Tiscali is a European ISP that had a deal with IFPI, the paramilitary international wing of the RIAA, to offer legal, paid for, licensed streaming music to its customers. IFPI made them remove the feature that allowed paying customers to search for the music they wanted to hear by artist (!) saying that this was too much “interactivity.”
Meanwhile, if you want to download non-DRM music for free or cheap, there’s always eDonkey, ThePirateBay.org and AllOfMP3.com.
Amazing that the only folks who’ve managed to offer a usable, decent music service are the ones who are ripping off the music industry. If I was a musician hoping to earn a royalty or two, I’d be plenty pissed at how my label (through IFPI) keeps chasing off the paying customers.
It took the move after it was told to remove the service’s search by artist…
“Consumers were allowed a high degree of interactivity that breached these rules in many ways – for example, streaming individual tracks on demand,” it said.