I signed up today for Spotify. This is a music service that like all the best innovations can be explained in a few words. You download the client (Mac or Windows), which has a Mac-like user interface for searching and playing songs. You type in a search, double-click a song in the result list, and it plays. When it finishes, it plays the next one in the list.

Yahoo! has officially announced the closure of its online file storage and sharing service, Yahoo briefcase. The company has cited low usage and low service popularity to be the only reasons for shutting down this service.

At a Dec. 15 hearing in Rhode Island federal court, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Nesson and his team of students will defend Rhode Island residents Arthur and Judie Tenenbaum from the full might of the U.S. recording industry’s combined lobbying and litigating power. The Tenenbaums face legal pressure from the industry's lawsuit against their son, Joel, a graduate student at Boston University accused of sharing music files online.

File sharing is taking its worst toll on smaller albums, “devastating” lower ranked titles on the Billboard Top 100, according to the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).