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Apple to Launch Music Service?
discstickers writes "The San Jose Mercury News is running an article about an Apple music service that might be ready to launch next month. $.99 a song with the ability to burn to CD doesn't sound too bad."
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This seems to be the business model /.ers have been yelling at the RIAA to adopt. Let's see if it's actually viable...
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
Means I don't have to buy a whole album for one or two songs, the commpanies make just as much money so they're happy, aside from it's not free as in air, what's not to like?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Follow:
99 cents a track.
~12 tracks on a disc.
~12 bucks for the music, and you have to provide the bandwith, physical media, and case. oh, and no liner notes.
Thanks, but I'll go to my local indie store, where they have the media, case, and liner notes all for 12 bucks.
Actually they might make less. They like charging you for filler songs.
I find it interesting that the information comes from an unnamed source at an unnamed company, and no one will comment on it. Perfect food for the rumor sites, but the LA Times and San Jose Mercury?
The new service would only be available to users of Apple's Macintosh line computers and iPod portable music players
.99c and then burn to CD or email to your friends
Which indicates there is something in it that stops the rest of us using it. This would further indicate either a closed format with codecs only for these two. Or DRM on top of something that exists.
Now is that bad ? Maybe not, but I was pretty sure that the Slashdot perfect model was
Download for
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
That's true. I think a lot of people are downloading for free, because they have the excuse that there isn't a way to get just the songs they want on a CD. Now that there is an option to get CDs for $15, but with 15 songs you DO want on it. It's time to see who is making excuses for their piracy and who really just doesn't like the system.
Cripes! Where do these people get their pricing ideas?
For a typical 12 song CD, that would cost as much as the meatspace equivalent. And when I purchase it for $12 at Target, or where ever else, I get to keep a physical token.
I could, however, see using this for hard to find CD's, like the bad plus. A dollar per song would be worth it when I can't find it in stores, or wait for Amazon to special order it.
But for everything else, if they charged $.25 per song, they couldn't upload them fast enough for me. As long as they're a dollar, I'll think long and hard about downloading anything.
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
I seem to remember Apple having difficulties working as a media business when another older company, Apple Records (The Beatles), is still around. Perhaps they have worked something out.
"I can get them 99c cheaper on KaZaA. ... and that is why it will fail. "
Not if:
a.) The selection's good.
b.) The quality is guaranteed.
c.) The transfers happen quickly.
d.) There's an ability to preview the song.
Believe it or not, the price tag is not the major contributer to using Kazaa. It provides the best service. But it's got plenty of room for somebody with good bandwidth to come in and make a better model of it.
You have to remember, this is the same country where people drive gas-guzzling SUVS, pay $3.50 for a coffee and pay over $1.00 for bottled water. They want quality and service, the cost isn't really that big of issue.
An anonymous slashdot post was the first good description of this whole rumor. No one thought it was reliable, but the fact that it didn't sound like it was written by a two year old helped its credibility.
I'm just waiting for some electronic music distributor to realize that they'll make more money if they distribute MP3s and use social pressures to discourage piracy. If an album cost $4 online, and they'll let you do whatever you like with the music, why would you steal?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I'm as big of a Mac Zealot as you can get, but I think this too is doomed to failure. $.99 a song? Ripoff. This means that the average CD will still cost $10-$12 to download, and you don't get a CD, a jewel case, or liner notes. Legal music swapping will not catch on until it is significantly cheaper, like around $.25 or less. THAT is a good business model. I assume that this hinges on the record labels and that Apple is just performing as the middle man with these prices. I, for one, will still use Aquisition until the record companies stop gouging me.
I would like a service to give money to the artists I enjoy in exchange for the songs I like...
So the big question is (and always has been), are people generally more like you or more like me?
If the service really does offer MP3's for download at $1 a song, then we might get a chance to find out.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1. No DRM, beyond that which is already in my iPod, meaning I am free to burn CD's as I please.
2. Catalog choices. If the selection is limited to Top 40 hits of the past ten years, no way. But if the choices are wide and deep (and maybe even out of print songs as was suggested earlier, and
3. Previews, allowing me to edit out the album filler. $.99 is cheap, and most albums only have a max of 4 good tracks.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
I'd definitely check this out, I like to buy my music. The article talks about how it is kind of an odd decision for the record industry to work with Apple because of their low marketshare. The thing is, a significant number of that ~3% have iPods, and I would think that anyone with an iPod has an obvious interest in digital music, and would be more likely to use a service such as this than other consumers. We'll see what happens...
"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won..." ~ Mohandas K. Gandhi
So long as I can preview it before paying for the download, and don't have to pay to re-cownload it if my CD gets scratched... While the RIAA is bitching about piracy, I've bought the same damn Nine Inch Nails CD 3 times at $17 a pop since 1993. I should really stop losing my stuff every time I move...
I think you've got to admit that a business model which financially rewards the creators of content is likely to be more sustainable in the long term than one based on 'everybody gets the content for free'. If you want to see the continued creation of music, you've got to consider how you can fund artists (not that I'm condoning the current business model which ensures that the few commercially successful artists that exist make thousands of times more than, say doctors, but hey... they deserve a few pennies for their efforts). Options like this one just might provide a better solution for that than the current publishing/distribution model.
The problem is that the existence of 'free' (modulo the long term social cost of killing the creation of future music) alternatives could prevent this potentially sustainable model from catching hold.
Normally, when a society wants to proscribe some activity which is destructive to its long term health (such as the widespread freeloading of music), it uses social norms and, in extreme cases, laws to prevent them. Hmm - maybe copying music without giving anything back to the artist ought to be socially unacceptable, or maybe even illegal?
Ket's face it. Kazaa is annoying. Sure, you can get free music. But you still have the problems of mislabelled files, low quality rips, disconnects, slow transfers, interrupted transfers, incomplete 'catalogues', scarcity of uncommon material... The list goes on and on. The BIG advantage of a commercial (B2P ?) service is that, unless Akamai goes down, the files are always Right There. It's the classic "you get what you pay for" situation.
An Apple-designed service can be expected to be well-designed, reliable, and cool. If 4 major record labels really do provide content this could take off in a major way. This could materially increase Apple's marketshare. Contrast this with Microsoft's DRM-laden plans and you'll see that there will be a clear choice
My employer pays a lot of ASCAP fees, and we have to support Limewire because we have legitimate needs for rapid access to a vast music library. The #1 question during the iTunes 'rollout' was "can I download MP3s with this ?" That answer is about to change.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
I imagine it would be a much higher adoption rate, if it were all this, and the RIAA and record congloms saw $$ coming in.
But in a sense you are right. There will always be those that weren't going to pay for it to begin with.
Someone mentioned one of Apple's good philosophies above.
Kepp the honest people honest by offering incentive such as 5 liscense packs of OS X for only $70 more
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
"Now that there is an option to get CDs for $15, but with 15 songs you DO want on it. It's time to see who is making excuses for their piracy and who really just doesn't like the system."
That depends: does the customized CD have the original CD audio files, or CD audio recordings of a lossy-compressed format? If I'm going to be paying for it, I want CD-A, not MP3s.
I'm one of the RIAA and company's most vocal critics. I also use filesharing services from time to time.
.. the goal is to cut out the middle man and make music cheaper to buy for the consumer, and more economically viable to pursue for the musician.
... this is not an option going forward, as more music will be created in such a way that it cannot be performed live. A much, much, much cheaper cost per song than we're paying now (20$ for 2 songs, as the saying goes) is the ideal goal in my mind, and I do hope that you support that. While you clock dollars at your job, musicians have to work minimum wage jobs and live in shitholes (or with the parents) in order to provide you with the music you want. Given how ubiquitous and important music is to people, I'd like to believe that most people would volounteer some cash to help artists if the option were available and reasonable in the marketplace. Its just a matter of reducing the expected production value of current music (the artificial barrier to the mainstream music market is insane thanks to the labels) so that both consumers and creators can stop worrying about the economics and focus on the music.
But please, if you remove the RIAA from the picture, and thus their bilking of the arist, the artists would like to be paid *somehow*.
I give my music away on mp3.com, besonic.com for free. But if I entered into a recording contract, I would like to imagine that people dont want all their music for free, for ever, no ifs ands or buts.
Kazaa is preferable to handing over money to the RIAA's members, but paying 1$ a song should be preferable to most people than getting all their music for free.
Even building a cheap mini studio to make music can cost anywhere from a grand (if you dont mind poor sound quality and only listen to intrumental/vocal music), to ten grand (approaching radio-quality production quality, more electronic type music). While many artists would like to give music away for free, its just not economically possible. So please temper your opinions with the realization that money has to come from somewhere
People say musicians make money from touring, but alot of the new kind of music coming out doesn't make sense in a live context (electronic music, mostly.) So its a pipe dream to imagine that getting distributed copies of music should always be free because musicians can just tour
Thanks.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I don't understand how this is different from rhapsody from http://www.listen.com Listen.com has a plan where you pay $9.95/month, then you can preview as many as you like. You can also download and burn as many as you like for an additional 49 cents per track. I've seen someone use it, and it works really well. it also has links for other artists that are similar, and some history and info on each artist. It's not perfect selection, but pretty darned good, and it's legal AFAIK.
I recently asked a non-geek who gave up buying CDs a few years back if he would be willing to pay about $0.15 for this kind of service. He said no. This is the same person who spend $60+ on a concert ticket.
The paying for recorded music meme is dying, and there's very little that can be done to prevent it. No law is enforcable when more than about 10% of the population are breaking it, and so they will have to either loosen copyright law, or not enforce it at all. Artists are worth money, and people will pay good money to see them. Recordings are just advertising, and most people object to paying for advertising.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Dude, you can live off lawn grass and rain water for free if you like, and yet, for some odd reason, you're not doing it.
...
Is that because you might actually pay for something that is otherwise available for free if the quality of that product is offered at a price you consider worth spending on it? Gasp
"Old man yells at systemd"
While I agree that being able to pick song by song would be nice in the short term, I do think it would have some long term consequences that may not be so good.
Imagine some future world where everyone gets their music via these services... you could easily wind up with a situation where every new song is overproduced (and possibly run by one of those 'AI' music-hit detectors mentioned here previously) to try to ensure it is a hit, since any time spent writing/recording it will be 'wasted' if not enough people pay for the song by itself. Right now you have an environment where artists can put some experimental tunes in between the sure-fire hits. Maybe these tracks hit the mark and become huge, maybe they tank, but at least they are trying something different. If everything is per-song I think we'll eventually see even less artist experimentation and artist growth than we do now, and that is scary.
The article says, in effect, that in exchange for reduced audio quality, providing your own CD's, a lack of liner notes, you too can make record company executives happy.
If you really like music, you would never accept a lack of subsonic. You buy full albums of artists you like, and you Kazaa / live 365 to find new artists. If you don't really like music, you probably have never even heard of Kazaa. Maybe you will like this service, then.
In a world where costs have been cut dramatically, you can't go on charging the same. Tapes were a step above records acoustically, and CD's were a premium above tapes (despite being cheaper to manufacture). What do MP3's offer? They're cheap. Charge a premium for a lower quality? Nuts.
All you can eat 128k MP3's for 19.95 per month, with 180k MP3's available for 29.95, and lossless CD for 59.95. Why is supply, demand, and competition such a hard concept for record executives?
The ______ Agenda
Don't forget the other important fact: not breaking federal copyright law. Downloading with Apple's service would not be a violation, while Kazaa is (except when permission to redistribute is granted by the copyright holder of course).
If you think popular music is crap now, wait until this business model becomes successful. Artists will be pressured to have every song on thier album a hit to maximize downloads. We'll also face lables promoting even more Britney Spears and N'sync type groups. Perhaps labels will just use the hit-song detecting software and just hire a little T&A to sing it for them
;^)
Well, then again maybe we'll not see a whole lot of change after all
On a completely different note, if you download an entire CD, they should make available a printable version of the cover and liner notes.
First off, CD manufacturing is less than $1/ea. (some have said as low as 25/ea.) Taking the "plastic token" out of the equation does not represent a significant reduction in cost.
Secondly, it's common practice that when manufacturers break out single units that they charge more. Ever buy a Coke from a vending machine? How much did you pay for it, 65? And what is the cost per unit when you buy a 12 pack from Food Lion? 40/ea.? Nothing new here.
Third, there are real savings here. Yeah, if you want the entire album, you may be better off just buying it from the store. However, if you just want one or two songs, then you have saved yourself $10 or more. I can think of a LOT of songs from the past 30 years that I'd like to buy, but I don't care to get the whole album. There's a lot of one-hit wonders out there, but very few artists that can pack out an album with great material.
I think that the price is right. In fact, if I were doing it, I'd set the pricing as a range, from 75 for the "moldy oldies" to $1.25 for the latest stuff. Really, the only hitch I see so far is that they haven't answered the question of DRM. If there is DRM technology built into this, then yes, you're right that the cost is way too much. I wouldn't be willing to pay more than 25 for songs with DRM, if that.
The LA Times article says that the AAC files can be DRM locked, but that Apple has required that they can be burned onto a CD, which would unlock them.
See I have a couple of different reasons why this doesn't hit me as a fair deal from apple. Reason one is that I have an eMusic account, same premise. You pay a monthly $10 fee, and you have unlimited downloads of music off their service (And there is a lot that they offer.). Great place if your into punk music too, Epitaph Records is always releasing titles to eMusic for exclusive downloads.
Why would I pay $1 a track, $15 a cd when I can go to a used Record/CD store, pick-up used copies of the artists I want to hear for about $6-$9 a pop. And lets say that Artist releases 5-6 Songs off said album I got as a used CD, Those with this music service from apple will have to go out, get to the site, log in, find the track, pay for track, wait for confirmation of the payment being recieved, then once that confirm is recieved - download it, and then play it where as all I had to do was find case, open case, remove cd, insert cd, play, enjoy.
Oh and I don't have to worry about falling victim to someone else's idea of "High Quality". Commonly people and services will encode at 128 or 192 to save space on their drives, and if you even remotely concidered yourself an audiophile, such sampling would be really sub-standard to your ears. =)
Besides, I for one am still really leary of any site that wants me to pay for digital downloads, what's really there to stop the RIAA or some of their Brain Washed supportive Artists from coming after members on that service? And what's worse from such acts like in the case of Napster, this time they'll have your Real Name, Real Address, Real Credit Card information, etc where as on Napster you at least had Annoniminity from such worries.
======
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. - Euripides
The reason is that it costs a lot to package and market a product. In the case of matches, it costs a very tiny fraction of a cent to make one, but to package, market and put it on store shelves costs enormously more. So it's not economic to sell something as cheap as a single match, or even ten matches.
Last time I looked, CD singles cost a substantial fraction of what albums cost, and I think that's why albums are popular. If we can reduce the transaction cost, as Apple has, then we can sell individual songs.
I like buying albums, though, because there are at least a few songs in a typical album that I will enjoy that I didn't hear before buying it. For instance, I bought Vanessa Daou's 'Make you Love' CD based on a couple of tracks, and my favourite song happens to be one I didn't hear before I bought the CD. I wonder how you could work around that problem. If people only hear one song on the radio, that's the song they'll buy.
I wonder if this might be a way to eliminate the truly stultifying "we only play three songs" commercial radio experience? It maybe become necessary, for marketing purposes, to play a wider variety!
D
Or for that matter, music selection. It only mentions that it will only be available to people with Mac AND iPOD, whatever that means. Where did the poster get this information? We really need to have a moderation system for articles, with karma influencing bonus @slashdot or something.
Exactly. If any of these services want to succeed they need to realize that targeting small audiences IS financially viable with electronic distribution. The main complaint a lot of record companies seemed to have in the past was the problem of maintaining stock for things that don't sell a lot. With digital distribution, this problem no longer exists since you don't need to have 35,000 copies of an album by VanDerGraff Generator for instance. You have one which is duped and has a one time unlock code inserted so that it can be burned to CD by the user.
BTW... I went to a Mr. Bungle concert back in the early 90s in Cleveland. Very cool show. I wish I knew who the opening band was though. They were awesome too.
Un-news
Here in Canada we can now make copies of CDs legally. I borrow my friends CD, copy it, and give it back to him. My copy is perfectly legal thanks to the blank media levy that was introduced. I'm not sure it's worth it, though.
I believe, that there are different kinds of music consumers. On the one side we have the Top-40 audience. They only want the hits. They buy CD-singles and compilations, download single songs from file-sharing services and listen to heavy-rotation radio stations. On the other side we have the album buyers. They buy the full album, adore soulseek, and hate most of the radio stations. I am sure that there are different in-between types of music listeners, but for the sake of simplicity let's just look at these two.
If you only like hits then that is what you will keep buying. I would hope, that full albums will not be priced number of songs*$0.99. So album buyers will still listen to all songs an artist has to offer. A lot of artists will continue to make the music they want to and not only machine-selected hits.
Hank! White!
Key difference: Listen.com requires windows. Apple is doing this to make an apple version, because there has been little effort on the part of 3rd parties to cater to apple users.
You say
I'd cream my jeans if all those one-hit-per-cd musicians went down in flames. I'll still get every last track off every damn Radiohead album ever released. EPs included. Same for Pulp. Same for Blur. Same for Sublime. Totally worth my $1.
Some rockstars care about the quality of their product.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Man, everyone is ripping on this guy, I have to come to his defense...
Everyones analogies to other real-world products are cute, but they don't apply. One guy said, (paraphrasing) "you can live off grass and rainwater, but you dont, do you?" No... but if there was a totally free, in-home chef that would make me food exactly like I'd pay for at a restaurant, but it takes him a little longer or I can't get exactly what I want off the menu at any given time, I'd probably choose that alternative a lot of the time.
People post, "Kazaa is annoying", "slow downloads", etc. For movies, maybe. For most songs (I realize a lot of smaller artists are not represented as well), downloads are plentiful and fast, and for a 5 MB file it's QUICK.
Others post, "You have to supply the bandwidth, CD, no liner notes, etc". This is true. But a LOT of people don't want a CD, don't care about liner notes. If you like the band enough to want all 12-15 songs, I totally agree, buy the CD. But for most people, this is more of what they want. And obviously the people that would use KaZaA or this service already have cable modem or DSL (or dialup and don't care about speed).
I think $.99 is a good deal for a track, a GREAT deal. But when it comes down to logging on to some secure server, giving a credit card # up, etc, it's just going to be quicker to hit KaZaA or whatever P2P alternative there is and download.
I agree with the parent, I don't think anything like this, however good the service, will take off as long as a free alternative exists that is anywhere near as user friendly as the for-pay service.
Mark
$1/track strikes me as a pretty good deal. I imagine the price is not imformed so much by Apple (while you may think their stuff is expensive, this scheme does nothing to directly contribute to their bottom line, i.e. hardware sales), as it is likely informed by whatever potential deals they want to strike with the existing content providers.
The pieces are all there - Akamai's hooked up, hell, the whole QuickTime network must be in bed with several studios already with the movie trailer video streaming service (easily the best on the net). One wonders if they have already laid the groundwork for those music-based partnerships.
And, lets not forget QuickTime. It's fantastically powerful and flexible, and they could package their media any way they wish. Some have mentioned the lack of liner notes, artwork etc. I would consider that moot if they provided, some real digital packaging. In Mac OS X, you can assign graphic files to the background of windows, you've got those 32bit 256x256 icons... if I could browse through my MP3 folder and have those icons sized nice and big with the appropriate artwork, fully tagged ID3-wise, and it's a high-quality file... yeah, I'd bite. Absolutely.
On another note, there is DRM of a sort in the iPod, specifically for the Audible content, but I think that is unique to their format and not system wide.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
One thing that I've noticed about Mac users is that many of them are in the business of creating content (graphics, music, writing, etc.)
.. these users understand the costs of creating content and that someone's making a living doing it.
This is the perfect market to test this pay-to-play scheme
If this scheme doesn't work with Mac users, it won't work with a larger audience...
You're right -- that doesn't sound too bad, it sounds terrible! The music industry has just eliminated all shipping, storage, storefronts and sales personnel and the price is still $12 for a 12-song CD?
The difference between one of these CD's and one you purchase in a store is that the one you assemble would presumably not have any filler that you don't like. You would get 12 songs that you enjoy for $12 rather than having to buy approximately 6 discs at $12/each to get two good tracks off of each one... which is the better deal?
The radio companies aren't stupid... they know they put out filler. Most people don't do the math and figure they just paid $12 for a CD for that ONE song that they liked... thus paying $12 for that ONE song...
I can purchase songs at 30c/each AND
Again, your pricing off the filler... think about just getting the "quality" songs that you personally enjoy... none of the B.S.... the songs are worth more then, no?
the ability to get a partial refund -- say, 90% -- for songs that I download but don't enjoy. So lets say that I download 200 songs in a given month and I decide a third of those (65) of those are worth keeping. I'd pay $19.50 for the ones I keep and another $4.95 for the ones I "returned." Frankly, I'm not going to bother spending 10 minutes of my life tracking down that song I just returned to them on Kazzaa to save 30c.
Go to amazon or any one of the millions of sites out there that offers previews... just preview the song there. And if you're going to argue that point, why pay ANYTHING for a song you don't want?
Snooze and you lose your sushi.
I'm sick of all this whining about 99 per song=$12-14 per album.
.Mac members" or some such thing that highlights tracks recorded by Mac users, not just über-chic stars-of-the-moment.
The whole point it, YOU DON'T HAVE TO BUY THE WHOLE ALBUM! This isn't meant to replace gonig to the store and buying a CD. It is supposed to COMPLIMENT it. Buy one song. If you like it and feel comfortable buying the whole CD, why on earth WOULD you sit there downloading inferior quality files to burn to a generic CD-R without any liner notes? Look, wookies don't live on Endor, OK? IT JUST DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!
The whole point is to let people choose a few songs here or there. Or to give a band who can't get the $ together to record a whole album a chance to have their music distributed AND receive some money from it. And do you think it'll just be major label music? Let me tell you this - if this whole thing DOES go through, you can rest assured you'll see a "featured
And as far as the whole "I can get it for free on KaZaa" argument - well, have it then. When the DOJ comes knocking on your door after the RIAA's spyware tracked u down after downloading a bugged file, let me know how that free prison food is. Besides, the kind of music I like generally isn't available on KaZaa, because KaZaa reflects, for the most part, a large portion of society that listens to really bad pop music. If I were to trust any company to make cool, obscure music available to the masses, its Apple.
So before you start bitching and whining about price and convenience, please know what you're talking about. They're not trying to replace going to your local record shop to buy a new album. They're trying to offer a NEW service that will be easy to use, fun to explore, and relatively inexpensive considering the years of joy that a single song can bring.
Phish has recently started selling their recordings online. They are the live show soundboard recordings. Very high quality, and you can download in SHN or MP3.
the price is around $10-15 depending on which show you get and how many songs the download has in it. They average about 2-4 CD's per download set after it is decompressed from SHN and burned to audio CD.
Apparently, they plan on releasing previous shows and all future shows in this format. It's a nice change from the $25 each for the live albums they had put out previously.
Maybe some day, other bands will follow suit.
For those of you who just want one song, and are willing to pay MORE than it would cost at the CD store just so you only pay for one song, you should probably start listening to better music that isn't on the top 40. top 40 is just a measurement of how much the CD stores were force fed that particular album by the record label, it isn't a measurement of quality or popularity by any means.
If this new service has all the songs from all the labels, full length and in a reasonable format for both lossy and non-lossy compression (read: not encyrpted for DRM), it might be a decent thing. But at 99 cents a song, only lossy downloads, and probably not many artists signed up for it, add the fact that it will say DMCA and DRM all over the package, and I doubt this service will do any good.
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
This could lead to Artists being pressured to shorten the length of their songs. The song meat by moe. is 45 minutes long. Would this cost the same as Storm Troopers of Death's Anti-procrastination song which clocks in around a whopping 8 seconds? They should charge by the MB instead.