This week, UK band Coldplay offered a free download of a track from their upcoming album. The song is called Volet Hill and was available from Tuesday this week, for one week only.

After the week’s free download has expired, the single will be released in stores. Before then, you can download the song here:

Coldplay’s new album, Viva La Vida, is available in June.

Following on from Coldplay’s free MP3 download; Metallica is considering making some music available as well, despite their well publicised troubles with former illegal download site Napster.

It seems that the opinion of bands on the whole music download phenomenon is changing from one of distrust, to one of embrace. They’re realising that digital music is a natural progression of the marketplace.

Radiohead famously offered their album as a ‘free’ download, where fans were invited to contribute what they wished for the album. While many did offer to pay for the download, a great many of Internet users downloaded the album without paying.

We can expect more musicians to follow suite and offer their work for free download via the Internet in the near future. It is fast becoming a medium that bands have to embrace, rather than fight against.

It’s one of the most anticipated games of all time, and if Rockstar’s previous efforts are anything to go by, it’ll be one of the best. Grand Theft Auto IV marks the first foray for the GTA range on the next gen consoles, and it’s a sure-fire winner.

One of the many selling points of the previous games, save for the senseless violence, massive arsenal of weapons, huge supply of vehicles and free reign within a city was the excellent range of music on offer. Indeed the music with the GTA series has been so good that it’s even had its own album release before.

For this new GTA game, players can download the music from game in MP3 format from Amazon.

During the gameplay you can dial in on your cellphone and tag any song that you’re listing to, and then preview, buy and download the song on Rockstar’s social networking website.

The game is expected to sell 9,000,000 copies on launch, meaning a lot of customers who would be looking to download MP3s for their players.

Amazon are seen by the music industry as a player capable of loosening Apple’s grip over the digital music download arena.

There have been a lot of reports lately about the dangers of damaging your hearing as a result of having your MP3 player’s volume turned up too loud. Philips are actually doing something about it. They’ve released a set of headphones aimed at children, which they claim will help protect the user’s hearing from the potential damages that could be caused through high volumes.

The headphones will be named the ‘Philips Children’s Headphones’ and they’ll come with a safety volume lock which will act much like the parental control found on Internet access. The lock will allow parents to control the volume that their children listen to their MP3 players.

Philips have acted after the recent studies into hearing loss came to light as a result of listening to MP3 players at very loud levels.

One such study was carried out at the Hearing Cooperative Research Centre in Australia, where they discovered that 1 in 6 Australians had contracted permanent hearing damage as a direct result to being exposed to high volumes caused by portable music devices, such as MP3 players.

Philips Australia general manager, Matt Moran said:

Philips is committed across its consumer lifestyle and healthcare businesses to improving people’s lives through innovative technological and healthcare solutions, so adding the ability to protect children from hearing loss is a great opportunity for us.

Following the trend of increasing sales in iPod, MP3 and Portable DVD products, the demand for specially designed children’s accessories including headphones is also growing at a rapid rate, providing retailers with a great add-on sales opportunity.

It’s often been argued whether playing on a games console can compare to the real thing, whether that be driving, football, tennis or any other physical activity. With the invention of the Nintendo Wii the physical aspect of any sporting event has come into the gameplay, meaning that gamers can genuinely claim that their consoles offer a realistic alternative.

Ten pin bowling is one of the many sports on offer from Nintendo with their Wii console, and some experienced bowling fans have recently cast their expert eyes over the game. Made for the younger generation, senior citizens in Dallas, USA, have been having a lot of fun with the game.

Prestonwood Court in Plano, Dallas, Texas is a senior citizens home where the residents have been playing bowling on the Wii, in their common room.

89-year-old Crissie Kennedy said about her bowling on the Wii:

My age doesn’t mean a thing to me, because I know I can still bowl.

The Nintendo Wii game has become a big hit with residents of the home, as Amber McCollom, PR manager for Nintendo, says:

It just proves our point that anyone at any age can be a gamer

Nintendo didn’t expect their console to appeal to the older generation, but they’re delighted they’ve landed an unexpected market.

As iTunes and Apple close in on total dominance in the music industry, and the digital music market, it’s worth looking at just how Apple was allowed to get such a stranglehold on one of the biggest industries in the world economy.

With the music business being so lucrative, how can the major labels have allowed Apple to get so big, so quickly? In just five years Apple has grown to own 70% of all online music sales, and is expected to top 28% of ALL music sales come 2012.

Apple’s foray into the music industry after they acquired SoundJam MP in 2000, a program that was to become the iTunes application.

The music labels made an exclusive agreement to license their intellectual property to Apple because initially the iTunes Store was only available on the Mac, which represented a smaller marketplace that the studios could test the fledgling digital download market.

Naturally the sales to Mac users came about very quickly, resulting a Windows version of iTunes being launched soon after; opening up the World market for Apple, iTunes and the music industry as a whole.

This instant control iTunes was afforded has been impossible for anyone to break ever since.

In addition to the monopoly iTunes enjoyed, the global success of the iPod helped increase the reach of the digital download platform.

Five years old this week, Apple’s iTunes has grown to an unrivalled size and has sold over four billion tracks. iTunes has a share of around 70% of all of the digital music sold the world over.

Speculation puts Apple, and iTunes’ share of all sales of music at somewhere around the 28% mark over the next five years. This is partly due to its dominance in the digital music market, and the falling sales of CDs in bricks and mortar stores.

Digital music is expected to account for 40% of all music sales by 2012 according to figures released by InStat, which means that if Apple holds onto the digital music share it currently has, it will be responsible for more than a quarter of all music sales come 2012.

Paul Resnikoff, the editor of Digital Music News said:

I’m very skeptical about whether iTunes can be unseated, because there’s not a lot of consumer pain there.

iTunes came about when Apple bought the little program SoundJam MP, in 2000. If only they knew how big it would become and how the whole of the music industry would be changed forever.

High street giant HMV is hoping to take advantage of the online community by launching its own social networking website. HMV hopes that its new site will allow members to sign up and share their music tastes with other members by importing their own MP3 files directly to the website.

The social networking website is called ‘Get Closer’ and is now being tested by just 1,000 beta testers. HMV hopes to launch the website on September 1st.

When users upload their own music they become linked to other members with similar tastes in something HMV is calling a ‘Spider Cloud’, based on the music genre, the artists and indeed the films they share an interest in.

The chief executive of HMV, Simon Fox, said:

We will then match you up with similar people. It’s all about connections and collections.

HMV is looking to online music as CD sales have been dropping in sales in stores, resulting in the high street retailer reducing the floor space it devotes to CD.

HMV hope to fund the website through advertising revenues.

In the coming months the amount of music made available on MP3 via download with DRM removed is expected to increase. DRM means Digital Rights Management, which is a form of copyright protection, reducing the way users can copy music from the MP3 players to their PCs and other formats.

Since the advent of the MP3 player and digital music, online digital downloads has become a thriving business. Instat, a market researcher, has just released a report showing that sales of digital downloads has now topped $3.05 Billion, which shows an increase of 49 percent from 2006.

Online digital downloads now account for a staggering 10% of all music sales, which is an increase from just 6% in 2007. Projections from Instat say that digital music sales will account for 40% of the market’s music sales in 2012.

It’s Apple who are expected to be the big winner in all of this as they’re grabbing the majority of the sales. Apple’s iTunes has only been running for 5 years and has already sold over 4 billion tunes, which represents a mammoth 70% of all online music sales worldwide. Even with the market becoming more competitive thanks to Walmart, Amazon and Tesco joining the fray, Apple is still expected to hold onto more than 25% of all digital music sales before iTunes reaches the 10 year mark.

It’s not like iTunes is struggling for coverage either. An estimated 30% of all computers in the world have the application installed.

As music downloads increase, you can expect Apple to be at the forefront of the technology, carving themselves an ever increasing piece of the pie.

It seems obvious that pupils probably shouldn’t use their MP3 players, games consoles and mobile phones when they’re in school. They’ll disrupt the concentration of others, and cause the teacher to have serious difficulties in conveying the point of the class upon on the children.

However, a certain school in Wales was rife with such distractions, causing the teacher in question to be sacked from his job due to professional incompetence.

Martin Reynish of Bryn Celynnog Comprehensive in Rhondda Cynon Taf was dismissed from his job at a hearing, due to his inability to control his pupils.

He has since been ordered to take further training within two years by the General Teaching Council of Wales. In the hearing it was revealed that pupils would spend their time listening to their MP3 players and playing on their handheld games consoles during his English lessons. Apparently one pupil even chatted on their mobile phone.

The hearing that saw Martin Reynish dismissed was one that is usually reserved for misconduct.

Mr Reynish apparently failed to control his pupils, or to motivate them between 2004 and 2006.

According to testimonies Mr Reynish was a competent teacher who was faced with a difficult class who wouldn’t respond to motivation. Obviously items such as mobile phones, games consoles and MP3 players should be taken into school with pupils.

It’s been known for some time that listening to your MP3 player too loudly can, and will, cause you to damage your hearing. However what may not have always been apparent is that the damage to your ears will come on gradually. So gradually in fact that you won’t notice any difference, until becomes too late.

The problem has escalated since companies like Sony and Apple with their Walkman and iPod brands have improved the sound quality on their devices to such as extent that music fans have been spending more time listening to them.

When personal stereos were all the rage, cranking up the volume merely made the sound distort so that you couldn’t hear the music over the muffled sound of the speaker system. Now that sound is crystal clear music fans can increase the audio levels to as high as they wish, without losing any quality… except in terms of their future hearing.

Hearing damage is also irreversible!

Hearing loss comes about when the hair cells in cochlea are damaged as a result of the increased volume. Those hairs are used to transport the sensation of sound from your ears to your brain.

If you have ever experienced muffled sound or ringing in your ears after visiting a club or concert, that’s a short term effect of the damage your ears have suffered. Exposing your ears to constant levels of noise over a period of time will damage your hearing irreparably.

Experts claim that a third of all people who have experienced hearing loss have done so through sustained exposure to loud noises.