If you’re lucky enough to be living in the UK, you might want to hold off on downloading Tokyo Police Club’s debut full-length album Elephant Shell from the iTunes Music Store, and wait for the bonus double disc that hit stores in the UK on May 5th.

The extra disc features remixes of Elephant Shell tracks from Field Music, Tom of Los Campesinos!, Dntel, the Good Life, and Flowers Forever. Those UK-only bonus tracks, meanwhile, include a new song– appropriately titled “New New Song”– and a cover of the Rentals’ “Friends of P” (!) pitchforkmedia.

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With the announcement that iTunes has become the #1 retailer of music in the USA and MySpace announcing its own online music store, the fact that anybody wants to buy Snocap is bewildering. But as announced earlier today, Imeem just bought the struggling digital music service company.

From Billboard:

Imeem itself is a customer of the service, using Snocap to identify tracks uploaded to the Imeem service by users to ensure content owners have allowed the full streaming of their music, as well as manage the ad-share revenue payments back to the appropriate label and artist each time a registered song is played via Imeem. Other customers include MySpace, which uses Snocap’s MyStores widget to let independent and unsigned artists sell individual tracks to fans via MySpace profiles.

Snocap has been struggling over the past year and was actively seeking a buyer. Although the registry contains more than 7 million tracks from all major labels, few services use the database and those that do are relatively minor in comparison to the market-leading iTunes music store. The once-hyped Mashboxx P2P service was supposed to be Snocap’s coming out party three years ago, but that service never launch, and likely never will.

The MyStores widget, meanwhile, never caught fire with the robust MySpace artist community. Many artists complained Snocap charged excessive per-track fees, which led to high-priced downloads to fans and leaving little left for the artist.

I mean, Snocap looked kinda cool on paper (or on screen, rather) — little independent bands could host a widget directly on their MySpace and fans could buy MP3s…but the service was only free to bands for the first year, and Snocap took a healthy percent of the sales, and I’m pretty the bands were obligated to stay on for another two years and pay Snocap for the privilege of gouging them…that’s why I never signed up for that shit. I call BULLSHIT on the Snocap model. Now it’s in Imeem’s court. Lemme know how that works out for ya…

Good luck Tom:

MySpace, the world’s largest social network Web site, said it has formed an online music venture with three major recording companies in a challenge to Apple Inc’s dominant iTunes Music Store. Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group have minority stakes in the new MySpace Music venture announced on Thursday. Financial terms were not disclosed.
MySpace Music will offer free music and video streaming supported by advertising, paid-for MP3 downloads, ringtones for cell phones, concert ticket sales and merchandise. Chris De Wolfe, chief executive of MySpace, said the launch date of the new service was “fluid” with commercial features being added to the site over the next three to four months. He said MySpace is in talks with more music industry partners to offer their services on MySpace Music.

In the meantime, Apple’s iTunes recently supplanted Wal-Mart as being America’s #1 music retailer, with 19% of the music sold in January.

Like Nine Inch Nails before them, Radiohead are making the individual tracks to their new single “Nude” available on iTunes for use in crafting homemade remixes. However, the one caveat to this seemingly fan-appreciative jesture is that the “stems”, or individual components, for each song have to purchased separately. That sound you just heard was Thom Yorke’s bank account getting stacked with loot:

Radiohead, iTunes and Garageband are giving fans the opportunity to remix the band’s new single “Nude” at http://www.radioheadremix.com

To make remixing easy, the separate ’stems’* from the song will be available to purchase from iTunes. The ’stems’ available are bass, voice, guitar, strings/fx and drums. Fans can mix them in any way they like, either by adding their own beats and instrumentation, or just remixing the original parts.

Fans who purchase all five ’stems’ from iTunes during the first week they’re available, will be sent an access code to a GarageBand file ready to open in GarageBand or Logic. However, you don’t need GarageBand to do a remix, all the stems are available in iTunes Plus and compatible with several music software platforms.

Finished mixes can be uploaded to http://www.radioheadremix.com where the public will listen and vote for their favourite remix (voting ends May 1st). Fans can also create a widget allowing votes from their own website, Facebook or MySpace page to be counted as ‘mix votes’ back on radioheadremix.com.

Sounds like a lot of work to me. I’d rather just teach my shitty band the chords to “High and Dry” and play that shit for free.

Mozilla CEO John Lily called Apple’s attempt to force its Safari browser upon Windows iTunes and Quicktime users “just wrong.” Apple included the browser as a “stealth update” via an application called Software Update that is included as part of standalone iTunes and Quicktime downloads.

Lily’s objection to Apple’s tactic no doubt stems from fear of competition, but he claims to have altruistic reasons for his statements:

While a user has the option to uncheck the update, Lily argues that most will just press the “Install” button, which automatically installs Safari possibly without the user realizing what he or she has done.

“Apple has made it incredibly easy — the default, even — for users to install ride along software that they didn’t ask for, and maybe didn’t want,” he says, “This is wrong, and borders on malware distribution practices.”

However, Lily may be getting worked up over nothing. According to Information Week, Safari 3.1 and Windows XP and Vista aren’t the best of partners. XP users have reported that opening Safari causes their operating system to crash, and despite rigorous testing, the browser doesn’t function properly on Vista.

“When I try to start Safari 3.1 in Windows XP, it crashes right away,” said SakJosep, in a post currently on Apple’s online support forum.

“I have this problem too, I have no idea what it is,” said another user, OllieK92.

“I’ve tried removing and installing a new Safari — still fails to open,” reported KobeKungFu.

Such complaints are echoing across a Safari support forum thread on Apple’s Web site that’s drawn more than 1,000 views in the past week — an indication that the problem could be widespread.

Macs are cool and all, but Safari’s pretty fucking lame; and honestly, I’ve been so disappointed with recent Firefox updates that I’ve been using IE more and more. I don’t know if that means I’ve forfeited my standing as a geek or not.

For a while now there have been whispers of the Fab-Four finally going digital and making their back catalog available for download, but for the most part it seemed to be just wide-eyed speculation. However, that appeared to change a few days ago when the UK press (Daily Record, Telegraph, Daily Mail, etc.) began reporting that a deal had been struck with Apple Inc. (computer company not Beatles publishing, that’s Apple Corps.) to make the songs available for download on iTunes.

It looked as if I’d finally get replace those tattered old records with substandard, compressed mp3s! Hooray! Wait, that doesn’t sound right. Why should I be excited to replace organic audio with a cheap codec-ridden blather that’s one-tenth the file size? To be honest, I’m not. Sure it’d be great to line the pockets of Ringo and Paul with a little more cash; after all Paul is about to get hammered by an ugly divorce settlement. But personally I’d rather scour a record store (even if they’re going the way of the buffalo) looking to find that classic album on vinyl. Now you might be thinking, they’ve yet to create a Walkman that plays vinyl, and they probably never will. Truly, you would be mistaken, and you can find one right here that will only run you $250. Even if that groovy gadget isn’t your style it remains true that most of The Beatles’ catalog is already available on CD, which can be purchased and made portable. In the end it becomes a compromise of quality for price.

All techno-babble and rhetoric aside, the issue is still unsettled. The initial reports of an agreement have since been discounted and only time will tell when those famous boys from Liverpool will finally go binary.