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MP3.com 'Subscriber Service'
nelomolen writes: "Looks like MP3.com is trying to promote a new $2.99/month ($29.99/year) ad-free service. as a listener I've come to love MP3.com as it provides exposure to a LOT of good music (and bad). In the past I know artists have had it out for MP3.com in regards to their "payback for playback" -- wonder if this new ad-free subscription service will help?"
You'd never know they existed, but eMusic is already offering unlimited mp3 downloads of major-label albums for $10/month.
I think the reason you don't hear anything about them is that they were acquired by Vivendi-Universal, who is quietly sitting on them until they roll out whatever big new service they're developing.
I assume eMusic's successor will only offer crippled mp3s that can't be copied or that expire after some period of time, but for now, they've got plain ol' mp3s -- and they even make it easy to download a whole album with one click.
The downside, of course, is that they have a limited selection of music. You can't download any CD ever recorded. But there is a lot of good music on there. For example, they seem to have the entire Fantasy Records catalogue online, which, if you're a jazz or blues fan, means a whole lot of really good albums. In the first week, I downloaded 62 albums.
I assume that one day eMusic will morph into something I no longer want to subscribe to, but until then I'm sucking down everything I can grab.
It's definitely worth checking out.
I have been an artist on mp3.com for about 3 years, and at first I thought it was a great place for an independant artist such as myself to promote my music, however as soon as commercial bands began having sites there I believe that mp3.com turned too much into something mtv-esque. For instance there are schlock bands such as the pre-made-on-tv O-town hosted there now. After that I decided I would add all new material to besonic.com, a great site which is populated mostly by independant artists. As for the payback for playback, I didn't really make enough money to warrent the 20$ a month it cost to stay in the program. I also believe that that program caused some artists to become greedy. Now they want visitors to pay aswell? I don't see it as being worth it. For all I know, I would say MP3.COM IS DYING. Perhaps they have suffered one suit too many.
The Slashdot Effect: A new for
Let's see, if a guy on Oak Street was selling popsicles for 25 cents a a
stick and another guy on Elm Street had the exact same popsicles for free,
where would you go? The simple fact of the matter is that consumers will
always make the most logical choice when acquiring what they want. In the
field of digital music, it is readily available for free via many
different routes on the internet. Hence, in setting up membership fees for
service, MP3.com will be nailing it's own coffin shut. Undoubtedly,
millions will abandon the service for something else out there that is
equally as resourceful and above all free (Morpheus come immedialty to mind).
For these companies, MP3.com ludicrous decision is a golden opportunity.
If MP3.com wants money, then fuck MP3.com. As a company, all they are is
a popular conduit for digital music tansfer - big deal. They've done
nothing to achieve loyalty in me as a consumer. If they are banking on the
fact that the majority of MP3.com users are capatilistic moral crusaders
who believe that paying for thier service is the noble thing to do - then
they are banking on bullshit. Furthermore, even if I did feel that way,
why should MP3.com be making any money? Nobody at MP3.com wrote the music.
They don't give a fuck about the artists, they just want money, like any
other company under the sun. Morpheus here I come, so long MP3.com.
Oddly enough, that is exactly how the traditional record labels work...
If they can pull these off, I'll sign up immediately for a more expensive monthly service. Also, contrast this with Napster's plan of having their own retarded proprietary format, where you pay monthly, and don't get to keep ANYTHING you downloaded after you quit the service.
The Free desktop that Just Works
No, actually, fuck *you*.
What if the guy down the street giving away the popsicles had STOLEN THEM from the guy selling them for 25 cents!?! Still interested? I would hope not.
MP3.com gets their music with *consent*, and still gives it away for free. You don't have to buy their premium service to get the free tunes, you just have to put up with ads. MP3.com is entitled to whatever they make in this business, as they aren't STEALING anything from artists *cough*Morpheus*cough*, and they're providing a valuable service, ie: storage space, organization, search utilities, and how about that giant monthly bandwidth bill?
On the other hand, if Free-Uber-Alles is really your mantra, expect to see me at your house tonight with a flashlight and a few garbage bags. I figure, why should I BUY anything, when I can just raid your house for it? I mean, it's the *obvious* decision, right?
The Free desktop that Just Works
No, most sites DON'T get ad impresions if the page is loaded without viewing the ad. Most of these softwares work on the principle that the counter isn't incremented until the banner loads.
But yeah, I think it is an individuals right to not load up advertisements on his or her computer if they want. I just don't think its very moral.
I simply tend NOT to go to sites that bombard me with advertisements. I use to love the Onion, but there is something in their Javascript that constantly crashes my browsers with their popups. I don't visit them anymore. Its like the X10 stuff...I have a crap load of this stuff from back in the days when they simply had the skanky ads of half nekkid women that had nothing to do with their products. I can deal with small advertisements...and I can laugh at sites that know how to get their target audience to look (see: half nekkid), but once they stated spamming every damn site with the popups I stopped buying their products. Smarthome.com offers the same thing without all the popups, so they will be getting all my purchases from now on.
Maybe some of us content providers should start applying the DCMA to our websites. By loading the following links into your computer, you agree to have them display as they were intended by their designers. My site doesn't advertise for its bandwidth, I don't like obnoxious advertising, but its really the owners of the content that should decide how it should be displayed. If you don't like that, there are a dozen other sites that give you the same thing...
clif
sonikmatter.com
This is a great idea. I would gladly do this. Have the low quality streaming(64kbps?) tracks available for free on the artist's page, and then allow members to download the 1440kbps .WAV version of the song for like 1$ each. That would be a great music site. You could have like a $5 annual membership fee and a free trial period. Of course a 3 minute song would be about 30MB or maybe 16MB if it was losslessly compressed with, say, Monkeys Audio or FLAC. Probably not practical for people with dial ups, but there are probably enough broadband users to make it profitable. I, for one, will never pay for lossy compressed garbage.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Trust their customers? Haha! Guess they forgot to mention their little crusade back in the days before the Napster filters, when they encoded watermarks into all of their MP3 files and then got users who were trading them on Napster banned...
;-D
BTW, most of the MP3s in my collection are 128k. That seems to be the most popular format for trading, since it fits decent quality into a very reasonable file size (something slightly less than 1MB/min.). Yeah, I know you "purists" out there will mod me down, but I just don't have the hard drive space to store 320k MP3s of all my music, and 128k sounds fine to me on my system. Not as good as higher rates, of course...if I were burning to a CD or something, I'd want better quality, but for listening on my computer, I'd rather have twice as much music at 128k quality than what I could fit on my drive at 320k. And since my CD player's busted...
Also BTW, I've found many great artists through MP3.com...Blue Cyberia, Amethystium, 303Infinity, Egan, Higgins, and my favorite, GNOMUSY. All excellent music that probably won't ever see the light of day on a RIAA-produced medium. If you find an artist you like, buy one of their CDs for $10 or so.
DennyK