Late last year we wrote about the launch of i/denti/tee, a customizable T-shirt line that features lyrics from people’s favorite songs. The company has recently launched an interesting lyrics visualizer that cross references songs and displays what they have in common word-wise. Plans for the future include visualizations that will track genre and artist by geography, and locations of popular lyrics based on user votes. i/denti/tee has also recently won the ‘Pay It Fashion Forward’ Award from Fashion Delivers, the ‘charity of choice for the fashion industry’. 
i/denti/tee lyrics visualizer

While online music distribution avenues like Apple’s iTunes have had moderate success in keeping the music industry alive in the wake of the disintegration of CD sales, the new music consumer still prefers downloading the best or most popular tracks off the album, leaving the rest behind. Some music traditionalists and certainly record labels bemoan the death of the physical album as a complete, physical package, and not just for the fatter sales tapes, CDs, and LPs procured for the latter. Beyond the simple fact that stores and labels could charge more for albums, the sentiment persists that there was [...]

Last week, Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan mused how little iTunes in 2009 has to do with the CD icon we click on to launch it—Apple’s original “Rip. Mix. Burn.” promotional slogan seems so antiquated today. The laptop this very post is being composed on has had its CD-RW drive used only once or twice since it was purchased at the beginning of this summer—perhaps poignantly, a CD placed inside and forgotten was recently removed because of the annoying spinning noise it created every time iTunes was started; the disc was not a medium but an irritation. So Buchanan asked Gizmodo’s [...]

Record labels don’t always have a smooth relationship with music artists. If a band chooses to release their music using alternative means, one of the most common assumptions is a) that their music wasn’t good enough to get them signed by a label or b) that they were difficult for labels to get along with. For established 20-year music veterans De La Soul, neither was the case. Releasing on iTunes tomorrow, De La Soul has partnered with Nike to bring us the “Are You in?: Nike+ Original Run,” 44-minute workout LP. This marks the return of the hip-hop trio to the [...]

iTunes is going for a new pricing structure starting on April 7th. A tiered pricing plan will charge $1.29 for popular songs (including long-standing classics), and dial down to a low price of 69 cents for the least popular. This sliding pricing structure is supposedly based on supply and demand economics, but as Gizmodo points out – there is an infinite supply of any mp3. And besides, the most popular songs are going to be the most available tracks on blogs, file sharing networks and streaming audio services.Though this system bodes well for new artists who can go for the [...]

iTunes 8.1 has been released, and it has a handful of new features. One curious standout is a new addition called “iTunes DJ”. It’s similar to the Party Shuffle of past versions -but now, anyone with an iPhone can request, and cue up songs remotely to the “DJ” using iTunes. Party goers can also vote up songs they like higher in the playlist. It’s kind of fun in a way, but I don’t know if “crowd sourced” DJing is the way to go. There are always those people at a party with really bad, or inappropriate requests for the DJ [...]

China is arguably the most difficult market in the world to sell legitimate digital music downloads.  This is largely due to Baidu’s free mp3 search that dominates the market and generates huge profits for the Chinese search engine.  However, there is one group of people who are making a decent living off digital downloads by hacking Apple’s iTunes gift vouchers.
Ulysses Shi from music industry consultancy Outdustry writes that on Taobao, China’s biggest C2C online shopping site, $200 iTunes gift cards are on sale for 17.9 RMB, roughly $2.60.  Gift card codes are created by hackers using key-generators and transferred via [...]