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Basically, our friends at the RIAA are more than happy if you'll keep buying your CD's at fifteen dollars a pop, then every few years they'll try to make what you already purchased obsolete by offering a new release with better packaging.

Sometimes I wonder if they are deliberately incompetent in issuing their first release. I remember back in 1991, I picked up Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue." Five years later, the record company had re-released it, along with the shocking announcement that one of the original CD's songs had been mastered at the wrong speed -- so the CD I owned had a song that was therefore in the wrong key and at the wrong tempo. And for this incompetence, on their part, I was supposed to shell out another fifteen bucks to get the fixed version.

Understandably, people are tired of this crap, so they've resorted to downloading music. That's where the RIAA's new revenue generating tactic comes in: they're using their legal department to send letters, coercing downloaders to pay up at about seven grand a pop. That's a lot of shiny CD's.

So buy CD's or download illegally -- either way the RIAA wins. Unless you decide to get out of the game.

If you follow the RIAA's tactics at all, you might have decided it's appropriate to not give these bloodsuckers another dime of your money. So here are a couple tips. Don't buy from labels that are affiliated with the RIAA -- and don't buy legally downloaded music from these labels just because they happen to be on the iTunes record store.

Second, check out sites like Magnatune. Read everything you can about their business practices. These people are cool, their artists' music is awesome, and they deserve our support.

• Suport for MP3, OGG and FLAC.
• Wireless for music download/upload
• A standardized protocol for sharing music wirelessly with other portable owners (for legal sharing of course.. such as the mp3s from a non-evil record label.)
• Long battery life (when not using the WiFi at least)

You mean like this?

Of course, it never ends there. Next is going past the CD-quality barrier, and doing 24/96 support, etc.

Of course mangatune already supports FLAC, WAV, etc.

Ok, so they provide MP3's without DRM. What license do they provide when you make a purchase? MagnatuneCreative Commons

Most of emusic's material is also encoded with LAME's preset standard vbr setting. And it's also available without any attempted DRM nonsense. (And despite using a somewhat funky custom client, they support linux.)

Then there's magnatune, featured some months back on slashdot, who offers uncompressed wavs.

Don't get me wrong - *three* online distributors who treat their audio and their customers with respect is better than *two*. But, they've gone a bit overboard claiming to be the first to offer high quality, drm-free stuff.

I cant see companies offering downloads in lossless format anytime in the near future

You can if you visit magnatune.com, since they offer FLAC and even WAV files, as well as Ogg Vorbis and MP3. You could, if you were insane, even download all four formats.

steveha

1) Williamson
2) Version
3) Solace

1) Williamson
2) Version
3) Solace

1) Williamson
2) Version
3) Solace

Then why not offer different compression schemes for different folks? Works for Magnatune, and they've got some pretty good stuff.

Good .oggs and ham for me, please. :)

Okay, so you think it's good because you've heard of it? I appreciate that there are certainly some good, popular, major label bands. But I've found lots of great bands on MagnaTune. I see no reason why Bleep can't do something similar. Non-DRM encumbered music, high quality recordings, and good music are a big draw for me. Being able to preview and play through bands and genres that I might otherwise not hear on the radio is an even bigger draw. Surfing around on MagnaTune is a FUN activity for me - it has brought back some of the joy I used to take in music that has really felt dead to me in recent years.

Well there is magnatune. Not a p2p system, but a nice idea. They are a recording company that sells all music online and splits the price of the sale 50/50 with the artists.

About the only thing "Weed" has going for it as a music distribution system as far as I can tell is the pyramid scheme payment system. Kinda cool that if you get friends to try and buy a new song you get rewarded with a small cut, but I'm not sure how much of a factor that would be for most casual users.

Agreed. Though sometimes I use WinMX still (it's nowhere near as polluted as Kazaa), I generally prefer AllOfMP3.com which while slightly sketchy is still less sketchy than P2P services, and the quality is far, far, far better. Also the low price on AllOfMP3 gets me buying lots of music I would otherwise probably never hear and certainly wouldn't buy. Occasionally I frequent iTunes, though a buck a song still feels too expensive to me, and the M4P format, while far better than WMA, is still annoying. Or best of all, Magnatune, which is starting to look like what MP3.com should have been.

http://www.allofmp3.com/ ... question about legality when used from the US
What about Australia? Anyone? Oh well, I guess I'll download and see if I get arrested...

On topic, I can't believe no-one's mentioned Magnatune yet, a site I found from a mention right here on /.
You can download or stream all their artists in low or high quality mp3, then buy the music and download it in a variety of formats. And their motto is "We are not evil". What more do you want?

http://www.allofmp3.com/ ... question about legality when used from the US
What about Australia? Anyone? Oh well, I guess I'll download and see if I get arrested...

On topic, I can't believe no-one's mentioned Magnatune yet, a site I found from a mention right here on /.
You can download or stream all their artists in low or high quality mp3, then buy the music and download it in a variety of formats. And their motto is "We are not evil". What more do you want?

While they may not have RIAA label music on their sites both
Magnatune
and
Audio Lunchbox
Provide drm-free ogg vorbis files for purchase.

If I purchase a song, I have the right to back it up. I have the right to listen to it where I want and not only on one PC.

I agree 100%. That's why the last three albums I purchased have all been from Magnatune. You even get the full CD-Quality .WAV files when you purchase if you want them. That plus knowing that the artist gets a much bigger share of my purchase than through an RIAA label.

They definately don't have the top hits, but at the same time, they do have a surprisingly good selection. Especially of alternative stuff. I'm just checking out the rock now, but I've gotten techno from them in the past.

You can buy some music that is RIAA free. The site RIAA Radar helps you avoid paying indirectly to the RIAA.

RIAA Radar

Or you can pay to download Music with no DRM that is RIAA free from MagnaTune.

MagnaTune

I wish back in high school that I could have known that, when I was buying records, I was providing the bands I liked with almost no financial support. More than 95% of my purchase price was going straight to one of the most corrupt industries on the planet.

I'm not at all surprised to hear that the Netherlands' version of the RIAA is now going after individual users. The industry has clearly decided that the threat of litigation is about the only thing that's going to keep people buying CD's.

Except for one tiny thing. In the process of trying to scare people, they've made people like me their lifelong enemies. Now, where music is concerned, I have only two ambitions: one is to give the artists I like as much support as possible. And the other is to not give another penny of my money to RIAA labels. Quite simply, the RIAA has a completely different vision of the future than that of music lovers. They want to keep themselves as the middlemen in perpetuity, despite the fact that technology has the potential for making major labels irrelevant.

That's one reason why, as much as I love the iTunes radio store, I would never purchase an album from there that was produced by an RIAA affiliated label.

What people disgusted by RIAA actions need to do is to work hard to educate the public about why the industry does not deserve our support. Music lovers ought to be doing everything possible to starve out the RIAA affiliated labels, and to channel as much of their entertainment dollar directly to artists. And we should especially support artists who are wise enough to help us in this task -- artists who sign with magnatune, or who have a website set up so that they keep the bulk of every purchasing dollar.

Apple does a nice job marketing. 25 million downloads is not alot of downloads at all. Kazaa gets that many downloads in a few days. The flaw with the Itunes model? No one knows how much money actually goes to artists. Its legal but most people using Kazaa don't give a shit about the law. So you have a situation where someone like me who currently boycotts the RIAA has no intention of ever supporting Itunes simply because Itunes hurts artists. Artists don't make a penny. Customers get robbed paying $1 for a low quality audio rip. You don't see that you are still paying the RIAA $1? I support Magnatunes, I supported Mp3.com, I even support Emusic. I'll never support Itunes, I will never pay for music on a per song basis unless at least 50% of my money goes to musicians. I will not pay $1 a song, songs should be priced by the market and not buy record execs. If you want to continue to pay content owners, go ahead and waste your money. If you want to save the music industry and help the artists and yourself Itunes is not the answer. Here are some alternatives Magnatunes Weed The Itunes business model will never be mainstream. When TV was invented, pay TV was not the mainstream and while cable did make money, most people had reguar TV.

And just what artists would they have on their label? All the artists they have now are already signed to the major labels. Sure, they could start signing on indi artists, and compete with magnatune, but honestly most people don't dig indi artists, atleast not the kind of people who buy an iPod (the trendy people).

Suppose there was a competitor that didn't give us the garbage x.99 cent "marketing price". In fact, the fee paid was variable! So the extra amount is equivalent to a tip. Some might say that tips make sense with digital goods, where the marginal cost is near zero. Cynics (plentiful and uncreative) at this point just walk out of the room after delivering a few loads of regurgitated garbage. So, the option is $5 to $18. Do you think $5 is the choice taken most? Look here.

That's already happened.

No.

Musicians NEED to be paid. Would you rather that they're happy in the knowledge that you are happy with their music while they're homeless and on the street?

When you make someone laugh or have a good time, it's ENTIRELY different from a musician spending weeks in a recording studio trying to perfect an album. How do you expect the musician to pay for that time spent doing that if the music is free? Why shouldn't they just get a normal job and leave music altogether if they aren't going to receive any financial compensation for it? Do you think that creating music is free or doesn't take up valuable time?

Back to reality with you.

That said, I'm not willing to pay the exorbitant amounts that the RIAA wants us to, nor am I willing to support them with my money so that they can quelch P2P and filesharing. Thus, I'm very interested in places like Magnatune that are totally unrelated to the RIAA, let us choose the price (within reason), and let us hear the entire album before buying the full CD-quality non-compressed version.

What we need (I've mentioned this before) is a P2P service that charges a monthly fee, not based on per-download, that reasonably supports the artists. That is something I'd be willing to pay for.

Here. Apparently only a fifth choose to pay the smallest amount.

The article talke about how customers can now simply go out and find their own music on the net, rather than rely on a brand to determine what is good music so they can sign them. Does anyone else think that that basically says it all? Labels are obsolete in their current form. What services do they provide, exactly?

CD stamping? Cost has become so cheap that it's hardly part of the equation.

Promotion? I suppose, but at the cost of an artist's livelihood. In effect, the artist is paying for it anyway, so they could just hire an advertising firm and be done with it.

Talent selection? OK, if this were the case, would we not all be listening to at least a portion of the top 50 most of the time? Why is it then that many artists that aren't signed to a major label become cult phenomenons on the internet?

Places like Magnatune try to advance the definition of the record label to something more useful, and I sincerely hope they succeed. But to the rest of the labels, my message would be simply evolve or die. Because if you don't evolve, you're simply not going to get my money one way or the other.

mp3.com did have a couple of really good artists...and I bought about a dozen CDs off there from those artists before Vivendi took over.

I really hope some of those artists can submit and head on over to Magnatune and get on board there.

The download formats alone add enough value to buy stuff. (wav, flac, ogg, mp3 vbr, mp3 128) Not to mention I actually feel like I'm supporting the artist, which makes it all worthwhile.

You mean something like MagnaTune that was linked some time ago on Slashdot?
Their moto: "We're a record label. But we're not evil."

magnatune.com

They'd be smart to use a lossless compression format to save on their bandwidth costs though...

They do use a lossless codec, Flac.

Selection: iTunes: Lots Magnatune: Not a lot

You can't even compare several hundreds of thousands of songs to hundreds of songs... But the philosophy behind Magnatune sure is cool!

The thing is, this wasn't free music. MIT was actually trying to pay for music, and the RIAA stopped them. People won't be pissed off about it, but it won't encourage them to buy CDs, either.

I suspect it won't be too long before Congress realized that the RIAA is a bunch of foriegn companies using dodgy interpretations of copyright law to screw over American consumers and artists, and outlaws their business model. In the meantime, I'll be buying my music from people who are willing to sell it to me.

Streaming mp3 feeds. They're programmed by someone else, who chooses things I might not, and I'm often pleasantly surprised by what I hear. I've purchased a couple of CDs based on things I've heard this way.

You should check this out. I'm not affiliated with them, so I have nothing to gain by spreading the word. It's a great service. I wish I'd done it. I suspect/hope this is what the future looks like.

Also, Magnatune was not reviewed.

Yes, I know the restrictions can be gotten around by burning, and then ripping that, but that's not the point. It's a matter of principle. Companies everywhere keep trying to put restrictions on what we do with things we *own*, and that's just not right - economically, morally, or socially. It saddens me so many people are willing to accept the situation without question.

But in the meantime, I'll stick with services like Magnatune which don't try to control the content once it leaves their hands.

I much prefer Magnatune("we are not evil")

The problem with Magnatune, CD Baby, and many other self-service labels is that they don't seem to assist clearance of copyrighted songs for recording, and they don't seem to provide access to an expert witness so that a singer-songwriter can determine with some level of certainty that he didn't accidentally infringe the copyright in an existing copyrighted song by subconsciously copying it. Apparently, according to the terms, Magnatune is interested only in selling recordings of arrangements of pre-1923 classical music:

No samples or copyrighted cover songs: we cannot release any music that has copyrighted samples in it (please make all your own samples) or is from a copyrighted song. Songs in the public domain (i.e.: classical) are fine.

magnatune. You get WAV files from the master recording. Selection is pretty limited at the moment, but it's a non-RIAA studio, and the artists get %50 of the sales.

My biggest issue with all of these per-song services (iTunes, MusicMatch, the upcoming new Napster) is that you are paying relatively full price for lower quality.

I much prefer Magnatune("we are not evil") who allows you to download wav and lossless .flac versions when you purchase a song or album.

My second problem is that my tastes are rather eclectic, and using iTunes to find albums to my taste hasn't been working. For instance, I'll pick an album that I really like, and look at the "people who buy this album also buy" and discover I don't like any of their suggestions. But I don't buy much popular music, so it may work for other people.

Related, the 30-second browsing is often not enough for me. Supposedly the new Napster per-song service will allow you to preview the whole song. I know that I bought some Magnatune album recently because I could browse the whole album.

-- Herder of Cats

Come on, if you want legit digital downloads, there's going to have to be some restrictions.

I lived in Athens Ga. a few years ago. Many of the bands had sold more records in Europe and Japan than the U.S. If an artist directly (and digitally) sells 10,000 copies of an album globally for $5 (not unreasonable at all), they are doing better than they would pushing plastic locally or regionally in the U.S.

Sites like Magnatunetake care of bandwidth and billing for a 50% cut. They offer fans the option to buy albums on a sliding scale (pay anywhere from $5-$20. Eight bucks is recommended.) And they leave the artist free to enter into any other contract they choose (they can press their own cds or have a cool label do it.) MP3 and Ogg are available for free. Purchasing the album (i.e. supporting an artist you really enjoy) entitles you to uncompressed .wav or aiff

Weedshare.com also has an interesting idea--they pay fans to distribute music. Unfortunately, they only offer .wmv at the time and they seem open for abuse. Still, how long will it be before musicians establish something like affiliate programs. Maybe if fan sites kick over enough paying customers, they get a little cut of the moola (a la Amazon) At the very least, they could support their music habit.

These are interesting and exciting times. Independent producers are the real winners and video is right around the corner thanks to Apple&friends. Now, if only I could convince my local cable monopoly to just keep their boring channels and instead offer me a 20mbps internet connection ; )

You can download the tracks you buy as MP3 (fixed or variable rate), WAV, OGG, or FLAC. No DRM. No country restrictions.

Magnatune.com got it right - they offer all thier music in various formats, including both FLAC and Ogg!

Try magnatune and cd baby. They both let you listen to high-quality previews (magnatune does more than previews, you can listen to their music for free straight from the website). CD Baby has a really large catalog. I've found tons of stuff worth owning in there. And the best thing is: they're not peddling RIAA material, and they don't try to screw the artist.

MagnaTune

I believe they were mentioned a little while ago, but they're the
"We're a record company, but we're not evil" people.

Seriously. Asside from a few artists I absolutely love, I have started getting my music fix from mp3.com and magnatune. If you're gonna listen to them though, please do help them out financially. It takes a lot of bandwidth to stream mp3s.

Here's one that is: Magnatune.

Why don't you all people forget about the P2P hype and start using services like http://www.magnatune.com/? The future is not in the technology but in the people selling their music.

"Just found they've got Joglaresa in the classical section. Somewhat eosoteric, but Belinda Sykes is highly critically acclaimed in her field "

I'm glad you noticed that Sykes was there -- I was immensely psyched to have her on Magnatune. I'm really big into Medieval music, and she's excellent. I'm hoping to sign Shira Kammen next week (from Project Ars Nova, Sequentia and others) who's also a heavy hitter in the medieval field.

You may also want to check out Catherine King, a renaissance singer who is also immensely acclaimed (she's my favorite renassance singer, and not because she's on Magnatune) -- her voice also does the spine-shiver thing for me.

See http://magnatune.com/artists/heringman_king

-john (from Magnatune)

http://magnatune.com/

Some REALLY big names in classical have signed up to Magnatune. See Classical - Trevor Pinnock is huge, and I've worshipped Jacob Heringman for years...

-john