales, is trying to replace compact discs with MP3-redeemable cards.

Digital music sales surged 50 percent above 2006's tally, totaling 844.2 million tracks sold in the U.S. in 2007. Unfortunately, CD sales didn't fare so well, dropping 14 percent. [Ars Technica]

Sony may be prepared to throw away copy-protection software on some of its music in early 2008, but that doesn't mean it's freed all its tunes. That's why, in the meantime, it has supplied a helpful guide for any iPod owners who'd like to circumvent the restrictions on Sony's protected Windows Media song files. It's the age-old trick of burning a CD and ripping it. This has more to do with the ubiquitousness of Apple's iPod and Sony's complete lack of MP3 player market share than any actual regrets about using copy protection, we suspect.

Justin Timberlake, released by Sony's Jive label, will soon be available in MP3. This big news we found buried in a report that Sony BMG, the last of the four major record labels to hold onto copy-protection software, is finally going to embrace the MP3 format. The inevitable decision has generated a lot of drivel from mainstream publications about how industry titans are dropping DRM, whatever that is, and banding together to overthrow Apple's stringent 99-cents pricing regime. Amazon.com, the copy-protection-free alternative they're embracing, is more flexible on the cost of individual tracks.