There has always been a debate between audiophiles regarding downloadable music. Part of the camp claims that downloaded music will never sound as good as music purchased on a CD. Regardless, you can't deny the convenience of buying music online. Famed loudspeaker manufacture Bowers & Wilkins hopes to change the quality of downloadable music with the launch of the B&W Music Club.

The B&W Music Club is a subscription based service which provides its members with an exclusive album every month in Apple Lossless Compression. The idea is simple, record the album in one of the most advanced recording studio around and distribute it in a lossless format so that you can hear the music as it was intended.

A yearly subscription will run you around $67 which is about $5.50 an album which isn't bad considering the quality you'll be getting. And while we lacked the reference equipment to appreciate the work that went into making the recording, just the thought of having a file that wasn't compressed made is sound better.

P2P music community site Grooveshark has entered a new phase with the launch of Grooveshark Lite, a Web based application to allow community users to share and purchase tracks. Grooveshark differentiates itself from other music Webtailers by giving community members credits every time a fellow user purchases a track from their music library.

Grooveshark lite allows you to organize your music and build playlists or makes recommendations on top tracks from other users to build playlists if you can't be bothered to build your own. Grooveshark also lets you stream entire tracks from other users before you make your purchasing decisions.

The Web site is the latest incarnation of a service that launched in beta as a P2P application that maps your music library and then allows you to share it with fellow community users, as Download Squad wrote last year. Music that is then made available through Grooveshark can be purchased by other users, and community members are rewarded with credits each time purchases are made from their library.

Grooveshark is a radical new service that attempts to fuse community services and P2P music file sharing with a product that will motivate users to share music files and simultaneously accrue credits towards music purchases from the process. Subscribing to Grooveshark turns your own personal library of music into a music store available to family, friends and any other passing consumers that you can draw in. The service is an ambitious attempt to commercialize a P2P distribution distribution with social networking model of distribution.

Grooveshark requires the user to download a Java app that interfaces between the Web service and your library of tunes. The site operates like a music laundering service, no questions are asked as to where the tracks came from, but when one of your contacts chooses to download the track from your computer, Grooveshark will bill your contact for the full cost of the track and then pay a share of the money to the label and credit a portion to your account against future purchases.

SpiralFrog's Canadian only beta just opened this week, after months of speculation as to what the service -- originally announced last August -- might look and act like. The long and short of it is; The service works as advertised, it doesn't include audio advertisements as many originally speculated and, they have a significant catalog on offer. There are some serious catches involved though so, read on for the full review and a screenshot tour of the first true "free and legal" music download service offering up major label tunes.

I'm not a fan of DRM, and that's certainly no secret. I find myself in more powerful anti-DRM company all the time. Today I'm joined in my distaste by Jim Balsillie, chairman and co-chief executive of Blackberry maker Research In Motion who says the entertainment industry is "holding up development" in the wireless sector with its relentless quest to sell you another copy of everything for each new device you buy protect its content.

Balsillie told a roomful of analysts and investors yesterday in Toronto, "I think [DRM is] just going to break down with the normal proliferation of the Internet," adding, "It's going to be tough. I think [content providers] are going to have to shift their business models. But they will go down swinging."

Balsillie also thinks the Blackberry is poised to become quite the stud among the newly developing mobile phone + mp3 player market. While I don't agree that RIM is in great position to take over a large chunk of mobile music market share, I do share one belief I'm sure hangs heavy in Balsillie's mind; Until DRM dies a quick ugly death and is mourned appropriately by the entertainment business, RIM's not going to stand much of a chance as a music player manufacturer.

Is DRM headed the way of the Dodo bird? Depends on who you ask. In a recent survey, performed by Jupiter Research, 62% of European music execs said DRM free music would sell at a quicker pace, and 54% felt current DRM systems were too restrictive. A divide still exists however, as only 48% of major label execs felt DRM was holding back sales, compared with 73% of independent label execs.

I forecast during the last week of 2006 that DRM was going to die a pitiful and ugly death in 2007. Even Steve Jobs recently argued that DRM needed to go, much to the surprise of anyone who's given much thought to the link between iTunes lock in and iPod's success story. So we're warming up for DRM's big funeral, right? Not so fast. Jupiter analyst Mark Mulligan warns, "Despite everything that has been happening the record labels are not about to drop DRM, even though all they are doing is making themselves look even less compelling by using it."

DRM is a lot like hiring Barney Fife to guard your record store. He irritates the paying customers while the shoplifters just laugh behind his back and walk away with the merchandise. How much longer can the Fife-like DRM hang on to a job it does so poorly?

Today iMesh will launch BearShare 6.0, which is a long-standing p2p file sharing client many people us to download copyrighted music. Apparently, this edition of BearShare is a legalized edition. It sounds like iMeshToGo and BearShareToGo will offer a long awaited solution to the problem of illegal file-sharing, and the other problem of no way for people to buy music in an effective way that is user-centric. The services will run side-by-side and users will be able to interact between the two services later this year. This makes it easy for users to share their music preferences and even download ringtones as well. I obviously haven't tested out the new product, but it is the first service I have seen to get a grip on the actual problem that exists with music downloading.

[Via Reuters]