Music 20 Cents a Track in India

xzap writes "Indiatimes.com , an Indian portal is now offering "International Chart-Busting" music for download legally at Rs 10 (20 cents U.S) a song. They say they (through a partner) have tied up with music labels like BMG, EMI, Warner, Tips, Times Music, Lahari, Enrico Hindustan (which is the oldest catalogue of HMV) and Archies Music "." I still believe that if the bigs let us download MP3s for a quarter a track, we'd do it.

Comments

WOW!

[boy_afraid]

I'd definitely do it!

I'd buy that for a dollar!

P.S. Finally, first post.

Re:WOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think not, my logged-in nemesis. Way to throw your karma away for a second post.

Re:WOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

A DOLLAR? Are you stupid? That would be pretty much the same price of a brand new CD...

Re:WOW!

[snyperm]

yeah a dollar is a little high, might as well pay for the damned cd that way. $. 20 a track seems ot make some great sense, not only would I be more than willing to pay that. But truthfully they'd prolly still make a profit. Hell, the increased amount of poeple actually buying music alone would more than make the difference of the lower cost. Plus they could save a substnatial amount on packaging an pressing those cds.

Re:WOW!

[HotSIag]

Robocop, people. Not the hardest reference around. yes, a dollar is too much for one song, but that's probably what the record companies will want if something like that is available.

Re:WOW!

[maverick_and_goose]

I would be down with something around a quarter. Now that morpheus is possibly the worst functioning software I have ever had to use I would be really cool with paying a quarter so that I could dl at like 50kB/s. If they can do that I am there.

Re:WOW!

[cbensinger]

Depends on your line of reasoning. I've got dozens upon dozens of cd's where I've bought them for 1 or 2 songs only. I don't really have a problem with a dollar a song for current music and something like .25-.50 per song for older music. Of course this comes under the assumption that I'm allowed to take the song(s) that I've just purchased and burn them onto a cd or put them in my RIO, etc. If it's more of this proprietary stuff that I've been seeing (songs locked to the PC that d/l's them, etc.) then I'm still not interested.

This will get to the US soon enough.

[Marx_Mrvelous]

I'm sure that the record companies will give in eventually.
When a business model fails, it is not the government's responsability to make laws to sustain it. There might be a temporary period with a oush for that with lobbying $$, but it'll stop eventually. New marets will open, and purchasing music online will take over.

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

"When a business model fails, it is not the government's responsability to make laws to sustain it."

Um, just one problem there, pard'ner. Laws already *exist* and it *is* the government's job to prosecute them.

Have fun in San Quentin! Oh, I'm sure you won't go there for music piracy, but with depth of insight like that, I'm sure you'll end up in legal trouble someday.

anonymous bastard

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[Big Sean O]

"When a business model fails, it is not the government's responsability to make laws to sustain it."

Robert Heinlein, I had no idea you were still alive...

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." -- Robert Heinlein

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[donweel]

The music biz needs new blood, If the big guys try to sell the same crap online as on CD it will fail. The MP3 P2P works because it offers the users choice instead of flavour of the month you get in the store. MP3 allows new artists to be heard that the execs would not give a second glance. Look at the 60's, do you think many of those artists like Frank Zappa would be heard today?

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[Erasmus Darwin]

"When a business model fails, it is not the government's responsability to make laws to sustain it."

I see this argument over and over again in the copyright-related threads, and it irks me. The laws are designed to combat something that is already illegal.

Awhile ago, the government came out and said something to the effect of, "Okay, we're creating this copyright thing. Yes, it's essentially a legal fiction (then again, so are currency and government), but we think it's good. Basically, we'll reward people who devote time, effort, money, and talent to creating information-based works by giving them a time-limited exclusive control over that work."

Now in the interim, we've had the government do stupid things related to copyright, such as the Sonny Bono Act and the DMCA. However, that doesn't change the underlying principle that people who venture into the business of creating works for commercial sale are doing so because the government has created an artificial system that allows them compensation.

When it comes to P2P music sharing, the problem isn't that it's invented a new loophole that isn't covered by copyright. Instead, the problem is that it's a new form of massive copyright violation that's nearly impossible to prosecute on an individual basis. When something's already illegal, (allegedly) massively cuts into sales, and unstoppable, that's not a failing of the business model, per se.

Anyway, getting back to the point of the article, it looks like an interesting idea. I'm honestly curious to see whether or not it succeeds. It's a service offering cheap, legitimate equivalents to what's already available free on P2P services.

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[DebtAngel]

I'll grant you that the situation is somewhat unique. The car analogy (ban the car, the horse whip makers are all going out of business!) can't be applied here.

However, it's safe to say the VHS argument can. The movie industry makes a metric tonne of money off of video sales every year. In the early 80's, video was heralded as the Death of Hollywood. Hollywood looks rather not-dead to me.

The medium is changing again. People like their music in files. We'd like to purchase it that way too, but the industry won't let us, so we get it for free elsewhere.

I would say a business model that nobody wants to support is a dying one, wouldn't you? Sorta like selling ads on the Internet, really. Nobody wants them, people go out of their way to get bypass the business model, and businesses die because of it. This isn't because people are bad, its because the business model is unrealistic.

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[addps4cat]

Yeah, so what? Just because Robert Heinlein said it, doesn't make it wrong. He has a point. There shouldn't be this drive to sustain a crappy mode of sale.
- phranck@nycap.rr.com

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[mrcparker]

Maybe so, but if you speak to Jack Valenti, he would tell you that the VHS is taking millions if not billions of dollars out of the pockets of Hollywood each year.

It might be that there is a way for multimedia companies could make a whole lot of money out of this, but it seems that no matter how much they make they do make they always see the glass as half full.

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[SB5]

he really didn't say anything against Heinlein, which is what I find funny, maybe he could show something besides quoting other stuff and state something in his own words instead of insuinating something? whatever that may be...

-sb5

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[SB5]

I also might want to add just because a man dies, his ideas do not, just look at how infectious the ideas of Karl Marx, those great Greek Philosophers, and probably several thousand others. Their ideas still live on in individuals, they may have not have been to the first to think of them, yet they were the ones that brought them into the public forum. I don't know it just seems like you are saying Heinlein is wrong, maybe it is missed sarcasm on my part.

sb5

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really what music-sharing is saying is that the public, the customers of the record companies, don't think music is worth what is charged for it. It's being black and sitting on the white bus for the first time. It's saying, "this sucks" and I'm tired of being taken advantage of by a company who doesn't know anything but the bottom line and how to shake a half-naked Britney Spears in front of the ignorant masses...

Which brings me to another, slightly related point:

Why, in this country, do we value entertainment more than we value the education of our children. What is wrong with a country in which Jay-Z is big pimpin' with all his bling-bling, and Britney Spears is made for life before she can drink legally drink alcohol, yet a second grade teacher (who arguably contributes more to the aggregate of society) can't afford to send their own children to college. It's not the record company, or Jay-Z or Britney, or the NFL or the WWF or reality TV that allows this...it's the consumer...this is capitalism at its best. Have we really lost all creativity to enteratin ourselves? Are we really so shallow?

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[homer_ca]

If they had stuck to the time limit spelled out in the Constitution for copyrights, all music up to Hall and Oates, The Go Go's, Culture Club, Def Leppard, and Motley Crue would be public domain now. The perpetual extension of copyright terms is government intervention that inflates the profitability of their business model. The life+70 or 95 years term we have now is unreal.

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[Erasmus Darwin]

"In the early 80's, video was heralded as the Death of Hollywood. Hollywood looks rather not-dead to me."

I still don't think it's the same thing. There's a noticeable quality difference between watching a video and going to see a movie -- even the most unobservant viewer would be hard-pressed not to notice the giant movie screen. mp3s, on the other hand, come much closer to CD quality. Overall, I'd say a better analogy set would be: Theatrical movie release ~= Concert; Video/DVD ~= Tape/CD; mp3 ~= DivX ;-)

Furthermore, the DIY crowd has had no problem getting legitimate mp3s (at least until the recent copy protection uproar). Personally, I just pop CDs that I own into my CD player and then run a script that handles all the effort of identifying the artist/tracks with CDDB, ripping the CD with cdparanoia, and finally encoding the music with LAME. I got what I wanted, and I paid for it.

Instead, the problem is in rampant duplication. Yes, if I'm patient, if I have 2 VCRs, and if I can bypass Macrovision, I can make a copy of a tape for a friend. It happens, but it's small scale. There's also something of a quality degredation issue after a few generations.

With mp3s, on the other hand, people have the resources available to trade them far and wide. A 50th generation copy of an mp3 is identical to the original mp3 (provided you don't reencode it). Also, P2P lets me share it with hundreds of thousands of my closest friends.

I dunno. It just seems that there's no clear win for the music industry in this scenario. Maybe it'll work. Maybe it won't. But I don't think it's the same situation as before.

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[Spagornasm]

We could always look at what is really good for the artist, and what is really good for the label. Take a band like Radiohead. If you download one of their CD's like Amnesiac, and send them even $2-$3, they wind up with more money than if you had bought the CD (I think it would be fine at something like $5.00). They get even more on top if you buy a ticket to their show (and maybe a t-shirt or something). However, with this model, the record company looses all of it's profit margin, and it's only elgible for repayment of marketing and signing advances. It's no wonder the RIAA isn't after the right of artists to get paid, but rather the industry's out-dated business model to survive.

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[joshsisk]

I thought it was originally the life of the artist + some small amount? Lots of musicians from the 40s, 50 and 60s are still alive.

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[elton247]

Just because the state claims its illegal doesnt make it immoral. I believe the current form of media control is horrible, therefore I don't feel the need to uphold laws made just to protect those in control. Communication and file distribution is at the point where we don't need the middle man, the huge recording company with the distribution channels. All the music that I really enjoy I didnt hear on the radio or MTV, but on message boards and muscian's websites, or taking a chance and downloading a band i never heard of. We could be paying the artist directly, and that is the way it should be done.

I would pay .25 for an MP3 if I could download the whole album and find every song the band ever produced! That would be sweet. A lot of the bands i enjoy, its hard to find a lot of their songs on a P2P program.

And then there is ticketmaster.... just kill the beast!

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[elton247]

I completely agree. The current model sucks for both the listener and the musician.

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[KernelHappy]

You are correct that copying video is far from perfect and that image quality and ease of copying may deter some piracy. But could it just be that movies are reasonably priced and music isn't?

CD's today run anywhere from $12 to $20 for which you get 12 tracks, of which only 1, maybe 2 if you're lucky are likely to be of any interest to you. Most movies are far more expensive to produce than a music CD, yet they only cost a couple dollars more with many priced between $15-$25.

I personally have loads of bandwidth at my disposal and obtaining a VCD/SVCD/DivX copy of a movie is quite easy. Even though the actual effort to obtain a free copy of a movie is so minimal for me I can't be bothered. Its just doesn't pay when I know I can get a DVD with far superior video and audio quality for for a song.

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[Erasmus Darwin]

"Communication and file distribution is at the point where we don't need the middle man, the huge recording company with the distribution channels."

That's all nice and good. However, that means you should be buying music from independent musicians. That doesn't mean that you can just ignore the copyright on existing music which the middle man has essentially purchased the rights to from the original artist.

Similarly, let's say I walk into Walmart to purchase a Coleman lantern because I think of them as the classic camping lantern from back when I was a Cub Scout, and say my decision has nothing to do with any of their advertising or Walmart's advertising (with Walmart being chosen because it's the nearest store to my house). Now is it fair for me to demand a discount on the lantern because I didn't need any of their advertising? Is it fair for me to demand a discount because I didn't need to ask an employee for help? Is it fair for me to demand a discount because I'm willing to bag my own purchase, thereby allowing the cashier to help the next person in line more quickly?

The point is that the entire role of business is to take a bunch of expenses and distribute them (and a profit margin) across a number of products. In the case of the music industry, they've got expenses ranging from television advertisements (which may've been how the person who told you about a band heard about them) to studio time (expensive!) to money lost on failed projects (which Ms. Love's classic money thing fails to consider) to licensing fees for songs that borrow heavily from earlier works.

But if you don't want to contribute to that, fine. But rather than engaging in copyright infringement to obtain music which was financed at the expense of the music industry, go with an indie-produced work. That'd be comparable to me going the mail-order route for my lantern above (and thus avoiding some but not all of the overhead I mentioned in that example).

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[Erasmus Darwin]

"Most movies are far more expensive to produce than a music CD, yet they only cost a couple dollars more with many priced between $15-$25."

Of course many movies have the luxury of being able to completely recoupe their expenses before they hit video. For example, "Panic Room" had a 48 million dollar budget, and made 30 million on opening weekend alone (currently, it's at 73 million). Even "Van Wilder" (currently clinging to the bottom of the weekend top 10 list) has raked in 13.7 million versus its 6 million budget.

Still, you do have have straight-to-video releases. But these also tend not to have the vast budgets for which theatrical releases are famous.

Re:This will get to the US soon enough.

[klez23]

...the VHS is taking millions if not billions of dollars out of the pockets of Hollywood each year.

That doesn't make sense at all. I don't go to the movies because i can't afford to spend $10 on the ticket. I can afford to split a $3 video rental with a friend. The video stores buy their videos from the movie studios, so the studios do get some of that money. If VHS didn't exist, I still wouldn't spend $10 to see American Pie.

Har har har.

[dj28]

"I still believe that if the bigs let us download MP3s for a quarter a track, we'd do it."

No you wouldn't. You will still complain that the record labels are ripping you off. There would still be thousands of rationalizations for pirating music. The problem is not going to be solved by dropping prices or have a per-track fee.

Re:Har har har.

[the_2nd_coming]

perhaps not in the 1% minority that actualy pirates, but for tha majority of folks, it will work...that and reducing the cost of CDs to $10

Re:Har har har.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it is! I'd happily pay that sort of fee provided I knew that ALL the money was going to the people who'd worked on the track.

Re:Har har har.

[timothy_m_smith]

Let's face it though, the labels will never sell us MP3s. They would still have the same problem that the music could be easily distributed with no copy protection.

Re:Har har har.

[hymie3]

No doubt. I've got about nine gigs of music that I've downloaded off the net which I don't give a flip about. If that partition crapped out, big deal. I definitely wouldn't want to pay for it.
I've got around eight gigs of stuff downloaded from mp3.com and sxsw which is free, so I don't have to pay for it. I've also got about four gigs of music I care deeply about. I own CDs for almost all of those tracks, so I don't have to pay for that.
I've got about 300 megs of stuff that I'd *consider* paying for if I could pay $0.25 per five minutes of tunes.
Typical users, when given the choice between paying and not, will typically choose not.
If forced to choose between pay for the music you listen to and don't listen to music at all, my informal survey of friends says most people would rather not listen. Which is why digital radio and anything paybased the big guys come up with is doomed for failure.

Re:Har har har.

[Jaycatt]

Finding music illegally isn't always easy. I'd pay $0.25 a song if it was a fast reliable connection, and the song was really the one I wanted recorded with a high bitrate. Knowing you're not wasting your time downloading something mislabeled/corrupt is worth $0.25 to me.

Re:Har har har.

[evilned]

While I agree that the mp3 piracy most probably will continue even if they did that sort of plan, I personally would pay a quarter a track for a high bitrate mp3 or ogg vorbis file. Secondly, the tracks I get off of the trading services have a bad habit of being cut off early as well. If they give me high bitrate and guaranteed download, thats worth a quarter to me. In fact thats the main reason I still buy CD's, 128 sounds like garbage to me on both ogg and mp3, and 160 is barely usable on ogg, and I always know when I do my own rips, that I am getting the full song. The record companies have to market themselves differently, they have already lost the price war, so the only thing they can market themselves with is quality, but they will be carried kicking and screaming down that path.

Re:Har har har.

[hymie3]

Ack. Not to follow up to my own post or anything, but the link should have been to: sxsw.

Re:Har har har.

[Rogerborg]

• No you wouldn't. [...] There would still be thousands of rationalizations for pirating music

Shall I give you my number one reason? DRM.

The partner in this instance is Soundbuzz, and - as usual - they're missing the fucking point, big time.

The one thing that their site managed to tell me before it squealed and died was that they use a Digital Rights Management system.

Sigh. Forget it then. If I want to listen to music where and when it suits the music to be listened to, I'll use the radio. I won't pay 10 cents for a crippled .wmf. I wouldn't take a rights restricted .wmf file if you gave it to me, and if the labels keep pushing on down this insane road, it might very well come to that.

It's a pretty simple proposition. We can all get completely uncrippled music for nothing. It's no big secret. And the labels just don't have a big enough stick to threaten us with. The guilt trip doesn't work, because we can all see that sharing isn't hurting the music industry nearly as bad as they claim. DMCA hasn't made a dent in it, and CDBPTA looks like it's failed the laugh test. Crippleware music disks (not CD's, dammit) are about the worst idea they have come up with yet; if you buy one and want to assert your fair use rights to space shift, you have to break the DMCA (which demonstrates how insane that is) and/or grab an MP3 from a P2P system (and they are all over it like a rash). DRM just illustrates how great MP3 (/ogg) is for music lovers.

I can't believe that the labels don't get that. They must understand that by trying to sell DRM content (on disk and online), all they're doing is driving people - including their best paying customers - to P2P.

It's not a difficult proposition. Give me a site where I can enter my CC details, listen to a low quality streaming mp3, then download a high quality (200 kb/s+) version at 25 cents(*) a pop. Bill me monthly. I'll use it. Yes I damn well will.

MP3.com is close, but no cigar. It's too service oriented, too limited, too much aimed at pushing specific end uses ("burn CD's!") and maintaining a customer relationship. Often you can only buy without streaming. Sometimes you can stream without buying (!). I don't want a relationship, all I want is the mp3. Just give me the track, and I'll give you money, and we can both go away happy.

I mean, what is the label's major malfunction, that they can't understand this simple proposition: I'll pay them 25 cents for the same content that I'm already getting for nothing. I hadn't paid a red cent for music for ten years before Napster appeared, and I haven't paid any since. If I'm allowed to, I will pay for tthe good tracks, even though I don't have to. However, if they continue to offer padded, over produced, over promoted, over priced CD's and DRM protected music disks, and crippled DRM downloads (at any price), I'll just keep on doing what I'm doing right now and sharing it for nothing.

Don't they want my money?

(*) 25 cents a track. Yes, that's right, not a dollar, not fifty cents, twenty five cents. Maybe less. Because as we've seen with the instant Slashdotting of an Indian site, we're in a global market, so we need a global price. If you're wondering about the real reason why the labels won't offer online music, keep on thinking about the implications of global pricing on their market segmentation.

Re:Har har har.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love you, and I want to have your baby.

a confucian principle

[dryueh]

You know, this kind of thing isn't that unusual (in principle anyway). Go to China and music is distributed (whether that's domestic or imported labels) without paying any regard to copyrights, etc etc etc. A forever and constant -twang- in the sides of capitalist artists.

The Confucian influence is, after all, good for some things, eh?

The Master said, "Groove."

I'd pay up to 50 cents a track...

[SpotBug]

... as long as it really was only 50 cents. No extra charges. Shipping and/or handling wouldn't make sense, but I can see them figuring out a way to tack on extra fees.

Re:I'd pay up to 50 cents a track...

[ThinkingGuy]

The most likely tactic would be trying to offer "upgrade" deals, like "for an $_____, you can download the HIGH BITRATE version of this song!"

Re:I'd pay up to 50 cents a track...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fifty cents per track is about as high I would go. And that would be for 192kbps or higher bitrate.

Re:I'd pay up to 50 cents a track...

[sugrshack]

the most likely way of tacking on fees would be to give the music an expiration date, such as one month from the date of "purchase." I believe some companies are already doing this...

the recording industry has been looking for years of ways of making people pay for each listen..

Re:I'd pay up to 50 cents a track...

[nil error]

aww man if they set up, like a cola machine that you just placed a cd into and pay $1 for a song - of course pepsi would have some crap like britney spears - I would do it - nil error daily .sig still 34 still unemployed computer programmer stilll drinking jack danilels still having the best 8 months of my life

25 cents a track?

[AltGrendel]

They could go for volume, but I'd rather pay 5 cents a track. And the option to "return" them if it's not what I want.

Re:25 cents a track?

[Anonymous Coward]

"And the option to "return" them if it's not what I want."

Oh yeah, that would fly. I can picture it now: "I just downloaded 2000 tracks that I didn't want, please refund me even though you have no guarantee that I will delete these tracks from my hard drive."

Get with the program, moron.

Re:25 cents a track?

[mblase]

They could go for volume, but I'd rather pay 5 cents a track. And the option to "return" them if it's not what I want.

As if three or four songs by a given artist wouldn't tell you whether or not to keep downloading them. You'd demand the right to return an item that cost you $0.05 to purchase in the first place? What are you going to do, download their entire library and send back everything you don't like?

Re:25 cents a track?

[spankenstein]

Umm... $0.25 is pretty small. That would be $3.75 for a 15 song CD. I would hope that they would give 10 - 20 second "samples" but $0.25 per song is not bad at all!

Re:25 cents a track?

[Anonymous Coward]

To return it just upload back to them of course!

Doh!

hell yeah!

[diesel_jackass]

$0.25 a track?

I'd definitely be in for that shit. Screw kazaa and the myriad of hidden programs inside of it.

Re:hell yeah!

[azosx]

yeaaaaaaah, sifl & olly ROCK, yeaaaaaah, ROCK!

Re:hell yeah!

[Chuqmystr]

"Screw kazaa and the myriad of hidden programs inside of it."

That's the one thing I worry about though. Not that we'll ever see anything like this in the US in our lifetimes. But hypotheticaly speaking, if we just happened to have such a service, then just how much crap would they sneal into the legit clients? Oh, and how many peopled would get DMCA'ed into oblivion for hackin up a clean version or for writting one of their own, ala OSS?

Re:hell yeah!

[Dave Bailey]

Okay, how about $0.50 cents per track. How about $1 per track? What are you willing to pay for _legal_ copies of stuff? Where is your threshold - where is the record companies threshold? Can they be made to match...?

Re:hell yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

www.kazaalite.com

Idiot.

Re:hell yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, how about $0.50 cents per track. How about $1 per track?

A 12-song CD for $12 is still a deal by today's standard.

What about a discount rate when you buy a whole CD? $1/track or $7 for the whole album?

Re:hell yeah!

[diesel_jackass]

its a good idea, but it isn't stable enough.

Re:hell yeah!

[joshsisk]

For me to buy downloaded tracks instead of physical ones, the price would have to be at least half. As the price get nearer to the cost of an actual CD, I'd be less willing to pay. At $1 a track, a 15-song album would be $15, close to a real (major label) CD. Personally, I'd buy the CD and get the case, packaging, etc. Looks nice on my shelf, plus if my Empeg HD fails I can always go back and copy the songs again. Good to have a back up.

There are _lots_ of bands who have only one song I like. There are lots of songs I like that I don't even know who did them. $0.50 a song would work for me, especially if I could hear samples first, find those songs and buy just the ones I want.

Soundbuzz

[proxybyproxy]

Although not mentioned in the article (why?), the site is already up at Soundbuzz.com

Re:Soundbuzz

[twodiddyliddy]

The site crapped when searching for songs (asp timeout), and besides it's napster ripoff logo, it seems like the real thing.

A google search did come up with a lot of mirrors for "Soundbuzz - The Digital Music Revolution" (Christ, what a .com slogan)
www.channelv.com/ferhad/
hk.soundbuzz.ly cosasia.com/
www.geocities.com/truly1206/tru9913. htm
ip is: http://203.126.135.171/
(looks like a basement project :)

Anyway, I got this to work:
http://203.126.135.171/freedownload.asp but when trying to actually get a file, it was not available.

.... which would explain them not linking to soundbuzz in the article.

Re:Soundbuzz

[satterth]

Whats with the Chinese Tradition Language pack requirement on all the pages... I don't even see any Chinese on the page.... :-(

Re:Soundbuzz

[phossie]

here is the indiatimes-branded site:
http://www.soundbuzz.com/partners/indiatimes/music download.asp

(no mod)

They can't extort these people

[sketerpot]

They are doing this in India because they can make more money there by selling the tracks cheaply than overcharging horrendously, as they do in rich countries where they can get away wih it.

If they did something like this in America, I would use it. I would very gladly use it if the monet wet to the musicians via FairTunes (FairTracks?), without the big record companies and the RIAA getting their cut of the loot.

Re:They can't extort these people

[spankenstein]

The record companies do deserve a cut. Not what they take now, definitely but they put up money, resources and time. They have to recoup the moeny spent for the artist to record, produce, manufacture and advertise. They have to pay the A&R people and the tour managers and producers. Then they also have to turn a profit to keep going.

I completely agree that major labels suck. They take massive cuts, only push certain bands and sneak in lots of bad terms in contracts. However you should get paid for what you do.

Re:They can't extort these people

[gorilla]

They charge the artist for that time. The artist has to cover every expense of the record company from their royalties before the record company pays the reyalties.

Don't believe it

[yatest5]

I still believe that if the bigs let us download MP3s for a quarter a track, we'd do it.

If the same tracks were available free then people would still rip them off. End of. Full stop.

Without protection to stop people doing this, it will never be financially viable - its not like CD's where you get something 'better' having an original...

Re:Don't believe it

[Tim C]

its not like CD's where you get something 'better' having an original...

Oh yes you do:

1) Guaranteed quality - no chance of an incomplete, low bit rate copy of a CD that skips part way through the track
2) Guaranteed availability - no searching for tracks, only to find that the host is too busy, just go to the website and there it is, quick 'n' easy
3) Peace of mind - no worries about getting busted for having illegal copies of music on your machine, no worrying about your ISP logging your activity, etc

Okay, so 3) is pushing things a little, but I'd pay for 1) and 2). In fact, I only started using P2P apps to find music when I was unable to find a way to legally, quickly obtain a certain song that I just had to listen to (I get like that sometimes). I couldn't even find anywhere online to buy a CD single of it, let alone download it.

20 minutes later, I'd installed Kazaa (yeah, I know now, and it's history), found it, and downloaded it. At the time, I would have happily paid 2 or 3 pounds sterling (roughly 3-5 dollars, or around 10 times as much as in the article) to have legally downloaded a high quality electronic copy.

Of course there will be people who will download illegal copies regardless of how cheap, quick and easy it is to buy them legally, but I think you'd be surprised how many people will think "how cheap? At that price, I might as well just buy it"

Cheers,

Tim

Re:Don't believe it

[Dephex Twin]

If the same tracks were available free then people would still rip them off.

Yes, there are always people who don't pay for things. But if they were truly reasonably-priced, of high quality, were easy to get, and had no strings attached, I think you'd be surprised how many people *would* pay.

mark

Re:Don't believe it

[letxa2000]

I think you'd be surprised how many people *would* pay.

You're obviously not a shareware author. Given the choice between free and cheap, people will choose free.

It's not just being cheap or free that's at issue. It's the whole "relationship." It's easier and "safer" to hop online and grab the song anonymously from someone you don't know (and who doesn't know you, and doesn't care) than it is to log on, identify yourself, probably provide your credit card number, etc.

Selling music, even online in MP3 format, can't compete with free music on price nor on ease-of-use and on privacy points. The only possible benefit is quality, and that can be resolved by looking for a high BPS version of the track you want. I normally download 128k which is sufficient for most pop music; but I almost always see the same track in 160, 192, and even 256k versions--for those that really need to hear every minute frequency of Britney Spears.

The music industry is a losing proposition as it stands now. They can't just "move" to an online model. They are obsolete. The current music market is history.

As someone else said, it used to be artists went on tour to promote their CDs. Now the music will be given away free to promote themselves so people will go to see them in concert. The tours and live concerts is where the money is going to be made in music in the future--not in the digital or analog representations of the music itself.

Again, as someone else said, it was a market fluke that allowed people to become rich distributing music. They made billions of dollars providing a service and product that was necessary in its time. But they are no longer necessary. Laws, bitching and moaning, lawsuits may delay the inevitable for a few years--but it cannot change what is inevitable: Music will be free, and those artists wishing to make a living in music will have to tour. God forbid they actually have to "work" on an ongoing basis...

Re:Don't believe it

[Dephex Twin]

You're obviously not a shareware author. Given the choice between free and cheap, people will choose free.

That's true, I've heard about shareware woes. And I could end up wrong about it. But I think an MP3 service could have an edge over "illegal" MP3 trading that might make it a good buy.

Shareware is freely and widely distributed. It is easy to download and install, and completely legal. But then when it comes to paying, there's trouble. I see the major blocks to be:

- It's already on their computer, so they don't feel like they are getting anything by paying for it.

- It's easy to put off paying for "later".

I know it's more complicated than that, but I would see an MP3 service as not having these tough problems.

With the MP3 service, you pay, and then get a song. The song is of high quality, quickly downloaded, is not mislabeled, distorted, or cut off early.

Yes, there is the credit card issue, which some people might not like. But I do think this service could be easier in all other ways than illegal trading. If they did it right.

If the service tried to cripple the MP3, make it proprietary, or price it too high ($2.00 or something), then no way will it work. And maybe it wouldn't work anyway. But I think it's possible, thinking about it this way.

mark

Re:Don't believe it

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone else said, it used to be artists went on tour to promote their CDs. Now the music will be given away free to promote themselves so people will go to see them in concert. The tours and live concerts is where the money is going to be made in music in the future--not in the digital or analog representations of the music itself.


Actually if you had been paying attention you would have seen that tours and live concerts are where money is made today (at least by the bands).

Re:Don't believe it

[Eccles]

If the same tracks were available free then people would still rip them off. End of. Full stop.

And no matter how secure you try to make banks, people will rob them. So building a bank is pointless?

Re:Don't believe it

[Lumpy]

WRONG.... thanks for playing...

you will not get a nice clean Mp3 that can be played on your audiotron,NEX-II portable, your rio car(empeg) or your rio reciever. you will get one special audio format that play's on your PC with a special player that is serially locked toyour pentium's serial number or your computer and name/etc...

you get to listen to a song that is useless on anything but that computer and will more than likely DIE within a timeframe. I will bet $1000.00 on it. there is no way in hell the RIAA will allow anything but crippled/timebomb songs to be legally downloaded. those of us that bought legal mp3 player hardware will have to resort to illegal activities to use the legally purchased hardware.

so sorry... it wont happen, dont even try to say it will.

Re:Don't believe it

[exodus2]

Wow, whatever your job is I want it. I don't like spending $12 on a CD, yet you have no problem droping up to $5 on one song. So if you like 3 songs on a CD you just paid more than it would cost to buy the CD.
It seems to me that $1.00 is too much per track, most CD's have 12-15 tracks, so you will end up paying as much for the whole album (if you liked all the songs.) At .25 I would buy any song I herd and liked, at .50 it starts to get too high, and I would buy verry few songs. at .25 I would buy much more songs, and spend more money total on music than at 50 cents. At $14 for a song(I will not pay more thatn that for a CD) I buy verry few CD's, none, this year, cant think of any that I have bought for a longtime(except my 12 for the cost of 1 from BMG, but even that has been over a year) I only get CD's now for birthdays or Christmas. I copy all my CD's that I have to my computer then make a few disks for my car. I dont ever look at the real CD, except when I open it, I would prefer to buy by the track, at .25 I would buy hundreds of tracks a year, at the current cost of about $1(when on a cd) I buy atmost 2 CD's per year.

oh, and no I dont download them and violate artists copyright. I mostly listen to my old CD's and NPR.

Thanks for listening to me rant.

Re:Don't believe it

[joshsisk]

I agree with a lot of what you say, but not with the shareware analogy.

The thing about shareware is that the user has to make an effort to pay. With a music downloading service, they'd make an effort only once, when they signed up. After that, they'd just be billed.

Another difference is that with shareware, users feel like if they are willing to put up with the aggrevation of popup screens, wait times or other reminder methods, then they don't have to pay.

Also, with shareware you can just download a different program. "Drat, turbo-ftp expired, I guess I'll download nitro-ftp." You can't do that with music as easily. If you want a particular song, you want that one specifically.

.25 US per song..hell yes.

[billmaly]

If I could buy a quality MP3 of a song for .25, store it forever, and burn it to my own CD's for personal use, I'd do it. I'd even let them tack on a "protection device" to prevent me from letting others use the copy (of course, no reasonable device yet exists, but all things in time). Instead, @$20 for a CD that all too often contains 50% or more mediocre content. Hmmmm...wonder which plan will eventually win??

Re:.25 US per song..hell yes.

[wurp]

To protect it from copying would require that your PC have hardware to prevent any unauthorized copying. (Well, even that would only stop the honest citizens, not criminals). Don't under any circumstances let them get their foot in the door to controlling what content you watch on your PC. Before you know it, they'll restrict you from downloading 'unapproved' music, movies and programs and you'll be force-fed nothing but corporate America, all the time.

Re:.25 US per song..hell yes.

[Erasmus Darwin]

"If I could buy a quality MP3 of a song for .25, store it forever, and burn it to my own CD's for personal use, I'd do it."

I'm not sure the U.S. price would be that low. It's 10 Rs (20 cents) for an Indian mp3, but the regular CD there costs 250 Rs ($5). So if the prices are proportional, it'd be 50-60 cents per song here.

Not quite.

[haunebu]

I still believe that if P2P apps allow us do it for free, we'll keep using that.

quarter a track?

[AsnFkr]

no, i dont think so. i can still get em free on kazaa, ill use my quarters for gumballs.

Why the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, it costs 20 cents a song in India to download the song legally

And it costs like like $20 ($2) a song here to buy it off the shelf. CD's only costs a few cents to make and copy onto,

So i ask, Why the big difference?

I just can't wait until someone asks the RIAA, "Why can't you offer that here?"

Re:Why the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe because 20 cents in India is worth about 2 dollars here? Man, do you people even wake up before formulating your arguments?

Re:Why the difference?

[alen]

CD's cost more than a few cents to make. You have manufacturing, transportation, cover art, marketing, advertising, studio time etc. Then you have the retail markup. Stores have to make a profit too. If you only want to pay $1 for a CD, you're free to go visit the factory and buy it without packaging or cover art. Of course getting to the factory may cost you quite a bit more.

And then the average per capita income is less than $1000 in India. So you have to take that into account too.

Which is what in comparison?

[Burgundy Advocate]

You have to remember something about this:

There's a huge difference between 25 cents here and 25 cents in India. The average income is much lower.

For instance, 25 cents in India could equate to around $4.00 there.

Now do you really want to pay four bucks a track? $40.00+ per CD?

I didn't think so.

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[elefantstn]

For instance, 25 cents in India could equate to around $4.00 there.

Now do you really want to pay four bucks a track? $40.00+ per CD?

Well, by your logic, real CDs would "cost" $240, so I guess $40 would seem like a bargain.

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[Quixote]

For instance, 25 cents in India could equate to around $4.00 there.

The average income may be lower, but the difference is not that steep.
Look at it this way: a typical CD costs Rupees 200; and the cost per song is Rs 10 (or, 1/25 the cost of the CD). Use the same formula here (US), where a typical CD costs $15, and the cost per song works out to $0.60.

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[SkyLeach]

"You have to remember something about this:

There's a huge difference between 25 cents here and 25 cents in India. The average income is much lower.

For instance, 25 cents in India could equate to around $4.00 there.

Now do you really want to pay four bucks a track? $40.00+ per CD?"

found here
and

"Rs = Roupees, current exchange rate is about 1 dollar = 49 Roupees.

Studies vary, but the "average" family income in India works out at about $450 per year." found here

Very interesting and informative here. Proves price fixing doesn't it? You see, if the cost/person in Indea compaired to their income is the same as the cost/person in America compared to our income and the cost in the UK/person comapred to their income all work out to about the same rate, then we know they are fixing prices globaly.

I think that 10 Rp to an Indian making $450/year works out at about 22,050 Rp. That means an average income equivalant to the US, about $20k/year/citizen.

IANA Economist, but I would love to know if Indians are having to pay the same amount of their salary for music as Americans would have to pay for their music.

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, by your logic, real CDs would "cost" $240, so I guess $40 would seem like a bargain.

+1, More Insightful Than its +5 Parent.

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[psin psycle]

India is a vast country with a huge difference between the rich and the poor. It is not unusual in India for a wealthy family to have a maid, a cook a driver and a nanny. (btw, the driver usually takes the bus to work! imagine that!)

The target market for music is probably not the driver the maid and the nanny. The target market is the wealthy Indians who make a significant amount of money. For these people spending a few rupees on a MP3 download isn't all that bad.

The group of servants probably cannot even afford a computer let alone internet access and an MP3 on top of all that!

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[gokulpod]

India isnt as badly off as you presume. Rs 10 isnt really anything nowdays. Cassestes with 8 songs cost Rs 60 ($1.5) and CD about Rs 300 ($8). And only one song among them will be really worth listening to. Therfore 10 bucks for a mp3 is a sweet deal.

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[NeoCode]

10 Rs in India = a bottle of coke. So its NOT equal to $4 there.
You have to take into account the target market there. The teenage younger crowd that owns a PC and an internet connection. The average income of this demographic is higher than the averge income of the country. And as it happens, the Indian population is gradually coming from lower income to middle/higher income class. So it is a good plan for the future.
As the article says, if you really like a few songs from a CD and don't want to buy CD, it is well worth downloading a few tracks for 40-50 Rs and be very content with that.

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[Citizen of Earth]

Now do you really want to pay four bucks a track? $40.00+ per CD?

I'd be willing to pay $2/track. But what is on the average CD anyway, one or two hits, one or two okay songs, and the rest just filler. You wouldn't want to buy *all* of the songs from an album.

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[cygnusx]

A CD from Sony/Virgin/BMG etc in India costs between $8 and $12, more for double-CD packs/rare CDs/etc. They sell well, too, among the upper middle income group (which is huuge in India, thanks to a 1e9+ population. A lot of middle and lower income groups still prefer cassettes, though, which are between $1.x and $2.x. Still, Rs 100 for 10 songss ($2.x) doesn't sound too bad. But I'm really afraid their selection will suck ... too much Top 40 and Pop trash. Let's see, am off to check it out.

Note: One dollar ~ Rs 49.

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[shri]

Is not about the average income. Its about the income of the folks who have internet access. About a million or so people (vaguely rememever some surveys from NUA) have internet access and even fewer are accessing the 'net from home or a location where they could download and collect the MP3s.

Bottom line is that the median income of the folks with Internet access is well above the average income of the total population.

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[dracken]

This scheme is going to be a roaring success, the calculation regarding ``the fraction of weekly wages, purchasing power parity'' blah blah blah notwithstanding.

75% of the people who download music from their sites are going to be Indian students in the US or software professionals in the US. Considering the fact that an average Indian is an Indian music freak and there are *********too********** many Indian students / SW professionals living in the Europe and the US and the fact that getting Indian music in gnutella is hard, even if the Indians living abroad download music the company is going to do brisk business. And of course there is this HORRIBLE skew in the distribution of wealth in India. 15% (read 150 MILLION/SW company owners/Yuppies) of people in India have unimaginable riches. For them 10 bucks is a pittance.

Just trust me on this fellows, me I know ;)

-Dracken

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[aliebrah]

I think this post just requires a one word answer:

Duh!

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[sisukapalli1]

Comparing rupees versus dollars is more appropriate when done on a case by case basis. For instance a computer costs about the same (in dollar terms) in India and US. Booze/international telephone calls/gasoline is more expensive in India than in the US. Basic necessities such as food and shelter are much less expensive in India compared to the US. Some medicines are prohibitively expensive in India, whereas some are dirt cheap.

Since the CDs and the MP3s are targetted to the upper middle class people and up, and since they are more or less on the same "dollar level" as the middle class americans, 10 rupees in India should be looked as something between 25 cents and a dollar.

Most of the time, the price of the goods are dependent on how much people can pay.

Sastry

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps... the target audience for this online shop is earning waay over Indian average.
There's quite a lot of piss-poor in India (due to extremely unfair system). If you have time to spend, internet access and a computer to play the songs on you probably earn pretty good relative to the average salary.

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[Wise Dragon]

Good point there. The average Indian family struggles just to put food on the table, let alone buy music. The service is clearly targetted at the wealthy.

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[oever]

There's a huge difference between 25 cents here and 25 cents in India.

Not for the artist and not for the label! For them it's only 25 cents. They won't make more money because the average income in India is low.

Strange logic.

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[ChaserPnk]

i support this completely. I have been to india and to give you an example, what you pay $5 in US for a McDonald's meal can be bought for "cheaper" in equivalent Rupees yet the fast food industry does better in America. This is because of various econmoic and cultural reasons and also the fact that labor is very cheap in India as compared to the US. As for the success of this new business, I would have to doubt it. Internet connections in India are mostly dialup (cable/dsl for the super-rich), and the backbones aren't as good as in the west.

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[hashinclude]

Look at things like this:
The people who can afford to buy music can afford to buy music online. The point just is that here, Audio CDs cost somewhere around Rs.500-700 EACH. For the average person who DOES buy music CDs, the income is something like Rs.25K per month.
However, most people would rather use MP3s here (obviously), as the CD Players themselves are quite costly (compared to the salary yada yada).
Now, if this service really catches (and is good, and have a lot of songs, which, as of now, they dont seem to have) I will go for it, as I get a CD, full of __SONGS THAT I WANT__ for Rs.150 max (no more than 15 songs usually fit onto one Audio CD) .. which is the same as the price of a tape (of a similar set of songs).

Way to go Indiatimes (no URLs, no slashdotting, please)

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[xezas]

You are absolutely correct.

Rs. 10 is about 20 cents. You can buy a casette for about Rs. 50/- ($1) or a CD for about Rs 100/-($2) of any local language album.
The costs are approx. double for an international album. Some albums cost upto Rs. 600/- (about $12).

Any country has a basic cut-off currency. I was in South Korea recently and found that 1000 Won (approx Rs. 40/- or $0.80) is the cut-off currency there. What I mean is that this is the denomination that is most common and most easy on the psyche. Anything more that this is costly and anything lesser is cheap. A cut-off denomination is "perfect".

Well, Rs. 10/- is the cut-off currency in India (or at least in most cities in India). I doubt if people are going to pay this amount to download songs off an ISP when the neighbourhood cybercafe guy will get u an mp3 Cd with all the latest songs for less Rs. 50/- ($1 :) )

Land of Pirates

[DJOrient]

It'll be interesting to see how sucessful this venture is going to be - considering that India is within the Land of Pirates - Somehow I doubt that this is going to be financially rewarding...

money matters.

[QualityWithAKei]

How much does $.10 buy in india?
i'm guessing its worth a lot more then it is here.
i bought lunch for $.30 in china.

Re:money matters.

[amanb]

$.10, or 4 rupees will not get you a lot.
A bottle of pepsi would be around $.25.
An international music CD about $10 - $15.
Cable TV would be around $2 - $3 per month (with HBO!)
Books for a semester in college would cost less than $20.

Re:money matters.

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet that $0.30 rat was good

did you get a upset tummie?

Sorry i'm having a bad day

Nope

[Kami-sama]

I still believe that if the bigs let us download MP3s for a quarter a track, we'd do it.

I wouldn't. The big labels have zero to offer. I don't even bother using Napster/Kazaam/Mopeus/whatever because of this.

Decent labels have free samples of their own. Make it a decent label like Warp Records or Alien 8 Recordings and I'll consider it.

Well FINALLY! Some questions though...

[ari{Dal}]

Someone's doing something right! It's about time they attempted a business model that's more in line with the price/times.

One can only hope that this doesn't fall flat on its face. I'd hate to see this service cancelled because the record companies scream too much about 'lost revenue' due to trades/etc. But from the few details in the article, they have a decent business model set up.

Having said all that, there are still alot of questions that need answering. The article's short on technical details. I'd love to hear from someone who's familiar with the business. What format will the songs be in? Have they come up with a proprietary file type? How'd they manage to get the record companies to agree? How do they control who gets to download the music (ie - can I download from their site even though I'm not in India) ?

I'd be very interested in statistics on usage, downloads, burn rate, etc. This is going to be a fun one to track.

hey....

[the_2nd_coming]

you can actualy use this from the US. perhaps the recording industry will see how much cash they will get from having unrestricted MP3s sold for 20 cents and say "hmmm perhaps we have had it all wrong from the start."

Entertainment Industry piracy

[Sydney Weidman]

They steal culture from people, suck the life out of it, shrink-wrap it and sell it back to those who created it in the first place.

I'd pay 20 cents a download if I knew the money was going to artists and not to Virgin or BMG or whatever.

Re:Entertainment Industry piracy

[sketerpot]

Perhaps someone could make some open source thingy for doing this sort of thing, rip a bunch of music for it, put a lot of them in public places that hopefully the RIAA will overlook, don't publicise it, offer the tracks for a cheap price (half this? something affordable and convenient), then give the profits to FairTunes, where it will then go to the artists directly. People get music, artists get compensated, everybody is happy. Then you get sued...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Take a closer look

[sameerd]

Take a look at
http://www.soundbuzz.com/partners/indiatimes/mus ic download.asp"

Tell me what you would buy for 20 cents.

The entire CD for music like this would retail for something like $3 or $4. 20 cents per song seems reasonable.

Re:Take a closer look

[sameerd]

Corrected Link

http://www.soundbuzz.com/partners/indiatimes/mus ic download.asp

Sorry

Downloading music

[technopinion]

If I could "preview" (ie, bad quality streaming) music tracks for free, I would totally be willing to pay 50 cents or even more per track for good quality downloads.
Oh, but I have to be able to use them on more than just the one computer I downloaded them with (ie, play them in the car, and on a portable player)

What is that in Ruples?

[taya0001]

I think 20 cents is the average annual income in India. The music industry has gone to far! Taking food away from the mouths of poor indian children so they can be forced to pay for the music they download

Re:What is that in Ruples?

[goldspider]

20 cents, last I checked (about 1 minute ago) was about 9.8 rupees. Sounds like a good chunk of change to be paying for music over in India, if you ask me.

You're quite welcome. :)

Buying Power Is More Like $2.50 USD

[Josh]

Please understand that most all of the costs in this situation are sunk costs and that the buying power of 10 RS in India is perhaps equivalent to $2.50 USD or more. It is not really so different to what would be charged in the U.S.

Blowing smoke

[NiftyNews]

"I still believe that if the bigs let us download MP3s for a quarter a track, we'd do it."

Don't delude yourself. As long as something is free, people won't pay for it. The only correlary is that some people will pay more for convienience. But again, be serious...if you bought more than one or two albums worth of songs each week it would STILL be money you don't have for beer. Free is always cheaper than cheap for most people.

Re:Blowing smoke

[Anonymous Coward]

Free is always cheaper than cheap for most people.

Isn't free cheaper for all people??

Re:Blowing smoke

[Anonymous Coward]

My time is valuable. If it takes me an hour to assemble a cd off of gnutella, it just isn't worth it to me. You're not saving money if your using up your free time.

Re:Blowing smoke

[wurp]

Bullshit.

I don't use any of the file sharing utilities any more because I spend hours online to try to download an assortment of stuff (not exactly what I want, just whatever I can find that looks good).

If there was somewhere that I could download over a fast http connection and just find what I wanted without it being an all-night struggle, you bet I'd pay a quarter a song, or 5 bucks a movie.

And maybe everyone doesn't feel this way, but I would certainly feel better if I thought I was giving a fair price for what I got. In fact, there is a recent article in Scientific American (maybe 3 months ago) of a psychological study which showed exactly that: given the choice between paying a cheapish price for a good or service and getting the good or service for free, people will consistently pay the cheapish price. We don't really want to be freeloaders. Go figure.

Re:Blowing smoke

[pseudofrog]

I disagree.

As it is now, the cost of a CD (getting up around 20$) is outrageous. I can buy a DVD (sometimes two) for that price. For this reason I don't feel so bad downloaded music for free. I can honestly say I would not buy 99% of the stuff I download at that cost.

Buuuuut...if I can download a track for 20c, or a full CD in the $2 to $2.50 range, I'm going to have some trouble downloading music without having that twang of guilt.

And let's say only 10% of the people change to paying for their MP3's...which is a conservative guess in my opinion. That's still a LOT of money -- a lot of money that the recording companies/artists did not get previously.

Don't underestimate people's scruples.

Re:Blowing smoke

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

As long as something is free, people won't pay for it

Not really. Most people put in money at the "Suggested Donation" box at museums. Now, museums don't receive enough revenue from the box to stay afloat, and they sure as heck don't have the outrageous benefits of being a music exec, so the RIAA wouldn't go for it. Still, if the music was priced reasonably, I think a lot of people would pay. Not everyone, but a lot.

Re:Blowing smoke

[rschroeder]

I've got to disagree here. While gutella, etc don't cost any money, It's a real pain in the ass the find the track I'm looking for, and forget about a whole album. I'd pay for the ease of use and quality of product.

Besides I do believe that _most_ people want to pay for music it's just that there's currently no way to do it.

Re:Blowing smoke

[letxa2000]

In fact, there is a recent article in Scientific American (maybe 3 months ago) of a psychological study which showed exactly that: given the choice between paying a cheapish price for a good or service and getting the good or service for free, people will consistently pay the cheapish price. We don't really want to be freeloaders. Go figure.

I think that's a case of academia being in contradiction to real-world observable facts.

I've sold shareware. Damn cheap. And no, not low quality. I can assure you, most people are freeloaders even when given the chance to pay a very small price.

Re:Blowing smoke

[cthrall]

> As it is now, the cost of a CD (getting up
> around 20$) is outrageous.

Which is why I buy used.

Re:Blowing smoke

[NiftyNews]

"Besides I do believe that _most_ people want to pay for music it's just that there's currently no way to do it."

Heh. I think this mis-statement underlines the point nicely.

Re:Blowing smoke

[Gannoc]

As long as something is free, people won't pay for it.

Then how come people buy bottled water? (Yes, I know even tap water costs money, but for all intents and purposes, its free.)

Re:Blowing smoke

[DrXym]

Some people won't pay for it, but the vast, vast majority will. If there was a site where for 50 cents I could download an MP3 track (signed to me if necessary) from a superfast server then I would happily pay for it.

Aside from the convenience, such a site could be a community where I could rate songs, find similar music, read news about my favourite bands, meet other fans, buy the CD, buy concert tickets etc. If such a site was prominently placed in AOL, MSN etc. the pirate market would dry up overnight.

Gnutella et al would be second rate by comparison. Yes you could get your song eventually but it would probably cost you more than 50 cents of your time and connection to do so.

Re:Blowing smoke

[p3d0]

The only correlary is that some people will pay more for convienience.

Wow. You just demonstrated that you don't know how to spell "corollary", nor how to pronounce it, nor what it means, all in once sentence. :-)

(Yeah, I have plenty of karma, so I spend it picking on people. :-)

Re:Blowing smoke

[karnal]

Which brings up my point -- you can usually buy a used album anywhere from 6-10$, but when you look for the same album in any of the chain stores, they're usually marking the album UP. I've seen Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here for around 25$. That's just nuts! (not taking away from the decent album, just not wanting to shell out 25$ for one cd.)

Re:Blowing smoke

[pmz]

Here's something worth considering:

If most people will choose free over inexpensive, then why do the major Linux distributors, such as RedHat, make the money they do (looking at gross revenues)? This isn't pocket change, here.

For example, I have decided that I don't want to pay $600/year for a broadband connection and that my 33.6kbs modem is mostly just fine. However, I also found that the time involved in downloading software packages is prohibitive. I, then, quickly decided that time saved is worth some money, which is why I have purchased CD distributions of Linux and OpenBSD without any regrets. Also, I like the idea of providing some money in support of free software.

If the music industry can achieve something similar--providing high quality downloads & CDs for the market value of the time saved by not using peer-to-peer priateware--then they just got for themselves a guranteed revenue stream, since time will always equal money in the minds of many people for as long as people exist.

Re:Blowing smoke

[razboinik]

Don't delude yourself. As long as something is free, people won't pay for it.

Don't delude yourself. As long as I have to spend hours searching for the music I want, then downloading it at somebody's modem speed, then hearing it through to make sure it has been recorded completely and with acceptable quality, boy, I'd rather pay for the service. My time is not free at all.

Re:Blowing smoke

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing one thing though. They would be able to offer top quality sound, high data rates, and fast downloads. I get a lot of shitty sounding stuff using morpheus and grokster. I would gladly pay for them if I could get some kind of consistent high quality.

Re:Blowing smoke

[gspeare]

Don't delude yourself.

I have no illusions that illicit copying of music would end...but for me, it's worth two bits for the peace of mind that comes with having a legit file.

Re:Blowing smoke

[Derkec]

I for one would have been very interested in this sort of service. I wanted to get my girlfriend the complete works of a band (about 12 CDs) for her birthday and approached it from a "I'll just download them" approach. Knowing what I value my time at, I would have happily paid 25 cents a track. The hassles of poorly named files, digging for some more obscure older tracks and loosing downloads in the middle leave a place where the music industry could provide a better service and charge for it. The only reason I might not participate at this point is that I feel bad about myself when I give those jerks money. But then again, I feel bad about ripping off the artists too.

Your arguement that free is always cheaper than cheap for most people couldn't be further from the truth. People pay for services they could do themselves all the time. Some could do some repair and plumbing work for pretty much free, but prefer to hire a plumber or handiman. Milkmen just drive milk to your house. Many technical people choose not to build their own computers because it's so much less hassle to have Dell or Gateway or the shop down the street do it for them. People pay for quality service. If the music industry provided a high quality service that made it quicker and easier to download high quality mp3s, they could charge for it. It's not going to be a p2p solution, most likely, but a centralized site (perhaps with a downloadable ap) where I say, I want song XXXX or every song from cd yyyyy and a little bit later, I've got it at a fraction of the cost of a CD and a fraction of the time of finding all the songs myself.

The kind of user I am:

&nbsp I can't say I'm the most sophisticated mp3 digger out there, but I use tools like limewire and audiogalaxy pretty well.

Re:Blowing smoke

[ZanshinWedge]

Don't delude yourself. As long as something is free, people won't pay for it.

Completely wrong. I have myself and many of my friends as counter-examples. There have been occasions when I was in the music store and the only CDs I bought were ones that I already had on MP3s, all the tracks, and good quality rips. Why? Because I like music, and I like musicians. The only thing that is going to get me to stop buying CDs other than lack of money is the evil machinations of RIAA et al that make me want to take a shower before and after contemplating doing anything that would put money in their pockets.

For the most part the people that have the largest MP3 collections are people who are music fans. Music fans like music (duh). Music fans buy music. Of all the people I know there are very few exceptions to the rule that the people with the largest MP3 collections are also the same people with the largest CD collections.

Re:Blowing smoke

[zipwow]

This is the single best analogy I've seen in this case.

The free thing *can* be as good as the for-pay thing, but often is not.

If you want to be sure you get a good version of the free thing, you have to do a lot of looking around, and even then your locations change.

The for-pay thing isn't really that expensive, and guarantees quality.

The free thing can be dangerous (lead, virii).

The for-pay thing is quite safe.

I like! Bravo!

Zipwow

Re:Blowing smoke

[geekoid]

Thats why the would have to compete on the convience level.
I'd pay .50 cents per track I downloaded, and If I got a good connection, and perhaps some other features.
actually, I think something like this might work:
10 cents for the lowest quality mp3.
20 cents per medium quality
30 cents for hig qualtiy mp3
50 cents for a song taken right of the cd no compression.
If done right, I would even pay 5 bucks a month for a membership fee.
The last qualification is at least 50% would go to the muscians.

Not everybody will take a song for free if its reasonably priced for the consumer, and easy to get.

Most people don't know about the various distributed peer to peer programs, and wouldn't want to set one up.
When I say most, I mean out of everybody, not just the /. crowd.

I would also like to point out that people BUY pirated software. T%here are whole market where people go and buy software for 10 or 20 bucks. You would think the industry would learn something from this, like, softwares true market value.

Re:Blowing smoke

[jzitt]

Most people put in money at the "Suggested Donation" box at museums.

The box is usually within full view of others at the museum, so that there is social pressure to pay, which is not there on most Web sites. If you were living in a small town and walked into the local museum without paying, you can be sure that the whispers about your not paying would spread faster than a greased meme.

An analogy would be if a site had a frame listing people who had signed on within the past hour or so, in columns labelled "Thanks for supporting us!" and "Cheapskates", or maybe a periodic email listing these people. Sure, a few people would stomp in without paying anyway, and some would boycott the site, but I suspect that, if the fee were very low and the ease-of-use were exceptional, many would happily pay.

Re:Blowing smoke

[Cyno]

As long as something is free, people won't pay for it.

And that's the problem. Most Americans are criminals. Instead of treating geeks like criminals the RIAA needs to treat dumb Americans like criminals, too. They're no excuse for ignorance of the law. Anyone caught with illegally copied mp3s should be punished to the maximum extent of the law. They're costing our precious music and movie industries billions of hard earned dollars. I say throw these criminals in prison for a year or two and see how they feel about their crimes against humanity.

Re:Blowing smoke

[Basje]

Good argument.

On top of that, I believe people will do it because it is easier. Nowadays it's quite easy to find popular tracks with [insert favorite napsterlike tool here]. Rare tracks are still hard to find. The more people use these tools, the larger the network becomes. And the better it works.

When people only have to pay US$0.25, and don't have to search, and don't have to wait, they will go to the record company's site. This, to the record industry, has the added bonus that the swapping networks will dwindle: the masses won't use them anymore, so it will be even harder to find tracks on them.

I don't believe that will happen. Many people over the years have argued that lowering the prices of cds/records/songs would increase sales. This is just another argument in that discussion. As long as the record industry's economists fail to calculate, they will stick with a broken system. An feed it to us. So I'll continue to use the donkey.

Don't be so cynical

[g_bit]

It takes a long time on the computer to find exactly the song(s) you're looking for. You'd pay $0.25 to download what you want, when you want.

C'mon, for an album of 12 songs that's only $3.00 you'd have to be an idiot to waste even 1 hour (unless you make bare minimum wage of course ;)

Also, at that price I could build my own 'Internet' jukebox for clubs and bars and make a fortune!

Re:Don't be so cynical

[the_2nd_coming]

and to make it even easier, they could get Kazza and morphius to move over to their network so that people can actualy use those popular tools to BUY the MP3s....I would support a law that outlawed apps that have a function that allows the downloading of MP3s illegal MP3s. that is short enough in scope to not hurt any application, and keep functions like looking for porn films still viable on kazaa :-)

Re:Don't be so cynical

[Surak]

I would support a law that outlawed apps that have a function that allows the downloading of MP3s illegal MP3s. that is short enough in scope to not hurt any application, and keep functions like looking for porn films still viable on kazaa

Um, no, it's not. How would you technically do such a thing? You can't check the file extension, because that's easily changeable. What about scanning the file contents? Well, then people might start zipping first. Or using encryption. Or whatever.

So the only way you could outlaw such a thing would be to outlaw any programs that do file transfers. That means FTP servers (like ProFTPd), Web servers (Like Apache), file servers (like Samba), terminal programs that do Z-Modem or something similar, IM clients that do file transfers (like AIM, gAIM, ICQ, etc.), and quite possibly all removable media in existence.

Don't be in favor of laws when you don't know the repercussions of those laws or understand the consequences of said law being taken to the extreme.

Re:Don't be so cynical

[the_2nd_coming]

hey, I said out law, I did not say enforcability.

the fact that it is against the law reduces your population of violaters to a small percentage, IFF the law is well balenced and fair to everyone.

even making it illegal to download copyrighted MP3s, explicitly, would make it less of a thing to do, since most folks out there right now do not see a problem with it, or even know it is illegal.

also, I would only support this in the face of a cheep unrestricted service like soundbuzz.

Re:Don't be so cynical

[Surak]

the fact that it is against the law reduces your population of violaters to a small percentage, IFF the law is well balenced and fair to everyone.

You still haven't answered my question. If you make software that enables one to download copyrighted MP3s illegal, how do you get around the fact that any program in existence that does file transfer would have to be made illegal if the law is to be enforceable? Doing so would be a violation of First Amendment protections. A law that is unenforceable because of the First Amendment is therefore illegal.

even making it illegal to download copyrighted MP3s, explicitly, would make it less of a thing to do, since most folks out there right now do not see a problem with it, or even know it is illegal.

Most folks don't know it's illegal? Oh, c'mon now. Don't be ridiculous. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if I'm copying something from someone else that normally costs money, I'm breaking the law.

Besides, why would we need a law specifically makeing it illegal to download copyrighted MP3s? It's already illegal.

Re:Don't be so cynical

[the_2nd_coming]

better law enforcement :-). and I did answer your question.....I had said out law, not enforce.

The music industry would still not move

[cholokoy]

Changing their business model is anathema to them as this will lessen their profits so no more executive bonuses. Who, in his right mind, as PHB would want to do that?

Some new entrants will have to come in and develop this new model. I don't know if there are some venture capitalists out there thinking of how to exploit the new model. I believe the barrier to entry is quite big or else some should have done this before. Well, there is always a first time.

-----
Return the bells of Balangiga...

But...

[r_j_prahad]

This is hard to make a valid comparison to U.S. business model, since Indian music is sooo much better than U.S. music.

What, me biased?

Yours objectively, Rajendra.

Re:But...

[pangu]

I concur, though by my sig it's pretty obvious I might feel that way. :-)

Re:But...

[sinserve]

Give me Asha, Lata, and Rafi anytime, and I will never ask
for any western music.

P.S. I am not an indian, and am not related to the subcontinent, or even
Asia in any way.

--

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

My favourite is the badshah of indipop, Daler Mehndi

Very, very unlikely

[brain-in-a-box]

that they have a contract for distributing the music internationally. Probably only for India.
A little calculation:
an normal audio CD has max. 20 tracks
20 x 0.2 = 4 $
(legal) audio CDs cost much more than 4$.
And CD production and distribution isn't so expensive.
There are 4 explanation for the above sheme:
a) Their contract forces them to pay $$$ to the label and they think they can make the money by the famous crack-pot-dot-com business plan. -> instant financial death.
b) They made the contract with the famous WarezH4x0r label.
c) They big labels can't calculate.
d) They big labels think the music will be only distributed in India because their business drones stuck their fingers/tongues into the 230 Volt plug.

Re:Very, very unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean "socket", chump?

You can't force people

[tom_newton]

Laws can only be so effective, the easiest way to make people abide by the law is to make it the easiest option to do so.

If it were easy (read: cheap, fast, convenient) to get music legally, I'm quite sure the illegal methods would become much less popular. On the other hand, squash one illegal method with the "might" of the law, and another springs up to replace it.

At the minute, it's very easy to get music illegally without being caught. It's going to cost a lot of money to make it a lot more difficult whichever way you look at it, so a scheme like tis seems the only viable option!

not that different from emusic.com

[ip_vjl]

You can download tracks you want right now.

eMusic's offerings are subscription based, but allow unlimited downloads.

I poked around their site, but don't yet see enough artists/titles in their database to be worth my $9.99/month yet. Too bad. It's sort of a catch-22 for them. Probably need more subscribers to build their collection, but can't get more subscribers until their collection is bigger.

Re:not that different from emusic.com

[ShavenYak]

Yeah, I looked at eMusic after the /. article on Gateway's 'digital music PC' ads. I'm thinking of subscribing, they seem to have a good bit of stuff I'd like. I'm just wondering how quick the downloads are, how hard it'll be to get unsubscribed if I decide later it's not worth it, those sorts of things.

Re:not that different from emusic.com

[kurowski]

i've got 768k dsl, and their downloads are fast enough to keep my pipe filled. i've done a couple downloads from them while at a client's site with multiple T3's and remember it being significantly faster (wasn't checking the actual rate, though). anyway, point is that it's fast, and always fast, and if you're at the end of consumer-grade broadband your downloads from them will be at the max speed that your connection allows.

Re:not that different from emusic.com

[kurowski]

for my $9.99 a month, i download a few of their editors picks each week. one of them ends up being something i really like and might not have otherwise found. so, i average about 4 full ablums that i like from them each month, which is about $2.50 per album, or just under $0.25 per track.

sure, i don't have the option to just spend only $0.25 and only get britney's latest chart busting single, but emusic's target market is, i believe, people who actually appreciate music and not the lemming-like consumers of the billboard top 40.

Re:not that different from emusic.com

[ShavenYak]

Thanks for the info. I'm on 1.5m cable. I grabbed a couple of the freebies and they were fast, but the demo is (almost) always better than the real thing. The only other thing I'm wondering about is the encoding - do the MP3's sound reasonably close to CD quality? I know they're only 128k, but I've heard some 128k MP3's that sound really good, and some that sound like manure.

Re:not that different from emusic.com

[UncleFluffy]

Cool ! Emusic has got a Stooges album I've never heard of - "Rough Power"

Excellent quality control, folks.... ;-)

Re:not that different from emusic.com

[bjohn]

I was a long time subscriber to the eMusic service. Downloads were quick and the only problems with them were the need for either FreeAmp(okay) or RealJukebox(ick!) to download whole albums easily.

I have however canceled my subscription due to the track quality. All tracks are encoded at 128k and while most are fine, some have certain stereo problems due to the encoders used. That said, I'd resubscribe in a second if they offered higher quality downloads. It is a very convenient service. The catalog was constantly growing and I found myself sampling artists I would have never imagined buying CDs of before.

To those who say people will not pay for that they can get for free, do not discount the value of convenience...

Re:not that different from emusic.com

[Kwil]

In eMusics case, I find that the samples are almost always *worse* than the full track - at least for sound quality. For speed, all that's changed between a demo track and a paid track is the interface you use to get it, it's the same file so speed and quality of the track are the same as any you'd get from a paid subscription.

But speaking of quality the RM 30 second samples are utter pants. The MP3 30 second samples are better but still not quite as good as the full track in my opinion. The songs themselves sound just fine to me, but I'm not a serious audiophile. I've got a couple of cheap-ass harmon/kardon speakers here and comparing between an MP3 from eMusic and the same track from a CD I already own sound the same on them.

Re:not that different from emusic.com

[kurowski]

actually that's my only problem with emusic- 128k fixed rate mp3s. they sound great on my crappy computer speakers and on my nomad with sennheiser earbuds, but in my car (empeg with boston accoustics speakers) they only sound fine at low volume. crank it up and you can hear artifacts of the compression. how noticeable they are depends on the kind of music you're listening to, so you'd really have to try it out to know. some of the best albums i've found on emusic i've subsequently bought on cd, just so i can make some higher quality mp3s. but for $10/month, it's been well worth it for me.

25 cents? Hell yes.

[The Mainframe]

I agree.. I'd even be willing to pay a buck a song. I know that from time to time I want a very specific song, and a buck is a fine price to pay. Considering how much it costs to print and ship actual CDS, the labels would be raking it in. I've tried this with a couple of sites (like cdnow.com) that claim to support "downloadable MP3s", but they are always crippled. Getting these MP3s to play, even under Windows (which is always the only OS supported) requires a net connection, a special player, and all sorts of authorization.
In short, let me buy and download MP3s for a buck (real MP3s that will play on any platform) and I'll stop about 75% of my pirating... it's not that I"m not willing to pay, I"m just too lazy to get to the record store, and I don't always want the whole album.

cause and effect

[brian6string]

The music industry's real (self-inflicted) problem is that their product is largely crap. No one wants to buy a whole album, b/c VERY VERY few whole albums are worth having.

So, downloading songs (even for pay) addresses the symptom, but not the disease. A & R reps. at record companies need to stop going for the flashes in the pan.

Pros and Cons-

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course some people would still download music illegally, but with a service like that available in addition to anti-piracy enforcement, I am sure that number would go down a lot, at least in America.

I would totally buy songs for 25 cents, but I really dont see anyone in China and I am not sure anyone even in India doing it. 25 cents over there will buy you a lot more then in the U.S., food-wise.

Buying music by the track.

[PhunkyOne]

I think this is an awesome idea. I would drop 50 cents or whatever a track of music. I think there are two problems with this and the weak minded music industry.. First is that they have no way to control us - ie there is no good copy protection (well at least not yet). And hell I would require my right to personal reproduction if I bought the damn track. Secondly musicians would have to work a little harder, I can't think of all that many CDs that I think every song is great. Most of the time when I buy a CD there are a couple of good songs and the rest is fluffy poo. It's disappointing that I have finally just accepted it but for the norm that's the way it is. Of course I think the RIAA is screwing most musicians though so who knows... I for one might even pay a buck a song for music...it's cheap when you think about it...hell they have to pay bandwidth and stuff also and if it was something that I wanted the entire CD I could just buy the entire CD. I wish the Music Industry would just catch on and see how much they are missing out on by everyone having to rely on Morpheus or some other thing like that.

Dumb fucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Every one of you dumb fucks talk as if all music came in three minute "songs". That is NOT the universal unit of music.

Dumb fucks.

Re:Dumb fucks.

[curunir]

Every one of you dumb fucks talk as if all music came in three minute "songs". That is NOT the universal unit of music.

Well...Universal does pump out a lot of music around that length...so maybe you're just getting confused over capitalization.

ten cents a pop

[Mr. Slippery]

I still believe that if the bigs let us download MP3s for a quarter a track, we'd do it.

25 cents a track is three bucks for a CD's worth (twelve songs) of music. I can do better than that by clever manipulation of CD clubs.

I think more like ten cents a pop would defintely do it - think ten bucks, one hundred songs.

And if we cut the middlemen out, most artists would probably end up ahead.

Re:ten cents a pop

[parking_god]

Even if you can reduce your CD cost below .25/track by flogging the CD clubs (a practice I heartily endorse!), you're still only getting one song you like, two songs that aren't painful to listen to, and nine batches of line noise.

Although I'd prefer a .10 price point (hell, what consumer wouldn't?), .25 would be fine by me.

Worth it.

[realmolo]

I'd pay 25 cents a track. Lots of people would.

IF...you could get any track you wanted. Imagine if the labels had giant servers that contained their entire catalogs in 192kbps MP3 format. No more hunting around for what you want. MP3s ripped by people that know what they're doing. Ahh ;)

THAT would be worth 25 cents a track.

Re:read the damn article

[Britissippi]

Rs = Roupees, current exchange rate is about 1 dollar = 49 Roupees.

Studies vary, but the "average" family income in India works out at about $450 per year.

I guess you've never used emusic.com

[allism]

Emusic.com does something similar, except instead of paying a quarter a track, you pay a monthly fee for unlimited downloads. Before we lost our high-speed bandwidth, we were using this service on a regular basis, even if we found we could get music for free. Not EVERYONE is out to pirate music, I'm just not willing to pay $15-20 for a CD I can't listen to tracks to before buying and may (probably does) suck.

oldest catalogue in HMV?

[YakumoFuji]

hmm bollocks. I work in the data warehouse of HMV UK (where HMV started), and I can tell you its not the first entry in the master catalogue!

not sure where indiatimes got their info from...

Re:Slashdot

[hummerman]

To anonymous coward why are you dissin on us slashdotters when obviously you are surfing the site too!

bastards

[the_2nd_coming]

well the US folks can use it, but they only sell non-US music. so that means no Korn, no britiny (if you like that) and other crap that is US based.

well, I guess I could get into the south pacific nations music :-)

Re:bastards

[Anonymous Coward]

All good pop (pop being anything that is not classical) music is US based, or a foreigner who is copying an American.

Don't believe me? Research why the Beatles named themselves the Beatles. Research the lawsiuts filed & threatened by Willie Dixon.

Re:bastards

[Anonymous Coward]

that is my poit retard. no US based music = crap for main stream music lovers.

Artist Beware!

[explosionhead]

The issue here is will the artist actually get anything from this, the current music distribution systems being implemented in the states don't actually give anything direct to the performer. And moreso, recording contracts are now loaded with clauses to cover "future distribution technology"

Complete with Digital Rights Management

[Anonymous Coward]

//... Start now!! It's finally easy... Buy and //download legal Commercial tracks using our //secured payment platform and Digital Rights //Management system...

No plain old mp3's here? Can you play your legally downloaded music on anything but Windows or Mac?

25 cents... and "we" would pay?

[sielwolf]

Let us compare:

25 cents

versus

0 cents (and a nil chance of getting busted).

Let's try again:

You have to wait until the Tuesday of release.

versus

You can go out, get a full promo copy of a cd that isn't out yet (El-P - Fantastic Damage, Blackalicious - Flaming Arrows) or a cd version that will never be released (N*E*R*D - In Search Of (import version), Latyrx).

Hmmm, ok. No, there has to be something that will prove that an honor digital music system would work:

You get to be monitored by a large corporate service and are accountable to the government.

versus

Complete and utter anonymity (for sake of argument).

Conclusion: There is no way in Hell that commercial digital music sharing will take off as long as a viable free PtP service(s) exists.

Re:25 cents... and "we" would pay?

[pomakis]

Okay, how about:

You download the track once, assured that it will be a complete, high-quality encoding with full ID3 tags.

versus

You download the track once only to discover that the end is cut off, so you download it again from somewhere else, only to discover that the quality sucks, so you download it again from somewhere else, only to discover that there are skip/stutter artifacts in it, so you download it again...

I know a lot of people (including myself) who would pay for the convenience and assurance of a legitimate system!

Re:25 cents... and "we" would pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you download it again to discover that it's a mislabeled piece of RIAA propaganda that after the first 22 seconds of the song starts screaming "Pirate! Pirate! Pirate! Pirate!"

Re:25 cents... and "we" would pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

...Or the fact that you get to click 5-10 sources just to get a valid download... And that's not even guaranteeing the track is legit. i'd pay 25-50 cents for a good connection (speed and stability) and good quality (160+). Sorry for ya.

Re:Corrected Link

[sameerd]

Corrected link
If a space appears between music and download delete it. Why is slashdot mucking up URLs in text mode?

microsoft reliability

[apachetoolbox]

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e31'

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired

/buylist.asp, line 612

arrrghh!

Pay For Play?

[Luminous]

I'm equally skeptical that people will pony up money when they can still easily get it for free, BUT I have a Lockian sense that people will choose to do what is legally and ethically correct more often than not. Which means if an easy to use service, with a simple User Interface were to appear which was tied to an account (not a credit card, but an account that money can be deposited into in order to control willy-nilly downloading), offered free streaming music a la spinner, offered oddities like MP3.com, allowed artists/record labels to offer tracks for free, and was a no brainer to use - people would use it.

I am the type of person who listens to Spinner, hears a song I like, goes to the new Morpheus and looks for it. I may be atypical, but I don't think I am. I think a lot of people would do the same if given the opportunity. Hear a song on the radio and have the option to buy it immediately . . . it is a great sales strategy. Music stores do it, they play stuff that they think people will buy once they hear it.

Get the service software bundled with PCs with the downloading option disabled until an account is activated, people will still get the radio ability which can have little ads between songs letting people know that if they really liked they song, they can download it.

Re:Pay For Play?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am the type of person who listens to Spinner, hears a song I like,

That's "I bes hearin a song I likes," bonehead.

Re:Pay For Play?

[PlaysWithMatches]

I'm equally skeptical that people will pony up money when they can still easily get it for free

The problem with stuff like Gnutella, Kazaa, etc. is you generally have to know EXACTLY what you're looking for. One of the reasons I joined emusic.com (a pay service, $10-15 a month depending on which subscription you get) is because I can find all sorts of stuff simply by genre and style, or by specific artist/song if I choose.

I can't go to Gnutella and say "find some contemporary jazz" and expect to get anything decent. I can go and type "Louis Armstrong" if I know that's what I want, but I don't always know what I want. Most people don't either.

Here's a sum-up list of why I pay for emusic:

• Search by artist, track, album, or browse the genres. The latter is something you really can't do well in existing file-sharing networks.
• Excellent download speeds at constant rates. I can snag multiple tracks off emusic at 180-200k/sec pretty much anytime, day or night. Contrast this to the crappy 2-5k/sec I got from people on Gnutella.
• Lots of music in the styles I like. I'm not much for what's "cool" like Brititney Spears or whatever. Since the filesharing networks, by their very nature, tend to only have what the majority of people like, it's hard to find the music *I* enjoy. I don't see a lot of smooth jazz or caribbean music out there on the leech networks.

Other than that, all I can say is - go try out the 30 day trial and see for yourself. It's pretty sucky you have to have a credit card to sign up for the friggin' trial, but you may be surprised what good music there is to be found on there. Personally, what I find is worth paying for.

Re:Pay For Play?

[YourGarbageMan]

I agree. Furthermore, music sharing as I see it is a form of advertising. The only difference where downloading is concerned, is that the user gets to pick what they want to listen to rather than the music industry making that choice. When I was in highschool my friends would make mix tapes for each other. I was exposed to a lot of new music that way and consequently ended up purchasing many records. That's a form of advertising and what's more, it's advertising with zero cost to the industry. It's also targeted advertising which is always more efficient, but as I've said, its advertising which is not controlled by the industry. Maybe that's what they don't like.

learn your damn economics

[ShavenYak]

If you're going to be inflammatory in your subject line, you should at least have a cursory understanding of the topic.

You are suffering from a confusion between the exchange rate of a currency, and the purchasing power of individuals in other nations. The exchange rate is (apparently) 1 Rs to 2 cents. That does not mean that the average Indian makes Rs 25,000/week if the average American makes $500.00/week.

The original poster was indicating that for an average Indian citizen, the Rs 10 was roughly the same in relation to his income as $4.00 would be to the average American.

These numbers may not be exact, in fact they were probably pulled out of the Management Information And Statistics System (MIASS). The concept is correct, though.

Re:learn your damn economics

[Citizen of Earth]

The exchange rate is (apparently) 1 Rs to 2 cents. That does not mean that the average Indian makes Rs 25,000/week if the average American makes $500.00/week.

This is Purchasing Power Parity. The same thing is true of the Canadian dollar vs. the American dollar, for example. The PPP is US$0.79 whereas the exchange rate is US$0.62. The Canadian dollar is undervalued by about 22% from what it theoretically should be. Many other national currencies are similarly undervalued, e.g., Australia. Some third-world countries are undervalued by up to 50%.

Convenience two ways

[yerricde]

The only correlary is that some people will pay more for convenience.

Legitimate music download services such as eMusic and the one that this article mentions provide more convenience than Gnutella, KaZaA, and WinMX in two big ways:

• The downloads work over HTTP and thus work better over connections that severely throttle non-RFC-defined services, such as the router on Rose-Hulman's T1s.
• Three nines availability. There is negligible risk of "Connection reset by peer" ... Resume ... "User offline".

Re:Convenience two ways

[pomakis]

I can think of a very important third benefit as well. Most of the MP3s I've downloaded over the internet have been really crappy encodings. Even at 192kbps, whatever encoder the average joe uses seems to do a really lousy job! I would think that a legitimate service would provide high-quality encodings (perhaps using the Fraunhofer codec), complete with proper ID3 tags, etc. I would consider this a great convenience, because I hate having to download something 10 times from 10 different sources and then analyzing each of them to figure out which is the best. To me, that's well worth 25 cents (or even more) a track!

Re:Convenience two ways

[sixthofmay]

Emusic.com only offers only low quality 128 kbps mp3s and they have no details on the ripping method or encoder. My own rips are done using Exact Audio Copy and encoded with LAME in the highest quality VBR true stereo mode. That mode generates files in the 220 to 290 kbps range and is damn close to CD quality no matter how complex the source material. I can always tell a 128 kbps MP3. They sound horrid, usually with a warbly high-end and/or flat sound. And Emusic's selection is poor. Not even a gothic-industrial-ebm section. While it's good they're making an attempt, they have much work to do before I'd consider using them.

Re:Convenience two ways

[Anonymous Coward]

Hint: when you have downloaded a song, listen to it, and decided to keep a high quality version of it, instead of downloading it 10 times do what the rest of us is doing: GO AND BUY THE F*** CD.

Quarter a track?

[dcavanaugh]

"I still believe that if the bigs let us download MP3s for a quarter a track, we'd do it."

I would cheerfully pay $0.25 per track (for uncrippled MP3s). That would be infinitely more than I spend now. Currently, my music budget is $0.00 because I won't pay $17.99 for what amounts to be one track, distributed with some other junk, all of which is potentially crippled by copyware. And to think RIAA blames their problem on piracy! Idiots!

RIAA better get smart before everyone's music collection is limited to what they bought during the heyday of "orange book compliance". Then again, waiting for them to get smart is like waiting for hell to freeze over.

Heck ya!

[mr_zorg]

You bet I would go for that. 'Tis what I've been saying all along they should. Heck, I'd even go as high as $1/track. That's about what they charge for a CD, but it allows be to get just those cool songs I like without the crap that comes along for the ride...

Up to a dollar would even work

[md_doc]

I do not use music swaping software much but when I do use it it is usually a time consuming task to find the songs I actually want. I know I would be personally happy to go to a site like cdnow.com where I could preview each song (30 seconds) and then download the song for anywhere between 50 cents to 1 dollar.

I cannot see how anyone else out there would not be willing to do this as you would get exactly the songs you want and you would download them at a fast rate. Downloading over a DSL line with at a max rate instead of at 5-20k a second would be well worth the 50 cents to a dollar.

I know I would still go out and buy the cd's because there are some kewl things that come with cd's like memberships to sites to download other hidden tracks and lyrics or what not but I can promise, like most people, that I would go to a site and pay 50 cents to a dollar before I go to limewire because I know it would take a lot less time.

It depends...

[Anonymous Coward]

If we're talking high-quality MP3 that I move to my iPOD or burn onto a mix CD for my CD changer then, hell, I'd do it. Otherwise the big music companies can continue to kiss my ass.

Of course we would...

[Colin Winters]

Download music for 20-25 cents a track. Consumers would be happy being able to pick out music they like and not have to pay $15 for one track+a lot of garbage. Unfortunately, this will never ever happen. Think of the cable industry-how cool would it be to pay $1 per channel for normal channels? I don't know anyone who watches more than 10 channels, the rest are all wasted on them. But if the cable companies were to use this pricing scheme, they'd go bankrupt quickly. By packaging content as a whole, they are able to subsidize crappier channels, just as the music industry subsidizes crappier tracks/albums.

Colin Winters

RIAA Strawman?

[Corporate Drone]

OK... so you've established that $0.25 / track is worth a whole lot more in India than in the States.

Why, then, are the bells going off in my head, telling me that RIAA will use the argument, "We tried. It cost only a quarter a song , and it failed. See! That business model doesn't work!"

Problem with this model

[cholokoy]

One of the issue that I think the record labels are hesitant to move into this model is equitable pricing. I'm not sure if they go with the model, they can still make a profit. The reason is that economies are different in many part of the world so that it would be difficult to create this model.

In first world countries like the US, Europe and Japan, $0.25 is practically small change even for a minimum wage earner and is not a big dent on one's income even it they buy 50 songs a month or even more.

Compare this from a viewpoint of someone buying the song in a third-world country. The $0.25 cost is now probably equivalent to an hour's salary for a minimum wage earner, consenquently enabling people there to buy only a few songs.

Now, if the labels will charge for less for songs bought in a third-world country, there currently is no mechanism that will prevent someone from a first world country to buy songs from them if say, they only would charge $0.05 per downloaded song. With credit cards, this is not a big issue since servers can be located in high-bandwidth points.

Re:read the damn article

[mirko]

what about the average income of an average internet connected family?
But anyway I agree with you on one point : this would make the same songs around 40$ each for a 90k$ earning family which nobody wants to spend.

Twenty Sensa-Trac

[Massacrifice]

Twenty Sensa-Trac?

Isn't Sensa-Trac a brand of razor?

Why would Indians base their currency on razors? So they can stay on the cutting edge?

Those crazy Buddhists...

Nobody would pay?

[Dephex Twin]

People keep mentioning that if people can get the music for free, then they are going to do that instead of paying for it. Maybe among the /. crowd this might be true.

Right now, with no structure, pretty much the only way to get MP3s off the Internet is from Kazaa or some other illegal source. So, you don't feel guilty or obliged to pay... this is how everybody does it and it's the only way.

Think about if there was really a well-known structure in place. Everybody knows, this is where you go to get MP3s, and it costs 25/50/whatever cents per track. And think about Joe Average consumer. He would probably use this service without a second thought. The interface would be nice. He could find any song quickly, probably with a 15/30-second sample so he knows he's got the right song. And then he'd get a guaranteed speedy, uninterrupted download, and without those little blips, or a cut off end to the track, etc.

If he could then burn that song to a CD or put it in his MP3 player just like the "free" versions, I honestly think that Joe Average is almost certainly going to do this!

mark

$1 and below/ per song ?

[ltsmash]

I would love to know where people get the idea that record labels would allow songs to be downloaded for $1 and under. I guess people assume that a song is worth the CD ($15) divided by 15 songs. This is not the case at all. Typically music companies expect you to pay for a "favorite" song, maybe a few favorites, while the rest of the CD is songs you don't want. Anyway I don't see how anyone can claim that songs will ever be $1 each in the US. Reminder: How much are record labels charging for singles?

Re:read the damn article

[ShavenYak]

So, the average family income in India is Rs22,050. That's Rs424/week to live on, so downloading 10 songs will use a quarter of their weekly income. Ouch.

Re:Corrected Link

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Malda's busy having his cheeks stuffed full of JonKatz goodness while Neal's busy stroking it in a pile of shit.

It's the same everywhere.

[Anonymous Coward]

No matter how hard I try to convince my wife the RIAA is evil she still buys CDs. However, I've successfully converted her to used shops so they don't get their cut (Yea you Garth Brooks you greedy fuck).

We're not the market they want

[puckhead]

My friends who are geeks or geekish have this in common: they buy a lot of music and they download a lot of music.

My friends who are not geekish have this in common: They do not buy a lot of music because it's expensive and they don't download any music because they think it's a hassle and probably wrong.

The second group has the largest growth potential for the music industry and the artists themselves. If they make downloading cheap and easy they will make mo' money.

I'd do it

[Komodo]

In case anyone from the labels is listening, I'd much rather pay a quarter (even a dollar) a track to get a song I want and not have to pay ten bucks a CD to get one track I want and twelve that I think totally suck. You may think that's making you more money, but I'd really rather just not spend my money than have to pay for music I don't like.

I just recently spent over an hour in a music store, listening to three CD's that had a grand total of three songs I actually liked, and decided not to buy any of them because at twelve bucks a pop, it wasn't worth it to me.

Your business model is flawed. Remember: just because you're old and rich doesn't mean you're entitled to stay that way. Get with the times or you'll be forced into the past.

The Future: One /.er's Vision.

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, here goes.
Ever notice how whenever something like this comes up, you have +5 insightful comments say:

1. Righteous: "Well *I* only buy CD's -- I don't believe in stealing money from the artists who spend their lives creating content for me."
   
2. Self-righteous: "Well *I* never buy CD's -- everything the record industry puts out these days is crap."
   
3. Apologetic: "Well I'd like to pay for music, but 99% of it just goes to the record industry anyway." They might add: "So I'll just download it instead, and save my money for concerts (what artists really make their money off of it), just on the off chance that Bach will come to play in my own little corner of the world."
   

No more!
Your friend, Anonymous J. Coward, is at +5 insightful for rehashing the old idea of micropayments--and how they'll change the world. Wait, I just read the article. Seems they did it already. Nevermind. You can all go home now.

Does Katz write for them?

[ThePlague]

Indiatimes, the online destination of millions of Indian netizens, is now offering its surfers the pleasure of listening to and downloading international chart-busting music from the Internet at a nominal cost.

Are they stuck in 1998?

Paying per track == stupidity

[Snuffleupagus]

How can anyone say that they would pay per track, I mean is ridiculous. This means if you were willing to pay 25 cents a track you would only have to pay $1.25 for Chemical Brothers 'Brothers Gonna Work it Out, but if you wanted to buy White Stripes 'White Blood Cells' I'd have to pay $4.00. The thing is The Chemical Brothers albulm is longer. There is no way music industry could have a flat rate, the price of the track would have to be based on the length of the song.

Re:Paying per track == stupidity

[Luminous]

Since we are talking hypothetical, the cost per track is the core of the discussion. I agree the cost should be variable, based on many different factors. Length shouldn't necessarily be a key factor, though. I don't want bands doing 15 minute intros to their songs to boost price.

Some sample returns

[mblase]

I'd be very interested in statistics on usage, downloads, burn rate, etc. This is going to be a fun one to track.

Search For smash mouth in Artist Names [Search]
No matches found....

Search For madonna in Artist Names [Search]
No matches found....

(Maybe if I search for "All Star" or "Lucky Star" individually....)

Search For star in Song Titles [Search]
25 Results from: Atari Teenage Riot, James Taylor Quartet, Double Vision, Patric Catani...

Clearly the major record labels are giving Soundbuzz.com nowhere near their entire collections of music. At this price, I'm reasonably certain they never will. Nothing to see here, folks.

icrunch

[BobbyK]

Things like this has been around for years now. try www.crunch.co.uk . Problem is 1 £ a song is a bit steep and you won't get chart music (not a problem).

Now if only the US were as smart as india

[HanzoSan]

THIS is the answer, Id gladly pay 20 cents a song
A. if the money goes directly to musicians and only musicians

B. If i have the right to distribute the songs in a non commercial way.

Think of it this way, like software, I want music to be free, not free in price, but in freedom. GNU music, think of it that way.

I'd gladly pay for mp3s if musicians set it up via paypal or whatever 20 cents a song, I swear to everything holy that if it were setup this way, I would have no reason to rip musicians off using napster.

When i use napster like products (Im not saying I actually do but lets pretend I do)
I use it to rip off the record companies, the fake musicians like nsync and britney spears, you know what i mean?

Same reason I dont think most people would pay for photoshop is why most people dont pay for music.

All who agree with me, please comment positive confirmation.

I'm sure theres certain people here who disagree, I'd like your comments to, If you look at my posts from my history, I'm someone who likes to debate about this stuff, and I have an opinion that information should be free, I guess I'm a GNU zealot and im not ashamed to admit it.

Re:Now if only the US were as smart as india

[Anonymous Coward]

A. if the money goes directly to musicians and only musicians

Then where will the money to maintain the system come from?

Some money will have to be diverted to keep the network running, to make a profit for the company offering the service, and at the very least to pay for the effort it would take to keep up a secure system which would ensure the artists get your money.

Had the record industry done this pre-napster...

[Mean_Nishka]

.... they wouldn't be in this mess right now.

Let's face it, the only reason why Napster et. al. came into being was that it was friggin difficult to find mp3 music! Had the record industry been there with every song ever made for .20 a track, they would have probably expanded sales considerably.

Music has never been 'secure.' Whether it's a dual deck casette boom box or a cd burner, people have always copied music. But the industry managed to still sell it when it was reasonably priced. I believe the same would have occured had the industry flat out adopted MP3.

Oh, please

[Brigadoon]

Don't delude yourself. As long as something is free, people won't pay for it. The only correlary is that some people will pay more for convienience. But again, be serious...if you bought more than one or two albums worth of songs each week it would STILL be money you don't have for beer. Free is always cheaper than cheap for most people.

There's more to it than money. If you want to pirate music, you have to go through the work of finding it, making sure it's not some no-name band posing as whoever you're looking for, be sure all the tracks are there and are numbered correctly, not to mention they exist in their entirety and aren't cut off halfway through.

Additionally, if you're like me, you don't want to download some half-assed attempt at a CD-rip - 96-128kbits CBR MP3? Please. I rip all my CDs to OGG at a decently high variable bitrate.

Then there's the fact that few of us really WANT to take away from the artists. The only CD I've purchased in probably a year or two was bought simply because I love the band and want to support them. If we could download track-by-track at a low cost, given high audio integrity, and if we know a good deal of this money was going directly to the band, give me one good reason why people wouldn't use this.

Free may be less expensive than cheap, but there's always the time, effort, and honesty that comes into play. The latter with fewer of us, but it's still a part, nonetheless.

-X

One more thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

I forgot to mention that I would only pay for a plain old mp3 (or ogg). No restricted crap.

Awesome. The cost is effective!

[dasmegabyte]

The other day on cdnow I noticed, whilst perusing the new "arsonists" disc, that I could down some "CD Quality" MP3s. I was quite excited.

Then I noticed that each track would cost me $1.60. Whoa man -- that's more expensive than a can of pringles, and for one song. Ten second skits and intros cost the same. All told, to download the whole album would have cost me 12x$1.60 = 19.2$, for an album that cost $16 to buy and ship.

And their definition of "CD Quality" is 128bit. I'm not sure if you're aware of the arsonists, but they're a hip hop group that relies heavily on vocal texture -- they may have three of four guys rapping behind the main guy, as well as a thick beat and a nice, crisp loop.

Hopping on half.com, I noticed I could buy the disc & ship it for $10. The artists make no money, but I save $9 from the mp3 solution.

Cost effectiveness is the key...i worked out that on my hosting service ($10 per month for 1 gig, www.webslum.net, we love you), a 5 gig MP3 download costs the host $.05. And that's after our service markup! An artist selling that track for $.20 is making a profit of $.15 per download, close to $2 per album.

Re:Awesome. The cost is effective!

[dasmegabyte]

er that's a 5 MEG mp3 download. Remember the preview button, children!

Only if it's a WAV file not bloody MP3

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you.

1) Quality has to be top notch. No lossless compression of any kind, mp3 sound awfull.

2) Exactly, being able to get hold of the record you want or the song. There are lot's of songs which are not release as singles (which btw are way to expensive) which I would buy

Re:read the damn article

[arvindn]

So, the average family income in India is Rs22,050. That's Rs424/week to live on, so downloading 10 songs will use a quarter of their weekly income. Ouch.

Hmm... If you think the math is so simple, you are sadly unaware of some facts of life in India. The point is that the wealth distribution is ridiculously skewed. For instance, my family is "middle class", and the *monthly* income is about Rs 50000, about 30 times your average. Admittedly a small fraction of the population, but keep in mind that this is a country of a billion people.
The "average" family has never used a computer and probably never will.

Price comparison India vs USA

[Tensor]

Let's take an international price for comparison, say Mc Donald's ...

Now in india a Chicken McGrill is Rs 25,similar to the american but with mint sauce (!!!,go figure)

So unless i'm mistaken a Chicken McGrill in the US is around $2.89

So each track is almost 3 DOLLARS (you came really close on your guess btw Burg Advocate :)

Before flaming starts ... i KNOW this is not a perfect but its far better than saying a quarter a track !!!

on another note: i'd rather pay $6 for 2 songs i like than $20 for 2 songs i like and 8 i don't.

Re:Price comparison India vs USA

[larien]

on another note: i'd rather pay $6 for 2 songs i like than $20 for 2 songs i like and 8 i don't.

On a related topic, one of my favourite lines is "a man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs, a woman will pay $1 for a $2 item she doesn't need".

Re:Price comparison India vs USA

[Anonymous Coward]

McDonald's is a nice resteraunt in India, and it's not because it's a poor country. Thats just how the McDonald's corporation has it setup.

Take a look at the menu, keeping in mind that the average income in india is about 21,000 rupee's a year. (21,000 / 365 = 57.53 per day) When was the last time you spent more then a whole days salary on a McChicken with fries and a drink?

Re:Price comparison India vs USA

[Daimaou]

Their menu sucks. Where are all the hamburgers?

Re:Price comparison India vs USA

[Tensor]

Ouch ... that is a comparison that didn't cross my mind.

Of course, as in most countries but the US, McDonald's is a nice resturant because its not meant for the masses, but for a small group, usually in the upper middle class range that wants "american" things.

So its not really aimed for the 21000 rupee a year guy but nevertheless its like us (profesionals, not avereage) paying like $ 140 (50000/365) for a Mc Meal ... it really puts things in a new perspective.

Re:Won't work...

[FunkSoulBrother]

none of that crap you said was decent was decent either -- It just proves you like rock, shitty rock at that, over R+B, or Pop, or whatever.

weblisten.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange nobody mentioned them. They offer LEGAL mp3, available to all the world, a very BIG catalog with almost all well known singers and bands, and with better prices. I.e: all you can download in 12 hours for 1,1$. Worth a look.

Re:read the damn article

[cygnusx]

There is a *lot* of imbalance in Indian development (Pol.Sci and sociology freaks will have a field day here). The figure you quoted -- 22k ... Most urban households will make more than that in a month. In the larger metropolises (Bombay, Delhi) many will easily make 2x that. And even if they are a tiny fraction of India's total population, they are a large number simply because the size of the total population!

Would anybody have a source for that $450 a year figure btw? The CIA Factbook lists India's per capita GDP (PPP) at $2200 (for the year 2000).

When is a computer not a computer ?

[TheFalken]

When it's a equiped with a device 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.

Under the guise of 'preserving America's intellectual capital' and supported by the funding of the entertainment industry cartels, the US is seeking to sustain the entertainment industry's Industrial Age business model (and monopolies) in the modern Information Age - where such models are rendered obsolete by emerging technology. By doing so, the elected puppets of Hollywood will continue earning campaign contributions and ensure their job security.

And, like the lap dogs our government is, we'll get the same law over here (or, at least, people will be extridated without evidence or trial )[1].

It's so obvious that the RIAA are just pissed that they completly missed the whole music download boat. So what do they do ? Bring out their own, cripiled 'download' services that are completly useless compared to (say) Kazaa or Gnucleus. And then, when no one uses their systems, they lobby the govt. to produce a law that is wrong (want to read a book in a library ? Fine, but you can't buy it and then read it at work. And you can only own 5 books at a time.).

What they need to do instead is produce a service that provides high quality, unlimited use (>190bps MP3/Ogg would be good) music tracks of their whole catalog for a small per-track fee (50p ?). I'd pay that. But unless they offer a service better than the free systems they can't control [2], no one will pay.
Common sense, innit ? Someone should tell them.

Land of the free ? Nope.
Home of the brave ? Yup.

[1] Don't be silly. Never happen. Hasn't happened in the post Sept. 11th era at all. Nope. Never. USA good. Must follow. Baaaa.
[2] Napster may be gone, long live really decentralized systems like Gnucleus.

( from my site )

Shareware

[Luminous]

I think shareware isn't a good analogy. The times I've used shareware, I've downloaded it, used it for awhile, and moved on. In the cases it was a program that was really cool and I thought about sending in the 5 bucks, I never bothered to because it meant getting out the checkbook or getting a money order and ... etc. etc. I don't even pay my phone bill on time. Of course this was shareware before the internet, so it may now be easier to send the money. I did it with CoolEdit2000, they made it real easy for me to give them money.

That's really what we are talking about. We are a society that throws money in pools of water for crying out load. Why? Because it is easy to do.

realities of indian market

[Anonymous Coward]

They have to do it because music, and for that matter every Intellectual property is rampantly pirated in India. For a country with per captia GDP of $400(yeah little more than a buck a day!), affording a $20 CD is a dream. So those who have to listen to music, they simply copy liberally and use. The Textbook industry learnt their lessons long time ago. Who can afford a Network Engineering book for $90 in India? So the publishers came out with special South Asian editions of the books, priced at one tenth of the original price, sometimes even cheaper! They are just trying to adjust according to the market realities there.
Similarly, music companies are realizing that music will be pirated in any case and that they adjust themselves accordingly.

Rape and Pillage

[Mulletproof]

Once the Labels get over themselves and realize they simply can't control the digital transmission of music, this is the model that will come into use (hopefully). I mean, really, your music is worthless now. It can be obtained anywhere. And what happens to products that can be obtained anywhere? They fall in price. Except in the recording industry. I figure if you make the service you provide better and easier than piracy, you'll have a lot of people more than willing to do the right thing. Yeah, I can get the latest hit off Bearshare or AG, but there are no assurances as to the quality or the service. How many of you out there normally click on 5-10 sources per download and once you have it, find out it's nothing but the same 30sec. looped over and over? I'd pay money for a fair, reliable, fast and easy to use download service service. Maybe charge an "import tax" if your service doesn't have the song you (effectively "importing" it from your competition). Fact is no free service or even advertisement supported will be able to offer the service you'll get by paying for it. BTW; I don't consider any service that, once quit, removes your access to music you've already downloaded fair. That's pretty damn shitty.

One of these days, i hope the record industry will stop labelling all their customers pirates and get a clue about where music is going. It seems everybody realizes it but them. Am I a pirate? Arrgh! You betcha. But I also bought 3 CDs last week, two of which I already have in MP3 format. And of course that huge dip in sales last year didn't have anything to do with the resession the entire economy faced last year, right? Yar! it be all us pirates! Dumbasses.

http://www.digitalconsumer.org

[volsung]

I figured I'd plug the Consumer Technology Bill of Rights. Read it, think about it, tell your friends about it, email your government representatives about it. That way we can all have a coherent answer when asked what we want from our digital media.

Put your money where your mouth is

[brunes69]

If you want to support downloadable tunes, then go join eMusic. For 5 - 10 bucks / month depending on the plan you choose, you can download unlimited tracks from their website. These aren't crappy proprietary tracks either, they are high bitrate MP3's, no restirctions. And I have checked out their content, they have some really good stuff available. Not just a bunch of unknoqns like MP3.com has, they have stuff from all kinds of people including GooGoo Dolls, Rancid, Bush, Green Day, and many more. These artists all have multiple full albums available for download.

So if you really want to show your support go sign up. Or, if you want to keep whining and leeching free stuff from Gnutella, go ahead. But don't complain when the whole MP3 format becomes outlawed when no one uses it but pirates.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[interstellar_donkey]

Gee. Great.

So to show my support, I'm supposed to pay money to join a website to download mp3s of the same crappy bullshit artists the big record companies are in love with?

Um, no thanks.

I'll stick with the latest file sharing program, find music I like and that's actually good, then go down to the local record store and buy or order the CD.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Contact]

Erm, nope.

Firstly, emusic isn't 5-10 bucks a month, it's 10-15.

Secondly, their range is pretty restricted. For example, their "Rock / Alternative" section lists the grand total of 45 bands - if they're trying to promote new music, why isn't there more available? I may be missing something but when I trialled emusic I basically couldn't find enough to occupy me for a day, let alone the minimum three month subscription (or 12 months if you want to get the lower, 10 dollar a month rate).

Thirdly, their MP3s are hardly high bitrate - everything is as 128 kbits, which might have been classed as high quality a few years ago, but in these days of vbr lame rips sounds decidedly shoddy.

The emusic concept is quite good, but to entice me they'd need around 10-100 times as much content and decent quality mp3s.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[liquidsin]

When I first heard about emusicb(back in december), I went to their site and read through everything. When I discovered that their "high quality mp3s" were 128 kbit, I sent an email. Here's how it went:

I was perusing your website, and I noticed that you only encode your music to 128 Kbps. While I'm sure it's probably an issue of server space, I have found that most people can notice a difference in sound quality at 128 Kbps, and many still notice it at higher rates. I find for myself that 160 or 192 is preferable. The reason I bring this up is that your service looks to be rather impressive and definitely interests me, but I was wondering if you had any future plans to increase the bitrate of your music (maybe even offer higher quality tracks for a "premium" membership fee). Thanks for your time, (my name here)

Here's the response I got:

Hello, Thank you for writing to EMusic. Customer satisfaction is very important at EMusic. Although there are no current plans to change the bitrate, we continually monitor customer's feedback regarding bitrate preference. While increasing our bitrate improves the sound quality of downloads, it also dramatically increases file size and download time. Many of our customers use dial-up connections, which would create issues for them with increased download time. And, unfortunately, offering multiple bit rates would be cost prohibitive to our customers. Regards, EMusic.com Service

So it seems that they have no real plans to increase the quality of their tracks, and I would have to actually be a customer for my feedback to matter to them anyways. When somebody starts to offer better quality at comparable prices, I'll join.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Lumpy]

Ummm no.

128 crappily encoded is not high quality. if you didnt encode with lame using the best quality settings at 160 or higher then you have portable headphone quality.

Hell many of their songs have butchered highs (the cymbols for example) full of mp3 artifacts to the point I get a headache.. and this is a cause of using a really crappy encoder. (Probably Audio Catalyst from 2 years ago)

Oh and you forgot something important.. you are LOCKED into a Contract for 3 or 12 months. with no way out of it.... no thanks.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[raygundan]

I signed up for 3 months at $15/month. Their selection may not be huge, but if you find 4 or 5 albums you like in three months, you come out even. It's been about a month, and I've found about a gigabyte of stuff I enjoy-- It's safe to say I got my money's worth.

It's a very good deal if you like punk (they have Epitaph and Lookout!'s catalogs).

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Fudishiyo]

If you like hardcore metal or punk music, emusic is awesome. Lots of hard to find/older hardcore and metal albums.

Mp3 vending machines

[HanzoSan]

Imagine connecting your mp3 player to a vending likee machine and downloading the song of your choice for 25 cents, it might just work as a business model.

of course record companies are too stupid to change their business model

Who is stopping it happening?

[vohlish_n]

It makes perfect sense for the record companies to allow us to pay 2 GBP per track. I'm sure they would love too have this avenue open. Unfortunately, something appear to be stopping them doing this.

Is it an infrastructure problem? Do they want to hire a bunch of slashdotters to implement it for them? Or are there internal pressures preventing it from happening? I know that if I owned a music-store, I would lobby my suppliers to prevent this from happening. Who is going to shop at HMV for their music, when they can have benefits of instant downloads?

If a customer can download a low quality version first, and then decide to only pay for half the tracks they are definitely going to go this way. Most of the CDs I own are at least 40% filler.

Whatever the reason, someone is scared of this happening. Hopefully these people will either be replaced or made to see sense before digital music rollercoaster loses momentum, and lobbyists get laws passed outlawing the equipment required for playback.

DVD region-encoding. Music CD's are next.

[Ilan Volow]

This is why we have DVD-region encoding, folks-- price-discrimination, "As Seen On Your Economics 101 Exam". You of course know that next logical step is to move music CD's, or rather their DVD audio successors, over to regions too. Of course it will be too bad for all those people who go to India to buy music DVD's they can't buy in the US, since they will not be able to play their Indian music on their North American region 1 boombox when they get back home. "Not to worry," says Jack Valenti. "If you buy a sitar and strum it while playing Britney Spears, you'll swear it sounds like it Indian music."

money

[Jucius Maximus]

It seems that this SoundBuzz site could have higher profit margins, but look what I saw on their site:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e31'

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired

/buylist.asp, line 612

teehee

Probably cheap because of the -labels-

[rob-fu]

While it's not clear exactly who the artists are, I doubt that these are the 'international chart-busting' artists that you would normally think.

These are mostly Indian labels (with a couple of exceptions), and hence, Indian artists.

These artists aren't Britney Spears, NSync, Backstreet Boys, etc. (need I go on?). So it makes sense that this company can get away with charging such a small amount for this service. I would bet that if these were the aforementioned artists, and this service was here in the US, the rates would be much, much more expensive.

By the way, isn't this the same idea as what BMG and Napster had for their subscription service? I.e. you can only download artists on that label for a set rate per month? Sounds very familiar.

Indian music

[MrDingDong]

well the price is right, but then again, have you ever *heard* Indian music? Maybe that's why they're offering it for so little. I doubt that I'd pay a nickel for all that wailing and stuff...

Re:Indian music

[Anonymous Coward]

given the choice between indian music and (most) american music (country. ughh), I know which I'd pick. And, no, I'm not from India.

What a Rupee Buys

[scotpurl]

The minimum wage from different areas of India varies, but is usually stated around 2,000 Rs. per month. In reality, most folks are paid about half that. At 49:1 exchange, that comes to $489 U.S., or in the range of other numbers given here.

Museum admission (for Indians) was 5 Rs. when I was there (50 Rs. for us westerners), and meals at restaurants wound up being 8-25 Rs. per person. So roughly 1 Rs. equals $1 U.S. in what it'll buy.

That comparison breaks down quickly, though. Petrol was 25 Rs./liter when I was there (January, 2000), and electronics and internet access seemed to be a straight ($1 * exchange rate) conversion. The commercially produced cassette tapes of Hindi songs sold for about 60 Rs, for a price comparison.

While 10 Rs. is cheap by American terms, it's pricey by Indian terms. I think the U.S. would settle on $3/track, which would kill the service, intead of $1/track, which would generate revenue and business.

Don't Be Surprised If You Can't Find Brtiney...

[dbretton]

Or N*Sync/Limp Bizkit/etc...

Why? Because in India, most of the most popular music is not US pop music. The most popular music comes from movie soundtracks. No, not the soundtrack The Scopion King, either.
In India, movies are primarily used as a vehicle for promoting new music. Indian movies have a large number of song and dance numbers, and the plot is typically a vehicle used to tie together the diferent numbers (this is why I was really surprised to see an Indian movie up for an Oscar nod...unusual).

So, the most popular music Indians will be searching for will be Indian movie soundtracks. Still, though, this may seem like a move in the right direction, it will ultimately not prove to be worthwhile. Why? Simple. The US Dollar goes a lot further in India, thus 25 cents is not cheap over there. Besides, why pay for music when you can get it for free?
Music piracy in India is EVERYWHERE. It is so bad, in fact, that it is common to be able to download (or buy) the soundtrack for a summer blockbuster movie months before it is even released! So, no one will ante up to this subscription service until all of the piracy has been virtually eliminated.
...and the piracy in India will probably be eliminated right around the same time I open up my Texas Steakhouse in New Delhi.

-D

No, They've got a lot

[xzap]

Checkout www.soundbuzz.com, the partner site,more specifically the Genre links to your right there, they've got everything from Westlife to Alanis Morisette, even the Moulin Rouge soundtrack and almost all the good Indian songs that I want.

The Buddha Smiles!

Posted AC but I actually D/Led sometracks and....

[Anonymous Coward]

pretty bummed, not as nice as it could be. Sure they let you download some songs for free, I did so (on my 'doze box I use just for consumer-ish crap).

OK, so it says click here to download free track, I do so, and get an immediate D/L of a WMA track (NOT MP3!!).

this is important, cuz as I go to open the 3.91MB file, Windoze Media Player is all like "we need to stamp you with a GUID and send it to Microsoft so that you can enjoy the Features and Benifits of this Fine New Thing! (ok Im paraphrasing, but the info is sound).

I figure wth, cuz this box has nothing "private" or personal about it (I use to try out spyware loaded freeware and sites that want cookies and IE etc.) I then wait a minute while MS presumably mucks about deciding im cool to listen.

then the crappy WMP opens up and starts playing this 96KBps bitstream. Im not sure what annoys me more, the fact that it was free yet I had to 'register' (the MS GUID thing), or the fact that I couldn't put it on my PDA if I wanted (crap song, but still, if I wanted to I couldn't) and last but not least it wasn't until I actually was a ble to play the tune that a message popped up saysing "hey aren't you glad we let you download this LOW BIT RATE slice o' wonder?! BTW: (sorta quoted, real close to actual wording:) "Feel free to enjoy this free music download as many times as you like between now and .... gee I have untill... untilll TOMORROW!!! GEE THANKS!

sigh. when will these guys get it? make it easier and more compelling then P2P and I WILL PAY just dont try and sell me what I dont want and expect me to like it. I think one problem that may be is that the Music Industry (TM im sure) doenst see P2P as what it really is: COMPETITION, after all, music guys don't make it, they just DISTRIBUTE it! WAKE UP GUYS YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE TELLING YOU WHAT THEY WANT..

ok so I will go back to work now. Ironicly, as a contract tech worker for Virgin. (hence AC)

have a grand day, and don't listen to to much of the indian music, it may trigger tinnitis or whatever that is.

Yes, what about copy protection?

[WowTIP]

As you said, the industry would probably be very reluctant to sell songs in digital form without any kind of copy protection, which is the reason why you can't download most CDs today. And that raises another interresting question: What rights would you have to make copies of these songs when they are downloaded and paid for? Could you copy the songs to a CD for your stereo, your portable MP3 player and still keep a copy on your computer? Of course this would not stop most people from copying them as they like, but what would really be legal? As far as I can tell the article did not say anything about restrictions.

Re:Yes, what about copy protection?

[timothy_m_smith]

Your points are all good ones. For as irritating as the music industry is right now, I think they have to know that consumers will revolt at some point when digital copyright protection goes too far. Hopefully, our legislators or courts will come to the rescue when "fair use" of music is put in jeopardy and we cannot move music between our personal computers, cars, and portable music players.

You're not quite correct

[Smack]

The price is $10-$15 a month, depending on whether you want a 3 or 12 months commitment.

And I don't think 128 kbps is "high bitrate".

But if you like punk, they have the whole Epitaph catalog which is quite a lot of good stuff. I've probably downloaded 35 albums in my 2 months. Sure, some of it is crap, but it costs nothing extra to try new stuff.

Please explain this to me...

[V_drive]

From article:
Sanders contended it would be too expensive for companies like AMD to "create products for multiple, inconsistent versions of Windows."

who creates a cpu for a specific version of an os? sounds a bit like a construction company worring about troubles of making houses around "multiple, inconsistent versions of furnature."

let's take a closer look. does this prove that microsoft has, in the past, dictated specific x86 features? it must if amd now complains that multiple versions of windows will be a hardship for them in this way. it shouldn't be a hardship for amd because they should just be able to build the chip and release the instruction set. it's only a hardship if the court order for microsoft will make them turn around and make impossible demands on amd. right? is there any other conclusion?

why I won't buy mp3s

[charstar]

why would I want to buy and download a 128kb/s MP3? the quality would be horrible? who would dictate what bitrate they sell the file at?

I still prefer to buy my CDs and encode them myself. That way -I- get to control how big my files are and how good they sound.

Its just so obvious....

[ainsoph]

Wow, what a smart idea.

Why couldn't our companies figure this one out? Why, because it's so much easier to demonize internet users and those (in their eyes) pathetic teenagers that download movies/mp3's/warez. Saying these activities are costing them more and more each year, while out of the other corner of their mouths claiming they have made more money then ever before.

Yeah then freedom/innovation limiting legislation.

Land of the free!!

RA!

track for a .25

[Anonymous Coward]

20cents track. Well they also sell CD's for 1/2 the price the charge in the US because they know most dont have 15-$20 of extra money to pay for CD's. SO are you willing to pay 50c track? ?

Re:track for a .25

[Oswald]

Yes. $.50 per track to ensure I actually like the music I buy, and can time/space shift it to my heart's content is perfectly reasonable. Many people agree and wonder what the fuck is the delay. In the absence of such a reasonable system, we steal.

ikonoklast baby - conform to noncomformism

[entheon]

I hope that these little gems of logic are impecably valid though anyone is very free to debate the truth of them as even I can see problems with them. The problem with any valid syllogism is that it must stem from some sort of inductive reasoning which is in essence a generalization based on consistent observations so the truths may not hold all the time. I hope that most of you will be able to agree with most of what I present.

consider these syllogisms:

all organizations trying to make a profit are commercial organizations
a pay-per-play website is an organization trying to make a profit
a pay-per-play website is a commercial organization


a method of increasing profits is selling more product
an interest of a commercial organization is a method of increasing profits
an interest of a commercial organization is selling more product


products that sell more units than other products are more popular than other products
this product is a product that sells more units than another product
this product is more popular than another product


going from the previous syllogisms:
a product that is more popular than another product is an interest of a commercial organization
this product is a product that is more popular than another product
this product is an interest of a commercial organization


I skipped some logical steps to get straight to my point and not bore you entirely to death with syllogism bs. The point is that a pay per play website will be interested in selling the products that are more popular because they will sell more and generate more revenue. These sites will not be interested in those singles that are not popular. Singles themselves are not interested in the other songs on the album that are not popular.

There are far more bands in this world than those on the top 40, and many of the bands who are not on the top 40 are far better musicians than some of those on the top 40. The reason for this? As I just pointed out, commercialism. It doesn't matter if you can play Chopin nocturnes at the speed of light, if people don't enjoy listening to you or the nocturnes they will not be interested, will not listen, and will not buy. Simple as that.

As the advent of the boy-bands and the sexy-girl-singer groups has hit us here in these recent years I don't know how anyone could miss this glaring difference. There is nothing new in this business of mp3 selling, it's a different format, that's all. And slightly harder to enforce or police because of the nature of it's distribution medium the internet. When audio cassette tapes came out the record companys threw a hissy fit claiming that all intellecual property rights such as artists rights or artists income but namely those of the companys to make a buck, would fly out the window. Has that happened? Hardly. There are tons of other formats that I could use to copy and distribute my music. Cassette, ADAT, mini disc, CD-RW, any of the other compression formats out there, lossy or not, mp3, wav, aif, shn. Most people realize this too but have they stopped buying CD's? Nope.

If you care about being a rock star or you care about milking the recording industry for all the pennys you can squeeze, then by all means jump on the band wagon, start getting hysterical and wave a large trout about your head, maybe even smack someone with it to get attention. Otherwise, if you really care about music, and enjoying music, do it yourself. Make it yourself, buy it yourself, get it yourself, from friends, from family, with friends with family, from the internet, from the radio. There are ways of doing anything both with and without corporate involvement. This article is simply pointing out the rise of another, possibly large and profitable, commercial bandwagon on which to ride. The real musician and the real audiophile listen not only to the music advertised to them but to the music they want to listen to, the music they only sort of like, the music they have heard, the music they have heard of, the music they haven't heard, they listen to the music that pushes boundaries and rides on the edge of being just a little too out there for most, hell even for themselves. Well roundedness is the key for anything, and that goes for music too. Even now the currently availble tools for dowloading music such as p2p nets like gnutella still leave much for me to desire primarily because of my ecclectic taste in music. Much of what I enjoy can only be found on vinyl these days, or even more "shocking", only in concert. So do what you want, pay if you want, don't if you don't want it's a matter of personal choice, and I say if you choose to hop the bandwagon, or give it money for gas, great, but I'm not gonna.

Who will REALLY benefit from this

[agslashdot]

The Indian-American community has a sizeable population, particularly in San Jose & silicon valley, central New Jersey, parts of NY, etc. They live on a staple diet of Indian music & movies. They can definitely afford to pay Rs10 per track. I'm sure they'd plunk down $100 in an instant if you put up golden oldies in Hindi or other Indian languages. These are quite hard to find outside India, and EMI & BMG have the copyrights & do not market them well in the US. I doubt if an Indian living in India will bother, though ( unless he is an upper middle class bloke with a white-collar job in a multi-national corp ) The rest get to listen to tons of cool stuff on the radio & buy inexpensive audio cassettes, which are really the mainstay there.

Ok, but what's the solution?

[Backov]

Yes, it's massively illegal. But what do you do about it when a VERY large percentage of the people that those laws serve (believe it or not, copyright law is there to serve the people, NOT the record companies) decide they're not going to abide by them anymore?

Do you pass redundant laws? Do you try to erect technical measures to stop the people? Do you start building prisons and arresting people?

No. You change the damn laws, as the people have spoken.

At least that's how it is SUPPOSED to work. Think prohibition.

Cheers,
Backov

Re:Ok, but what's the solution?

[Erasmus Darwin]

"But what do you do about it when a VERY large percentage of the people that those laws serve (believe it or not, copyright law is there to serve the people, NOT the record companies) decide they're not going to abide by them anymore?"

The problem here is that those people're being short-sighted, as the works that they want to copy exist primarily because of the copyright laws. While the government exists to serve the people, it has to look beyond the individualistic actions of even a large group of people.

For example, it'd be safe to say that most Americans don't want nearby nuclear reactors. At the same time, most Americans do want cheap power. Similarly, most Americans don't want pieces of their property condemned for building roads. At the same time, most Americans want to be able to travel from place to place with minimal amounts of traffic.

In this case, most Americans want to be able to share music with the friends at no cost. At the same time, they want the music made possible by copyright to exist (otherwise they wouldn't be able to share it).

Re:Ok, but what's the solution?

[kableh]

Yes, it's massively illegal. But what do you do about it when a VERY large percentage of the people that those laws serve (believe it or not, copyright law is there to serve the people, NOT the record companies) decide they're not going to abide by them anymore?

We didnt just up and decide to NOT honor copyright laws anymore. A technology came along that caught the music industry offguard, and apparently there are more lawyers than anything else in the entertainment industry, so they got their little law passed. At the expense of the consumer of course. VHS does little to prevent copying, besides using a technology that degrades the quality for EVERYONE (kind of like this lame CD access control stuff), but the movie industry is booming.

For a (fairly) liberal person, I tend to believe in letting the free market decide. Sure, I could rent a DVD, convert it to a VCD, and watch it to my hearts content on my DVD player. But the cost of DVDs is quite reasonable in my eyes, and I would just as soon pay 20 bucks for high quality video/sound and a nice case. The same could be said of the music industry, a couple years ago perhaps. Now they've pissed their customers off, and we all want them to die the long overdue death that's coming.

At least that's how it is SUPPOSED to work. Think prohibition.

Right, because we all know that was great success. Just like the War on Drugs®.

Re:Ok, but what's the solution?

[Backov]

Just from your comments, I'm not sure if you got my meaning. The reason I commented on prohibition was because it DIDN'T work. It was finally repealed after the public ignored it for long enough.

I also agree that the record companies needs to pull their heads out and get with it. I don't often download music because of poor rip quality, but I sure as hell would for a minor fee if the quality and availability was guaranteed.

I'm all for the free market deciding, don't get me wrong! I'd love it if they decided to actually play this like a business.

Cheers,
Backov

somebody doesn't want to change

[SB5]

So to sum up the argument, all the RIAA is trying to do is maintain their job security they have built up over the years, and not change a thing that they are used to working with on a daily basis. So in simple words, the RIAA doesn't want to change to the way the public wants them to, so what do they do up the price of cd's via pricefixing, and sue anyone and everyone they can. I hate to be a bit cliche, but it seems to me that the RIAA is being a bit terroristic.

-sb5
I have nothing of real value to say.

Re:First Post?

[First Post Counter]

Congradulations, AC! Your first post has been officialy recognized as the true First Post

Current Statistics:

Logged in FPs: 5
AC FPs: 3

First Posters:

1 - morhoj
1 - Spanko
1 - teambpsi
1 - Tensor
1 - xnok

$450 average links

[Britissippi]

Sure, here's some links:
The BBC

Worldbank (Seems slightly out of date)

The Globalist

FHS Sponsorship

The average I supposed is really gained depending on how it is worked out (Mean, Median or Modal average perhaps?). From what I understand, many of the tribespeople in India earn at or around $7 a year, while others (as kindly pointed out by another poster who is from India, and I'd trust his word over mine :) ) earn far, far more.

IANA Economist, however.

Microsoft has instituted it's own copy ...

[mflorell]

protection on this site. I tried to search(soundbuzz.com) for a song and got:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e14' [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Cannot sort a row of size 8469, which is greater than the allowable maximum of 8094. /buylist.asp, line 612

Guess they need to test the site, huh

What happened when i tried to buy a song....

[President Chimp Toe]

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e14'

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Cannot sort a row of size 8469, which is greater than the allowable maximum of 8094.

/buyli st.asp, line 612

Oh well.... back to Direct Connect and WinMX. I really did want to pay...

A comparison of earning vs. spending for India

[The-Dork]

Lets first take into consideration who is being targetted. It is someone who lives in urban areas, has a computer & internet connection. You cannot take into consideration the whole population of India because you have to take into account the reach of the internet, and doing so would also falsely skew the average salary.

1. The average salary for these 'urbaners' is about Rs.10,000.
2. A CD costs about Rs.250 with about 10-15 songs. Hence, an average of Rs. 25 per song.
3. As the article mentions, you might only want some of these songs, say 8. Hence, 8 * 25 = Rs.200

Now Rs. 10 per song is definitely a steal by any standards!

Not to mention getting rid of those unwanted songs :)

Re:read the damn article

[ShavenYak]

Well, no, obviously nothing in the real world is that simple. You are right, that is a wild wealth distribution - in the US, a "middle class" family probably makes double the median income or ~$40k. Thiry times that would be considered "rich" by almost anyone's definition. And the low end of the scale there stretches out differently also, with far more people in abject poverty.

The "average" family has never used a computer and probably never will.

Obviously not. Which, I think, is sort of the point of the original post in this thread - this is not a service for 'everybody' in India. Only the middle class and above can reasonably afford it, even though on paper it seems incredibly cheap by western standards. I'd expect anything sanctioned by the RIAA in the US to end up priced in the same relative ballpark - $3/song or so.

"the bigs"

[Ogerman]

I still believe that if the bigs let us download MP3s for a quarter a track, we'd do it.

If we could pay a quarter per track and download unencrypted, high-bitrate (or lossless) compressed audio, we wouldn't need "the bigs" now would we? I would gladly pay that much per track as long as the money ALL went to the artist(s)--the only ones who deserve it.

Duh! Ppl The Indian Internet is the same

[ghoul]

Hilarious!!

I have been seeing a lot of posts saying that when will this come to USA etc etc. Did ppl forget if its on the net its on the net? U just have to enter www.indiatimes.com and u r there. No need for a mirror site except for maybe improving download speeds. Speeds in India suck.
And u can flame me all u want at p_ghosh@indiatimes.com

Re:Duh! Ppl The Indian Internet is the same

[Anonymous Coward]

DMCA, DRM, Region Code: some buzzwords to kickstart your brain.

Re:Duh! Ppl The Indian Internet is the same

[Anonymous Coward]

(-1, doesn't know how to type)

I just tested the site and here is my beef with it

[Vspirit]

WMA is a necessity!
I have to create an account(an deposit money)? to purchase?
I am not going to get a ogg ot mp3 file?

Had these circumstances been different, I would have purchased several numbers I never heard of before already. I tried.

It all falls apart

[Mulletproof]

I think it's a mixture of short sightedness and greed, honestly. They are making too much money charging $15US for a disk, even though you may like only one or two songs on it. They can't see that they can no longer control what they publish since it's no longer easily confined to a physical medium. I personally think they're still grasping for control when it has already left them in the dust. Too much damage control/scortched earth policy and not enough proactive innovation. And all this idiotic thinking will eventially catch up to them since the net is only growing more apart of everybodies life everyday... Alas...

Telephone charges

[ghoul]

A computer costs at a minimum Rs 20000. So if u have a comp to download with and an internet connection (which is like Rs 2 an hour for Dialup)
u can download it. What everyone is ignoring is the speeds. Most Indians have Dialup so to download music would cost more in Telco charges than it is worth.(Yes telcos charge by the minute for internet access in India)

Re:Telephone charges

[sisukapalli1]

>

Many places burn the MP3s onto a CD and give the CD, so a retail store can have a partnership with the music houses and can give "custom CDs" for a small extra charge.

S

Re:Telephone charges

[ghoul]

I wasnt referring to what happens at a lot of places. Everyone knows a lot of piracy takes place. I was referring to the viability of this service. This is pretty ridiculous if u r going to use dialup but maybe Indiatimes is putting the service in place for the day most Indians shift to broadband

Earth to Labels.. Come in, labels...

[Mulletproof]

ANd there you go. Supply and demand. The supply for music is now infinite and easily obtainable and like every other good or service that's plentiful and easy to get, costs far less. One of these days the record industry will recognize basic economics and find other ways to make their money.. Like India. It's no longer off physical media, but the service they provide (ie; cheap, reliable downloads).

No big names available

[LazLong]

I admit I only spent about 10 minutes browsing the web site, but I wasn't able to find any big name artists (by U.S. standards) that had tracks available for download. There was a link titled "... to buy or play tracks click here," to the right of advertised albums from such artists as Goo Goo Dolls, Sting, Ricky Martin, U2, Alanis Morrisette, but they all resulted in only being able to play a sample of tracks, not purchase the tracks as .mp3's.

What's up with this bogosity?

WMP

[WiseWeasel]

It's Windows Media Player format, with a really crappy selection of music . . . the other guy's right, nothing to see here . . . as long as they try to distribute in closed formats, they will fail time and time again. The only choice for them is to embrace the internet and release all their music in MP3 format for pay. I know I will never pay for a WMA track.

Bah, get informed man.

[entheon]

uhh... no... just don't listen to it loud, tinnitis is caused by - among other things - exposure to overly loud sounds, symptoms of which include a ringing noise in the ear which can in serious cases be heard by others near your ears. our ears hear in selective ranges of sound, and listening to something loud can damage parts of your ear responsible for "hearing" the various frequency ranges. For most people the high frequencies go first because it takes more precision to hear them, hence why bass is often the only thing you can hear when the neighbors start pumping the gansta rap downstairs. Listening to something at about 90 dB for an hour or so can give you or start to give you tinnitis. It's not the music, it's the volume. And the louder you listen the faster you loose it. A good resource for info on hearing and damage due to sound levels check out some Common Misconceptions About Hearing at Digital Recordings. There are other factors than just sound levels that can cause tinnitis. For a more in depth discussion of the syndrome itself check out the tinnitis FAQ .

A Nessisary link.

[Mulletproof]

Who'd ensure you'd get a decent download speed? Quality files? Good user software? Not dissing your comment, just curious as to who is going to provide all the support for this stuff, because somebody will have to. We've already seen what a "free" service can do... Napster was my high watermark and it's gone downhill since. Somebody, whether distributing physical media or files is going to have to assume the role of "the bigs", if not the current bigs.

Re:Paying per track - Auctions?

[Kwil]

Weird idea, but what about a blind auction system?

Set minimum bids (5c? 10c?), and a maximum number of downloads per time period (day? 12hrs?). Auction is held and the top bidders in that period up to the maximum downloads get the song at what they bid.

Yeah it's using artificial scarcity to increase value, but with a reasonable time period I'm not sure people would mind. It also makes it very obvious to the record companies what kind of stuff is selling well. Naturally quality and speed of download would have to be top-notch.

Put your money up your... Well, yeah.

[Mulletproof]

"But don't complain when the whole MP3 format becomes outlawed when no one uses it but pirates."

That is assnine. It'd be like prosecuting the car in a drunk driving accident. Since when do you outlaw the vehical when it's user commits a crime? Countless numbers of Fords have been used in an equally countless number of crimes, therefore we should ban all Fords, right? yet this it the kind of logic groups like the RIAA are using against us...

Thanks, i'll keep being a pirate-"Yarr!"-until the labels look for a win-win situation and stop gouging their customers, the pirates.

too little..

[Suppafly]

.. too late.. we already know now that music can be free.. although $.20 a song isnt too bad.. that would make a CD cost about $3 like we all know it should..

Just Cause

[Mulletproof]

Concise and to the point. "Yar-har-har, me Maties!"

Show me the Money!

[dreadlord76]

Your arguments regarding willing to pay for a perfect digital quality makes ZERO sense. All someone has to do is to look for "LEGIT, PAID A QUARTER FOR" version of songs to download to get around the quality issue. And if everything is available, then someone would have paid a quarter for it, and made it available on PtoP. Come on, you people are smart enough to think 1 more step. Joe pays a quarter for his song. Joe makes that song available for download. Everybody gets free song at perfect, digital quality. End of revenue stream. Artists make exactly 0.25 penny for their work, site makes 4.75 cents and goes bankrupt when their funding runs out. The credit card companies are happy with their 20 cents, too bad there aren't much more of that money flowing in. When shareware first hit the scene, it was great. Everyone got good software for free. So few people paid, and we get Cripple ware.

Already downloaded?

[sean23007]

I still believe that if the bigs let us download MP3s for a quarter a track, we'd do it.

Do you think they'd let you buy, for a quarter each, every song that you might have downloaded illegally? I know that for a lot of people the rigor of redownloading all their songs would just not be worth it, especially since they would have had to pay to do it. Perhaps they could just charge a little more to "validate" mp3 files that had been previously downloaded.

Re:Pay For Play? Computer games?

[grahamsz]

I think computer games are a reasonable analogy since they are *reasonably* priced (at least in the US).

Here if I really want a game, i'll go out and buy it. I'm perfectly capable of leeching it from gnutella or trading it on irc, but for me (and i'm not on any huge salary) the convenience outweighs the cost. Now if i could legally download iso's of that game from a blisteringly fast site then i'd do that in place of buying it in a store.

Also once i've bought a game i'll sometimes make a couple of copies so i can play multiplayer with my housemates - and I feel that this sort of piracy doesn't hurt the publishers since it's unlikely we'd all feel strongly enough about the same game to buy 3 copies in the first place.

Music is the same - given the speed of cable connections, i could have an album in under 10 minutes. Sure i'll stick that straight up on a samba share to share with my housemates but again - does that really hurt?!

As with video games there will always be an underground group of traders, but for the mass of the music buying public a cheap fast reliable unrestricted service would be better an a free slow unreliable one. Just look at how many people in the US still use free isps like netzero - there are a few but most people would rather pay the small amount for decent access!

He's so right.

[Mulletproof]

Nothing like cutting to the heart of the matter. And it's the absolute awful and hideous truth the labels don't want to face.

Your product costs me nothing to get now. Why should I continue doing business with you? Your good looks? Decent business practices (chuckle)? Because it's legal? Nah. I like music, but like the terrorism, you can only put up with so much crap before you don't care.

The guy above me is right about their mentality and a global market. Why are DVDs zoned? Just to deprive you of your favorite foriegn movie? It's all about the moneys and control. All that control goes poof once your media goes digital and so does your ability to make the optimum amount of money based on the country your selling in. Hell, this battle over music is just the rumblings of the storm. Just wait until you can get high speed par excellent quality movies for next to nothing (you can now, with sacrifice in speed or quality most of the time). And you said the future wasn't going to be exciting...

20 cents a track? For what?

[fataugie]

Some twanging on a Sitar from Ravie Shankar? No thanks...I'd rather start my truck and listen to the crankshaft slowly eating a bearing.

Fraunhofer sux; use LAME

[yerricde]

I would think that a legitimate service would provide high-quality encodings (perhaps using the Fraunhofer codec),

For 192 kbps class MP3 encoding lame --r3mix produces the best results. It even beats Fraunhofer's own encoder. Go to r3mix.net and click "quality" and "analysis" for the lowdown.

Did I insinuate something?

[Big Sean O]

I really like the Heinlein quote. I think he hit the nail on the head. I'm sorry if I made it unclear if I liked the quote or not.

The internet has been 'popular' for about 10 years, and it takes about 10 years for a new technology to come into it's own (as people adapt their thinking to the possibilities of the technology). My parents both remember early television, and the difference between TV in 1948 and TV in 1958 was tremendous. Another example is the rise of the Personal Computer in the 80s. Those who could adapt quickly benefitted (Microsoft), even over those who had better technology but didn't know what they had (Xerox).

When new ideas shake up a society, people (and corporations) become discombobulated [sp?]. That's where you want to be: it's more fun, there are more challenges, and there is more opportunity. It might be tough, but it certainly aint boring...

Anyhow, I think I'll close with another quote:

Problems worthy of attack,
Prove themselves by hitting back -- Piet Hein

Re:Did I insinuate something?

[SB5]

Yeah, I guess I just fell for somehow fell into my own mind's trap. There are those that are vehement against Heinlein, those that don't mind him, and a bunch of other different ways people interpret the "scifi pulp" writer that he was. I personally do like his writings, mainly because of the instances he hits the nail on the head. Sorry, I guess I may have been provoked by reading something else and end up looking like a troll. Go figure :)

When you said, paraphrased because my lazy ass doesn't want to look in the comment, "Robert Heinlein, I didn't know you were still alive!" or something to that effect, just from my point of view it seemed derogatory.

Another great person to grab quotes from, Sun Tzu. I talked to a friend of mine yesterday, and we discussed how the internet is going to be driving force behind a lot of things, since now people can network better, and form circles and groups of similar intrests. Basically the internet supports diversity, and freethought. So hopefully in the next 100 years we will see some drastic good changes that wouldn't have happened with the internet, or at least not at the same speed. Magazines, Newspapers and what not came out before the internet, but the internet has the speed advantage.

-sb5

Contemplate that

[technos]

Say a full CD sold there, with all the liner notes and case costs 300 rupees in a store.

That's $6 US.

The cost of pressing a CD is going to be pretty much static (they're already manufactured wherever it's cheapest to do so) at $2.50 US.

Now ask yourself why they charge the US a $16 markup on the music and charge only $3.50 in India.

Re:Contemplate that

[yawble]

$16 plane ticket as opposed to a $3.50 bus pass mebbe?

You're confusing "free" with "stolen"

[YourGarbageMan]

Plenty of people would be willing to pay to download legitimate copies of music. You're argument is predicated on the belief that everyone is essentially a thief at heart. Whereas I believe that most people are basically honest, and they pirate music because of the absense of legitimate and reasonable alternatives. The key word there being "reasonable".

Music for $0 in KaZaA

[t_allardyce]

KaZaA have started a service where you can download tracks for $0 a go. Gnutella is doing the same thing!

In other news, a small Texas start-up is about to begin selling spam. Yes, for 35 cents a pop, you can get any spam email sent anywhere you want!

Pretty clean smoke.

[Penguinoflight]

I'd pay $.25 per track if I got good transfer rates, the kind of songs I wanted and guarenteed connections. I'm sick of Kazza/Gnutella, you never know if you can get anything.

but I don't have cable, I'm just a download freak.

Re:In related news

[Anonymous Coward]

Note: Atleast is two words.

It should be spelled "at least."

Also, remember to capitalize. :-P

hm this is all good but

[theCURE]

stealing is too easy. Their solution to the piracy is to make things affordable instead of trying to deter it by punishment. If they weren't buying the cd's, why would they buy the song, no book, no case, and no hard copy?