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."

Comments

Ogg? No.

[kaosrain]

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

MP3 download is not a hit for eMusic

[Anonymous Coward]

"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

Re:Ogg.. no chance.

[EvilBuu]

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!

Make it accessible

[be-fan]

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!