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Goodbye, Liquid Audio?
gosand writes "Yahoo is carrying the AP story that basically says that Liquid Audio's days are numbered. The board voted unanimously in favor of a $57 million stockholder cash payout. They would rather sell the company, but if there is no buyer then they would probably have to liquidate the company. Liquid Audio indeed. There have been other Slashdot stories on this topic, but this could be the last one."
Maybe they should have embraced more platforms than just Windows. Every time there has been a story on /. about Liquid Audio, many people bitch about linux or mac support. They should have listened, then they'd (theoretically) have a few more customers. Frankly, IMHO, if you are going to be an internet/internet based service company, you'd better support all internet platforms or you're just bound to fail (unless you are M$).
today is spelling optional day.
This seems curious, given that Microsoft just bought 20 or so of Liquid's patents for "digital watermarking, content distribution, audio encoding, loss-less compression and transferring audio to digital playback devices". Maybe Liquid was just trying to raise cash, but where MS is involved one has to wonder if there's something else afoot. Maybe they told Liquid to sell or they'd stomp them. Maybe Liquid knows that their days are numbered once the beast gets into the business. Maybe Liquid feels that DRM is a lost cause and is getiin' while the getin's good. I've got a headache, so someone else can do the math, but this has to be more than a coincidence.
Sigs are bad for your health.
Dear Recording Industry: feel free to implement this at anytime...
A music professor of mine said that he thought the music industry would improve if it went back to a "singles" market (ie: Don't put out a whole album of crap if you've only got one or two good songs). This is the way it was in the 1950s and 1960s. This makes perfect sense for downloadable music. I see two real problems with these a la carte tracks right now.
Number One: There is not an easy way to pay for something online that costs so little
Number Two: Traditionally, you have paid for a tangible product that you hold in your hands... a work of art, if you will.
I suggest the following to counteract this:
If the music industry truly want's to treat online music as a service, how about $0.10 - $0.50 a track. You don't get unlimited downloads (except maybe a way to resume a download that did not complete or something) At this price, who cares if you lose it? You can just download it again really cheap. It's probably not even worth most people's time to back it up to a CD, but it's certainly something they can do.
Now what about the micro-payment problem? It's simple: pre-paid music cards. They work for telephone service quite successfully in the US and for cell phones overseas. Why not sell a $10 card at the local convenience store (or even at something like Tower Records to start with) that works like a phone card and allows you to download whatever music you want! Maybe you get even more "download credits" for buying more at one time (a la Dave & Busters game cards... the more money you put on at one time, the more credits you recieve) Special incentives can be offered to frequent downloaders, etc.
Liquid Audio was used by certain major label acts (Creed comes to mind) to release "unreleased" tracks on their web site.
I don't know why people are up-in-arms about the company's demise in the slightest. They had plenty of patents on digital watermarking technologies and the content was very restrictive, besides being available only on one platform (Windows). Bye bye, Liquid Audio. I'll hardly miss ya.
Simple, easy-to-implement solution: your money buys you a certain amount of time (six hours? 24 hours?) in which that file is available for you to download. A click-through legalese document says that you assume the risk of making sure your download worked, and backing up the file after it's been downloaded.
They give you six hours (or whatever) so even a modem user can retry once or twice if he's having temporary problems downloading (lousy connection, computer crashed part-way through, etc.). And they implement the permissions by storing a cookie on your computer with a session ID; the *server* stores the "time left in download window" information so that hacking the cookie won't do you any good. This also defeats people E-mailing the d/l link to their buddies or putting it up on a Web site (a really savvy person could E-mail the cookie along with the link URL, but this will stop 99.8% of the kiddiez who might try this).
I've seen a system like this work for delivering software across the 'Net: you pay and you get a temporary download link. Seems like it should work just fine for music as well.
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."