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HMV to Sell Digital Downloads

Posted by michael on from the hear-no-evil dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Sales of digital music downloads on sites like PressPlay and MusicNet have been a bust so far and for good reason. They cost too much, have too many restrictions and the palette of music you get to download is too limited. They have almost nothing to offer over what the various P2P networks give you for free. So why do record chains like HMV want to get in the game? Simple, these services cut out the middlemen and if they should ever succeed record retailers would be left out in the cold. Research shows there is a percentage of consumers who will pay for digital tunes if the conditions are right. They aren't now, but market forces will push them to improve the terms or die. PressPlay has already capitulated to some of these limitations. To protect their interests in the long term, retailers like HMV and Tower records have jumped on board and signed on with On Demand Distribution (OD2) - a company co-founded by Peter Gabriel to be a wholesaler of digital music tunes - to provide the music and the back end to their new services. HMV's service launches in September at five pounds at month (about 7 bucks), a price point which will mean nothing if the song selection sucks."

6 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The times they are a' changin by evilmonkey_666 · · Score: 3, Informative
    How refreshing it is to see intelligence in corporate America once more.

    HMV is based in the UK.

    --


    - PS. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R where eliminated.
  2. Quality and eMusic by Moderator · · Score: 3, Informative

    How is this any different from EMusic, a company that offers entire albums for download at something like $9.99/month?

    --
    The World is Yours.
    1. Re:Quality and eMusic by Kanon · · Score: 3, Informative

      The difference is that Emusic doesn't care what you do with the mp3s once you've downloaded them whereas HMVs servivce will only allow you to burn (Or have insecure copies) of a small number a month. (See the OD2 homepage)

      From where I'm sitting Emusic seems to be the better option (As long as you like older music and bad Euro death metal :) )

  3. HMV sell region-free DVD player.... by anonymous+cupboard · · Score: 5, Informative
    HMV are interesting, they publish music but they also retail it and have quite a big retail chain inEurope (Ibelieve they are also linked with Virgin Records as well now). Of course this means they are in the middle of the music-sharing etc. disputes. An interesting fact is they seem to be selling region-free DVD players in their retail outlets and, most importantly, advertising the fact.

    What this means is they are not automatically either RIAA or MPAA friends. Good luck to them.

  4. HMV has sort of already been offering this by Steve+Cowan · · Score: 4, Informative
    At least in Canada, I have browsed HMV's site a few times in the last year looking for specific products that turned out to be only available as .wmv downloads. Even though the they are in (yuck) Windows Media format, it is definitely a forward step.

    The downside was the price. I was looking to order some CD's from the "Ultra-Lounge" collection but they were only offered as digital downloads, and the price for the download was actually more than I had paid for some of the CDs from that collection that I had already bought!

    If HMV can pull off this pay-for-download feature and actually keep prices good and cheap, then distributors will have good reason to be shaking in their boots. But if prices turn out to be unreasonable, then I'm concerned that HMV will be trying to merely squeeze out distributors while keeping prices unreasonably high.

    Remember: right now artists get about 6 to 10 cents per song, up to a maximum of 10 songs, per album that is sold. That means most artists see a maximum of $1 from a CD that sells for over $15. And that's putting it simply: in most record deals with major labels that dollar goes towards recoupable expenses (production costs, legal costs, shipping, manufacturing, the whole bit).

    A big price break here could cause consumers to purchase a lot more product, which in the long run is good for consumers and artists, probably works out well for companies like HMV, and the knuckle-dragging major labels will barely be affected at all. So as long as they can stick to offering cheap digital downloads, this is excellent news.

  5. Even better... by dmaxwell · · Score: 4, Informative

    Use a good LAME VBR preset. Even at 192 kbits, there is going to be a lot of wasted storage space and transmission bandwidth. There is no reason to encode dead silence at 192 kbits. I've been using LAME's --r3mix preset and getting 8:1 compression (on average) with excellent quality on my CDs. For crying out loud, VBR has been out for years.