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Audiogalaxy Returns as Pay Service
Triv writes "I just got an email from Audiogalaxy explaining how they have come back from the dead as a subscription service, labelled as Rhapsody."
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Woo, come here Microsoft, I want to rent a new OS!
...for 8 days at least. I predict they'll see a massive drop-off in users then.
Does anyone see any future in subscription services, or will we stay in p2p anarchy for the rest of our days (or until the megacorporations take the networks down)?
If they do that, then they'll be stealing from the rights holders (to use the label's parlance).
Artists != labels
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
There are a lot of ISPs that don't have their own Usenet servers anymore. Those who do often don't carry the large volume *.bin.* groups. Germany's largest broadband ISP is an example for this. I'm surprised the RIAA isn't sueing the remaining into not carrying the (majority of the) bin groups, their whole purpouse is to violate copyrights, after all. There are free servers, but non-surprisingly, they're crap. The decent ones are pay services. They're pretty cool, though, if you're willing to pay for Warez.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Oth is the FTP media search site. Most sites indexed on AG's FTP search are also indexed there, as well as sites garnered from IRC and ratio traders. Highly recommended, its what I mostly use now.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
Yep, Oth rules. And it's from way back. I distinctly remember how I got my first music using Oth when that whole MP3 thing was still very mysterious. I barely knew what FTP was, but after being lucky enough to not find a ratio site I acquired what I had been looking for. In the meantime since using it years ago I used a lot of P2P, but now I'm back to Oth for any serious fix. :)
FTP servers are a good source, anyhow, because you get full albums, high quality and all this without really having to do anything manually. You often have to put something into it, that is upload an album the siteop doesn't have, yet, but with nice siteops this gets you a personal login with an extremely good ratio (upload 1 kb, download 10) or even leech access.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Seriously. Is such a paid, streaming content model really a viable solution? When Thomas Jefferson put the idea of intellectual property into the Constitution of the United States, he did so because he realized that information leaks; once people learn something, they can reuse that knowledge. If there was no protection to intellectual property, people would not be encouraged to share knowledge with others. Writers would not write, inventors would not invent, artists would not . So in the US Constitution, it says: The reason why this is important is spelled out in Jefferson's own writings: His assumptions are based on the fact that you can not control what people do with information that you give to them. If you hand someone a book, they can transcribe it. If you give someone a physical invention, they can disassemble it. But if you give them a new form of media, say, a song on a copy-protected CD, and they can no longer listen to it except on approved devices that they cannot copy from, why should the government provide the same protection to you? The record companies and movie studios want to have their cake and eat it too. They want traditional copyright protection, technological copyright protection, and a government guarantee of technological copyright protection. They want to deprive all those bearded Linux hippies their DeCSS, so they can't watch bootleg Buffy the Vanpire Slayer DVDs in their parents' basement. But if they have technological protection, then why should the government give them traditional protection? It was only there because information was hard to protect as property.
How far are we going to let the copyrighters go? We need to remind people that copyright, like most laws in the US, is a balance between two forces, and the scale should not be tipped too far to one side.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
It's tangible enough if I always happen to want to listen to the music at a computer. This is, for most people, not the case. What I want to be able to do is download the music, so I can put it on my portable player, or, maybe even play it on one of my linux boxes (since this is a windows only program that would be out of the question).
Will I pay $10/month for an on-line music service, yes. In fact I already have done this, using emusic. And with that service I get mp3's that I can download, move around, and enjoy wherever I want. Hell, I'd probably pay up to $20/month if the quality of the music was good enough and diverse enough to make me want to keep coming back for more.
This will flop, just like all the other ones. The logic espoused by the record labels will be that they could make money on this sort of service if it wasn't for all those P2P pirates. In reality it is simply a matter of them not providing a quality service. I love that my privacy and freedom will get trampled because they can't make a quality service. My message to the RIAA: give us what we want, and we will pay for it. Don't give us what we want, and YOU will pay for it.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
-davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
I know being legal isn't a big point on Slashdot. But, with everyone on here whining for a legal way to get music electronically, this is one. It may not be the best, but it's the beginning of options.
Not everyone wants to steal, steal, steal....
So what's going to stop me from firing up Sound Forge, record from the wave device, encode to MP3, and add it to my MP3 directory?
If someone desperately wants a song, I'm sure they wouldn't mind taking a few extra minutes doing that.
I pay for cable to watch on my TV, which is where I watch television anyhow. On the other hand, with this service I'd be paying to listen to music on my computer which is not where I listen to it. I listen to music on my stereo system, or in my car, or on my portable when I go for a walk. I'm not about to pay money for a service that makes me listen to music in a way that is inconvenient to my life.
Is this worth $10/month over free Kazaa? Not in its current form. It's way worthwhile if I can actually download music in a non-proprietary protected format. Hell, it's worth $20/month. Why? Because with Kazaa and the like, I have to dig to find the music I want, it's not always in good quality, and it's never organized as an album. I will pay for that convenience, and I think a lot of people would. I also think most people would rather that the artists were getting money and would prefer to pay a little and insure that than just outright steal the stuff.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
large archive, and if there's something i want and they don't have, they try to get it
i get to choose the quality: 64kpbs mono for a quick preview to cd-quality, with some bitrates in between
nice and/or usable (+quick) interface with working search function (ever tried searching for A on cddb or freedb?)
since they'll generate a user profile based on my downloads anyway, they could suggest other artists (like amazon)
pricing could (loosely) depend on traffic, so previews would be cheap or free and high-quality would still cost less than the cd
lyrics, links, booklets, etc.
i'm sure you can think of more...
If you don't like breaking the law and/or to a certain degree see that music should be either bought by you or given to you by the author ( RIAA, DMCA[, ABCD and the rest of the alphabet soup] is way too restrictive and enforce silly laws that doesn't protect the artist ... ERROR! BUFFER OVERFLOW *** WARNING! CPU TEMPERATURE WAY TO HIGH ...) you should use a subscription service such as emusic which lets you download the music. Or you could by the actual records and rip them (which according to some copyright notice isn't legal, under no circumstances.)
Look a monkey!
This is just a slightly-rebranded version of listen.com's Rhapsody, and the price is the same, so I don't see how this is likely to save AudioGalaxy.
Too bad, I was feeling like plundering anything I could during the free period...
Warning, I'm really pissed off.
Audiogalaxy Satellite(save for the eventual spyware)was one the most amazing things ever to happen on the internet. On the original service I was able to find new artists and sample their music in full before making a purchase decision. This included very indenpendant artists that I would have never heard on the radio and certainly aren't available on Rhapsody.
I was able to find all the tracks from the soundtrack to the movie Real Genius, which is one of my favourites. The soundtrack wasn't ever even released for purchase!
All in all I bought a large handfull of discs that I never would have before thanks to their service. Hell, some of the artists I would have never discovered had it not been for the "If you like this artist, try this one" feature. On Satellite, it seemed, no album/musician/track was too obscure to be found.
On the other hand, Rhapsody costs $10 a month. You can't download anything. It uses WMA for encoding. Music is only added as the central company adds it, which makes it very difficult for non mainstream music to compete. You can't share anything. None of this music(which you are paying for)can be downloaded to a portable mp3 player. Last I checked, Radiohead wasn't available as a listening option. I looked around in the David Bowie category and sauntered up to the Low album, which is a favorite of mine. It was missing half the tracks.
This is f*cking rediculous. I would have been quite happy if they could just revive Satellite with a subscription system, paying the artists as they go for downloads. It doesn't seem so farfetched to me anyway. Once again this situation gives the RIAA way too much power and leverage. And the modern brilliance of taking your independant record, releasing it on P2P, and watching your music propagate throughout the networks and into people's view is dead.
For $10 a month, go to a local record store that lets you listen to CDs, and check shit out for free. Then look for a used copy, and give the RIAA the hot and bothered middle finger.
I've used audiogalaxy ever since it's launch. It was my only source for music. I refuse to buy cd's, at least not the ones under RIAA labels. When they shut down, I was lost. I can't bring myself to using a P2P. The problem with them is that they make it too easy for anybody to use, making the networks crowded, unreliable, slow, etc. At least with AG, you had to have a certain degree of ftp knowledge etc., something that kept the teenie boppers off and the geeks in control. Now I find myself struggling to find music. Screw you AG, screw you.
I also have a question? What is to prevent somebody from releasing some open source software that is a clone of AG? Surely it is not complicated, basically a database with online addition capabilities, search functions, and a crawler. Legal implications? If there was an easy to use open source solution, the databases would be created faster than the legal process works, something that happened with p2p clients.
The good
- large catalog
- good editorial content & categorization
- sound quality
- files start playing very quickly
The badMany of the "it sucks 'cause it's streaming" critics here don't get it. It's not about having a bunch of songs to download & collect as tangible property (that would be a product). This is a service, like a night in a hotel, a taxi ride, a massage, Netflix, cable TV, a DVD rental from blockbuster, renting an apartment. When you think about it, this model may make more sense, you don't really own copyrighted music when you buy a CD (if you think I'm wrong, try to copy & sell it to people). Since you no longer really need CDs to listen to it, why not move away from buying the music and start just listening to it, at no marginal cost.
The problem with this is that people like to collect music. It is a big source of their identity. They like the experience of choosing a piece of music to buy, and knowing it's always there.
There was a big short-sighted article on Salon a while ago about how great Netflix is, and how music services should be like this. The problem with the analogy is that DVDs are copy protected in such a way that most people don't even bother to try and that people only want to experience movies a few times, and always in the foreground. You can listen to good music over and over, and in the background while you work, drive, cook, whatever. People generally don't "steal" their netflix movies. People will "steal" any music they possibly can.
I've had fun with Rhapsody these last few weeks. I've discovered some new stuff and listened to some old stuff I haven't heard for a long time. But because people like to collect thier music, they can't make it possible for me to download, burn, and listen where I want to (the car, mostly). Someone could sign up (or do the free trial, even) download everything they could possibly want and then cancel their subscription. As a result, I'm probably not going to sign up.
Imagine a future where you have a low montly "media bill" that allows you to see what you want, when you want, listen to what you want, where you want and with no additional cost for the next thing. I would love it and actually want to pay for it. Would you?
But since I have the eyes of fellow Usenet users allow me to try again.
Bottom line: Anyone that has used Usenet knows it is supperior to P2P networks.
The only advantage that P2P networks enjoy over Usenet is the ability to find whatever you are looking for immediatly. With Usenet if you want something obscure you will probably not find it today. But the beauty of usenet is if you request it, and be patient it will be posted. And during that time you will find tons of stuff to peak your interest. And the audio quality is almost always supperior to P2P networks.
That being the case here is my question.
Why is it that the media says NOTHING of usenet?
I pick up the newspaper and P2P was invented by Satan himself. But usenet is not mentioned anywhere.
I am not complaining mind you. I have always just kinda shook my head whenever I read about the evils of P2P wondering this.
Once again... I'm willing to pay, but I have to GET something as good as I used to get.
There's no way that "Over 17,000 albums by over 7,000 top artists" is going to come close to the richness and variety we got from of individual fans trading their individual favorites.
I am now going to make a quick test on four items I obtained from the "real" Audiogalaxy a few months ago. This is an authentic test, I do not know yet what I am going to find. Bernard Cribbins, 'Ole in the Ground; Harry Champion, "I'm Enerey the Eighth;" Nervous Norvus, "Ape Call;" and the MIT Chorallaries, "We Are The Engineers."
Well, it seems you can't search for individual titles unless you actually join, but with great labor you can page through the artist list, and I find:
Bernard Cribbins: Nope.
Harry Champion: Nope.
Nervous Norvus: Nope.
The MIT Chorallaries: Nope.
Now, someone is saying "What kind of market is there for the MIT Chorallaries, for pete's sake?" Well, all I can say is, when Audiogalaxy was for real, _I_ wanted to hear them and _someone_ out there wanted to share them.
Without SHARING, all you're ever going to get is Britney Spears and Elvis Presley.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I used many different audio searches back in the day, including Audiogalaxy back when it was simply an FTP search engine; it used to scan networks for FTP servers, trying different usernames and passwords, and it was surprisingly successful. Then once they introduced the Satellite, Audiogalaxy stood out as the only place on the Internet where you could find obscure music. If I heard a song on SomaFM, by an artist I had never heard of, I could search for that artist on Audiogalaxy and download all their songs; it might take a week or two before the correct user signed on :D, but I'd eventually get the music. And if I liked it, I could go buy that artist's CD.
:D)
Now, Audiogalaxy has become a neo-Pressplay or Musicnet. It's a "filter-in" music search, except that it's only popular artists from the major labels represented there. I don't care about the streaming, or anything else; I'm just saddened that Audiogalaxy no longer offers the obscure music it was once famous for, and I can't even find out about that obscure music anymore because Soma FM is down.
AG, it seems, has sold out. Napster, obviously, sucks; FastTrack can hack your registry; the only realistic filesharing protocol left for Linux users is Gnutella, and it of course has scaling problems. As far as Linux users are concerned, then, the RIAA has certainly achieved its goal of blocking filesharing - but when they stop selling records, because nobody knows what to buy anymore, it shall be a problem. (You know, I almost wish that the Copyright Royalty Arbitration (CRAP) panel had required mandatory royalties for old-school radio, too - I'd just love to see the expression on the RIAA dudes' faces when their record sales drop 90%, because nobody knows what records to buy anymore.
I realize that I am in the minority here on Slashdot when it comes to my opinions about IP law, but there are some serious flaws in your logic. For example,
if they have technological protection, then why should the government give them traditional protection? It was only there because information was hard to protect as property.
By that reasoning, if I buy better locks and window bars for my house the police should no longer patrol around my house. The only reason they drive around my neighborhood is that it's so easy to break into houses and steal things, right?
Technological protection isn't intended to be a replacement for legal protection. The fact is that there is widespread, blatant disregard for the existing laws when it comes to copying intellectual property, and new digital technologies are making it easier and easier. And while new laws are in the pipeline it is unlikely that the U.S. government will provide additional enforcement. So companies that own the rights to digital music recordings (for example) want to find new ways to protect their property. They paid for the creation of the music, and they did that in order to be able to sell it and make a profit, and they want to be compensated when people use their property. This is true of both huge corporations and independent producers. And of software developers, movie producers, etc. etc. etc.
I have a lot of trouble understanding the current furor over all of this. It's as if the citizens of a city with a high crime rate are standing up and shouting "This isn't fair! We have been able to steal things for years and years without fear of being arrested, and now they are passing new laws and enforcing the old ones, and people are installing new security systems in their houses to keep us out! We have done it for so long that we now have a RIGHT to steal things!
I would love to see a poll taken about people's attitudes about this issue. I'd be willing to bet that there would be a direct, inverse correlation between 1) dislike for IP laws and technological copy protection and 2) the amount of creative work that a person has done. The more truly creative work that a person has produced in their lifetime, the more they would be in favor of strong copyright protection, both legal and technological.
And that would produce an indirect correlation with age. The younger the person, the less genuinely creative work they would have done and the more likely they would be to think that it is their "right" to make free copies of other people's creative work.
That, as far as I am concerned, is the "Unbelievable Crap".
- Good: Well, from the screenshots at AG's site, the interface looks well designed, though it does fill the entire screen in a manner
which is ill-suited for those who just want a music player. Like me. There better be a "compact" mode.
- Bad: From the list of available artists, I'd say they have a rather impressive collection for a RIAA-stomped file sharing service
making a comeback. Except of course we're now limited to a mere 300000 or so (probably fewer) tracks, and it's not possible to add your
own music to the mix anymore, download remixes, or download rare tracks that are hard to find elsewhere, legally or illegally - just the
stuff I used to use AG for.
- Good: They've got a free preview period. Which doesn't require you to give away CC details. I figure lots of people will sign up for
the preview only to dump it 2-20 hours later or when the preview runs out, whichever is sooner.
- Bad: It's no longer free. Well of course it's not, the users aren't providing the content anymore! Though $9.95/mo would be quite
nice provided the downloads were high-quality MP3 or OGG's - heck, even WMA's (wo DRM) would be preferable to the streaming shit they
currently offer. Which brings us right down to
...
- Bad: STREAMS! God, don't we all hate those things? Can't save them. Will definately require a special program to download and play, which means bugging down our systems with even more apps, probably loaded with DRM. Also, most of us aren't on connections that can handle a constant speed of 128-192kbps, especially not people living far away from the servers (which will be centralized, no doubt).
- Bad: No way to burn music to a CD (apart from analog copying - if I can hear it, I can record it) or otherwise get those streams to somewhere without an Internet connection. That thing alone renders the service utterly and completely useless to me as a music consumer. I believe I'm not alone in feeling that way.
- Bad: It's Windows only. No further explanation or comment req'd on that one
...
- Bad: It's only available in the US due to licensing restrictions. I mentioned above that not being able to carry stream music with rendered the service useless to me - well, since I live in Sweden, this "US only" thing kind of ruins it a little more.
Conclusion: This will crash and burn. It doesn't even try very hard to succeed, the people running AG know what it takes to please the crowds who want UNRESTRICTED, FREE FILE SHARING, not limited access to a closed library of songs from a relatively small selection of artists. This will fail, unless lots of people figure the music that's available is enough for them, and that they can live with the obvious drawbacks and restrictions - in the light that it is still quite possible and easy to get those very same tracks in MP3 or OGG format through any of the file sharing services still available and thriving. I might mention Gnutella, I might mention Direct Connect.Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
So, why don't you go look a giFT horse in the mouth?
At this moment, there are 720 users on the giFT OpenFT network, sharing a total of 5.2 terabytes of files. Sure, it's not as much as Kazaa...but it works under Linux and MacOSX and Kazaa doesn't. And it's not as much as Gnutella...but it works at all and Gnutella often doesn't. And the more people use it, the more useful it becomes. (Yeah, you do have to get it from CVS, and update frequently, but the installation instruction page has tips for doing that and it's really quite easy.)
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
$0.00/month or $0,000.00/year.
In the car.
On the tram/train.
Family cabin (no phone, not even cell phone).
Jogging (riiight.. let's just say, outside).
And heaven forbid, what if the server or whatnot is down? DoS'ed? Or my ISP?
Sorry, but unless your life is confined to your WLAN coverage area, mp3 is extremely much more portable, reliable and supported. Tell me again the advantage?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Whoa...easy, tiger...
The point you made at the end of your original comment was a good one. My comment was on your introductory paragraph - that's why I quoted it in my comment.
Learn to calm down and be less defensive - it will serve you well in life.
The point you made at the end of your original comment was a good one. My comment was on your introductory paragraph - that's why I quoted it in my comment.
The introductory paragraph was a synopsis of Jefferson's beliefs, so to say I'm "overstating my point" means you didn't read the rest of the post, where I actually state my point, in contrast to Jefferson's point.
But I should have known better; slashbots like you never read past the first two paragraphs before making a pseudo-pithy karma-whore comment to an out-of-context quote, so how can I fault you? You're just proving the stereotype. Congratulations.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
If you use Cooledit, you can save the stream of sound coming through your soundcard directly to an mp3. However, its not going to be insanely high quality if you are streaming it, and then compressing that with mp3 will make it even worse.
Jefferson was *against* copyrights and patents. He thought them unnatural. He only left them in as a compromise.
James Madison was the person who viewed copyrights (and patents) as necessary.
Here's something to consider (from an article at MSNBC):
"While Jefferson acknowledged that a limited copyright could potentially encourage creativity, it had not been demonstrated. Therefore, Jefferson wrote, "the benefit of even limited monopolies is too doubtful, to be opposed to that of their general suppression." "
Read the article at this link: "http://www.msnbc.com/news/594462.asp"
If you go to Monticello, the curators will proudly tell you that Jefferson invented a new type of plow that became popular, but he never patented out of principle.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Neither XM nor Sirius carry the music I enjoy listening to. And also, I don't think they have a version I can just carry around with me on a walk :)
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>
> ("Transfusion", anyone? "Zoomin' down the highway, doing 79...")
Audiogalactic doin' 79,
Got sued by Rosen now I'm feelin' fine,
Hey man, dig that, was that a "ded kitty" sign?
Transfusion, transfusion,
We're in desperate need of a cash infusion,
Never gonna download an MP3 again,
(Stream a tune to me, June...)
Send out a press release at a quarter to nine,
I gotta appease that VC of mine,
Draw down my credit line or pay the bonds on time?
Transfusion, transfusion,
Maybe they won't notice the DRM intrusion,
Never let 'em burn a CD again,
(Slip the green to me, Gene...)
Oh, my revenue, it comes from two classes,
Spyware hogs and RIAA jackasses,
So remember to sub-scribe today!
(Hey, daddy-o, uh, make that check payable to Harry Fox, huh? 'attaboy...)
- With apologies to Nervous Norvus.
This service is of no use to me. The old free Audiogalaxy used to carry stuff like JPOP and HKPOP which the new pay Audiogalaxy no longer has available. I guess you could call it "value-subtracted."
However, I'll concede that most Americans have no interest in Asian pop music so I could see this rebranded Listen.com being moderately successful IF they did one little thing: Allowed the user to print out 10 coupons a month each for a dollar off one retail CD. If the user buys 10 CDs that month, then the service is essentially free. Meanwhile, product gets moved, consumers are profiled, everybody's happy.
Now ask yourself why coupons for CDs aren't already widespread the way they are for food, shampoo, even cars (in the form of cashback offers) and then remind me again how the RIAA isn't a price-fixing cartel which deserves to be broken up.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Like, when ever you see any world music in top100 lists ? Never, unless its crossover like Bahamen or similar ..
yush
>Except with Radio, i get to tape the music and listen to it later, or loan it to my friends.
>You really don't get it, do you?
Please explain why you think you would be unable to tape this?
Advanced users are users too!
That's all fine and good but if it's streaming and I can't put it on a format playable in the car, then it's worth nothing to me. I can't play it on my living room stereo system either. Why don't these people get it? So, for $10 we get nothing at all.
You're probably trying to FTP within Netscape. Under no circumstances do this -- Netscape, like IE, consistantly hammers their sites and doesn't support active (or passive, I forgot) mode, which will get you banned from most sites. What you need is FlashFXP, it even supports site-to-site transfers that use other people's bandwidth so you can get 100Mbps FXP on a 56K line, for example. Highly recommended.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare