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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 .
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
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?"
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 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.