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MP3.com Removes "High-Bandwidth" Streams
mshiltonj writes "I noticed today that mp3.com no longer offers high-bandwidth streams for its genres or stations, although it looks like artists' playlists and individual songs are available in high bandwidth. mp3.com has lots and lots of free music that was free and legal to listen to online, and a good number of my "music bookmarks" were on mp3.com. I'll live (I've still got my favorite stream), but I don't think it's a good sign. Is streaming music doomed to die, not because of RIAA litigation, but because of expensive bandwidth costs?" I don't think bandwidth will be the determining cost - that's a price that has been falling and will continue to fall. But are things like iTunes store the future, or is it streaming?
Company cuts cost in down economy.
Wow!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Of course bandwidth has a cost and sometimes it's just too much for a site to bear. A popular service can be punished by it's bandwidth costs. How many times do we see/hear of a site going down due to the /. effect...and probably a lot of them are due to bandwidth caps rather than fancy content delivery systems hogging CPU/drive.
Of course it's not a problem if they have a *real* revenue stream for their service as they should then be able to *pay* for their bandwidth needs.
I just think it's a sign of the times.
I have recently been listening to Shoutcasts at work (of mostly live, allowed, recordings). The three major ones I listen to are at 128k. 1 of the shoutcasts boasts a # in the 100s at 128k. They also offer a bunch of live shows for shoutcast at 128k in addition to their random one.
I find that the server is CONSTANTLY having me rebuffer the stream making it increasingly difficult to listen to (I have a broadband connection at home and at work).
I switched to a shoutcast stream that has only 10-15 people at 128k and it seems to handle it much better.
Radio doesn't sound like 128k to me, what's the difference if MP3.com isn't offering that to it's listeners?
Here's mp3.com removing High-bandwidth streams, and now we go and slashdot it to oblivion! What next? We get 128kBps AAC from mp3.com??
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
MP3.com discovered that legal fees and bandwidth costs couldn't be covered by the very very small amount of cash coming in from ads.
Rather than go to a pay model they just decided to drop their higher streams... Maybe they should have had a system where you can pay some negligible fee (25 a year, perhaps) to hear the high bandwidth streams, and the low ones are free?
Some tunes are available only if you pay, but you can stream in hi-fi quality (128 kbit/s). Now, why would anyone pay for the tune, when they can just capture the hi-fi quality stream into an .mp3 file??
Before you call this stealing, think. It's just capitalism in action. Greedy agents acting on behalf of their own interests and agenda. If they can get something for free, they will. Morality has nothing to do with this.
It's business. It's the same thing the companies have been pulling, but now consumers can actually leverage their greediness directly.
Sucks to be the artist, though. But they would make peanuts with mp3.com in any case (been there, done that).
Now that more people have broadband access, it seems nuts to me that people are now removing higher quality/higher bandwidth content for financial reasons, although I guess that broadband is there for the consumer, not the supplier - mp3.com don't have anything to gain by streaming high quality audio other than... well, more customers and more used bandwidth.
So I guess this means one of two things will happen, either:
a) Streaming will continue to be lower quality and more people will drop their high quality streams, or
b) bandwidth prices will drop as more and more people get broadband, making streaming at high quality feasible.
Either way, the provider has to recoup expenses or prices have to drop, so the action mp3.com has taken isn't really that surprising.
Couldn't something like bittorrent fill the gap?
You fool! You've given cheese to a lactose intolerant volcano god! Do you know what that means?
I've found Launchcast is much better than mp3.com for streaming stations, though if you listen to more than a certain number of songs per month (350? 400?) it goes into low quality mono for the remainder of the month.
Highly customizable though.
Rumor has it MP3.com recently laid off 40 people, roughly 15%.
When: May 08 2003
Maybe people just find Kazaa to be so much better.
-- the only thing we have to fear is really scary things
I'm sure it was either cut bandwidth...or people....or both.
With RIAA breathing down everyones backs, I'm sure it would take a small lawsuit to put these guys in the negative earnings.
Business.
Rob
But are things like iTunes store the future, or is it streaming?
There's this really weird mindset that seems to take hold in techie circles that there's only one given solution to an issue...that aside, why is only one of these going to be the future? Christ, AM/FM survived alongside records, cassettes, and CDs...why's the Internet going to be any different?
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This has got me thinking. Why isn't there such a thing as a subscription radio station?
The annoying thing about radio is the adverts and the rubbish DJs. In Spain they have at least one radio station that just plays music with no breaks all day. It rocks. But I'm not sure how it pays for itself.
I guess the problem with subscription radio is that the receivers would need descramblers. But can anyone offer any insight as to why this has never happened? Or if it has in any part of the world?
I run ampfea.org, a collective of thousands of musicians which, for the last 6 years, has been providing online archives and storage for individual artist mp3's.
We're moving to bittorrent. That sorts out the entire problem.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I U M A
This is what mp3.com used to be but a bit better.. if your signed. you CANT be there.
so you get a nice untainted pool of real artists.
mp3.com has sucked for over 3 years now. I haven't been back there cince mid 2000.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I used to be CTO of a now defunct online radio service in the UK (puremix.com), way back in 2000/2001 and worked at various radio stations before that.
We streamed 64K Real Audio and it sounded great. The secret to making it sound good is audio proecessing, just like an analog radio station does. I am not advocating New York style maximizing of loudness at all cost, but any signal needs some work.
That work is missing on most not only amateur, but also professional streams or it is done by very bad software solutions. Online music services are often created by people who love and know their music and are geeks. Few of them are actualy audio wizards. (Even at radio stations, engineers are often under valued because the "creative" people don't understand what's involved) The result is that even peak signals are below maximum modulation and missing (multiband) compression and limiting makes sure there is no consintancy in quality and loudness between songs, which brings out encoding articfacts much more. And that is a real shame.
That's not a useful comparison. That's like saying "Is Stop & Shop (a supermarket, for those of you outside the northeast) the future, or is it farmstands on the side of the road?".
They serve two different markets. Streaming is totally different from purchasing a song and burning it to CD. Also, I believe MP3.com did not cost money. So if you're talking in the short term, yes, for-profit business are the future compared to those losing money. However, comparing free streaming to the iTunes music store is like apples and oranges.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Would they ever do that? I'm not holding my breath :)
...richie - It is a good day to code.
In all fairness, this post is right. Radiohead's "kid a", "amnesiac" and most recently "hail the thief" were highly swopped on p2p networks. Still they hit number 1 INSTANTLY on release. Still they sell out tours all over the world. Bands/artists who bitch about p2p sharing dont have enough faith in their own ability. The bands who needs more coverage have a chance of getting it. The bands who dont get it anyways.
DSL and cable make it look like bandwidth is cheap but it isn't. Try buying 1.5 MBytes from a major backbone and you'll see it cost between $500-750 per month including transport (that's what your ISP is paying, it would be $850-1200 if you tried it). Seven years ago the cost was $2000-2800. Seven years ago the average modem user used 500 b/s. Today the average DSL user uses 4000 b/s, but the average for P2P users on DSL is 128,000 b/s.
I've been following the discussions on ISP-PLANET and Internet providers are pretty concerned over this trend as it breaks the economic model the Internet grew-up on. Articles there are looking at changing pricing from the flat-rate structure we have now to everything from pay per MB to using dynamic bandwidth shapers to reduce the speed of large data transfers to kicking high bandwidth users off their networks entirely. The last is the most common remedy in use now.
I admit I'm an ISP. Since only 10% of users use P2P or streaming, I kick P2P users off my network. My competitor didn't and I stole half his broadband customers because his network became too congested. Now he is madly trying to block P2P after telling his customers he doesn't restrict their usage - he had thought that would get him our customers and it did get some, namely, those I didn't want because I was losing money on them. Many of the P2P types switched to cable after Adelphia started offering it here six months ago and the throughput on Adelphia's local network has dropped to less than a dial-up modem because of the congestion.
P2P and streaming (especially video or high-bandwith audio) is too expensive. About the only thing currently doable is multicast audio like Internet radio but unfortunately the RIAA want's 1.5 cents per listener per song (according to a local radio station ower who checked into it) making it infeasable for most radio stations.
MP3.com is just facing economic reality and it is doubtfull bandwidth costs will fall fast enough to allow them to resume high-bandwidth streaming of free tunes.
Another benefit of ogg is that to a degree they are adaptive - during silence and voice the bitrate drops, adding additional savings...
The biggest name to recently add ogg to their armoury is Virgin Radio, which you can listen to here.
Take a huge step back from all this, and realize the big issue is that, here in America, there is now music that is illegal to listen to. Fucked up, isn't it? "I killed my family... what are you in for?"
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Mp3.com was aquired by Vivendi Universal (RIAA member) in a lawsuit.
Since then, Mp3.com's goal has gone from promoting individual (mostly unsigned) artists to promoting Vivendi artists.
Which is why Vivendi won't reconcile the accounts of Mp3.com members who are owed less than $50 (most of them) and why Vivendi artists get top billing.
Cutting the streams isn't new - Mp3.com also limited bands to uploading only one song recently, in a move that angered everyone but Vivendi Universal.
See, I'm sure the bandwidth costs were a factor. But you have to understand, you only cut those expensive items that aren't critical to your business.
Before Vivendi Universal bought Mp3.com, streams were a priority. They allowed new bands to be heard. Multiple songs were also a priority for Mp3.com, because their business was promoting new music.
Now their business is promoting Vivendi Universal music - and compared to returns (since Vivendi can afford to put their music on the radio) it's not that big a deal to them. So it - and the bands it promotes - gets shafted.
But are things like iTunes store the future, or is it streaming?
Long-term, I think the answer is streaming, but not the way a commercial company wants. Even on broadband, my upload cap 256kbit is too low for what I'm thinking of, but I know what has been happening on student campuses, student homes etc. 100mbut to the wall, and people use those around them as their "extended hard disk"... They stream music, video etc. from other people instead of actually downloading it. Ultimately, that's where I think the Internet is going too, but for now it's too slow to work out, it's send/recieve instead of stream.
Of course, that all depends on how badly RIAA/MPAA/BSA will crack down on it, but even so it'll exist in a form of "friends" network.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
/joeyo
2^5
> I've still got my favorite stream
/.
;)
Great idea, post a link to a 150-listener station on
Now I'll have to listen to crappy music until it goes off the front page and I can get the stream back!
The high-bandwidth "streaming" was actually distributing m3u playlists that linked back to where they allow you to download these songs. I think the problem is not technically "streaming", where they only need enough bandwidth for one stream (each packet contains the ip address of all recipients and routers split it up into copies later) but because they don't use that kind of "stream" or radio station. They need enough bandwidth to allow everyone listening to the "stream" to download it every time.
It would help if they had actual internet radio at that quality somewhere -- I have 768k DSL, so it doesn't even break a sweat at this (128k mp3s), yet it's so far the best substitute I've found for really high-quality internet radio. Does anyone know of another free service that does something like this?
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After MP3.com started paying artists a mere fraction of what they paid them before, many artists fled from MP3.com, rightfuly noting that no longer was releasing their work onto MP3.com a profitable venture.
:`( *sigh* was once a great place for Indie artists to make some spare change.
Because of the lack of new artists signing up for MP3.com, MP3.com in general has been in decline.
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MP3.com can't do that; their business model is presumably you seeing banner ads while there's some sort of network connection between you and them.
But that brings me to the part about streaming I never understood: Why the hell bother?
On one hand, you have "download, burn, play". Zero network bandwidth consumed. At 128, 10+ hours of music on a CD-R. Sounds like crap? Encode it at 320-stereo! Now you "only" have 5 hours per disc. Zero pay-per-use issues. Got a favorite disc that got scratched? As long as you have at least one copy of the music back on your hard drive (and you do back up your hard drive, don't you?), just burn it again. Got a favorite band whose website just went dark? No problem, you still have the MP3s they gave you.
On the other hand, you have "streaming". Think of an office with 50 users streaming 128k streams. We're talking metric buttloads of bandwidth burninated, and it all goes to /dev/null :) Sounds like crap? Tough! Take what your stream provider offers you! Pay-per-use - either in bandwidth, or in the fact that if you wanna hear a song again, you gotta beg the server to send it to you again, or in the fact that the server can insert ads - just like radio. Got a favorite streaming server and it goes down or cuts to 64k to save its bandwidth costs? You're... screwed! The best band in the whole universe's web page is now 404? You're... screwed!
Streaming gives you the worst of both worlds - the bandwidth wastage of P2P, with the DRMness of pay-per-view. Maybe I'm a Luddite around here, but when it comes to streaming, I Just Don't Get it.
1) It's been like this for a few weeks if not a month. Old hi-fi playlists are still working, with the exception of some songs being removed from streaming.
2) They're doing it because they have a membership service now, and hi-fi genre playlists are on the list of reasons to join. It's still not hard to get hi-fi songs from mp3.com, I doubt this changed their bandwidth usage very much. Besides, my reaction was to find the top ten artists on a genre, visit their page, load their hi-fi list, and compile them together in to one huge list. They sure as hell aren't saving money through me.
An even better way for mp3.com to save money would be to switch to the Ogg Vorbis format. That would have two advantages:
;)
1) better quality at the same bandwidth or equal quality at a lower bandwidth (therefore saving bandwidth costs without sacrificing any quality)
2) no longer having to pay royaltees for MP3 patents
On the other hand, it would be pretty bizarre (not to mention confusing for some people) if a site called 'mp3.com' only offered OGG files for download.
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
I can't speak to the whether MP3.com's moves are due to high bandwidth costs, but I think that we should address the larger issue of why streamed music/radio broadcasts are still unicast, with a per user increase in bandwidth consumption. Why isn't the world adopting multicasting? This would seem a win-win solution? Broadcasters could signifcantly reduce their bandwidth consumption while ensuring higher audio quality and reducing buffering due to server overload. ISPs could significantly reduce their IP traffic because they could proxy one stream for all their users. Users wouldn't be shut out of popular servers. Is the hold up still the router manufacturers? Or is it server software like Shoutcast, which is still unicast based?
What we have instead is a huge infrastructure to do the job with incredible inefficiency. It might pay for the network industry to buy the music industry and give the stuff away.
As an employee of Vivendi Universal Net USA/MP3.com, I can attest that most of this is true.
The goals of our site changed radically a few years ago when after we released the Instant Listening service we got sued to oblivion on. Prior to launching that service, Michael Robertson made a decision to change focus away from the independant artist and try to commandeer the popular artists. The RIAA sued us and at the same time Napster took away most of the wind in our sails, to the point where most people thought Napster was MP3.com. The RIAA/Napster owned us, which recently became a sad irony, as Roxio bought a section of our company and currently the engineers who built the Instant Listening service are building the new RIAA-legal, paid Napster service.
Our business turned away from promoting the little guy a long time ago, because there isn't money in promoting the little guy. We could get away with independant artists as our main attraction when money was free and Pets.com could run ads. When the internet bubble collapsed and we got sued into oblivion for our very legally questionable Instant Listening service (yes, a lot of us here questioned it while building it), we had to start charging for previously free services as well as cut back on services.
So in conclusion it wasn't so much being bought out by Vivendi that changed our business model as it was market conditions and our own stupidity at losing 90% of our IPO money to the major labels in an ill fated attempt to corner online music.
-MP3.com AC