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Have you seen www.magnatunes.com?

i would say serious.. i can't stand lossy encoding when it comes to soloist's and clasical music.. i only buy music from places that let me download either the wav or flac versions

http://www.magnatunes.com/ is a good one - all indy for the most part and alot of very good stuff

http://www.magnatunes.com/

has a nice selection of eltronica and techno - they have alot of nice streams - i listen to them often - and they are nice to buy from too

The cost of something is determined by the lowest retail price. For music that is zero today. Most people are unwilling to assign a much higher value to it either.

This just simply is not true. Look at Magnatunes: they let you choose how much you want to pay for an album, with a minimum of $5. If what you said was true one would expect almost everyone to pay $5. Instead, the average price people pay is $8! Apparently, people are perfectly willing to pay for music, as long as they know (as is the case with Magnatunes) that it is DRM-free and half of what they pay goes directly to the artist. I know I am, and that there are many people who think the same.

And saying that the reason people are willing to pay is because Magnatunes is a small label whose music isn't generally to be found on the peer-to-peer networks won't fly either, because Magnatunes make it extremely easy to listen to their music for free without any restrictions.

Please don't forget the good work being done by Magnatunes: http://www.magnatunes.com/

And also www.magnatunes.com - they let you choose how much you pay, which is pretty cool.

They've yet to discover this thing called the Internet[s], except insofar as people use it to "steal" "their" content. If we've learned enything with the Net, it's that info-iteration loops can be completed very rapidly and cheaply--we don't need to spend $millions to discover a flop.

The labels haven't figured it out yet but some performers are onto it, so small and or local bands use the net to get their music out. Magnatunes and some open source, creative commons, websites are used for this.

Look into

cdbaby

magnatunes

jamendo

I've found some great music from all of the above. I'm sure that there are others.

"This is where most of the money for a track should be going--to the creative talent. If you look at the breakdown for the $1 that gets spent on an iTunes track, about $0.70 goes to the RIAA member [cite: Fox]. They have to give $0.08 - $0.16 out for mechanicals (by law you say)."

I believe that the $0.08 statutory is split among the composer and songwriter, so it's not doubled to $0.16 if a song has one of each. Those are just the statutory royalties -- there are often contractual royalties above and beyond that if the performer didn't write the song.

"That means, at worst they get to keep $0.54 per track for producing nothing (especially true in the case of digital distribution)."

The rest of the money isn't "kept" in the sense that I think you mean. It pays for the production of the music. Until the day when everybody involved with the production of the music can be cajoled into working for free, those costs will be there. If a record sells 10,000 copies and has ten tracks: if the artist paid to do the cover art got $1,000 (a low figure), that's a penny per track. If the recording and engineering cost $10K start-to-finish (again, a low figure), that's another dime per track. If the record company invests $10K into promoting the album, that's another dime. The difference between the gross margin and the net margin is a real devil bitch, no matter what business you're in.

Others have suggested that digital tracks be sold for at or near the cost of the bandwidth and royalties because the music production costs can be burdened into the physical CD sales. That might work well today, when digital sales are (say) 30% of your revenue. But what happens tomorrow when they're 40%, 60%, 80%?

"Especially if you offered non-DRM, variable bit-rate files (like eMusic)--I have to imagine a service like this would crush Apple and be highly profitable for the recording industry. I also imagine that if the RIAA itself was the digital distributor that they could offer distribution at much less than $0.25 / track, and could make even more profit there. I firmly believe that the reason this doesn't happen is because all of the labels are run by old-time executives that fear change and want to maximize their profits while minimizing their efforts. They don't even see that with a little bit of effort they could double their profits."

I believe the point you're making here is that many Slashdotters understand pricing theory and the supply curve better than anybody in the record industry. And, in fact, it's conceivable that no record company has ever hired smart people with econ degrees or MBAs to do this calculation for them. Or, perhaps the record labels haven't really taken the "maximize profits" (ie. pick the best point on that curve) thing seriously enough. The impression I get from reading lots of Slashdot posts is that if only a few Slashdotters had the desire to set up their own record labels, they'd do it right, and -- as you say -- double profits. For example, you might even be able to operate your own record company at a 4% net margin, vs. the 2% net margin that Warner Records managed last year.

Magnatunes is a great example of a record label done right -- I think it fits the model of how many Slashdotters would run their own label:

• DRM free
• Buyers are encouraged to make copies for their friends
• A generous revenue split -- I think artists get 50% of the sale price

But, this raises some questions:

• Why are they so little-known? By comparison, the record labels who just "don't get it" move millions of tracks a month on iTunes.
• Why do even they sell CDs for $8 or more each? That's still $0.80 or so per track. Keep in mind that Magnatunes, unlike traditional record companies, don't fund the production of the music -- if you want to sign with them, you've got to handle the production yourself. So if anybody'd be able to make money at $0.25 a t

Did allofmp3 pay a cent to artists getting downloaded? No RIAA , no DRM argument please. Lets say I downloaded David Gilmour album, did Mr. Gilmour get a cent?

So, our right to get robbed with a fake legit site and artists not getting anything at all is broken. Very sad!

Only thing allofmp3 has proven is: International users exist besides ~18 countries and they somehow pay for music they get. Yes, I am referencing iTunes store and "you can't buy anything at all, you are a thief!" attitude shown by Apple/RIAA/MPAA for years.

If you really hate RIAA and you love to pay for your music, http://www.magnatunes.com/ , 50% 50% share, quality music, FLAC, Creative Commons, no DRM.

That is what I do besides paying to Real Networks for "radiopass" broadband radio. Paying to a shadowy Russian site knowing the artists not getting anything just to have fake legal music isn't a right of me so I didn't lose anything.

"Clear Channel is a copyright-created cartel that would not exist if it wasn't for their right to monopoly given to them by copyright laws."

I believe the business unit we're discussing here is the one that owns the radio stations. They don't own the copyright on the music they play. They pay the artists (not the record companies) for the priveledge of playing music... the copyrights of which all belong to other people. I'm also not sure of your choice of the word "cartel" here. The first definition provided by "dict cartel" is "A combination of independent business organizations formed to regulate production, pricing, and marketing of goods by the members." Clear Channel is a single business.

"My wife and I are friends with 2 bands that are in the Top 100 right now. They make almost NO money from the distribution of their music (one of them will sell millions of albums in the next 2 years). They make ALL their money from touring. How does copyright help them?"

"almost no" != "no."

I presume they're under contract with record labels. The record labels funded the production of their music, in exchange for exclusive rights on the distribution of the recordings. The label's promotion and marketing machines have given these bands noteriety and allowed them to embark on an apparently lucrative tour.

If the record labels didn't have copyright protection -- that is, if they'd invested tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into producing and promoting the music, only to see some Chinese company or anybody else distribute the finished product with impunity -- then they wouldn't have taken a chance on your friends in the first place. We can have fun with "what if" scenarios of how your friends might have been equally successful if, say, they'd instead taken a loan out from a bank and hired their own marketing and promotion experts -- but here in the real world, it's copyright laws that allow the record companies to operate as they do, and it's the record companies that gave your friends a chance.

"They understand that the only way to enter the monopoly-controlled market (FCC and copyright created artificial barrier to entry) is to give up the rights to their music to the cartels."

Bullshit. They could have signed with Magnatunes or another "non-evil" label. The top bands at Magnatunes make thousands of dollars per year. They could have signed with one of the tens of thousands of indie record labels -- the sort that have fewer than ten employees and most certainly aren't members of the RIAA. And, of course, they could have absorbed all the burden themselves by taking personal loans from the bank, and used the services of CDBaby to get their stuff onto the iTMS (the vast majority of the stuff I buy on iTMS is the work of tiny indie labels). But your friends chose to sign with major labels. Maybe they had a good reason to -- maybe they wanted to take that chance of making millions of bucks, a chance that, frankly, Magnatunes and the tiny labels and the self-publishing routes just don't offer. Maybe making just a few thousand bucks a year at their craft via Magnatunes just wasn't good enough for them. That's perfectly fine... if that's the case, I don't fault them at all. But it was their choice, and nobody else's.

I had never thought of amazon doing something like that.. It would be great but i don't know if it is going to happen i would sure like for it to that is how http://www.magnatunes.com/ works if you order a cd from them .. it is almost as if the cd is the after thought as they are mainly a buy for download music service. I would love to see amazon do that - now if they could only get a site designer that has a clue.. the more links and things that flash at me makes me want to close the window..

My definition of "sell out" does not include what happened to Napster or MP3.com. Both companies were destroyed in court, with their investors loosing everything and then some. After essentially stealing the companies, the RIAA and friends went after the investors to punish them for putting their money forward, a first in copyright law abuse.

The new owners obviously have different dreams for Napster, which mostly end badly. A few months after the purchase, the new owners of MP3.com threw away terrabytes worth of wonderful content that had been built over the years.

I can envision a new industry, where artists sign with small labels or produce their own music, and sell DRM free music on the web, and have small batches of CDs pressed at reasonable prices to be sold at reasonable prices in stores of the brick and mortor and online varieties.

That was essentially MP3.com's model if you take out the brick and mortar. Anyone could put their music up to be found by preference matching. "People who like X also like Y1-Y10" was a powerful sales tool that matched musical tastes. Anyone could download DRM free mp3s. MP3.com would make and mail CD player compatible CD's on demand that also contained mp3s and could be ripped to any format. The price was much more reasonable than either Itunes or the New Napsters of the world. The MP3's were convenient and the physical archive was reassuring.

Today, you have Magnatunes, the Internet Archive and many others stepping into the void.

Maybe they are downloading free music legally?

http://www.magnatunes.com/

http://www.irateradio.com/

Maybe they are transferring their CDs onto their portable players so that they can listen to them more easily?

I still believe that a CD is vastly overpriced for what it is...

Then don't buy it.

Who said i did?

I criticize anyone who downloads illegally.

I don't. I can understand why people would want to download a clean FLAC or high bitrate MP3 rip instead of paying for a CD loaded with crapware. Either way as the artist does not receive fair payment, from my point of view both are receiving stolen goods. Why give money to theives?

Most artists are adults. They can decide for themselves wether a deal offered by a label is right for them.

Things I've noticed about the artists that speak out against P2P. They're either stupid or they've already made it. A friend I used to work with was a talented musician as well as a good business man with a working knowledge of contract law. He refused to enter into any contract he considered unfair. Needless to say he didn't make it in the music biz. Would he have made it if he signed? Who knows. Who knows also how many clever ,talented musicians also don't make it because they wanted a fair deal.

But illegally downloading their label-sponsored music does not seem to help expand their options much.

I'd rather work to expand their options.

In that case don't buy from the majors. Downloading music doesn't generate revenue but it helps the smaller guy get noticed. Publicity they would normally have to pay for out of their own pocket. Also www.magnatunes.com seem to give a fair deal.

you are apparently not one of their customers (or at least not a very profitable one, it would seem), so why should they listen to you? More to the point: how can they listen to you?

Because they should want my business? They can listen buy coming down from their corporate ivory towers.

Oh the music industry gets it, alright. Not for a second do they miss the relationship between CD and $0, between DRM'd DVD and $80.....

Early on it became apparent that the DRM and Region locking on DVDs are worthless. Full length DVD images are available on the net as well as album rips. The difference is that the bonus material has been stripped from the DVD images. If you love the film and want the extras then you have to buy the Disc.

Both the music industry and the movie industry want to be sure they have some other fallback to protect themselves besides a horrible bandwidth infrastructure.

they want to make sure broadband rollout does not go as most people would like it to.

Yes that's what's happening. Take a look at who's buying up the ISP. SKY, Time Warner. That's right the media conglomerates. And you can bet it's because they want to control distribution. Lets take a look at upload bandwidth. A few years a go it was 2:1 thats twice as fast down as it was up. Now its 4:1. Upload bandwidth has not increased at all. Download bandwidth on the other hand has quadrupled. Next year the ratio is going to be more like 9:1. You can see where this is going. You can consume but there's no way you can distribute unless you want to tie your net connection up for days. It isn't Joe six pack that's putting his DVD's on the net. P2P is just the end of the supply chain. Choked upload, DRM or even Legal threats is no deterrent for the more determined pirates out there.

My point with the GPL is that all the code is public but companies make their money on the support and services. Sure I could get some d00d out in Iscrapistan

And it's just that easy. > In an ideal world we'd all have OGG-based players with FM tuner, I use an iriver, which both plays OGG and has an FM tuner. > and access to DRM-less music, or at least a universal, compatible format. Check out magnatunes. An online label with no DRM and you can download in pretty much any format you like when you purchase an album. Of course they don't have as much music as any of the popular online music stores as they only have albums from their own artists. But there's some pretty good stuff there anyhow.

"Stop suing your customers."

The paid download market is exploding. Sales are up something like 10X this year over last. The record companies probably think that a carrot and stick method is best. As long as the online music market continues to be wildly successful, it will be tough to dissuade them from continuing to take legal action.

"Stop forcing DRM on customers."

The other side of the coin is that while DRM-laden stores like the iTMS are doing amazing business, the sites that specialize in legal, DRM-free music are just having trouble getting an audience -- or content. We can sit here and say that what the customer really wants is to buy music from Magnatunes or MP3Tunes, but the fact is that they're not doing one hundred of one percent of the iTMS' business. Consumer acceptance of DRM is probably not seen as a big deal by the record companies, given these numbers.

"Sell cheaper, and make up the difference on volume. More people would buy an album for $7.99 than they would at $21.99."

Agreed. And, so do the record companies -- they're way ahead of us. FWIW, I know that $7.99 and $21.99 are just two imaginary numbers you pulled out for the purpose of making a point, but we can't expect $7.99 prices any time soon. Despite the cries of the "I buy CD-Rs for $0.25 so a record company could make money selling CDs at $5.00" geniuses, the realities of the costs of a two-tier distribution system and the expenses of producing CDs won't let that happen.

"Those are the facts. It's a shame the RIAA (and the Canuck equivilent) won't accept them."

This is one of those pot/kettle/black situations -- and I'm not referring specifically to you, but to Slashdotters in general. As I covered above, the phenomenal success of online music resellers like iTMS/Rhapsody/Napster demonstrates that the "add DRM / sue your customers" method is working just fine. We can say that perhaps if Apple hadn't added DRM, or if the record labels hadn't litigated, the online music industry might have grown 1,500% year over year rather than merely 1,000%, but I don't buy that -- particularly in light of the relative failure of the DRM-free MP3 stores.

http://www.emusic.com/

http://www.magnatunes.com/

"Unless you have the artist's permission, I think it's clear that it's wrong. The fact that the music industry is engaged in a greater wrong is not even that much of a mitigating factor. It's up to the artist to choose to involve themselves in civil disobedience against the label system, to accept the consequences of sharing their songs on P2P, whether good or bad. It's not up to you to make that decision for them."

Very well put. To elaborate further, I think he was implicitly asking his students to look inward and ask themselves:

1. Are there times when two wrongs do make a right?
2. Is the golden rule (that is... treat others how you would like to be treated) subjective? If somebody that you don't know would rather that you not violate their rights, does it apply? Does what they do for a living, or how much money they make have an effect on your decision? In other words, was Orwell on to something when his characters in Animal Farm wrote "some are more equal than others?"
3. If somebody makes what you perceive to be an incorrect choice (here, choosing to sign a recording contract rather than giving your work away for free) does this change the way you feel about respecting their rights?
4. Can it be considered "greedy" to download music for free as an alternative to paying for it? Likewise, can it be considered "greedy" to choose to sign a record contract, rather than making your work available for free?
5. The masses have the power and the leverage here. Ultimately there's nothing you can do if somebody wants to violate your rights, so ultimately, all musicians have to truly rely on is the honor system. Do you agree that "might makes right?" How would you answer if you were (a) a high school student who can't afford to buy all the music they want, (b) a musician who relies on royalty payments to pay the rent, (c) an American Indian living during the westward expansion of the 19th century?

"If you don't like the label system, it's far more moral and effective to promote sites like 3hive that hilight independant artists, many of whom are more than happy to let you download complete songs (not just 30 second samples) if there's a chance that'll convince you to buy their CDs. And, heck, it even works."

Agreed. There's also MP3Tunes (you have to pay, but it's high-quality, non-DRM stuff) and Magnatunes (which I believe is payment optional). Plenty of ways to get high quality, low-cost (or free) music from musicians who haven't gone the major label route.

Some people blame diminishing CD sales on unauthorized CD copying; others blame it on technological obsolescence (people buy DVD's instead of CD's now); still others say it's because poor artistic decisions by record labels result in releasing uninteresting music that people don't want to buy. I haven't yet seen a connection made with authorized, freely downloadable music, that people can listen to instead of buying proprietary CD's, just like they can run GNU/Linux instead of buying Windows, Apache instead of IIS, etc. Sure, a lot of mp3.com downloads are crap, but lots of commercial CD's are crap too.

Another really good site, by the way, is Magnatunes. They publish entire CD's under a Creative Commons license and you can download the complete CD's in mp3 format and pass around copies noncommercially. You can also pay to download in FLAC or Ogg Vorbis format, or buy commercial licenses (e.g. if you want to use one of the CD's as a movie soundtrack) through a simple web interface. There is some really excellent music there too.

After being pampered by the likes of Kazaa I decided I wanted to buy a music CD.

I've purchased indie bands online, but I really haven't been in a music "store" for a decade. I quickly found myself in a foreign place.

There were a number of albums for the artist I wanted, while the one I'd specifically decided to buy wasn't in stock.

I decided that maybe I'd buy something else, too, but just as quickly found that *gulp!* there's no way to sample the tunes before you buy!

So, you spend $12-$20 without being able to "kick the tires" and no way to sample the tunes first?

Just rediculous. I'm surrounded by thousands of albums from hundreds of artists, and have no idea what I might be interested in.

I eventually bought a mediocre "Alanis Morrissette unplugged" CD that I really don't appreciate all that much - she sounds bored, without her usual passion and fire.

Preview, then buy? I might very happily do it! Ever see Magna Tunes?

...that commercial outfits are starting to crop up that take advantage of the CC licence's flexibility.

I only hope we'll start seeing more places like this, and they'll rise in popularity.

Sorry, but I'm still not turned on to the idea of online music downloads.

Ever tried getting them for free? Yes, of course it's legal. And, while IMHO the best, it's not even the only way. If you like a band, and you feel like it, just send them a couple of bucks: what you consider they are worth, not more.

I think you're reaching for some reason to justify illegal downloading of music. I have NO sympathy for the greedy "artists" (puh-lease!) who think an RIAA contract is a big score.

If they're any good, they'd make much more $$ by submitting their music to places like Magnatunes, where they get 50% of each album sale.

It'll burst when someone creates a non-RIAA internet radio station / distribution hub.

Do you mean like this?

Take a look at Magnatune. Albums for $5, no DRM, listen before you buy, and most important (to me anyhow) 50% of all sales go directly to the artist. I generally buy albums at $8+ (albums are actually $5-$18 but you choose what to pay) because the artist gets 50% and I only buy albums that I like a lot.

Going digital to analog and back might not give you the quality you expect. This, of course, is what the makers of DRM want to force on you. Distribute in crummy and lossy formats that don't copy perfectly. It's a perversion of available technology.

You mean going from digital to digital and back.

It's enough to appease the record industy because they can tighten the screws later. They first have to move people to crappy formats and make them think they are gaining something before they take it all away.

And if they tighten the screws later you can stop buying the label's music and start buying independent music with the same old non-DRM that you're used to.

Nonsense. People are already providing music that's more reasonable. DRM is unreasonable because no one asked for it and it breaks. The artists themselves are rebelling.

Really? So I guess the 150 people from the indy record labels were just there for punch and pie.

Would you please provide me one good reason not to use free software? All of the above is circular - use it because you must. I've yet to see any advantages of DRM and encumbering new technology with 100 year old limits and more.

Let's see. It appeases the gate keepers while everyone figures out a better way of doing things? I know everyone loves to plug the caring and sharing underdog but the fact is the major labels hold the people and the expertise that makes music sell and they also have the huge back catalogues that the people want to buy.

reasonable licensing too

Now if they radically opened up the distribution to bypass the majors... now that would be rather revolutionary...

-No DRM. MP3
-Try before you buy
-Artists get 50% of the purchase price, artists keep the rights to their music.
-No RIAA connections.

if you are good, why not see if these guys will sign you.

you get 50% of sales.

If, like me, you think this sucks and want to cancel your subscription go here before November 8, 2003.

I'm going to sign up and cancel... just to show them that I think it sucks. :) Guess have will have to just stick to Magnatune for now and hope they draw more artists. I must say though... the music-to-noise ratio there is pretty good.