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Universal, Sony Cutting Prices on Downloaded Music
Don Symes writes "Sony Music and Universal appear to be getting ready to allow downloads of singles for $.99 and albums for $9.99 without crippleware or restrictions on personal copying/burning." Another semi-interesting piece submitted by several people is this propaganda from the recording industry. 2.8 million copyright-infringing CD-R's were seized in the U.S. last year (9 million world-wide); from that the IFPI extrapolates that 950 million copyright-infringing CD-R's were actually sold, world-wide. How do you get from 9 million to 950 million? Mostly hand-waving .
Yes, you heard correctly - secret watermarks. Want the music cheap? Sure, here you go. Of course, if you do trade it online, we'll get back to you on the number of times we find it on other computers and charge you full price plus treble damages. It's not as if we couldn't see through this business model by now...
...Althought $5-$8 would be a lot better. Problem is, if I buy an album, I want 44.1khz PCM data, and not a compressed stream with a not-insignificant portion of the data missing.
.94 cents buys .05 of an ounce of cocaine to line the nostrils of a record exec.
If my $.99 bought me the raw stereo PCM data to burn, MP3, ogg, or sample then I would consider this reasonable.
Of course the artists probably get less than $.05 of that sale. The other
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Any reasonable cap shouldn't be a huge problem for downloading MP3's. MP3's are small compared to things that even "normal" users might download. I suppose it depenes on how many MP3's you plan to download, or upload to others. Or how many gnutella packets will pass through your system.
The bandwidth cap is more likely to prevent you from running:
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
not 128kbs, but at LEAST than 196kbs, otherwise it isnt worth the cash outflow...
personally if im going to pay for something I want a solid object in my mitts, a physical CD, liner notes, pictures, etc....
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Everyone has their opinions. Who says it won't work? I've been getting my MP3s for free since I started downloading them on my 'BRAND NEW 14.4!' back in the day. BUT, if a company were to promise me good download speeds (40k/s would make me happy), high availability at any time, a HUGE selection covering all the genre's I like, then I'd happily pay $9.99 for a CD or a buck for a single song. In all reality, P2P programs annoy the bloody piss out of me. I can't stand their spyware, and their connectivty scheme tends to chow ALOT of bandwidth. IRC is quite a pain in the ass too. 700 people in one channel, you can't even go in there on dialup because the user list will cause loads of lag. So if a company could legitimately sell me a high quality MP3 for a buck, and I could find it easily in a search engine, and then download it right away with no queues, then I'd be a happy consumer again.
Can all fish swim?
And do you know what? This will flop. Terribly. Why? Because the same people who have been shouting that they'll pay for music will, in the end, not pay for music.
Once, a few years ago, I pirated music using Napster. I got quite good at it, amassing more than 5 GB of songs. But eventually, I had to face the facts: I was stealing music. A few of my friends asked me to justify what I was doing, and I couldn't justify it. I was stealing music. I thought about "making up", by buying all the CDs that I wanted music from, but I didn't. And do you know why? Because it would cost money.
I know it's not hip to agree with the RIAA on Slashdot, but in this case I feel that it's correct to. The pirate community has been screaming that they want low-price music, and now they're offering it to them. But it will flop, because in the end, people don't want cheap music.
They want free music.
The music files will be avaliable in Liquid Audio format.
"Liquid Audio files are scrambled so they can't be freely copied from computer to computer. But Universal has decided to let buyers burn the files onto conventional CDs in unscrambled formats, meaning they could be copied or moved freely from that point."
People wants MP3s. We have MP3 walkmans, players, car stereos, stereo components. We don't want a crippled version of song no matter the price.
Universal- will allow buring to CDs with you can then rip into MP3 format.
Sony- will not be allowing any burning
It's regrettable, because this is a step in the right direction, but this won't fly.
The article mentions that the tracks discussed by Universal are to be in Liquid Audio format.
(More about them is available here)
Closed-format music that I can't play in non-Windows operating systems or in a dvd or car cd deck that can decode mp3 CD's doesn't interest me in the slightest. MP3 succeeds because it's portable and small. Liquid audio files may not be very large, but they're not portable at all (except to Rio players).
By the time I've converted to CD and then ripped to mp3 again, I've spent way more than $1 worth of time, and I'm inclined to just go get an mp3 rip of the song and have done with it.
Sorry guys, try again. They're halfway there, but it's got to be MP3, or bust. The really depressing part of all this is that when this fails, it will fail because the dirty thieves on the internet want something for nothing, not because they tied themselves to a wrongheaded proprietary format that nobody asked for and nobody needs.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
From dictionary.com (emphasis mine):
theft
\Theft\, n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e. See Thief.] 1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same ; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief. See Larceny, and the Note under Robbery.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
SO give me a high bitrate MP3... 128Kbit is not an acceptable quality at a buck a song.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
Of course, the labels don't really want this to work. They want it to fail so that they can go back to Congress and say "See! We lowered prices and they're still stealing! They wont pay 99 cents! We're bleeding from our arteries here! You guys have to do something to protect our profits, er, the artists!"
If they want to make this work they have to devote themselves to it. But for a label there's not much reason to do it. There's no way that selling over the internet isn't going to cut into their gross for a while. People wont pay $16 for an album's worth of MP3s.
But it's not a zero-sum game, because RIAA can't control their end-users. Their music is digitalized and distributed for them, at no cost to anyone. Actually, for RIAA they may just be stuck.
Music distribution is no longer tricky. Just stick mp3s on your website. Finding new talent can be done just as well by a bunch of independents as it can by a giant music conglomeration.
In the next decade, music may just go back to being an art instead of an industry.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
- Use 320kbps mp3 (or ogg) files, NO RESTRICTED FORMATS
- Embed lyrics in the mp3 files, because why the hell not?
- Sell them to us at 99 cents a song or less, eight or nine bucks for a whole album
If people take the files and try to trade them on Gnutella or the like, DON'T sic the lawyers on them. A certain amount of copying is unavoidable, and there are ways of making that more trouble than it's worth if a guaranteed good copy of the song is readily, legally, and cheaply available. Most people will then choose to buy the song, those who don't probably don't have much money in the first place or they wouldn't waste their time.All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
Calling that little PDF hand waving is being too generous, it's fraud. Notice the little bar graph about "disc piracy" and how CD-Rs are fuelling the growth of piracy?
Well, take another look, this time at the cute pie graphs. You'll notice that while CD-R piracy increased from 165 million copies in 2000 to 450 million copies in 2001, cassette piracy dropped from 1.2 billion to 900 billion.
Out with the trusty HP calculator: 450 - 165 = 285, and then 1200 - 900 = 300. Oooh, look at that: 285 < 300. Cassette piracy dropped more than CD-R piracy increased.
Lets add in the pressed CDs: 500 million in 2001, 475 million in 2000. That would mean an increase of 25 million. So, takin all formats into account, we have an increase of 10 million. A whopping 0.5% increase from 2000!
Gee, wonder why they didn't include cassette piracy in that bar graph, huh? Would have spoiled their party.
Now, if my sources are correct, the annual growth of the population of the world is somewhere around 1.3% annually, which is more than 0.5%. I guess this means that piracy per person, at least where physical copies are involved, dropped.
But of course, the goal is to levy tax on CD-Rs as "compensation" to the music publishers, so why look at the facts?
I'll tell you *my* problem with Liquid Audio!
.WMA format) play on quite a few devices and software packages. If I purchase online music from a vendor, I'd like to be able to dump it straight into my car MP3 player (Rio MP3 Car).
It's a format created and supported by only one software development firm. How many software programs have you seen that play Liquid Audio format files? I'm betting none, other than the one produced by Liquid Audio themselves.
MP3, on the other hand (and even more and more, Microsoft's