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

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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?

[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!

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!

[diesel_jackass]

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

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.

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.

.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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[aliebrah]

I think this post just requires a one word answer:

Duh!

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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

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...

[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.

--

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :-)

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.

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.

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.

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

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: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

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: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.

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!

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?

[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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!"

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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!

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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."

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

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 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.

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!

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.

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...

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.

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: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.

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..

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!

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: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®.

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?