Listen to this music

I give something away for free. Still would you come to steal it?

That's one of the surprising discoveries to come out of an experiment by the British band Radiohead last week. On Thursday, the group made its latest album, In Rainbows, available for direct downloading from the Web at an unusual price: whatever fans feel like paying. Downloaders who want to pay nothing can enter "zero" in the site's price field and download the album for free.

But for hard-core music pirates, even free hasn’t been enough of a draw. According to music industry analysts, hundreds of thousands of Web users who frequent copyright-infringing file-sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay and TorrentSpy, have chosen to download In Rainbows illegally, distributing their contraband around the Internet just as they might with any other pirated album.

It’s not economics anymore; it’s got to do with habits.

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Shake-up in Music street

Apple has been comfortably camped at the peak of the online music mountain for so long now that it may have tuned out the noise from the climbers struggling below. But the competing expeditions are getting more formidable. Today, MTV, RealNetworks and Verizon announced a joint venture aimed at loosening the grip of the iTunes-iPod-iPhone party.

MTV is taking its Urge digital music store out of a futile partnership with Microsoft and merging it with RealNetworks' Rhapsody subscription service to form a new entity called Rhapsody America. Verizon will be the exclusive mobile carrier through its V CAST system. Urge's Michael Bloom will head the company, but Real will own 51% and contribute all the software assets. One nugget is that MTV will lend the JV $230 M.

So, can Rhapsody America's combination of retail sales, subscription service and mobile downloads (coming soon), all for multiple devices, pose a challenge to Apple? An uphill battle to be sure, but analysts are chipping in with suggestions. And Adario Strange writes, "The one Apple Achilles heel Rhapsody America is positioned to exploit is iTunes' lack of mobile phone downloads. Which means the next major announcement from Apple in the next two quarters will probably have something to do with wireless music downloads on the iPhone."

Will our mobile startup entrepreneurs take a leaf…?

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