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Rent Music Over the Net
NerveGas writes: "Financial Times is reporting that two competing services, both backed by major music labels, are about to offer legal music downloads. For $9.95 per month, you can download up to 100 songs per month. The catch? Cancel your service, and you lose the ability to hear *any* of the songs that you've downloaded. There are other caveats, as well - but at least it's a start." So what happens after you've got your hard drive filled with rented music and the monthly fee goes up to $199.95/month? Pay up, or lose it all...
One or two record lables offering this kind of service doesn't interest me one bit. Until it becomes possible to get ANY song on this type of service, no matter how cheap, I'll continue to use my free p2p client of choice.
The RIAA and MPAA doesn't yet see that they are dinosaurs in the tarpits.
How long do you think it will be till this service is cracked? A week?
Software Wars
www.emusic.com will allow you to download perfectly ordinary MP3 files for $10 a month. you can then do what you like with them.
If you support them, they'll grow and grow...
My Journal
Interesting point of the original poster. Can they really forfeit your right to listen to the music?
across the entire span of my music buying life I estimate I have spent about 10 quid a month EVERY month (thats about 20 years)!
It's shitty to do the no service no play part, I guess that alone will kill it.
I pay 10 quid a month for cable TV and I spend much more time listening to music than watching TV.
I'd spend an extra fiver to get solid 60kbps+ for music downloads no problem.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
This is rediculous! When I pay for music, I want to OWN the cd i paid for.
Who in their right mind would pay to rent a cd when they can buy it and own it forever? I know that when I go to blockbuster to pick up a DVD, i sure as hell won't buy it afterwards unless it's REALLY good.
Why don't we download our music for $0 per month, and keep it forever? One day record companies will wake up to the fact that this is what they are competing against.
Until then, good luck.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
There is no way they can keep me from running my speaker output into my line-in and recording the sound from there. They can't be betting that this will keep people from pirating music. My guess is that there is some kind of value added in addition to the music content, otherwise they're running a glorified ftp site with broken music.
These will be total failures. Not that this is any surprise to anyone. Maybe they are being set up to fail?
sulli
RTFJ.
Do they really thing think that they can keep people from figuring out a way to change the files into another format that they can not control? Even if you have to through a Digital to analog and back in the mix.
Somebody will soon come up with a hack to listen to all those files, even if they cancel the service. Then they will be able to p2p those files, and the whole thing will start over again. So there's no real reason to do this, when p2p is so quick and easy.
I bet this is not "First Post."
It seems pretty obvious that it will take 1 week for someone to 'break the code' so to speak and allow you to keep your music.
My guess: When you buy a CD, you don't have to agree to any terms or conditions (at least explicitly). However, when you sign up for this service, they can put more restrictions in the contract than exist in a CD purchase.
Presumably, they can also watermark your files and know who it is that distributes the music online, and then come after you for breach of contract.
there are 2 kinds of people. those who divide people into 2 kinds, and those who don't.
Cancel your service, and you lose the ability to hear *any* of the songs that you've downloaded.
That sentence right there is enough for me to never to sign up for this. But then again, I predict a 3.5 second waiting time before there is some kind of hack for this. I would still rather buy the cd's of the illeagle mp3s that I really, really like in my collection.
-----
"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
Pipe the songs through the virtual audio cable and you can do with them whatever you want.
Somehow I don't see myself buying into this service. This music thing is like the next .com thing. Except this time they are selling real products. In 2 years time 95% of these businesses won't be around thanks to their wacky business models. Who in their mind would pay for something that you have to keep paying for to use?
The successful music over the internet companies will sell you songs that you keep for life, or at least until the next time your PC crashes.
I'm sure someone will show up soon with some crack to disable the check of the music with the server!
Didn't you know that you can't use the word "legal" before the words "music downloads" in the United States? The RIAA doesn't believe in fair use, remember. The only legal way to listen to music is to buy a grossly overpriced CD that the actual artist MAYBE gets $0.10 from the sale of, and play it on your non-computer-based CD player.
ANYONE offering any type of music downloads will eventually get shut down, especially places like emusic that allow you to just download an MP3 (straight into the dirs you have shared on audiogalaxy and gnutella, of course).
Stop the RIAA before we all have to stop listening to music all together!
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
Wired news has also run this story with some more details about some of the services (and restrictions):
RealOne Music consumers will be prevented from moving their music from a PC to a portable MP3 player because of digital rights management technology attached to the files.
There is a limit of 100 downloads and 100 streams per month from the Warner Music, EMI, and BMG catalogs as well.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
Wouldn't it be great if there were some compact medium onto which we could somehow store music, allowing us to play it whenever and wherever we wished, as long as we could find a suitable device that could interpret the music? That could revolutionize the industry!
I don't know about you, but I'm going back to 8-tracks.
Let's assume that most CD's are 10 tracks long and $15 a piece. This gives you 10 CD's you can download a month. 10 CD's which you can't play on your CD player. 10 CD's which you do not own. 10 CD's which if your hard drive crashes you may or may not be able to get back because you can't make backups.
Now I feel that I buy a decent amount of CD's. I have about 300 which is a lot for some and a speck of dust to others. But most of the time there isn't even a new CD that comes out each month that I would want to buy. So why not just hold onto my $10 a month and buy my $15 CD's when they come out. The quality of that is guaranteed to be even better than whatever this service is offering and I get to keep it and do what I want with it indefinitely.
On the topic of quality, MP3's as they currently are are pretty dang good to most people's ears. The amount of people that hear a difference between the two formats is questionable.
Firstly does anyone have details about how the songs expire once you cancel service. Do the files use such a proprietary protocol that requires a handshake with the service before it will play?
Also, how long will it take the geek crowd to write something that will convert the files to MP3 or Ogg (even just intercepting the audio output) and therefore remove the shackles?
The months are just too short. I can count the number of days on one hand.
This really isn't any different from a stream-on-demand service. You pay x per month, and this gives you the right to listen to this music whenever you want, until you stop paying.
So... what's the point in downloading it? If the music isn't yours to keep, there's really no point in downloading it at all. Just stream, if you must.
However, I will not be subscribing. If I can't listen to my music while I travel (Which is a lot), then there's really no point. I'm not going to sit down at my PC whenever I want to listen to a certain track. And I'm willing to bet that this music format isn't compatible with the various MP3-on-your-hifi devices kicking around at the moment, let alone any of the portable music players.
I'll stick to buying the CDs, making MP3s, burning onto CD-R and playing them on my Diamond Rio, thanks.
...this me too, mentality that corporations have to glom onto someone elses good idea and try to make money, but at the same time make up their own rules for the whole thing, is totally out of control. They just keep taking cracks at this stuff, it never really works out because the real target consumer knows there is something better(Un-restricted MP3's, Ogg), cheaper(Free), and easier(name your P2P). Gnutella, and Napster et al, have good concepts, but the concept isn't to make money. Hell the distrubution medium(The Internet) was never ment to make money, just share information...things have always been free on the net, and always will be, I remember my best friend downloading Rush, Counterparts in college in Sun .au format in the early 90's it wasn't perfect, because at the time it had to be converted to .wav becuase we couldn't find a .au player for dos/windows, but it was out there.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I coulda sworn I read "both hacked by major music labels" and I thought whoa, now that's different...
So say I have a date, can I rent a bunch of Barry White and Luther Vandross just for that evening? That way she'll be impressed and get in the mood and I don't have to worry about any of my buddies finding it later.
Cnet is also running a story on the new music pay service started by RealNetworks.
forma3
The record companies don't get it. People want music that they can have... forever (or at least seemingly so). It has to be easy to deal with, portable, and saveable.
.mp3 is a reasonable standard until something better comes along.
I'll sign up when....
- They offer high quality files. 192Kbps MP3 is the MINIMUM. Lossless CD quality would be better.
- They use an open format. No ticking time bombs. No proprietary players. Ability to take those files and burn onto CD.
- They offer a LARGE and unrestricted catalog. I want obscure songs, b-sides, pretty much anything that's been commercially released.
- They offer cover and insert art in a high quality format. If I download a CD, I want to re-create the whole CD... including the artwork.
If they do that, yea, $10 or even $20 per month is more than reasonable. Anything short of that and I'm not buying.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
These services aren't going to work for several reasons, or at least not in the foreseeable future:
1) They are being created to counteract the spread of P2P filesharing services, IRC mp3 channels, and even websites that provide mp3s for downloads, not to mention your standard ripping / copying from friends. They are also well behind the pack -- the P2P sharing services provide more than these people will provide (huge selection of rarities & standards both), and they do it without a subscription fee (for the most part), and they do it without the red tape required in the recording industry.
2)My first reaction was "So I spend $250, cancel my internet access after awhile, and then I have no tunes?" The straight retail CD business has a better model than this.
3)They are providing content of the traditional sort (Studio releases, megahits), over a new distribution channel. They have failed to grasp that it is the non-traditional content as much as the non-traditional distribution that has led to the soaring popularity of first Napster and now Morpheus. If I want to track down a live version of Michael Stipe and Vic Chesnutt singing a duet of 'Wounded Bird', it won't take me more than an hour on existing (and illegal) distribution models. Would that song even be available on a corporate-run service? Probably not.
I don't download that many songs -- I prefer to buy albums so that I get the additional content (sleeves, cover art, lyric sheets that weren't typed up by a half-deaf 12 year old dyslexic) and I also like to have a physical representation of what I own. I like to be able to pile my records/CDs. It makes me feel good to walk into my room and see the rows of brightly coloured cases and sleeves. It makes me feel dumb to walk into my room and see stacks of CD-Rs. People like me won't sign up for this service, will continue using P2P to sample new artists and then will subsequently purchase the album if it is enjoyable (my last 40 or so CD purchases happened like this). It'd be pointless to me -- I listen to maybe 20 songs a month over P2P. It'd be pointless to people who do a lot over P2P and obviously don't care about legal / artistic ramifications, as well.
So who is this service for?
I reckon if the business is run as a tight ship, they could keep a slim enough margin to stay profitable. But they're not going to be making cash hand over fist, and they won't be detracting from the appeal of P2P.
-l
Real Networks. Like anyone, who this type of project should appeal to, is a fan of real networks.
Bah.
"Thoughts are more powerful than any weapon, and I don't even let my people own guns." --Joseph Stalin
cat
Now play that funky music and...
oggenc --raw
Wow. Making a copy of this music is gonna be reaaaaallly difficult.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
I have very eclectic musical tastes, from Beethoven to Sisters of Mercy, Tenesee Ford, Warren Zevon, Bob Segar yada yada ya...
..gone...
I had a cd collection once it got stolen, I havent replaced it since, I have a few favorite songs Ive rebought CDs for but in general to build a 100 song collection of stuf I like would cost me a freaking fortune. Id buy into this, its a RENTAL agreement, you rent movies you like enough to see once or twice but dont buy them, same thing here... Songs youre NEVER going to hear on the radio, might like to listen for a fw times then
Then again Im told I have ADD so I get bored quickly , maybe this idea just fits my midset.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Put all music online.
Let me access it on any PC, anywhere.
Let me download it to a portable player.
It doesn't matter if it's on a proprietary player in a propietary format, so long as I can get to it anywhere I have net access and a sound card and that it sounds good. At that point, I might consider it an essential service that I would pay monthly for, like phone and utilities. I already pay extra for having a phone I can carry around with me, and since I love music, the idea of paying $120 a year (which is far less than I spend on music right now) for unlimited access to any music sounds good to me.
Wonder if there'll be subsidization for low-income families like there is for phones and such?
Pretty silly, but that's the nature of the music industry, isn't it?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I'm kinda confused by this. I mean, I always said that I would pay to get music from the net (as in per-song fee) but I would never pay to rent a music on the net. This is not like a movie-rental business because when you rent a movie, you usually don't care to see it more than once or twice, but when you like a song, you're going to listen to it quite a lot.
They are probably going to fail with this plan and then come up with the usual excuse that the web is "not a good business place and blablabla".
Maybe one day someone will realise that with good ideas and a somewhat logic price-tag, the web CAN be a good place to sell stuff. It just isn't the "promised land" dot-coms seemed to think 3 years ago.
We know this. The question is, why don't THEY. I mean, you'd figure that with so many people working for these giants, at least a few of those executives or managers would have guessed it by now.
IP Therefore I am.
Anyone with a car. Hah!
Ok let me stop being a wiseass. I know what you're getting at.
A bunch of people brought up the point of "what are they going to do once its cracked?" well, couldn't it be that the company is EXPECTING it to get cracked? i mean, i(and alot of you it sounds) wouldn't pay $10 a month for music i couldn't transport around. once its cracked it will become $10 a month for whatever music you want and their ability to stay up without getting sued might be better than p2p because after all, everythings safe right? sounds like it could be an interesting stategy to me. go with the riaa rules knowing that your service is going to be usefull, as soon as someone breaks it.
Imagine if you could get multiple free streams of music broadcast to you wherever you are, for free. Something where you just turn on some receiving device and select a stream. Something wireless, with receivers that could be placed in cars or worn on the body. The audio content could even be recorded if someone just wanted a copy of a song and didn't care too much about quality. If someone could come up with something like this, nobody would even think of paying for something as silly and worthless as this rental scam...
this has about as much of a chance as working as the original DiVX business model.
who knows, maybe they're just setting it up to fail miserably in order to get the govt. to enforce stronger anti-piracy laws.
or they're just dumb.
your jesus is another mans xebu. chew on that hypocrites.
Nearly every major music store, as well as Best Buy and friends, have music listening stations in which most stores will be happy to let you listen to any CD they have in stock for a test run. If RIAA would simply extend this concept to the net, and again, use rather poor MP3 encodings to do it, they'd be finding a lot more friends among audiophiles.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Sounds like a great service to me...
--tim
When are the Record people going to get it. The music buying public want to buy their music at a fair price and play/store it on whatever device they please.
I think I would much rather spend the $10.00 a month for a subscription to XM radio which allows you to recieve digital audio virtually anywhere that can get sat. reception. Might not be able to get the exact song you want on demand but you atleast get very high quality, unlimited listening and you can pick a genre of the type of music you want to hear and recieve it. Plus it works in a car so you can actually use it outside the house.
Why do the kids in West Side Story have to join a street gang if they can afford $70 Gap khakis?
What the hell crack you smokin' boy? When you buy a CD you own it, the disk anyway.
Its actualy the same with software in most states, 'click-wrap' licenses have never been enforcable in court.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
E-Music doesn't stand a chance. The only way it could work is iff you agree to buy at least 100 more songs, after you get your first 100 for free, at "Regular Club Prices". Even then, it probably will be regulated further to purchasing at least 5-10 songs per artist, like a static compilation. (Even some of my fave albums have songs I'd rather skip over)
Once they get you into a membership, it doesn't matter if the songs can be passed around freely anymore, because it'll be so easy and simple to just pay the club.
2) If they expire when the service is cancelled, I take it that I can't burn a CD for my stereo, my portable CD player, or my car.
What a shitty service. I will not be subscribing until it improves substantially. And if they want a LOT of people to subscribe, they had better move to a value ADDED business plan. If it just equals free sharing services, there wont be a lot of interest. They need to have some kinds of features that set it apart, as well as making it just as good as the free sharing services.
But, I don't think that the music labels want to do this. Intead, this service will be used in court as a weapon against better sharing services. (ie "see, there's no reason to steal music, we have this crappy legal service that can be used instead!")
This is obviously a step in the right direction. It obviously isn't perfect, but nothing ever works right the first time through. My question is how quality will the music files be? Will they be 128, 256, 320? Whether they're mp3s, ogg, or some other format, will they be cd quality? I mean if I'm paying for music I'm going to expect to get the highest quality version there is. If I'm going to pay for low quality ones here I might as well go out an buy the cd.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
If you check the FAQ, they encode at 128Kb.
And yes, they don't have everything. But it's a step in the right direction, and it's the kind of service I'll happily pay for because it's the right way to do things.
My Journal
See? Capitalism works. All needs are being satisfied by the market. God Bless America, God Bless the RIAA
What about all the new technology companies are producing to prevent all of the current MP3 sharing? I mean, they now are producing mp3 players where music can not be shared.... the only mp3's you can play on them are the ones you personally rip and encode.
So, lets say I go out and just bought one of these "new" mp3 players because I only listen to my cd's anyways.... And these "new" mp3 players are being made because the RIAA is making such a big stink...
Now lets say I sign up for the RIAA's new subscription service at $10.00 a month and find out these songs don't work on my "new" mp3 player!
So who's going to refund my money?
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
Rent music, that another good one. Let me guess, they have backing from the RIAA (this is just a guess). Te only use I see for this is if you want to hear music before you buy the cd's then you can rent the song. But even then, I can go to HMV and get them to let me lessen to the cd for free.
Now here's another thought, if/when the company goes under, then dose the music you have payed for and where still planning on paying for still be usable or well it be auto deleted or something.
If this were the only way to get music over the net, I would just buy cd's (and I buy more cd's since I have been downloading mp3's if anyone is interested). At least then its my music with no real risks of losing it because a company goes bust.
my 2 cents plus 2 more
The goal here isn't for the record labels to make an immediate return. Rather, they're establishing legitimate services that offer MP3s so that when they take their "Anti-Napster", "Anti-Kazaa", etc. cases to the courts, they can cite their existing services as viable, and the "free" services as damaging their business. It's hard for them to prove that record sales are slumping due to MP3s, but they sure can make a case that the free services make it impossible for them to turn a profit with their online ventures.
Could they possibly be so clueless to think that this is an attractive option?
Are they doing this with some malice to see how many suckers they can get? Testing the waters?
Do they want to see just how dumb people can be?
Unfortunatly, I see two ways that this could go:
1. A moderate number of people use this service and they claim it to be a huge success.
2. Nobody uses this service and they declare that commercializing music on the Web is impossible, therefore all mp3's are illegal and evil. They will use this "evidence" to run more music trading circles into the ground.
Caffeine underflow (brain dumped)
I would appreciate it if you could fix this by reposting this article into the 'It's Funny. Laugh.' section.
Sound blaster live cards (and probably many others) have the ability to record anything that plays through the soundcard to a wav file.
In order for Windows to consider a sound card when an application opens a Secure Audio Path, it has to have a driver signed by Microsoft, and that driver must turn off all cleartext digital outputs (waveout->wavein, ->file, ->spdif, etc.) while the Secure Audio Path is open. (Read More...)
Will I retire or break 10K?
So what happens after you've got your hard drive filled with rented music and the monthly fee goes up to $199.95/month?
Yes, because they want to make it completely unafordable. Why price yourself out of the market of recurring revenue, which is the goal. Stop being so fucking shrill about this. Does rent-a-song suck? Yes. Are they going to get everyone hooked and then jack up the price to 200/month. Surely the most asinine thing I've read here in a year.
Why do people worry about buying these 'services'. I'm so sick of RIAA, MPAA, everyone. Instead of sitting here all day posting 'This will never work! DOWN WITH RIAA!!!' I've just turned on my radio. We got some really cool DJ's at the local station, they play good music, let them worry about copyright crap. And for the songs that I absolutely must have, I just download the MP3 on IRC. *Shrugs*
Can all fish swim?
that those swines started to intentionally cripple CDs in order to copy protect (cough) them, now that's a real disgrace and an insult to the artists.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
For sale:
Old retro analogue speakers without digital rights management module. Require special hardware for listening to music.
I accept Micro.NET money(TM) only. No RIAA Digital Rights Enforcement officers please. Email for details.
muzak4free@hotmail.com
Pipe the songs through the virtual audio cable
Windows ME and Windows XP have a Secure Audio Path that disables all of a sound card's digital outputs or the driver doesn't get signed. No pipe for you, sorry.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Playing very cool:
:)
"I have a better idea. How about I keep downloading for free, and you start charging reasonable sums for ordinary CDs?"
After that, we can reason about charging any money for music on the net. As it is now, the outrageous CD prices probably are somewhat outweighed by piracy.
Someone needs to take the first step to diminish both, and knowing the computer community, they won't. Maybe they shouldn't either.
One step the computer community *could* take first is stop clogging the bandwidth downloading *everything*. Guess what you are winning? Pay-for-bandwidth providers. DL what you need/want instead. That would probably be enough to calm the companies too, it would probably lower the MP3 downloads to 5% of what it is now.
Who is impressed by 80GB (mostly sucky) MP3s anyways...
I dont want "radio-like streams", I want digital high-quality music to go with my digital high-quality stereo system. Strike 1.
If a subscriber to RealOne Music lets his membership lapse, he loses access to music that was already downloaded. In effect, this means subscribers are renting the music more than actually buying it.
That ain't gonna cut it... People wont pay rediculous fees and then lose everything they collected when times are tough and they have to make some sacrifices on "extra expenses". Strike 2.
Analysts say the label-backed services have some advantages over the free-song sites. The quality of the file transfer - which is crucial to how the music sounds - is guaranteed to be high, which is not so on free sites. And the labels' services also offer protection from viruses.
guaranteed high-quality? streams are plagued by Internet slowdowns, and the MP3s I download now are 160+kbps. and "protection from viruses"?? how many viruses do you know that are sent in MP3 files?? the marketing spin-jockeys are hard at work.
But there are other obstacles, too. Neither service will allow users to transfer songs to portable devices or to CDs -- both considered essential features by many online music fans.
so.. you're forced to sit at your computer and listen to the songs that you dont own. what a great deal! lemme get my visa!
While both services are expected to offer about 100,000 songs when they launch, subscribers to one service will not be able to hear songs on the rival.
limited catalog and competing formats... strike 4, 5, 6, and 7.
you're out. stop wasting everyone's time with your stupid ideas on "how to help people not break the laws that we wrote in the first place".
However, they do have lots of really good stuff. For example most of the recordings of Bill Evans, lost of albums by Elvis Costello, all records of my favorite guitaris Emily Remler, lost of good blues (i.e. all recordings of Lightin' Hopkings, latest album by Sue Foley, Albert King, Hot Tuna).
Also all files are encoded at 128 bits. Finally, to get the $10/month rate you've got to sign up for a year.
I've used the service for few months now and I must have downloaded about 30 CDs of stuff.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Another alternative: just crack the fscking file format and keep the files forever.
It's been done before. It'll be done again. When will these clueless marketdroids and PHBs will understand that it is basically impossible to protect a file that you can download to an independent machine?
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Something interesting I noticed clicking on the link. I have set referer sending off in my browser but interestingly enough, FT.com tries to set a cookie with the following value:. co m;path=/track/
FTReferrer=http%3A//slashdot.org/%3F;domain=.ft
So, somehow, the article ID knows that the user came from slashdot.
Was this article submitted by someone at FT.com to track the slashdot effect?
I was hoping that the VAC2 would not have been blurbed about in such a high-profile site like Slashdot. Watch it magically disappear as the DMCA thugs-lawyers will muscle them in court, calling it a circumvention device.
Found this on Sunday night. Works lovely. And it's open source too, what more could you want?
Just tell me: "who thinks this shit up?", and: "how can i get a job thinking up dumb ideas?"
why would i want to buy music on a closed proprietary format that controls what i do on my own computer. Why would i want to pay a company for something that won't work if i'm not connected to the internet. WHY OH GOD WHY IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, THE F*CKING HElL WOULD I WANT TO HAVE MY COMPUTER ASK PERMISSION TO LISTEN TO SOMETHING I HAVE ON MY HARDDRIVE!?!?!?. And last of all... Please, someone tell me, why i would want to spend a month building up a collection that wont work if i stop paying, when i can build up a collection for free?
This is absolutely defiantly going on top of the dumb ideas hall of fame:
The Dumb Ideas Hall of Fame:
Online Music Rental
CueCat
Cactus, SafeAudio (and any other system)
CSS (not style sheets)
The DMCA
The SSSCA
Crypto-export laws and backdoor laws
DVD (what a stupid format)
DivX (the old rental format, not the codec)
Windows Media Format
DRM
Windows Product Activation
Dongles (why?)
G.W.Bush
Anything i've missed out?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I know the UK is having broadband problems but you can't even get 56K dial-up? Brutal.
The line about "cancel your service and you lose the ability to listen to any of the songs" well, to do that, they must have to connect to the internet in order to work this one out. To enforce this, they must have their own player/codec/format/thingy which needs this to work. No net connection, no play (am I the only one having this trouble on MS Media Player?).
How many people will actually pay for this shit? If you've only got one phone line and someone's using it, you can't listen. If you want to drag the laptop out in the garden for a barbeque and connect your amp & speakers, you need to run the phone cable out as well. Want to listen on the train? Well, you'll need a compatable cell phone and a lot of patience.
As someone said earlier, the normal CD business has a better business model.
I can see a few dumb people signing up for a few months, but after they realise that to listen to their purchases (legally - of course it's easy to rip anything one way or another), they need to huddle round the PC in the corner.
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
The quality of the file transfer - which is crucial to how the music sounds - is guaranteed to be high, which is not so on free sites. And the labels' services also offer protection from viruses.
Ok, i know p2p has it's problems with speed, especially if the RIAA does a DOS attack. But virus on music (mp3/wma/realone) files: is this even possible?
And the quality of the transfer: this is only important for streaming audio, and it is always less then non-streaming (on my 56K6 modem).
They will have a VERY hard time convincing users.
Last week here in Switzerland I decided to go to the shop and buy some video games. Well on my way I saw some CD's, VHS tapes and DVD's for sale.
So I look at the price and they are as follows:
CD: CHF 19.90
VHS: CHF 19.90
DVD: CHF 29.90
Notice something interesting here. The VHS tape is the same price as the CD. Two things to note here.
First when CD's and cassettes co-existed the price difference was not that big.
Second a movie basically costs the same price as a movie. I hear the music industry whining on how much it costs to produce a CD, but EXCUSE' me how much does it cost to produce a film?
The point is that the music industry is lost. While the music industry worries about illegal P2P the movie industry already has made their content easily available.
Here is what I mean. Notice how easy it is to get movie content? Either through Pay Per View, Movie Theathers, Movie Channels, Hotel viewing, DVD's, Rental's, etc. The point is that the music industry has flooded the channels and as such their income is assured in one form or another.
The music industry on the other hand has decided combat anything that is not based on sales of media... And the worst part is that the music industry keeps pumping out CRAP in terms of boy and girl bands.
Maybe the music industry should take a lesson from the movie industry...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
grossly overpriced CD that the actual artist MAYBE gets $0.10 from the sale of
The songwriter, on the other hand, makes a full 75 cents from each record sold, which she splits evenly with the music publisher. Moral: to get rich in the record industry, write your own songs.
ANYONE offering any type of music downloads will eventually get shut down, especially places like emusic that allow you to just download an MP3
The United States has a "compulsory license" scheme (see 17 USC 115) for sound recordings such that the copying party pays the label a set royalty for each phonorecord (i.e. copy) or digital delivery made, and the label can't veto it.
Will I retire or break 10K?
thats an excellent approach, especially since they guarantee "highest quality" downloads - so you have extra SNR in the data to spend while doing your D-A-D conversion! :)
I suspect that "remastered" versions from a few brave sould willing to pay will end up out on Gnutella.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
What next, are they going to sell their collected account info to telemarketers so they can call to sell you concert tix?
"Hello, I see you just downloaded..."
This deserves to die a horrible, untimely death.
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.
Well, is there any file-level protection system that wasn't cracked ? remember that it's only '0's and '1's :)
____
nico
Nico-Live
Maybe I am just in a good mood but I hope this is a positive step towards finding common ground between the music industry and its consumers. No, I don't think this model is going to succeed,the price is steep (especially when studies show users of P2P actually increase their cd buying) and the terms of use are too restrictive. Lets hope the "industry" can at least learn from this and improve their offerings in the future.
With that said, excuse me while I take off my rose-colored glasses and go back to living in the real world, where the music industry is a bunch of greedy, backstabbing whores.
www.sguil.net
The Analyst Console for NSM
to re-encode... cancel anytime.
The music industry will continue to SUCK until artists publish directly to the web themselves.
Spell check? Why bother. That is what grammer/spelling Nazi freaks who waiste band width posting "spell right" are for.
Just the other day there was a hilarious comic on dilbert about some guys in a swamp whose business model was to sell mud to people who live in mud.
I don't see how this is any different. First of all the services these companies are competing against are 0$. On top of that there are lots of restrictions on what you can do with the music you download and you lose the music once you stop paying.
There's simply no way this can be profitable. It has failure written all over it. Hosting the music costs money, licensing the music costs money, writing and maintaining the software needed for playback and license enforcing costs money. There's no way that cost can ever be recovered.
Jilles
Any copyright holder who wants to put his music up for legal download can do so. What do you think mp3.com is all about? In other words, what the hell are you talking about?
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
Instead of renting music (where you lose the ability to play the music when you stop paying the rent), it would be nice if you could lease the music. After having leased the music for a while, you would own it and wouldn't have to pay for listening to it anymore.
Of course, it would be very hard to implement such a scheme and even more difficult (if not impossible) to make it unbreakable.
to listen to the music you rent i assume you will be sending it to your speakers. can you simply send it to another computer's audio input and record it to a non-crippled format? sure its not the same digital quality, but at least you got the music forever. besides someone will come up with a way to break whatever scheme is being used.
before someone makes a beow.. er, creates a player that doesn't verify a subscription. And the argument about portability of these songs will be moot soon enough. But personally, if the quality isn't CD or better, I see little or no incentive to switch to such a pay-per-listen system. The quality of most MP3s that I've obtained online is poor. Pops and skips about, and finding anything but top-40 songs in a format over 128kbps is an excercise in futility. Everything else aside, if they can offer me a wide selection of tunes at high-quality bitrates, I'd likely subscribe.
--
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Dixv (not to be confused with the codec) was this DVD based movie format. The Divx -DVD's and your player would phone in and charge you every time you played the movie..
I think there was a larger fee to "unlock" the movie permanently for 1 player as well. It was supposed to make rentals that you didn't have to return etc..
Judging from the complete lack of Divx/DVD players in stores, I'd say consumers didn't go for it. So being fast learners they try it with music now..
Of course with the headphone jack and a MiniDisc player the issure becomes moot..
[Use a UNIX-spec system's pipes to capture the audio]
Too bad the player doesn't run under *BSD or GNU/Linux, and Wine doesn't support the Secure Audio Path API. (If it did, it would be branded a circumvention device under the DMCA and relegated to the non-US distributions.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Is this as easy to crack as changing the date on your computer to a month where you're all paid up?
I don't think that the record labels want or expect these services to succeed. They are designed to fail. When they fail, the record labels will have the cover of "plausible deniability" they need. They can say that honest people don't want online music, that they really want to purchase CDs, and that the role of the Internet is to accept orders for copy-protected CDs that can be mailed to them. Now nobody will believe this, but it will be all that Congress needs. That's where the game is played.
And because Congress is in their pockets, they're protected by the DMCA. If (well, "when" is more appropriate) anyone cracks the service, they'll be liable for prosecution. So will web sites that post the cracks, although of course there will be just as many of these as there are sites carrying DeCSS. Again, it'll be a way of separating the world into "thieves" and their good customers.
These services download proprietary encrypted formats, which is why there can be timebombs. They might be semi-useful for a Kid In A Dorm Room, for whom the computer (consumer grade Windows box with subwoofer, etc.) has become the music system. But if you can't move it to a real disk or portable MP3 player, then it's not going to be usable on your real hifi system or in the car. Big whoop. Again, designed to fail. Why pay $10/month for what is, in effect, the right to sample things?
Now personally, I would be willing to pay a reasonable fee for the right to download some number of tracks a month, in an unrestricted format, and/or to sample (stream, whatever) from a catalog before buying. Then I'd burn my own CDs. The artists could make just as much as they do now. But the record labels are wedded to their high-overhead business models and don't care what the customers want.
I expect an impasse to last for some time, with online filesharing continuing one step ahead of the law, until some successful artists band together and join an alternative to the Big 5 record labels. That alternative would promote online distribution as well as sell CDs, and would have the clout to buy radio play. No, not MP3.com, which was basically unsigned acts.
I prefer getting my music for free using a p2p app.
This is the worst logic the music business has come up with since the price of CDs. The price of CDs, more than anything, IMHO, is the reason that P2P sharing is so overwhelmingly successful. If they's make CDs available for $3-$6 (and there's plenty of fat in that price), who'd spend $2M on equipment and $20 a month connection to download commercial tracks?
I love it. This is the first time the fans have run the music business since the sixties. This round, they're going to lose.
From: Me
To: The Recording Industry
Re: Online Music Rental.
After reading your proposals for online music rental, I have come-up with some new ideas that I think will benefit everyone:
1. Instead of: "You pay us a monthly fee": "I will pay you nothing, you evil money grabbing basterds".
2. Instead of: "You can download 100 of our great songs a month": "I will download what ever songs i see fit enough to be listened to, and in any quantity"
3. Instead of: "You will use our format, and the songs will only work when your computer authenticates with our server": "I will listen to whatever i want, when ever i want, and however i want, and you will go and f*uck yourselves."
and finally
4. Instead of: "We will pay our artists their share of money for their time and effort": "I will pay your artists by merchandise, and tour tickets, if i think they are worthy of my time. unworthy people such as Hear'Say, Westlife and other timewasters, will give back their limos, and go and get jobs, if they want to make music, they will do it in their own time."
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Everyone needs to agree on a set day and time to downlaod everything they can. This should hammer thier servers pretty hard and they'll have to let you have it at a lesser price (it took how many hours to get that song?)
When the price goes up, I say we send those dead files back to them. Let's see how well they can handle that load of people wanting to return thier defective product.
good luck,
sopwath
Neither service will allow users to transfer songs to portable devices or to CDs -- both considered essential features by many online music fans.
This is the problem in a nutshell -- not the fact that I lose the songs if I end my subscription, but the fact that I can't back them up, take them with me, or burn them to CDs. Sure I listen to music on my computer, but I'm never bound to it. I can carry it away on CD or upload it to another machine at any time.
If this service allowed me to download music to my home entertainment system and archive the songs on it, then this might be marketable. At least that way the music is located someplace where I or others will listen to it most. But this is a failure waiting to happen. If it was free, I'd accept the restrictions on portability. For $10 a month, nobody will.
...as it works out to 10 cents a song. And especially if you have a little jewel called Total Recorder, see http://www.highcriteria.com. I have no interest or connection with this company except that I love this product.
... but I'd like people to think about why it won't work. The most obvious point is the whole needing to maintain your subscription - even at $10 a month for 100 songs, most people aren't going to be into effectively committing to this service for life.
Step back though, consider why they're doing this. Do people really think that the record companies get a kick out of not letting people listen to music while on the move? If you do - fine, I'd like to know why, but its your opinion. I feel more though that the fear the copying of the files.
Can anyone here genuinely tell me that most of the efforts toward breaking the security on this will be so that someone can distribute music amongst their friends? I'm reasonably willing to bet it'll be broken because someone wants to copy files illegally, not because they're frustrated with the subscription model. Maybe I'm wrong - DVDss were a good example of where this theory has been wrong - but even there, the information was rapidly adapted to allow people to copy DVDs.
Perhaps people could think more about how illegal copying affects everyone. If you don't agree with the pricing of some music, sure don't buy it, but also don't copy it. Make a statement that you're willing to go without this, because it costs so much, not a statement that you're going to copy it because its cheaper.
Also, everyone that's saying "this model will never work, its not what I want" - are you going to do anything about this? Are you going to contact any of the companies involved, and tell them you're opinions in a calm and rational way, or are you just ignore the entire thing. These companies won't realise what people want, through magic, so tell them!
I forsaw this situation a year ago when I bought a nice little Sony MiniDisc player/recorder. When I want to make my MP3s or CDs portable, I simply connect the digital "out" of my soundcard to the digital "in" of my MiniDisc with an optical cable and make a nice clean digital recording. The MiniDiscs hold about 74 minutes of audio, the same as a CD, and only cost about a $1.50 each. The only downside to MDs is that you must record in "real-time" - there is no way to speed up the process like with a Rio MP3 player connected to your computer with a USB cable. BTW, there are new MD players out now that support the new extended 320 minute format. Drool!
It'd never work. These "multiple free streams" are clearly in violation of the DMCA. I mean, where's the copyright protection? If I want to give out copies of music I've heard over these "streams," as you've suggested, who's going to stop me? Surely, these "streams" will destroy the music industry! If we go sharing these "streams" around, artists won't get compensated for their work. Take away Mammon, and where's the motivation for original work like Brittney Spears, Christina Aguilaria, and the thousands of other pop stars with breast implants going to come from? What about proportionality? If these "streams" are "broadcast," as you say, then any number of people will be able to tune in, and artists will never get compensated based on who gets listened to the most. This is a very terrible idea. I'm thankful that these "streams" violate the DMCA -- I mean, where else are twleve year olds going to find pop stars to jack off to except the RIAA.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
I'm getting a little tired of the new mentality that everything can only be rented, not bought anymore. You can pay a fee and download and "rent" music, but you do not own it? BULLSHIT. If I ever pay money for music, then I, by way of paying the fee, have the right to do anything (legal) with that music. If I want to burn it to a CD to play in my car or send it to my RIO that is my business and coporate America can fuck themselves.
So... I get the 100 tunes and then pay for the rest of my life to be able to listen to them. Nice.
"It's a very immature business (where) most of the important mistakes haven't been made yet," said Aram Sinnreich, an analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix.
Oh, I don't know - they seem to be doing a damn fine job of trying to stuff all those mistakes in. For years now a few of us have been saying on Slashdot that what the publishing concerns are gunning for is a pay to play world where you never own an actual product and never get to control any aspect of your temporary rental of the products you pay for - except for deciding when you press "play" (provided your subscription is up to date, natch).
Basically, the existance of technologies that by nature should make the ownership of a copy of a particular piece of intellectual property much cheaper and much more useful than it has been is being exploited as an excuse to make the act of paying for the right to access intellectual property more expensive and much less useful.
Go to a record store and buy a regular CD - any artist or label you want, if they have it in stock. Rip it to your hard drive. The thing is basically immortal now, barring accident or theft. Rip it to MP3s, make your own mixes, use your personal server to stream your own web station you can listen to at work. Make compilation CDs for the drive or vacation. You never pay to access that content again. Sick of it? Sell it, recover a tenth of your purchase price.
Or: Buy a subscription to a service. Limited access to a limited catalog. You can bet there are all sorts of restrictions on reformatting, how many machines the thing can reside on, etc. Andpay to maintain it. And pay to maintain it. And pay to maintain it. The longer you ae a member the more diffuse it becomes - you are paying a smaller and smaller amount for the maintenance of each song. But you NEVER get to stop paying.
There is only one group of copnsumers these services could be appropriate for - people who spend more than $10.00 per month on CD singles. For the rest of us (I've never bought a single in my life) it isn't even relevant. But it is a warning shot. They're gonna try to use the DMCA to completely eliminate ownership of a registered copy of copyrighted material, an act which, given the results of the recent 2600 case, pretty much allows them to eviscerate the concept of fair use. Alternatives (like emusic.com) are the ONLY solution. People who care NEED to start supporting artists who choose not to join the publishing giant slave-parade. Information may not want to be free but it doesn't have to be expensive.
Cheer up - the publishing industries', particularly the music industries' time of maximum vulnerability is upon them. Keep your eyes peeled troops and get ready to support the good guys.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Do you know each other in real life? If not, how do you know he uses Windows ME and Windows XP?
How do you know that the proprietary player doesn't degrade the output quality significantly if it detects Windows 95, 98, or NT 4?
Will I retire or break 10K?
...there wasn't that looming threat of "Cancel your subscription, lose your music"
IMO, 10 cents per song is a great idea. Except that it must be a permanent purchase, not a "rental." If it is a fair deal, which 10 cents per song is (permanent), then people will flock to it. Make them MP3s (I saw a discussion earlier in the thread about a service just like that) and it will be even better.
I believe the whole reason that Napster and free clients were widely used was that the record industry was charging way too much for CDs. Keep in mind that the cost of the more expensive to make cassettes has hovers around $10, even while CDs at the mall shops has risen to almost $20.
People do not want to pay $20 for a CD. And that is really the crux of the record industry's problem.
Greg
Although he has not been mainstream since the mid-eighties, Prince has embraced the internet and music distribution quite well. His music club (www.npgmusicclub.com) allows fans to subscribe for $100 a year to receive monthly downloads of new and old songs, live recordings, and videos. Definitely aimed at fans, the songs are mostly unreleased and quite good. They can be downloaded in low (128) or high (256) MP3 formats. From there, I burn CDs, put them on my MP3 player, or whatever else I want to do with them... And its cool because Prince (the artist) gets the lionshare of the profits. If all musicians did this when their contracts ran out, the RIAA would evaporate into thin air!
run a cable between the digital-out of one soundcard and the digital-in of the other
Did you even read what yerricde wrote? "that driver must turn off all cleartext digital outputs (waveout->wavein, ->file, ->spdif, etc.)"
Personally I would pay ten dollars a month just to see to it that Britney Spears, and her clones all disappeared along with the "boy bands" and any other "musicians" that are put together by producers into a money making machine rather than coming together to make music for its own sake.
That is the kind of garbage that dominates top 40. I for one want nothing to do with it.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Don't feel angry at this person - he is differently-humored.
I spent two years in Japan in the early '90s and found a very cool chain of stores that was called "Book Box". The first floor was books and periodicals. The second floor was video and CDs. A member was able to rent music CDs (and video, of course)! I found this to very very cool and wondered why it never caught on here. Anyone ever seen this anywhere else?
~~~
I agree, and echo the statements in effect saying "they are setting themselves up for a failure to prove their own point".
This is spin + corporate politics + capitalism + a "victim" mentality (that sadly works all to well in the court system) = No Soup/songs/fish/fair use for YOU!
And it suddenly occured to me that the acronym RIAA just might stand for Retentive In Anal Areas.
At least, that is what was running thru my mind while reading the article.
Oh, and I don't think anyone hit on this particular part: The first internet music service backed by major record companies
What is wrong with this picture, people?
2 Major labels? when it has been said that the Music industry, like the TV industry is/are so "in bed with each other" that when on person sneezes, everyone covers thier mouth, reflexively".
I can say with confidence that we are dealing with the devils we do know and the devils we don't want to know, also.
Cheers,
Moose
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Why? Well, essentially, it means for 10 bucks / month (1/3 of what I spend on morning coffee), I get reliable, high quality music downloads, and I don't have to put up with GNutella's crap. Sure, AFter I d/l the songs, I'll use my line in jack to convery them to MP3/OGG so I can do what I want with them, and won't be at risk of losing my music (Shh, don't tell the RIAA!). But I sure won't be sharing my songs over gnutella. Pirating IS wrong, the only reason I used to do it was it was convienient. Seriously, if you look at what you're getting fr measly 10 bucks (the equivalent of 9 CD's of music, plus, only th songs you want on each), it's quite a bargain.
Rent it, rip it through Total Recorder to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis or whatever, cancel. There's always a way to pirate.
Not that I'm advocating such a thing, of course, just pointing out that if someone can hear it, they can copy it just as easily. Copy protection schemes are just a waste of effort.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
The _only_ reason I use p2p clients is to find obscure music. If you're stuck with something like GnuTella (decent idea, but slow searches), try an OpenNap client (like winMX) ....
Easy, download the song, use streambox to rip it to a standard mp3, keep the monthly service as long as you want new mp3's at a dime a piece (100 @ $10), quit when you don't. Then, even after you quit you still have all your music, which you paid for, I might add (and at what I consider fair market value, greedy b@stards...)
The great advantage of the internet is that we can have a huge content available for a little (distribution) price. With napster, we typed the name of an artist and had a lot of content from that artist. Now, it's more and more difficult to hear the music we like. The street stores can't have everything. We can buy a CD online but we have to wait and of course, we have to buy the whole cd.
The music distributors are in fact putting restrictions on what we can hear. They select what we have to hear, and how to hear it (windows media player, not on a cd, not on a portable device, not if your rental expires) and then promote and distribute it. It is well known that independent distributors can't survive in front of the big ones. No wonder the EU commission is planning a lawsuit.
Smaller artists are getting screwed because they can't get to their public as easily as they could with the internet.
If you want to support them, go to their concerts.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
Something like this is being used for Muzak in a shop i used to work in. :)
When I was there a CD would last a week before it got "scratched". Nowadays they've got a PC hidden away connected to the sound-system. Every week it downloads a whole new bunch of MP3s costing like IR£10 a week. The muzak runs continuosly, and you don't have staff "sratching" the MP3s. It's also siuted to the season, because the Christmas stuff is starting to come down the pipe now and driving everyone nuts!
"hehe, website" - Homer Simpson
on my home computer? that sure as hell aint worth no 10 cents a song, I want to listen to the music on my 500 watt surround sound system with its 15" woofers, not on my 4" computer speakers and sub woofer. I want to listen to them in my car, while I jog, where I work, I cant bring my desktop with me to listen to the songs...
this is, as has been pointed out, designed to fail...
Thank God for alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.bootlegs, Used CD shops and pawn shops...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
You could write a wrapper for your sound driver that dumped all of the uncompressed byte code to your harddrive. So, in addition to being setup to fail, as previously stated, it is (somewhat) easily circumventible.
Revenues are falling in the record industry and costs are higher. They have to put sooo much money into getting a record to chart now, that
it's not economical to promote anything which wont sell loads
they have to sell as much of that crap as possible
... well it could if I could play it properly.
I, for one, would be buying more music (on CD) if Napster was still there (and I could get to it from work - damned firewalls) 'cos I could listen first. I've got more chance of shagging the pope than hearing anything to my taste on the radio these days. If I can't check it out first, then I'm not going to risk the money.
BTW I came across this site last week. I can just pay, print out the music, and then I can be sure that it'll play on any compatible piano
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
Golly, for _only_ $10.00 a month I can preview music (see: consumer's rights to inspection) then pay $17.00 at the local music store for it! Oh, wait, most of what I listen to is imports, so that'd be $21.00 + $5.00 S&H. Thank god the RIAA is saving me money!
-laMEduck
Whats to stop you from plugging your audio out
into your mic in and copying these files so that
the poorly coded software you download can't remove them? Or finding some way to extracth them from whatever weird format htey will have to be in and burn them onto a CD?
-- Henry
...why I would want to pay for music?
The *only* thing stopping me from going completely mp3 is storage technology... and as soon as a good cheap smart media disk with +1GB capacity comes out, my CDs are going in the trash.
I don't even respect napster any more... disintermediated P2P make the entire idea of a "music subscription" completely useless.
Rent OS Over the Net: Micro$oft announces . . .
How long will it be till we see that one?
Uhm... remember FM radio ?
"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."- Friedrich Nietzsche
"file transfer" quality being crucial to how the music sounds ? I bet some kind of music is playing forever in the reporter's mind, impeding his thoughts.
And the labels' services also offer protection from viruses.
Viruses? What viruses? Any evidence of an MP3 virus? Not that I ever heard. Hits of FUD campaing, if you ask me.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
You're not a recording artist, are you? Virtually nobody makes money on records. For example, Glen Campbell, who has had more than twenty gold records, has publicly stated that because of the recording contracts he was forced to sign, he would never have made a living at music if he had to live on royalties. Most artists lose money on recording, in fact. The real money is to be made in live performances. This is in no small part a factor in the draconian nature of recording contracts. To get enough exposure to make a living playing concerts, artists are required to sign contracts that generally give the artist less than 25 cents per CD sold, and those quarters must be used to pay back the record company for the costs involved in making the CD (studio fees, distribution costs, advertising, etc.) before the artist sees a penny of it. For this reason, the vast majority of artists never see any money from a record, and some of them actually take such a huge loss that they quit the professional music scene entirely (which is one of the main reasons behind the "one-hit wonder" phenomenon).
More to the point, however, is that many of the artists that are presented with a recording contract are young and inexperienced, and most are not given the chance to refer to legal assistance before signing. I personally know several artists who were presented with contracts on a "this night only" basis. When one of them asked to have a copy before signing so that his attorney could look it over, the exec told him, "No way. If you don't sign it now, you won't sign it ever." He refused, and the exec made good on the threat. With the fear of oblivion hanging over them, many artists fold under pressure and sign, hoping to hit the big time and make it back. Others will sign anything that's put in front of them by someone claiming to be a record company. For the most part, it's a screw-time by the record companies, designed to get money for the record company execs, with little concern for the artist, because, as was said to me by a contracted musician, "if you don't sign up, there's always someone behind you waiting."
So, in response, yes, most artists under record contract are mistreated. Some accept it more readily than others, but it's still mistreatment.
Virg
What an absurd idea - renting music over the Net. Scenario:
I'm having a party at my house, and I want it to be fun, so I'll download some ska, play it, have a good time, and then revert back to my normal, boring, Barry Manilow life, and "return" the Reel Big Fish the next day.
Puh-lease.
And, as far as copy protection schemes, the only way the RIAA or anyone else is going to stop me from copying music is to cut my ears off. They apparently don't seem to realize that any OUTPUT stream (be it aural or visual) can be turned into an INPUT stream. Until they eliminate the OUTPUT, I've got INPUT to copy from. Nothing can stop that short of taking away my ability to enjoy music.
It's time for the RIAA to sit down and really examine how far up their own ass they're going to crawl to find a "solution" to this "problem." The better thing to do is give up control to the artists and let them determine how they want to distribute their music. I buy the music from the artists I like (particularly LOCAL artists) to support their efforts. The RIAA need to face the fact that they DO NOT represent the artists, but rather a conglomeration of corporations who contribute NOTHING to the artistic process of creating music. All they do is stick the bits on CD and peddle them - and usually shitty music from the like of Britney Spears, N'Sync, and other lyrically-deficient teenie bands.
Mmmm... Pistol Whip...
It will never happen. The server side would require expensive infrastructure, probably big metal towers and electricity and stuff like that. The only way they would be able to afford to send out the music for free, would be if they were to completely commercialize it.
I'm just speculating, of course ;-) but there would probably be ads in between the songs, and the songs themselves would be extremely pre-filtered and not an accurate representation what the musician population actually creates.
So I don't think your pipe dream is ever going to happen, except perhaps in a perverted form. Keep dreaming, you foolish idealist.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The quality of the file transfer - which is crucial to how the music sounds - is guaranteed to be high, which is not so on free sites.
umm sure thing.
And the labels' services also offer protection from viruses.
viruses in mp3's... right
Joseph?
There are already some working sites for downloading music with a monthly fee. I will here analyze two of them :
1 e-compil (universal)
- prices : 8 for 10 downloads or 15.5 for 20 downloads (per month, min. 6 month)
- audio format : windows media ! quality unknown
- choice : ridiculously small, few artists, only one or two song per artist. (Example : only 45 titles in the techno/dance category !)
- ability to transfer songs to a portable device : limited, you have to use microsoft active sync.
- interface : minimum
- artists retribution : unknown
- no search engine
- url : http://www.e-compil.fr/
2 emusic
- prices : 14.99$ a month (3month) or 9.99$ (12 month min.), unlimited download
- audio format : mp3
- choice : large number of artists but many of them obscure; many full albums.
- ability to transfer files : maximum, they trust the customer.
- interface : good
- Artists are paid per download.
- url : http://www.emusic.com/
Conclusion
Unfortunately, those two services are not what a music enthusiast expects : e-compil is pure crap (at this time), windows only, very limited choice. emusic is better. The only problem is that they only have the music that the big bussiness has left them and that is sure not enough for a music fan : we choose music we like, not music produced by X or Y.
We'll see what pressplay and musicnet will offer but I praise you to never, never commit to a service that use windows media. Microsoft has already a insane grip on the computing world, don't let it come to the music world.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
CDNow does let you listen to Real, WMP, and MP2 versions of most of the tracks, but they're also usually less than 20 seconds in length. I like your idea better.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Copy protection schemes are like perpetual motion machines: there is always some crank claiming to have one, despite sound arguments that no such thing can exist.
This plan was clearly produced by some savvy businessmen. They charge a modest fee, but lock you into the service FOREVER-- the longer you subscribe, the larger your collection, and the greater the penalty for terminating the service. What an incredible business model!
Of course, it relies entirely on the integrity of the copy protection scheme. OOPS!
Amazing that such "savvy businessmen" are completely taken in by the copy protection cranks. Not just once, but again and again and again and again and...
I buy lots of music, I even pay for CD for the SHITTY MAJOR LABELS. When I can't find somthing for sale I search Morpheus and ALMOST ALWAYS find things that the so-called record companies cannot provide me but would like to SUE me for trying to listen to. The record companies are doomed, and rightfully so. When your industry is RUN BY INBRED MORONS things tend to go south.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I saw ads for about 4 months, then that thing went out of business.
The RIAA should've listened to their motion picture brethren MPAA about that idea...
-
Now, as the label-backed services are set to launch, the companies are careful to position them as works in progress. "It's a very immature business (where) most of the important mistakes haven't been made yet," said Aram Sinnreich, an analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix. "They're focusing on the early adopter audience at this point." (emphasis added)
Seems to me that all the biggest mistakes have been made and repeated several times already, by all the major players. They've managed to alienate the customer base and chase them away to the competition, even to the point where few have any qualms about bootlegging and to hell with whatever the music cartel offers. I'd say Mr. Sinnreich hasn't got a clue.
But he's right, it's a very immature business .
Edith Keeler Must Die
While like you I won't be busting down a door to join the major labels' online efforts, don't spread the rumor you're not allowed to copy music. :-)
Ja, man. FM Radio. That's what the post was all about. You know, how insane the DMCA is?
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
What bothers me about the band thing is that it is pre-created crap used to make money. Seriously...
Look at how bad things have gotten. Elton John refuses to make anymore albums because he is so disgusted with how things are going.
I watch the "band" building sessions. And from it I saw that the they look for the following things; coordination, stage presence, good looks and singing talent. The kicker was that the "director" said singing was at the last thing they look for. Why? Simple in a "band" it is easy to hide the lack of singing ability. Look at the remake of Billy Joels "Uptown girl" remake. The boy band did not have the ability to sing to the same ability as Billy Joel.
The point I am trying to make is that here in Europe the boy/girl band has become a pure money making scheme. THey just keep pumping out the bands and raising the hype. They are not interested in musical talent!!! And that is why the music industry is dead and decayed...
There is a new band "BroSis" and from the TV talk they are now International Stars. BULLDODO... They have one song no chart, but the marketing machine just keeps on going. BTW as a disclaimer there is one BroSis member who has real talent. Forget his name though.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Use VMware! ... Linux can snarf stuff off the audio device
Do you imply that the Secure Audio Path can't detect vmware?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Even if I wanted to continue to pay $9.99 a month to listen to my music forever, what happens when the company goes under? My music would be as worthless as a Circuit City DIVX player.
Why does it suprise anyone that this has happened. Look where eveything is going: Microsoft wants to 'rent' you software (.NET). Cable companies rent you content (don't think they wouldn't make it impossible to tape/save/record if they could). The music industry will let you download music, but you can't play it if you stop your subscription.
The revenue stream for selling things once isn't as nice as one that comes in every month. M$ looks at AOL -- wow, you don't just sell 1 copy of windows (that maybe gets copied), you get your $25 (or whatever it is these days) every month!! Hence MSN (or whatever their ISP service is called). Look to the phone company (though, that model has changed quite a bit, but you still pay a flat fee per month, but it's for a service rather than 'content').
We will see more and more companies try to move to this revenue model; whether it succeeds is more up to the consumer than then company.
It is a bad idea to try and pursuede a group of techies to consider renting music online when we are the ones who realize the limitations of such a business model and would most likely hesitate to pay. So the industry tests their programs. Then theres the task of convincing the not-so-technical public, most who still use a dialup, to pay for the right to "hear" music online. This software is better appealing for users with broadband connections and most of us get by with the other methods that are currently under fire.
Off topic, but I want to see: (1) Total $ Lost by us copying files (2) Total $ spent on copy protection, lawyers, fees, propaganda?
Honestly, I dunno how popular my opinion's going to be here but... I dunno. You say this like it's a bad thing.
.sig quote was "Music Isn't a Product" and I don't know how many times I have to reiterate it before people understand.
For a good long time my e-mail
Let me just turn on one of the big stations in Vancouver for a minute.
Destiny's Child - Survivor
Britney Spears - Whatever that new one is
Afroman - I Get High.
Well, isn't my life better because I've heard those three songs.
The thing is, these are relatively high-production quality but at the same time the music is entirely mediocre. Essentially can be summed up in one word: Overproduction.
And it's interesting, The more I hear new music the more I realize that local Indie groups are the only ones that sound at all intelligently produced and aren't designed simply for the lowest common denominator of music.
Either that or Imported stuff (yay Cheesy Rotterdam!) that is incredibly hard to get over here in any form other than MP3...
Take electronic music. It's been going on for a good 25+ years now, but only around '96 to '98 did it really get noticed by the record labels. And as a consequence the music went drastically downhill (see: Alice Deejay) in terms of novelty and intelligence behind the music being produced.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that maybe record companies folding isn't such a bad thing. Then maybe more talented artists (And by artists I _don't_ mean dancers...) can get the exposure and respect _as_ artists that they deserve.
Like I've said in the past, Copywrite Laws are a casualty of the war against corporate dogma that says we have to like what they want us to... Wear somebody's name on your underwear... Be Young, Have Fun, Drink Pepsi...
(I suppose you're all tired of my idealistic anarchistic preaching so I'm gonna stop now.)
Karma: Non-Heinous
When the whole shitstorm over Napster was playing out in court and the mainstream media over the last 12 months or so, I thought a lot about why people want music over the net, what they want, and why they don't want to pay for it.
Quit laughing, the answer to "why they don't want to pay" isn't as obvious as you think.
I don't want to pay because the money's not going to the right place.
For better or worse, the Napster/P2P phenomenon is an American contrivance, and a lot of it is built, though not necessarily by Americans or in America, with American sensibilities. The Great American Idea is, "I want what I want, where I want it, and when I want it." And the complement of that is, "I don't like to be conscious of being told what I want."
The major labels are trying to play this like they have, or soon will have, total control, same as the old pre-cassette LP days of the 1960s. If you want to hear this music, you go to a store we designate, and you pay some money for a physical flat, black circular object and take it home to play it.
A lot of the labels (just like a lot of the book publishers until a few years ago) still think that they're in the business of selling physical containers for media, when really, most listeners don't give a shit how the content is packaged, they want what's IN it.
But it's that "control" thing that will nuke the labels in the end, because it runs counter to the Promise Of World Interconnection: anything you want, you can find, right now. Anything. The ethic of the labels is, "you can only have what we choose to sell you, when we choose to sell it, nyah."
This offends people. It sure offends ME. I could not possibly give a rat's ass about Britney or Garth or Blink or N'Sync. But the things I am interested in finding are uneconomic for the labels to choose to sell to me on physical media. If I'm interested in finding a particular track by a particular obscure 1950s Detroit blues band, and they recorded only one album that was released locally and there's maybe only ten copies left in the entire world, in a solid-media world, I am completely forked. That is, unless some major label chose to buy the rights to the album, then chose release it on CD, then chose to distribute it AND the stores around me chose to carry it AND they're not out of stock that day AND the counter staff has some idea of what bin it was chucked into.
All I wanted was to hear "Winin' Boy Blues," and I've gotta go through all that? Scruit.
Look at it now from a net perspective: all it takes is for one of those ten people to sample their rare LP, convert it and stick up a Gnutella host. I can then find it, and hear the music right now, and by extension, pass it along to other people who might hit my Gnutella node. No flat, black, rare expensive scratchy things involved.
I want what *I* want, not the shit the label wants me to buy this month. Nothing about any of these online distribution schemes is built to account for that paradigm. And nothing about their paradigm interests me. So yes, I will continue "stealing" the older, less-mainstream music I want, because I don't want any of the stuff they're trying to sell, or if I do, I don't want it on their terms, because their terms don't suit my intended use and strip me of fair-use rights under law.
The one big flaw in my approach is that the creators of the music don't get paid, and I want them to be paid. However, there's nothing in the major label structure that assures that they will be if I hand over my money to them, either!
One way out: rather than try to take on the labels at their game, invent a new one. Bypass the existing rights-management mechanisms and set up a net-based rights cooperative to handle micropayments directly to the artists, a la Amazon's Honor System. Not just for new or unsigned artists, but all artists, including the estates of dead ones. If I want to use an early Fugs track in a film I'm doing, or want to burn some Wes Montgomery to CDR for a friend, I go to the clearinghouse, find the track, find the item, list my use and contact info, and arrange for payment in real time. For artists and material not yet tracked, put it in interest-bearing escrow until such time as they can be.
They get paid, I get my stuff, and the control of labels over what I hear is reduced. The trick is going to be, get the rights to material to revert to the artists rather than continuing to let labels hoard masters they'll never, ever rerelease. Copyright was never intended to be a way for people to bury intellectual property.
I did an earlier essay on this that probably puts it better: The Death Of Napster
Turtle
---------------------------------------
Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
OOOps! You're exactly right, and I guess I didn't really say what I meant. You don't own the copyright - i.e. the right to make and distribute copies. The AHRA does forgive personal copies as non-infringing.
Don't just complain - DO something about it!
The recording industry ass. of america is making a half-assed attempt at downloadable music. When the business model fails, the RIAA will tell wall street that online distribution of music is a failure and the only profitable means of distributing music is the old Radio/CD store/Royalty model.
This will allow the RIAA to sue every P2P file sharing system and user with wall street's and capitol hill's blessing.
I hate these guys.
Why don't we draft a nice friendly letter telling these boards of directors about such sustainable business models. It shouldn't be too hard to get ahold of the names of the people on these boards, should it?
Any business major types out there want to take a crack at it?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
www.iceradio.ca
Give me some money and I, Fred Durst, will come to your house and take a big, juicy dump on your floor. You will eat it and enjoy it.
Does that sound awful? Don't worry, it's essentially similar to the RIAA/MTV/MPAA business model. You've been doing it for years!
Also, I have an extremely tiny penis.
Sincerely,
Fred Durst
If keeping hardware unencumbered, open and patent-free formats/drivers, not living in a police state, and maintaining free speech rights need to be sacrificed to assure the steady flow of "'n sync" hits, then I will gladly do away with the latter. I just don't want to live in a world where I have to have a license to enjoy a song. sorry.
But the deeper answer is that several of your assumptions are wrong:
#1. the present system supports artists.
At best a toss up. Yes, some mega stars drive around in cadillacs. Also, expensive music videos and add campaigns are launched. On the other hand, the labels make it difficult for me to get good music by:
An overbearing distribution network (control of shelf space, payola, verticle integration with media monoliths). This network makes it difficult for independent bands to get heard on the radio, or get their stuff in the stores. As soon as a new sound appears, the rip off bands get into high gear and -- with this distribution network behind them -- eat up the consumer dollars which could have gone to the band that was responsible for the innovation. Funny how people don't talk about that kind of piracy.
contracts which make middling bands inevitably fall into debt. The label then pressures them to be more mainstream in order to break even on the next album. Basically, this is an economic model which only works for mega hits. Like television, music is punished if it does not aim at the most mainstream tastes. Actually, thie demographic is skewed towards those with more disposable income (for obvious reasons) so the target market is not really "democratic" in the traditional sense. The major avenues that most people have to experience new music : airwaves, record stores, concerts -- are all dominated by monopolies, punitive and exclusive contracts which limit consumer choice and hurt the little guy.
price-fixing
#2. Musicians will stop making music if the current property rights regime is changed.
Well, this is just silly. Beautiful music was made in feudal, pre-capitalist, capitalist and socialist systems. It will go on. Perhaps those who dissappear will be the armies of boy bands, rip off artists, and the music professionals which surround them. These parasites have been squeezing out the real innovators since the thirties. I'll pay money to see them go.
#3. We soon wont have record companies.
That's just silly. The biggest asset which these monstrosities have is not IP rights, but a distribution/promotional network. They will still have that. Hopefully, it will be weakened enough so that good music can be heard above their marketing blitz. People will still buy records, because records are cool. Because of ownership fetish, for the artwork, and as a symbol of group membership. None of this will change, except possibly in scale. Even the rip-off artists, whise bottom line you are so eager to trade your rights for, will still make money.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
Do they not realize that many of us have digital connections to our speakers and therefore we won't hear anything?
If the digital connections you speak of are encrypted digital connections, Microsoft will take that into account when signing the driver. As I said, the driver must turn off only the cleartext digital outputs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
With a little work in my studio, trusty oscilloscope, two good mics, and some good monitor speakers I could reproduce any track and make sure it sounded little different from the original recording (maybe even better).
Which is why eventually, if the RIAA has its way, all audio recording equipment available without a government-granted professional license will detect watermarks. Defeating them gets you 10 years in a place where anal rape is legal. By the time you're out, this is your behind (warning: gay porn).
Will I retire or break 10K?
I would think that this scheme merits an antitrust challenge, not only by companies that want to offer competing download services, but from record stores of both the online and brick/mortar variety. Suppose a customer does this for a year, decides the downloading is too much hassle and decides to buy their future music at Tower Records because it's a great store. The penalty hanging over their head for switching (destruction of what they've already downloaded) makes it far more costly to switch to Tower, even if Tower's service, product selection, etc. is more appealing to the consumer. That's a classic anticompetitive practice.
No, no, no. This is not a sig.
A friend of mine tried downloading MP3s from the Internet, and then recording them onto his Sony minidisc player. The result? It sounded like crap.
The problem here is that you're re-compressing something that's already been compressed once. That's going to introduce more noise, and amplify the compression artifacts.
And then there's the whole signed DRM drivers for Windoze, and the unavailability under Unix/Linux that others have mentioned.
So the moral is: until someone breaks the keys on the format allowing lossless piracy, it won't be worth 10 cents a track even though you've busted the rental scheme.. For recompressed audio I'd pay, maybe, 1 cent a track?
What a waste of time.
PPL are talking about opening up wallets and what have you. Well why the hell would anyone do that when you can get free music ALLWAYS. If napster is out something new is in, if anything we shall go back to the dark age of surfing the web for music. Music corporations cannot make money off this anymore. In a few years ppl who get free music now will have kids, and their kids will not pay $16 for new cds, that can be had for $0.0 I don't have a solution to this, but I don't think encryption, limited music rentals, subscription, etc will work.
FIRST POST!!!
Arghhh!!! You all su>0r
eMusic's hefty GWAR collection should be enough to convince anyone to sign up.
Think about it -- how much do you spend on GWAR a month? Thousands upon thousands of dollars, RIGHT? CANADIAN DOLLARS, no less. Well, eMusic has massive GWAR, including their greatest opus, "Hell-o", which includes their teen anthem "GWAR Theme":
For we are GWAR
And we'll go far
We've got guitars
We'll eat your car --
GWAR! GWAR! GWAR! GWAR!
...oh, that GWAR concert I went to last year was sublime; like Lillith Fair, but more ass-rape. Oh...when they beheaded the George W. Bush effigy, and blood shot forth from his neck and, for no reason, genitals, I knew I was seeing something truly special.
Beauty, thy name is eMusic...
there IS one! (yay!) samael notes in comment (#2653326) a lovely online service i hadn't heard of - Emusic.com. (although redundant, i mention it as you managed to miss the original post, and it's exactly what you want.) being a finicky industrial/experimental music fan, i checked it out to verify that they wouldn't have anything i was interested in.
i was wrong. it is inexpensive ($15/mo for 3 months), a broad catalog with lots of weird/rare stuff, you get to keep the MP3s and do whatever you like with them, the artists get paid - everybody wins.
should this service actually make a profit, your understandably cynical predictions of record label bait-and-switch may be averted. this assumes that a whole bunch of us like it and use it.
I suggest everyone use babelfish to mangle existing code to create his or her own programming language, instruction set, and dump civilization by the wayside.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
burn albums on cheap mixed mode cds with all the necessary software to spread'n'distribute yer shit forward so that anyone who gets one of these cds don't need to buy it anymore.
best way to stop big labels is close those currency streams. that means you need to provide wanted releases for free or nearly free to the masses.
It may be impossible right now, but I assure you that Microsoft is finding ways to put vulnerabilities in MP3's. They've already had security issues with their ASF files, what makes you think they can't find a way with MP3's too?
Microsoft: How do you want to be exploited today?
I've read several e-mail comments from people involved in the online music industry in one way or another, that tried the service today. Based on their experiences I wont even waste the time to give it a look. I'm hearing things like 1 1/2 hours in to the download, install and start it up and still not able to get music. Search function for another didn't work. Another on tech support line for close to an hour and still holding. Thats what the American consumer really wants: lack of usability, non portable music, lousy customer service, and a catalog of music that at best, is terrible. Thats why almost every automobile sold has a radio, why we live at drive throughs at the local resturants, don't return broken items to the store where we bought them, and are overjoyed with automated pre-recorded responses.
The overall impression from the people I've talked to, who have tried it, is VERY negative. The interesting part many wanted it to work and work well. Needless to say they are disappointed. This article on CNET talks about the The Recording industies last chance.
So far it looks like they blew it..
You have a very valid point there, and one I'm sure that the DOJ is looking into in their investigation as well as, the possible price fixing.
Does anyone really believe that there won't be hacks out within about six hours for this? Anyway, my radio already does this, and it's free.
No sig for you.
Once the data is on MY drive, is it not MINE? Otherwise, what's the difference between this and streaming audio, except that streaming audio is.....free? I have yet to read and agree to a license for the mp3 file format...
"what happens when the fee goes up to $199.95/month"? Give me a break. This isn't Microsoft, after all :-)
:-), I'd pay for it, instead of doing it myself.
Seriously, I'd pay $9.95/mo for an eternity, to have access to 100 songs/month. If it were a more exhaustive list of labels and songs (i.e. mostly everything). I think a lot of folks would. $120/year for the convenience of hearing every song every made, any time you want. I think nearly everyone would go for that, and the industry would make far more money off of us consumers. Hopefully, this will be a start of the industry waking up, and we'll reach that goal eventually. In the meantime, I'm setting up my household MP3 server (from ripped CD's I own), with mobile gateways, etc., so I can hear *my* music, anywhere, anytime... If it were a service (and not windows-only
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Except in Shangai, or Ventiane, or Hanoi, or New Delhi, or Kabhul, or Algiers
So far, you've been very careful to pick cities in countries that have little disregard for United States GGM law but happen not to be embargoed.
or Moscow
Two words: Dmitry Sklyarov. If you sell to USA customers, you break USA law, and if you don't sell to USA customers, you have very little market and no way to move enough units to make profit. This makes USA GGM law effectively extraterritorial.
Will I retire or break 10K?