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New Legit Napster Service Coming
Serith submitted a CNN story talking about the new
Napster Service. This is of course an attempt to legitimize music sharing. Provided the price point is fair and paying is convenient, I'll be first in line. Of course the odds of that happening seems awfully weak.
this reminds me of when the photocopiers in the libraries had to have huge disclaimers about copying any material that was copyrighted.
When office copiers were first coming out, publishers of recipe books fought to prevent them from being available too easily. Their fear? Secretaries, who at the time were mainly female, would copy recipes out of books for swapping amongst themselves.
Trolling is a art,
MP3s have always been "good enough" for the casual listening environment. But why would I want to pay for an inferior version? If I am going to actually pay for something, it will be for a CD. Heck, then I can compress it myself in whatever format I choose.
What is needed is a system for music downloads that satisfies the needs of the consumer and a fair renumeration to the artists involved. No commercial offering has come close to this - they are all doomed to failure until they do.
What, explicitly is needed:
Compressed AND un-compressed audio file for download
Artwork / track listings etc. to print
Nothing to stop you burning a CD
No watermarking
Affordable pricing that reflects the facts that:
You've bought your computer and internet connection and CD burner etc.
You've bought your blank media and printer and paper
Musicians give their music away on the radio all the time, and the consumer doesn't pay for this. This has devalued and / or shown the true value of music and it is a very low value.
The price of second hand CD's more accurately reflects a true market value of music
Do the sums yourself and even taking into account the costs of setting up the service, the price per song / per minute is going to be pretty low, but if the service / artist do a 50:50 split on that (before costs) I'd reckon that would be amicable.
Ofcourse, this would put record shops out of business, but that's their problem. They don't offer much useful anyway (unless they sell vinyl)
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
I always fealt that the easiest way for the record industry to counter this is to simply make legitimate purchase easier that p2p.
Imagine being able to walk into Best Buy (using a kiosk for the broadband impaired) or a simple web page and accomplish the following.
1) Design/burn your own music CD selected from the complete vast archives of the music biz.
2) Each song being 128k quality or better or varying based on cost
3) Each song costing anywhere between 49-99 cents each
4) Each song delivered in choice of format (.mp3 or wav etc...)
5) Provide some kind of e-receipt which you could use to re-download/burn music that you lost or damaged (eliminate need for "backup")
Then all they would need to do is promote the crap out of the service using all the money they saved from not suing the crap out of everyone.
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Here are some ideas:
Movies and TV episodes
As well as all the stuff mentioned above (easy to use, good quality, wide diverse collection, album art, etc.) I think a good service should also offer movies and TV episodes for download, and maybe even software. I know this would make licensing even more complicated, but a complete service like this would certainly be added value!
Must be P2P
And it would have to be a true P2P service, with users downloading from each other, but with some check that the material is licenced for distribution on the service. This check would also help to maintain integrity and quality. The check wouldn't need to be on a central server either, lists of allowed files could be distributed.
A Community
Recommendations based on what other people with similar tastes to you have downloaded would also add value. People like the whole community thing!
Bandwidth-based Pricing?
An interesting idea would be a bandwidth-based pricing model, maybe with discounts for people who share more (like Kazaa's user ratings). But it would have to be simple enough for people to understand - maybe with just 3 or 4 levels of MBs/month - and people always knowing how much they have left that month.
Quality
I think the biggest problems with current free P2P networks is finding exactly what you want, and always getting guaranteed quality. Reliability would hopefully be solved by a paid for system.
There are so many ways value could be added to such a service. I think if a paid-for service addressed many of the points raised in this discussion, and provided a complete P2P file-sharing experience, then people would use it. I know I would!