Digital retailers in Britain have banded together in an effort to raise consumer awareness about “the MP3 brand,” because apparently “those music files that actually work on my computer” isn’t effective enough for their liking. So they got together and came up with, um, the logo at left, which looks like it was designed at one of those mall T-shirt stores to these eyes but is apparently going to “help give consumers confidence that the music files they are buying will play on a wide range of devices [and] also help them know that they are legal and that artists are getting paid,” according to the guy who runs the British Phonographic Industry. I would think that the money the consortium spent on that logo would maybe have been better served by sticking it in a bank or under a mattress, since, as Billboard notes at the end of its piece on the logo, legal downloads are doing just fine in the UK (single tracks up 41% year-to-year, albums 69%) and those people lurking within the Rapidshare/BitTorrent dark side probably won’t be coaxed out by a slapped-together bit of fancy fontage, but I guess even hacky graphic designers need to eat. [Billboard]