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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?"
or Die
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Jesus loves you, I think you suck
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
Illegal online services, kick-started by the original maverick Napster, have brought the music industry to its knees in the past few years, forcing global music sales sharply lower.
I wonder where they're getting their statistics about "global music sales sharply lower". Most of the statistics that I've seen say that the music industry is still an unbeatable juggernaut.
I suppose that the RIAA pushing new "Super-DMCA" laws through state legislatures is just a symptom of them being on their knees.
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
"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?
I don't know how many of you here have ever heard of this band called the Grateful Dead, but they didn't sell hardly any albums. Thier biggest hit was in the 80's, which was "Touch of Grey". During this time, they made thier money by working. That's right, they did work. They went out and toured, and performed for people, and managed to be the highest grossing band for years. They encouraged people to record thier music, and distribute is.
CDs are nothing more than advertisements for bands. Bands should make thier money working (i.e. touring, concerts, etc), and not sitting down at one recording session and cranking out 10 bajillion CDs.
People that want the cover art are going to be willing to pay for it anyways. But the rest of us who like to go to concerts and support the band by going to concerts should be able to do so, and even leave with a recording of the concert as a fond memory.
What the word "securely" means in this context is difficult to determine. It might mean the music itself is somehow secure (Digital Restrictions Management, etc.) or it might simply mean the purchasing itself is secure (SSL). I'm going to wait to hear the nuts & bolts of this thing before jumping to conclusions.
Though I'm not buying anything packaged in a closed format.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
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?
Illegal online services, kick-started by the original maverick Napster, have brought the music industry to its knees in the past few years, forcing global music sales sharply lower...
How many more time is the RIAA gonna try to stuff this crap down our throats and have us burp up sympathy?? Here are just a few of the reasons why a drop of sales in not at all necessarily due to downloaded music...
1. The most obvious of these is the drop in economy, with similar sales slumps in the last econo-drop of the early '90s.
2. Secondly, the increase in games and DVD sales is a contributing factor. With DVD's being, in many cases, cheaper than a music CD, their is much more value in a DVD than a typical CD.
3. Last, but not least, radio is highlighted as a problem due to its short play lists and the difficulty in getting playtime for new artists. Has anyone else noticed not that ClearChannel owns about everything, only about 20-30 bands ever get airplay??
I suppose EMI is stepping in the right direction, but IMHO its too little, too late. The future of music will probably have something to do with corporate sponserships, where hit songs are considered a form of advertising and bands are reduced to touring ad billboards where huge multinationals will "own" popular acts.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
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
1. Reasonable prices (remember $60 for a new movie back in 1983?)
2. Adopting new technology instead of fighting it (e.g., DAT audio decks, DVD+R vs DVD-R bs, mp3, etc)
3. Selling old content at low low costs to drive sales of new hardware/playback mechanisms
4. Enhancing the content/quality (e.g., an audio CD is unchanged since 1983 when it was introduced). At least DVD is much better than VHS
5. Selling different quality level versions of the same product at different prices (192k mp3 should cost more than a 64k mp3, A recent movie DVD should cost $12, SVCD $9 and a VCD $6).
6. Allowing flat rate pricing for content (e.g., $20 a month for all of the mp3 and all the VCD's you can download)
7. Actually apreciating the customers by including extras in the product (e.g., including 1 or 2 extra tracks on an audio CD or including a mini-cd with a few mp3's of other bands).
8. Packaging older material into collections at a reasonable price (e.g., a box set of all of the albums by a 1960's band should cost about $20 to $25). Same goes for TV shows (e.g., A complete collection of six million dollar man episodes should cost $50 max or no more than $1 an episode). Consider shows like Gunsmoke with 500+ episodes - would you pay $1000.00 for a complete collection?
9. Selling new audio CD's and DVD's by online auction to actually see what people are willing to pay for the content and then pricing content accordingly.
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.