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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."
What's the point in only being able to listen to 200? How many albums is that? I know that I listen to alot more music than that that I buy on a CD. Why not just limit it to say 1 song / month = set rate. That way the more I pay the more I can listen to... with no limit on the total # of songs. I don't see this helping their pay service very much
"Pressplay and RealOnes media formats hacked"
One unknown source was stated as saying "We can't give those little bastards anything! They have no right to fair use!"
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
OK. So I am now going to pay to listen to less music? You can say goodbye to these schemes now, as they have no chance of suceeding. Do these people honestly think there is a market for this, now that music is free for all intents and purposes? The proverbial genie has been let out of the bottle.
I cant understand RIAA's problem. These record labels are crying like spoilt brats. Who hasnt seen slump. Slump is everywhere, and what do they really expect, to be immune. To me the picture looks a weird, and I certainly feel that this will stifle bands which prefer to stream online rather than go to record labels, and currently many are doing that. On the internet there are lots of bands, real good ones too who prefer to use independent radio stations, if the record labels get in there and do some muscle flexing, they can very well kill independent radio! and its not just jurisdictions they are getting, but now they wanna come in from both sides. But you cant have your cake and eat it too. People will find a way to workaround real one and all the BS. One major crack, and a few thouosand songs get stolen adn put on some russian and chinese server, these guys will learn a lesson As for limiting the number of songs, i wonder who are these guys to decide how many songs i wanna listen to. Man i got my rights, if i wanna spend more and buy more i will, this rule wont really stand in court if you got good lawers backing you!
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
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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.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
The real tragedy in all of this is that the music studios are going to release these crappy, restricted music download services for probably the next year or so. No one's going to use them because of the extra rules they impose (like the 200 track max - who wants their music collection limited to twenty CDs?) and their proprietary formats that won't go onto a CD or mp3 portable. They'll fail like Circuit City's DivX did, not because there's anything wrong with the concept, people just won't want to deal with the hassle of managing when their songs "expire" or which one they have to delete to make room for the new N'Sync single.
The record labels are then going to go to Congress and say "Look, we tried letting these people download music, but the thieves won't use them. We have to have draconian legislation and internet police in order to keep our disgustingly fat and corrupt industry alive!". Congress will examine their campaign funds, find a way to slip RIAA money past McCain-Feingold, and pass the law.
I bet they've got this entire plan in an MS Project file at RIAA headquarters.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
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 don't think the RIAA is stupid enough to think there is a market for their "product" now.
But they are attempting to create a market through legislation.
And, who knows, if they can buy the US and make the US stronarm the rest of the world then this might actually work. A small step for their bottom line, and a huge leap backwards for mankind, artists and audience alike.
The "copyright industry" is quickly becoming obsolete, they are turning into useless middle men that doesn't provide any value to customers or artists. They can only continue existing in their current form through legislation.
I have no problem with supporting the artists, but I'll be damned if I let the middle men get their hands on my money. I completely stopped buying retail CD's a year ago. Nowdays I only buy second hand or directly from the artists, and if I can't do that, then I'll rather pirate than support these dinosaurs.
Obsolete bussines models are supposed to die. Darwin's laws should apply to businesses to, especially businesses.
Lets all give them a little push on the way.
I am doing my part, are you?
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
If the target market is the people who listen to top 40 radio, then they only need about 50 active songs at a time - after all normal commercial radio programs those 50 songs and rotates the crap out of them. The corporation that owns the radio station says you only need to hear 50 songs, that's all you need to hear. The corporation that owns the music says you only need to hear 200 songs, then that's all you need to hear.
It reminds me of a commercial from the mid 80s. It was supposed to be a Soviet fashon show - a stocky older woman walked up and down a catwalk wearing the same overalls while a Russian-accented announcer said "Is Eveningwear", "Is Swim Wear" and so on. The point was that in the "Free World" we have many choices, while in the "Communist World" you get what the oligarchy offers you. So we beat the awful Communists, now the corporate oligarchy offers us a choice of 40 movies and 200 songs. Hurray! Victory!
Let's wait about a year and check these numbers again. Real will be lucky if they can keep 100,000 people who are willing to pay for this lame-ass service. But, the thing that scares me about Real is the deals they are signing with Mobile phone manufacturers. In the future will I be forced to buy a Nokia phone with "RealOne" on it? What if I don't want this software installed on my phone? Can I uninstall it? Be afraid.... be very afraid.
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!
I'd like to find independent, non-RIAA music. Preferably, I'd like to pay the artists directly, although I don't mind buying the music from a non-RIAA organization.
Can anybody recommend any good sites or search tips?
If enough people are expressing their desire to have nothing to do with the RIAA directly to the RIAA (i.e. email them...) then they cannot call for Gov't support when they fail. "We had no idea people would hate that we tried to take their rights away!".
They can blame MP3's for the bad economy last year if they want, but they'll have a hard time blaming people for saying 'your service sucks, we're off to find somebody else.'
"Derp de derp."
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.)
Amen.
Thanks to un-crippled MP3s, I've been exploring increasingly-obscure electro/industrial/techno stuff. Shit, this week alone, I've discovered Dorsetshire, Dynamix II, and Industrial Artz.
(Actually, I think I remember Industrial Artz' "Powertrip", having heard it once on radio some 10 years ago and thinking "Wow, sampling Led Zep's Kashmir, that takes balls!". Naturally, it was radio, so I never found out who they were until last night when I said "Holy fuck! I remember looking for this CD 10 years ago and everyone in the record shops thought I was nuts!")
It looks like Dorsetshire and Industrial Artz vanished some 8-10 years ago, and there's no way to send 'em a few bones, but if I'm ever in Florida, I'll be checking out Dynamix II, live. And I'll be buying CDs - but I'll be buying them at the show, and/or tipping them directly.
Fuck RIAA. We don't need them anymore. The more of us realize that fact, the less power they'll have over us. The less power they have over us, eventually, the less power they'll have over our legislators.