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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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.