Slashdot Mirror
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 .
Seems like Sony's managed to pull its head out of its ass only part of the way. As has been stated before, no one's gonna pay for what can be gotten for free. Now, if people want to find obscure stuff that isn't floating around on most P2P networks, and Sony can offer that, that might be an incentive. Maybe offer a sliding scale for the quality, ie: 128 would NOT cost the same as something encoded at 160+.
The recording industry just wants someone to blame poor management on. The truth is that with Napster gone, it makes their job more difficult: they can't now pin it on just one company. It was easy to just sue Napster... Now they have to go after end-users, or find some way to tighten their bandwidth access.
Look at the ridiculous deals they signed just before the economy slowed here in the United States... The Mariah Carey deal, which failed. The Michael Jackson "biggest album ever" which sold about ten copies.
It's easy for the CEOs of these companies to place blame somewhere else, besides themselves. And the Boards and shareholders have so far wagged their tails, nodded their heads, and watched their portfolios halve in value.
They'll wake up... Someday... Maybe...
jrbd
Ten bucks is roughly what a record store pays the distributor for a CD. The music industry is just cutting out the middleman and keeping their profit the same. Not a bad thing to try.
I have been waiting for single song prices, but I still can't understand why a record label can't give a shop a Pc with a writer and usb.
You walk in and either buy (per song) a cd compelation that you created (no shit songs on the album where evry other song is perfect) or upload them to your laptop/ipod from an arcade game style unit.
Cool that they are doing it online now, prolly better than the song idea anyway.
mountvol \\?\brain{dbe069b1-65ae-11d5-bab4-806d6172696f}\h
If these were in a high-quality lossless format it would quite likely be worth it. But mp3 -- yeah it sounds okay, but its not worth paying for.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
The music industry is still trying to cover their own ass. They know they are going to lose this fight, so if they push everyone else out of the business first they can take it over like they have every other avenue.
Supporting them now is like caving to the first offer to a street vendor in Thailand.
I am bias and not afraid to admit it, we offer MP3s for $.10 - $.20 that are encoded at 128bit to 192bit. That's good enough to burn.
CD Cost: ~$1.50USD
MusicRebellion
Honestly, I cannot FATHOM that the number of CDR's they claim were seized actually were. Honestly, if 2.8Mega CD's were confiscated, where was the news coverage of the busts? I have never once heard of any of these busts on the news. There would HAVE to be at least a few big hauls of confiscation that would warrant news coverage. Hell, every time someone gets caught smuggling a couple of pounds of pot in, it gets news coverage.
The source of the data is missing from the Yahoo story, does anyone know who's ass this data was pulled from?
Someone should just cut out the middle man for good. The artists own the music, they should get most the money.
Just setup a site where the artists can upload their music and let them set a price required for it's DL. The site would then add a few cents to that (to cover costs) and would provide a burning service for $1-2 per CD (MP3 or CD Audio format). Just imagin getting a MP3 CD full of 60-100 songs for $10. With most of that going to the artists. Or an Audio CD with 15 songs for $3. I'd be all for that. Not that we'll ever see something like that.
You should have stopped right there. The record companies are stating these numbers as fact instead of admitting that they are pulling numbers out of thin air. Their strategy is similar to the ONDCP's: design the numbers to fit the agenda. In the case of the ONDCP, they estimate higher drug usage when they want a higher budget, then they estimate lower drug usage to prove their efforts were successful. The record companies are giving an outrageous estimate to shock people into believing that there is a serious problem with piracy. Wait a few years, until the DMCA and other dragnets have imprisoned and fined a large number of people. Then the record companies will revise their estimate to prove that the legislation was effective in reducing piracy.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
The article mentioned that the files were watermarked and that that watermark is used to keep track of who bought the song.
So you could download, convert to MP3, and give to your friends. Then one of your friends posts it to Kazaa. Well the company is monitoring the file sharing networks and comes across your song. They trace it back to you using the watermark, send in the lawyers, and cut off your service.
I'd tell my friends to get their own damn account. I don't need the hassle and it's only a buck for crying out loud.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I justified it because everyone else was doing it, and you can't listen to the radio at work where the music was available. Pretty weak excuses, but the latter had some merit.
Now I have progressed to the stage where I still refuse to pay full price for albums, but once they are £10.99 in Tesco, or £9.99 then I will buy them. If they are really good, I will buy them as well. I have also realised that there is a bucketload of excellent old music out there, priced between £4.99 and £6.99 at places like 101cd.com and your local backstreet music store, and thus for a mere £110 I can buy 19 full albums of music that I like, even if it isn't the latest and "greatest" (ha!).
Once modern albums contain more than 2 or 3 good songs and 5 trash songs, then my money might start going on new music again. Tempting though "Baile del gorila" by Melody is, it is the only good song on the CD so I will not buy it. I bought a best of Boney M for £4.99 instead.
So I bought Aphex Twin Classics today for £5.99, I will buy two deftones albums for £5.99ea this weekend after England beat Denmark, possibly Madonna Music and Madonna Erotica Tour as well at the same price (and thus cover those MP3 downloads a year or two ago). And 19 CDs in the post as well... the next couple of weeks will be fun.
I love CDs, the cases, the physical things. But I will only pay reasonable prices for them. If all new CD albums were £8.99 then I would probably have a CD collection in the many hundreds by now...
Remember, if you listen to a £15.99 CD 20 times, then you are paying around 80p a listen. Too high for my liking. Listen to a £5.99 CD 20 times for 30p a shot - much better for background music most of the time.
From page 7 of the IFPI document:
Since Ukranian artists cannot make money selling their albums, they are forced to give endless concerts to survive.
I guess I should feel bad... except that this is the situation for all musicians everywhere, regardless of piracy. Musicians don't make money selling albums. Period. Especially musicians who have signed a recording contract.
Having been a musician myself, I have only one response to Katya Cilly: If you hate playing music so much, go get a real job.
I don't support piracy, but honestly, I never cared about it with regard to my own stuff. The point of recording music is so that other people can hear it and enjoy it when I can't be there to play it live. If somebody bought my CD and made copies for all their friends, great! Maybe all their friends would come to my next show. Nothing compares to playing a live show. That's what being a musician (or any kind of performance artist) is all about. If you don't like doing it, then being an artist is not the profession for you, and you should look for something else.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
You're completely, 100% wrong. Yeah, it will flop, but not because people won't pay. It's silly to assume people don't pay for music. People pay for music all the time. How else do you think the recording industry stays in business? No, piracy is most certainly not why this will fail. It will fail because the suits misunderstand their thetarget audience for this service.
I have ~18GB of MP3 files. They are all, to the last file, arranged in complete albums, with proper ID3 tags for each file. Why? Because I bought the CDs and then ripped and encoded them myself. Napster was useless. You got iffy quality, screwy naming conventions, weird ID3 tags (if you got them at all), and the files sometimes (mostly) had defects. Even if I didn't want to pay, I'd still pay rather than listen to the crap you get off Napster (or Kaazaa -- same problems there).
I require two things for digital music: The complete album in high bit-rate MP3 format. I do not want single songs. I do not want proprietary (read: non-MP3 or non-OGG) formats with built-in "digital rights management". I do not want to "burn" anything. Why the heck would I burn a Liquid Audio (whatever the hell that is) on to a CD-R? I want the music on my fileserver where it belongs. Where my AudioTron downstairs and my workstation upstairs can get to them. Where I can stream them from work. I might even put them on a portable MP3 player, but last time I checked the portables didn't support "burning" or formats besides MP3.
I'd love the chance to pay $10 for a complete album. As long as it's in MP3 format at a decent bit-rate. But this "service" can't give me that and therefore is completely useless. It will fail because they are going about it all wrong -- not because people don't want cheap music.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
If Sony and the other labels had offered this low-cost downloadable music option a year or two ago I think it would have revolutionized their business model and been a roaring success.
Unfortunately, they've left it so late that I fear (like others who have posted here) that it will fail.
Why?
Simply because music theft has become an "acceptable" activity in the eyes of too many Net users.
Pirates have learned to justify their activities by citing figures that indicate the recording artist sees only a tiny percentage of the sticker price for CDs.
If the recording companies had moved in while there were still pangs of guilt associated with the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted music then they could have pulled it off.
I predict that some people will opt to buy legal downloads (just like some have signed up to the subscription-based online services offered by record labels) - but the vast majority will continue to get their music for free.
This is unfortunate for all concerned because it means that we'll all end up paying more for our music.
Just watch the demise of the audio CD within the next two years.
The recording companies will force everyone to move to a new format with built-in DRM. Okay, so it won't affect hardened pirate (nothing ever will) but the recording industry will go ahead and do it anyway -- and we'll all end up having to buy new players just to gain (legal) access to the latest releases and paying the premium required to offset those development costs.
The solution?
The recording companies should give the damned music away for free!
No, I'm not kidding.
Let's face it -- they're effectively doing that every time a music vid screens on TV or when an FM station plays a track. Sure, there's a fee paid for each public performance -- but there's nothing to stop people from recording those broadcasts and burning them to disk or CD. Hell, I've got a great (and growing) collection of MPEGs containing all my favourite music videos. When it comes to "pop" music, I just capture what I want from free-to-air broadcasts and burn it to VCD or SVCD. I don't have to download MP3s -- I just record the audio and video track.
Artists and recording companies should put all the music on the Net for free and switch to other revenue streams.
What other streams?
1. Product endorsement (how much does Britney Spears make from her Pepsi commercials??)
2. Live concerts. Let's face it -- how does any recording artist justify earning millions of dollars for a few weeks in the studio cutting a new album?? Perhaps they could do some *real* work for their money -- just like the rest of us have to.
And there are an armful of other revenue streams that could be generated by giving away free music.
Perhaps it's time that the recording industry realized (just as the manufacturers of carbon-paper, horse-shoes and vacuum tubes had to) that the market has changed and old products and business models may no longer be valid.
The MPAA will have to take the same long look at itself -- and perhaps actors will have to realize that a couple of months work simply isn't worth tens of millions of dollars.
Then maybe the record company needs to take it one step further... offer the cd for $9.99 off of the website in 196kbs mp3's, and leave an option for the customer. If they decide that they like the CD enough to buy the actual disk, let them come back within say 2 weeks, pay an extra $3-4 (S&H) and have the CD itself mailed to them. They've already made the bulk of their profit (bandwidth for an entire CD is probably only a few cents out of the $9.99) and it would be a good way to get an extra $2 out of the customer. Shipping, labor, and the materials for the physical CD are probably only about a dollar or two, and the band/promoters/radio stations have been paid out of the profits from the downloaded version.
I see that as an option where everyone wins. Too bad it'll never happen (unless the physical CD would only be discounted from the regular price of $15 down to $10 if you've already paid for the full cd off the web site)
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
I suspect that the 20th century will be viewed as an aberation as we move to a "Star Trek" economy of art, where no one watches TV anymore (or listens to the radio, etc). Instead, people will prefer to attend live performances, usually by firends or family, occasionally by a recognized star. Like the Grateful Dead always did, recordings will be used primarily to introduce someone to a performer; the "true experience" will be the live concert.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
I said this in another post, but I'll consider using their service when they release a Liquid Audio plugin for XMMS. Another thing I forgot to mention is that I refuse to buy it if I can't put it on my NJB.
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
I want a program I can download from the record companies that will scan my MP3 directory and tell me how much I need to pay to legitimize my collection. They don't have to encode music for me, pay for the servers and pipe for me to get music, I can get my MP3s through my own means. I just want the license to legitimately listen to what I want on my computer, MP3 player, etc. I will even deal with the shitty quality.
There's no reason that they couldn't charge me $0.05 per song or less. Hell, it's resonable to expect that it's $0.99 for the first ten MP3s, $0.50 ea for up to 100, $0.05 for up to 1000, and a penny thereafter. No cost to them, no loss, it's basically free money. Now, if/when I ever get audited for my music I come up green and not red on their Good Boy/Bad Boy list. Everybody wins, except probably the artist, but then again, they're the ones who sold their rights to the music. It's a fucked up system, but this would at least appease two of the three parties in the tight spot.
Regardless, until then, CDs are too overpriced and inconvenient for me. Call me a bastard, I'll deal.
--
Do you have something against the ability to trace the original source in the case of wide spread distribution? No, really. I'm curious
Um, I'm against having to try to change the format into something I can play in my DVD, Rio, Car, etc in a compressed format. I hate jockeying a box of CD's in the car while driving, carying a box of CD's while out hiking, etc. I want the small portable format of MP3's. Liquid Audio is incompatible with my hardware and 8-10 songs per CD is too bulky to carry everywhere. Lugging enough batteries for a weekend hike is bad enough without also lugging along a case of CD's that have to spin 100% of the time to play (battery eater). I prefer a MP3 CD player for hikes as they start once or twice per song vastly extending battery life.
The truth shall set you free!
I can't play it using my favorite software and hardware (BeOS and SoundPlay, FWIW, although I'm sure you can think of any number of other hardware and software platforms that Liquid Audio is never going to support). I'm also not entirely comfortable with the thought of having audio files with my fingerprint in them.... would I be liable if someone hacked my machine and started distributing copies of my files?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Whereas Liquid Audio is a free, open format with no royalty payments required. Oh, wait....
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"So wherein lies the problem exactly?"
They don't play on my iPod, which is what plays all my music.
No need to 'get over it' -- I simply won't use it. There are plenty of free alternatives that do the things I want, on the software and hardware that I use.
I suspect there isn't any LA support for a number of (essentially) dead systems. Too bad. This is the way the world works.
And therefore LA won't get used by people who use those systems. Too bad. That is the way the world works.
If you want it that badly, write it yourself or run something that can handle it.
As I said, I don't want it that badly. It doesn't offer me anything that mp3 doesn't give me now, and it doesn't meet my needs. So I'll happily ignore it. And as a previous poster said, even if I did want it that badly, I probably couldn't write the software myself due to the technical and legal barriers thrown up by LA to keep their format "secure". (ha ha)
Kvetching about it not supporting your dead-as-a-doornail OS is about as good as horse buggy makers complaining about the Model T
I wasn't "kvetching", I was just pointing out what it was that would keep me from using it. And keep in mind that someday, every OS will be "dead-as-a-doornail" -- even your beloved 'mainstream' OS. At that point, your thousands of dollars invested in LA files will be lost, as you will no longer have any way to play them. (and if you are counting on LA to write a new version of their player for whatever OS you upgrade to... then you haven't been watching the software industry for very long. I give 50/50 odds LA won't even exist in 5 or 10 years)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.