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Interview with MusicNet Chief
prostoalex writes "Alan McGlade, chief of MusicNet, which sells subscriptions to its digital music catalog, talks about his view of digital music market, expectations and life in general."
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It's been said before, but I'll say it again: www.emusic.com has it right.
$15 or $10/month (depending on whether you sign up for 3 months or a year), for
all-you-can eat, no digital "rights" managment, mp3 format music.
Oh I don't know, I can think of a bunch of things that will add value:
...". Just use your imagination here.
1) What about lyrics distributed along with the song?
2) Videos anybody?
3) Making songs easy to find.
4) Helping you find music you like ("Oh, you like that beatles song?? We also have these three different versions of that song recorded live. Would you like to listen to those too? What about this Stone Temple Pilots version of the same song??" Or maybe, "Our statistical calculations say you like this type of music, you're about to waste 10 downloads at the end of the month. Here are some songs you might want to check out
5) Histories and stories of the songs and the people who made them.
6) Online interviews with artists.
7) a trillion other things... use your imagination.
I think there could be tons of value added. I'd love to use a service like this, as soon as it becomes cheap and truly has alot of content.
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi
You have some good points, but you're a bit off here:
"Well, I don't think you compete [with p2p], but you do create a service that has its own value.
Err, that's called "competing"..? I guess he assumes the p2p sites will all be shut down by the RIAA at some point."
Actually, I think there is a demand for a much more convenient service than p2p. In fact, I know there is such a demand (because I am that demand); the question, of course, is whether there's enough demand to make it profitable. I can go to emusic (I don't know MusicNet), read their recommendations, search through their catalog, and pick a few albums to download. Then I simply click on one link to download the entire album and save a playlist to replay it later. It's all very high bandwidth. The rate at which I get albums is orders of magnitude faster than with any p2p service, and for me it's certainly worth the very low price.
This guy obviously doesn't know his enemy.
"the file quality is guaranteed,"
That's odd, all the P2P clients I've ever used told me the quality in number of hosts. Most P2P users don't intentionally host crap.
"the download times are optimised,"
And P2P clients also tell you the connection speed of a host. To optimize the download time, get the file from that guy with the T1.
"What's the business model of Kazaa or Morpheus? How will they make money to support being around long term if the idea is to steal it and give it away for free?"
The business model is to take cash from spyware vendors in exchange for sneaking their spyware into the client.
Of course, for an open-source client like Gnucleus, the point is to make music available, not to make money, which renders his argument moot.
And that is why P2P will outlast paid music: As long as there's open-source authors who want a P2P client, they will get it.
The world can be wrong today for once.