Digital Media

Yahoo Music is offering refunds to anyone who bought songs from the service. Is it time for MSN Music follow Yahoo's lead?

Yahoo announced last week that it would no longer issue authorization keys for the digital rights management, or DRM, software on its songs. This meant that anyone who bought songs from the service would still be able to hear their songs through its service but would be unable to move them to other devices or computers.

This did not play well with Web users. Now Yahoo Music plans to issue refunds and is trying to go one step further. If a customer would prefer music over a refund, Yahoo is looking for a way to give the customer copies of the purchased songs in the DRM-free MP3 format, according to a Yahoo representative.

Yahoo Music is transferring customers of Yahoo Music Unlimited to RealNetworks' Rhapsody service. These are both subscription music services, so Yahoo users who choose to make the move are unaffected. But those who purchased songs would be out of luck after September 30.

The question now is, has Yahoo Music raised the bar? Is it time for Microsoft to pony up with a refund for MSN users?

MSN Music shut down and announced that it would stop issuing DRM keys, only to change its mind last month and say it would continue issuing keys for another three years. As noted by Michael Spiegelman, Yahoo's senior director of music, Microsoft just delayed the withdrawing of support for songs.

A Microsoft representative could not be immediately reached.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for Internet users, has called on both Yahoo and MSN to issue refunds.

Facebook has hired Mozilla technology veteran Mike Schroepfer as a director of engineering, as part of the social network's recent executive shuffle.

Mike Schroepfer is joining Facebook as a director of engineering.

(Credit: Mozilla )

Schroepfer, who led the development of the Firefox browser as Mozilla's vice president of engineering, will be one of four directors of engineering at Facebook when he joins the company in the coming weeks. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company created the position for Schroepfer to work on its social-network platform and Web site. Facebook is still looking to hire a vice president of engineering to replace former CTO Adam D'Angelo, 23, who left the company this summer.

Schroepfer is the newest executive to walk through Facebook's seemingly revolving door. Mark Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, joined the company's board of directors in late June. Earlier this year, former Google executives Sheryl Sandberg and Elliot Schrage joined the company, too.

On the flip side, Matt Cohler, employee No. 5 at Facebook and its head of product management, said he plans to leave the company this fall to join venture firm Benchmark Capital.

For his part, Schroepfer leaves the close-knit Mozilla community for another social network. He announced his departure to the Mozilla developer team on his blog Monday. "This is the first time I've decided to leave something I really truly love - I will dearly miss getting a chance to work with all of you every day. Everyone that I've met from the community has, and will continue to be, a huge inspiration to me."

Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, who has just left Yahoo, has some less-than-adulatory remarks about his former masters.

Speaking to CNET sister publication ZDnet during an Australian visit, Butterfield said he would have preferred it if Microsoft's attempt to acquire Yahoo had gone ahead.

"It was not so great," Butterfield said of the Microsoft acquisition saga. "Once the ball was rolling I would have rather seen the acquisition happen. I think a lot of damage was done to Yahoo. Not only from a company perspective, but from a leadership and (morale) perspective."

Butterfield left Yahoo July 12, and fellow co-founder Caterina Fake left a few weeks earlier, part of an executive exodus from the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company.

He also criticized Yahoo for being concerned about quarterly results at the expense of longer-term, riskier investments.

"I felt like the biggest problem while I was there (was that) that management was oriented a little bit too much towards the quarterly results...If the entire focus of the company is produce a certain amount of operating free cash flow or a certain amount of capital expenditure...it isn't hard for other people to out-maneuver you, when they're not so concerned about those things," he said. "I am sure the management at Google, despite their outward proclamations, are every bit as concerned about those numbers, but they are taking bigger strategic risks, and other Web start-ups are as well."

Yahoo has updated its search results to include recent headlines more quickly.

"Because we're better able to detect when a query is about a breaking-news topic, we're able to deliver fresher results when it matters most," Paul Yiu of Yahoo search product management and Jean-Francois Crespo of Yahoo search research and development said in a Friday blog posting.

In addition, Yahoo can better place the news in the results page, balancing news with less time-sensitive results, Yahoo said.

Google also has made a strong effort to mix breaking news into its search results.

Neil Young says the tech industry doesn't care as much about music quality as it should.

Perhaps that's because the average iPod-toting iTunes customer doesn't give a second thought to whether the digital file of the latest single they just bought is uncompressed or lossless.

Young told a bunch of tech luminaries gathered for an industry conference as much on Wednesday: "People's understanding has been skewed by MP3s and convenience. It's important to get music out there...but not at the expense of quality."

He's not the only one who feels that way. Grammy-award-winning producer T-Bone Burnett (who says audio nowadays is so degraded it's akin to viewing "a Xerox of a Polaroid of a photograph of a painting") is spearheading CODE, a new high-definition audio format distributed on a DVD.

CODE gives the music consumer options, by including many different formats, including 24-bit/96-kHz WAV files, uncompressed 16-bit/44.1kHz files, AAC, and MP3 on a single disc. What Burnett has done is show consumers that there are options, more than perhaps they are aware.

Young and Burnett are certainly vocal, but aren't the only people dissatisfied with the listening experience offered by today's cheap, one-off music downloads. So we checked in with our own resident audiophile, Steve Guttenberg, who writes at CNET Blog Network's Audiophiliac. Here are his suggestions for hearing music the way it's meant to be heard.

*Listen. Well, sure, that's the point right? But Guttenberg means really listen, as in, don't have it playing in the background while you're filling in spreadsheets at work, or scrubbing your shower. Once you do, you'll actually notice how much is missing from a compressed MP3 file.

"People who actually put on music and listen--whatever form it's in--they hear more because they're giving it their undivided attention," he said. "Once people really listen, they care about (sound quality) more. Whether you're listening to an iPod or $20,000 turntable, it doesn't really matter. But that's sort of the beginning of everything."

(Credit: CNET)

*Download quality file formats. Now that you can get music players with 160GB of storage, file size isn't really a huge issue anymore. MP3 files are generally regarded as the lowest-quality music file since the audio uses a lossy compression process to make the files smaller, meaning some of the data is left out, like higher frequencies.

Luckily there are alternatives: Apple lossless for iPods compresses the files, but losslessly (which means it sounds exactly like uncompressed, but is actually compressed, Guttenberg says); AAC, which is a lossy compression encoding process, but is generally accepted as better than MP3; or OGG (no, no relation to me), which is another lossy compressed file format, but is open source and is known for its higher fidelity. And then there are WAV files, which are completely uncompressed and sound exactly how they're "supposed to," according to Guttenberg.

*Buy used CDs. Though CDs probably aren't Neil Young-approved, it's a vastly better quality experience than MP3s. Plus, it's kind of a deal, Guttenberg says. "It's cheaper than buying iTunes (songs) and certainly sounds a million times better."

*Think outside the iPod. Though there's nothing wrong with Apple's portable music player, it's not the only device out there. Besides other brands of players, you could get super pro and go with a set of turntables. And you don't have to spend a ton. There are USB-equipped turntables that go for around $100--cheaper than most iPods.

*Listen to it live. If the other options still aren't getting it done, you can always go see your favorite act in person. But Rule No. 1 still applies: Actually listen. A lot of people "talk because they're used to music being in the background, they don't just shut up and listen to it."

The Federal Communications Commission is expected to announce this week that Comcast wrongly interfered with file-sharing traffic, according to a report Sunday night on The Wall Street Journal's Web site.

The commission is due to issue a ruling Friday that the cable giant violated federal law when it prevented some customers from swapping videos on file-swapping service BitTorrent, according to the report. Comcast has admitted "delaying" traffic to file-sharing sites. At a public hearing in February, Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen said, "Comcast may on a limited basis temporarily delay certain P2P traffic when that traffic has or is projected to have an adverse effect on other customers' use of the service."

Late last week, three of the five FCC commissioners voted in favor of an item saying Comcast violated federal policy by dialing down peer-to-peer traffic over its network. The ruling, which won't include a fine, will require Comcast to stop blocking or slowing traffic to peer-to-peer sites like BitTorrent, explain to consumers and the commission how it has blocked such traffic in the past, and publicly disclose how it plans to manage its network in the future.

Comcast, the largest cable provider in the U.S., has been under fire for months after it was discovered the company had been slowing down peer-to-peer traffic on its network. The company claimed it had singled out peer-to-peer, file-sharing traffic, because it was eating up an inordinate amount of bandwidth, which caused degradation across the rest of its customers.

Consumer groups were incensed by the tactic, and the FCC investigation ensued over whether Comcast had violated any of its Net neutrality principles.

The five FCC commissioners grill Comcast representatives at a public hearing held in Cambridge, Mass., earlier this year.

(Credit: Anne Broache/CNET News)

The Federal Communications Commission appears poised to take steps to punish Comcast for allegedly blocking access to file-sharing traffic.

Three of the five FCC commissioners have voted in favor of an item saying Comcast violated federal policy by dialing down peer-to-peer traffic over its network, according to FCC officials cited in The Wall Street Journal.

The news isn't much of a surprise, given that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has publicly criticized Comcast for the practice and recommended to the rest of the commissioners that they vote in favor of the decision.

"The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers' access to the Internet," the Associated Press quoted Martin saying earlier this month. "We found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles."

If the punishment comes through, which is all but assured now, Comcast wouldn't be fined. But it would be ordered to stop blocking or slowing traffic to peer-to-peer sites like BitTorrent, explain to consumers and the commission how it has blocked such traffic in the past, and publicly disclose how it plans to manage its network in the future.

Comcast hasn't denied slowing traffic to file-sharing sites. At a public hearing in February, Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen said, "Comcast may on a limited basis temporarily delay certain P2P traffic when that traffic has or is projected to have an adverse effect on other customers' use of the service."

However, Cohen did deny blocking such sites outright, saying, "Comcast does not block any Web site, application, or Web protocol, including peer-to-peer services, period. What we are doing is a limited form of network management objectively based upon an excessive bandwidth-consumptive protocol during limited periods of network congestion," he explained.

A final ruling on the issue is expected to come at a commission meeting scheduled for August 1.

Google has ended negotiations to buy social-news site Digg.com, according to TechCrunch.

The two companies had reportedly been in the final stage of talks to bring Digg into the Google News group for $200 million. Some sources said the trouble was due to technological incompatibilities, while another said it was more about a clash of personalities. Digg was informed of Google's decision late this week, according to the report.

Rumors of a bidding war between Microsoft, Google, and two unidentified media companies began in March, sending some Digg users into a panic about what a new corporate overlord might mean for the site. With a no-go on the Google deal, Digg could either pursue other offers or go after another round of funding and keep chugging along on its own.

Neither company responded immediately to a request for comment.

Facebook banded together with hordes of programmers this week at the f8 developers' conference at San Francisco's Concourse Exhibition & Design Center, where company CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced advancements to the Facebook Platform.

Take a look at some of the scenes from the show, including application developers hard at work, doughnut girls, and Zuckerberg's out-of-character footwear, set to the sounds of the exhibit hall and key speeches:

The third of the big three proxy advisory services has issued its recommendation on how investors should vote during Yahoo's upcoming election. The advice: send a message about Yahoo's overpaid top brass.

With investor Carl Icahn and Yahoo coming to terms, there no longer is an opposing slate running against Yahoo's board of directors. But there's still going to be a vote, and Proxy Governance thinks it's a good time to take a stand.

"The average three-year compensation paid to the named executives is 480 percent above the median paid to executives at peer companies," Proxy Governance said in a statement about its advice on Friday. "In light of Yahoo's relatively weak financial performance, we therefore recommend that shareholders withhold votes from the members of the compensation committee."

"Given the exorbitant pay levels awarded to the company's executives in the face of its weaker performance relative to peers, we believe that a stronger emphasis on conditioning certain compensation awards on performance relative to the company's peers is warranted," the firm added.

The two other firms, Glass Lewis and RiskMetrics, issued opinions already. Glass Lewis also recommended voting against the compensation committee members: Chairman Roy Bostock, and directors Ron Burkle and Arthur Kern. However, for practical purposes, it's unlikely the directors actually will be ousted.

The firms issue recommendations to their clients on how to vote on proxy matters. These clients include mutual funds, pension funds, and asset management companies, which often hold large blocks of companies' stock.