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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."
I'm not a big fan either, but I'll gladly fork up a buck to offer support of the idea, in the hopes of encouraging more for the future. I'd like to see a million purchases of this one track for just that reason. Its about time some of the "biggies" got their heads out of their asses.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Forgive my ignorance, but would someone mind enlightening the stupid as to who she is? What genre, how good is her music, etc? I might just buy the song if it's any good.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
I have not heard of this artist and I'm assuming that most people haven't either.
But my question is, if this sells poorly will they point to it as proof that straight mp3 sales don't work?
I have a shitty sig!
...you can download an mp3 pronouncing her name.
Anyone with some knowledge of online transactions knows that offering something for $1 is generally not profitable. First, you've got fees from the credit cards, and then you've got the the whole chargeback thing. One song gets charged back, and you've wiped out any profit from at least 100 sales. The only thing they've got on their side is that an mp3 is not a very good target for credit card fraud, and most people will not bother to chargeback $1.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
"Sure, there is always a concern of piracy; there's always the concern of people illegally transferring things. But we feel the best way to combat that is by giving people a legitimate alternative, and this is a test to make that alternative available to them," I couldn't have said it better myself. This could be a viable alternative, although the price might be a little high. A 15 track CD at this price is just as expensive as a store bought version, without the extra goodies and higher quality. Still, if I were interested in the music, I would consider spending the buck just to support this practice.
I still wont pay for sh*ty music. There's more to it than just offering it online in mp3 format folks.
Heck most of what the recording industry puts out these days isn't even worth stealing.
then the music industry will deploy this on a larger basis....we can all afford $1...even us po' ass university students...com' on every one...lets /. the shopcart software!!!!
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
OK the price is a little high and she's not a big, big name, but you get an unprotected download to do with as you please.
So buy it and show support for the concept, check out the quality and if you're happy with that then send nice feedback
as a customer(lower price, different artist, etc) and give them a chance.
In a time of universal lies, Telling the Truth is a revolutionary act - George Orwell
can you hop on gnutella and drop me an email with your IP? I love her stuff.
.99 for stuff, but really, how many people will when you can get it for free?
Free(as in beer) > All(nonfree beer) People say they'll pay
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
I really have no clue who the artist is but I can already hear what the RIAA will say. "We tried to sell MP3's on the Internet but nobody bought them because there was no digital rights management." "This is why we need the Hollings bill!"
$1? :)
Make a statement.
I'm DLing it right now, for $1 I don't even care *what* the song is. I just want to wave my dollar in the face of this company, to show them that I have dollars to spend on DLing songs!
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 $0.99 online.
How is it that when two people want to exchange mp3s, they just do it, but when a corporation wants to, they've gotta make it all complicated?
__
Choose mnemonic identifiers. If you can't remember what mnemonic means, you've got a problem. - Larry Wall
I've seen a few posts encouraging everyone on here to buy the song even if we don't care for the artist or the actual song.
That will achieve nothing. Depending on the success of this pilot they will determine whether it is worth doing at all. Next, they will probably release a whole CD that way and see how that goes. That will be followed by release of another few - say 10%. Unless every Slashdotter is committing to buying every thing they ever release online, buying this song now is not going to serve any purpose.
At this point they are probably trying to assess the extent of piracy/online fraud they are exposing themselves to as well as trying to figure out the logistics of every step of their operation. That's what pilots are for. I doubt they are going to say "ooh, we sold a million copies of this, let's release everything this way!"
Mmmm.. Donuts
...it has the words "little" and "late" and there was something else that sounds like the number 2. Now what was that phrase?
Seriously, does this strike anyone as an excellent way for the RIAA to claim that this kind of system "just doesn't work". Just put out a no-name artists that nobody really likes or cares about, and when that fails to sell 500,000 copies, just throw up you hands in despair and tell congress, "Well, we tried. It just can't be done."
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I feel like a kid who had all his toys stolen by a bully, who was told he was a bad person for protesting, and now I should be happy to get that toy back, all mangled beat and ruined. Yeah.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
1. You're assuming that you would buy a 12-song CD. I think this is a mistaken assumption. You would purchase only those songs that you felt were worth the cost of purchase. Therefore instead of paying $13.98 for 3 good songs and 11 bad ones, you'd pay $2.97 for only those 3 good songs. Sure, you don't get the nice packaging, but that is another debate for another day.
2. You don't value music very highly. This is something that one has to determine on their own. If you feel that $.99 is too much to pay for 3.5 minutes of entertainment that can be repeated as many times as you like, then that is your opinion. There are certainly music sharing sites that you can download the media for free and avoid financing the musician at all.
I don't know how to respond except to say that I disagree with you.
I have been pwned because my
She's the one that played "Wild Night" with John Cougar Mellencamp (or whatever HE is called these days) several years ago.
Decent bass player, she is.
http://www.remhq.com/html/remix/remix.html
A full CD of remixes, with album art.
Not my taste in music, but its nice to see Stipey and the bunch practicing what they've preached in interviews with me and others.
In addition, REM did "pre leak" these songs on various peer-to-peer networks to see the rate of propagation.
This is the second time REM's put free tracks online for fans. The first was Peter Buck putting some tracks he did for a play's soundtrack up. In an interview last year he said he wants to do this more frequently with the "leftover" tracks from recording sessions.
This was covered in major media, but not as extensively as a one dollar MP3. Sad.
Ethan
Marked money, my friends. Something to think of....
$.99 for one track? No linear notes or hard media copy? No option to rip it as .ogg or higher/lower bitrate? Many $12 CD's have 14+ tracks, obviously this breaks down to less than $.99/track. I think I might buy when they offer a download for $.05. Think of it like pay-per-view movie. They go for a couple bucks, vs the "hard copy" DVD going for $19.99. No one would pay for a pay-per-view movie if it cost the same as the DVD of the same movie.
I love going down to the elementary school, watching all the kids jump and shout, but they dont know I'm using blanks.
Okay, if the music biz is finally waking up to reality, let's make sure that they set the terms of their initial toe-dipping at a realistic level. Having persuaded them of a general, provisional willingness on our part to pay for content, it's important that they don't develop overly high expectations, Stephen King-style, only to have them torn down by reality, causing them to retreat back into denial.
As I see it, many people (certainly the same number of people who currently buy CDs) will eventually be willing to buy music online if it fulfills the following requirements:
1. Reasonable cost. I always suspected that, for sound marketing reasons, we'd end up paying a dollar per song. It's a fair price and I've no doubt that music companies are about to make more money then their thieving little minds ever dreamt possible; at a $ a pop, there will be a massive increase in the casual purchase of music.
2. (Convenience) Now that we, the consumers, are going to be covering the cost of the physical storage of music we've purchased, the industry needs to fully accept that they are in the business of marketing and selling rights, rather than physical products. Storing downloaded songs on our computers and portable devices, there's a high chance that we will loose them at some point and need to download them again. For that reason, songs we pay for must become part of an online, permanently accessible portfolio that we have permanent, eternal access to.
3. (Convenience #2) No messing around with weird-ass propriety/encrypted formats. Take it as read that if people want to pirate music (and, of course, many will) they're going to find a way no matter what you do. That, however, is no reason to inflict inconvenience and device incompatible formats on your paying customers. Accept reality and move on.
So, there you have it, follow the above, simple ingredients and the music industry enters a new Golden Age as the world's highest paid web hosts.
.... we sure are sending the wrong signal by slashdotting her site. shes gunna think shes the missing beattle or something.
The beauty of MP3 for me is that I can elect to sample at 224k or 256k for my car CD/MP3 player or I can sample at 128K for my Rio 600. I can encode with LAME or whatever encoder I like best. I can set the options based on file size, encode speed, or sound quality. It's all my choice.
I don't want the record companies to sell me some compromised, one-size-fits-all MP3 of their favorite song off of the album. I want the ability to rip and encode the CDs I own without legislation or copy protection to hinder me. I want the RIAA to recognize that I am a customer with hundreds of CDs and not their enemy. I want them to sell me a CD at a fair price and not cripple it in an attempt to prevent me from making a copy to play in whatever device I want.
You feel free to give them $.99 to sell you an MP3 of a song you don't know by an artist you've never heard of. I'd rather just keep asking my Congressional representatives to sponsor legislation prohibiting copy prevention and guaranteeing consumers the right to copy and format-translate any music or movie that they buy.
You people!
Over the last year I have read post after post where you all say "If only they'd offer unencrypted music downloads in a standard format for a reasonable price, where I could pick your songs one at a time instead of having to buy the a mostly bad album. I'd do that in a minute!"
Well, ladies and gentlement, Maverick and Vivendi appear, at least, to be offering an olive branch, and is giving us exactly what we've been clamoring for.
A few of you, like me, are going to go download this song and pony up a buck no matter who the hell the singer is, just to add credence to our point of view, but as I look through the responses to this story, what are the most prominent responses I've seen? (I am quoting you here:)
"MP3 is a good start but I won't pay for lossy music."
"I still won't pay for shitty music."
"Great idea, but at 1 buck per song, a whole album would cost plus than 10 dollars, I think it is a little expensive." (NOTE: $10 per album is still half fucking price!)
"Can you hop on gnutella and drop me an email with your IP?"
Jiminy Christmas, people! Here's your chance to make a difference. Put your damn money where your mouths have been for the last year. After this, I can almost see things from the RIAA's point of view. Thanks a lot.
(I apologise for generalising and lumping all Slashdot readers into a collective "you." I'm just really annoyed at some.)
I am the very model of a modern major general!
Could someone who has downloaded the song please post a brief review? What kind of music is it? Similar to the works of what other artists?
I know that US$1 isn't much, but I'm not going to spend that on every artist who chooses to sell this way without at least some idea what I'm buying.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
So I guess I should download the song from kazaa first to see if I like it... Hmm, that would be pointless.
Hacker Media
$1 for 1 MP3. A quick glance through my CD collection shows a range of 10-18 tracks per CD.
Do the math, then consider that they aren't giving you a CD. Then consider that they are cutting the retail store out of delivery-chain. I think I saw a post elsewhere that said stores pay about $10 per CD.
It is an interesting experiment with some interesting potential, and it's a step in the right direction, but it isn't worthy of a major celebration.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
In what may be a first for the recording industry, Maverick Records and Vivendi Universal's online division are asking listeners to pay just under a dollar for an unprotected MP3 version of a new single.
Yeah, you'd almost think they are ahead of their time. Music over the Internet? That's just crazy talk.
3: People will rather have a lossless copy of a song on a tangible media format than a file that can be deleted with one bad keystroke.
Oh please. A CD can be destroyed with one bad scratch. And I can make backup copies of an MP3. In fact the first thing I do when I buy a CD is rip it to MP3, then I put the CD away in a rack and never touch it unless I want to play it in the car. (Yeah, bad quality, whatever.) I keep my MP3s at work synchronized with the ones at home, because I don't want to lug CDs back and forth.
My reluctance to pay for the digital media files offered by the cartels so far is really based on the fact that
1. They're designed to expire
2. They're designed to be nonportable
3. You can only play them so many times before they "run out"
4. They require goofy playback software that runs on Windows only and insists on showing me ads
5. I can't reformat my drive without losing everything I've paid for
6. I can't listen to them at work unless I lug my computer back and forth
These aren't considerations at all with an MP3. I might delete it by mistake but I'm not going to reject the idea just because I think I'm too stupid to be trusted with my own files.
"Sure, there is always a concern of piracy; there's always the concern of people illegally transferring things. But we feel the best way to combat that is by giving people a legitimate alternative, and this is a test to make that alternative available to them," Grady said.
He says it right there. They want to try what we've been bitching for. Let's all drop a buck and support this kind of behavior. (She's not half bad, btw)
My grandma always told me you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. If this is what we want, then we should support it. end of story. Time to vote with your wallet, even if for the purposes of this experiment, you've never heard of the lady.
I'm buying my copy. Are you?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
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.
The RIAA members are interested in ways to cut out the record stores, media costs, shipping costs, return processing, and every other cost associated with selling CDs.
If they can get people to buy online, they have no cost. MP3.com will eat the cost of the bandwidth in order to get you to view their banner ads. The record companies will have gone to an essentially zero-cost model for distributing their music. Compared to the cost of a CD, printed liner notes, packaging, shipping, and splitting profits with the local record store, it's a lot better for them if you just PayPal them the money.
End result: If you want music, you will get it online compressed at whatever rate the publisher wants to supply it. If you have invested in a high-end audio system, that's tough. You'll take the MP3s at 192K like everyone else.
First of all: I bought it just because I wanted to support the "effort". I do want the music companies and musicians to think that this sort of distribution will work because this is how I would like to be able to buy music. As for the song itself. I have never ever heard of Marshall Mdegeacella, but I have heard of Ben Watt of Everything But The Girl fame. I like EBTG's music generally, but I'm not a huge fan. Earth, the tune in question, is good stuff. The mp3 is 8 minutes, 45 seconds long. The sound quality is good enough for my Altec Lansing ATP3 computer speakers. But for me, the tune is not compelling. It's a little funky, a little dancable, the vocals are nice, the music is fairly simple, and the rythm is groovy but basic. But I go for stuff that has a little more energy and this isn't it. I'll put it in my playlist and see how it grows on me and I suspect that I will like it more with more listens. But for now? For the creativity and quality of the music: 6/10 and for my personal taste: 5/10. Worth $0.99? Not really, but not a big disappointment either.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Well, the issue of CDs vs. MP3s is really a matter of personal preference. What is different is that with a CD, there's a greater sense that the purchase is based on the principle of you buy it, it's yours. Perhaps the record companies never saw it that way at all, but the permanence of the medium made it a moot point. We always knew we weren't supposed to make and sell copies of CDs we bought- that was always obvious to everyone. But very few people had the equipment to copy audio CDs anyway. (Except to tape cassettes, but somehow that never became an issue.)
Now we're being rudely informed that all these years we haven't been buying music at all- we've been licensing it. They never charged us a per-play fee only because there was no technology available to enforce such a thing on us. Now they're getting the ability to extend their miniature version of a police state into our living rooms and entertainment systems, so this is becoming an issue. And they've bought legislation that gives their little technological hurdles the force of law. So they're now trying to make it abundantly clear that you buy it, it's yours isn't and wasn't the business model at all- it's more like you rent it, and then you get fucked by us because we can fuck you now for every moment of intellectual property pleasure that enters your senses. But this isn't what customers are used to, it isn't what they want, and they won't stand for it, even if a hated law is purchased that makes all reasonable alternatives illegal.
I hope they do start selling MP3s. I'd buy a dozen.
Get a good receiver, no, your 79 dollar Aiwa system with blinky lights galore doesn't count, and some respectable speakers.
These guys did, and they found that LAME 3.92 can encode CD quality sound transparently at an average data rate between 160 and 192 kbps. For more information, read the "quality" section of r3mix.net.
You can definitely tell the mp3 artifacts
What artifacts? You mean the artifacts from the Xing encoder?
Will I retire or break 10K?
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...
1: People think mainstream is pretty much shit.
2: People will pay money for GOOD music.
Give it up.
Lots of people on here may think that mainstream music sucks. It seems to be a running theme. But step outside your ego--if it wasn't popular, it wouldn't be mainstream. The stuff that sells is the stuff that the MPAA cares about! They don't care if it's 70 minutes of George Strait farting into a microphone; if it makes money, they'll produce/sell it.
People will pay money for the music that you say is shit. You may not believe it, but Britney Spears albums don't go platinum for nothing.
pony up...
fork over...
shell out...
Why is it the smaller the amount, the more often phrases like these are used? Does anyone *ever* "fork over" amounts more than $10?
sigh...
Bout 98 cents too high for one of her tracks, no?
What do you mean by 'her'?
slashdot!=valid HTML
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 [...]
So, how many different companies does it take to change a lightbu^W^W^Wsell a single MP3 online? (Or, equivalently, how many man-hours were wasted on high-level executive meetings to sell a single MP3?) Yea, there's hope for them, but just how much hope remains an open question.
// zyqqh
But "I think you'll be able to count the number of sales on one hand," he added. "As soon as one person gets it, it's all over the (peer-to-peer) networks for free."
OK - let's prove him wrong. I need five more people to go buy it. I just did, and if you like dance music, it's worth a buck.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Offering an mp3 of a track is like selling photographs of a Picasso. Yes, technically it looks nearly identical, but once you get closer, you notice that it just doesn't have the appeal that the original does.
Yet many people still spend the 99c in the museum gift shop for the Picasso postcard and hang it on their fridge. Just like not getting the original Picasso, you don't expect to get the 32- or 64-track studio reels for $25 at Tower. Hell, even a new, regular CD is a 5th, 6th, or 7th generation copy.
Intelligent Life on Earth
i mean mp3 is a good start i guess but IM not going to pay for lossy music
/. audiophiles)
Better start buying concert tickets, because if it ain't from their mouth straight to your ears, it's "lossy".
(ducks and runs for cover from the
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
As I recall Vivendi bought MP3 earlier this year. It was a big loss for the internet music when the original designers of MP3 burned up their investment capital in an absurd copyright lawsuit over their Beam-It CD technology.
So refresh my memory...why would I buy a "lossfull" (is that a word?) mp3 again?
Simple. This song is 8:45. You may have the bandwidth to download almost 90 mb of data, but many potential customers won't, and even the largest labels will hesitate before inviting that much abuse of their servers.
--- Work, worry, consume, die. It's a wonderful life. -- Bill Griffith
I went there to get it, and admittedly, it's not as bad as some I could mention (and start a flame war ;-) ), but couldn't they offer up something good?
This song can be found as an "EMusic Exclusive" on this page, for my fellow EMusic'ers.
Mozilla's a nice operating system, but it needs a better browser.
Of course, you wouldn't download it uncompressed.
The track Brothers in arms by Dire Straits is seven minutes long and 70.7Mbyte. Using Monkey's Audio (for instance, there are others) it compress to 32.31Mbyte.
A typical "radio edit" track of about 3-4 minutes will compress to around 20Mbyte.
If I'm to buy music online it would have to be a more flexible scheme, ranging from a lossless encode to lossy of my choice (I use Ogg Vorbis 'quality 6' for all my encoding at home).
A 128Kbit/s encode using some unknown codec using unknown settings? You've gotta be kidding me.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
There's Universal Music (i.e., Bronfman's mafia, with their hard line on banning anonymity and stamping out MP3s, and their copy-restricted pseudo-CDs), and then there's their new media division, which includes mp3.com and emusic.com.
This could be part of a power struggle between the two poles, the hardliners and the moderates. If enough people buy the MP3, the moderates will get more power in Vivendi, and the hardliners will be discredited. If this fails, the hardliners will just say "I told you so".
I'm reading lots of posts saying people should get it even though they've never heard of the artist before; well, I for one would love to be able to get a good song legally for $0.99 but I am not rich enough to spend money without sampling the product first. Especially when it comes to something like music, where the quality of a song varies with the listener. (Ie, the same song is one person's jewel and another's garbage)
Luckily, neither I nor you need shell out our $0.99 before having listened to a sample, conveniently linked from the front page of MP3.com.
Now even if you don't like the song, you should still consider shelling out for it as a sign of support for the business model. But if you're a cheapskate like me, try the sample first.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
... please post a review of it (genre, style, influences, quality). Just a wild thought, but shouldn't we be using the power of this big ol' inter-web thing to make informed decisions about mp3 purchasing, rather than just making the point that we'll buy any old junk as long as it's mp3?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
r3mix.net's myths section is dumb. E.g., they say that vinyl has a lower dynamic range than CD, which is wrong...it has a higher noise level, but with advanced signal processing (e.g., an ear and a brain), you can follow a signal well below the noise level.
"Currently available for United States residents only."
It probably makes sense - credit card payment probably costs more for them when done from a non-US country. But that also means they are missing out on everybody in the rest of the world, which is a loss both for the record company and us international customers.
My guess is this song has been fingerprinted (md5 or something slightly more subtle) and they're going to watch the P2P networks to assess how quickly this will be "shared".
That's the info they're looking for, in my opinion.
Because if they really wanted to prove something, they'd choose a band or act that people have heard of.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
At a buck per song, most albums I own would cost over $15, often around $20 or more. That's more than it would cost anywhere except the most expensive record shops.
The "I still won't pay for shitty music" argument isn't so bad either. Making this test run with only a single track available almost smells of a deliberate lack of effort. Using ten or twenty tracks from a wide selection of genres would have made for much more realistic results; this way, few who aren't Meshell Ndegeocello fans will make the purchase.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
you get an unprotected download to do with as you please
Whoa, not so fast there, Tex. You get an unprotected download, sure... but don't think for a minute that you can do with this as you please. You better believe this song is still protected by the full force of the copyright and that it is still illegal to distribute it over the internet.
But what's most offensive to me is the cost. At a buck for a song this is hardly a better deal than a CD - for a lossier format! That's a terrible deal and too much trouble for no physical product and no packaging.
I'm mystified by these abortive forays into electronic content. Pay three bucks for a book that stops working after fifteen days! Pay a buck for an ephemeral, lower fidelity electronic impression of a song! Pay ten to twenty-five bucks a month for "Internet Radio Minus" - download limits, and when you quit the service you lose the ability to play everything. There are still plenty of unfettered CDs, used and new, for sale out there at ten times the bargain and usefulness. And I'm not even interested in file trading - I've never uploaded or downloaded an illicit MP3. I'm just concerned with the value and versatility of my own collection.
Earth to the publishing and recording industries (and those who would seek to replace them): when the deal doesn't SUCK I'll "show support for the concept."
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
I just downloaded it... paid my $0.99... am listening to it right now.
You know, I never really had any funk music before. I kinda like it.
Quality is pretty good (not the best)....
I think I'll support this. Vivendi, good job. Next, offer multiple versions.... perhaps charge a bit less for this quality ($0.75) and a bit more for higher quality VBR ($1.25). But I like this first forray.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
I really would like to know who this is for.
In my opinion, filesharing does not act as a substitute for cds, it acts as a substitute for radio. You hear a song you like on the radio, you buy the album. You find a song you like on a filesharing network, you buy the album.
The people who don't are the same freeloaders who used to tape their friends cds, or cds from the library, etc. Nothing will make them buy music.
The supposed drop in music sales, which is far from agreed upon by statisticians, could be due to a lot of other factors:
* They shut down Napster. Even now, nothing is quite as pervasive, because there was only one game in town. I know I used to buy a lot more when Napster was around, because I used to find a lot more. I've used all the other networks, but the community is definitely more fragmented, and also seem to be interested in videos a lot more.
* They are pushing crap music. TBH, not much produced in the last couple of years has been stellar...
* They killed the single in the US. Then complain they are not selling as much? Do they have no understanding of their market? A lot of singles are sold to children. This is how we get so many boy bands etc in the charts. They were a small purchase. Now they have to buy an album, its a big purchase, and parents won't buy large amounts for kids.
Anyway... who the fuck buys music from an artist they know nothing about? This is an experiment set up to prove how evil mp3s are, nothing more.
Why not go to Smells Like Records (Sonic Youth Label) or Matador and download free MP3 samples. Then buy the reasonably priced CDs (~$10).
The record companies are about revenue not music. We can make them irrelevant.
I don't think ANYONE is under the illusion that consumers _want_ DRM. It's being sold to legislators as a way to protect "content providers" (ie. their compaign contributors) from their own pesky customers who don't behave the way they should. More likely it would be "Nobody is willing to pay for mp3's, because they're ALL stealing them! This is why we need the Hollings Bill!"
Freedom: "I won't!"
Firstly, I have no clue who this person is. She's obviously not mainstream. There's nothing wrong with that, mind you. It's just that I have no motivation to buy this track. I can't even locate the track on the gnutella network (okay I found 2 hosts with it, but I couldn't connect).
Second, the bitrate is horrible. I mean, it really is. I'm no audio snob, but I stopped downloading/encoding anything less than 256kbps about 2 years ago.
Contrary to others, I have no problem with the $1 price tag, as I don't have a problem with the "buy more, pay less" scheme. That is, I don't mind $1 for a single, but I wouldn't pay more than $10 for a full album in this way, regardless of the number of tracks it has.
You want to impress me, Big Label? Release the current top 5 or 10 songs in all mainstream categories (pop, R&B, classical, new age, country, rock, etc.). Offer than for a buck apiece. This would blow me away -- I'd buy a Britney Spears track just to support the effort. Even at 128kbps I'd do it, just because this would be a major scary step for the labels. Next, offer me an uncompressed file format -- straight WAV, baby! I'd pay a 50% premium over any compressed format, though I'd still not go over $10/album as any more would lead me to pay for a real CD.
The point is, if the labels offered something really revolutionary (for them), I'd take these kinds of offerings a little more seriously. Until then, I'll remain skeptical.
Method of processing duck feet
Not likely, it's possible they're modifying each downloaded copy slightly (like in one of the ID3v2 tags) so they can find out who lets their copy out into the wild. Maybe then they'll try to hunt down pirates based on information given upon purchase.
It's definitely possible; I know a company that modifies each of their software's installers upon download so info provided during signup can be retrieved for any particular installer file.