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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?"
We need reasonable quality downloads. Lossless compression means big files, so watch out for the ISPs with restrictive download limits.
It would sure be nice to pick and choose what I want to download in flac.
EMI realizes that the Internet isn't just an avenue for music theft, it's rapidly becoming the most significant way to make money with little unneccesary investment.
They provide the music, other people handle the packaging, shipping and shelfspace, if you will and they collect the money.
They don't even have to pay to have the CDs pressed or the cover art printed.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Do you think we might have Apple to thank for this? No, seriously. Perhaps they got wind of what Universal was going to hook up and made a press announcement before the 28th.
I mean, this sort of thing should have been embraced five years ago by all of the labels.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
"Does this mark the beginning of a major change in the music industry?"
Confused Philospher says:
NO.
This is because we will have to wait years for other companies to follow suit, since few people will use the EMI service initially because of the ease of using Kazza for FREE [minus jail time and billion dollar law suits].
The music industry missed the first boat when Napster sailed.
Why slashdot? Why not?
At first I read this and I thought we're talking about downloading MP3's.
I thought "wow someone finally gets it! They know they have no choice". I clicked on the article hoping to find a link to one of these sites selling the music, and actually thought I'd buy an album to check it out.
After careful scrutiny, I noticed this line from the article:
We are using new technology to benefit both artists and consumers by massively expanding the amount of music available securely online,"
This is not MP3's nor is it Ogg, and I am not going to buy anything that limits me in any way.
Well after the english singer Robbie Williams claimed that piracy was 'great', and his record company (EMI) went ballistic.... it is quite an interesting change of tact from them.
Either that or they realised that expanding their online availability might be due to the new report that online downloads of songs will impact on the national pop charts?
Just my 0.02 downloaded songs (or cents/pence).
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
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. I suppose that even if you "buy" a song online you still can't put it on kazaa, as that would be considered distribution?
What if they were just trying to track down the distributors? It would be SOO easy to put a signature on each track they allow someone to download. Then, they just connect to all the various file-sharing places, download songs, and analyze them. They find out who put their tracks out there. Then they prosecute those people.
This would be SOO easy to do, too. I mean...geeze...ESPECIALLY if they ake the people play the downloaded tracks with a special codec they have to download, that has a private key in it...but even without that, you can still sign a file without encrypting it, and just wait and see who's files get shared. Then when you arrest those people and charge them $10,000 per shared song, you take care of the problem from the other end. When people have 100Gigs of MP3's, there's almost no chance they have even 10% of the cd's to back them up. Someone, somewhere, ripped those cd's and originally shared them. So don't just go after the people who continue to share things they've never had - those go on and on. Go after the ones who do the original ripping.
Decent conspiracy theory?
[What I don't understand] 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....
Maybe they will watermark the downloads individually. If they were really nasty (clever?), they would embed your credit card number into the watermark as as additional deterent from file sharing. (Nah, they aren't that evil...)
At least this might cut down on the number of retards that keep claiming that "downloading copyrighted files is illegal" (So downloading a Redhat ISO is illegal then?)
A dingo ate my sig...
From the article: "...giving them access to most songs on today's top-selling charts.". "them" being the consumers.
I could not care less about the top-selling quote artists unquote. I want EMI's back catalog. Unlike the material world the Internet does not entail the costs of reprinting, repackaging and redistributing out of print material.
I will not get exited and more importantly I will not open my wallet until I see that the record labels are making an effort. There are ways to make music better through Internet distribution. As long as I sense that the music labels take care of numero uno first, so will I!
How can music be better? I'm glad you asked.
Small artists can get published for free through major labels and the second they catch on they can start selling. It sure beats touring like Black Flag did. The overhead of publishing a number of small new bands with a couple of songs each on an EMI server farm will be negligible.
If the user has bandwidth to spare uber-high fidelity downloads should be an option. We are not limited to CD quality on the net. High paying consumers can have custom stereo/mono/bitrate/hz files generated from the masters real time. These custom packages can be downloaded or burnt onto DVD and mailed. Will this allow you to get a perfect master and facilitate piracy? No more than high fidelity vinyl. 99.9% of the people that spend big bucks buying a custom remastered 60GB version of Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" will not be disposed to spread it around until the technology allows them to.
To reiterate, I want back catalogs and so do most serious music lovers. I cannot imagine people buying rare Hendrix, King Crimson and Brittney Spears in one group.
Maybe "chart toppers" should be printed on disposable CDs? The music will be irrelevant in weeks anyway so why print them on the same material that you print real music?
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
A quick look at HMV - one of the retailers mentioned in the article reveals that they are going to use Liquid Audio format. Player is free, but the format is as proprietary as it gets. Now, that smells like another software empire 5 years from now, doesn't it? The best M$ move now would be to simply buy LiquidAudio (if they haven't yet...). Of course, Liquid Audio player is only for Windows - I'm guessing why and I don't have to think hard. When will people learn?
iThink iHate iMod
Although this comment is kind of fundamentalist (essentially, Ogg or Bust), it does raise an interesting question: How will EMI distribute the music online? The article doesn't get into this at all. There's been talk about lossless vs. lossy compression so far in here, but even amongst these there are choices. If EMI chooses lossless, will they go for WAV, FLAC or some other encoding. For lossy compression, there's a plethora of options: Ogg, MP3, Real Player, Windows Media, etc.
Although I am a fan of Ogg as a media format, I think it's safe to say that it will not be the number one choice of EMI. What's more, I feel that there is a narrow chance that even MP3 will be offered as one of the d/l options. Although MP3 has near ubiquitous compatibility with audio players and consumer hardware, it does not provide a key feature that companies like EMI do crave: Digital Rights Management. I predict that the only d/l options available to users will be Real Player and/or Windows Media.
EMI, if they have not done so already, will make "distribution deals" with both Microsoft and Real so that these two formats are the only ones used for downloading. In return, software like "Windows XP Media Edition" (or whatever that new thing is called :-) could push the user to acquire Music from EMI (MS did a similar thing with respect to Internet access and AOL... I'm certain many of us remember installing Windows at some point and seeing that the Desktop had, by default, a few icons for various large commercial ISPs).
As a final note, I don't feel that my claims that Windows Media and Real will be the only formats available is unsound. /. readers are, typically, a bunch of nerds (self-proclaimed :-). While it is easy to give arguments like "But MP3 is better" or "Ogg roxors cause it's patent-free", these do not hold much water from a business perspective (which is where EMI is coming from). Other major sites already use Windows Media and Real as their only distribution format (e.g., amazon.com, when previewing tracks from CDs).
/<en