About a year ago, Yahoo Music GM David Goldberg stunned attendees of the Music 2.0 conference by urging major labels to abandon DRM and give unrestricted MP3 sales a try. The biggest side effect of DRM, he said, was that it tended to lock users into a single service and a single device – not something that made them happy.

A lot has changed in the last year. Physical CD sales continue to drop, and labels seem to be more willing than ever to try anything that might help increase digital music sales and make up at least some of the difference. Suddenly eMusic’s model of selling non-DRM’d music seems to make a lot of sense, and others are experimenting as well. Amazon is rumored to be considering a MP3-only music download store. MySpace sells no-DRM music. Yahoo has experimented with no-DRM downloads. And so on. Even Bill Gates admits DRM is a deeply flawed solution.

I spoke to Goldberg and Yahoo Music VP of Product Development Ian Rogers last week about their views on DRM today and going forward. While they won’t say DRM is dead, they do provide valuable insights as music industry insiders on what we can expect in the future. Including, possibly, side by side sales of DRM and non-DRM music, with a discount for customers who can stomach the DRM. We also talk briefly about the proposed music tax in Europe to replace DRM entirely.

I’ll be writing more at TechCrunch about my own views on DRM as well.

Time: 40:07 Minutes
Size: 9.18 MB

Digg is launching several new features this morning that signal a strategic shift in the company’s all news focus to date. They’ve added a podcasting content area, enhanced the video area and are signalling that new content areas are coming as well. Among the changes, users will now be able to consume audio and video content directly on Digg. Another key feature addition is the launch of “Top 10 Stories,” which is a quick view of the ten hottest stories on Digg at any given time. See TechCrunch for the full story and screenshots.

I spoke to Digg founder Kevin Rose, CEO Jay Adelson and VP Marketing Mike Maser for a few minutes to talk about the changes. We also discussed how Digg acquired the SpikeTheVote domain name, Digg’s current user stats, their upcoming financing and other issues.

Time: 38:59 Minutes
Size: 8.9 MB

Steve Gillmor and I recently spoke with Adobe senior vice president and chief software architect Kevin Lynch about the upcoming release of the Apollo platform. Apollo, the code name for “a cross-operating system runtime” is a platform that will allow developers to create to desktop applications using existing web development skills such as Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript and Ajax. Web applications can be run online or offline through Apollo, which will also have the traditional benefits of desktop applications – speed, drag and drop functionality from the desktop to the application, and accessing the file system. Apollo is cross-platform, meaning any application developed for it will run on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. And they are promising easy porting of existing web applications to the Apollo platform.

Adobe is counting on platforms like Apollo to drive future revenue growth. Look for a developer release in the near future and a full release in 2007. More on TechCrunch, including screenshots.

Time: 37:32 Minutes
Size: 8.6 MB

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has been talking about their web services business unit a lot lately. Moments after he left the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit last week I was able to speak to him about three of their most recent web service offerings: Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This is a short podcast but you get a glimpse of how important this new business line is to Amazon’s future. The full post is on TechCrunch.

Time: 16:57 Minutes
Size: 7.8 MB

Condé Nast announced the acquisition of Reddit, a social news site, this morning for an undisclosed price. Reddit was founded in 2005 and has just four employees. This is a model company for young entrepreneurs looking to create a new startup with limited resources.

Marshall Kirkpatrick and I interviewed founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian today just hours after the acquisition was announced. While we couldn’t get them to disclose the acquisition price, they did talk about traffic and fundraising – Reddit is currently attracting around 70,000 unique visitors per day and 700,000 page views, and the company has raised just $100,000 in seed funding, all in the summer of 2005.

Time: 24:36 Minutes
Size: 5.63MB

Michael Arrington interviews Jingle Networks CEO George Garrick and investor Josh Kopelman about today’s big financing news as well as the history and future of their free, ad supported 411 service called 1-800-Free-411. Key facts from the discussion: Jingle currently has costs of around $0.25 per call, and revenue of $0.20, although Garrick feels that potential revenue per call will approach $0.50 as the market matures. Garrick and Kopelman also discuss upcoming potential competition from Google and other search players, and how Jingle will compete in that market. The service, which is growing rapidly, now claims 3% of the total U.S. 411 calls, a roughly $8 billion market.

Time: 31:39 Minutes
Size: 7.24 MB

If you are looking for a hosting provider, you need to check out Media Temple’s new Grid Server product that launched this morning. For $20 per month (the same price as most low end shared hosting providers), they are offering a fully scalable hosting product that will grow (or spike) along with your site. See TechCrunch for more details, but there are aspects to this that are superior to shared, virtual dedicated, and even dedicated server hosting.

Michael Arrington spoke with Demian Sellfors (CEO), Chris Leah (Director of Technology), Alex Capehart (Director Marketing) and David Feinberg (Product Manager) for 30 minutes yesterday about the new product. The podcast is enclosed.

Time: 34:48 Minutes
Size: 7.96 MB

Ajax home page Pageflakes, headquartered in Germany, is just settling down after its recently announced venture financing from BenchMark Capital. In the next few days they’ll be launching Pageflakes 2.0, a “significant upgrade to the current offering” CEO and co-founder Christoph Janz tells Michael Arrington. Get the details at TechCrunch, and listen to Michael Arrington’s conversation with Christoph and Pageflakes designer Jeremy Baines here. Topics covered include the state of Pageflakes as well as some hints at the new product.

TechCrunch coverage of Pageflakes is here.

Time: 33 Minutes
Size: 7.5 MB

See TechCrunch for the details on PayPerPost’s announcement of its $3 million Series A round of financing by Inflexion Partners, Villiage Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Michael Arrington and Rob Hof (Silicon Valley Bureau Chief at Business Week) took a few minutes today to talk to Ted Murphy (founder and CEO of PayPerPost) and Josh Stein (a Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson) about the funding and the controversial nature of PayPerPost’s business. It’s a somewhat heated discussion, but we managed to keep things fairly civilized.

See our previous coverage of the company in our post “PayPerPost.com offers to sell your soul.” The company facilitates a marketplace where advertisers can pay bloggers to write about the company’s product. Disclosure of payment is optional.

Time: 53 Minutes
Size: 24.2 MB

Episode 12 of TalkCrunch features Robert Scoble at Scobleizer, Om Malik at Gigaom and Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. They speak for just over an hour about their favorite startups and the hot news this week in tech. Topics covered include the state of VOIP, next week’s Yahoo Hack Day and Robert Scoble’s hot new tv show that’s launching Monday, ScobleShow.

Companies mentioned include Digg, Facebook, Myspace, Skype, PicksPal, TechMeme, Jajah, PersonalBee, Scrapblog, Rebtel, Hullo and GrandCentral.

Time: 60 minutes
Size: 27.7 MB