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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."
I'll be the first in line to pay. I'll still download some stuff for free if I can't get the quality I want or can't find a particular song, but I'll definately pay for some because I believe this is a step forward for the music industry.
You're nothing; like me.
Ogg would be nice, but wouldn't you rather have something lossless, like FLAC?
2) If the selection is limited to only MP3s, I would want to have the option of downloading files at bitrates higher than simply 128kbs like Emusic currently only offers. Ideally I would have the option of getting any bitrate I want between 128kbs and 320kbs.
3) Clearly defined download limits. Recently an Emusic user was banned for downloading 200 albums in 3 days as an "unlimited" subscriber. No hard cap was set in the TOS agreement, and if I were hypothetically using a service like this, I would want to be very clear on just how "unlimited" my downloading abilities were.
4) Most importantly, I want to be able to formatshift, burn, mix, freely trade, and put the music files on any device I wish. I will never use a service that imposed DRM restrictions on my fair use rights, due to both principle and practicality.
The market often takes wild shifts, all due to a lawsuit, or some other lawyer induced money exchanging frenzy. If enough people are scared into using "truly" free software, and not the "stolen free" kind, then OS formats will catch on with more than just the geek crowd.
Don't be a nerd and steal, when you can be a geek and use Open Source.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I believe that, if the artists were smart at all, that they would bypass the record company conglomerate altogether, if there was a p2p service that offered music and had contracts with the artists directly, that would be the ultimate record label, imagine how good music would become and how obselete going to the record store would become if you were supporting the artists you liked by downloading thier music. It wouldnt need to be a big fee, just 2 or 3 cents a song, and if a song is popular, that offers up a sizable check to the artist. I wish i had the know-how and the time to set up a p2p network liek that someday, but alas, even though its a good idea... you still have to deal with those record company a-holes, but its a good idea for the future-- new artists that want an alternative to someone else owning thier music.
sig is broken try again tomorrow
IIRC, FLAC is slated to replace SHN as etree's audio compression format of choice. It has a number of features that SHN does not. The most relevant being the fact that FLACs include an integrity check for the file so that you don't have to mess around with a separate file for md5 hashes. You can also use metatags with FLAC files so you can label them in the same way people do with OGG/MP3 files.
Actually -- why the hell not? The labels could get together and run their own P2P network, with their own kazaa-like client, and for a fixed monthly fee, let everyone grab every MP3 they care to (making sure each is properly tagged with info that steers the user to a website where they can order the CD as an impulse purchase).
That would be a good business model -- effectively getting customers to pay for advertising (free samples in the form of MP3s), while losing nothing -- the MP3s are already out there; this would be attractive for *reliability* (if they did it right).
It would be especially good for back catalog items, if only they'd realise how much filetrading revolves around finding old, obscure, out of print titles.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Seriously, CDs cost (materially) !
I DO pay -- $20 / month for emusic.com. And I'd be willing to pay even more (say $35-$40 / mo) for something with a more comprehensive catalog.
However, here's the catch: it's gotta be subscription, not pay-per-download, and it's gotta be unrestricted usage. Gone are the days when I would pay $16.95 for a shitty cd. The key thing for me (and I think most other people) about p2p or emusic is being able to explore a much bigger world of music without having to risk paying for something I don't like.
If they try to pass *anything* else off as competition for p2p, they're delusional.
From the article: After a 5% decline in the sales of recorded music in 2001, the first fall in living memory,.
That statement would be correct if nobody could remember way back to 1997. In those heady days of the Clinton presidency and the dot com boom, the folks at the RIAA reported a 6.5% decrease in annual sales. Back then they didn't have the p2p bogeyman to blame so they laid the blame on retailers streamlining their inventories.
On the whole 'who to blame' angle, I'm amazed that nobody is talking about the role of Clearchannel's radio monopoly on decreased music sales. Before one company dictated that there would be only a handful of radio formats across most major cities, stations were more likely to expand their playlists to include local acts, independent musicians, and songs that local programming personnel liked. Now, playlists are sent down from the home office, and there is more homogeneity among playlists. What does that mean? Fewer new songs get any real airplay, thus giving the listeners of Big Radio fewer unique albums to consider buying...
Back to EMI: The description of their system has so many vague statements that I seriously doubt that this will take off (and we know that EMI never tries to mislead listeners). What listeners want is ease and freedom.
Here's what needs to happen for online music to be profitable for the labels:
1. Record companies have to realize that consumers really don't care who produces or distributes an album. When I go to a record store to by an album, I don't have to know whether it's a BMG or Sony album, I just go to the store and buy it. With these disperate online music services, each with their own catalogs, consumers are supposed to care about these things.
2. Give me the freedom to listen to my music how I want and when I want. Too many of these services offer limited ability to burn CDs or copy to mp3 players. Stop that. I bought the damn music, let me listen to it the way I want. Stop treating your customers like crooks.
It's not that hard. Record executives have a hard time realizing that the music industry is about the artists. Yes, Mr. Exec I'm sure you're a really neat guy, and I know you spend a lot of time doing important things like Bribing radio stations to play your music and engaging in $480,000,000 in price fixing, and I can only imagine how difficult it is to threaten academic researchers. But seriously, you may be getting just a teansy bit greedy and irrational.
Man, I need some sleep...
I hope this does work out for the best, but EMI has to be extremely competetive in order to get people to pay for something that they can already get for free. There better be fast, effecient downloads, lyrics, album covers, videos, band history, download history, chat, reasonable pricing, the whole nine hundred yards.
What everyone on the planet needs is a nice fat bitch of a pipe so that we can download uncompressed, high quality audio to burn to our cds.
Oh, and it better work on linux.
"But the cars are all flashing me, bright lights are passing me, I feel life passing me by" - Stiff Little Fingers
Users of less-than-optimal quality compressed formats such as MP3 & Ogg use them because they are convenient to download (& share), and because they are manageable in terms of storage needs -- especially for those who like to keep them online. Such formats have taken over from the C90 audio cassette of my school days in that they provide the best medium for music-swapping. However they still do not provide the best possible digital listening experience, and I prefer to own my favourite music on CD.
So here's a radical idea that no-one seems to have taken seriously to date, and it's one which would suit all parties: Artists, Recording industry, Publishers/Distributors and Consumers.
The advantages of owning music on CD are: Quality, Variety, and Packaging. The music is in uncompressed format, the track collection may include numbers previously unheard (leading to new discoveries), and the packaging hopefully provides reading and pictorial material on the artist(s).
Now if publishers produced a package as a downloadable CD-quality image, incorporating uncompressed music and a multimedia "sleeve" (background, photos, soundbytes, interviews, videos, printable CD cover, etc.), such that I could burn this to CD, I for one could be persuaded to part with $$ for this. OK, it might take me 6 days to d/l until I get DSL, but the time has come to consider this.
I understand CD fabs are expensive, so the industry could pass on some of the savings they make [howls of ironic laughter from the crowd], with the standard CD price redefined at around say $5. Who would balk at that? The "single" or EP format will continue to appeal, and should also be offered, at lower cost. Recordable DVD offers possibilities for larger collections, movies and so forth (though how the network may creak under the load is for another discussion).
No-one is pretending that the swapping will not continue, but collectors are prepared to pay a small premium for extra quality if the price is right.
If the reality turns out to be as good as the appearance, I definitely plan to reward EMI in two ways:
1. Buy all their music in my collection that is not as yet paid for, and
2. Stop sharing it -- since there is now a cost-effective and convenient way for anyone to get it for themselves.
This is contingent on the following:
1. No DRM in the files, ideally OGG or MP3 files.
2. High-quality recordings (i.e. 128-bit is quite marginal, I'm hoping for 256-bit or at least an option to choose bitrate).
3. Reasonable cost. $5 per song is too much, $1 per song would be awesome.
I don't want to get into the whole you're-a-pirate-no-I'm-not argument, but I do believe there's a balance between producers of content and consumers, and this balance is created not so much by the free market as by a matter of conscious choice in society. It is not theft for the people -- you and I -- to decide we no longer wish to offer the same terms to copyright holders that we once did. It made sense at one time, but as the average individual increasingly gains the ability to copy data, the cost to us as a society in giving absolute protection to copyright holders increases dramatically. This is true not only in enforcement issues, but in the simple ability of millions of people to enjoy from and build on copyrighted works.
This doesn't mean we don't pay the piper anymore, but it does mean the balance has forever changed. Pretending the old rules still make sense just doesn't fly anymore. EMI seems to be making the first concrete move toward acknowledging that reality, and if the details work out, I say kudos to them, and I'll be their best customer.
Dear record company CEOs!
I am proposing the following business model for your company:
I pay you the price that I am paying you now (1-3 CDs a year): about 5 bucks a month. For that price (a monthly flatrate), I want all the records that you have in your archives.
Please provide for easy download via FTP. I prefer to use wget --mirror. Bandwith doesn't matter. Your business will then depend on new, interesting releases. I would also be willing to make an agreement with you in which access to earlier records will increase over time. For example: After 1 year of membership, I will be able to retrieve all the stuff in the last two years, after 2 years four years and so on.
As long as you deliver content that is
- e.g. not accessible for me (e.g. some proprietary player as Liquid audio in the EMI example)
- e.g. not reusable (DRM shit) or
- not playable on any device that I own (CD with copy protection)
- overpriced
SCREW YOU!Why are people in general unwilling to pay for MP3 quality music?
People are used to getting access FREE OF CHARGE to any of dozens of available unrestricted mid-fi audio streams which are completely unrestricted, can be recorded with anything, can be uploaded to MP3 players or anything else. People have been using this to make compilation tapes, make tapes for friends, and "try before buying" since long before many of you were born.
Yes, this is for real, and is everyday reality not only for propellor-heads, but for the average American.
It's called FM radio. Is the quality really all that different from 128Kbps MP3 quality?
MP3 distribution is no more a threat to industry profits than FM radio is. Is there any reason why FM radio is so important a promotional tool for music that the industry will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a single song played on the radio where EVIL pirates could record it and try to get people who put the same song at a similar quality level on Internet Radio shut down or jailed?
The difference is that the record industry can control FM radio via payola and no obvious way to do the same thing via the Internet except through sites controlled by the industry. Joe Average can submit a song to an Internet Radio station for free, and if the owner likes it, he'll play it. Universal can do the same thing for the same price. The record labels are unhappy about the Joe Average part. They would have no problems with it if the Internet Radio stations played only the content they were told to play.
What the industry likes least is a mix of familiar label tunes with Joe Average's music, because the familiar label tunes tell the listener what genre of music can really be expected at a particular station... and what kinds of unfamiliar songs might be found.
The only new music the RIAA labels want us to hear is their own.
So through their legal sockpuppets in Congress and the CARP panel, they did their best to shut down the potential competition.
Why should there be legal harassment just because people choose to listen to it via Internet instead of via Clear Channel or companies choose to deliver it?
Does anybody actually believe that a 128K MP3 is the "perfect digital copy" that Hilary Rosen and her apologists have been whining about for years? If you do, don't waste our time by responding. First, get your hearing checked by an audiologist. If there's no problem, go to your wall, take that precious MCSE you just got after a month of hard work, burn it, go back to school for a few years and don't post about technology and public policy until you've learned something about both.
I don't find the idea of buying the real product, uncompressed CD audio tracks a-la carte or as albums for 50 cents to $1 per track online intrinsically objectionable in the least. The ability to get the single or two decent songs on a typical album without the filler would be worth it to me. Too bad they can't deliver it, and the fact that they can't really isn't their fault.
50 megabytes of download per track are a bit much for a dialup to handle, and the average Internet user is going to be using dialup for quite some time into the future as I do.
So why do I think they're hoping for failure? Because the spectacular failure of Yet Another Venue For Selling Music Industry Promotional Items in place of music to the public gives them another excuse to whine to Congress about how EVIL INTERNET USERS are determined to STEAL music from them WITHOUT PAYING.
The RIAA labels just want to get a legal strangehold on the development of any technology which has the remotest possibility of opening up avenues of competition to outsiders.
Tech Public Policy stuff
An MP3 file is not encrypted and hasn't got any kind of copy control mechanism built-in, nor is it possible to add something like that to the format since it's just an MPEG audio stream with no header or stream descriptors or anything.
That means that there's no way EMI could prevent you from burning, uploading to any portable player or copying the tracks you download from them.
Ergo, the format is probaly going to be WMA, which does have that kind of controls built-in. But that means that it's going to be more of the same:
In other words, the same old fair-use restricting crap that we're used to from the industry. There's nothing revolutionary or new about this...
This actually is the way EMI and other companies whining about p2p should be going. Not charging for the service - let them charge 20 bucks for the client, or for a one-time fee for access or something, and give people access to everything, with advertising linking mp3s to websites where they can buy records, stickers, shirts, panties, whatever, plus read bios, interviews, etc. Let people take the music freely; the music is already out there, and any network they build, there will be no way for them to keep the music on that network. The problem is they won't take the step of understanding that they aren't losing anything by doing this -- the music is and will be out there. Once they accept that they can think intelligently about ways to make more money. Until then they're pouring more and more time and money into stopping piracy which is a business model that is bound to fail. But their freakin egos are too big; they really believe they deserve 16 dollars every time some kid downloads a song. They can't see past that; or at least they've refused to so far.
1. No DRM in the files, ideally OGG or MP3 files.
Nope. WMA, preferably w/Windows Media Player 9.0. No support for anything but M$. Only few portable devices are supported.
2. High-quality recordings (i.e. 128-bit is quite marginal, I'm hoping for 256-bit or at least an option to choose bitrate).
Yes, the recordings are high quality - and rather large.
3. Reasonable cost. $5 per song is too much, $1 per song would be awesome.
1 per song. Now that's a deal.
Jeez, do you see the horse-drawn car makers bitching to the car manufacturers? Progress is progress, and I'll be damned if I am going to go along with halting progress just so a few media companies can make a few bucks.
I'm pretty sure this whole idea is going to suck based on EMI's "me too" attitude regarding copy protected CDs.
.02
1. The digital media files will most likely have SDMI or some other Digital Rights Management enforced to the hilt. I wuldn't be surprised if the masses were clamoring for WMA files, according to EMI.
2. Burning to a CD. I can't imagine any company so enthralled with releasing their catalog with copy protection is going to allow you as a consumer to record youur own CDs without first contacting them to see if it's OK. I'm thinking what Audible has (program contacts Audible to ensure you can copy this audio book to CD) is what they'd use. I can't imagine them letting consumers just burn digital audio without some catch.
Just my
So, what are the factors that made DVDs widely accepted and adopted? Yes, better picture and sound. Yes, a smaller, more convenient format. But to me, above all, it was better contents that made people switch to DVDs. You don't just buy or rent the movie, you have extra scenes, alternate endings, bloopers, interviews, etc. Hollywood could have put all of that on VHS as well but they didn't. They wanted us to switch to DVD and we have, based on contents. You just have to listen to any DVD movie advertisement to be convinced. The emphasis is on contents, not technical merits.
Now, why can't it be the same for music? Technical merits of digital music are well known by now. When I start seeing music companies think outside the box and provide me with an enhanced listening experience, such as 5.1 surround, lyrics, clips, mind dazzling visual effects, special editions to name just a few that quickly jump to mind, and which is only available from their service, then I'll think it's worthwhile to subscribe to it and pay to download. Until then, I want nothing of the lazy, uncreative, retarded way of thinking displayed by dinosaur companies who are trying to sell me the same old crap.
Face it guys, you dropped the ball. No amount of trying to sell me what is now free will ever change that. Sell me something else that I'll want to buy.
I'd pay for an MP3... BUT I'd prefer to buy CDs... I'm just not paying (or letting my kids pay) $13-$20 for the latest greatest CDs.
Back in the day when cassette tapes were king and CDs were new, I never understood why the CD was $14.99 and the cassette was $6.99. They had the SAME DAMN SONGS on them!
I don't thing the problem is the musicians... It's the greedy bastard record companies...
A buddy of mine pointed something out: at least the movie people are adding content and features to DVDs to make them WORTH the extra $5-$7 over the VHS version. The music industry occasionally will put one "bonus track" or a prettier booklet with the CD... It's isn't worth $5.00-$7.00 more, though!
$G
-- $G
Regarding ogg files, I use them and plan to continue. Regarding EMI and other large crooked devil dinosaurs w/ decaying distribution monopolies - screw 'em, just like they've done to artists and consumers for decades. Go to your local pub or music hall and pay to see the artists, and buy their offerings directly from them. Until the industry shows good faith, compensates the artists properly and offers a good variety of music (as opposed to a hand full of sex laden no talent superstar trash), and repeals their copyright extensions, then I wont reward them with one thin dime.. and there's an excellent chance most of us wont have a spare thin dime if the bankers keep melting these economies down. In which case, get a second hand guitar, chances are you'll go far :-)
Isn't this how the word is spread about these things? How do you think MP3 became popular? Grassroots promotion, one person at a time, is how we can popularise ogg vorbis and other goodness like mozilla.
I feel better knowing that I have shown many IE users the light. Everyone should do the same in a non-zealotry manner.