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

"Quarter cent per song"

[delta407]

There's an article entitled "Courtney Love does the math" that talks about why Napster isn't the problem; rather, the record companies are screwing the artists. (Worth a read.)

This applies to the above "quarter cent per song" -- which may actually be more than what they get making CDs.

Re:"Quarter cent per song"

[Rogerborg]

• There's an article entitled "Courtney Love does the math" that talks about why Napster isn't the problem

The big eye opener for me is this line: "It's not piracy when kids swap music over the Internet using Napster or Gnutella or Freenet or iMesh or beaming their CDs into a My.MP3.com or MyPlay.com music locker. It's piracy when those guys that run those companies make side deals with the cartel lawyers and label heads so that they can be "the labels' friend," and not the artists'."

Napster, uh, yeah, I remember them. The guys who tried to move up to the Big League with the labels, right? Didn't they used to run a P2P service? ;-)

That's not to say she's completely getting it though. She's a bit confused about the ability of (e.g.) Gnutella to control the content that's being shared; girlie, there's no point exhorting a bunch of P2P developers to work with you. My god, Limewire (the most professional gnutella client development team that I know of) has six code monkeys and a web guy working on it. How can they negotiate deals with tens of thousands of artists? And that's just one solitary client running the gnutella protocol.

And the horrible thing is, Courtney is still stuck in litigation with Universal. See Hole's web site for the latest news. And notice that despite good intentions, Courtney is still not offering us what we want. You can download 60-some 128 bit MP3's right off the site (all live recordings rather than studio recordings, because lest we forget, the studio owns all rights to the music, and Courtney only owns limited rights to her performances of it), and you can click on a link to buy albums from CDNOW or Amazon. But you can't pay money for the MP3's, or pay for better quality ones. It's frustrating when even the champions of the e-distribution campaign don't give us the chance to show how lucrative sales of uncrippled, high quality, correctly labelled, untruncated, non-radio edit mp3's could be - if they were only given a chance.

Gimme a break...

[Danse]

Early last December, three of the world's biggest music companies launched a counterattack against the rampant digital piracy that has gnawed at their sales in recent years.

I would love to see their evidence for this. I assume it would be the same crap they've been whining about for months, which is that their sales are slightly less record-breaking than they'd hoped. Whooptee... it's a recession. Guess what kind of stuff is the first to get cut from people's budget? Yep, overpriced crappy music.

Here's what I want in a music service

[Basilius]

And, most likely, what I'll never see.

1. Cheap downloads of decent quality (160 or 192) MP3s. Maybe US$0.25-$0.30/song. Give me a printable receipt. These are true MP3s, no time sensitivity or DRM. If you want to encode the receipt number into the MP3, I think I can deal with that. Just let me copy it onto my laptop, MP3 player, etc. and keep it for perpetuity.

2. Now, since I've paid less for a lesser quality product, I'd like an upgrade path. Let me use that receipt as a discount coupon on the album I've downloaded. Usable anywhere.

This way, I can legally sample albums for about a buck. If I like it, I'm not out that dollar, It was just a down payment on the stuff I like.

3. (Since I'm already shooting for the moon, why not...) Let me order custom-mixed CDs of MP3s I've purchased. With or without the aforementioned discount. That part I don't care about. If there's 10 or 12 songs I like where the rest of the album's trash (i.e. just about everything released these days) then let me just buy those songs.

4. Access to _every_ label's material, not just two or three.

5. A shopping cart style interface. Something like Amazon will do nicely.

I can't imagine I'm the only person out there that thinks something like this would work.

How the royalties get distributed would naturally need some thinking. It's got to be better then a quarter of a cent per song, though.

Re:more than....

[ergo98]

How does a song that you don't know, from a band that you've never heard, expose itself to you on any of the P2P programs? The reality, of course, is that it doesn't: The only most people ever hear it is if they pulled a fast one and labelled it "Britney Spears duo with Christina Aguilara.mp3". The P2P networks are all built around searching, meaning that you hear a song on the radio, or in a movie, and you think "Hey! Remind me to download that from Gnutella later!".

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..

Not then only example of bias

[drew_kime]

You quoted:

Early last December, three of the world's biggest music companies launched a counterattack against the rampant digital piracy that has gnawed at their sales in recent years.

But you missed this one:

And there are the problematic relationships between the record companies and the rest of the music industry, which make it difficult for MusicNet to offer as much music as the illegal services do.

And this one:

The struggle to create a legitimate commercial online music service goes back years, before there even was a Napster.

And this one:

Yet the industry still feared that creating a legitimate market for music downloads would cut into sales of compact discs.

And this one:

But now, music fans were racing to outlaws such as Napster.

And many others, but you get the point: Not only are we accepting on faith -- and against reams of evidence to the contrary -- that online trading actually hurts sales; but also that any services that aren't set up by the studios are "illegal services," "outlaws" or, at the least, not "legitimate."