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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
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
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.
"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!
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.