Embedding Ads In MP3s?

icqqm writes: "According to this Wired article, a company called Digital Payloads is planning to embed small ads into MP3 files to generate revenue for the record labels. The advertisers would pay a one-time fee (since MP3s can't be tracked) and then the file would be relased to be Napster-ized, etc. The company is betting that people would rather listen to ths small ad than go through the trouble of having to remove it." OK conceptually this isn't necessarily a bad idea, but it would take about one hour before software existed to automatically strip it out: and open source gnapster clients would simply add a plugin interface to offer post download filtering before playing... which would strip the ads. I want a way to make MP3s kosher, but this ain't it.

Comments

One perspective

[Chris Johnson]

*points to URL link* that is mp3 music. It is mine, copyright to me, and I get to do what I want with it. I choose to give it away because I see mp3 as one big radio- and in fact according to David Boies there's no such thing as an illegally copied mp3 so long as nobody's paying money for it.

That said: I know who my competition is. It's the same major labels that have brainwashed generations into thinking that only majorlabel-signed acts are worth hearing, even though this is less and less plausible every year. As an indie musician (btw- buy one of my CDs for $5.99? Please? :) ), my mp3s compete against the 'unauthorised' mp3s of major label acts distributed through services like Napster.

If the major labels want to make their products more unpleasant through building ads into the mp3s or other annoying practices, I say great, go right ahead and do it. If they can magically replace _all_ the existing majorlabel mp3s (hah!) with ad-laden ones, woohoo, go ahead and do it! I am delighted to observe any method by which the music biz can destroy itself through arrogance and greed. I would love to be known as 'one of those people who makes mp3s which DON'T have annoying ads on them'.

Because here's the secret- the majors don't have a lock on worthwhile music. They don't even have a lock on well-produced, expensive sounding music- you just have to be enough of an audiophile geek to know how to make things sound right. I rejoice and dance about chortling smugly at every sign that the biz is going to leverage their supposed lock on all good music by building ads into the mp3s, or making their music SDMI-only, or making the CDs unrippable (and unreliable). They are only hamstringing themselves and doing great damage to the quality of their product, thinking that nobody can replace them. And today, you don't need to have the same kind of distribution networks to replace them... the rules have changed...

(do please go listen to some tunes of mine at the URL given above- they're free and they're up there to be heard, and there will be more and more of them)

If the music industry wants to harness MP3's...

[tcd004]

here's what they need to do.

Forget the ads.

Develop their own napster-like system, which is 200X better than the current one:

More reliable servers
better search mechanism
wider selection
etc...

Then advertise on the website and in the client software, as seen in Apple's Sherlock.

Think of the targeted ads you could develop. "Do you like the Beatles track you just downloaded. Buy it now by clicking here!"

The problem is they're too stuck in the old ways to consider this solution.

tcd004

An idea I had that might work better...

[sterno]

Rather than having an ad recorded that people have to sit through, I had a thought that might work a whole lot better. Have a plug-in for WinAmp, XMMS, etc, that would integrate with a modified MP3 format. The modified MP3 format would require the plugin to work.

Now, what the modification does is put a little "buy me" button on the player. When you are listening to a song, you are offered a chance to send a little money to the artist who made it. You don't HAVE to send the money, but basically you make it such a small amount that people won't mind sending it. Then you just have the system bill your credit card.

I've noticed that PayPal allows increments as small as 1 cent to be charged, so I had the thought of using Paypal somehow as the charging system. Basically it would allow a small band to start distributing, getting some money back, and would require no significant infrastructure to process.

If you wanted to take it a step further, you could provide a way for the people to buy a related CD, T-Shirt, etc. Or maybe have a contest where if you chipped in your money your name would be entered to win something cool. A personal performance of the band maybe, or autographed band items.

The trick to all this is to insure that the system is neither intrusive nor restricting. Requiring a plugin is no big deal as long as the effort to install a plugin is more effort than it is to reverse engineer it away. Asking for payment, but not being intrusive about it, insures that nobody has an incentive to break your system.

Sure, with such a system nobody is guaranteed to get a dime, but I think most people would honestly be happy to send 50 cents to an artist if they liked the song. If you get your music distributed broadly enough, the 50 cents can add up quickly.

By the way, if you want to make such a system, go right ahead. My idea is now out there in the public pool of ideas for you to use as you see fit. In fact, I beg of you to make such a system because I think artists should get money, but I want it to be easy for them to get it direct from consumers without a bunch of money glutton corporations in the middle.

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