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EMI Promises Downloadable Music
SataiCam writes "The Economist has an article up referring to EMI's plans to implement digital music downloading starting on December 1 through a whole host of 'distributors'. They claim it will allow users to get music in 'the formats they are demanding' (ogg?), to burn copies of songs, and download them to other devices. Here's the press release from EMI."
At one point in the story they mention that this is downloadable SECURE DIGITAL music. When will the music industry catch on? People want their MP3 (and ogg around here of course). Guessing this is destined to be another failure.
actually, the article states that some content will be available to burn onto cd, or put on portable devices...
They claim it will allow users to get music in 'the formats they are demanding' (ogg?)
Unfortunantly, ogg isn't going to be the choice. The companies that ELI has signed this agreement with (Alliance, Ecast, FullAudio, Liquid Audio, Listen.com, Musicnet, Pressplay, Roxio, and Streamwaves) are all based around mp3s.
-Kaos
"Dear EMusic Subscriber,
I'd like to offer a personal apology for some of our recent communication with you and other EMusic customers. Over the past several weeks, we have implemented some new tools in an effort to identify subscribers that are using EMusic in ways it was not intended. It's important for us to do this to ensure the long-term viability of EMusic -- so we can continue to offer our service to you and the rest of our 70,000 loyal subscribers.
Many EMusic subscribers recently received a letter outlining unusual activity in their accounts. After personally reading through every email sent to us in response, it's clear to me that we need to rethink our approach. While we need to identify customers who are not using the service as intended, we do not want to do this at the expense of passionate EMusic users.
I want to be as clear as possible about what we consider abusive activity and how we will manage this going forward. Although EMusic is an "unlimited" service, there have to be some restrictions on this policy.
EMusic is similar to a buffet advertised as "all you can eat." For the restaurant to be successful, it has to have reasonable limitations that apply to people that stay too long, eat more than their fair share -- or waste food. The service is indeed unlimited for the vast majority of the restaurant's customers whose actions never draw attention. The restaurant reserves the right to deny service to any customer.
EMusic was designed to be an interactive service for personal use and enjoyment. Our intent is to allow our subscribers unlimited access to an amount of music that they can reasonably use. We did not design the service for people who want to download music simply to collect it or to fill up their hard drives. This would be not be responsible for us as a business or provide incentive for our label partners to make their music available.
Obviously, the definition of "reasonable" varies by user and many of the responses I have read are simply requesting some definition. Based on our current analysis of typical subscriber behavior, we believe that downloading more than 2,000 tracks in a 30-day period is not reasonable for personal use. Using a 12-track album as the average, this represents more than 165 albums and over 10,000 minutes of music. Less than 1% our subscribers ever approach these levels.
If, for any reason, you do not find this explanation satisfactory, please use the following link: http://help.emusic.com/cu/index.cgi to cancel your
account. We'll immediately end your subscription - even if you are still in your commitment period - and provide you a refund for the current month.
Again, I apologize for any inconvenience or frustration we may have caused. I can assure you that our team is extremely passionate about continuing to provide you with the best MP3 subscription service possible.
Best regards,
Steve Grady
General Manager, EMusic.com"
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/23396
Here's another article also about EMI's plans for digital music online. The quote that I like is:
/.
The product and the category we're delivering is the one they're looking for.
I swear these guys must read
-N
I've nothing to say here...
I must be a bit anal about sound quality and find even 128kb/s a bit lacking - the Grado Labs SR325s I have at work are almost a bit too for my own good in this respect. So I'm not too much into music piracy and do often have gigs left of my 3GB monthly ADSL quota.
However, CDs copied to the Media Player using the highest quality setting are pretty darned good - I can't discern any difference in quality.
If they provide say 192kb/s WMA files, I'd be inclined to buying music if I could really use it for all my personal uses; burn to CD, copy to my work and home PCs. And of course if, I could actually find something interesting to buy! (I find most of the 'run of the mill music' being published these days more annoying than anything).
The price must be right though, considerably less than for real CDs. Even though I don't really know where to put my 400+ CD collection anymore, I still like getting the physical product. E.g., I have a very nice collection of Pet Shop Boys, Faithless, Depeche Mode and a few other favourite artists; there's something to be said about the physical product...
ISO certified == THX certified
Is this related? Musicmatch.com offers subscription services for BMG, EMI, Universal, and Warner Brothers. This was noted on BMG's site in their news section yesterday.
now that an integer-based Ogg Vorbis decoder (called Tremor) has been developed, one of the main hurdles for hardware Ogg support has been removed. Tremor source code here. That pretty much leaves two other areas as far as I can tell, artist support and customer demand. Hopefully everyone aware of the benefits of Ogg is making an effort towards one or more of these areas. And thanks to the codec developers and everyone generally involved in Ogg!
full length albums complete with print resolution artwork -- earth2willi.com
Not entirely flamebait, but Ogg is inferior to MP3? What FAQ are you reading? According to this FAQ Ogg is "better" than MP3, and several blind tests would seem to confirm it.
Unless you're not talking about quality-by-bitrate, in which case the only argument for MP3s superiority is that it is widespread (devices, decoders, etc). If that's all it takes to qualify for superiority then let's just support Microsoft, McDonalds and Dodge Neons (those things suck ass) all the way!
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
Sure M. Carey and JLo pull down the big $$$ and Michael-Circus-Freak-Jackson just complained about Sony ripping him off (ha, who wants to see old pointy nose grab his balls again, raise your hands), but how many don't get dough at all? Lots. Where does the money go? Into the hands of record execs.
Methinks you should kill the messenger service, not the messenger.
1-3: somewhat true
4: Don't know when you read the OGG faq, because it certainly doesn't say that these days. Furthermore, I have seen no evidence to indicate that ogg is worse than wma (except in the case of some classical music at low bitrates), or any evidence it is worse than any mp3, ever.
5. hardware support is coming, according to (some) manufacturers.
As for compelling reasons, there are a few ogg vorbis may succeed:
1. Technical superiority*
2. Support already coming from hardware manufacturers, which will hopefully become default encoding parameters, which will hopefully lead to mp3 getting less use etc etc.
3. Zealots like me ranting about the greatness of the Ogg Vorbis to all and sundry, convincing them, and having them do the same (believe me, it actually does work)
yes, I am a zealot on this front. sorry.
gnoshi
*according blind tests at low bitrates have established this - conducted by ff123 who may be found on www.hydrogenaudio.org boards (hope you don't mind the mention)
Also established at higher (but not exceptionally high) bitrates by another serious listening test, but I honestly can't recall who the tester was. A tech magazine, German I believe.
Above 160/192 Kbps, Musepack is king, up until lossless.
I've said this before a couple of times, but it's particularly relevent. Thsese services need to make their content accessible. I recently *bought* a subscription to Rhapsody, which is currently the biggest online music site (aside from maybe eMusic, but Rhapsody carries big-5 stuff). I was perfectly happy to shell out $10 or $20 bucks a month (note, I buy about 1 CD a year, so this is 12x the amount they usually get for me). I considered it a pretty fair deal. Then, I found out that you could only use it with Internet Explorer, and only on Windows. Windows is my dedicated CounterStrike OS. I've got like 100MB free once XP and HalfLife is installed. Screw them if they think I'd boot back into Windows just to use their service. For a streaming media website, this makes no sense at all. So in the end, I decided that Shoutcast was good enough for me, and cancled my subscription. While the number of Linux users out there is comparatively small, the number of MacOS users isn't. And I'd tend to bet that the MacOS-types are significantly more likely than the average Windows user to subscribe to something like this. Also, a lot of desktop Linux users are on the younger side, and they'd also be more likely to buy into this. All told, there is probably a pretty nice chunk of change that they're losing from being uni-platform. Especially since it takes *less* development effort to just use the browser and native media systems thatn to roll your own!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'm a sound engineer, I _code_ audio DSP and wordlength reduction, I _analyse_ various mp3 codecs in novel ways and I have studied Ogg Vorbis and concluded that it offers the best of all mp3 encoder approaches, all at once. It has all the transient liveliness of Fraunhofer and all the tonal purity of Blade, and I've no doubt it's been improved still further since I looked.
I don't know who you are, but you're certainly no sound engineer (or audio DSP coder), and I... strongly disagree with your claim.
We should be buying new music from small labels and encouraging them to experiment with Open Media/Open Source releases. That way we'll have it both ways, good new music, and we can copy and re-use it however we want without worrying about cracking and hacking some god-awful crappy protection scheme.
We do we have to buy such safe multinational anodyne music??? Come on slashotters EXPERIMENT! There are so many interesting labels out there.
static
LOCA
Bearos
Tigerbeat
Anticon
To name just a few....
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
Unfortunantly, ogg isn't going to be the choice ... all based around mp3s.
Unfortunately your score 5 post gives the misleading impression that they will be using MP3. If you read the press release you'll see: "capability to burn a limited number of personal copies". That means it's your standard DRM with the oh-so generous capability to put a couple of them on disk, and to import them into DRM-compliant portable devices a limited number of times.
It seems the "the formats they are demanding" means Windows media format DRM, though I can't say for sure.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.