NAPSTER GETS THE FINGER

In a move to further its pay service—and perhaps make some folks at the RIAA just a little bit lass antagonistic—Napster has licensed Alexandria, VA-based Relatable’s acoustic fingerprinting technology, TRM. Sources inside my head confirm that "acoustic fingerprinting" has nothing to do with building a database to track the movements of folk singers.

Instead, TRM analyzes the acoustic properties of a song’s waveform, meaning that changing the spelling of a song title or artist’s name won’t fool it. According to the companies, TRM identifies a track regardless of "format, bit rate or minor signal distortion." Look for this exact same phrase to appear in the music industry bible, Billboard Bulletin, sometime next week, when they report on this same story.

Said Napster interim CEO Hank Barry: "Digital fingerprinting technologies are developing rapidly, and Relatable’s new acoustic fingerprinting technology shows great promise. We are now working closely with Relatable’s engineers to coordinate their technology with our file-filtering systems; we hope they will be a substantial part of our overall filtering solution…if we stay open long enough to have an overall filtering solution."