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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 .
...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
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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!
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.
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!