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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."
Damn, y'all. Emusic has been offering all-you-can-eat, unencumbered mp3 downloads for years now, for a modest fee ($10-$15/month depending on the plan), and not just sample tracks of no-name garage bands, but complete albums of real artists from Bad Religion and NOFX, to John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk, to Creedence Clearwater Revival to Belle and Sebastian, to Bob Marley, to Guided by Voices, to Yo La Tengo, to Pizzicato Five, to Pavement, to Willie Nelson, to Bush, to Isaac Hayes, to The Donnas, to Apples in Stereo, to Edith Piaf, to Otis Redding, to the Goo Goo Dolls, to George Carlin, etc. etc. ad nauseam. (and, yes, They Might Be Giants - blah)
More often than not, they even have an entire artist's career, not just an album or two.
I'll don't understand why people are lining up to pay Vivendi $1 for one lousy track. If you're going to pay a major label (VivendiUniversal bought emusic a while back) your hard-earned cash to support a business model based around unencumbered MP3's, emusic seems like a better deal.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
If you're not hung up on top-40, check out emusic.com - sign up for a year subscription at $10/month, or 3 months at $15/month; there's a 14-day free trial, and you can download:
- as many songs as you want (max 50 tracks during the free trial period)
- unencrypted
- with no special DRM
- and keep the tracks after you cancel your subscription. (They even tell you to keep the 50 tracks if you choose not to subscribe!)
They claim they split the revenues 50/50 with the artists. (even if you allow for some exageration here, it'd almost have to be a better deal than the few pennies an artist gets per CD track sold through traditional outlets...The only restrictions are:
- they ask that you not hog the system by mass-downloading everything; just grab what you plan to listen to now or in the near future
- and you are on your honor not to "steal" from them by sharing those files elsewhere
In other words, they are selling MP3's exactly the way we want to buy them, and trusting us not to rip them off, instead of imposing some clumsy technological constraints - just like any other honest business. (ok, I would prefer higher bitrate encodings, but so what? 128k sounds ok on my pc. I signed up, I sent them a long letter telling them what I liked about the service, and what I would like to see improved, including the option to pay a bit more to download better quality encodings. Who do you think they are going to listen to more - their existing, paying customer base, or people heckling them from the sidelines? [I got a personal response to my letter from their customer service. They didn't promise anything, but at least i know they heard me.])They don't have many huge names (probably the most famous contemporary group in their catalog is They Might Be Giants,) but they have an awesome collection of old jazz and blues collection, a good classical section, some really bizarro-but-intersting international stuff, and a bunch of small indie labels. (They claim over 200,000 MP3 tracks available, from over 900 different [mostly small] record labels) Oh, and some comedy too, like most of George Carlin's albums.
Sorry if I sound like a commercial - I'm just a subscriber who loves this service, and I don't understand why more people haven't signed up yet...