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."

Comments

And for an extra 25 cents...

[dlek]

...you can download an mp3 pronouncing her name.

This has got to be a symbolic gesture

[geoffsmith]

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

This could be a good thing

[dweezle]

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.

set-up

[asv108]

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!"

Don't buy it if you wouldn't otherwise

[donutello]

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!"

Re:Don't buy it if you wouldn't otherwise

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

That will achieve nothing.

I hate to be contrary, but you're wrong. Imagine 10,000 slashdotters download the song and buy it legitimately. What if some noticeable fraction discover that -- saints preserve us! -- they like her music. So now they might go buy more. And we might have some numerical data to demonstrate that filesharing might, in principle, actually serve to increase sales. At least it's a chance to show how a post-dinosaur world might work.

On the other hand, the record companies are probably doing this so that they can point to how quickly the sales fall off as the MP3 is fileshared and people stop shelling out the $1. Then they can point to the experiment and say, "See? Everyone is a thief. Pass the CBDTPA!"

So don't do that! Don't rip or copy the song; don't hunt it down on Kazaa or what have you. Resist the urge to "stick it to them", at least on this one.

But at 192k sampling rate.

[fmaxwell]

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.

Oh God, the hypocrisy is KILLING me!

[saarbruck]

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.)

Re:Misassessment of the threat

[MillionthMonkey]

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.

Quoth the Record Exec:

[dfenstrate]

"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?

emusic, for god's sake!

[isaac]

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

It's free if you're an Emusic subscriber

[agravaine]

This track is already available free to emusic subscribers.

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...

Prove Him Wrong

[Bob9113]

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.