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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."
how many of the 22 million people that use AOL are either doing AOL High Speed or using it over a TCP/IP connection from another broadband provider? Is it really a good move for them to do this when they have such a large dialup userbase? There already seems to be financial trouble ahead for the ISP as the appeal of dialup dwindles even further...
No thanks, I am not paying $23 + $4 - $x for songs when Kazaa is still fucking free.
How can they let you download them, but stop you from burning them to CD?
Actually, they let you burn anything you want, but stop you from downloading them.
AOL at 56 Kbps for MP3 downloads? And booked as a pay service? Maybe they'll get granny to believe she has broadband now that she can download music...
*scoove*
Anyway this is al speculation. That is what has happened in the past with other subscription services, though. You get the files as a .AOM (American Online music) file or something that is encrypted.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
I am wonderign what the usage rights will be on CDs you burn using songs from their service. One copy only?
I wouldn't be surprised if the RIAA either A. raises holy hell about how this will cut into their CD sales, or B. demands a goodly chunk of the revenue generated to compensate them for their perceived loss.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
the true intent of the media companies is to go out and "prove" that internet distribution is "not workable".
.... if Gutenberg were alive today, they'd have his nuts in the courts for trying to "take down the industry" of scribes. Because that's all that this is... this is the 21st century equivalent of scribes who copied books.. who now see their liveihoods being threatened by that newfangled contraption which is pirateing away their profits...
Who in their right fscking mind would pay $18 to burn 10 tracks? If i want to take it in the ass, i'll go and buy a cd for $18 in the store! Hell, it may have 12 tracks on it?
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.
Look - lets all be reasonable - the media companies are dead set against the internet as a form of distribution, because the old form of distribution is what they know, and makes them money by the truckload.
Do you blame them for selling (essentially) $.50 of materials for a markup of 3600%?? If i could shit in my hand and sell it for $5 a pop, you're damn right i'd be eating "Britanny Spears Bran Flakes" night and day too.
I swear to
Who's going to write books if everyone can get a copy for nothing?
The Brits have a term for people like this....
WANKERS!
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
In a previous discussion, I'd suggested that AOL is perfectly positioned (what with the content TW owns outright) to offer music and movie downloads as premium content ... but not like this.
:(
If they want it to work, it needs to be a flat rate, like $9.95 per month (in addition to your AOL membership) for all the unencumbered MP3s you can download. That would make the music downloaders happy and would give AOL a marketplace advantage in the ISP arena.
But nooooo, we're *so* afraid one naked MP3 might escape our grasp...
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
See, the way is works is, if you want to change your business model, you can't keep the old one around "just in case".
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!"
Right, you won't make any money because you haven't thrown out the OLD system yet. These two ways of doing business are mutually exclusive. Either you're selling CD's, or your selling the rights to listen to music. You can't do both. Right now, you spend millions a year on production and distribution...so much money in fact that you have to charge $18 for 10 songs (be it in CD format or downloadable format).
The solution is CUT COSTS. Stop spending millions a year on pressing and distributing CD's and just put everything in an online library. It's just that simple. Then you can offer more because it costs less to produce. Then people will buy...but not until you make the leap.
I am so tired of monthly fees for everything. I pay $20 here, $9 there, $40 for tha tother thing.
I'll pay $1 a song, but I will not subscribe to any more services. It adds up quickly.
In the end, it comes to the record comapnies still fighting for a way to make the money and stop the bleeding. I truly believe that they want to offer an innovative way of releasing music "tailored" to the consumer and at the same time protecting "their " property. I still buy CDs , but 18 bucks for 10 burnable tracks per month?! I wouldn't DRIVE to get 10 tracks for $18! someone will soon get pay/play system down in retail stores that might make the grade. Tear it down and build from the ground. The way they used to do business still works but it wont for long. Adapt or cease to exist.
you never lose in ure razorblade shoes......Beck-Hotwax
Perhaps they should include a blank CD-R with each of the Spam CD's that they mail out. Better yet, send the AOL software out on a CD-RW!
AOL is trying to get away from the whole dial up ISP business and move into the pay-for-content business. Dial up is a dead saturated market but the hope is that they can make money by offering the huge amount of highly valuable content they have behind them exclusively to subscribers.
Actually, I saw this and the first thing I thought was "Maybe it is time to get AOL." Many people have said that they would pay for songs if they could. Well, here's a chance. Hopefully they will release what their catalog plan is before long, as not many will jump on without know what is available. And their count of burnable seems low. But if it works out that they have the songs I want, and in a year it comes out to better than a per CD cost (especially since it may take 8 CDs at $15 a pop to get what 10 songs I want), then I will seriously consider it.
If we want our entertainment companies to take us seriously, we must in effect stage personal strikes. I don't buy CDs not simply because I can't get the mix I want, but because I think it is ridiculous that 25 year old albums cost $14+, especially when they're sometimes of LPs of less than 40 minutes of music. They can argue all they want about how much it costs to produce new albums, but if it went platinum over 15 years ago I'm pretty sure the costs are now negligible.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
$18 for unlimited download and streams? DRMed music using AOL propriatory player?? 10 tracks a month to burn? using AOL propriatory burner? doesn't sound good to me at all
Note there is STILL NO PAY-PER BURN ability at the moment. How long have those services existed? A year? Two? Why is it that they have a fixed set of tracks-to-burn? Are they even aware that they are serving customers that might want... *gasp*... 11 tracks?
I, personally, *would* use a cheap mp3 service instead of gnutella... But it has to be mp3 (for my own players/burner...) and I fail to see why should I pay for priviledge of buying music from someone (i.e. monthly fee).
This isn't a bad move by AOL. True, most of their customers are on dialup, but they would like them to be on AOL broadband. So they offer extra content on broadband (there will undoubtably be 'six months of songs free when you switch to AOL broadband'). They don't expect this to take off with dialup users, but to serve as bait for them to switch.
I've been subscribing to listen.com since they came out with their new subscription model a few months ago and have been very pleased. $10/month for unlimited music on demand, with a very broad catalog. Even more reasonable is the $4/month radio plan. You can create stations based on favorite artists and hit a button to skip songs you don't like.
They typically charge $1 per song to burn, but have an offer going through March 31 to charge $0.49 per song. This seems to be the pricing point that folks on Slashdot have been claiming they would support. I plan to burn a few CDs just to show my support.
Also, when I had problems getting their new software to work through my University's firewall, a developer worked diligently with me through email before finally sending me a patch to test. It worked great and ended up being included in the next release. It was a level of support I don't encounter with software much anymore.
I'm not affiliated with listen.com, but I do endorse them and I seriously doubt AOL/Time Warner will be able to match up.
"If they want it to work, it needs to be a flat rate, like $9.95 per month (in addition to your AOL membership) for all the unencumbered MP3s you can download."
I respectfully disagree.
It seems to me that since AOL bills it's customers every month, via credit-card, they have a wonderful way to get around the problem of micro-payments.
They charge downloaded MP3's at 50p per-track, or whatever, with no subscription costs, and at the end of the month, add up all the 50p downloads, and stick it on the AOL credit-card charge.
£15.99 plus 12 MP3s @ 45p each = £15.99 + £5.40 = £21.39.
You get a detailed online bill, in your account details somewhere, with each track and cost, and you can buy a track as you feel like it, you don't have to pay any stupid subscription service, and the scheme is feasible since it doesn't incur the prohibitive credit-card payment the card company charges for using it's services, that would apply to small amounts: one big charge, inclusive of all micropayments.
What am I missing? It seems so simple, I've got to be missing something.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
While I agree that your idea would work well in the world of micropayments and pay per use (it certainly takes care of the "how the hell do we bill 10 million teeny little charges??" problem), such schemes tend to fall flat in the real consumer marketplace.
People generally prefer "all you can eat for $9.95" to "only a quarter per carrot" and having to keep track of how many carrots they ate so they know how much the bill will be at the end of the month. Anyone with kids would be sure to get at least one $100 surprise bill!! And that would lead to a new requirement -- that subscribers be able to limit or more likely totally BLOCK the service (so their kids don't get out of hand).
See, the best way to get people to UNsubscribe from a service in droves is to surprise 'em with a higher bill than they expected. Remember how people fled from AOL at the first opportunity, back when flat-rate ISPs began supplanting AOL's pay-per-minute use fee?? Remember when 900 and 976 number blocking became mandatory in the U.S. because of "surprise bills" run up by people's kids?
Anyway, that's why I think flat-rate, all-you-can-download would go over better in the realworld marketplace, even if it wouldn't be as attractive to people who only want a few files per month. And it's a lot easier to advertise an "unlimited" service as being the greatest whizbang deal to ever come along.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Ok. Here's a business model that I would really like, with the potential to make a lot of money:
Offer a music service that, either for free, or for a fixed price, allows you to download all the songs you want, from fixed servers or from other peers, in some compressed format.
Provide software or a web site that allows you to easily design a "mix" CD, based on either songs you already have on MP3, or lists of songs that you don't have from a catalog.
Once you've selected up to 80 minutes of music to fill your mix CD, you design the CD label. You can pick from a template, or upload your own disc art. You can also design your own template. More on that below.
Then you select "purchase" to order a custom CD.
o The custom CD is burned to a CDR, using full resolution, uncompressed WAV files.
o The CDR is printed on a high-resolution full color inkjet or dye sublimation printer, using the disc art that you selected or designed.
o The CDR is placed in a white sleeve, and mailed to you.
The cost would be say, $11.95 per disc plus $5.00 fixed shipping and handling charges no matter how many discs you place in a single order. Keeping the per-disc cost low and the fixed charge high is advantageous, as it would encourage larger orders.
This way, you could use the P2P system to "sample" and explore music, and find the music you really like, then order an uncompromised, top notch, attractive product:
1) The music you really like in uncompressed format -- the same bitstream as the original CD, as opposed to lossy MP3s.
2) Attractive, highly professional custom-printed CDRs with zero effort, instead of piles of hand-labelled CDs.
The "user community" would be built around bulletin boards, mix lists and disc art. Once you had paid to burn a CDR, you could opt to save and publically "publish" your mix list and disc art, so that other people could make identical copies of your mix CD by clicking a "purchase" button. You could also upload your own cover art templates that could be used to print any track list. There would be no way to download other people's disc art -- the only way to get it would be to have a CDR custom burned. This would create an additional incentive to use the pay service. There would be a system for people to rate and rank mix CDs and cover art, and a regularly published top 100 list. You could set up a system where if 1000 people use your mix list or disc art, you get a free CD, thus encouraging people to put a lot of time and effort into coming up with really good track lists and sick disc art.
It seems like it would be fun to me. Sound like a good time? Would people pay for that?