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New Online Music Push by EMI
akadruid writes "EMI has signed deals with 20 top European websites to sell its music online.
According to Reuters, 'Consumers will be able to make permanent copies of songs and transfer them to recordable CDs, portable music players and their computer hard drives'.
This represents a major shift in policy by EMI, who previously went to great lengths to protect their music from copying.
Does this mark the beginning of a major change in the music industry?"
I can't find it anywhere on their website, but Best Buy has an advertisement for "Rhapsody" in their stores. I don't know who is promoting it. They are selling them ala Netflix, but I fear that their might be a real music company backing it. The service plan would be $19.95/mo.
Sig Nazi- "No Sig for you, come back 1 year."
The idea of that sounds great, but unfortunately in reality, over 95% of bands do not make money touring. I work with tons of small localish bands, and can say here is how the current biz model works for small, medium, and large bands.
Small (i.e. local bands)
1. May break-even on their CD after recording costs. Some even make some decent cash on the CDs if they sell more than 2K of them.
2. Unlikely to get any decent amount of ASCAP/BMI money.
3. Lose money playing out. Lucky to get a beer for a show.
Medium (i.e. developing artist - sales under 900K)
1. Lose major cash on the CD. Label invents big dough in videos and stuff hoping to push them to Large sized act.
2. Make a bit of dough from ASCAP/BMI if they get radio play.
3. Band breaks even playing out generally because the label generally underwrites their shows (called a guarantee) in hopes that it will drive CD sales. If the label has given up on CD sales, the band loses big touring.
Large Act (over 900k):
1. Either make huge cash or no cash on their CDs. The no cash ones are like MJ where the label spent massive dough promoting and producing the album but saw sales that would make money with most artists, but because they poured so much dough into the album, they lose.
2. Almost all large acts make good dough off of ASCAP/BMI.
3. Only the acts who have a number of huge selling albums or extensive, extensive touring history make huge cash here. but when they do get to that level (i.e. rolling stones) they make massive, massive cash.
As somebody working in the music biz, I feel a little bit like I work at a buggy whip manufacturer or something as we are perhaps a business destined for the history books...
Anyway, I agree with your three points--- especially #2. At the store I work at, DVDs and games are going through the roof. Some in the music biz argues that that's because they can't be pirated, but I think it's simpler than that: customers like video games better than a CD and would rather spend 50 bucks on a game than buy 3 CDs.
US Mechanical royaltys are at least 8.1 cents a song. Paid to the song writer with 3% cut going to the Harry Fox Agency for overhead of collecting the royalty. You aren't going to get such prices.
[...] Is how they're going to sort out whom has a legal copy of a song, and whom has an illegal copy of a song.
They could do what EMusic does, which is keep a catalog of all the music you've ever downloaded with your account. This is supposedly for convenience so you can look back and grab songs you downloaded before, or something like that. But I bet it'd be a good way of proving that you have a legit copy of a song you got from the service.
Don't believe that I have a legal right to that copy of "Hey Pachuco"? Check my EMusic history, bub. I got it fair and square.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
No, what I wanted to really respond to was this:
Excuse me? The whole point of MP3 (and other lossy-compressed audio formats) is to reduce storage requirements for the data, and to reduce bandwidth requirements for its transmission over a network or broadcast medium. Your statement runs completely contrary to the spirit of that engineering design goal for MP3 audio. MP3 is obviously inferior to uncompressed (or losslessly compressed) source material for critical listening; where MP3 shines is in streaming applications and applications where storage space is at a premium. Of course you can jack the bitrate up to 256 kbps, but if you're going to do that with MP3, why not use a better codec that's engineered for musical reproduction, instead of using MP3, which was engineered for digital television broadcast and network streaming? ATRAC seems to get some things right that MP3 doesn't, especially at more modest bitrates. I've been hearing good things about AAC as well, although the patent restrictions may hinder its adoption.
I mean, seriously, would you rather listen to an uncompressed CD or DVD-A or SACD on your high end home stereo, or an MP3 compressed copy of the original source material? I don't even think there's a contest here! No, the MP3 copies are good for putting ten hours worth of music on a CD-R that you can play on a portable player or in a car's deck. When you're in a car, or flying cross-country on a plane, or stuck in a hotel room somewhere, or visiting family, or when you're camping somewhere -- these are non-critical listening environments, and highly compressed audio is not a problem.
If you haven't checked out emusic, give it a look:
www.emusic.com
If nothing else, you can get 50 free MP3s*... but I've found a subscription to be very good value (I must have at least 4Gb of MP3s from the site)...
[* they will ask for your credit card number; as far as I can tell they're secure and respectful of privacy]
Yes, I am sure about it... and it's a conservative #... The reason small bands keep doing it is so they hope they get "discovered" and think that getting signed is this massive road to riches. Where getting signed will raise the bar for you (meaning some cash may be put behind you) it is by no means a sure thing...
The reason most people don't believe the # when they first see it (I think it was pollstar that put the losing show estimate at 99% a couple years ago) is that they're only looking at big shows! Take a look at your local alternative paper and see how many bands that you've never heard of who are playing dive bars trying to make it big. In decent sized cities, those bars make you *buy the show out* before playing... so you only can hope to break even if your show sells out...
It works like this:
club owner: i've never heard of you. I don't want to risk losing beer sales.
band: we'll promote ourselves.
club owner: b.s.
band: we swear
club owner: well, ok, then my club has 200 capacity. at 10 bucks a head, that's 2K. I'll let you play but you have to give me the 2k up front. I'll give you the full door for that.
band: time to call up grandma and borrow more money.
The press release today by EMI seems to have been but a PR move. The thing is, the 20 sites mentioned have been open for a while already, and although EMI's music is available on them, there is nothing EMI-specific about these services.
The company that has been implementing the actual sites is (as someone already pointed out) OD2, or On Demand Distribution, founded by Peter Gabriel. OD2 has released music download services on about 20 European websites, including Tiscali's and MSN's. All of these services feature music from all of the major labels, and all of these services allow burning of songs & transfers to portable devices. (For a price of course.)
OD2 also organized a promotion effort for these services called Digital Download Day; check it out if you want to see the complete list of sites the service is available on.
Incidentally, OD2 uses WMA audio. If you check out the press release, you'll also see that it doesn't mention MP3. I sincerely doubt that EMI would go for an unprotected format, although some news organizations have interpreted it as such.
So you see, it's not just EMI that's doing all this. The only real news in the article is the amount of tracks available (200.000). The whole of the OD2 service includes ca. 150.000 tracks so far, so it could be that EMI has cleared a bunch of new songs for release.