Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The authors of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high-quality digital multimedia. Its name is derived from "ogging", jargon from the computer game Netrek.
Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjunction with the Ogg container format and it is therefore often referred to as Ogg Vorbis.
In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs.
A netlabel is a record label that distributes its music through digital audio formats over the Internet. While similar to traditional record labels in many respects, netlabels typically emphasize free distribution online, often under licenses that encourage works to be shared, and artists often retain copyright.
Magnatune is an American independent record label based in Berkeley, California, founded in spring 2003. It only sold music for download through its website but added a print-CD-on-demand service in late 2004 and in October 2007 began selling complete albums and individual tracks through Amazon.com. In May 2008, Magnatune launched all-you-can-eat membership plans. From March 2010 Magnatune dropped the CD printing service and moved exclusively to all-you-can-eat membership plans. Magnatune was the first record label to license music online and as of May 2015 had sold over 7,000 licenses in its twelve years of existence.
RealPlayer, formerly RealAudio Player, RealOne Player and RealPlayer G2, is a cross-platform media player app, developed by RealNetworks. The media player is compatible with numerous container file formats of the multimedia realm, including MP3, MP4, QuickTime File Format, Windows Media format, and the proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats. RealPlayer is also available for other operating systems; Linux, Unix, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian versions have been released.
eMusic is an online music and audiobook store that operates by subscription. In exchange for a monthly subscription eMusic users can download a fixed number of MP3 tracks per month. eMusic was established in 1998, is headquartered in New York City with an office in London, and is owned by TriPlay.
A music download is the digital transfer of music via the Internet into a device capable of decoding and playing it, such as a personal computer, portable media player, MP3 player or smartphone. This term encompasses both legal downloads and downloads of copyrighted material without permission or legal payment. According to a Nielsen report, downloadable music accounted for 55.9 percent of all music sales in the US in 2012. By the beginning of 2011, Apple's iTunes Store alone made US$1.1 billion of revenue in the first quarter of its fiscal year. Music downloads are typically encoded with modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) audio data compression, particularly the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format used by iTunes as well as the MP3 audio coding format.
Lagoona was a dance and techno band, consisting of the two music producers Andreas Viklund and Björn Karlsson. The band was based in a small town called Porjus in northern Sweden. Lagoona was one of the first groups to call themselves "online artists" and they released their first free MP3 single on the Internet in October 1997, long before the format became widely popular.
Amarok is a free and open-source music player, available for Unix-like, Windows, and macOS systems. Although Amarok is part of the KDE project, it is released independently of the central KDE Software Compilation release cycle. Amarok is released under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later.
Esa Ruoho, better known as Lackluster, is a Finnish electronic music producer and performer from Kontula, Helsinki. He is also known as Esa Ruoho, XLLV, Can'O'Lard and Kökö and the Köks.
Suomisaundi, also known as suomisoundi, suomistyge or spugedelic trance is a style of psychedelic trance that originated in Finland around the mid-1990s. "Suomisaundi" literally means "Finnish sound" in Finnish. Suomisaundi's biggest proponents are said to be Tim Thick and his label Thixx'n'Dixx.
Yepp was Samsung Electronics' digital audio player brand until Samsung decided to retire most of their family brands in February 2011. From then on, their MP3 players were simply branded "Samsung" worldwide until they discontinued all of them in late 2013. The brand included a wide range of hard-drive based as well as flash-memory based players. The name is claimed to be an acronym for "young, energetic, passionate person".
SanDisk has produced a number of flash memory-based digital audio and portable media players since 2005. The current range of products bear the SanDisk Clip name, a line of ultraportable digital audio players. SanDisk players were formerly marketed under the Sansa name until 2014.
Amazon Music is a music streaming platform and online music store operated by Amazon. Launched in public beta on September 25, 2007, in January 2008 it became the first music store to sell music without digital rights management (DRM) from the four major music labels, as well as many independents. All tracks were originally sold in 256 kilobits-per-second variable bitrate MP3 format without per-customer watermarking or DRM; however, some tracks are now watermarked. Licensing agreements with recording companies restrict the countries in which the music can be sold.
Esem is the stage name of Georgi Hristov Marinov, a Bulgarian electronic music artist. Esem used to be known as the tracker musician StereoMan, a member of the music group New Objectives in Sound Exploration (NOISE).
Fast And Cheap Mixes is the 2010 remix album project by HK119. The album is a collection of remixes of tracks from her 2008 album Fast, Cheap And Out Of Control, after all the tracks were made available in their individual parts via HK119's official website as part of a competition for anyone to submit their own remixes of the tracks to be considered for a later release.
Daniel Nieto is a Chilean electronic music producer, engineer, and visual artist born in Santiago, Chile. He is known for his solo work under the name "Danieto" as well as for his role as a member of the group Skipsapiens, along with Pier Bucci. Daniel Nieto began his career in the late 1990s, influenced by the intelligent dance music movement in the UK. Daniel is also one of the founders of the netlabel Impar.
Since the mid-2000s, a counterculture has taken place where numerous netlabels, online labels that release their music for free, located in Japan have been formed and garnered a huge amount of publicity which, according to writer Patrick St. Michel, has shaped how popular Japanese music is produced. Japan's netlabel phenomenon was the first time in the history of the nation's music industry where underground musicians could produce their works however they wanted to and have their music noticed by the public; this is an aspect that was previously absent at a time when major labels in the country followed a conservative method where they managed how artists would produce their music. Starting in the 2010s, the netlabel scene has crossed over to the mainstream music landscape and all across the world, with netlabel producers transitioning into working for bigger labels and western producers like Cashmere Cat and Ryan Hemsworth being influenced by the music of Japanese netlabels.
