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HMV to Sell Digital Downloads
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."
Somebody out there actually realizes that the current music business model will eventually fail. How refreshing it is to see intelligence in corporate America once more.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
If the online music industry had music files that where in a much higher quality format than what is supported on CD, I'd definitely take a look at what they have to offer.
The majority of MP3's are ripped from CD's so the quality is limited to the quality of the CD.
DVD Music and other new formats are slowly working their way into the market, but if these online pay music sites offered these formats with no large initial purchase of equipment, they would definitely turn a few heads.
I hate the concept of subscription models. All of these services want to rope you into month after month of fees. Everyone from Microsoft to music wants the luxury of a constant income stream.
I don't buy CDs every month, why would I pay to download songs every month? Same goes for software.
Let me come in, buy one or two songs for a buck (and give me my fair use rights to them), and maybe I'll be back in a couple months to spend more.
As it currently stands, the majority of dance/electronic music is only released on vinyl. However the CD dj is no longer a novelty, but the problem arises of finding music on CD. But the current amount of CD dj's don't warrant the need for widespread CD releases. It seems like a PERFECT idea to sell this type of music online, with the intention of people buring the music for their own use. You can't even find much new dance music on P2P networks, so there isn't a whole lot of competition. And I think that many DJ's would jump at this opportunity. You can buy or pirate pop/rock anywhere, but the dance music scene is no where to be found in many american outlets.
Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive.
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.
...we do start paying for music like this, and get mp3s in return, and the RIAA comes cruising along the networks and tags us for having "copyrighted content" on our computers?
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
Here is the next Brilliant Idea..
Since Radio and record Lables have acted monopolistic in nature to reducing the choics of quality music..
One would think if one offered a P2p music service with the ability for local bands to add their works and a play sample that this would be a very big business idea..
Hey Music execs WE WANT CHOICE!!!!!!!!Hey Music execs WE WANT CHOICE!!!!!!!!Hey Music execs WE WANT CHOICE!!!!!!!!Hey Music execs WE WANT CHOICE!!!!!!!!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
HMV is just trying to make some money here. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. They're in business to sell entertainment products; don't ever ever expect them to give it away. Why do you think they call it the entertainment industry and not the entertainment social laboratory?
One reason people might pay HMV a few bucks a month is for access to a wider range of music. The music on the P2P sites reflects the interests of the people who put it there, and they all seem to be 20-year-old college students.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
What this means is they are not automatically either RIAA or MPAA friends. Good luck to them.
- Music stored available in multiple standard formats with multiple bit rates: OGG,MP3,FLAC,SHN
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A pricing structure starting at $10/month going up to $30/month based upon bit rates, not the amount of songs you download. At $10/month you only get to download 64kbps mp3's, $15/month for 128, working your way up to $30+/month for flac or shn downloads that are lossless.
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Every CD ever made period.
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Allow transfer to portables and CD's
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An intuitive web interface, instead of building some bulky windows client that does everything your computer already does: CD burning, music manager, etc; just have a well designed web interface that works on all platforms with all browsers.
Now if they can just figure out a way to pay the RIAA and the artists, we will be set!Honestly, I think the part many are missing is the fact that most people still need their music to reside on a physical piece of CD media before they can enjoy listening to it.
This is the real reason behind your statement (and consequently your logic) that you'll opt to go "buy a CD" instead of download a file.
There's an entire infrastructure built around the public listening to their music on compact discs - and no p2p network can change that fact.
The recording industry needs to address this before they begin trying to make money on downloaded MP3 songs!
As I've said many times before, a really good alternative for them would be building computerized kiosks that let the customer burn his/her own selection of songs onto a high-quality CD - and pay for it by the song. (Probably by taking a resultant printed receipt up to the counter/checkout lane with the shiny new disc)
This would eliminate the issue of requiring huge amounts of physical store space to display all the music. (Instead, they might have a tradeoff of a little bit of "back room" space taken up with a server containing all the digital data that makes up the music collection, and some boxes of blank media to reload the kiosk with when it runs out.)
I would think most retails stores would absolutely love this idea, as would consumers who can finally buy their own "custom mix" CDs - instead of paying for songs they don't like/want, just to get a few that they do. By tallying up exactly which songs sell best, the recording industry gets much more accurate feedback of what's "hot" and what's "not", too.
Selling downloaded MP3 music has only very limited appeal in a world where many people don't even own the tools required to move the songs onto media playable in their car/home stereo. (The rest of us do, but we don't always appreciate taking all the time/effort out to do so.)
Speaking as someone who hasn't bought a cd in almost 10 years, I was really suprised when I learned of EMusic. I am a fan of punk, ska & hardcore, and glady pay EMusic $15.00/mo in order to download their vast selection of music in that category. Granted, their other sections lack content, so my girlfriend gets upset when she can't find her newest pop album, but I am rather happy with the selection that they offer me.
Digital music downloads is what's known as a 'Disruptive technology'. Every industry has disruptive technologies that, when they appear, are not as good as what is currently in place, but end up improving to a point where they replace the original sustaining technology.
An example of disruptive technology is the 8" hard drive. The 14" hard drives were fast and stored a lot of data, but few of the disk companies bothered to make 8" drives when they came out because they were slower and didn't store as much data. Not only that, but they cost more per megabyte. But the market for Minicomputers demanded lower cost (even if it was higher cost per meg) overall drives, so they started improving. Only one or two hard drive companies from the 14" market survived the switch to 8" drives because they didn't see the benefit, and their customers didn't either, until it was too late.
The same thing happened again when the 5.25" HDs came out. Only a couple manufacturers of 8" drives stayed in business, and only because they spent money on the 5.25" drives well before they were good enough to sell, or profitable.
Finally, look at the excavating market: Up until the 1940s, steam shovels were all cable activated. They used cables to lift the arms and control the scoop, not hydraulics. When the first hydraulic dirt movers came out, they couldn't move anywhere near as much dirt and they cost more to operate, but eventually they became more powerful, safer, and cheaper to own and operate then cable operated stuff. NONE of the steam shovel companies that were in business in the 1940s survived past the 1950s because they didn't see the benefit of selling what they saw as inferior technology, which hydraulics definately were in the beginning.
This created opportunities for the startups to dominate the small hydraulics market unopposed until they were able to grow into and take over the domain of the cable operated steam shovel.
What HMV (and these other companies) are doing is learning from the mistakes of those companies. Digital music download is a disruptive technology to the sustaining technology of physical music purchase. It's not as high quality as CDs now, and it has lots of deficiencies, but they know that eventually, the market for digital downloads of music may grow to compete with and even replace physical media sales. That's not what customers want right now, but the market and technologies change, so 5-10 years from now, customers will demand this, and whoever is in the business first will have lots of advantages.
Remember, what the customer wants is not always best, and if you spend your life following the customers requests only, you'll eventually go out of business when a disruptive technology appears. It happened to the 14" drive manufacturers who listened to their customers (who weren't interested in slower, lower capacity drives), and it'll happen to the music industry that doesn't embrace and extend downloads.
For more data on this, read 'The Innovators Dilemma' by Christensen.
Let me come in, buy one or two songs for a buck (and give me my fair use rights to them), and maybe I'll be back in a couple months to spend more.
One problem with such an arrangement is that you'd be forced to buy mislabled songs, corrupted songs and so forth. If they charge on a per song basis, customers will demand some sort of quality control so they don't end up spending money downloading crap. And that means a lot more work for the downloading service. On KaZaA I find lots of songs that are mislabled (wrong band, wrong song, etc.). Doesn't bother me too much because I can always try to download the correct song later. But if I was paying for those downloads, I'd be mucho pissedo (that's Spanish for "very upset", BTW). Another problem would be the RIAA flodding the service with those bogus MP3 files which have been discussed on slashdot before. Purposely corrupted MP3s that cost you money to download.
Your idea is nice but, as you point out, the downloading service is gonna want a steady revenue stream and they certainly don't want to have to inspect each MP3 on their service for quality and accuracy. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a per-song downloading service.
GMD
watch this
SimpleFiles is my project. What I do is charge a small amount ($0.02 usually) per file to cover my costs, the rest of the price is set by the seller. There is no subscription to pay, and you can choose which individual files you want to sell. An aspiring artist could put their mp3's (or any DRM format if they want to) up on the site and charge what THEY think is right.
Travis
I do buy CDs every month. In fact I usually buy several each week. Music is important to me, so I'm happy to spend £20-£30 per week on it. A subscription model would be a godsend to me, but only if they have the music I want. The kind of stuff I listen to seems to only be available in specialist stores. Much as I love spending a Sunday afternoon browsing through these stores, if I knew I could get all the releases I want for a monthly subscription, I'd be sorely tempted. I'd probably still buy the stuff I really like on CD too.
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.
And for the record, I did make heavy use of these machines back in high school. I'd create mix tapes by a dozen bands I was curious about but hadn't yet heard -- the Sugarcubes, let's say -- and come back later to buy full albums by the bands I ended up liking. (Mind you, this was before the popularization of both the Internet and in-store "try-before-you-buy" listening.) Pretty much the same thing a lot of people use Kazaa/Gnutella for today -- a sampler platter. And the labels would opposed a CD-based version for all the same reasons.
Shame, really...
I subscribe to emusic, and have for a long time. Unlimited downloads, mp3 format. It's mostly not major label stuff, which is a good thing for me-- why should I support the RIAA?
The only drawback is sometimes they don't add music as quickly as I wish they would. Still, they've got enough music in there to keep me busy exploring new genres and bands at no risk to me but the downloading and listening time (and their transfer rates are so high that download time is negligible).
Up front admission: I work one of OD2's rivals. So if you like, take what I say with a pinch of salt.
OD's service, as well as ours, does not cut out the middle man. The labels still get paid. OD2 paid the labels for this content (albeit by offering shares in themselves, not with actual cash). The subscription fee you pay does, therefore, filter back to the label. I would be very surprised to see any minor label, let alone any independant band hhave content available.
OD2 are well known within the industry for offering Microsoft formats only (perhaps one of the reasons MSN have choose them to power the MSN downloads.
Their licensing model is a music "rental" scheme. The problem, for slashdot users, is this seems unacceptable to the "technical public". The normal public may well go for this, after all, 99% of people accept the video hire model, why not music hire. However, it is, in my opinion, still too limited. If I am going to pay for access I want more than 25 downloads per month. I'd happily pay £10 pcm for access to all of EMI's back catalogue. Maybe one day EMI will listen and go for it (and preferably use my code base *grin*).
However, the suggestion in the story that "these services cut out the middlemen and if they should ever succeed record retailers would be left out in the cold" is rubbish. The labels provide the music, of course they get paid.
This shouldn't pose a problem - sell the songs for 1 euro a pop from fast servers and provide "community" features such as artist news, chat, song rating, special offers etc. and people will come. Many users would gratefully pay a reasonable price for guaranteed delivery and the other value added content on the site.
You can get 192 kbit files which sound no better and even worse than 128 kbit MP3 it's all down to the encoders. The latest version of LAME for example produces excellent quality files if you're willing to wait longer for your encoding. I've seen alot of 128Kbit MP3's encoded with intensity stereo which should only be used with 96 kbit or less rates. Also MP3 files tend to lose alot of harmonics regardless of the bitrate used, newer formats seem to do better in this regard. I personally like the sound of OGG and whilst I generally feel WMA sounds worse than MP3 some of files I've heard have sounded very "warm". Finally, 192 kbit is 50% larger and hence will take 50% longer to download and remember there are an awful lot of people who don't have broadband.
Sadly, HMV is not an American franchise. Granted, I'd kill to see on of them stateside, but I know from experience they're all over SE Asia. They are so much better than our chains it's pathetic... sigh
You need a FREE iPod Nano
All you have to do is play off the weaknesses of the current p2p models and they'd be set. Lord knows their's plenty of them.
1) Consistent high download speeds.
2) What you see is what you get downloads, ie; ensuring their quality (no cracks, loops, hiss, bogus files, etc).
3) Stable downloads. No "need more sources", "qued" and all of that BS.
4) No sideband search traffic or p2p downloaders sucking up my bandwidth.
The only reason why we use p2p is because it's the only option anymore, not because it's good. But to these three, you have to add:
5) Downloaders rights. You pay for a song/subscription, it's yours to copy, burn, etc. Some services erase your archive or it becomes useless if you quit their service. Funny, but I don't see the repo man coming after my T3 magazines if I don't renew. I bought it, it's mine.
If you combined these with a reasonable download price, and maybe some extra goodies thrown in for your patronage, then I'm betting you'd actually have a snowballs chance of grabbing a large share of the legal market. It'll happen eventially, but damn, they are seriously behind the curve.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Your customers are telling you what they want and how much they will spend. You can't pay for this kind of market research! Summary:
.MP3 format. Read that again. Again! .zip .tar or stuffit archive folks)
1) Must be
2) Digital media is about choice and freedom - not piracy. We want to play the music on whatever device/software we have handy. Not just the ones you want to sell us.
3) Let me either subscribe OR purchase entire cd's at once. (have we ever heard of a
4) $10 to $30 subscriptions and $8 to $12 per album.
Let me get my 2x4... Bonk!
"Smile, listen, agree, and then do whatever the fuck you wanted to do anyway." ~Robert Downey Jr.
Until the record companies figure out how to make us interested they can lose all the money they want.
-- SIGFPE
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.
There are markets that would be willing to subscribe to a service for a flat rate and be able to download music, in unrestricted, unencumbered fashion. Why?? because the P2P networks, as awesome as they are, still have problems. You still have to hunt around for songs, songs are named incorrectly, people are hosting them from a 56K connection sometimes that 20 poeple are trying to share, some people flat out refuse to share files, too many connections, etc.
It takes time to hunt, and it can be slow. And just because you found one song you like, doesn't mean that you can easily find ALL the songs in that album. And they still require you have an idea of what you're looking for. If you just want to sample some random music in a certain genre, your options are still rather limited. Usenet is great for this, and people pay money to major news servers for the privilage of being exposed to music they've never heard of before, yet someone else thought enough of to bother to post it in the first place. Not everything is great, but I've discovered a lot of cool stuff that way, and I probably never would have found it any other way.
So if a service was to offer fast downloads, accurate names, full albums, quick searches that return results, and random samplings, or even a full archive list available, sorted by genre and other means, they could make it. And of course, no silly encryption crap. It's not really necessary anyway.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Just going to chip in with my $0.02 worth of "what I'll pay for" when it comes to digital music distribution:
#1 - Must be an open encoding format (MP3, OGG, etc). I will NOT EVER subscribe to any service that requires any digital rights management / licensing. When I buy the music, be it online or on a CD, it's MINE, and I don't want to have to worry about screwing with licensing if I move the media to my portable MP3 player, upgrade my computer, reinstall windows, move to linux, etc.
#2 - Single tracks must be available, not just whole albums.
#3 - Purchasing a whole album must be less than the cost of purchasing individual tracks by at least 20%
#4 - The total charged for a full album must be $10 or less.
#5 - If downloading the full album, graphic files for printing CD covers/labels must be available as an option, for perhaps $1 to $2 more.
#6 - Consumers must have the choice to pay for either a monthly subscription (unlimited downloads, but lower quality - perhaps 64kbps), or purchase music as a single transaction. If the consumer has a monthly subscription and wants high-quality, they should be able to purchase the high-quality version for half the regular price.
There you have it. Now I'm expecting that some people will get all bent out of shape about my requirements. Please be mindful that these are MY requirements, not what I'm realistically expecting the industry to adopt.
Of course if they don't adopt them, or something very close, I won't be a member of a pay service.
The most important requirement is #1 - I am absolutely inflexible on that.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
Here's the kicker: 'But subscribers may only burn five tracks per month.' Hmmmm.....
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's an interesting point, this whole "get onto the emerging/disruptive technology before everyone else does".
Of course, the problem is spotting which technology is truly disruptive and going to replace the existing one, and which one is a hare-brained idea. Hindsight is everything. Remember the people who managed to warm otherwise level-headed (I suppose) venture capitalists to the idea that everybody was going to (insert famous dot.com disaster here).
My hindsight prediction is: Considering that people are already actively downloading digital music, and not because they're interested in trying out new technology but because they aren't able or willing to obtain the music in the traditional way, this is probably a real disruptive technology, not a dead dot.com end.
On the subject of how on earth anybody at all (least of all the artists) is ever going to make any money out of it, my crystal ball is silent.
How hard is it to burn wav files onto a CD ?
It seems so obvious... the problem is not that the music services make you pay, it's that they don't provide what people want.
I'm willing to pay, but what frosts me is the idea of paying for something that's NOWHERE NEAR AS GOOD as what I was getting for free.
I enjoyed downloading really weird stuff from Napster and AudioGalaxy. Are the Sonys and Vivendis of the world ever likely to provide Harry Champion singing "I'm 'Enery the Eight I Am?" Cab Calloway singing "Nagasaki?" Joe Venuti playing "The Hot Canary?" Raymond Scott playing the Clavivox? Charles Trenet singing "Fleur Bleu?" Kay Thompson singing "Eloise?" Bernard Cribbins singing "'Ole in the Ground?"
Or will they just have Britney Spears?
The solution is obvious. Let people upload and share material. "Electronic record store" is the wrong model. "Electronic flea market" or "electronic swap meet" is the right model. The only thing that needs to be changed from what Napster was doing is to do what flea markets do: charge a small fee to participants.
I have these items because other people that share my weird tastes were willing to provide them. Nobody has to wait for some executive to decide whether there's money in releasing them. If anyone thinks they have something that might interest someone, they upload it and if you're right, they download it.
This frees the service from all the cost of acquiring and converting recordings themselves.
Now, how much does sharing REALLY cost the record companies? There's not a doubt in my mind that a) the amount it affects them is tiny, almost lost in the noise; b) if it does represent lost revenues, it's a TINY loss; and that c) a solution along the lines of the "blank VCR tape tax" or the similar charge for home audio digital media could take care of it.
The other piece of the puzzle is micropayments. Why does EVERYONE want to charge me $4.95 and $8.95 and $11.95 per month? To cover the costs of charging me, or something? A jukebox will play a single song for a single payment $0.25. If we can put a man on the moon we should be able to provide an Internet service that delivers what a jukebox can deliver.
So, what you have a service patterned on the very successful Napster or Audiogalaxy, the only difference being that to access it, you need to charge $15 to set up your account, and every time you download a song, $0.25 gets deducted from the account.
There's no reason in the world other than pigheadedness why this couldn't work, and could be very profitable for music companies.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I'll wait until the price gets reasonable". I'm still waiting
I'm in the same boat. I have a laserdisk player. I've been buying tapes waiting for the promise that disks are cheaper to make because they can be pressed in high volume. They changed from laser disk to a macrovision and region encumbered format that is even cheaper to press, but sadly it's still more expensive than tape. I also am still waiting.
There is a MP3 jukebox recorder by Arcos that does a fine job preserving my audio tapes and disks by enabling encoding to MP3. Maybe someone will do the same for me in the future so I can back up my video collection to a more stable medium.
After I bought the rights to a song on tape or disk (LP) I was even hoping they would provide an exchange where I could turn in stretched tapes and scratched LP's for a small media exchange fee. It never happened. You have to back it up yourself or buy a new copy of the medium and license. (new CD)
The music industry severly lacks in consumer support in supporting the products the consumers have purchased. At least I can find a mechanic to repair my older car when it gets scratched. No such support exists with the music industry. Too bad.. I have boxes of cassettes and LP's in need of service. It looks like I have to do it myself.
The truth shall set you free!
Err, just about everyone and his brother sells region-free DVD players outside the US. In fact, you'd have to look pretty hard to find a major European retailer that won't sell you a region-free player if that's what you want.
This is especially true in Britain where buying US-imported Region 1 encoded discs doesn't present a language barrier and, amongst DVD afficionados, is often the preferred option.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The "we got 2 hit singles and 45 minutes of filler" business has been SOP for decades. Often happens in order to quickly capitalize on a new band's initial success. Alas, many follks only have two decent pieces in them. It won't go away as long as the basic format for selling recorded music is something -- album, CD, DVD -- that packages several tracks.
The record industry suckers almost everyone into thinking commercial music is going to change the world. It isn't, but the con sure sells a lot of crap.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
>> "Or even the mental tools to comprehend."
You wouldn't happen to be a Linux user, would you? A number of them believe intellectual prowess is indicated by choice of OS.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
They have almost nothing to offer over what the various P2P networks give you for free.
I think this should have read, "They have almost nothing to offer over what the various P2P networks give you illegally, but for free."
And so are the moderators who modded you up.
/. article a while ago about a small label hand burning CD's and mailing them to you for $4.95, shipping included. And making a profit doing it. $1 of that went to the artist. Assuming there are at least 10 tracks on the CD that's 50 cents per track. And that includes a physical CD, hand burning each CD, and mailing it. Large volume file downloads are practicly free in comparison.
The suggestion is for the the MUSIC COMPANY to sell downloads of the music they sell anyway. THEY HAVE THE MASTERS. It would take gross negligence for them to sell you a mislabeled or currupted song.
I ran some of the numbers. As long as they do a large volume of sales I think they could be rather profitable at 25 cents a track. The volume of sales and free publicity are guarenteed at that price. The bandwidth, 24-hour staff, and location costs combined are pennies per download. A few cents per download for the artists. Sell it as 80 downloads for a $20 subscription to avoid micropayments. And it makes a great gift-certificate.
Sceptical they could do it for a quater a download? There was a
At 25 cents a track for legitimate, high quality, and well indexed music, it WOULD be cheap enough to defeat P2P.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
No shit!? I didn't think we had any... Too bad they're not more widespread!
You need a FREE iPod Nano
May be interesting that he has a new album to be released in September.