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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."
Sort of gives a new meaning to AOL CDs.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
...in hell comes from.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
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.
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.
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?
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?
THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS HAS CONVENED TO DISCUSS THEIR NEW ONLINE MUSIC STRATEGY.
AOL SUIT #1
So, the idea is this - we've already got subscribers, and the music people want subscribers, so lets turn OUR subscibers into THAT kind of subscribers! I'm frickin' brilliant!
AOL SUIT #2
But, what if they pirate the music they download? Can't they just play it out of their headphone jack, onto a MiniDisc, or basically anything else?
AOL SUIT #1 motions to the gorillas standing guard at the door. With a quick motion, AOL SUIT #2 is sent through a trap door under his chair. At the same time, his stock options are released from a hatch in the ceiling and all the other SUITS scramble to collect them.
AOL SUIT #1
Now, as I was saying...
FADE OUT
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?