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My.MP3.Com's New Useless Status
Masem writes "The NYTimes is reporting that MP3.com will reopen the My.mp3.com program today, but with changes reflected by their recent court battles with RIAA groups. Namely, the service will now cost $45/yr, though you still can only listen to songs that you own. However, they plan to offer an ad-based service that allows up to 25 CDs stored for free. To prevent borrowing of CDs, you'll have to reinsert CDs at random and periodic intervals to prove ownership. Given that Napster may be going to a $5/mnth for unlimited use, it seems that my.mp3.com in this new format will become obsolete. Additionally, I wonder about being double-charged for the same CD; if you've already got the CD, you should already have free access to the mp3 of it, since you lose content (mind you, only at the extreme frequencies) and therefore there's no value added." This doesn't look good.
Not true. Check out First Sale Doctrine and standard contract law. Now I would agree that the record companies probably do not want us to have any kind of ownership in exchange for our money -- and some of their wishes, such as "no commercial rental of music without permission", are law. But they have not managed to abolish ownership and private property just yet.
so the people we have all heard of make the best music? you must be a britney spears and n'sync fan you moron.
See? This is the result of people stealing music by the gig using Napster, Scour, and other methods (WWW, etc).
"But I only used Napster to get unreleased or indie music!"
Doesn't matter; your actions don't make up for the millions of thieves who ruined MP3 for everyone. I bet if you MP3 thieves hadn't turned the file format into a facade about "freedom" (when it was really an excuse to be cheap and not pay what you rightfully owed), my.mp3.com could have survived, even been supported without much trouble, by the music labels (you know, the companies that help produce and distribute that music you love to steal?)
You can thank Shawn Fanning and almost every thief on Napster for the end of a great service. When SDMI becomes the standard, and it becomes far too complicated for Joe User to bring his music outside of home in non-disc-based form, you'll have no one to blame but yourselves.
And take it with you where you go. Storage space is cheap, cdparanoia and LAME are free. XMMS is free. Winamp is FREE. OpenNAP is free.
my.mp3.com is never going to work and they know it. Of course there will be "individuals" with more money than knowledge who will pay for this, but there won't be enough to really keep it alive, I don't think.
blah. GNUtella would probably work nicely if more people shared files. Leeching is just that - sucking the life out of something and giving nothing in return. write a good gnutella client (so that people would use it) that mandated sharing files, and there would probably be a notable increase in the health of the network.
I dunno.
The beauty of my.mp3.com was that you didn't have to take the time or bandwidth to upload your CDs. I spent about 4 hours running ~120 CDs through BeamIt, had about a 75% hit rate, and was done.
Myplay.com and a couple other sites which let you upload mp3s all do it per track which is pretty gruelling.
I think I would pay $50/year to have the same my.mp3.com service I had before the RIAA shutdown. This reinserting CD thing could be a deal breaker but it really depends on how they implement it. If I'm at work and suddenly I can't use the site at all because I don't have my CDs here, it's worthless to me. I think my limit is once a week, *at my convenience*, to insert the CD of their choice.
I'm disturbed about the direct marketing aspects but again the details will matter.
I'm wondering where this download vs. stream rumor came from. At the moment I'm listening to my shuffled "Women" playlist at my.mp3.com and it's streaming just like it was before the RIAA shutdown (I also haven't paid and don't see anything about paying on the site yet).
I agree with your first two points, but not this third one. I had around 150 CDs beamed to my.mp3.com before it was originally shut down and they were all my own and all very legal. Re-inserting these CDs would be a royal pain for me for several reasons:
That's OK though, because after my.mp3.com got shut down I started using mp3.com to find indie music and I started converting my existing CD collection to mp3s using Grip. I also picked up an MPTrip which lets you listen to CD-Rs with MP3s on them! Grip and MPTrip are taking the place of my.mp3.com for me (but I still use mp3.com because there is a lot of good indie music on there).
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
All of the CD's that I added to my.mp3.com have vanished. This whole time they've been there, but locked. Now I don't see them. Anybody else see this, or know whether it's temporary? It wasn't very many CDs, but I don't can't arsed to re-add them.
I definately don't want any of my money to go to the RIAA for their stupid causes..
and I don't want to be charged twice for my cd... screw that... we already pay enough for CD's as it is and hardly any of that money goes to the artist..
Not using napster or my.mp3.com after this goes online.
my $cents = 2;
ChiefArcher
Obviously, this is completely useless. Why would I ever pay $45 to listen to stuff I already *bought*? No way, that's 3-4 more CDs worth of new stuff. Not to mention the annoying "insert random CD" stuff -- my time is worth too much to me (and to my wife ) for me to be jerked around with ca-ca like that.
Any utility this service had is *gone*. I hope it goes flat on it's face, because it will show the RIAA that it's not going to break into online music if it doesn't learn to "get it".
Unfortunately, this will probably be pointed to as an example of how the poor RIAA is being so screwed by hackers that they can't make any money -- "look, we *tried* to sell them music, but they keep stealing it and not paying us".
Oh well... online music will happen whether they want it or not. Too many geeks dig tunes.
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
Yeah, and my "guaranteed" 384/384 both way SDSL connection can barely stream 128k MP3s during the daytime. Thanks Verizon!
No, it's true 384/384 (I pay for it too). The problem seems to be on Verizon's side of things. It's a business account, so it's supposed to be a guarantee, but my ISP says Verizon has been screwing around a bit with things.
In any event, things are working good this week, and it always works during the night time. Just usual day traffic that's the problem.
From my experiences with representatives of major record labels? -- YES, it's VERY accurate! ;)
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seumas.com
-j
I forget what 8 was for.
In fact, that's all that matters. Ask any musician. Or software developers. Better yet, ask that hot marketing bunny down the cube farm.
Spending money to "prime the pipe", then putting the bait in lots of easy-to-reach locations is all this battle is about.
If the vested interests had any idea what to do with MP3+internet, there would be no issue. People would flock to the solution like a... well, like a flock of napster users.
Lawyers are going to determine the landscape for music sharing, based on weird analogies from 1814 case law about cattle jumping onto someone else's land. The rest of us are going to do what we have been: running internal MP3 servers (with my entire collection, about 400 CDs, plus contributions totalling about 700 more) that nobody seems to get upset about.
Go figure. Economics 101, anyone?
-j
I forget what 8 was for.
Basically, I agree. You agree. We all agree. No discussion is going on.
-j
I forget what 8 was for.
Think about it. This isn't terribly complicated.
-j
I forget what 8 was for.
-j
I forget what 8 was for.
THen you should remember to scream at the theives who abused the service. Maybe you were using it for legitimate purposes, but the problem is that others weren't.
Capitalism is dead. The new capitalism is corporatism. It doesn't matter whether you provide value to your customers as long as you provide value to your shareholders.
Bite the hand.
Bah. mp3.com is trying to drive themselves out of business. Surely they have the option of dropping the my.mp3.com service altogether, and could get back to focusing on their original purpose: selling CDs.
Or maybe they have a few terabytes of storage sitting around and have nothing better to do with it...
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
That's what mp3.com was, before they started their my.mp3.com crap.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Get yourself a high speed connection (DSL/Cable) and setup your own webserver. Wherever I go, I have access to all 60gigs of my high quality MP3s (thanks LAME). I even put them in tarballs by album for ease of downloading.
F.O. Dobbs
Portal-Potty.com founder and Mr. Brown drinker.
There is no way that either Napster or MP3.com will survive if they begin charging for what is, essentially, a free service. There is no basis for charging access to a service that merely provides you access to your own music. Bandwidth limitations on the net today are too slow to make this worthwhile. Sure, I'll put all my cds online for 45 bucks and then, when I want access to one not only do I need to reinsert the CD (what the hell, might as well listen to the CD) but I'm going to need to wait 45 minutes for the tracks to download. Sure, mp3s are small, but they're not THAT small.
I just don't feel that these services are going to be worth the money that will be charged, and for that reason I feel that all of these payperplay ideas are going to flop and flop quickly. Say goodbye to Napster, if they start charging they will die.
Lets hope everyone looks into advertising because that's the only way this will work.
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RumorsDaily
You should patent this process while you still can, then you can charge royalties when anyone does it. We already know the patent office goes for this kind of stuff as long as we word it correctly so now is your chance.
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now what I am curious about, is if napster charges $5 dollars a month, and 100,000,000 people decide not to use it anymore, how are they going to live up to their paying customers expectations? Are they going to run mp3 servers of their own? You know once they start charging their wont be near the amount of variety thats on there now when all the people leave and noone is going to pay for 10 songs amongst three people. just a thought
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|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
b0z, recompile with the -DDETECT_SARCASM option.
Too true. In fact, I've tried suggesting a new motto to Napster: "That's Not Phish" Sadly, they've yet to come to their senses and adopt it.
. Many major label artist's tours end up losing money.
This is because they are subsidized by album sales and spend too much money telling people that they like the music. It is more than possible to make money on tour, but not if you use it as a big commercial to sell CDs.
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+&x
You know, if a business model sucks, then it won't generate revenue. Napster, at $5, is still an incredible bargain. I mean, we expected that the napster folks would have to generate a revenue stream at some point. So like, we deal.
My question is, will Napster continue to have artists OTHER than BMG signed groups?
Dirk
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
Services like MyPlay already provide up to 3GB of space with a decent connection rate. They're supported by ad banners, but I wonder what they'll switch to once they realize that there's very little money to be made that way. In any event, it'll cost you a LOT more than about $3/month to find a service that will host your CD's and be able to play them with at least 128kbps speed. You'd be better off getting DSL service and streaming them from your own hard drive.
For more information, click here.
At least if MP3s take 45 minutes to download, the time they're playing for is vastly extended. Assuming you like juddering, glitchy music, you'll be getting better value for money.
IIRC, there was a Linux version of the CD scanning program. In fact, it was in source form except for the 31337 encryption part.
I don't know if MP3.com has a workable business model or not, but I don't see a reason to assume that they would adopt a suicidal business model.
Suicide or murder at the hands at the RIAA, it's all the same result. They "decided" to implement a bad service model, regardless of how long a grace period they have for verification. I don't see how it can be made workable, but that's something they have to explain to their investors, not their customers (and I am neither).
BeOS does all of what you require and a bag of chips. Go to the audio/video section of www.betips.net to found out more. For examples of real-life implementations, check out www.betips.net/mp3box.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
To be honest, my.m3.com has always been a silly proposition. I'm sittng at home, and, assuming I have a broadband connection, I have the choice of listening to mp3 versions of my own CD collection, or I can just pop those same CD's into the player and listen to the real thing? Or, because I have a broadband connection (and listening to mp3's on a 56K connection is certainly not viable to any but the desperate or the terminally fixated with technology), I can listen to HUGE mp3 collections over Shoutcast or similar (Internet radio) systems, and for FREE. Further, it isn't difficult to create mp3's - I know a 12 year old girl who manages it quite easily - and, for the mp3 audioholic, creating them is part of the pleasure. Or trading them on CD compilations, or downloading them off Napster/IRC.
To be fair, I might be sitting at a workplace lucky enough to have a broadband connection, and a very tolerant boss, and listen to my mp3 collection, and that would be nice. But then I would have to have my entire fucking CD collection at work, which would cancel that convenience. I might be at a friend's house (who happens to have a broadband connection), but the inconvenience of carting my CD collection to that friend's house eliminates the "cool" factor of listening to them off of my.m3.com.
Storage space isn't an issue any more, either. CDR-W's are cheap, as are second HD's (I just bought a 40GB Maxtor for $174). If you can afford an expensive PC and a broadband connection, then you can generally afford the CDR-W or the extra HD.
Who does that leave to consist of the my.mp3.com consumer legions?
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
These double-standard, back-stabbing, money-grubbing assholes make Hitler, Satan and Jerry Falwell look like swell guys.
I do understand hyperbole, but isn't this comparison ridiculous?
RIAA Officer: "I have come to confiscate and incinerate your DVD collection."
Nazi Officer: "I have come to arrest, torture, and incinerate your parents and children."
Are they really comparable?
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
That's not correct. A typical MPEG-1 level III encoding loses 90% of the content, or more. The good thing is that you probably didn't know it was there in the first place (perceptual encoding, says Bullwinkle). This happens over all frequencies. The notion that it happens only at say, 16 kHz or above, was peculiar to one or two early enconders that saved CPU time at the expense of just throwing away everything above 16 kHz.
Well, once Napster is forced into 'compliance' by the RIAA and the courts, it will be a simple matter for the RIAA to shutdown all the OpenNap and other Napter clones, who have no money to hire lawyers, and would have a tough time winning the case anyway, considering the precendent set by the Napster case itself. So basically, they'll ALL go away. Or at least go underground, like warez sites.
Personally, I'd pay a lot more than $3 a month to not have to drag all my CDs to work.
uhrm, that's the point everybody's trying to make. if they ask you to re-insert the CD at (potentially) "random" intervals, you will have to bring your CDs to work just incase the "verification" decides to check you while you're a work!
of course in typical slashdot style everybody is assuming that the system will check for a legitimate CD at random intervals when we don't actually know this. but what do i care? i listen to vinyl.
- j
If you want mp3's of a CD you own, then download LAME and GRIP and make them yourself! It ain't hard. :)
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That's what paytheartist.com is going to be for.
-Legion
Every owner of every store wants people to visit. The more people who visit the more the owner will sell. It's just that easy. Provide a service and customers will come, and they will come back as long as some senseless bean counter like you does not annoy them away.
The new service is a non service, as everyone here has pointed out, because it requires you to haul around your CDs anyway. myMP3.com has been fuckedcompany.com for a while, soon is will be nocompany.com. Remember the story about the goose that laid the golden egg? She was killed by some fool like you.
Personally, I pay a lot more than $3/month for my bandwith. I'll be happier when ATT@home decides to let people set up servers so that I can share my own music with myself. I'm not going to count on greed heads like you to do it for me, nor would I pay you a dime to let you try.
You just don't get it. Music trading has gone on for as long as people have been making recordings. If it were not for such individual promotion, music sales would plummet. How many CD's can people really share? Let me rephrase that so a greed head like you can understand. How many CD's are you going to spend time putting on the net or coppying for your friends? That's what I thought.
Here's your gold star for Corporate Stooge class. It should make you feel better for all the bad grades you must have gotten in school.
Unlike you, I can see why people would want to use such a service, and why people own CD's. It would be nice to have my entire collection of CD's available at work because most of it is not Free. It would also be nice to be able to organize them into groups of like music and have the server randomly sellect tracks from the groups, the way I listen to music on my cheap 7 disk changer at home. I can also see how this could be more efficeint if only one copy of a track could be used to serve many legal owners, and how this service might engender the public good will that would allow you to outsell your greedier rivals.
Also, I'm worried about who now owns all of that great independent music? Who gets paid when I acutally buy a CD? Yes, I buy their CD's as often as I buy music elsewhere. I don't have net access everywhere, and I like the artifact almost as much as the music. It also feels good to give money to people who were providing a real service. $8/cd, $4 to artist, $4 to MP3, I thought. Not a bad split and much much better than $20/cd, $0.05 to musician, less to cover artists etc and other creators of content, the rest to promoters, payolla, radio stations, advertisers, packagers, truckers, and the whole rest of the commercial food chain right down to some infinetesimal amount that goes to the now obsolete sales clerk in a record museum, all designed to restrict my choices and ram crap down my throat. I'm sure you will be bothered if it turns out that Gretchen et al will cease to be rewarded for their work the way MP3 sought to reward them and they thought they would be rewarded.
Thank you. I've heard about LAME before, but now it's bookmarked for when I get time to do something about it!
Sure that would work, EXCEPT that it still asks you to put in the cd at random intervals. This would mean that you can't listen to it unless you are at the physical location that your cds are. This makes it pretty much useless. You might as well carry the cds with you. Rom
How come all the mp3.com files sound so bad? do they re-mangle everything to add their tags? even if I were listening to riaa's pop music I wouldn't want anyone "licensing" me poor quality mp3s. oh, and hail lame
since you lose content (mind you, only at the extreme frequencies)
At the risk of picking nits, you lose sound quality across the entire spectrum with MP3s. For a project I was working on, I had to conduct tests comparing the sound quality of MP3 and CD Audio. In all but the rarest circumstances, the sound quality of MP3s was noticably worse than the originals. The only times that the sound quality wasn't worse were when the original recording was not of top quality, such as the live recording of a concert.
The tests we conducted showed sound degredation not only in spectral analysis type tests, but also in the human perception of the audio files. Though the sound quality of MP3s is still high enough to be acceptable for everyday use.
Scott
EventNation.com - Find, post, and discuss upcoming events of all kinds.
Because.. maybe my sound skill's aren't there.. I don't know how to do it so 45 bucks ISN'T a big issue
UPS Sucks
You don't even need to log onto the web, it's that easy! Just follow these three easy steps:
It's really that easy. You don't even have to pay me for using it, 'cause I'm such a nice guy.
But is the reasons for the service fee, besides being used for service maintainance (web servers, bandwidth,etc), because of fees being paid to the record companies?
If the 1,000,000 email succeeds in getting the legislation past, will the price be reduced?
I do not look forward to having to pay twice to listen to the same thing. Now if they perhaps reduce the price to a $9.95, $19.95 or $29.95 a year charge...maybe. I guess this is also to may the lawyers as well.
BreezyGuy
Eric B
ebresie@gmail.com
I don't know if MP3.com has a workable business model or not, but I don't see a reason to assume that they would adopt a suicidal business model.
I am actually listening to my songs on my.mp3.com right now! They are thinking of doing several things (depends on what article you read). One is that you can have 50 songs for free, unlimited for $50. I'm certainly not going to pay twice for my own music. If they want me to pay to play, I'll just delete off my stuff and make mp3 cds. Another thing might be to play audio ads between songs on the free service. Thats not too terrible, but would be annoying (and it won't take long for someone to come up with a winamp plugin that just plays every other song).
MP3.com: Your music collection has expired. Please re-insert CD 1 of 2046.
In a few years, this service won't be that special anyway. We'll all be carrying pager-sized MP3 players that hold 20 hours of music. And we'll all have high-speed connections that let us stream our music ourselves. (Okay, maybe a little bit more than a few years.)
They're discriminating against those of us without CD-ROM drives.
'Please insert CD "Spank Me, I Deserve it" '
Insert into where? It doesn't seem to fit in this floppy drive thing. Maybe if I stuff it between my drive bay covers that will be good enough. Damn you my.mp3.com! I've scratched another perfectly good CD!
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
I'm with you. Some good stuff in amongst the static. Outside the Box
Mambo dogface in the banana patch
These restrictions are arbitrary, needless, and will probably eventually run mp3.com out of business. Since they already have a rip of my CDs, it's not like they're using a log of server space to record that I have 25, 100, or even 10,000 of them. A simple database insert will record everything necessary.
The other restriction of periodically proving your ownership makes it even more useless since you lose all the portability of mp3s. Might as well use Napster or myplay.
Check out my mix.
- You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!
I heard once that under canadian law napster is considered legal. The thing is that our copyright law aready specifys that a person can copy and distribute any copyrighted material that they have paid for as long as its for personal use and as long as they aren't making money, the scale doesn't manager. It was created back when people were moving from tapes to cds. And allows people to copy their cds to tape for use in the car and walkmens, when it was unrealistic to expect people to purchase expense discmen.
If you can't fix it ask the 3 year old down the street.
From a filesystem point of view, you're perfectly correct. If building an inefficient filesystem or network protocol was a chargeable offence, you'd have a case against mp3.com if they did it the hard way.
In fact, if my.mp3.com had actually used something like rsync instead of clearly just streaming a copy they already had, they might have actually had a solid defence against the RIAA. Also, in that case, they would have allowed customers to send up any CD at all. They needed to construct the system so that the lack of licenses was a feature, not a problem, and so that if two people send up the same file, the system automatically takes advantage of this, without the knowledge or intervention of the system owner on a file-by-file basis.
The problem is that all of this is irrelevant in this particular case. mp3.com's problem started when they bought thousands of CDs and made copies which they sent to other people without having purchased a license for that purpose.
The difference is entirely legal. It's so "legal" that mp3.com might have been better off to run it the inefficient way, and get their customers to complain to Congress about the legal silliness. This would have potentially forced the RIAA to defend the oddities of copyright to Congress. Congress certainly pays attention to the corporate elites, but they also pay attention to thousands of people complaining about legal silliness, because corporations don't vote!
There's just no way that I'm going to pay good money to listen to my own CDs on those terms.
But you're not listening to your own CDs - you're listening to my.mp3.com's CDs, and that makes all the difference. If MP3.COM had provided a solution that had every user rip and encode the tracks on their machine, and then send the resulting MP3 to a my.mp3.com locker, they wouldn't have been hammered in court.
Hunt down a provider that uses that method, and you'll have all the good features back again. Just to be safe, I'd prefer a service that lets me do some simple encryption before uploading, so that I can ensure they can't actually look at the content. They can ensure that only one stream is generated per locker at any given time. Then I can stream the results down to me, and listen almost anywhere.
I use my.mp3.com as basicaly a portable playlist that I can use to play my favorite classical music whenever I am sitting next to a computer that has broadband and speakers (which means almost anyplace now days) I also frequent the independent artists on mp3.com on a daily basis (remember, thats what mp3.com was orignaly for?) and quite frankly, I have NO problem with them taking actions to ban illegal uses of music, though I do agree that having to insert the CD makes it pretty useless as a portable storage system. But then again, can't you just use any other remote file server for those purposes? Or heck, even take the CD with you? (Its called a -COMPACT- disc for a reason!)
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Quite right. It's not that hard to stream MP3s. I've got my entire Marilyn Manson collection MP3'd so that I don't have to change cd's all the time. All I have to do is move them into ~/public_html and I'll be able to get them from anywhere using Winamp or XMMS. (Oh, I'm on a T3... kinda helps I guess)
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Desperation is a stinky cologne
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Lame argument. Do what I did with my collection of VHS tapes when DVD came out - sell them. I ebay'ed the majority of my VHS collection, and at *least* broke even. For example, I sold my Die Hard VHS Trilogy for over $30, when I bought the DVDs for less at CompUSA the day before.
Not everyone adopts technology at the same time. People still buy vinyl, cassettes, Super Nintendo games, etc. There is a market for older media formats.
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I hope whoever was making money at mp3.com has already extracted it from the morass. This biz is going nowhere. Talk about a business model that's DOA! The RIAA definitely wanted this to happen. They will sit back and laugh with glee. Not only will they have put mp3.com out of business, they will have gotten paid a settlement/licensing fee to boot! LOL!
Wow, its amazing how we become delusioned by the feeling that everything on the Internet should be free... I'm sorry, but I haven't read one post where someone seems to realize that this setup is subsidizing MP3.com's providing you of this service... You are asking a company to provide you a significant amount of space and bandwith (yes, I am aware that there is one collection of mp3's, but you get the idea), and then expect this to be free... Get over it, in this Internet economy, companies just can't afford to do that anymore... I think we will see a lot more of this type of stuff in the near future... Yes, there are some annoying features, like having to insert cd's at random intervals which I'm not too excited about... But I am glad to have my accesss back, and if you read the press release on MP3.com, you will see that you get to keep all your existing uploaded cd's without them counting against your new addition of 25 for the free (ad supported) service, or 500 for the pay service... Just my two cents, Josh
I still don't see how this could be viable. Given the low cost of storage space, particularly versus bandwidth, why would someone need to have their music streamed to them? It obviously requires a computer so if you are traveling with your laptop so it should be much simpler to load your HD with whatever you wanted before you left home. There would be no need to dial up anything, you could listen to it on a plane, no service outages, etc.
Unless they have something else up their sleeve we'll probably be seeing them on dotcomfailures.
Icebox
Do you have any more info on this? ;)
It would be cool to print a bill like that and show it to the people who complain to me that making cds out of mp3s is illegal.
The merits of this idea are neither here nor there; what about faking it to trick the service into thinking you have the CD? There are plenty of ways to cheat when your machine is trusted to be honest--online gaming, alternate ICQ clients that don't really "ask" for a user's permission to add them to your contact list, etc. How long is it going to be before you can easily download a simple program that fakes a CD-ROM drive (those already exist) as well as the signature of a particular CD so you can access its MP3s? Or does such a beast already exist?
"I say consider this day seized!" -Hobbes
"Tomorrow we'll seize the day and throttle it!" -Calvin
With my.MP3.com, you do have to buy the cd. That's the whole point. It's a service that allows you to listen to the cds you own anywhere... at work, for example. Except the new rules seem to make the service pretty pointless.
Josh Sisk
I do have to say, it makes sense that they would make you insert the cd every once in a while. Otherwise, everyone would just sell all their cds to other people (or used cd stores) and just listen to them via MP3.com... Or at least that's what the record companies think would happen. They should make the reinsertion a regular thing, though... Say, six months after adding a cd you have to "renew" it. Not that I care, since I don't use this service anyway.
Josh Sisk
With the ability to rip your own CDs and store the mp3s at http://myplay.winamp.com, I can see that this one is bound for fuckedcompany.com
"Straddling the sword of technology..."
Like allways, the lawyer`s are trying to shape the world as they seem fit. The end result will be a technology battle which will "seek out new life and civilisations" beyond the laws of those who create them, time and time again. I`m not exactly sure if that`s a bad thing. New applications and devices like the Creative or Rio mp3 players will continue to defy whatever lawfull rulings people can try to constrain evolution.
But in the end, I hope even those judges will think about their lawsystem which now enhances the juridical differences between realworld appliances (you can copy your own) and online appliances(you can`t copy, or you got to proove it), however indirect the consequences may be of their court decissions. As long as new media will be available that enables the masses to copy and transfer, the future has no choice but to open up laws and constraints towards other similar appliances as well. And if we should be disallowed to copy, the world stops turning, or 80% of it is turning into a criminal. They don`t really have a choice, they just don`t realise it yet.. Too bad my.mp3.com takes the first hit of the battle.
So while on the one hand, I don`t like what judges come up with when they keep trying to make their ancient copyright system work, on the other hand it won`t matter anyway, since evolution will find a natural way out eventually. We just got to stay smart and search for new opportunties and applications.. imho it`ll take some more time, yes, but we can`t loose this one..
Moments like this make you think if the juridical copryright system is not inherently flawed again.. Stephen King tried to explore new possibilities, but his case is special. I wonder if the new generations can be as open to these new ways of running a society with new laws: shared responsibility and self regulation. You pay for something you don`t explicitly _have_ to pay for ( but if you don`t pay chances are higher that you`ll never be able to read a book of him again ).. it`s a nice concept, but it`s still too early to really tell if it`ll ever work or not... The same probably goes for musical art & content.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
If there were no value added, there would be no reason to use my.mp3.com, even if it were free. You're not paying for the right to listen to your music. You're paying MP3.com for the service of streaming your music to you. If you don't like it, bring the CD with you. Just because you bought the music doesn't mean that companies should be falling all over themselves to make it easy for you to listen to it whenever and wherever you want.
This would hold if you didn`t have to bring along cd`s to proove you`re really really really listening to our own music.. That practical quirk renders this model totally useless. Sure, it might be streaming, but who needs streaming if they have to carry a set of cd`s with them anyway. Kind of defy`s the original concept of my.mp3.com, doesn`t it. Besides, 25 cd`s online is not THAT much of a deal, I`ll take my Creative portablee instead. So yes, added value, but added impractical cost too.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
With my DSL line I can stream my music to myself.
Nathan
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
The whole .com "phenom" is puttering out because people are very cautious as to when they pull out their wallet. Does my.mp3.com think that these same people will pay $45 a year (or even 5 cents) to listen to music they have already purchased???
Like I am going to purchase a CD for $15 and then pay another dollar or so for the priviledge of listening to it.....NOT
sog
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I use Napster, and OpenNap, and I've NEVER gotten the wrong song. Why is this? Because I do 3 things to ensure that.
1) I predefine the bitrate I want
2) I compare the size of the song I'm gonna download to that of other songs (fakes have different sizes)
3) I start playing the song 1/10th of the way through and see if it's what I want.
And I am a modem user too...
Careful: I know how to MetaMod!
SIG: HUP
So every time I burn a copy of myself singing or playing, I'm paying a levy to the recording industry. Every time I back up my files, I'm paying them. Every time a CD I buy has errors and has to be thrown away, I can at least feel good knowing I was able to donate to the recording industry. That's one reason to be glad I don't live in Canada.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
If individuals wanted to pay for their music a lot (of course not all) would be doing this. People want it convenient, and free. File sharing services such as Newtella that require no central server will easily replace these forms of media. http://www.snowboarding2.com
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
before, napster wasn't MAKING MONEY off of pirated music .. now they will be. making that much easier for the RIAA to put em out of business. oh woe is me we need a Gnutella that works :(
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
i could live a little longer in this prison
are we willing to trade personal freedom for economic prosperity? that's not a rhetorical question, either.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
i could live a little longer in this prison
Good point. I couldn't imagine I'm the only one in the world who does this, but I enjoy owning the CD rather than a bunch of MP3's on my hard drive. What I like to do is listen to the MP3's from wherever I get them and then IF I like the CD, I'll buy it... otherwise, I'll just make room on my hard drive for good music.
I didn't know that capitalism meant greed and extortion.
Capitalism: using men's greed to better the economy and the products and services they offer. Plain and simple.
there are corrupt capitalists just as there are corrupt socialists, but fundamentally, they view the human spirit in two different ways.
you are making the connection between being a good capitalist and being an ethical person. That connection is not necessary.
Get some discussion going on Michael's latest "Minute" discussion at:
9 &m onth=200011
http://msg.mp3.com/news/liststory/?topic_id=149
I just gave him a piece of my mind there at the bottom...
Robert aka
fun_merlin
"please could you stop the noise im tryin a get some REST? from all the unbornchikkenVoicesin my head?"
bm :)-~
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
With all of this talk about Napster charging $5 a mo. for service, and now this my.mp3.com deal, how will any of this affect the use of say gnapster and open-nap servers? Are the open-nap servers linked at all with this Napster deal? If not then do they think this will really stop people from trading music for free? Sure it may slow down temporarily, but how long will it take the mainstream to find out about napigator and switch to these other servers?
This article is almost as scathing and pessimistic as " Sony's Latest VAIO Looks Like Barf ."
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
This latest strategy of mp3.com is going to fall flat and hard. Very few people are going to want to pay for a service which allows them to listen to music that they already paid for. That would be like having to pay to listen to a radio. I loved the my.mp3.com server when it was free, but I doubt that business model will work until online advertising starts pulling in real money, on par with radio and TV advertising.
An idea for adding value: I pay a fee, and I get to not only listen to my own music, but the music from other people as well. This would be a Napster type of thing, expect that is would be client server instead of p2p.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
You've been suckered.
First we give you something for free. Then we make some legal foo-foo stink. Then we charge you money for it.
Bait and switch, you've been had - pffht!
with the high increase of broadband this should not be an issue now a days. /server irc.foobar.com /j #somemp3leech /ctcp #somemp3leech xdcc list
=)
I still get 70% of all my mp3;s from IRC =) trust I say die napster die my.mp3.com die guntella and all other lame services.
- I came I saw I Conquered
I see this all heading towards there being large collections of music that you can subscribe to, probably the big label's libraries, competing for subscriptions. ten bucks a month or whatever, and artists get payed for the popularity of their respective downloads. The labels will pay for the music so they keep popular interest. kinda bad if you don't like pop music though.
With Napster you never know what the hell you're getting. A modem user is not going to want to pay money for a service where you don't know if you're getting a high-quality recording or someone's idea of a joke.
Why in the world would I want to use this service if I have to re-verify my CD's? That implies that I have to carry my CD's around to be ready to put them in the machine when My.MP3.COM asks for them again. The whole point of My.MP3.COM is that you don't have to carry around CDs that you own. Looks like they wasted all of that money on those lawsuit settlements...
Just wait till the time that the $500,000 dollar house you just bought really belongs to the architect. The way things are getting .. it *could* Happen :)
... This whole issue sucks anyways
...
The suit you bought belongs to the designer. You will have to sign a EULA at the store. Alterations? Forget about it unless you want to pay the designer big bucks to 'redesign it to suit your needs'.
Last on the agenda would be human genome copyright. Unless you pay *HUGE* royalties to HTAA (Horizontal Tango Association of America) You will not be allowed to procreate and a smaller license fee will be issued for recreational purposes. And if you *DO* beget some children good luck on choosing a name cause all the first names will be copyrighted. Expect to see people with names such as WQRTWQBVWHQ and NJSDWNWJW around (multiple charecters in different scripts - Kanji, Arabic, Cyrillic will be mixed with English to get a name which might not be copyrighted)
Enough of my ranting
The number of the beast
No "Backstreet Boys"?? No "N'Sync"???!?
I'm out...
Sues MP3.com for offering legitimite service
Doesn't touch myplay.com
Let's do the math I promised, shall we?:
Total number of songs I have stored on MP3.com: 35
Total number of songs I have stored on myplay.com: 56
Total: 91
Total number of illegal songs I have stored on MP3.com:0
Total number of illegal I have stored on myplay.com:56
The math speaks for itself.
AC comments get piped to
I suspect that the home recording act allows one to make copies of CDs for personal use, so a home MP3 player (see this month's issue of Maximum Linux) could be easy, inexpenisive compared to on-line services, etc. One could probably even go into the market of making them comercially. CD players are already out that do this. How long can this continue?
RIAA is a bloated, draconian organization which is apparently oblivious to the fact that people who download lots of music also buy lots of music because they continue to develop their appreciataion for the music. IMO, they have the right to hurt their consituants because, in the end this will be their undoing. I think that artists will look for other means of advertizing their gigs (which is where the VAST majority of money is made for musicians).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I take a disc full of mp3's to work and listen to them from my CD-ROM bay. When I'm at work, I don't want my employer to see mp3 data trafficing across their network, nor do they want their bandwidth being used on things like mp3. And when I'm at home, I have all the files on the hard drive with backups on CDR. So tell me why I would even want to use a service like mp3.com?
you'll have to reinsert CDs at random and periodic intervals to prove ownership
So why should I pay them? If my CD is already in the drive, I'll just listen to it instead of some poor quality MP3...
But only if I was assured a large percentage of my fee went directly towards lobbying congress to pass the earlier metioned bill. Then all those people who don't subscribe could benefit from my support later on. Just like people who watch public tv and don't donate. Oh wait, that's me . . .
You're feelings towards the RIAA are well warrented, but keep in mind the artists who actually take time to make the music. Don't you think they deserve some reward for that?
I admit, I don't like paying for music; of course, I don't like paying for anything so there's really no harm done. I will, however, pay for music which I really like and has come from an artist I wish to support (that is, if I have money to begin with).
Reasonable access to modern culture is absolutely fine; I'm all for it. But a complete lack of monitary price, in this society, is by far unreasonable. On the opposite of the spectrum, however, so is $20-30/CD, $45/yr, $5/mo, and what have you.
Information will be free, sometime. Completely free. No price will be needed. This is hindering the process by which that will happen.
Our arguments stand.
Why can't you just use something like launch.com? Sure, you can't download the songs, but it's still streaming music and 100% free. The only worthwhile reason to use Napster is to get that one song you really don't want to buy a whole CD for so you can burn it onto a Fistgrrl Hot Mix. It takes about 3 minutes to download a song from Napster, launch.com just streams.
Vote for me for Hippest DJ.
Fistgrrl
"We're tired of all those Microsoft developers shoving their Win-Ho's in our face. Now we can tell them about Todd. Who's laughing now?" Linux Developer Gets Laid
"We're tired of all those Microsoft developers shoving their Win-Ho's in our face."
Thanks to the (CDDB is now) Gracenote FAQ for this info.
--
Long time reader, fourth time poster.
If you own the god damned CD why would you not just rip the cd instead of paying 45 bucks. Frankly ripping software is so good this company is so stupid. I sence a new company for Fucked Company dot com.
Suit #2: Hey! If we have zero users, our costs are down to nothing! Then we'll be all profit, baby!
Suit #1: Excellent! I'll fire all of our marketing staff. If nobody knows about us, nobody will sign up, and then we'll be rich as kings!
Sorry for all the exclaimation points. Remember, suits are easily excited by lame-brain ideas.
-
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
If you ask me the CD-access feature is the least interesting thing about my.mp3.com. The thing that is really cool about mp3.com is the access to a bajillion independent musical artists from around the whole world.
I could not agree more. My.mp3.com is a red herring. The salient feature of mp3.com is its indie music. With their current playback royalty scheme, mp3.com is paying large amounts of hard cash to unsigned, independent musicians. There is an 18-year-old in Minnesota who's been making like $8,000 a month by producing techno music on a SoundBlaster Live card. This is the only functioning alternative to the big-music-label hegemony that I've ever seen. Give it some credit and stop whining about their my.mp3 program. Even Towel Daddy himself makes a bit of change with his rocking-yet-commercially-unmarketable music at mp3.com. RD
Aside from all of the monetary issues which make this whole fiasco a "fiasco", I believe we are looking at an entirely larger issue here: a security issue. I'm not familiar with any online service which I would allow to scan my drives, or other hardware for that matter. Given the short amount of time needed to implement such a crazy solution, security problems are inevitable. Not only that, but how long (and seriously, how long) would it take to crack the process...no time at all. Jesus christ I hate technology.
I'm going to have to say that I really don't care about my.mp3.com. The good part of mp3.com is the unsigned artist community.
I mean, really. The amount of cases where it is useful is decreasing. You need broadband access in order to play your MP3s at a decent clip. The only time I saw it make sense was if you wanted to listen to some tunes in a computer lab on campus.
If I want to transport music around, I just burn it to CD-R disks that I can cary around. Plus, that frees up hard disk space for other things.
Gentoo Sucks
... you cannot just close it.
.mp3 in order to listen if he likes or not the CD
MP3.com attempt to charge for the storage of your already-paid-for music is not going to work. The box is open, and a more creative solution that just being an e-harddisk should be done if they want to attract users.
I belive more in the Napster attempt to make money besides advertising. Legal and profitable peer-to-peer music sharing can be done in an easy way:
1.- Person A adquires a legal CD and register his own copy on MyMusic.com for FREE (or whatever site you want it to be)
2.- Person B pays MyMusic.com a small fee (let's say the US$5/mo that is belive Napster would charge)
3.- Mr. B can temporarily download Mr. A legal
4.- MyMusic pays some fee (an small fraction of the fee paid by Mr. B) to the CD's MusicHouse who published it.
5.- After some time, let's say 2 weeks, the mp3 downloaded by Mr. B stops working
6.- If Mr. B liked the CD, then he/she/it buys it and pays the MusicHouse. If Mr. B dislike the CD, he/she/it does not.
In this way, Mr. B is not paying for something that doesn't want, but at same time the MusicHouse is earning some revenue from the music sharing
The final question would be if $5/mo for downloading ~100 songs will seem attractive for the MusicHouse (5 cents/song); which I believe they will because 5cents is better than nothing.
And, if Mr. B only wants to listen to the today-popular-tomorrow-forgotten music (let's say KidRock, Britney or Eminem), Mr. B is getting a good deal for just $5...
Imagine the past, remember the future - Carlos Fuentes
Why does anybody think that I'd rather have them store a db of my CD's so I can listen to them online? First of all, I'd rather go out and spend that money on a larger hard-drive, even if it won't pay off by the time hard-drives jump another technology gap. But I could use that space for other stuff, too! And another thing...like the article said, if Napster is going to move to thier new business model, then I'd rather spend my money on that, considering that I get more for my money. AND I can d/l the songs and keep them permanently. That's where I see this sort of technology going. My thoughts on the subject. You don't have to agree.
-SlashDot Whore
'I'd rather be crazy and think outside of the box, than be crazy and think "I am a box".'
I'm crazy in the sense that I think outside of the box, not "Look, I am a box!"
So your pissed about having to pay for a CD that you already have on tape/8-track/vinyl. Since we're beginning to separate the content from the media, you think you can pay just for the new CD/jewel case/liner notes and NOT pay for what's stamped on the cd and printed in the liner notes? So why not start a company that will give you "content credit" if you exchange your vinyl copy of _Frampton Comes Alive_ for a CD of _Frampton Comes Alive_?
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
I think the fee might be to cover for people who borrow a CD, download all the songs on it, and then return it. Doesn't make total sense, though, because those people could always rip the songs on their own. More likely, they just want to pull a Microsoft and derail the competition. If they take out MP3.com, they don't have to worry about all those indie bands. They'd take down the internet for a nickel.
(Do not sign anything.) -- Fell, Planescape: Torment
Beg Pardon? If the server is demanding bytes that either means the server is storing uncompressed copies of everything in addition to mp3s(gosh that'd be wasteful), or you're required to have a copy of the current mp3 stored locally with the same encoder. Of course I could be wrong and it could be generating mp3's from cd's on the fly (again, the number cd-changers to have that many cd's boggles my mind).
*shrug*
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Ok, so besides all of the comments that have been made already about this new service, I just went and tried it out for myself.
Now I have had a my.mp3 for some time now and i have found that from the 15 or so albums that i have uploaded, only two of them appear there now... "What the fuck!!", I said.
I searched to find the answer... this is what i found from their FAQ
"While MP3.com has been successful in turning on many titles in My.MP3 user accounts, certain CDs are still unavailable. MP3.com has elected to remove these CDs from My.MP3 pending further negotiations. Stay tuned to the latest news about access to your music by visiting progress.mp3.com. "
And you know what sucks even more? Upon opening the two albums i have stored online, not all of the tracks are available on the CDs, only 3 or 4 tracks...
What is the fucking point now!
-MjZ
I do agree that this charged service will probably kill the company.
It'll limit the usefulness of the my.mp3.com, but I doubt it will kill mp3.com outright.
my.mp3.com is still a useful service as it was originally intended - as a means of "bookmarking" your favourite tracks from mp3.com artists. When the beam-it software was first released, I went through a bundle of my albums until it recognised one (the joys of obscure music!), thought "that's kinda cool", and went back to listening to even more obscure (but far more tasty) music from mp3.com artists.
...j
(who has an NMA and bits and pieces on mp3.com, available by clicking immediately below here)
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
On a previous article about mp3.com here on /., I posted some comments. Somebody from mp3.com actually contacted me afterwards and we exchanged some more ideas. I got the impression that there are people there who really care. I think they had a brilliant idea and were on to a winner. Unfortunately, I don't like the straight-jacket they've been forced into, and the service that they will be offering.
For me, the whole attraction of my.mp3.com was the ability to listen to my music wherever and whenever I wanted. This convenience alone overcame the issues of the internet, e.g. connection interruptions. When I get the urge to listen to a particular CD, that's all I want to listen to. I don't want to run the risk of them saying: "please reinsert CD for ownership verification". Maybe if I tried the service, I would find that it isn't as intrusive as it sounds... but I'm not going to. Somebody somewhere else mentioned that it's now a download and not a stream... that's not convenient to me either. It now seems less effort for me to rip my own MP3s and put them on a CD-R... I can carry 10x fewer CDs this way for not much effort.
We really need a legitimate alternative to the way music and video is purchased and distributed. It really angers me that we have to repeatedly spend money for content that we have already spent money for -- to replace damaged, aged and obsolete media . We do not own the content we pay to listen or view and you cannot get it replaced at a nominal fee if your media goes bad (so does that mean I'm paying for the media and not the content or the conent and not the media? Or am I paying for both even though I am given the rights to neither?).
I have a pretty hefty DVD collection, but when they go bad or become obsolete, they're going to make another few thousand bucks off me for content I've already purchased the right to view? -- Screw that. I'll go without video or music if it comes to this. These double-standard, back-stabbing, money-grubbing assholes make Hitler, Satan and Jerry Falwell look like swell guys.
---
seumas.com
I personally can't wait for copyright to fall on its arse, and as such can't thank the RIAA and MP-whatever enough for their efforts.
Actually, it does seem to. It's not that you have a 25-CD limit, it's that you have a 250-song limit. After checking into the site, on which I have about 49 CDs, I've found that about half of the tracks I have there are locked, seemingly at random. In other words, I only have 250 tracks I can play, and I didn't get to decide which ones.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Okay, I've checked out MP3 Mystic and save for a few annoying glitches, which I'm corresponding with the coder to get fixed, it works really well. (But if you think I'm gonna give you the URL to try my server, you're off your nut. :)
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Has anyone yet written a package to make it easier for the technically semi-inept to set up their own MP3-streaming service? I know about Shoutcast and Icecast, but they both require access to the local player on your own box to control the tunes. Is there some system that allows control by remote (for Windows and/or Linux, since I dual-boot)?
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Just as a point of information, my.mp3.com is free for up to 25 CDs. I don't know if you can change your set of 25 over time. For $50 a year you can store up to 500 "with more functionality and less advertising".
In addition, it looks like those of you already have my.mp3.com accounts can keep listening to your old tracks. You still have a "free" account, and the music you've already signed up for doesn't count against the new 25-CD limit.
See the press release for more details.
Huh? Why?
Server says, "tell me the byte at offset 98761534" and if client answers wrong, then server doesn't send the music.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If you don't like it, bring the CD with you
Well... my.mp3.com will ask you to insert your CD at random intervals to proove that you indded have the original CD. So if you want to use this service, you have to bring your CDs with you. What is the use of asking them to stream me songs of CDs I own if I have to bring the CDs along?
"When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun...
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
You should play the lotto, because you are aparently the luckiest person alive. I have between 400 and 600 songs off of Napster and I would guess that somewhere around 8% of my songs have incorrect titles. About half as many have incorrect artist names. The rule seems to be if the song is funny, it must be by the Blood Hound Gang. If it has a "jam" feel to it, it must be a Phish song. One of my favorite things I've found on Napster, The Gourds, a bluegrass band covering Snoop Dog's "Gin and Juice" is labeled as Phish most of the time. I have no problem with that as long as it's free. If I'm paying money, I want decent quality songs that are complete and correctly labeled.
-B
Actually, I wouldn't use it for that. I think there's plenty of other good uses that could be put to.
And as far as ad banners not working, that's old news. I'm amazed that anyone can convince investors that they are a viable revenue source to base a business on. It's enough to make this computer nerd interested in economics.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Why would you ever want online documentation - books aren't that hard to carry around, and you could burn digital copies onto CD's to read from.
I have about 300 CD's now, at 10 per CD that's about 30 CD's. Sure that's manageable, but what about the time required to rip all those CD's? What do you do if you want a playlist that has songs from CD's 1,4,29,8,7,23,and 5?
It's all about convienience and the network. When I used my.mp3.com, I could just say "play all my TMBG". Or, I could pick a category like Jazz and play random songs from my collection. All that for just ten to twenty seconds per disk to veryify what I had. Not to mention that I had access to my music from any computer with speakers and an internet connection, great for when I was moving around from computer to computer.
Of source now thier use model is horribly flawed and I won't be using it - but it was very nice at one point.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've seen undergrad business students write a business plan that has a better chance of succeeding than this crap from mp3.com
Of course, we have to ask ourselves, do they *really* want this to succeed? If it works out, great, they're screwing people to pay to listen to music that they already paid too much for in the first place. If it fails, then the record labels will say that this proves that MP3's have little "value" to people.
Even if I wanted this, it's not worth the trouble, even for free, for me to go to my CD jukebox everytime it prompts me too, especially when I'm away from home. As others have pointed out, the whole scheme is just too prone to being hacked/duped anyway.
It would be nearly impossible, but the record labels need to wake up and re-evaluate their market and their target audience. People *liked* MP3.com because you could get music fast and free. CDs are a huge ripoff. $15 for 12 songs, only 2 of which I've previously heard (on the radio) is a gamble for someone who doesn't have a lot of disposable income. I've been "behind the scenes" in parts of th music industry and have heard labels utter things like "give us at least 10 songs, 3 of which are good". Knowing things like this go on makes it *really* hard for me to want to plunk down my money on the unknown.
If a song is getting continuous airplay, is it really so wrong for me to get it off of Napster? I've already heard the damn song 100+ times without paying for it, so what is the problem? What about the single that's going to be released next month? That'll get played to death also, so I might as well just get it now.
Of course, if CDs were priced appropriately at about $4.99/disc then Napster would never have taken off in the first place. It would be easier for me to buy 10 discs, than to go through the trouble of downloading them.
The record companies are using end-to-end flawed logic and bad assumptions in trying to deal with the Internet and digital music distribution. New bands come along every month, and we're getting more and more clips, albums and whatnot via the Internet. Record companies and record stores are becoming a middleman, desperately trying to keep their hooks in our wallets.
-This sig intentionally left blank
However, I think that there are better pricing structures and delivery modes for this type of purchase. For example: Pay $2 extra and we'll e-mail you 160kbps .mp3s of the whole album. This would be something that would actually add value and be useful. Being able to stream mp3s just isn't all that cool.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
They may not die that quickly. Some people will fall for their ideas. If you do the math, Napster at $5/month will be $60/year. To some people $45 dollars a year doesn't seem bad.
What we need is a new Large capacity medium to store MP3s on so I can carry all my MP3 from all of my legally purchased cds. Somehting else will pop up. I say boycott MP3.com now.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Though there is a levy on blank CD-Rs it does not give you the legal right to make MP3s of music you do not own, and according to fair use you already had to right to make MP3s of songs you do own.
Morally is another question. You are already paying a levy for the CD-R so does that entitle you to copy a song you do not own onto it? But it most definatly does not grant you a legal right to do so.
Yeah... thats really what I want to do, carry a bunch of cds on the road with me just in case mp3.com decides it suddenly has to check if I own them or not.
If I can stick the cd in to make them happy that I own it, I can also simply stick it in to listen to it, and not pay them jack shit.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
... their.mp3.com.
Multiplayer Strategy
An obvious hack of that scheme would be to modify client to send pseudo-random data instead of CD blocks, and that pseudo-random data should be easy to calculate at a later time based on offset. Then the client will be able to "confirm" previous reading without the need of having a CD.
Alternatively, the unmodified client accesses hacked CD drive (driver, actually) to get the data. Access gets logged and read blocks get saved; later if client asks for those blocks the driver will return saved data even if there is no CD in the drive.
It is also possible to use a network proxy (like Quake aiming proxy). Neither client nor the driver need to be modified. The proxy has to understand the protocol (which, unless cryptographically protected in a serious way will be unavoidably reverse engineered). The proxy will rewrite the CD signature to be of the same pseudo-random but easily computable sort.
What I say is: this thing will be circumvented faster than anyone can imagine. The service is simply too challenging to teenage computer geniuses.
my-mp3.com. napster. myplay.com. These are all ways of _distributing_ files, right? Right.
As much as they may be fighting against these distribution methods, they're not what the RIAA, etc. is really scared of. What they're quietly shitting themselves over is the mp3 format itself. Sure these things make distribution (and let's be honest, piracy) much easier; but as long as FTP, uuencode/SMTP, or HTTP are legal (i.e. they will be), people will be able to distribute them.
What I'm saying is don't get your panties in too tight of a bunch over this. Fight the RIAA for sure, but if it comes down to a choice between closing my-mp3.com and making the mp3 format (or any others for that matter) illegal, don't get distracted from the critical issue.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
They will die a quick and painful death (as the RIAA intended them to).
UPS Sucks
Not true, check out the text of the bill. I provided the link elsewhere on this thread.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Debatably, yes. Note also that the recording industry were the ones who drove this legislation through. I really think they dropped the ball on this one.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Perhaps you're not really getting 384 or maybe they put a cap on uploads to prevent just this sort of thing.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Read the article - "Now MP3.com has negotiated licenses with each of the five major record companies and the group that represents most music publishers. To pay the royalties under those licenses, MP3.com will not only charge its users but will also sell the data it compiles on their musical tastes."
That doesn't say that mp3.com is having trouble paying for the bandwidth and server space, it says they have to PAY the RECORDING INDUSTRY.
I miss it.
I think there should be a campaign to put ads in popular magazines and other forms of media telling people about their rights.
The companies have been very succesful in keeping the public from knowing about their rights. I think it's time to educate.
Someone's going to hack this and figure out how to spoof the MP3 software into thinking that the CD has been inserted. I know that MP3.com samples certain areas of the CD in order to determine that it's genuine. I suspect that it's the same area of a given CD each time. The first attack I'd investigate is to simply capture the sampling the first time, store it, and then on subsequent attempts, replay it to MP3.com. I'll bet software to do this will exist within a week after MP3.com makes this change. (And I'll bet the first lawsuit against distributors exists on day 8.)
This my.mp3.com & Napster subscription crap is not good enough for me. I refuse to pay $10-20 for a CD (or any other equally unreasonable price) that should cost me almost NOTHING - Id be willing to download entire WAV CDs and Burn my own if it was available and at a reasonable cost based on that distribution method.
The fact is the RIAA is a monopoly - you can see this in how rigid they are with new delivery technology. Until the RIAA is gone I will not pay one single cent for music. I will be burning my own COPIES of CDs and downloading MP3s at will. I refuse to support a tyrannical monopoly in any form.
For those who will say I am a cheap pirate and nothing more: As long as monopolists try and dictate to the customers, for no reason other than to justify their present business methods, systems and sheer existence they wont get a nickel from me. Technology has rendered the RIAA obsolete - Simple Fact, what they are trying to do is use their monopoly to muscle control of a 'market' they want to dictate to on their unreasonable terms. For those who would argue the RIAA is not a monopoly: If they were not wouldn't one or some of their members have adapted to meet this new demand in the market place? This is they type of mess Capatalism get you.
It's a matter of principle - right and wrong is not black and white, what the RIAA is trying to do is by far 'more wrong' than people demanding reasonable access to modern culture.
Id suggest you all do the same - F the RIAA.
When I was a little kid, I used to sell pyrite to kids in my school and tell them it was gold. When my parents found out I got in trouble. They told me that in order for business to be done right, you have to honestly provide a good product or a good service to please the customer, and to get an amount of money back to satisfy you.
That is a bit innocent sounding but it is the best way to go if you intend to keep customers. Had I been MR. RIAA jr. growing up, I would have taken a baseball bat around with me to beat up the kids that find their own pyrite and take their money.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
This one is too easy to figure out. Here are your options:
my.mp3.com:
- You have to keep the CDs with you (defeats the whole purpose)
- $3/month
- Download everytime
- Only useable on your computer
Napster:
- You can do whatever you want once you've got the song.
- $5/month
- Download once
- Useable anywhere you want: computer, portable mp3 players, etc.
Clear winner: Napster. And of course, people will also discover "free" napster - OpenNap. my.mp3.com shot itself in the foot by agreeing.
Careful: I know how to MetaMod!
SIG: HUP
careful, slashdot readers, big brother is watching. so you say that just because you own a CD, you should be able to listen to its content whenever? no! others want to reserve all rights to determine when you can listen to it. and mp3s? why should you be able to listen to something before you buy it? you guys are driving a stake through the heart of capitalism. i want you all to feel guilty. very guilty.
Remember The Hornet Archive? It was a place where module music makers (remember those formats?) could post their music online. There was no profit made for the musicians, but it was a chance to be widely heard for free. Users of the Hornet Archive could either get the music online, or purchase CD-ROMs full of the songs, all without the registration mumbo-jumbo that too many modern sites have.
The closest thing I can think of to the Hornet Archive is Trax in Space. They also are a source of module music. Unfortunately, they have also gone the way of MP3.com and require registration.
We need a site that simply lets users upload and download their music, with a quick check done to make sure the works are original. It's as simple as that.
I would petition ibiblio or a similar site with lots of mirrors to do the task, but such a system with MP3s requires lots of bandwidth. I wish the Internet was back to the good old days again where everyone didn't want to know everything about you.
Ok, do we have any backup on the claim that the interval is random? This could just mean you have to put the cd's back in every month.
Wonderful, that would be much better.
"Bob! You're going to be late for work!"
"Sorry, Marge, it's the 1st of the month, and I've got to insert all 500 of my CD's, one-by-one, so that I can benefit from the usability of MP3!"
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
Hey, MP3s won't make artists poor if they do what Metallica did!
-N
Who is to say whether the identical bits are "yours" or "theirs"? If you copy files with "rsync", are you actually copying them? If you use transparent duplicate file elimination with copy-on-write, are there actually separate files?
If MP3.COM had provided a solution that had every user rip and encode the tracks on their machine, and then send the resulting MP3 to a my.mp3.com locker, they wouldn't have been hammered in court.
What mp3.com does is just a very optimized version of rsync. Forcing people to waste additional bandwidth by using a less efficient copying mechanism doesn't change the copy protocols, it is merely an attempt to make mp3.com as inconvenient to use as possible in order to boost distribution channels that the RIAA prefers.
People are crying out how this is a ripoff, how they have a right to listen to the CDs they purchased and other similar inane arguments.
.com's are dropping like flies. If you want a useful service like my.mp3.com to continue, bitching and moaning about them charging for service isn't going to help. Go visit f*ckedcompany.com for the latest list of companies that demonstrated that
If anyone saying that stopped for even a second to think about it, they'd realize how stupid those arguments are.
1)
2) Sure you own the CD. They're not charging you more for every CD you put in there so you're not paying for your CD twice. $3 a month isn't bad for the amount of bandwidth I use from them.
3) People borrow other people's CDs and use them to beam into their accounts. Very few people I know who used my.mp3.com hadn't done that. Thats illegal, and MP3.com has a legal responsibility given their situation and agreements to prevent that. Asking me to reinsert a CD that I legitimately own isn't a big deal.
People who see a problem with this either 1) have no understanding of economics 2) have no understanding of what license fees and bandwidth costs entail or 3) were planning on using the service to steal the CDs.
Personally, I'd pay a lot more than $3 a month to not have to drag all my CDs to work. Give me a way to stream them to my car, and I'd be even happier!
And it's setup more like my.mp3.com.....
why bother with live 365?
The worst part is that MP3.com is going to sell all the user info they can from this. The quoted example was an e-mail list of millions of Madonna users.
But I don't really blame MP3.com -- they just got screwed by the courts and RIAA, having to pay per-play royalties on all of this music. MP3.com is made up mostly of engineers, a lot of whom jumped ship from Netscape when NS got munched by AOL. They've been trying to do cool things, but the global-corporate-legal infrastructure is stifling them.
The best thing for us to do is to write to our congress(wo)men and explain that the current copyright/patent/trademark intellectual property situation is seriously flawed.
--
Make mine methylphenidate.
Server says, "tell me the byte at offset 98761534" and if client answers wrong, then server doesn't send the music.
Your point is valid. Some people have pointed out that they couldn't store all those cd's uncompressed, but that is a shallow argument as they actually could, but don't have to, just have to remember a few questions like the one you posed per cd.
My reason for thinking this won't happen is that cd's are re-mastered and released with the same cover art all the time. There's no version control, and no way to ensure that "sign" by led zeppelin has, as you put it, "oxfffcda5 at offset 59834". There could be fifty different masters of that cd, all with different bytes at different offsets, but the same songs.
Of course, they could ignore this problem, making the system ever more unusable. Which would seem to be in their best interest. So good point, I didn't think of that.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
Who honestly thinks that anyone would want to use this service?
Raise your hands.
Come on, I know there's a few of you... one? Never mind.
It's quite obvious what the point of this is. The RIAA, by requiring a solution such as this, is trying to drive mp3.com out of business. With such a money-drainer as my.mp3.com, the company as a whole would be suffering. The remaining competition to the RIAA is being knocked out, one by one.
--
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
In other words, it is perfectly legal here to make MP3s of music that you own. In fact, it is perfectly legal to make MP3s of music that you do not own because of the levy on blank CD's. You just cannot trade the MP3s (actually, you just cannot make the MP3s with the intention to trade them).
I'm not sure an additional levy on mp3s would be legal, therefore, because the levy on blank CD-Rs gives us the right to make MP3s (whether we are using the CD-Rs to store them or not).
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Two: I never used the my.mp3.com service personally, so I could be talking out my ass on this, but it checks to see if you have the cd by using a small piece of software to check and make sure the cd is in the drive, right? Harmless enough. HOWEVER, does this software only run on windows and mac? Is there "not going to be enough people using Linux to warrant software" a la MPAA style, thereby putting alternate OS'es on the consumer back burner?
This is really pathetic, you know? The RIAA found a LEGAL way to put a rival company out of business, as nobody is going to want to pay for something that they got for free.
The pisser is, if I knew that my money would go to mp3.com and not royalties to the recording industry, I would give them money just like the EFF. But now I know that my money would only go to paying their exorbitant penalty fee and to have them sell my info to outside companies, no thank you.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
"The more popular the service is among users, the more expensive it gets for MP3.com to run," said Heath Terry, an analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston.
Suit #1: so, you're telling me that the more people using our service, the less money we make...
Suit #2: we've already come up with a proactive solution: simply make the service as useless and customer-unfriendly as possible! It stands to reason that if more users is bad, then less users is good!
Suit #1: now that's thinking outside the box! good work!
/bluesninja
Ok... i'm biased but - how can they compete with myplay.com?
myplay have been running continuously for over a year, all through mp3.com's court battles myplay has been eating into any potential market share through their associations with winamp and other players. They've always been free, and they let you upload files rather than having to own CD copies of everything, and of course they're not having to pay the record companies royalties forr their service.
The fact that you upload files is a real boon for me since I'm a huge vinyl collector - there's no way I can 'beam' 12" records to my.mp3.com, expecially since most of them are UK only. I just rip to mp3 and upload them - problem solved.
Oh and I guess that's another my.mp3.copm problem - it's US only.... sorry about the rest of the world - that's another legal matter altogether. I'mguessing that a lot of the my.mp3.com rights are US only and that each territory will have to be negitiated individually....
(And that's before I even go into all the extra features that myplay has and mp3.com doesn't....)
But the point is, even with this service, you'd STILL have to carry your CD's around with you in case it suddenly decides you need to verify.
Let's face it, if the this draconian mess is the best that the RIAA can come up with than people will still just continue to pirate ad infinitum.
Anyone who ever succeeds in the business of providing a service knows that customers hate hassle. I think the whole idea is a crock and refuse to engage in any service that treats me like a crook and forces me to "prove" I am not on its terms.
In any event, I carry a laptop and about 300 hours of MP3's of music I own legitimate (i.e., paid-for CD's) copies of in my bag, so anything like MP3.com is not worth my trouble even if it were free.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I use Live365.com to stream my music. You can store 365MB of MP3s. The max bitrate is 56k if you store it on their servers though. However, its free, easy to use, and supported by ASCAP. I don't have my entire CD collection, but some recordings of my favorites.
Anyway, obviously mp3.com is changing their business model. If you think of the $45/year charge its kinda for bandwidth utilization, but with random CD insertions well.. thats BS and defeats the whole purpose. Anyway, Live365 rocks.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
We have already established that although CDs cost as much as 18 bucks, you don't get any kind of ownership in exchange for your money. Technologies like My.mp3.com and Napster gave us a peek at what life could be like if we DID own the music on our CDs. Unfortunately, both services were swallowed by the maw of big business. We have only one outlet left. We need to steal more music. Not "borrow", not "share", not "trade"...steal. Go to Best Buy this weekend and steal three CDs. It's winter now in the Northern Hemisphere. Nobody will notice a guy in a big bulky coat browsing the new release isle. Call up two friends and get them to steal CDs as well. The time has come for a shoplifting revolution. Tech workers of the world, rise up and throw off the your chains.
-B
$x/month for xMB of disk space and xMb/s bandwidth on a server with a good connection.
Provide a simple and secure access UI on the Web as well as support for ftp and streaming of data at a specific bandwidth.
The data is encrypted. You use it how you see fit. No questions asked.
I know there are services that do some of this (like MP3.com), but do any of them provide everything I describe?
Also, is this idea even feasible in a business sense (I'm sure the FBI would have kittens, but they hate everything)? It seems to simple and useful to actually happen.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Slashdot:
you'll have to reinsert CDs at random and periodic intervals to prove ownership.
Nytimes:
To deter users from borrowing CD's that they have not purchased to store in their MP3.com "locker," a small number of the CD's will have to be reinserted at certain intervals,
Ok, do we have any backup on the claim that the interval is random? This could just mean you have to put the cd's back in every month.
Keep in mind that only the client side can enforce this, and therefore that Hackmymp3.exe is going to be out in weeks to remove this. Of course, the DMCA makes it harder to distribute tools like this.
You'll have to post them anonymously to slashdot as source (:
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
The thing that really gets me is that you'll have to insert your CDs at random intervals. This means that my.mp3.com provides no benefit at all. I could see using (and paying a little for) this service if it ment that I could leave my CDs at home and listen to those songs while I was at work without going through the trouble of ripping/compressing/uploading to Xdrive.com/downloading to my work machine/etc. There's just no way that I'm going to pay good money to listen to my own CDs on those terms. Furthermore they won't even let me put any CD that I want on there. Only the record companies that they have deals with.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
If there were no value added, there would be no reason to use my.mp3.com, even if it were free. You're not paying for the right to listen to your music. You're paying MP3.com for the service of streaming your music to you. If you don't like it, bring the CD with you. Just because you bought the music doesn't mean that companies should be falling all over themselves to make it easy for you to listen to it whenever and wherever you want.
spare machine: free (you know you have one)
*nix OS: free
Apache webserver: free
Apache::MP3: free
MP3 encoder: free
Telling MP3.com and the RIAA to fuck off: priceless
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Just look at this 'The Onion' article! ;-)
That article sums up my sarcastic opinion of MP3's.
--
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I started using my.mp3.com after they disabled the "listen to your CDs" feature.
Yet I have hours of music stored there. This is all music that was put on mp3.com for public consumption by the artists themselves.
If you ask me the CD-access feature is the least interesting thing about my.mp3.com. The thing that is really cool about mp3.com is the access to a bajillion independent musical artists from around the whole world.
I've discovered bands and even whole genres of music that I love and would never have known about otherwise. Gretchen Lieberum, Planet Delirium, 12 Majestik -- I've currently got tracks by 43 different artists on my personal playlists.
Hell, I even made my own station so I could turn some of my friends on to this stuff:
I can share all this music freely. Copyright is not an issue, because the artists made the music available themselves.
All this quibbling about the issues surrounding copyrighted music at mp3.com and napster just bores me silly.
"Resist much, obey little" -- Walt Whitman