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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...
These will be total failures. Not that this is any surprise to anyone. Maybe they are being set up to fail?
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
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"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.
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.
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
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........
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.
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:
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!
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)
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.
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"
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
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
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
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