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.

Comments

And they say that MusicNet is secure

[Anonymous Coward]

how NOT true. You can record the music which they offer there WITHOUT even hacking anything in windows..

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 /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...

Now the fun parts begins - with your new program, start recording whatever comes out of /dev/dsp and press the "play" button on the MusicNet player. When the music ends - stop your /dev/dsp grabber.

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..