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Musicnet Fails to Impress Customers
mcwop writes "A Wall Street Journal story carried on MSNBC chronicles MusicNet's failure as a service before it even gets started. The story contains some funny quotes such as: 'The first offering was too clunky and too consumer unfriendly to hold much hope for its success, says Richard Parsons, AOL Time Warner's incoming chief executive. So we are going to go back, and we will come out with a 2.0 product which will be more consumer friendly, easy to use. ... This is a business of trial and error.' Any consumer could have informed the music titans that their business plan was flawed. Unfortunately, version 2.0 won't be any better unless the music industry is willing to take some risks. One of the more interesting aspects to the story is how the major music companies could hardly be present in the same room for fear that antitrust laws may be broken." A good business-oriented review of Musicnet's operations. With the artists making a quarter-cent per downloaded song, they're probably just as happy to see it fail.
its a quarter of a CENT .. not a quarter (like they deserve)
.. isn't it.
4 dls = ~$0.01
8 dls = ~$0.02
1,000,000 dls = ~$2,500.00
sad
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
The real problem here is that record companies are more than just distribution chains. They're also advertising agencies. They're good at making folks want to buy the stuff they're selling (and at going the other way: making what they're selling what folks want to buy...cf Nirvana).
It's the advertising element that makes artists famous. That's also a part of why they sign up. (No fame == no sales. No sales == no money. Plenty of folks are presently distributing music for free online....but you never hear about them since they don't have the advertising budget of the major labels.
Personally, I'd love to see a label split into two parts: a distribution channel and an advertising agency. But it'll never happen. The distribution chain only works because the advertising makes the demand. If there wasn't the advertising-created demand, the distribution chains would be worthless.
The recording industry tells the radio stations what songs to play. They make their own stars, and use the radio to advertise them. They know exactly how well their "artists" are doing, since they decided it in advance. You are correct though in that the radio stations do pay for the privelege of advertising for the RIAA.
Murphy was an optimist.
Then you should check out emusic.com. The trial is free.
.rmp song list downloading files and mention linux specifically as being able to use the "one click album downloading" via FreeAmp. I use Tafkar on my Mac.
1.)$10/month for a year subscription. $15/month for 3 month subscription.
2.)All-you-can-download, one click album downloads.
3.)MP3 format.
4.)You own it.
5.)Artists get paid.
6.)Tons of great bands you have and haven't heard of.
The only downside is that the bitrate is a bit low (128). But for my $10 I've gotten about 15-20 albums this month. All nicely organized and ID3 tagged, downloaded in one click. They use
I know I've posted about this a lot, but it seems to address many of the issues that slashdotters have with Musicnet and the new Napster.
This is the best money I've ever spent on music.
Even though I've never heard of many of the artists, emusic's "Picks" tend to be pretty damn good. And if they aren't I just delete them.
--wundabread
P.S. Check out all of Mogwai's stuff, Taking Back Sunday's album "Tell All Your Friends", Firewater's album "Psycoparmacolgy", and Ursula 1000's track "Beat Box Cha-Cha" track.
None of which I had ever heard, nor likely ever would have heard without my subscription.
how NOT true. You can record the music which they offer there WITHOUT even hacking anything in windows..
/dev/dsp. You can use KDE's aRTs or ESD, and play with it, but remember - both VMWare and win4lin (not sure about win4lin) run as setuid root, which means you'll need to run ESD or aRTs as root...
/dev/dsp and press the "play" button on the MusicNet player. When the music ends - stop your /dev/dsp grabber.
Here are few steps which you can do (if you have some linux programming skills, a VMWare [any version] or Win4Lin..)
Instructions are pretty easy - and I'll put it as generic as possible (who knows who reads this...)
You start VMWare with windows as a guest (or win4lin with your windows) and install the client and subscribe to musicNet. Now you're installing their client and making sure that everything works, and that you can hear your music well (with VMWare you might need to play a bit with "renice" command)..
Now - the Linux part. You'll need to write/steal/beg-someone-to write a small wrapper program which simply "records" whats going into
Now the fun parts begins - with your new program, start recording whatever comes out of
Now you have a big WAV file. You can use a simple editor to cut some empty sound seconds, and viola! you got a WAV file ready to be converted into mp3/ogg/wma/whatever - which you can now trade, put in your player, etc...
Enjoy..
You going to shows means more to an artist financially than album sales. This applies at every level; the Rolling Stones and I both have to tour to break even.
I run a small label with decent sales, international distribution, and a solid fan base. Costs are kept low, and our profile is relatively high, but we still lose money on every release. The only way to recoup is to go out and play live regularly for a year or so after each release.
On tour you sell discs direct, get a $ guarantee and a cut of the door receipts (usually). We make about $.80 on a CD sold in a store, and about $2.50 on one sold at a show.
I love it when people download our tracks, but I won't ever make a living off that. Going to shows is the best way to support your favorite artists. Labels bankroll tours as a sop to artists; the Dixie Chicks are free to pocket as much as they can selling schwag on the road (as long as they service their label debt in the process). And if you've downloaded tracks and want to buy a release, do it at the gig whenever possible. That's paying the artist, and not the VP of A&R.
Now, I work in the music industry, and I can assure you that a viable internet-based distribution model is pretty far off.
Two short reasons why:
1) Cost and Exposure. For all the carping that goes on about how labels pocket about $15 of a $17 sticker price on new cd's, it's not true. Once you take out mechanical royalties, publishing fees, licensing fees, distribution fees, songwriter percentages, producer percentages, miscellaneous finders fees, manufacturing costs (which typically run between $1.50 and $3 per unit depending on configuration), there just isn't that much money left over for labels to play with.
Don't get me wrong, a million-seller still rakes in the cash, but it's not like we're Saudi oil magnates.
Also, please remember that less than 10% of all releases sell more than 10,000 copies. When it costs tens of thousands of dollars to market an album, get it in stores, get a profile, that is usually a dismal failure. And now my point... labels, generally speaking, profit on one out of ten releases or so. That's a pretty poor margin.
Rather than drive labels to try to find more efficient ways to get music into people's hands (and money into artists' and our pockets), it makes them more conservative with their money, and ties them to traditional distribution channels.
2) Most/many labels are still run by boards of directors who don't know ANYTHING about music at all. They are interested in the health of the quarterly balance sheet, and are reluctant for their company to be the first one over the cliff into new, unproven business models. Also, remember, many of the major players in the music business- the rich guys, the guys with the cash to make digital distribution happen-- made their bones in the 1950's and 1960's. Even rich younger guys (...ermm...David Geffen??... Strauss Zelnick?...) learned at the feet of the codgers and adopted their ways.
Don't forget... if a label head tries some crazy new digital distribution scheme, and it goes horribly wrong, it's his or her butt on the line.
Dn't look for a really good digital distribution model from within the music industry any time soon.
And remember... all labels are not evil, and music is everything.
Why would anyone pay for 128kbps? You'd be better off going to a used music store and buying cassette tapes.. It'd be cheap, and probably about the same sound quality.
128kbps. Pfft. I won't even keep FREE 128kbps tracks.
Cheers,
Backov
In the law there is no overlap between theft and copyright infringement whatsoever.