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AOL Enters Music Service Fray
Masem writes "Several sites, including The Washington Post and News.com report that AOL is planning to enter the online music service market with its own MusicNet offering. The service rates vary from $4 to $18/month, the latter giving you unlimited downloads and streaming content and 10 burnable tracks a month to CD. Future plans will include a pay-as-you-burn cost as well, expected later this year. However, the service is strictly limited to AOL customers, making many wonder if it will grab enough attention of the current subscriber base to actually be of value."
Can we really expect any music from bands/singers that are not signed to a record company belonging to AOL/TW?
As opposed to Rhapsody (which I haven't tried), emusic has a great selection and uses the MP3 format, but 128kbps is not good enough for me.
Maybe they are going to use WMA format. Which is a pain in the ass to convert to MP3 or wav when it is copyrighted
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
I'll take this opportunity to again sing the praises of emusic.com, which sounds like exactly what you want. Unlimited MP3 downloads for $10 or $15 a month. Their selection is mostly limited to non-major label stuff, but if you can do without Britney there are tons of good tunes to be had. Their jazz section especially is very good.
I am a current user of AOL's Music Net service. They gave me a 30 day free trial and I thought what the heck. The amount of music in the catalog is very limited right now and you must use an AOL provided software to listen to the music. The AOL software is also the only way to burn the music to CD. The software is not very good when compaired to listen.coms RHAPSODY software of which I am also a user. In the end I will not continue with the musicNet service after my free 30 day trial as they just do not provide anything that I think is worth even $4 a month.
Quote "AOL will charge $17.95 per month for the right to burn 10 songs on a CD, roughly the same price consumers pay for CDs in a music store."
In Canada I pay about $17.95 (+15% tax) for an entire CD (usually more than 10 tracks!) and I don't have to pay for an extra CD to burn it. At the current conversion rate this works out to about $29 CDN for ONE CD. There is no way this scheme should be attractive to anyone. Advice to all: Don't buy it, AOL will just have wasted their money investing in a huge online service that is ultimately designed to go to shambles. Unless, of course, they significantly lower the price; at which point if I was silly enough to join AOL, I may consider it.
I wish I had the smarts to work at AOL.
8|
Its cheaper than this AOL crap, and allows unlimited downloads and unrestricted use of the music.
The downside is that it doesn't have Top 40 type stuff, and all files are 128kB/s, but they got tons of good music if you're willing to dig a little. (It helps if you're into jazz and/or punk).
I just wanted to bring them up as an example of a site doing it right, and worth checking out. I signed up not on principle, but because they had a bunch of albums I wanted.
Too bad that it won't be an mp3. No where are mp3s mentioned. Now thats not saying that you cannot still get a digital copy of it--it has to be decoded to be sent to the sound card at some point--but it does mean it won't be as easy as:
1.download from AOL.
2. Burn to CD with nero.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
well.. I doubt this would be legal if it were in the US.. But if the RIAA could come up with a site like this, I'd be there. Just like I'm at this site :).. Check out http://www.allofmp3.com/ .. $0.01/mb for MP3s. Many tracks are "online encode" as well, which means you can encode them to whatever bitrate and format you want, including WMA, MP3 and OGG (yes, OGG).. Be sure to click the 'English' link at the top if your russian isn't that great ;)
I don't care if this is redundant and costs me points, it needs to be repeated as often as possible:
,etc. etc. music - full albums, ten bucks a month if you subscribe for a year. Well encoded except for the metal, where the distorted guitars suffer a bit from the 128k bit rate.
Emusic has unlimited downloads of excellent indie, electronic, blues, jazz and classical
They have the entire Matador catalog, and oodles and oodles of other off-center selections. The first few days I was subscribed I downloaded 2 gigs of stuff and felt faint and woozy with music lust.
There's no Britney or Zeppelin, but who cares? If you're a Slashdot reader you probably have offbeat tastes, so go dig in!
"The volume of CD albums shipped in 2002 reached another all time high: 221.6m units"
Source: British Phonographic Industry
So sales haven't declined at all. I guess they just haven't risen as much as they hoped. At least in the UK, that is...
Music Match MX is the best. They found the correct way of providing this service. Both sound quality and pricewise. For me the sound quality is much more important though. Other than MX, I did like emusic.com but their 128 kbit Mp3's were awful for me.. I am still subscriber for them too.
Music Match MX, I think, uses MP3pro instead of Mp3. That probably explains the good quality. If you select CD quality for MX, the sound quality satisfies me. I am usually satisfied with 256kbit Mp3's minimum.
MX Gold ($3/mon) gives you something like a radio, you select an artist and listen to similar artists. You can skip songs if you want. Great for new music discovery. But MX also has a Artist on Demand feature if you buy the platinum service ($5/month). So you can only listen to songs from one or more groups. You don't get to select the songs, but you can skip to the next song if you want. Usually first songs are the popular ones.
You can create your radio stations based on artists, era, genre, and select the weighting of these. The system works great for me.
The current "on-demand" subscription services (the major ones being Pressplay, MusicNet, Listen.com's Rhapsody) all have licenses from all 5 major labels plus a number of indies that allow them to do the following:
- on-demand streaming (e.g., search for a track and stream it)
- tethered downloads - DRM'd downloads that can only be played on the PC they were downloaded to
- burnable/portable downloads
The licenses from the labels generally require the subscription service to pay a small fee (say, 0.2 cents) for each song streamed or each time a tethered download is played. Each time a portable/burnable download is purchased, the label gets about 50 cents. The music publisher gets an additional fee of roughly 8.5 cents.The prices now are all about $9 to $10 per month for unlimited streams and tethered downloads plus about $1 per track for burnable/portable downloads. Rhapsody and MusicNet currently don't offer transfers to portable players, only burns, but of course you can rip to MP3 after burning.
Currently the selection is variable, with some albums or tracks not available at all, some only available for streaming/tethered downloads but not for burning, etc., but the selection has been steadily improving over time. For example the current no. 1 album by 50 Cent is available on all of the services, and is available for burning. The Norah Jones album that just won 8 Grammys is as well. Some artists like Dave Matthews, Madonna, Metallica and the Beatles own their own digital rights and have not allowed their music to be made available on the subscription services yet.
Another issue affecting availablility is publishing rights - the subscription services need to make deals with publishers representing songwriters in addition to the artist or label who controls the master (recording) rights. In many cases this is why only certain tracks on an album may be available.
The article at the Washington Post is not as complete as the one at the New York Times. In particular, AOL is trying to sell a value-added service to consumers who already have broadband service.
...They can also download the songs to their computers for higher sound quality and the ability to listen to them when not on the Internet." What you will not be able to do for $8.95 is burn CD's from the downloaded songs. "A subscriber can listen to MusicNet's downloads on no more than two computers. They also cannot be copied to other devices or sent to other people."
"In the next few weeks, AOL is going to introduce an improved $15-a-month service, with a bundle of content and services meant for people who already buy broadband connections from their cable or telephone companies. That offering will include a limited version of MusicNet that will let users download 20 songs a month and listen to another 20 one time."
For those who don't want the regular AOL, "for $8.95 a month, users will be able to listen to a catalog of music, now at 250,000 songs and growing, on their computers... The standard $8.95 version of the service will allow users to listen to an unlimited number of songs on demand
The premium service is $17.95 and allows the burning of 10 songs a month in addition to unlimited listening.
Nobody is going to pay $18 bucks a month to download and burn 10 songs. You need to offer 100 or 1000 (or unlimited downloads) for $18 a month. "But!", you say, "That's not profitable! We won't make any money!"
:). Get the magazine, get the demo disc, play the demos, figure out which game to buy this month.
Read the article. The $18 price includes unlimited downloads as well as 10 burns per month. If you just want the unlimited downloads, it's only $9 per month. So the burn price is $0.90 per track.
This means the AOL subscriber can listen to everything, indefinitely, on their home computer and only buy the stuff they truly like. It's the ultimate try before you buy program. Heard the new ________ album? Go get it! Listen to it... decide it sucks, go download another! And then you can burn a compilation CD of your favorites.
I do the same thing with my X-Box Magazine subscription (~$2 per month, but includes those damn pop-up ads
Yea, there's still Kazaa, but I turned off sharing with other users a long time ago because I don't want to become an RIAA case study.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
>Odd. For home defense, I'd think that an automatic small-caliber weapon designed to wound a person would be ideal.
:)
p gj pg. jpg3 .jpg
:)
Nope. Movies and special effects not-withstanding, an automatic small-caliber weapon will make a LOT of noise and will spray bullets all over the place, possibly hitting an intruder (possibly not) but not your best use of force. Submachine guns jump around too much for my preferences, good for keeping someone's head down but not something you want to use in your own home - it would be analogous to using a flamethrower : effective at scaring away the bad guys but bad for your belongings. Get a 12 gauge shotgun and alternate buckshot and slugs.
Want to prove it to yourself? Take a heavy duty 1 gallon plastic jug full of water to the range. A Borden's Milk Jug works and if you don't drink milk then a 3 liter Coke jug works. Full of water, with the cap screwed on tight.
Walk it out to the other side of the range.
Put 9mm round nose ammo into you SMG (the manufacturers recommend full metal jacket round nose for proper high speed feeding) and point in in the general direction of the jug and spray bullets. If you hit (not particularly easy at 50 feet) walk over to the still full jug and watch the water dribble out. Takes a while. When the jug is empty, that is how long a guy with a bullet in a good place will last. Hitting the jug more than once at 50 feet during a spray of 25 bullets off-hand is going to be magic or luck. People don't simply fall down and die when they get hit - people die / go down / stop hassling you due to : shock from combined blood loss and seeing their blood all over (could take a while), lack of oxyen to the brain (depending on the size and placement of the holes in his body could take a while), cut a nerve cord (spinal cord) that makes the bottom half go limp (not very likely unless you get real lucky.)
Take a new jug and shoot it with the 12 gauge slug. No gray area there, if you hit a 1 gallon jug full of water with a 12 gauge hollow point 1oz slug the shock value shatters the jug and sends little pieces in all directions and the water rains down for about 15 seconds. For good reason, the sound of a 12 gauge shotgun pump action racking a shell into the receiver translates correctly in every language on the planet
In home defense if you are going to shoot somebody, shoot to kill them. If they live they are going to a) sue you in court (and possibly win), or b) come back and shoot you because getting shot hurts like a MOFO.
>Automatic weapons are illegal because
Let me reiterate this. Automatic weapons are not illegal. Live near Austin, Texas? Give me a call and if you have a clean police record and $6,000 we can go buy you one. No joke. Not cheap, and it isn't cash and carry (there is a background check before the transfer goes through) but if you have $6,000 and a clean record you too can legally own a machine gun. Short-barrel shotgun too, if that is your fancy - it is called a Class II weapon and if you submit the proper paperwork it is also legal.
Note that it is against the law to possess a machine gun without the proper tax stamp (costs $200, for the record) that you can only get during the transfer of the weapon, but then again being in the possession of a car or a computer that you did not obtain in the proper legal manner is also illegal.
As for hunting big game with a submachine gun the hide of a rhino or elephant would stop 9mm bullets from doing much damage, fired from your normal H&K MP5 etc... Even if they penetrated the skin and muscle there would be slim chance of them doing enough massive damage to internal organs to stop them from coming over and destroying you before limping off into the forest to die four days later of blood loss.
>They may be inaccurate, but if I believe that they are true
Fair enough. I can find a better way to spread the truth than by diss'ing on you. I will work on that, sorry.
http://www.cox-internet.com/arielinc/MP5PI006.j
http://www.cox-internet.com/arielinc/MP5PI013.
http://www.cox-internet.com/arielinc/MP5PI020
http://www.cox-internet.com/arielinc/MP5PI02
Oh so off topic, and yet so informative. Mods would have a field day if we weren't hidden down so far
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer