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Vivendi Offering MP3 Song for Sale
pmorelli writes: "Maybe there's hope for the media dinosaurs yet: According to News.com, Vivendi is teaming up with Maverick Records, MP3.com, RollingStone.com, GetMusic.com and MP4.com to offer a remix of a Meshell Ndegeocello track, 'Earth,' for $0.99 online. No restrictions, just a plain old MP3. Even though I'm not the biggest fan of her stuff, I just may pony up a whole buck to economically encourage this sort of behavior."
Man, whatever happens, someone will bitch about it.
Look, the revolution here is not that they're allowing you to have MP3s, forget about that. The revolution here is that they're selling individual songs. Imagine if this gets popular. One-hit wonder? Buy the song, not the crappy CD. The opportunity to support an artist for a good song, but to avoid supporting them for a good song and ten filler tracks is something I'll pay $0.99 for. And who knows, maybe their encoder is better than yours.
Or, maybe you should stop bitching about every little thing, because if they're offering to sell you one song, chances are they're not going to be protectionist about not letting you encode them yourself. People have a chance to show they approve of a tenative first step, and your first reaction is to bitch and moan about how it's not what YOU want. Well shut up, some of us are aware that first steps are delicate and that encouragement can lead to second steps, then walking, then running. But if people like you have their way, then Vivendi will give up, and the RIAA will be able to say 'look, we offered them what they wanted and they didn't take it'.
Nice.
--Dan