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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."
Ok lemme get this straight for $18.00 a month I get to listen to sub par streaming radio and get roughly one cd's worth of music...what a bargain :(
Of course when it goes down in flames they will blame it all on piracy and claim they offered an practical alternative.
To make this clear, first you PAY to download the music, then you PAY for the super fast net connection so you can get it this week, then you PAY to burn your own CD on your OWN time.
Yeah, I can see why consumers are going to love this idea.
I was a sub-sub contractor for a project like this that Sony wanted to do.
I spent days TRYING to talk them out of it.
They were convinced that the whole napster phenonminon proved that users wanted to burn their own CDs... not that it had ANYTHING to do with getting something for free.
CD's bought in a store are a convienence! The only convienience this gives me is that I don't have to buy a crappy song to get a good one. Yippie!
I would rather be ashes than dust!
$18/month for unlimited downloads plus you get a free CD of tracks you actually like in the process. Sure you need to keep subscribed to listen to the songs but many people spend more than that on their CDs every month.
Pay by the song will be interesting so long as the price point is sufficiently attractive ($0.25-$1 per song) as well as the conditions (physical PCM on the CD, no DRM bullshit).
Maybe they're sick of fighting us and actually want to give us what we want? How many people were saying they'd start buying music if they were given a chance?
Now that last year they lost more money than most small countries ever hope to see, they are starting to get their act together.
AOL should have been doing this two years ago as a way to boost subscribers to AOL Broadband. AOL should be throwing as much "fat" content like this, and their movies libraries down the AOL Broadband pipe for as close to free as possible. Something needs to stop the upgrading to (other supplier) broadband hemoraging which is sweeping through their user base like ants when one discovers candy on the ground.
Really, they were very stupid for not doing this a long time ago. This is a lot of the reason they merged in the first place.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
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.
Considering that the majority of AOL's customers are on 56k dialup that actually gets connection speeds similar to 33.6, I don't really see how this is going to take off. $18 a month on top of the $25 people already pay for AOL isn't that good of a deal, you might as well start buying cd's again. Broadband + kazaa is cheaper than aol + aol's music service and is definitly more unlimited than anything aol can come out with.
It's statements like this that validates everything that the RIAA claims.
If you want to positively change the music industry's approach to digital media, this surely isn't the way to do it.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
And, of course, the AOL 56k modem crowd is really looking forward to downloading music over 56k because that's not the 21st century's version of Chineese Water Torture.
Fortunatly for AOL most of their users are on it for one of several reasons. I will list the ones that I have seen most recently:
1. They want to connect w/o surcharge to a national ISP.
2. They don't know any better, dialup is what they have had since 1999 and DSL/Cable is foreign and/or too expensive for them.
3. They like keeping the same email address (why this bothers people I have absolutely no idea). They feel that it is a big hassle to email the 21 people on their addressbook to tell them that it has changed.
4. AOL users are just casual Internet users.
Umm... no, it doesn't validate the RIAA's claims. Not quite anyway. Had the parent poster said that he would never pay $18 to download and burn 10 songs when he could get a CD for less (yes people, you CAN find CDs out there for $12-$15, quit shopping at the mall), he would have been making a good point. But his comment still echoes the viewpoint of most internet users -- when faced with the choice of going legit and overpaying for music, or grabbing it for free, they're gonna grab it for free. The music industry has done nothing to make their online offerings attractive yet (it needs to have some compelling reason to do it, be it extras or just plain cheaper than buying a CD). If the RIAA was complaining that nobody buys CDs anymore and then jacked up the price of a CD to $20-$25 (for a single CD, so $35-40 for a double), and people said "oh I'm never buying a CD again," it doesn't validate their claims. It's business 101. If people aren't flocking to your offerings, odds are you're doing something wrong.
Perhaps I should have phrased it "validates everything that the RIAA claims to gullible lawmakers/ignorant public.
"If people aren't flocking to your offerings, odds are you're doing something wrong."
100% correct, but you forget that thanks to millions of lobbying dollars, it now means (more and more with every new law passed) that we must be doing something wrong!
My point was that the original poster's statements (whatever kind of music he may or may not have been referring to) can only be used by the RIAA to reinforce their position.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
If your going to provide a pay service, it must be in a standard format. MP3 is the current standard, and if it is not in MP3, it will go under. With this current strategy, Musicnet users can only play downloaded tracks through AOL! The CD burning feature is such a joke, 10 tracks? 10 tracks, considering the average song length is not enough to fill a 74 minute CD.
The most ridiculous part about this whole service is the requirement of an AOL subscription. So in order to use this service a prospective customer needs to pay $25/month for an AOL subscription and $18/month for unlimited downloads of a DRM crippled format and the ability to burn 10 tracks. So for $43, users can download low quality, DRM crippled songs from a 56k modem, and every month they can burn half of a mix CD with 10 tracks!
I've said it before and I will repeat it again, because apparently nobody at AOL/TW reads /. If you are going to charge for a service, any service whether it is downloadable music, catering, or blowjobs in a cheap motel, you need to meet the basic needs of your potential customers.
The time that free P2P will fail is the time that subscription services like this can offer better service than all the other free P2P networks combined. This includes file availability, speed, and price, though the price will fall in if the first two factors are well met. This AOL service is a far cry from being anything close to affordable or useful. No one wants to pay $18 for 10 tracks, equivalent to buying a regular old CD at regular old price.
That old system is idiotic, and the entire way that the music industry does business will change. No longer will they sell albums at huge rates like we see today. If they want to survive, they will have to sell each track individually and to keep the 'album system' intact, they will have to have the price of albums significantly lower than those of the combined prices of the tracks on that album. As it is, there is no reason why a soundtrack should cost more than the movie itself, as there are obviously no development or research involved in either of the medium, there is virtually no cost to produce either medium, and the content on the DVD is greater than on the CD. Yet the RIAA blames their slumping sales *completely* on piracy.
While these are not by any means new arguments, the industry just doesn't seem to be getting the picture. By offering services like these to "cater" to your average Joe KaZaA user, they are simply outlining the fact that they don't understand why KaZaA is so successful. It offers what users want at low rates (in this case free), and for the industry to compete with that price, they will simply have to offer a better product, and people will pay for it, *somewhat* like the idea of open source.
http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/fair_use_and_drm.html
Intresting link with a good all round look at the DRM vrs Fair Use issue. Peronally I don't think the companies get it. They need to get back in touch with the fact that the customer is always right. Right now the customers who have braod band access are thumbing their collective noses at the music industry because the industry is thumbing their noses at them. Get with the times folks, your hoarding bronze weapons when steel is on the market.
In regards to this joke of a music service being offered I have this to say. As long as they are going to practice highway robbery there will be pirates aplenty. Pave a 6 lane highway with no speed bumps and you might be amazed how many people are willing to pay to use it. You know this service reminds me of the end of Blazing saddles where they put up the Toll booth on the prarie only they expect it to work in real life.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
You simply can't sell what the public knows it can get for free. Someone at AOL must have more balls than brains...who would even _propose_ this idea in a meeting? The pop-music-swapping demographic they're aiming this at is the same that's grown file sharing to what it is today -- there's no way they'll pay for crippled versions of the same product they now consume for no cost, ethical or not.
"t's statements like this that validates everything that the RIAA claims."
It might validate them in their eyes, but as far as it being a good argument, that's questionable. He does bring up a good point about the pricing.
My math was a little different. You get 10 tracks a month, but you pay $18 a month. So you're buying an album for $18, that's a little spendy.
The flip side is that you get streaming options (presumably from the actual content...) and your CD is nothing but music you want. That's not all bad.
But there's still the sticker shock deal like the guy mentioned. Yeah, he sounds bad for saying Kazaa is "fucking free", but when you think about what he's really saying here, Kazaa is just plain a better service. I imagine lotsa people'd be happy to pay $20 to use Kazaa, just for the right to use it legally. (Note: that's completely different than paying $20/mo to use Kazaa because the company demands it.)
The RIAA hasn't figured out yet that the price tag isn't the major issue here (Lots of people are buying $50 games when the tools the pirate them are there and waiting to be used), it's a matter of the service. The RIAA still has a wonderful opportunity here that they're arrogantly overlooking. They should set up their own music download service. All the songs they can muster, they guarantee the quality, and they provide a server that can handle quick downloads. That's it. Don't make it more complicated than that.
I mean seriously, every single music service I've seen has pricing policies that resemble cell phone plans!
Ok...10 burnable tracks for 18 fucking dollars? You've got the be fucking kidding me. I can even buy a crappy CD with 15 tracks for less than that. You can buy a compilation CD of tracks you like for 15 bucks for 20 tracks. These people are nuts. You want to sell online music...it's so god damned simple. Streaming all tracks are free, Twentyfive cents for all tracks at 64kbps encoding, $1 for all tracks at 128kbps encoding, and $2 for all tracks at 256kbps. Simple, and people would buy it. I imagine most people here would pay 2 lousy dollars for a quality mpeg. Oh, and no DRM. That shit blows. If they really want to make sure you don't trade their MP3s after you pay for one, just make them only burnable (but playable on any computer) on the computer they are downloaded onto. Or if they really really want copy protection, only bother protecting the 128 and 256 mp3s. Honestly, I can't believe they haven't done this shit already. Oh, that's right, the Recording industry is a bunch of greedy whores.
Downloading music is easier, cheaper, and thanks to the new copy protected CD's, of greater utility than buying it at the store. Heck, it's easier and cheaper and of greater utility than driving to a store even if they were handing out the stupid copy protected CD's for free.
The right way to take advantage of this situation seems obvious to me. Imagine:
- A subscription service priced a little above what the average music buyer spent on recordings a few years ago.
- Artist royalties paid in proportion to each artist's downloads and total subscription revenue.
- More music to choose from than with traditional distribution (after all, old and/or very obscure titles consuming a little disk space is much less of a problem than unsold physical inventory)
- Reliable servers with enough bandwidth and physical locations to make it easy to get what you want whenever you want it.
- Consistently good quality files available in several formats. No hassles with downloading a song only to find that it's incomplete, recompressed, or otherwise poor quality. No downloading an ogg file only to find that some idiot converted it from an MP3.
- An easy user interface. Finding and retrieving the songs you want should be a no-brainer. Convenience sells.
- Very high download limits, if any. Subscribers should be able to hear what they want, when they want, without having to maintain a huge local collection. The only incentives to keep local copies should be to avoid download time & network outages, or to transfer to other media for portable use. Essentially, being a subscriber should be a lot like having the world's largest music collection, only more convenient.
- Losslessly compressed files available, though possibly with a somewhat more expensive account to offset the higher bandwidth consumption. If this service is to replace CD's for all purposes, it will have to provide equal or better sound quality.
- NO copy protection of any kind. The songs are not the product. The service is. People will be more willing to pay for that service if it is more useful to them. DRM can only reduce the value of that service, and thus reduce customer's willingness to pay for it.
While this would almost certainly result in people paying less per song, I believe that most people would be willing to spend more on music per month than average CD purchases. The recording industry would get the increased income it wants. Consumers would get the music and fair-use rights that they want. And independent artists would get an opportunity to gain more exposure and get paid at least something for their music, instead of having to give it away on MP3.com and only hope that someone might occasionally buy a CD.Music retailers would, however be screwed. But so be it. Holding back digital music distribution for the sake of the record stores would make about as much sense as holding back automobiles for the sake of livery stables.
I see a small problem with this idea: Not everyone has an Internet connection, especially poorer folks.
Problem is, these poorer folks still spend money on entertainment. My kid sister held a job at a movie theater about a year back and she always had to deal with people who were angry that the movie theatre didn't advertise showtimes in the paper everyday. She'd tell them to just check the website for showtimes and she got a lot of (often angry) responses that some people don't have money to spend on "the Internet".
There's still a digital divide, people, no matter how much we'd like to think otherwise. Until everyone who listens to music is online, then ceasing the production of CDs makes no business sense.
I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.
Any model that requires payment is doomed because it can not compete with Kazaa-like stuff.
I've used services like kazaa quite a bit in the past, but I wouldn't if there was a good alternative service. By good, I mean it has to:
- Not be outrageously expensive (pay-per-track would make the most sense).
- Have a large library of songs. Even if it wasn't run by a group of record companies a very respectable library could be had if they just...
- Pay the artist (or their corporate masters in the case of major-label bands). I'm not going to pay a penny for a work of art if it doesn't benefit the artist.
I would probably subscribe to a service that meets those three points. I certainly like being able to get music for free off of kazaa, but it has some annoying limitations that an "official" service wouldn't - I can't always find what I want, when I do find something the file could be mislabled or severely corrupted or of poor quality, there's no uniform naming scheme, the id3 tags are frequently missing album info etc. With an official service you would always know what to expect. I think that is a *huge* incentive right there, as current p2p apps are crap when it comes to knowing what you're going to get.
DRM is another sticky issue of course. Any subscription service would be afraid all of the files they distribute would be vulnerable to further distribution after the initial download. There isn't any easy way around this that I'm aware of - either you have DRM and annoy the bejeezus out of the end user or don't and risk that someone will use the media in some infringing way. But there will always be risk in any business, that's part of the nature of capitalism - if someone else can do it better and for less you're in danger. There's no way any service can be cheaper than free obviously, so its the 'better' part that needs to be focused on. Make a service that is convenient and delivers exactly what the customer expects (and doesn't annoy the bejeezus out of them preferably), and you'll have plenty of business. People don't mind paying for things, they just hate throwing their money away.
Gah, that was a longer rant than I was expecting... back to work.
I have to agree with that, $18.00 to burn a mere 10 songs? Forget that, that's robbery.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.