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Review of pressplay and RealOne
c64guy writes: "Okay, so we all know that the music labels launched their own digital music subscription services, and that the new for-pay Napster should be debuting any minute. Here's a particularly in-depth review that compares the nitty-gritty of the services. For example, with RealOne, you can only ever have 200 tracks activated on your system. Even if you've been subscribed for eight months and downloaded 1600 tracks, you can still only listen to 200 of them in one month."
I was not impressed with their selection. They had spotty atrist coverage and some artists had only half of their tracks available. My biggest two beefs:
1) You lost all your downloaded music when you cancel (you can keep burnt music obviously.)
2) All your music is stuck inside of pressplay. No mp3 player support.
Let me see... I can either have limited downloads in a proprietary, non-burnable format that explodes if I ever unsubscribe... Or I can unlimited downloads in MP3 format that I can burn, put on multiple machines, and keep forever. Think, think, think...
Seriously, Emusic kicks all three of these services' asses. Kicks them, gives them wedgies, then sends them home to their rich parents crying. Sure, you don't have the big-name lables, but you have tons of small ones. And the unlimited-download model lets you experiment with every band you've never heard of. Having used this to find Front Line Assembly more than makes up for the lack of Massive Attack.
I wonder why Emusic wasn't in the running? I'd give it a 4/5, myself.
The enemies of Democracy are
So he says he's "a pirate", but all he says is that he ripped his CDs for personal use. I don't see anywhere that he runs a FTP server to "share" the music or has uploaded to napster in the past, or anything that would take that music collection beyond personal use.
He does say: P2P file-sharing (new at the time) made the analog-digital conversion that much sweeter. But it isn't clear if he used P2P to get music that he didn't own, his main point is that he has MP3'ed (my word) his music collection. Perhaps he downloaded some of the music he had on CD via P2P, that is a grey area, but not hard-core piracy.
This seems to me that he has bought into the FUD that the music labels are spreading: (rip, mix, burn) == (music piracy). And that is simply not true. (or at least not proven/held up in a court of law)
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
I like Emusic. I think it meets all of these requirements. It might be -2- clicks to get to the rest of the songs by a band, but I'm not 100%. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
When Napster came out it was a way for you to hear that really cool new song. A way to sample the music you buy, without having to filter through the much on the radio. And the recording industry's sales went up because people were more inclined to buy what they'd listened to.
Now, RIAA's made it clear that their enemy is anyone who shares music online. They fired the first shot by biting the hand that was just beginning to feed them. Now the same people who were browsing through downloads and buying at Tower are burning not buying. Because they're angry with RIAA and they feel the record industry is out to get them. No wonder RIAA's sales are down (although , probably not as much as they say, RIAA's cooked up some phony numbers before), though it has very little to do with P2P file-sharing.
If the record industry really wants to shut down Morpheus they could offer the following service.
Sharing would be rampant, but it already is. RIAA wouldn't be losing anything even if the whole thing fell through. But it probably wouldn't.
Too bad I don't have millions of dollars and my dad isn't the head of Sony Music.
Sweat
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
There IS no client! You download music off their site with your favorite web browser, and that's it. You login, you download, you listen to MP3's.
Though to get the neat feature of 1-click album downloads, you need to have Freeamp installed (Win, Unix ports, don't know about Mac). You can use anything as your player, Freeamp is only needed for downloading whole albums.
The enemies of Democracy are
1) You could, but it's a felony under DMCA. Circumvention of a copy control mechanism.
2) You might not be able to. MSFT's "Secure Audio Path" is a step in the direction of locking down the hardware. (Under CBDTPA, this will be mandatory.)
3) Even if you could ("could" in the legal sense and and the sense of any technical crippling imposed by your operating system), you wouldn't want to. It'd be like saving a .JPG file as a .JPG - the encoding to MP3 is lossy, and you'd lose quality.
(This is, of course, the goal of the Content Cartel -- to make your computer, which is a device based on the principle that bits are infinitely reproducible, work like a cassette tape made of atoms which are not reproducible.)