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Evaluating a System for Selling and Delivering MP3s?
Dredd2Kad asks: "I'd really like Slashdot's opinion on this. I recently secured an MP3 distribution deal with an indie record label, and negotiations with other indie labels and artists are in the works. The music will be distributed through my internet radio station's website. As you know, if you can sell music in a format such as MP3 you eliminate the costs of packaging, shipping, handling. You do have to contend with bandwidth charges though. Most indie labels and artists seem happy to pass along the savings to customers and stimulate sales. What I have built is simple and functional. We are trying to add value to the MP3 albums we sell by including quality artwork that can be printed onto CD labels and jewel case inserts (so you aren't just getting a 'bunch of files'). What would make you want to buy music in this way? What types things would turn you away? What are the positives and negatives of selling music in this manner? Do you think this is a viable alternative to someone who doesn't want to pay $10 or $15 for a physical CD? Does the format the music is in or on have an impact on how serious you take it?"
The main problem dogging the Recording industry is price. Price is what the main issue is for most of us. 99 cents or under is a good place to start.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Might be the option to have cd quality files (different format maybe?), maybe for a slightly higher price.
Especially if it's something like ambient music, where hearing everything is important.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Fast downloads, thats all I care about.
The format itself does not really matter (to me). I would prefer AAC, but MP3 is fine. What really matters is that the encoding is at a high enough bit rate and was done well. Correct id3 tags and artwork help too. If format is so important to people you might think about offering multiple formats in the downloads (I'm sure a lot of people around here want ogg).
Regardless of whether I can print fancy jewel case covers/inserts out, I wouldn't really see your music as "just getting a bunch of files" any more than I would see a CD as "just getting a bunch of 0's and 1's". Ideally, I would like to focus on just two things, the quality of the music you play and the quality of the transfer of the music into the file. I would be willing to pay much more for those things than I would for the extras you mention.
I know yours is a Radio biz, but maybe the possibility to buy pre-printed or burnt-on-demand cds could be a nice side-income...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I'd love to see as much thought that goes into a cd album being put into this :
;)
Specifically, I'd definately pay for a package that contained:
High quality vbr mp3s.
Multiple peices of album artwork, not just a scan of cd-album front cover.
Lyric files to all the MP3s.
Where available guitar chords as well.
I think that copy protection would be a big turn off. For indie bands, I reckon that the majority of people would be happy to buy, even if they could get it for free, just as a matter of support.
Perhaps an introduction to the album by the artists concerned.
And of course, some decent music
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
but I would have the option of having a CD shipped with the tracks burned on it in either Audio or mp3 format.
Print out the artwork and insert that too.
Just for the techno-cripples out there.
It would be interesting to see how the cost of such a CD stacked up against the price of a standard, retail CD in the stores.
What types things would turn you away?
Juit quickly:
1. Low quality and / or fixed format files. MP3 has a large market penetration and LAME is a great codec for 99% of the material, but I'd like to be able to download FLAC, WAV, OGG, or something else. Preferably a clean open lossless standard i.e. FLAC. If the track costs more for the high-quality version then the regular MP3 version I'm okay with that.
2. Forced to purchase a full album over single tracks. This is a big turn off for me, as I find only a few tracks are really worth it.
3. No preview of tracks. I'm not entirly sure if this is bad or not, but some way of previewing, either by a short clip, or a really low quality version of the song, is definately nice.
4. No support for countries outside of the US.
Obviously the US would be the biggest market to start out with, but support for Canada is a cruicial second IMO. Apple's iTunes Music Store doesn't (to my knowledge) support Canada yet, so I can't yet take advantage of it. Ideally, the system would be able to easily support all countries, perhaps with credit cards this is possible, but I see some possible legal implications here.
I would probably buy something like this, but I have high standards...I must be able to listen to the music without wanting to pry out my own eyeballs with a spoon and poor molten lead in my ear canal.
If you can deliver THAT, then you will have the market cornered, believe me...
NR
Personally I really like the idea of buying non-tangible music online, with no queueing, no stores being closed due to the time of day, no having to wait for something to arrive in the mail and no wasted CDs being produced that no one will buy, ending up on a landfill somewhere.
I'd only buy such music in practice though, if it's distributed in a lossless format (.wav, .aiff, FLAC, whatever), because I might want to encode it to mp3 to listen to on a personal player, or Vorbis to copy it to a friend online and so on.
I would like to c forums for each band where the band are on the forums. Also high bit rate fast downloads and a really stable service, dont forget a cheap price like 25c a song or under.
THanks
I'm a geek deal wit it
Well, as long as you're distributing MP3s and expecting people to burn them to CDs, just make they're nice high quality. like > 128kbps :-P
:-)
From what I hear, Vorbis is good, too...
Other advice: just keep your site accessable. Don't use frames, flash, font tags, tables (for non-table things), or too many images. People are (supposedly) there for the music, not for your flashy web site.
What you have isn't too bad... I wouldn't want to deal with that HTML, though
Duct tape, XML, democracy: Not doing the job? Use more.
We are trying to add value to the MP3 albums we sell by including quality artwork that can be printed onto CD labels and jewel case inserts (so you aren't just getting a 'bunch of files').
So now instead of buying an album which includes artwork, booklet, blah blah blah... You have to download the damn things, print them yourself, etc. I'm sorry, but that's too much damn work for me. Plus, the result would look so unprofessional which makes it feel cheap, and I hate cheap.
This is so not the way to go. CD is a fine format. I like having the physical CD, I like having the physical artwork, I like CDs. I don't like the idea of paying money for bits and bytes that represent music.
They should find a way of distributing physical media at lower prices. This is just like books vs "electronic books". You can't beat holding the thing in your hands, placing it in your shelf, looking at your massive collection... But whatever, I guess.
I like to get suggestions about other music that people bought, related to what i buy. Like when you buy a book. You could also promote new artists in similar style.
1. Easy payment by VISA, no paypal.
2. Allow for some freebies so you can check out the band before you buy.
3. High quality files (more than 128kbit mp3), and allow the option of selecting either ogg or mp3. Although you might be eligble for paying royalities if you go with mp3.
4. Fast downloads.
=-kiOwA-> EOF
What I have built is simple and functional. We are trying to add value to the MP3 albums we sell by including quality artwork that can be printed onto CD labels and jewel case inserts (so you aren't just getting a 'bunch of files'). What would make you want to buy music in this way?
Firstly, I would like to say that this isn't intended as a slur on your musicians.
You must understand where the album came from, why it exists. It is an example of technology leading art. When the technology existed to fit n minutes of music onto a record, musicians started to produce works that were n minutes long. This is why first there were singles, then albums. This has meant that much of what is on an album is filler. I'm looking at my rack of CDs now, and most of them I bought for a few (3-5) great tracks out of a total of roughly 10. The MP3s I have online to listen to aren't complete albums, just the good somgs from each album. There are plenty of albums I can put on as background music, but few that I'd actually want to listen to. Some vendors (like Apple) are starting to understand that the album is an artificial construct... what people really want are individual songs, delivered efficiently. You can't do that so easily on CD, because there isn't so much of a price differential for a retailer to stock a CD album as a CD single (i.e. transportation costs, staff costs, etc are all the same). But now you can, with the network and the MP3 format.
So, the thing that would make me buy online is being able to construct my own "greatest hits" album from a musicians entire catalogue, and get it sent to me on SACD or DVD/A. I'm not even worried about buying compilations of different artists - I can do those myself on my HD after all.
This model is bad for some "artists" because it means they can't make money from filler, but it's good for real artists and their fans, because the percentage of an album that's worth listening to (and hence buying) is so much higher. And it's bad for record labels either way...
You wont make alot of money trying to sell mp3s, however if your mp3s are 40-50 cents each, it will work. I'll buy a few mp3s if you dsell them for 50 cents each, price is the issue.
I suggest you make your mp3s cheap, and make them high quality 360. Let us pay via paypal.
Another way to handle it, if you dont want to go this route, is to let fans subscribe through paypal for say $1 a month. For $1 a month they recieve access to a site you setup which has mp3s on it, comments from the band like a band blog,pictures of concerts, and a list of when the concerts will be in the area etc.
Sell your services, dont sell your mp3s, people want to pay for services not for music. Do what AOL does, dont sell the websites, sell the service, set it up so we have to pay to access the blog, the mp3s, the pictures, and anything else a fan may like, make them pay to access the forum, and use MP3s are just part of the whole package.
give away a few mp3s so new people can listen and see if your band is actually good, but keep everything else for subscribers.
Video clips, Mp3s, Forum, Blog, Pictures, if your band is good, fans will pay for this.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Most importantly, the user experience needs to be attractive since this is a very competitive space (and a lot of your competition has a compelling price point: free). Take a long, hard look at Amazon.com, which is the best e-commerce website I know. Notice how they have striven to make the purchasing process fun and informative. Notice also how the information-rich experience they provide helps to cross- and upsell customers ("People who bought X also bought Y"). If you can include ratings, recommendations, user comments, etc. in your site in a way that is slick and easy to use, that will definitely help to attract and retain customers.
Peer Pressure
I guess I am picky sometimes but here goes... 1 - the ability to manage downloads: if the guy loses his connection/ computer hangs/etc when (s)he is downloading and is not able to resume it they will be very p... off Besides, if (s)he has a dial up connection, (s)he will want to download the songs little by little... 2 - Encoding quality. Depending on the kind of music, higher encoding rates (160/192 for MP3)are a must. Example: heavy metal, music with lots of left/right channel division,etc. You may experiment having lower quality samples (32/64 for MP3) for free You may also want to experiment with other formats AAC and OGG are very good even at 128 (almost CD quality) WMA is good but has two problems (IMHO). Closed source (but there are linux players) and quality shifts a lot depending on the kind of music... Another option is to have "golden ears" flac files (more expensive, of course...) Offering the jewel cases is a good idea. I don't think you should charge too much for these (or maybe somthing like: buy the whole CD and you get the picture...)
how long until
When you have a nice stereo and are already annoyed by bad or mediocre recordings, making them sound worse with lossy compression is not really desirable.
If they are encoded 256kbit/s or lossless, I might think about it. Until then, I'll have to buy music in physical form.
And no, I'm not audiophile, just an enthousiast.
No, I don't give a shit about printable stuff as of now. Could change in the future.
However - one thing about MP3. When you're converting concerts [or anything else where the tracks are seamless] MP3 does not cut it*. Why? Because the MP3 specification does not allow gapless playback.
Stick to Ogg Vorbis or MPC instead, which are natively gapless [not to mention of higher quality.] The former is patent-free, royalty-free and more flexible than MP3. Plus Winamp has native support.
* There is a proposal that aims to calculate gaps from MP3/AAC/MP4 and remove them, but this isn't implemented in any player/decoder yet.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
If I were to be downloading these albums, something I would worry about is bitrate -- whether you encode at 128 or 192 or anything in between. I don't listen to rock, but when I'm listening to a techno track at 128, I cringe at every flaw and makes it quite unlistenable. Also, I'd be worried that if I downloaded this and then my hard drive went kaput that I wouldn't have access to it anymore. Of course it may be best to burn to CD as soon as it's all downloaded.
Things I Like: I like having stuff in .mp3. I have 3 mp3 players so it's much easier to not have to convert and as is especially the case with indie stuff, enter in the id3 info meticulously. I like the lower price. 2 bucks for a whole album? Sure I'll give 'em a whirl, especially if I heard them on your internet radio. I think internet radio sites need to become publishers more often so that people who hear the music can find it. I like your model: listen to IR, hear a song you love, go to your website, find the album the track is on and download it for 2 bucks, knowing you'll love at least one track but possibly more.
Again, kudos, if I listened to punk or metal or whatever, I'd give you a spin for sure.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
$10 or $15 for a CD would be a normal price. Overhere 25 Euro is more in the ballpark with "friendly priced CDs" being somewhere between 10 and 20 Euros.
Most things I buy are between 20 Euro en 40 Euro...
10-15 would be a great improvement.
The problem is people think selling mp3s is a good idea, you have to sell services and INCLUDE mp3s.
Selling mp3s is like selling webpages, people will not pay on a per site basis, EVER.
However, people will pay for quality and service, people do subscribe to gaming sites, if you offer it at a cheap $1 a month, or $12 a year, people will subscribe. You also must offer alot of things in the members sections, not just mp3s, but video clips, tourdates, blogs, forums, pictures,interviews, etc. You have to make it into almost an online magazine, you need to build a community, then you charge people to access that community
You charge the fans to access a SCENE, because to the fan, its all about the scene, just like to the musician its all about the art. Treat it like what it is, art! Do not treat it like product, when you treat it like product and worry about how many sales of mp3s you'll get, you wont sell any.
I suggest you let a person subscribe to your site, your fans will subscribe, you may only have a few thousand fans, but thats enough. 5000 people paying $12 a year, is decent money, more money than you'd make trying to sell mp3s.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Speaking of adding-value with graphic artwork. You can sell posters. "Dropship" via printer. Just send your printer orders and files. A scant extra effort (it's not like you have to have youre own shipping dept or anything) and you've got maximal album art.
I believe that MP3's purchased on the internet will continue to be a limited venture for the obvious reasons... 1. People can usually find the mp3s via illegal means, meaning free 2. People who really like a band and have money to spend on legitamite means, also like having quality music, which tends to be lost with the majority of mp3's. 3. Cover art is important, but more importantly is that CD's are purchased in a package with other songs. Many artists will create a CD album to include songs in a specific order and complimentary to each other. I can imagine that mp3's will be sold separately to avoid 50mb downloads. 4. The extras that were mentioned in other replies are not huge selling points. Tabs and such are useless to everyone who doesnt play guitar. Cover art to a person without a printer is just a background on a desktop for a week. All of these things should be provided by the band because they want to serve their fans. Bands have to have a demand before they can sell the supply.
> What would make you want to buy music in this way?
... and music I don't like :)
That it's easy and legal.
> What types things would turn you away?
non-flexible solutions like DRM.
> What are the positives and negatives of selling music in this manner?
Pos: It's easy and should be more competitive.
Neg: It's not done very often and often with too high a price tag.
> Do you think this is a viable alternative to someone who doesn't want to pay $10 or $15 for a physical CD?
Yes. If the price is right. That's Does the format the music is in or on have an impact on how serious you take it?
Yes.
WMA: No way.
MP3: Hmm... patent issues.
Ogg: yes
FLAC: great.
i'll echo the requests for quality. how about customer choice 160 kbps lame mp3 or 128 kbps AAC (m4a)?
other things that would be nice, the full liner notes. not just cover art, but maybe a pdf of the cover and contents. lyrics, photos bios etc. given that all of art is produced on a computer this doesn't seem too difficult.
most importantly, all the convience of the iTunes music store, but with a rating system and community feedback like amazon has.
if you could provide all of this for 79 cents a song or $8.00 an album there'd be no reason not to shop with you.
good luck
The thing I as a customer would like to see is some form of classification / genre grouping with supporting information.
One of my major gripes with the music industry now is that newcomers / unfamiliar bands are caught in a trap.
I may be tight-fisted but paying £££ for a new band I've not heard is a risk so I'm stuck with buying stuff which is relentlessly plugged on the radio (and which, to my tastes at least, is mostly bland dross catering to the "safe" markets beloved by the 'suits') OR sticking with "old favourites" which mean that the survivors of the 60s, 70s and 80s occupy a disproportionate part of my collection.
Offering small (possibly lower quality) samples for rapid downloading, together witha genre/"sound like..." listing would encourage people like me to experiment. I'd happily pay to download new stuff If I knew what I was buying - especially if it supported the smaller, independent music sectors.
I've burned all my music, and carry it around with me on my iBook/iPod. Then, I threw away all the cases, put all the CDs in binders, and put the binder in a box in my basement.
The point is, I want the music for the music...I'm not really interested in whatever packaging it comes in. Thats just something else I have to carry around while I'm travelling.
What I do care about is:
* Fast Downloads
* Price
Since it's more than likely that our good friends from R*AA and MS etc.. are gonna be astroturfing this site, and building their strategies based on some of the posts - methinks it wud be nice not to post any bright ideas.
Look what MS did to Schnazzle recently!
OMG: Google's taken off the article entirely. I'll dig it up shortly anyways.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
You do have to contend with bandwidth charges though
Is this really necessary? As I've posted before I think a different approach is possible. Set up a site where people can select songs and pay for these using whatever method you prefer: credit card, paypal...
Once they have paid they are free to acquire the song any way they can. This could include you providing a torrent or a slow download, but users are equally free to get the song from any P2P network or by copying from a friend, relieving you of much of the bandwidth costs
This has the effect of legitimizing P2P networks which is why big brands are not going to go for it for a very long time. It does however give small brands an easy entry to online sales. Users take care of the distribution and you only have to provide them with a way of paying.
This post is free (as in cheese in a mousetrap).
I would like to see a feture that enables you to download CD's you bought in the past over and over again. This way you dont have to worry about loosing you data after paying for it.
consider coffee a lubricant that helps one penetrate the coding zone
Ogg Vorbis would also save you some bandwidth cost as files with the same quality are smaller than MP3 files.
Ideally, you would want to encode at quality setting 5, which results in pretty-close-to-CD-quality. This is about 160kbps at the moment and the quality is, IMHO, a tick better than a 192kbps MP3.
One thing you really need is some publicity.
A good trick is to cleverly craft and advert for your site and then cunningly present it as an "ask slashdot" question, thereby getting free advertising to huge numbers of people.
I would do something like that if I were you.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
You'll need a number of things to even have a chance of being successful. Keep in mind that you'll be competing against things like the iTunes Music Store (hopefully coming to Windows by the end of 2003); thus, price per song will have to be less than a dollar; not a big deal.
Selection is important, but not in the same way as with popular, "name-brand" songs/artists; this is indie music, after all, and so the specific songs won't be as important as the general number (and don't forget quality somewhere in there...)
Having a good UI will be vital: people should be able to find the songs they want easily, find other songs to match their preferences, etc.
Providing artwork is a good idea. I really can't stress enough how important it is to have a good interface, especially with something like this.
Good luck!
I would not. I'm a big music fan and collector, and there are several problems for "us" :)
- lossy compression and other problems with MP3
- CD-Rs are inferior to silver discs which will last me a lifetime and not fall apart in 5 years
- there is no cheap & quality way that I could print out an album booklet and inserts
- I consider an artist's album (cd, booklet, packing) a complete piece of art and that can't be substituted with getting a bunch of files.
Theres two options. One option is to sell the product, I dont really think this would work very well but it would make some money.
Micropayments are an option.
The other option is subscription option, and this is the option I think will ultimately work. If we treat music like we treat TV, and we create channels for certain labels, you can charge someone to subscribe to a channel.
So on your site if you are a channel, you list the price of all your musicians, and combine it up, then offer a subscribe button which a user clicks and makes payment to subscribe.
Once they subscribe for maybe $1-5 a month, the user now can access all the music from that label as long as they pay their fee, or you can charge them for the whole year, charge them around the price of a CD, maybe $15-20, and they can access the music all year.
There should be more than music, this means the whole community, the blogs, the forums, the pictures, video clips, everything you offer and you should offer as much as possible.
Look at AOL, they are king not because they offer the net, we all can get the net, they are king because they offer the features people are willing to pay for, they improve the net experience.
Its your job as a music company to improve the listeners music experience. INNOVATE, dont treat the listener as a sale, treat them as a member.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Replying to own post is bad form, but I was pissed when I found that Google completely removed this page from their news site. This is from yahoo!
Microsoft tries to stop Schnazzle
Now, to investigate further at Google!
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
One of the very common mistakes I find on smaller US sites is the ability pay with a non-US card. Your address verification must allow for a wide variety of addresses.
A second problem is that of allowing non-US shipping addresses for a card that has a US billing address--but that won't apply in your case.
The poster mentions what most of us realized many years ago: aside from production of the music, bandwidth is now the only commodity necessary for distribution. Bandwidth has replaced packaging, to some extent even promotion costs.
So now for the off-topic section. Why isn't there a credit-based, RIAA-endorsed P2P system yet?
If I buy the new Celine Dion CD, rip the music and offer the tracks to others- I've done all the work. If someone pays into an RIAA credit system and then spends X amount of credits to download MY rip- who loses? I've provided the bandwidth, while I've received only a fraction of the credits- which I can use to buy more music from another user who has done the same thing.
Meanwhile, the RIAA P2P system is collecting the majority of the profits.
Give people who actually pay for the music some sort of credit, like a logo or icon they can include in signatures or on web pages that show they support independant music. May even have an indicator of how much the user has actually paid for. This image would also refer back to your site. Maybe even send out badges, hats or shirts when you buy x amount (and they pay for shipping). Maybe a nice FURIAA logo?
Another improvement would be, instead of buying tracks we should buy memberships to channels.
These channels, or sites should provide forums like this, and many many exclusive innovative features, interviews with the band, and whatever else. And include mp3s with the package, but not AS the package.
In the same way an AOL user gets AIM, Mozilla, Winamp, and all these cool software, but its not why they pay for AOL, its just what makes AOL a good package.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I currently subscribe to both AudioGalaxy's Rhapsody service and to the emusic.com service.
I don't use p2p at all.
The nice thing about emusic.com is that for a fixed price per month (approximately $15 based on a 3 month contract), I can download and burn all the CDs I want. My music tastes are quite varied (classical, jazz, country, new age, easy listening, folk, gospel, rock, and some that aren't so easy to categorize) and so I get my money's worth from that service.
Actually, I don't usually burn the CD as an audio CD. Instead, I write the mp3's to a CD and play it in a DVD/CD player. That way, I get about 8 or 9 albums on one CD.
Rhapsody is nice for the more in depth selections in many of those categories. They do have a CD burning option, but I've never used it. I think it is something like 79 cents a track.
As far as the question you are asking, how much I'd be willing to pay would really depend on the music and how much I wanted it.
If I really wanted it, even $1.50 per track wouldn't be bad. But part of that is due to the fact that the nearest record store with a decent selection is about 100 miles away and I only make it there once every year or two. If there was a record store nearby, the downloaded music would probably have to be about $7 to $10 for the entire album to tempt me.
But I'm probably not at all your typical purchaser.
The backend admin rips all the CD tracks (lossless - flac, shn, etc; lossy - mp3, ogg, aac) with a unique ID attached to them, as well as alternate rips in low-quality ogg or mp3 for streaming to the NAS tied to the commerce store.
The Method
Customer browses the store --> Previews albums, tracks --> Saves them to the wishlist or adds them to the cart (which calculates the duration of 80 minutes dynamically) --> Places order by a credit card --> The system then fishes out the selected tracks into a temp directory, queues and burns them --> Pick up the finished CD, package and ship.
Few things that could make the experience even better.
1) Customer can select alternate CD cover art as well as jewel case insets, even be able to add own text (which would be possible by ImageMagick.
2) User can choose to make mixed mode CDs (data + audio), which could also include live performance clips.
3) During the checkout, if the audio disc compilation has extra space you could offer promotional (Free) tracks to be burned by having the user to select from the list of songs as a filler (when met a certain minimum number of purchased tracks to avoid abuse)
4) Customer can choose his own compressed format (mp3, aac, or ogg). In MP3's case, they can opt out to select the tracks with or without ID3 info, which should be very easy to achieve by stripping the metadata after automatically copying them into a temp directory. This is important because ID3 tags are sometimes incompatible with some portables.
This would be the perfect solution to a complicated problem. And shouldn't be costly since there won't be any overhead in software costs - OSS got you covered.
You should really finish that idea up and write a paper on it.
Its genius, as long as the RIAA isnt involved, I like your idea better than any other.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
As a business model, selling digital files online seems like a great thing. You can reach a world wide audience, you don't have to pay for shipping, packaging, and like you said, distribution is the cost of bandwidth which these days is about $20 a month at most web hosts (unlimited bandwidth).
As a DJ, the one thing that I notice is that it is better to get a physical product into the hands of as many retailers on the web as possible and use MP3s for promotion. As a format, i don't think that I would ever pay for MP3s, there just not worth it. I equate it to radio. I check out songs that I have heard about to see if they are any good. If they are than I buy them on VINYL!!!!! But that is just my personal preference.
If you find that you are actually selling mp3s, all the power to you, but I think you would be better off investing some money in real product and getting it into as many online and real stores as possible. Follow that up with promotion online and off.
I think there is great potential for digitally distributed content, but as musician, you must be creative and try to get your music out as many ways as possible. See how much money you make selling mp3s. If it isn't much, than make them free to promote your album on CD, cassette, vinyl, minidisc, or 8-track
Just so we're clear, you've secured an MP3 distribution deal BUT YOU DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW HOW YOU'RE GOING TO DO IT?
Geez. Better hope your Indie Band doesn't read Slashdot.
This site is getting heavily astro-turfed. Innovative ideas get stalled
Watch out!
"Albums?" "Bunch of files?" Ye Gods, man, why? It's been years since music packaged as an "album" was meaningful. Unless your boys are the next King Krimson or Moody Blues, they -- and you -- should be focusing on distributing their work on a song-by-song basis.
"Artwork?" See above. Lyrics, sure. Give us a link from your Website. Band photo? Okay, fine, whatever. But artwork? Cute, but not a whole lot of value added, IMO. The odds of your band's tracks living on their own CD in my collection are tres slim.
Price? Competitive with iTunes. Less than a buck per song. Per Song Want the ability to preview each track I buy.
Format? I'm a 256kb/s Ogg man myself, but it's tough to argue for that against the vastly more popular MP3. You are aware that the second your avaerage customer downlaods a track from your site it will begin to swirl about the planet freely on P2P networks across which you will receive no compensation? I trust the bands have another surce of revenue (touring, day jobs) and aren't planning on getting rich from MP3 sales...? If your sales just about cover your prep and distribution costs, and you categorize the whole venture under "PR" or "Promotion," I'd say you would have a winner.
Im that kind of person, that when I buy software always order the hardcopy.. harddrives to go to hell, I know, it has happend, and more then twise. I dont want only files. I want files archived on CD. (this goes for music to)
Why not ogg??
The lunatic is in my head
The music wan'ts to be free!
release it in mp3!
fileshareers will share thee
The mp3 samples are nice, but I have a couple of suggestions. Make them a bit longer, so that at least the first hook is heard. Even having two-thirds of the song is up there won't prevent people from purchasing. Some of the songs don't even begin before they are cut off. Speaking of which, use some audio editing software to fade the pieces out so it isn't such a slap in the face when the song ends.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
I don't have a huge backup tape system.
Burning my complete collection onto CDs as a backup would be incredibly sucky.
I want the server to keep track of what I've bought and allow me to 'resynch' with it if my hard drive blows up.
The last thing I want is to have to pay for my entire myusic collection again. (Which is what you have to do with iTunes).
My Journal
I think that one of the ways you can add value to your collection as a whole is to be choosy about which bands or songs you provide. You will have more value to more people if you are providing a kind of filter on the content.
.wav format, in order to be ready for burning to CD.
Also, it seems that providing downloads in FLAC format would be popular. However could I suggest that you provide a program to automatically extract these files to
Multiple formats and qualities would be great.
Price has to be reasonable (less than $1 minimum, less than $.50 would be ideal)
Subscriptions would work in addition to per-track
CD orders would work in addition to per-track and subscriptions
Catalog site should be very plain and work very well
A more elaborate promotional site might help
Downloads should be fast and reliable
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
what would u do to get peoples attention in buying mp3s instead of people finding them somewhere else for free? Cause they have a recipt to show riaa proof? and what would happen if the person had a hd failure or had to format? Could they redownload it for free? And what if they burn the files then copy it? all little questions...that come to my mind. oh yeh another thing...i don't believe mp3 players can play .ogg format
.
Fuck albums. I don't listen to albums, I don't burn albums, I listen to and burn tracks. Don't force me to buy filler. If your artists are producing typical RIAA albums that are three good singles quality tracks and a bunch of filler, that's their problem, not mine.
I can preview RIAA music on the radio, on MTV-a-like channels, and in some music stores before I buy (oh, and I can share it, but let's pretend I only do that after I've previewed it elsewhere). How can I preview yours? Remember, this is per track. Don't give away the best track and then expect me to buy filler. I suggest you give away low bitrate previews, and that you consider them a marketing tool. Go ahead and mangle the intro and outro if you like, fade it out halfway through and then voiceover the URL where you can buy it, heck, I just want to get a feel for the style. Encourage people to share these sample tracks on P2P services. It's marketing, not piracy, and it saves you bandwidth.
Sell in the format that your customers ask for. mp3, wma, ogg vorbis, whatever people ask for, and in the bit rates that they ask for. Don't assume that everyone will want super-high bitrates, I generally downsample to 128 mp3's anyway, as the difference in quality is negligible on a portable device. Storage is cheaper than bandwidth, so store multiple bitrate versions. If you don't want to store every track in multiple formats and multiple bitrates, consider storing at high bitrate in one format then converting and storing new formats on demand. You can almost certainly convert faster than you can upload, so there won't be much of a delay even for the first person that asks for something. You won't have to do it that often, because (cue the denials) there won't be a large intersection between people that will actually pay for music and those that will only accept it in ogg vorbis format.
Don't sell crippled tracks. Don't even countenance it. If you treat us like thieves, you give us little incentive not to act like thieves. Be honest, acknowledge (explicitely) that customers can de facto share the music, but suggest - politely and in a positive way - that we share the demo tracks instead. Thank us for doing so. Thank us for purchasing. Make us feel good about helping your artists out.
Cover art, meh, whatever. I'd prefer lyrics, artist bios, trivia, something to read while I'm listening or downloading, but it wouldn't effect my decision to purchase either way.
Pricing. Well, the market will decide, but I feel that a dollar US is reasonable - for tracks that I've previewed, and which are in the format that I want. More than that, and I won't bother. Force me to buy albums, and I won't bother. Wave any "licensed for US distribution only" crap in my face, and I won't bother.
Does this sound like I'm expecting you to bend over backwards? Yes. Welcome to the cartel run music business. You're competing against a billion dollar marketing machine, so you need to offer sweet deals and rely on happy customers and good word of mouth to make this fly. Good luck.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Provide FREE downloadable compilations. Make the compilations come with band interviews, slideshows, etc. Make it something we look forward to every six months/year. Brand loyalty starts with making a product that people believe in. Give us a reason to believe. We want to buy your product if you do something cool and INNOVATIVE, not just give us jpgs of cover art.
Someone, please shake me from this wide-awake nightmare.
Hahaha, I realize that this probably is a troll, but God, that is the most retarded idea I have ever heard.
You described the advantage of selling MP3 as reduced costs, no packaging etc etc, and then you go on to try to figure out ways of adding extra things. I sense some confusion.
Dude, sell the music. Only. And sell it track by track, not per album.
If you want to be fussy about it, you could add some header info or better yet some bit overlayed (post encoding) purchase info to track folks "sharing" it, but other than that, keep it simple. People are used to the idea of $1 == 1 song, so if you can, just go with it.
The problem of course is that at $1 per sale, transaction fees become a problem, so you'll have to figure out some logistics first. Debit accounts could work, but you'll need more than one band to get people interested. Maybe selling "singles" rather than full albums would be the go, at like 3 bucks a pop or something. I dunno, but the golden rule of online selling is make it easy and make it fast.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
This of course is more interesting as the volume of the songs database grows, but I guess its a relatively easy to implement, and I for one would like it a lot.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Come on,
We all know the best price is free and that once it's released its free!
just prepare for the fact that when i bought an album from your site, i want to stored and played it on my main PC, media PC on the living room , my laptop , burn it on CD ,and who knows what other music players i will purchase in the future.
that means, we want to be abel to copied it an multiply it.
i pay for it. its mine
d035 7hi5 100k 1ik3 4n l337 5i6 2 j00 ?
what would make me buy MP3's is something like the Itune and the Apple Music store integration . do something like it that support more platforms and you've got a deal.
People want to be able to listen some tracks (or parts of tracks), like they do in music store before buying the electronic version of the track - this has to be very easy to do. Buying should also be simple and not take 5 minutes/per track.
none Yet.
I think this guy is on to something. Let's consider what's wrong with FM radio:
:-)
-lame playlists
-commercials
-you hear a song, then it's gone
-no way to buy a song you just heard, learn more about the group, yadda yadda
If your radio station could provide options that address these things, you might score a winner.
1. What if you agreed to provide airtime on your station to bands, and give listeners the ability to download and purchase tracks they just heard (or by name).
2. You could fund the station by a small percentage of sales, instead of running ads for The Gap. Alternatively, you could run ads in the player window if they were COOL (not on-line casino) and unobtrusive.
3. Free downloads. Each day you could provide a free download of the day.
4. Provide options. A lot of people will want to buy just a song.
Some might want links to similar songs, or see what listeners who bought that song also bought. Or see what songs listeners like (you could have people vote for songs). Look at the way Amazon and CDNOW try to steer you to buying another album or book.
Some people will want to buy a whole album.
Some people might want lyrics, guitar tabs, even sheet music.
Obviously, links to band websites, and fansites would be a must.
You also should be able to see where the band is performing next.
5. It's about the music. Ultimately, this thing will take off only if the music is good. As much as I might gripe about lame, limited FM radio playlists, record companies, etc., you have to provide a viable alternative, musically. If the music on your station isn't good--really good--it'll be hard to make a dent. You need someone with a good ear, who can pick songs that have wide appeal. Call me.
IMHO the basic concept to audible success is interacting and mixing with your audience. Your audience wants to interact with you. Let them - they'll love you for it.
Selling CD's is just physical mode/layer 1 broadcasting. That's why the business model is flawed.
The GNU culture is to interact - not to consume
Why not have an option to buy an iso file for the people with the bandwidth?
Have you considered jumping off a cliff as a alternative to telling jokes to amuse people ?
This is key, but requires more thought than you have currently put into it. Why did you immidiately think of adding album art? Well, of course becuase that's what the RIAA does, right? That sucks. They do the bare minimum to differentiate thier product, and that is all. If they could sell albums in wax paper with the name hand printed in magic marker they would to save a buck, but they can't because people expect at least the lyrics and a eye catching picture or two (boobies good!)...
Give it some thought. Real thought. What would you CUSTOMERS actually be interested in? Would they like home videos of the band? How about a compliation of interviews with transcripts? How about commentary by the song writers about the tru meaning and message behind interesting snatches of lyrics? Or Karaoke (mp3+G, I think is a simple enough format) versions ot the band's tracks so they can sing them at parties? Universal sampling rights so that people can make cool new mixes at home?
I can think of tins of Ideas, but until you are willing to hire me, I would suggest locking yourself in a room for a week with a case of beer and an internet connection. Go, think up some ideas!
This is one of the worst instances I've seen in a while of Slashdot being used for free advertising. I mean come on, this wasn't meant to spark discussion, it was meant to get the Slashdot crowd to look at his site and get interested in buying from him. There are many better "Ask Slashdots" for the front page. Let's address them before we start advertising for online music upstarts.
Find me in ~/.sig
Retards always entertain each other.
Give the music away as marketing, and make money from moichandising and streaming live performances, with breaks for real time chats and viewer requests. That model is proven to make money. You can find thousands of such performances going on right now. Granted, your bands would have to perform naked, but if they put up a "do not disturb" sign on their parent's basement door, that shouldn't be a problem.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
(Incidentally, have you thought about the rate of chargebacks you will get from people who download the music and then claim it wasn't them?)
This introduces a risk for the customer: what if I don't like it. You can reduce this risk in two ways:
Good luck.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
One is that I like the music - so provide previews. Why take a risk with an unknown indie band when I can buy what I've heard on the radio or hop on over to Kazaa? Good so far. The second is that you allow visitors to download most or all of the music for free. No, seriously. I (and I think a lot of other people) are so fed up with the tight stranglehold labels want on their intellectual "property" that we're not willing to pay to foster the "I made it, every copy is mine" attitude.
Here's what I suggest: make it so that users have the option of naming their own price (down to nothing) to download an album, but still make them go through the motions of using a credit card and having it billed (even if the value of the transaction is 0). I suspect that a lot of people, if they like your music, will be so thrilled to see a forward-looking distributor that they won't exercise this option but will actually pay your suggested amount. And those who won't probably wouldn't have bought your stuff at full price anyway. The key point here is that you remind your customers that music oughtn't be a free-for-all, but you show your trust in them, and you don't exclude those who haven't heard enough of your music to judge its worth (or need that $10 for food). I'm not going to buy an album from the RIAA anytime soon but I'd buy one from a hypothetical outfit like this just on principle.
Here are a few ideas that might help you out.
I have yet to see a site that knows whats its doing. Most are crap.. and the few that do something right.. do alot more wrong. The best thing is to remember what the goals are
Dont be like Darth Vader.. dont squeeze your grip..they will only slip between your fingers.. keep your hands open.. and scoop them all up.
like a cool tshirt!
But it would be necessary for me to have it so that you can download the same song multiple times after you buy it. If the file accidentaly gets deleted or whatnot, I wouldn't want to have to pay for the same file again.
From the site:
Once payment is verified the mp3 albums you have purchased will be added to your Rockbox. From your Rockbox you can download tracks from the MP3 albums you have purchased. The MP3 albums will remain in your Rockbox ready for your personal use at any time, should you ever need to download them again.
So, isn't that what you asked for?
personally, if it's a choon i like, i'd prefer to download a 16/44.1 wav. i don't care how long it takes, i don't want my quality compromised - after all i'm paying for it. in any case, most mp-freaks i know spend most of their time listening to the codec quality....
These are some things i liked from reading the other replies and some of my own ideas. 1. Ability to download single songs - This means i only get the songs i like. 2. Fast downloads - Always good ^_^ 3. Mailing List - This is an idea i had. Once the customer has submitted their details and created an account with u're site. The customer gets low quality MP3's sent to them, say 32kbps. This means that the MP3 will be small enough to email and good enough for the customer to decide whether they like the band or not. The MP3's sent are chosen according to the customer's music genre preference. This way the customer can listen to the MP3 anywhere with a comp and purchase it....which brings me to my next idea. 4. Credit - The customers have credit, just like a mobile phone. The customer can put money from their credit card to the MP3 account. So say, i recharge my account with $20 credit. Now i can download songs that i want without having to worry about my credit card number.....which prolly is more secure anyway. I know i didnt explain it very well, but in my mind it'll work. Well those are a few ideas any way. Good Luck with u're project. BTW FARSCAPE ROCKS!!!!!! |:>EmJaY:|
Here are two ideas I would like, and would certainly pay for:
(1) A radio like service where I can listen at any time and choose preferences about music type. Then, when I heard something I like, I can save it at high bitrate (higher than the streaming radio, or perhaps even CD quality) for a fixed price with a "one-click" kind of interface. Maybe it could cost a fixed price per month ($5-$10) and then maybe $0.50 - $1.00 per song that I keep. This is obviously the more complicated system, but I think it's just about ideal.
(2) A website where I can sample songs (maybe a part at low bitrate) and get intelligent recommendations. Then I just buy what I want. I would prefer to not have a monthly cost, since sometimes I tire of a service and I don't like to have to go through a cancellation. But, I would be willing to pay up-front (like 5 or 10 songs) and then choose the ones I want later (I know that saves on transaction costs for the merchant).
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
There's one big problem in buying music from the net: reselling. After I get bored with my cd, I just sell it away. With mp3s, I'm not able to do that. Printable covers make this problem even worse: I probably shouldn't be able to sell a self-burned cd? There will be tons more of illegal cds in second hand. Don't get me wrong: I don't work for RIAA, but there's real problems in distributing music in electronic format.
- Varied choice of encoding (mp3, ogg, flac, etc)
- If you have both lossy and non-lossy compressed files (Ogg and say FLAC), some abiliy to pay for an upgrade of your music files.
- Ability to play purchased music collections from your server (i.e. so I don't necessarily have to manage a colection on a local device)
- A good recommended music function
If you have DRMIf you produce a good album, there's no need to add any more value to get me to buy it. CD inserts? I'll never make them. Hell, I don't even own a printer at home. If the album makes it off my hard drive it's just onto a CD-R and into my car's CD changer. Price it reasonably and put it up for download. Make sure it's in an unencumbered format so I can listen to it on any of the various Linux or BSD boxen I'm logged into on a given day.
I want to buy good music that's reasonably priced, because I want the artist to make more good music. If you can provide that, don't worry about convincing me further.
Only con to the system: Everyone's not like me. You can't change that. You'll always have the few people who would rather steal and save a few bucks. You can live without them. Don't worry.
Game... blouses.
getting the artwork would impress me a lot - it connects you to the band to see their photos, artwork etc. it makes the cdr/rw you burn less anonymous, more of a product. but:
1) make versions of the artwork look good in black and white - not everyone has a colour printer
2) make the artwork easy to print using a standard printer set up for the usual a4/letter size paper as well as special cd labels. for example, i can print out at uni but only onto the a4 paper the I.T. guys load up, not onto cd labels.
3) mark where the print outs need to be folded/trimmed etc, and give instructions so that anyone can do it easily first time.
to me, the following conditions would be rather important:
1) no DRM. hardly anyone is going to pay for restricted music.
2) good quality. don't sell 128k MP3s, they just sound terrible. for MP3 use at least 192kbps. if this is too much, use OGG.
3) don't lock out the whole non-us world, like apple did.
in short. It should be a simple, open format (even ogg if you like ;), should be about 1$/song (or less, if you like), and it should be possible to copy the file as often as one would want to - for personal use, of course.
...a few albums off your site, the price is acceptable to me. But when I clicked on the Shopping FAQ, it seems that you only accept payments via PayPal.
Give me an alternative to purchase via a merchant with a properly implemented online payment scheme which doesn't require me to:
a) Live in the US/Canada/EU countries (or some other form of geographical bias).
b) Pass to them my current/savings account info.
c) Fax paperwork to them.
And there are lots of them out there on the net... Try to resist the "easiest way out" method by using (only) PayPal.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
Remember that the CD packaging, album art etc are part of what is being sold when the RIAA artists sell their music. While the Album art is superfluous, the packaging is not.
You still need to be enable the complete product, just like Apple has done with its iTunes music service. That means you also have to become an expert at CD burning software, drives etc. In the end possibly the best way to make this into a business is to partner with the CD/DVD burning companies, and/or blank disk (omg, I called it a disc, I am showing my age) sellers.
Selling bits alone online is something porn vendors get away with, but I don't think its the right way to try to sell music. At least not by itself.
You're absolutely right. It IS Mac users - that strange section of the computer using world where people pay for stuff that they value (often too much), like/love their computers and actually believe that a product that cost hundreds/thousands of dollars should be well designed from both an industrial and usability point of view.
They're a weird bunch, but if you can make a product or service that they like, you can make a PROFIT from it! And they'll love you for it, too!
That was classic intercourse!
Maybe it's just me, but I actually do like to have whole albums. While there's something to be said for per-song distribution, especially for artists who have already reached a wide audience, there are a lot of albums out there that just demand to be listened to all the way through (Radiohead, Zeppelin, etc.)
Even outside of those kinds of albums, there's something to be said for leaning back, turning the volume up and listening to a good rock record.
Music to me is something mystical, and though I have all of my CDs ripped to my hard drive, and usually listen to them off of that, I own many of my favorite records on vinyl. The sound quality may not be as good, but there's something about putting on a record, closing your eyes and just listening that no digital format will ever be able to replace.
That said, it can be hard to get any form of physical copy of a indy band's recording if they're not local to you, and if it was setup the right way I'd definately go for a way to check out bands from other areas. A couple things would be needed:
1. Hiqh quality (320kbps/VBR?), in the format of the customers choice. Ogg, MP3, whatever.
2. Fast speeds - no brainer.
3. Unlimited redownloads. If I lose a hard drive, I shouldn't have to pay again.
As far as "extras" go, it might be nice but personally it wouldn't make or break my decision to purchase something- it's one of those things that you can only really get with a physical copy... half the fun of owning an indy album for many is being able to say you were there in the beginning, and you just can't get that with a burned CD/printed CD covers, no matter how high quality.
Your target market is really people who live far enough away that getting a physical copy would be a hassle... people who can get a CD can usually go see a show, and that's a better way to check out a band.
I'm biased, I suppose... most of my friends are music freaks too. But among that group of people, I think buying habits are generally the same as mine.
You, me, outside now.
5000 people at 12 USD per year is ONLY 60,000.
Now lets do the math. Assuming you have hosting costs, Internet transfer costs would run in the order of about 1K per month, which is 12K.
So now you are left with 48K USD. You need a machine to host, so most likely you will use a providers machine (fail over, etc). That will cost you another 199 USD per month, which is 1200 USD per year.
Now you are left with 46.8K USD. Next you will probably run your own company and you need to pay health care, and other little office costs. Lets say that it runs up in the order of about 1K per month, which is 12K.
Now you are left with 34K USD where you still have to pay taxes. You will probably have to pay 5K, which means you are left over with 29K, or after all is done and said you get 2,410 USD per month.
You want to feed yourself on THAT? Come on you have got to be kidding yourself.
Being cynical, this is exactly why the dot.com's failed. NO business plan...
It is not to say that your idea is bad. But 12 USD per year is not a reasonable fee. The reasonable fee would have to be calculated....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
100,000 people download a few million files and suddenly Itunes is a success?
Yep. Pretty easy wasn't it? Fucking genius. Pure and simple right fucking genius. Wow! How could we all have missed it? Maybe we were too busy worrying about Johnny Warez and his flimsy-ass 14.4 kpbs house-o-uploads?
Billions of files are traded over P2P file sharing networks by hundreds of millions of people.
And NOBODY FUCKING CARES!!! They're STILL MAKING MONEY BY THE FUCKLOAD!!! It's absolute GENIUS!!
Itunes is about as much of a success as some of the micropayment sites are
Yeah? Where's the $5 million micropayment site since April?
Its MAC USERS!
Now multiply by 35 and you get the revenues when this thing makes it to Windows. It's FUCKING GENIUS!!!!!!!!!!!
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Check out Emusic. They are still doing things mostly right.
In a nutshell make it easier to buy then download.
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
What would make me buy in to this?
Good bands getting their moneys worth. Ideally, you would convince a major indie band (with an expiring contract with a record label) to distribute their next record this way. I would certainly buy this way if I liked the band. What would make me certian to buy the record would be an exact statement of where my money is going - e.g how much tha band gets, bandwidth and advertising etc.
Being open and honest about money would encourage people to part with it. If I knew the band were getting more cash this way than through a major label, I would prefer to download than buy a CD.
Let's face it, you are not yet distributing music for big time bands here. People who go to you to download music will do so only because it is a means to an end. Your primary goal SHOULD BE making it as easy as possible for your customer to find and download the stuff that they want.
Banking on value-ads like CD inserts and art will come with a big problem: To be cost-effective, you will have to rely on the artists and their labels for such content. Idies have a hard enough time preparing content for their gigs, let alone liner notes and the whole nine yards.
Feel free to advertise other bands and music on your site, but do not be to pushy about it. The key to getting customers to respond to your business will be providing them with an excellent first impression, in this case, getting them straight to the music they came for.
Along the same lines, your users should be able to get straight from the band's page to a place where they can get the music. They shouldn't have to go through any front pages of your website unless they want to.
My 10+ years as an Internet shopper and 15+ as an ICT professional tell me that providing a good purchasing experience is the absolute must for a successful e-business. There is a lot of competition around, and customers will shop elsewhere if they feel they are not worth an answer and that they needs are not taken care of.
This is not to say that cool features are not important, but if you do not get the fundamentals right from the start there will be no chance to improve later.
Now for the most important bits of customer support (IMNSHO):
1. DO make sure that the customers deal with only one access point. Please, no middlemen or other companies in the loop. Make sure your company controls the process entirely. Sell the music files from your site, let them download from your site, answer questions on your site and make sure all e-mail you send out comes from your company site domain. Just avoid confusing customers.
2. DO NOT ever send automated boilerplate answers to email enquires following a purchase. (It really puts the customer off.) Be sure the customer gets to know that you are paying (human) attention to that. If any glitch happens with a purchase and the customer does not feel that you are doing your very best to solve it, then they will never return. Worse, if they only get inappropriate automatic answers, they will assume that your operation is a scam and they will report you as such to their friends and acquaintances.
3. Be prepared to deal with more support enquires that expected. Especially if your site requires either scripting or plug-ins to perform properly.
4. DO NOT make your "problem report" form pages use any form of client-side/server side scripting, active pages or DB-generated pages. Chances are that your site will have a malformed, unusable form just there, in the error customer interface. Plain HTML forms are good for us. (I have seen a couple of telcos do that: malformed javascript. With their error report form out of order, it was easier to switch to another provider rather than report a minor service problem.)
In general: customer support will be your honest face and friendly smile as seen by your customers. Get this wrong and your business will be dead at its very inception.
Best luck with your new business.
Why are Indianapolis labels significantly more open to MP3 distribution than others? Is Indie the new capital of hot music or something?
I think it would be valuable to give away "stuff". I would love to be able to purchase 10 songs from my favorite band(s) and get a limited edition T-Shirt for free. Or a bumber sticker, poster, something. This would keep me loyal to the site (I have to have so many purchases in order to get my "stuff" points) and keep the P2P poachers at bay.
Well, at least if gives them an incentive to purchase instead of steal (even if I "share" the files I won't be sharing my T-Shirt).
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
The primary concern of mine is audio quality. I will refuse to pay for MP3s. Those are for sampling what an artist has and deciding if you wish to purchase their work or not. Listening to even higher quality encodes on my system is pretty painful, and my system is not even that particularly expensive (in the grand scheme of audio, at any rate.)
I would pay for FLAC, but that is a lot of bandwidth.
Originally, I was going to write that you should provide the ability to re-download in the future at no cost, like some of the better eBook distributors, but I think that is unnecessary and too expensive for you. The user should be responsible with their purchase. When I buy a CD, I immediately rip it, burn a copy and then store encoded OGG files for light listening usage. I then use the CD-R for common usage, and the "master" goes back in the jewelcase and into the library where it isn't touched. It's just common sense to me. If you buy a CD and step on it ten years later you are going to have go buy another one. If you lose the files you bought from some online retailer ten years ago, you'll have to buy another copy. The same risk of whether or not the original is available is still there with CDs, the thing might be out of print. Half of the CDs I own are already out of print. That is why I am so careful with them.
V
I will never really give up the CD. The CD to me is more than just a data carrier, but also a form of the artists expression especially with the album artwork and pamphlet. I am still lamenting the fall of the LP just because it caused a severe decline in the quality of album artwork (which is now limited to a miniscule space for CD's) I think Mp3 distribution could have a even more drastic effect on this medium.
Work's well on DVDs, so why not set it up with a CD music track as well. The MP3+CDG format allows lyrics to be played at the same time as the music. You copuld just as easily fill in here with comments from the band/composer about the music and lyrics that scrolls up in time with the actual music - sort of online liner notes. You could eben make them more interactive - different sets of comments from different band members about how they are playing the music, etc.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
The biggest issue I have these days with the major labels, is that they want to sell you a cd for 20 bucks (CAN), but they don't want to actually give you anything but a 5 cent piece of plastic with an embedded metal media holding the recording. Cheap bastards.
Back in the seventies, and the album era in general, one of the great joys of buying an album was being able to peruse the artwork, and info included wiht the vinyl. Ahhh, glorious were those days. Now I need a magnifying glass just to read the cd formatted info included with the disc, but that's another issue all together.
Fuck the RIAA!
1.) I have difficulty paying for a lossy compression Codec. If I was going to try to replace CD's, requisite to that plan would have to be that the quality is very good. Something like zipp-ed .wav or FLAC encoded files.
.02.
http://flac.sourceforge.net/
You at least need to have the choice of a high quality format for audiophiles out there.
2.) Format would have to be portable/convertable to whatever other formats needed (such as FLAC -> MP3 so people can use it on portable players). DRM lockups will not get business.
However, given 1 & 2, and #3 which is I like the music (you need short samples, BTW) I would buy music from you.
My.
why so you do the effort to cd produce?It is already ancient thing but iwould like to say that if you take a photo and you make a nice graphic,then you put on these matrial in your cd jacket.means,you must make a cool CD jacket before making music.
This short whitepaper discusses the use of Pico-Pay as a method for online music publishers to easily generate revenue.
This is totally off-topic but I can't resist sharing this little factoid: apparently the length of an audio CD (i.e. approximately 74 minutes) was chosen so that a full recording of Beethoven's 9th Symphony would fit on a single CD. So by your logic (which seems credible to me), those here-today-gone-tomorrow girl and boy bands are still tailoring their production around a format pioneered by old Ludwig Van in the early 19th century.
Peer Pressure
If people want to download MP3s, charge them one price. If they want CDs, another price. Want to do *really* easy CD fulfillment? Check out CafePress.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
And previews need to be free - maybe just partial songs, but free or really cheap.
You could have piracy tracing built in ... each high res track could have the downloader's info (member info) encoded into the music without degrading it. Any surge of these things on eBay or the Net could be traced to the original downloader.
I want the bloody music, why in Gods name do you think i care less about "services". Just because i like one kylie minogue track does not mean that i desire to buy a years membership to her "club" just so i can get the track. That's a HUGE barrier to purchase. Right now, albumns are a certain barrier but they are even a good barrier of sorts. The number of times i've bought an albumn because i've heard a couple of good things and ended up liking the whole albumn is common. If we split stuff into "individual tracks" then the spirit of Albumns will be gone forever and a number of those excellent "B-sides" will be lost. To sum up. I don't give a fuck about a "SCENE", i'm not some groupie. Fucking fanboy.
check out http://www.livephish.com/
they do the same thing with live shows, except the user has a choice of mp3 format or flac.
you can download a pdf of liner notes and cover art to go with for self-printing as well with each show
the history of the world
something similar to this once upon a time that was done via kiosks in music stores. You could listen to the tracks via headphones, then line em up and it would charge you by the track and spit out a cassette with printed cover and all. I think they had CD as an order only option but am not totally sure. This was as I recall sometime in the late 80s.
Follow eMusic's lead and be sure to use the best rip and encoding tools available. I'm almost ready to resubscribe back to eMusic. And that's saying a LOT.
I'm just randomly tossing this onto someone's topic:
OGG files are royalty free, aren't they?
To sell MP3s, don't you have to pay Frauenhoffer or somebody money?
well, you have my vote for (atleast the option of) ogg files, and flac would be good too for those audiophiles. BTW, how much does your lisence for the mp3 format cost?
> "I allege that SCO is full of it" -Linus
guess you havent tried the gapless plugin for winamp?
its been available for a few years now and it works.
the history of the world
and not 100% perfect. On many occasions I can still hear a pop/blip/silence between tracks such as in Queensrÿche's Operation: Mindcrime, where the tracks flow from one to another.
Vorbis and MPC have no such probs. Check them out yourself and see what I mean.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
...make it 128Kbps Ogg Vorbis format, stereo, and downloadable with the "Save file as" function. Do not charge more than 10 cents a song or a dollar an album.
Have a web page per song with lyrics and artwork. These pages can be saved. Have a tutorial for newbies.
Never use Real Player, Quicktime, or anything but Ogg Vorbis, or maybe MP3 if you have to.
"that strange section of the computer using world where people pay for stuff that they value"
What a strange fucking concept! Actually paying for that which you value.
Unlike the Windows Camp where it is expected that 90% of your hard drive is pirated crap and is entirely covered with way too much copy protection and user tracking (where as on the Mac, a copy of M$ Office is just a drag to the hard drive to your iPod away from a CompUSA Kiosk). Or unlike the Linux Camp where its expected that you are be treated as a fucking sleeze if you don't give away the entirety of your work where others with better marketting skills are free to take what you've done and sell your work as if it were their own (its all about the service, BUT if you are an inept geek with no social skills, do you REALLY think you are going to know how to service your users -- or are you just good enough to write a damn good program that a million other geeks find useful).
Yeah, the Mac side of things is very strange. Last I heard, 80% of its users were the creative kinds. Unlike most of these napster babies, we know what it costs to produce items that have no physical value, but more aestetic or personal value. Crazy I tells you. We don't measure our worth by how many hamburgers we can flip in a single day, but I think thats mainly because the last Gartner report claimed 97.5% of all Mac users are Vegitarians upon learning Steve Gods...Err...Jobs is one. Ok, we don't base our value on how many Boca Burgers we flip in a day either.
I just bought 3 songs off of iTunes last night because there were worth it. New Annie Lennox tune, Dido's White Flag, and a Rob Dugan instrumental. A lot of artists will probably ping Apple for the singles, BUT I look at this as a way to evaluate the album before I walk into the store to pick up the real deal. And quite a few things I've picked up were exclusives that I've looked at as additions to the album I've already purchased.
Yeah, we are wierd...
It's not the costs for packaging, shipping and handling. It' the marketing costs only that account for the $10 or $15 for a CD.
From the FAQ of the shop's website:
Now you know why marketing is responsible for the costs. The quality of the music does not play any roll at all. If you want to reduce prices, you'll have to do less marketing. Now, you could try to participate from the marketing that already has been done by letting the customers search for the singles they want. What singles do the customers want? Yes, the ones they have heard of, and yes, these are the ones that marketing has pushed. So, you would have to have a large collection of widely known individual singles, as a lot of the other posters suggest.
But the big labels will not give away their marketing efforts for free and thus you will not be allowed to sell widely known singles, except if you pay the $10 for a CD or the $3 for a single (not accounting for the fact that the big labels do not want to support high-quality MP3s floating around the internet). Therefore, the website's approach of reducing marketing and giving away albums of unknown artists for a low price is not this bad. At prices as low as $3 to $5, shipping and packaging comes into play again and the MP3 approach might be feasible.
Whilst I have no doubt that other file format would be a good thing, don't forget that by supporting OGG and FLAC you're really only going after the small percentage of users that would use this format (compared to MP3).
In my opinion, not the OGG or FLAC formats are the problem for Joe Sixpack, but how to deal with them. You need to explain to them how to use those files, "for Dummies".
Make a selection page for download, or a question mark, where you boldly explain that OGG and FLAC are higher-quality formats, and how to (easily!) install plugins for them for Media player, Real Player etc. Leave MP3 VBR around 192 kBps as the default download format, which is listed first. (And, by the way, add a non-VBR type for those bad old MP3 disc players).
I'll probably get flamed for suggesting it around here, but what the hell.
The single biggest barrier I would have to buying things from you isn't the fact that I'm forced to buy a complete album, or that I don't have a very wide assortment of format options.
What's going to stop me from buying anything from this site is appearance and presentation.
It's just very difficult for me to justify handing over my credit card number to people who spell "hear" as "here" and "sponsor" as "sponser" in the first hundred or so words on the main page.
Maybe the target audience doesn't care about professionalism, it's hard to say.
However, I do consider myself part of the target audience, and it matters to me, so you've lost at least one potential sale right there.
Flame away!
DON'T assume your customers are running Windows!
I can think of a couple of things that would make obtaining your CD's in this manner more palatable.
First, a "custom tool" that would take _all_ the hassle out of making the CD would be very nice. You download an executable, insert a blank CD and double-click to make the CD. Once the CD is done burning, you are prompted to insert your CD label in the printer and finally the jewel case insert is printed.
Second, I always like a little "added value" to my purchases. When someone actually buys the music it would be a nice touch to give them access to a "members-only" area of the website where there could be interaction with other fans, the musicians, and perhaps special offers or discounts on merchandise or whatever. Maybe even a "bonus track" or two could be out here.
Finally, make sure that you have "technical support" available. Even the easiest things can get messed up and having access to someone who can help is vital. In this case, I would recommend emailing the people who buy the CD a day or two afterwards asking them if everything came out okay. If it did not, obtain their address and mail them a physical CD with the label and the jewel case and everything. This kind of customer service "converts" a frustrated customer who feels like they are getting "ripped-off" into a true supporter and repeat customer. They will tell others how well they have been treated!
The main problem for me would be that the audio quality of a standard 128/192 bitrate mp3 is too low. You should consider, or convince the label to distribute low quality mp3 for free, and then charge for highest quality files.
Also to save bandwidth, you should push ogg files, which are smaller compared to a same quality mp3
I do some work for a company that already sells the mp3 albums online (not apple) and they were doing it a 1/2 year before Apple, so an e-music store is nothing new. The system they use is all custom written perl/sql which allows people to do the downloads once they paid. It also includes the cover art and any extras if they buy the entire album (i think it's about $8), but we figured the cost of hosting and bandwidth to be about $3 to $4 per album sold (that is if they download the entire thing)
.. and that is only about $800 revenue, $400 which might go towards hosting..
That means there is about $4 to divide up between the label and artist (which is about the same if you were to press the CD). Though you have to think of the consumer point of view now.. they also have bandwidth costs (as most dsl/cable companies are putting on data restrictions) and also cost of medium if they are going to burn it to cd. Then again if they got it off napster then it might be the same anyways.
Biggest thing by far is bandwidth.. do some math, 300mb per album X 100 ppl and you have 30 GB easy
-b
If an artist/group keeps putting out good music to the point that people want to collect it, then they can recover the recording and distribution costs. However, there is no huge potential for the mere recording artist no matter how good the music is. The real money comes from touring, in lieu of the huge-ass rock-icon tour bus that sucks all your money out of the deal.
A better way to use MP3s is to *let* people collect them for free. Just go on the road and record everything to beat the bootleggers' quality. Sell recordings less than the bootleggers. Make your money off ticket sales.
The problem with this is your typical rock band is dreaming of becoming stinking rich off their hypothetical fans. Stick with musicians who appreciate the opportunity to make a comfortable living working hard doing what they love to do.
Selling MP3s isn't going to get anyone rich, and everyone will be disappointed. Stop thinking that recordings are "product" that has "distribution costs" which MP3s reduce. Start thinking recordings are advertisement and people sharing MP3s will do it for free if there's any money to be made headlining a tour.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
You had a bad childhood right?
...We don't measure our worth by how many hamburgers we can flip in a single day...
Some folks do flip burgers as their source of income, and when you're that tight for cash, you don't have time to prance around licking eachother's flavored iMacs.
(where as on the Mac, a copy of M$ Office is just a drag to the hard drive to your iPod away from a CompUSA Kiosk).
Ok, you can either pay for things you value, or you can steal software from CompUSA. Choose one.
Yeah, we are wierd...
No, you're just common elitist artist-wannabes. Nothing weird about that.
$8.95/mo web hosting
Are all you crazy? That is highway robbery. Any "per download" payment method will just plain fail. Music itself is free. When you buy a CD you are paying for the convenience of having the songs collected together at an expected high level audio quality along with the liner notes and packaging. You DON'T pay for the "right" to listen to the song. You automatically have the right to listen to ANY song regardless of buying the CD or not. At least, ethically, that is the way it SHOULD be with IP. Sound is vibration of air molecules percieved by your ear. It is an action, not an object! We don't pay for air do we? At least not yet.
Shmoo, of the band Electric Gypsy
Support Local and Independent Music.
For the case issue . . . how about when you join, they mail you a package of blank cardboard CD folders. Each would be a flat 8.5x11 that you run through an inkjet, then fold into a little case. Then, each album you buy comes with a .pdf of the cover.
First off, kudos for doing whole albums instead of track-by-track. This allows experimentation and breadth of style.
First off, kudos for doing track-by-track and not whole albums. This allows me to sample individual songs and not have to pay the full price of an album if the first few tracks sucked.
- tristan
I used a free 7-day trial of Audiogalaxy Rhapsody a couple months ago (which I enjoyed), but I had some problems with it that could be relevant for your service as well:
1. Price $0.99 per song may be okay for a single track, but if you're the type of person who usually purchases whole albums, buying music online is a rip-off. For albums that have 15 tracks, you are still paying $15 for the CD but you AREN'T getting CD-quality music (remember, MP3 is lossy); nor do you get the actual disc, jewel case, or printed artwork. If you are going to sell music for $0.99 per track, the end-user should get a discount for purchasing the whole album. Personally I will never pay more than $8 for a full album in MP3 format, no matter how many tracks.
2. Availability Selling music online will NOT work unless EVERY record company makes their music available to online retailers. This is especially true if you plan to charge a subscription fee on a per-month basis; I would not pay for an online music service unless all the music I wanted to purchase was available. This factor is out of your control since you cannot force record companies to give you their music, but since you are focusing on the Indie genre I don't think you should have a problem; it's mostly the big record companies that are choosing not to make their music available to online retailers.
3. New Releases Taking a trip to the music store at midnight for a new release is not uncommon for die-hard music fans. In order to compete with this, you should have a policy for new releases where you guarantee new music will appear on your service within 2-3 days of the release (if not on the day of the release).
Quickly, before my coffee's ready:
/do/ think it's a bit stifling for music fans.)
/really/ high, but $10 for complete records and a buck for single songs, well, that's really good. Want sheet music? Price goes up. Want the highest possible rips? Price goes up. Want someone to take the time to get all of the album art, from head to toe, in a high-quality format for you? Price goes up. An obscure format that won't make nearly, NEARLY as much money as mainstream formats like MP3? Price goes up, if it happens at all.
/human torch
1. "I want Ogg!"
Not happening. Get realistic. Anyone outside of Slashdot know about Ogg? No? Okay. Next.
2. "I want raw CD audio rips!"
Not happening until all or most mainstream high-bandwidth ISPs remove transfer caps.
On a related note, transfer caps suck. I was lucky enough not to get one imposed with my 1.5Mbit residential service.
3. "I want every possible feature under the Sun, including complete album art collections and sheet music. Otherwise, it's not worth it."
Not happening, either. Rights to reprint and retransmit sheet music transcriptions for distribution-controlled recordings are licensed to sheet music companies like Cherry Lane, etc. Print music publishers are already here, so if you want to give out over the Web what they sell, the price will go up. Sorry. (Sites like OLGA don't reprint, so to speak, copyrighted transcriptions, for reference. It's a bit of a grey area, or at least, it has been a grey area in the past few years with agencies like the Harry Fox Agency suing tab and lyric sites left and right. I won't get into whether I agree or don't agree with it, but I
I'll address the "every feature under the Sun" part in the next few seconds.
4. "I want all of this for a quarter per song."
This is ridiculous. You can't have every feature and more for a quarter per song. Yeah, $18 or $20 for a CD is
I don't like the modern music industry, but I see it changing soon enough. A dollar isn't a lot to pay for a good song. (You ARE buying good stuff, right? If I catch you with an Edwin McCain or Celine Dion track, I'm coming to your house and kicking your ass.)
Flame ON!
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Yeah, sometimes Slashdot just runs ads for things unwittingly. This would be one of those times. Quick everyone, go buy some legal mp3s!
Eh.
--
RumorsDaily
I agree...99 cents is a no brainer purchase, but quality needs to be 192kps or better for purchase.
You'll need to build up a pretty good website in order to do this and probably some major bandwidth as well. (At least make sure you host somewhere where you can scale it up well.)
Give aways - Bit Torrents of 64 KB MP3's. The lower quality ones and maybe 25% - 50% of the tracks you're offerring. Since this would be a relatively unknown you're going to have to generate some buzz and the best way to do that is let some of these MP3's get onto Kazaa, etc.
Sell - High quality MP3's and full CD's. Sell the 192 KB VBR versions of ALL the MP3's and ask people to not share them around. Offer the art and lyrics if they download an entire CD (with maybe a lower price than the per-track cost to boot). Additionally, since not everyone is blessed with broadband you should sell actual CD's. Press new ones once a week based on sales and that shouldn't take up too much time. (Buy one of those CD robotic recorders with label printer gizmos).
Build community - Go donwload slashcode or something like that. Have discussion areas for the albums and artists. Offer streams of concerts. Anything you can think of to further push the buzz.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
I hate to tell you this, but we don't live in a Marxist country. Nobody gives a shit how much it costs to make. It's all about how much people are willing to pay for it. And if 90% of the world thinks mp3's aren't worth paying for, then they're not, regardless of how much they cost to make.
And look at it like this, no matter how much you spend at the iTunes store, would you spend as much if the store was poorly designed, slow and/or run by someone other than Apple? Hmm, maybe you're not paying for the actual file after all, but the service instead
I don't know why the music industry has caught on, but Director commentaries on DVDs are awesome. They describe where they were going with a scene, and even funny tidbits "Blank and Blank was sick this day... you can even see some drool..."
If a band were to come up with some commentary piece about their album, fave song, ____, I would definately pay $$ for that.
Here's a news flash for those of you that just don't get it. Musicians are not rock stars. Rock stars can be and usually are musicians. The difference is that most musicians don't snort coke off of hookers asses, we don't drive Mercedes, we don't jump off of hotel balconies and into the wedding reception below (except on a dare, but that doesn't count). We're closer to IT nerds than you may think. We're all social outcasts in one way or another, turning to our hobbies to give us some kind of acceptance to the world at large. I started playing guitar because I didn't have anything else to do, no friends, and really didn't want any. The day I picked up a guitar I knew I'd found what I'd do for the rest of my life. I assume it was that way with most of you here the first time you typed 20 GOTO 10. The difference being that I didn't have to go to school to learn what I know and I didn't come out of college into an industry where, according to some figures I've seen here, $60,000 a year 'isn't that much'. Musicians usually work regular jobs. I know a guy down here in Dallas whose band has opened for a number of national acts, has headlined 2,000 seat venues (which were packed) and still he drives a forklift every day. He has endorsement deals with several companies, but all this gets him is some cheap gear. His band's CD's sell reasonably well around here and his band gets constant attention from the local radio stations on their local music shows. Yet he still drives a forklift, and his wife works too. This isn't supposed to be a "Save the Musicians" cry for help. The dude does good for himself, but I hope you see my point. Playing music is a labor of love for most of us, not a way to make money. Buried in one of these threads someone mentions that $2,410 a month isn't much money. No, it's not if you're trying to divide it and live off of it. It IS a lot if you're simply funding a band with it. With $2,410 a month you could easily pay for all the regular expenses (strings, sticks, heads, new gear in general) and still have money left over to buy a GOOD van. In short, the $2,000 you'd get from your fans would end up paying for everything you did as a band.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
There should be a shift in the music industry. We should drive the record labels out of business by paying the musicians directly. I would rather give $15 directly to the artist, instead of $0.01 for the CD, $8.00 for the label, $6.95 for the record store, and $0.04 for the musician. They should be compensated directly for their work. I think, if you rip a musician's CD, you should send them $10 to pay for their work, and go around the record companies. The record companies don't deserve a penny, they've been stealing from all of us for too long. So, to answer your question. I would definately buy your album online. As long as it is encoded at at least 320kbs VBR, I'm happy.
___Abuse of power comes as no surprise___
I'm sure a lot of people do just this. I would hesitate to see the folks that actually evalute their lifes worth by how many they get done at the end of the day though.
:-)
"Ok, you can either pay for things you value, or you can steal software from CompUSA. Choose one."
The fact of the matter is, most Mac Users pay for their stuff, therefore its generally easier not to treat them like criminals in the first place. There are still a few criminals around, but they aren't the norm.
"No, you're just common elitist artist-wannabes. Nothing weird about that."
Nah...not and artist-wannabe. Elitist maybe. Wannabe, no. Maybe a piss poor artist by todays standards, but still an artist. Though most of the time, I'm just working with much better artists than myself. I produced a show for an artist with 8 grammies (not nominations) and several platniums 3 weeks back and ended up making a quarter million for breast cancer research. Sometimes, I think its a shame that I'd rather focus on my university research and will stay poor as opposed to doing this stuff full time. It keeps my weekends busy and my frequent flier miles alive.
Its a shame us elitist artist-wannabes have more clues than unknown deserts
no you can sell mp3s without royalties. It's the software tools that can make mp3s in the first place that have to pay royalties.
Please offer music files in high bit-rate OOG.
* The sound quality is very good;
* Open source software means no copyright issues
as with mp3;
* Better compression, so smaller files.
By that same logic, I don't go into horrible record stores that can't give me the service I want either. I'm NOT there to buy the service, I'm not there to buy a file, I'm there to buy the music. If the store is a hinderance to me buying the music, I can't buy it.
I would have definately bought into a service like this if it were done right regardless of who owned it.
As for Marxist, you are right, its how much people are willing to pay for it. So do it mean shoplifters are just good capitalists? If its not worth paying for, its not worth stealing...
Something else that isn't an online sales tactic, is to make audio CDs, and sell them at various locations (festivals, concerts, bars, whatever is around you) Sell them for $3, and have the music playing so people can hear it. I would rather pay $3 for something I can have now than pay 0.99 for the same thing that takes an hour to download. Sometimes time is worth money, and if it is in front of me I don't have to go out and find it online.
Will indie record stores, or bookstores take a gratis copy and play it in the store? Dunno.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
MP3 or Ogg Vorbis is preferred. All those closed formats like WMA and ACC suck, and would definately either prevent me from ordering or at least cause me to have second thoughts.
The good thing about iTunes is that you can burn those ACC files to a CD and then make MP3s out of them. But the bad thing is that it takes extra steps and is a PITA.
I'd say, sell your product for ~.$50 song, sell it in MP3 form (highest acceptance) and don't worry TOO much about the liner and stuff. Yeah it would be nice to download that stuff (or get it shipped to you), but it is more of a nice to have than a necessity.
Maybe your best bet is to offer the liner only to those who buy all the songs on the album, or who buy more than half of the songs on any particular album? Probably the best bet would be to have an electronic file in PDF format that you could print out on a color inkjet at home and stick in a jewel case. That way everyone can read it and print it out.
Good luck!
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
Streaming audio! And make it high quality, but don't allow stream-rippers. (If that's even possible, I honestly don't know) If I can listen to the songs first to judge how much I like/dislike certain ones, but I'm not forced to buy an entire CD full of crap for the one semi-cool song I like, trust me, I'll be buying dozens of songs (NOT albums) from your site. And everyone else is correct, make CD-quality (320- and 192-bit) mp3's available for sale, not just that 128-bit encoded junk... some of it is noticeably bad, especially when there is a lot of activity going on in the song. Put it all in .mp3 AND .ogg format for "choice", and I'll think you'll have a winner of a website!
While your point about the artificial length of albums is interesting, I think you may not have a full appreciation of the song and album writing process. While you may feel that most of the tracks on an album are "filler", I assure you that this is not how the artist (in most cases) feel. While only some tracks may grab _you_, each track was carefully crafted by the musicians and may be more enjoyable to different people, and after different numbers of listens. Also, while the length of albums may be artificial, the ordering and selection of tracks for albums is certainly not arbitrary. These factors are (usually) carefully taken into consideration in composing an album to create an entire and complete work of art. As the opinions of others in this thread have shown, your "Hit" track mentality is not shared by all.
The thing you are forgetting is that once these guys have this web distribution up and running, there is little extra time needed besides the occasional site update or links to new songs. The rest of the time they can spend on advertising/tours/new material/second job. Think of this system as a supplementary income whereas the system is making them money while they are free to do other moneymaking things.
One more reason to keep an eye on your money.
First off, let me say that I'm someone who has purchased music from the iTunes music store, and I bought ten CDs this month. I'm not some w4r3z addict pontificating about what might hypothetically make me pay for content.
OK, that said...
I need to be able to preview tracks. Especially if (as seems likely) they're from bands I've never heard of.
I need the site to work with any browser.
I need the files to be burnable on a normal audio CD. I would like them to be regular audio files unencumbered by DRM.
Ideally I'd like LAME encoded MP3s, using --alt-preset standard or --r3mix depending on how much bandwidth you think you can spare.
I'd like downloadable artwork, yes. I'd print that out or add it to the MP3s for iTunes.
If you're gonna sell whole albums only, I need the price to be lower than the iTunes music store. I wouldn't buy an album from the iTMS because it's no cheaper than CD if you shop around; all my purchases have been single tracks from albums I would never buy the rest of. I reckon about 50 cents per track or $5 per album would work.
I absolutely will not pay for RealAudio or Windows Media content at any price, because they're proprietary write-only formats.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The problem here is most new websites don't have the customer base or loyalty that Apple has. They also won't have the quality of service or a device for you to download your mp3s on. If I'm starting an mp3 website do you think I'm going to get distribution rights from any of the larger record companies as easily as Apple did? Of course not. Why? Because I can't afford to pay distribution rights for the likes of Eminem or Bob Dylan and I can't promise a return on investment. While I like indie music the majority of people in the world don't know your indie band or label unless you have a least one recognized act or creative marketing. So why am I paying you for music I have never heard from a band I've never heard of? That is in part the sucess of iTunes. The music they offer is what people want, the artist they want to hear at cd quality or better for a buck. If you can't deliver that I would say you have to offer features and they better be more than jewel case designs.
i agree with your principle, but i think that the label concept will always be around. anything that aggregates a bunch of artists will be label-like. i think people will always want that, rather than scouring the web for individual artists themselves...
Have you seen Ironstayn vs Supergovernment yet?
I like the mp3 format and I take the music just as seriously as I would in a CD format (it's about content not format for me) maybe more so if I can burn the mp3's to a CD (no restrictions) so if you distribute cover art with yours I think that's a great idea the user can then make a cd and print out the label.
Best of luck to you.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
This is something that I've been telling people for a while. If I'm going to pay for downloading a track or album I want to be able to down the uncompressed version. I want the CD quality .wav or similar non-lossy file format.
.wav file myself.
Then, if I wanted to, I could make mp3 copies off of the
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
160/192 is not a high encoding rate. I want 320 (at least as an option).
Call me picky, but I can tell the difference.
***
Radio Shack. You've got questions...we've got blank stares(TM).
I am fine with music in an electronic format. I don't like mp3, though, because it is lossy. It's great for radio (because it's streamable and better quality than actual airwaves), but I'd rather not archive things that way.
flac is a lossless compression format. It would mean more bandwidth for you and more space required for me, but it wouldn't matter if I was going to burn this, I have DSL, and I have lots of space (and can buy more). I'd definitely be willing to pay more for flac than for mp3 to cover bandwidth issues.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"Dear Slashdot...I'm starting my own business in a lousy job market, due to the fact that I had to move 2700 miles and it'll be a while before I find anything here in no-where-land. I sell {a href=blah.xyzthing.com} xyz thing {/a} and I'd really love it if you'd give me free advertizing to lots and lots of people...err...I mean, if people could tell me what they'd do in this situation."
You all had started getting better at not doing this...oh well
Now play back your MP3 files and see if they're gapless. They won't be. However, Vorbis and MPC files will be gapless.
You could argue there's no point in doing so when your current plugin works just fine. Fair enough, but for me it removes parts of songs where it shouldn't and that's unacceptable for me.
Hope this helps.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
All music I buy is ripped and transferred to a servers and various portable MP3 players as soon as it enters my house. The CD dissappears into a box never to be seen again, so including cover and inlay graphics would not be an incentive for me.
I suspect that there are already many people for whom this is true and the number will only increase in the future, so I don't think that's the way to go to sell MP3's.
Personally, I don't really need any more incentive past good quality (I rip my MP3's in VBR to about the same size as 192 kbit CBR MP3's), a reasonable price (say, 0.75 per song?) and no restrictions on what I do with the file.
The most important thing when selling mp3s (apart from price) is the bitrate. As longas its 192 kbps or higher i would pay, otherwise no way.
People seem to have this misconception that the $10-$15 spent on a CD/LP is used to pay for $0.25 blank CD, a cool cover, distribution, royalties and then the rest is profit.
But have you looked at the recent videos artist put out? These aren't cheap home-made videos. Most of them are elaborate multi-million dollar videos, with hollywood actors, movie grade special effects and so on. My point is that I'm sure the biggest cost music have to manage is the marketing cost. With these huge investments on a multi-million dollar video for a single song, radio airplay, TV interviews for the artist, Awards show (which honestly, is only used to promote the, already, succesful POP artist), using the web to distribute music isn't a sure thing.
The only way for an indy label to successfully distribute mp3 through the web, would be to increase its marketing budget. Now days, if you don't have a video, what are your chances to be seen. And to do that, you'll need to sell your mp3 albums for more than (the less than)$0.99 price people are dreaming about. We're looking at maybe $5, who knows. And who would want to spend $5 on an MP3 album which at most may contain 20 songs, where at best only 3 of them are worth listening to.
Maybe I'm pessimistic, but no one will become famous with an indie online label without selling mp3 at a higher price than $1 and using the extra cash in a serious marketing budget/plan.
I - "I'd really like Slashdot's opinion on this. I recently secured an MP3 distribution deal..."
Good for you, but so have plenty other people, all of whom screwed it up. Look at their faults before you start building.
II - "We are trying to add value to the MP3 albums we sell by including quality artwork that can be printed onto CD labels and jewel case inserts (so you aren't just getting a 'bunch of files')."
Why? That sort of stuff is for antisocial pirates who like to sit in ivory towers full of their bootlegs CDs. Most people will never look at the art, much less print it, and would rather pay less than get a nice image that doesn't serve any point on an iPod.
III - "What would make you want to buy music in this way?"
Good advertising, word of mouth, and the old staple, radio airplay. Of those three, word of mouth is king, because if I hear someone playing it in the office, car, etc., and he tells me what site to get it from, I'll probably do it within 48 hours.
IV - "What types things would turn you away?"
DRM. Crappy web design, especially flash or anything that only renders well in one browser or other. Use google as a model for all web design.
V - "What are the positives and negatives of selling music in this manner?"
Positives: No physical CD to deal with. I can buy an album at three in the morning. Bands can sell singles and short albums (LPs) instead of long albums that are mostly filler tracks. David Lee Roth did really well in the 80s with short, cheap, filler free albums.
Negatives: Most people are too cheap/lazy to backup large hard disks, and will need to download entire album collections when a disk dies.
VI - "Do you think this is a viable alternative to someone who doesn't want to pay $10 or $15 for a physical CD?"
Emphatically yes.
VII - "Does the format the music is in or on have an impact on how serious you take it?"
I would *not* waste money on mp3 audio. Even the best mp3s sound like crap on a decent set of speakers, much less my car stereo or the THX sound system at my desk. Make high-quality files (.ogg) an option.
DRM is also an instant dealbreaker. If I do not have total control over how I playback the music, I'll just download a warez rip instead.
As an older (40+) music lover, I would pay for recordings that are "out of print", or otherwise unavailable. Anyone who could distribute that kind of material could have my $5 per CD worth anyday.
THis is a survey question, not a discussion topic. Half says 'Sure, I'd buy MP3'. The other half says "Nope. Not good enough." Why not send this back to have a real question asked.
- Sig this!
We are trying to add value to the MP3 albums we sell by including quality artwork that can be printed onto CD labels and jewel case inserts (so you aren't just getting a 'bunch of files'). What would make you want to buy music in this way?
The first consideration is quality.
That said, price is more important.
Huh? Since I don't know the artistic quality of the MP3s in question, I need a (very) low price to get me to risk buying what I may never listen to.
This is why emusic.com has been so useful for me: there's no (additional, beyond the monthly subscription) risk to trying something -- and so no regret if that something isn't what I was looking for.
As far as value-added products: I have no intention of burning any of the music I (all legally) download; MP3s for me mean the convenience of not changing CDs, and the convenience of carray around 60 GB of music in my pocket. So CD cover art doesn't move me -- and how much CD cover art is that great anyway.
What does add value for me is complete and accurate ID3v2.4 tags. Also valuable would be lyrics included in the ID3 tags, and even better would be synchronized lyrics (another tag).
And of course, the MP3 techical quality matters: give me something on the order of -r3mix (joint stereo, varaiable bit rate at ~192 kbps average) at a relatively constant volume over the whole album, etc. Without the buzzwords, high quality encodings, and you'll probably want lower quality versions too for the guys who complain that anything over 128 kpbs is wasted on their ears.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I realised the other day, I hadn't touched for months. I tend to listen to music whilst I'm working or travelling so winamp and my iPod have me covered. Physical CDs are a pain in the arse to lug about with you - probably just give them away/sell them.
Even a 256Kbps MP3 can't encode certain sounds. If my master copy of an album is going to be digital, it needs to be a perfect reproduction. I understand there are one or two formats that have been created for just this purpose.
Maybe most folks would be happy with good-quality MP3s, so a tiered pricing system would seem the natural solution. Maybe $1 per track for the MP3, and $1+(avg. extra bandwidth cost) for a lossless file.
$.99/song
$5-6 for a whole CD iso, ready to burn, with cd label for jewel case
Some sort of subscription service, $10/mo. for 30 songs or something.
Clearly make two types of service, subscription and one-time. Sometimes people just want to try something and are afraid they won't be able to stop re-occuring billing. I know that I generally don't use services that only offer all-you-can-eat type values. It's a pretty quick tip off that you won't be able to stomach all that they have.
I can understand why people buy CD's. A lot of people do not own or understand computers, and are not capable of getting mp3's. For this large portion of the population, the only viable alternative is to actually purchase hard copies of the cd's they are interested in. For technologically savvy individuals, there is absolutely no reason to pay for music.
Don't you think it's unrealistic to expect people to pay for music (even if it is of high quality) when they can get it for free? Ideally, music would be priced reasonably, and everyone would pay for it, and everyone would win (artists & consumers). But in reality, people pirate music because they enjoy a large variety, and can not afford to pay for everything they want. Everyone needs more money. No one makes enough. If you can get something free, most people jump on the opportunity... which is exactly why pirating is so rampant. Let's be totally honest... most people are not too concerned with taking a few dollars from the pockets of multi-millionaire artists... and that same lack of concern trickles all the way down to indie artists too.
I don't beleive that selling music on-line is a viable business prospect. The first copy is sold, pirated, and dumped to newsgroups, peer-to-peer, and the net... and everyone gets it free. Good luck with your endeavor. I hope you are successful, and prove me wrong... but I doubt it.
pirc eof 99 cent sper track and the option to donwload the artwork and view artisits notes and stuff via membership website would sell me on the idea..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
In the last two years, my two favorite indie record stores in town went out of business, and the only good one remaining isnt even able to pay rent every month--the owner sold his Ducati this summer to buy new music. I must be in the vast minority here, but I still love shopping for music in independently owned record stores. Unfortunately this may not be possible in the near future because the industry is compensating for people who try to save a couple of bucks by downloading mp3s, and for artists who chose to distribute on line.
The worth of an object is relative to each person. The shops charge $X, enough people are willing to pay that for the store to be profitable. Shoplifters have nothing to do with it, they simply don't think it's worth the money but worth the risk instead.
If a musician charges $Y for a bunch of MP3s and nobody pays, it's the musician's fault, it has nothing to do with everyone not understanding the "true value of a work of art". If nobody pays for MP3s then you can't act like you understand the profession of artist because you do. Everyone else doesn't think it's worth the money, so it's not to them. If it's worth it to you, fine, but artists have to understand the majority of the world doesn't think what they offer is worth paying for simply to listen to. Get over it.
Also, you just proved my previous point. You're not paying for the file, but the music. Music is a service, not a product. Growing up in a "Copyright by default" society has clouded the wording of the issue to make it look like it is a product. Would you pay for these if it weren't run by Apple, but had someone else's DRM embedded in the file? Even with the same restrictions on the file, but MS or Real ran the show. Do you trust them to let you listen to your music forever? Apple's DRM is a service, that you pay for because you trust them. Same thing with quality, ease of use or any other reason you pay to download it from Apple.
I can't take it anymore. Your posting history reads like a how-to guide for being a fucking idiot. Please tell me you're a jackass, know-it-all college student and not someone with a career, house, etc. because at least then it would all make sense.
I'm serious, I have to know.
a small 'sample' fee to test an MP3 but unless you are selling AT LEAST 256 kbps it WILL never FLY as a money maker, sorry. Even then you'd HAVE TO BE REALLY AREFUL to make sure you are not aswscociated with the RIAA in ANY WAY. I stopped buying music 2 years ago...the audio resolution on MP3's in general is so poor only fools with TIN ears would collect them in lieu of REAL music...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
And there's the issue of quality. Buying lossy-encoded music makes me feel uneasy. Even though all my music is played back from Vorbis files, in the back of my mind I know that I still have the source CDs, so if someday I were ever to upgrade my hardware to a level of quality where artifacts were perceptable (however unlikely), I can always re-encode with a higher bitrate.
I don't think I want to buy 128kbps files, even though stuff encoded at that bitrate sounds fine on the equipment that I use today. Make 'em very high bitrate Vorbis files or Flac or something. But not MP3.
Beyond that.. frankly, I can't think of any value I want added to the music. Just give me the files and assurance that the musicians got paid, and I'll be a happy customer.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Going the mp3 route is not the only answer. Just suppose some of the great "digital remasters" of say the great George Szell recordings with the Chigago Symphony came available. Those recordings were on the Columbia label, and the originals were superb. Instead of using compressesed frequency altered crap like an mp3 I would gladly pay for an ISO file of the original that I could home burn. Sure paying a little more for the larger file is not in the plan so far but it would sure beat trying to find them in todays junk record stores. Or ordering them only to find that the company that puts them out for Sony does a cheap ass job of burning them on garbage quality disks.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I haven't seen anyone get assfucked like that in an argument for a while. Note to g'parent - might want to check posts for blatant contradictions next time.
By far, the most important factor in being able to find and purchase music is that it has to be recommended to me by a person with similar tastes, i.e. I like to see what that person's "Top 50" albums are, and that lets me know if I'm going to listen to their recommendations.
Also, I'd like some comparisons, what kind of music does it sound like.
Of course, listening to samples is key, but there's so much music out there (esp. indie music with little exposure otherwise), that simply filtering and sorting it out is too time consuming without trusted referrals.
AG back in its heyday had a whole index of genres and how they were related. The section I made use of was the different flavors of metal (death, black, doom, etc) While this might be hard to do on a limited indie catalog, my point is, if you can say "this artist is of this genre, these artists are also of the same, have a look." and "People who like this genre often like these genres over here" It will make it a lot more informative and, dare i say it, fun to look through your catalog and see who is who
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
High quality (-q 10, ~ 500kbs) ogg files only achieve about a 50-60% size reduction. high quality (256kbps) mp3s are only 15-20% in size.
I have no problem with that. I refuse to buy CD's anymore becasue a good majority that the RIAA bitches about has nothing but 2 good songs and a pile of useless garbage. I won't pay 18 dollars for 2 songs. Hello P2P.
I would consider some kind of bonus material.
I was a big Metallica fan for many years until their softening of their music, and their Napster stance didn't help much either. Although I'm not that fond of their latest CD, their idea of bundling a DVD with their CD is absolutely brilliant. It might be a bit more expensive for an indie to do, but there are cheap ways around it (home video recording, finding the cheapest DVD-Rs you can get your hands on). If you're OK with passing the extra costs on to the consumer (which you implied you are), they may be alright with the extra dollar or whatever if it actually has value added.
If the CD you're distributing is a data CD (since it's an MP3 CD), you can also consider including some video files or other data content instead of distributing a DVD-R.
I have quite the opposite viewpoint, and I dare say I'm a more your target audience since I've bought quite a bit from the Apple Music store.
I don't want to be encumbered by cd booklet, jacket art, or a physical CD. I spent quite a bit of time converting everything in my CD collection to MP3s for portability in file form. I also don't want to be tied to the album format; part of the point of Mp3s is to mix and match songs by artist. Therefore, the liner notes of a CD is uneeded for the song order. The song titles are in the file. The lyrics? If I cared that much, I'd look 'em up online. Art? I'm certainly not looking at the art when I'm listening to this stuff on an iPod...
I'd say in terms of extras you could focus on higher quality audio for people who like the tunes. And, put the lyrics online for those who want them. Lastly, I'd suggest music videos streaming on your website. Other than that, I don't think many people who are into buying Mp3s are going to be overly concerned with all these "extras". The people who are into extras are probably going to be wanting a CD anyway.
Take a look at Phish's online music site. They offer everything in both 128 kbps mp3 and, for an increased price, a lossless FLAC compression format. Thus, they offer a product that is indistinguishable in quality from a regular CD, but those who can't hear the difference/don't care can get their music cheaper and easier.
------- Was it just a coincidence I got moderator points the first time I logged on to
I've got a few Ideas, but not enough time to read all the posts so far, so forgive me for dups.
.zip files containing all the files for popular programs such as Nero and EasyCD Creator. Can't get much closer/novice friendly than that.
Images Perhaps deploying a backend application that would generate custom made ISO (or other popular formats) images and make them avail. for download for say 10 days or something. Then email an invoice and a download link to the user, they download the ISO and can use that to burn a CD from.
On the same page, have not just cover art in image format, but
However, this would probably require either A) An automated process to generate custom ISOs on demand, or B) A large library of albums with added content already in ISO format. Sounds like a fun project to me, if only I had time.
Services
As I noticed some readers mention in what I skimmed before writing this, a monthly service could be nice, but keep it low.
In exchange for the monthly fee, give them all they want in the way of singles. Since many indy artists (at least that I know) don't actually do singles, these could just be the 2 most popular tracks from an album. On the same page these freebies are downloaded from, have a link to Buy the whole album today!.
Added Content
You said you've got the deal for MP3s, what about MPEGS (or other popular video formats)? You could either charge per download, or do these as freebies for subscribers or both.
For example, subscribers could download 1 music video per album for free (I don't know how many indy label artists have time to make videos, but hey). And you could also make interview videos, or even offer a service to fans to distribute (with dues paid to artist and fans) submitted concert footage (preferably edited together from mulitple fan's cameras).
In addition to offering these as stand alones, you could offer these as part of the albums. I remember there was a brief fad of doing hybrid music CDs with added content (common with DVDs today) if you popped them in your PC. This would be a great thing to bring back, now when fans buy albums, they don't just get the music and cover art, but music videos, concert footage and interviews.
If you use macromedia's director you could even make an easy interface that would run on Mac and PC (but that's starting to cross the line of content distribution to content creation, but if you could find a few competent shockwave programmers to contract it could pay off and add value to your company).
All together package
I mentioned ISOs, these could either be music CD images, or just data CD images loaded with MP3s, an autorun macromedia interface, videos, etc.
Or (not sure how hard this would be) perhaps even both (were there compatibility issues with those music/data CDs? And could you do a Mac/PC/music CD?).
Anyways, hope there's some useful ideas in there.
Good Luck!
DONT PANIC
That sounds good to me. I hate paying for packaging and printing that I can do myself. I would lkie to see a try-before-buy option to weed through the huge amount of crap the industry produces. Perhaps an expiring file or something.
Emusic already specializes in MP3s from independent labels. They actually started out selling albums individually, and then switched to the subscription model -- and I suspect there's a reason. Apple is doing well with the individual song/album sales, but probably because they've got a lot of mainstream stuff -- people probably buy that hit song they liked in high school, or that album they always meant to get around to buying. I suspect EMusic customers have very different buying patterns to begin with. It seems like you'll be reinventing the wheel, even though you're talking about doing some things better (the downloadable artwork is a nice touch.) Rather than set up a duplicate system, why not sign up as an affiliate? BoombasticRadio is a pretty interesting example of what you can do -- check out www.boombasticradio.com. (Note: I'm not an employee of Emusic or Boombastic ((or even Apple)) -- but I do like them and use them often.)
Just how much is a "fuckload", specially?
--Slashdot: News for Turds. Stuff that Splatters.
High quality (-q 10, ~ 500kbs) ogg files only achieve about a 50-60% size reduction. high quality (256kbps) mp3s are only 15-20% in size.
Does anybody actually use -q 10 with oggenc? You're confusing the maximum data rate that a given encoder can output with the minimum data rate needed for total transparency to a "good" (+1 sigma) ear. For MP3, this typically comes in the 192-256 kbps range depending on the source material and the encoder. For Ogg Vorbis, it's probably a little bit lower; use -q 7 (nominal data rate 224 kbps) if you're worried.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I simply would NOT bank on people paying for MP3s. As someone suggested early on, you should build a fan COMMUNITY, and provide something that has a "scene" aesthetic. The subscription route is worth trying. Have some samples and freebies to get them motivated, then back it up with a "club" worth joining.
One thing that helps counteract media piracy is the tangible "value added" aspect of physical products sold in stores. Say you have a boxed SET, and the SET includes a physical CD, a poster, and some collectible object. (It can even be as simple as a keychain.) Diehard fans will want the REAL DEAL--the SET, because it's the whole thing (and not just the music) that's the EXPERIENCE. That's why you're seeing DVD sets in stores for example that include lobby cards, actual photo prints, and souvenir books, all together with the DVD.
If I were you, I would have lots of free enticing "scene" content, a few full sample MP3 files, some additional shorter clips, A SUBSCRIPTION PROGRAM (a "CLUB"...and you need to test pricing here...break it down and try it different ways), and that other magic element, MERCHANDISING. Shirts, autographed goods, etc., and of course CDs--suggest you add some unique item(s) of value to that as noted previously. Autographs, at least.
It's just a matter of time before any MP3 stuff you produce ends up on file sharing. So you want to make the PHYSICAL product more desirable as noted above, and you want to develop your COMMUNITY.
That's where the money is.
Forget selling just MP3s. Itunes is (and will have been) a novelty. They're getting the novice user and some others because of the novelty. That will wear off in time. Don't use them as a point of reference.
Point to remember: you're not just selling music, you're selling your SCENE. Remember that.
Wrong, Apple has provided a way to make sure my music stays my music. They have provided a way that allows me to listen to it in any format I want. In a sense, they DID sell me the rights to listen to that music.
:)
Microsoft in their Windows Media Format, sells a file. They don't sell the music. They make it intentionally hard to get at. Burn discs? Hell no. Heck, even the files expire after so long. I picked up a few exclusive Moby tracks last year in WM that I never got around to recording out to another machine (not too hard when I have optical lines connecting half a dozen machines in my machine room under my studio). Sadly, last time I went to listen to them, they had already expired and were unlistenable.
Most of the other services out there that one could buy music over the net involved a constant subscription...if you broke the subscription, the music you bought was gone. Hmmm...I didn't know I bought a limited listening of these files -- I tested some of these as an evaluation for a friends lable a few years ago as they were trying to court some genre based music in the indies realm. Needless to say, they didn't go for it (then again, they still sell a large amount of vinyl, so their audience REALLY wouldn't want something like that
I know the difference between a file, a service and music. I buy the music, I don't buy a service. I can deal with the music showing up in media that is easily converted to other formats...I can't deal with it being structurally tied to that format.
As for the Marxist comment, no one forces anyone to buy anything. THAT would be Marxist. Socialist would be that enough folks want something and thus the gov'ts collude to make a product worth $0.50 even though the absolute break even point is $0.99. Capitalist is saying there is a breakeven point, but the artist / management can make it what ever price and if they don't break even they fail...and if someone can't afford it, they don't get it. Theft is saying I can't afford it and I won't pay what others are asking for it, but I will obtain it anyways.
Maybe I'm an anachronism, but I simply refuse to pay for lossily compressed music. I want the real deal -- the best reproduction of the music that the artist can reasonably provide. Paying $1 for an MP3 feels like a ripoff, because I'm paying nearly full price for what amounts to a lame approximation of the source material.
To look at it another way, would you pay full price for a JPEG of a poster, just because you could download it on demand and look at it from any computer? I don't think so.
Also, like some other people around here, I tend to listen to music on an album-to-album basis rather than a song-to-song basis. I find artists that I like, check out a range of their work, and often wind up buying most of their catalogue if I like them. If an artist only puts out albums with 2 or 3 decent songs on them, I usually don't bother with them, because the artist in question obviously isn't very good.
So, I guess I'm not in your target market...
For me vari-bitrate is where its at. Its a decent compromise on most factors.
I agree, which is why I encode my CDs in VBR except for 96 kbps mono MP3 transcodes for my portable player.
I cant understand why more people dont use this.
One reason: many MP3 decoders in embedded devices such as many DVD players and portable players do not support VBR well. For instance, my Apex AD-1200 chokes on the first five seconds of a VBR MP3.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I think that everybody seems to have missed the boat, here. The issue is not selling the .mp3s, but selling the right to have, use and, interestingly enough, to distribute them to licensed recipients. Recording companies, while they have demonstrated competence at acquiring rights to these works, really haven't figured out the best way to package, format and distribute them.
.mp3, .ogg or whatever formatted subject matter using whatever software to whomever they want. If the user showed they had a license, then the distributor could just share it. If they didn't, the distributor could just sell it.
It is EASY to separate concerns here. Let us not have RIAA members build some kind of stupid monolithic DRM-based server that won't really solve the problem, but rather build a license-server that grants rights in exchange for money.
If we could do that, then everybody who is actually good at building systems and writing code could compete for the middle-market -- packaging and repackaging the process. They could distribute their
Basically, what we need is simply an apparatus for reducing the transaction costs of obtaining file-sharing licenses. One example of how this has been done is the Copyright Clearance Center, which provides a mechanism for obtaining rights to make copies of magazine articles. Indeed, a Second Circuit case found the EXISTENCE of CCC to make licensing of article copies cheap and easy, precludes a fair use defense by R&D researchers who made routine "research file copies" in many cases.
Imagine for example, a simple, on-line, service that gave you the right to obtain a copy of a particular phonorecord of a particular musical work, from whatever source, in whatever format. Presume (for the sake of the argument) that adequate measures could be and were taken to assure privacy and to prevent "re-playing" of the license token by unauthorized users.
And the market would determine all of the relevant factors, including prices for distribution services and to a lesser extent, even prices for licenses. Metallica could continue to license albums only, and their competition could continue to license individual songs -- whatever their hearts desire.
Look at this from the point of view of what we all want. We want music to be (i) readily available; (ii) conveniently acquired; (iii) high-quality; (iv) easy to use in whatever format; and (v) free. They want music to be: (i) purchased; (ii) in a controllable and measurable manner; and (iii) to control the means of distribution.
We aren't entitled to free music, and they aren't entitled to regulate technology. So why not recognize this and compromise. Let them sell licenses -- what they are good at, and then we can come.
There are exciting issues here galore: privacy, encryption, transferrability of licenses, scope and nature of licenses. But if RIAA would just deal with the reality of file-sharing, and instead of trying to stop the technology, try to figure out how to properly profit from it, they can turn this litigation fest into a profit center.
A file-sharing system could be implemented, for example, that would provide a measurable challenge for a license for a requested song -- and even permit a real-time-on-line purchase thereof! -- and now both parties are actually engaging in lawful conduct. Whether anybody takes a rake on that transaction will be determined by market forces impacted by ease of use, flexibility, marketing and network effects -- but the RIAA would get their license fee, and we would get our music.
RIAA could BENEFIT from this free distribution process, simply clipping coupons at their SOAP-based service center (or whatever), if only they had a moment's foresight.
Eight cents of that goes to the songwriter's publisher (who typically splits it 50-50 with the songwriter); copyright law dictates that this royalty per copy will increase in step with the Consumer Price Index. And don't tell me you claim to write your own original songs, because it's impossible.
Will I retire or break 10K?
One negative of doing business this way is that I already downloaded all the mp3s from the band you signed using Napster, without paying you a thing.
What I don't understand is why this guy isn't immediately comparing and contrasting with the *unarguable* most successful music distribution service... iTunes Music Store.
Unless this was submitted before the iTMS was unveiled?
GPL Deconstructed
I was just at the LightningCD Launch Party last weekend, they might be exactly what you want.
Their business model is to use the customer's CD Burners, and they have software to manage the download, burning, and printing of liner notes and such for music that is bought online. I think the client is only for Windows at this point.
Their big focus is to have artist-friendly contracts. They pay 50% or more of revenue to the artist, for every sale, on time.
I'm friends with the founder, so obviously biased, and this is clearly a (relevant) ad, but I do hope they succeed, and can vouch that the people behind this company are real and full of integrity.
And, where else can you buy CDs by John Tynes (author of RPGs Delta Green and Unknown Armies) and the indescribable Old Man Tasty and the Lords of the Future?
-- Kate
Would people buy MP3s offered for download in a convenient way? I think Apple's iTunes store clearly shows that they will.
That is unless you think consumers prefer AAC to MP3. Or prefer mild DRM to no DRM.
iTunes store customers are buying because they find the use of AAC with its DRM to be acceptable for the convenience and selection provided. Would they prefer simple, totally standard, totally unrestricted MP3s? Of course, who wouldn't?
The real question is: will someobody who find an album on the iTunes store at a reasonable price go check another site to see if it is available there in MP3 format at the same or a lower price?
Unless the alternate site has much lower prices, I doubt it. I am hoping for competition, but a compelling alternate has to have enough of a selection to make it worthwhile to browse there.If you use a DRM-free format then you will be dealing almost exclusively with indie artists. I periodically browse CDBaby, as do lots of other customers, so there is a market willing to check out a site that presents unknown music in a way that you have a good shot at finding a new artist that you will like.
Will consumers browse sample downloads without any clue as to what type of music is there? I doubt it.
On the flip side, when Apple opens the iTunes store to independent distributors you will have a tough time convincing the artists as to why they should use MP3 distribution. If you actually manage to compete on price with Apple, they'll be interested. But economies of scale are going to go a long way to giving the iTunes store (or any large-scale distributor) a major advantage.
Woah, there....
The album may be a construct, but for some forms of music, it has turned out to be a very important construct. It could just be the typical genres I listen to (progressive, progressive metal, symphonic metal, etc.), but I have found that, at least to me, albums unified by a story or central theme almost never have anything I would consider filler. Oh, I have some concept/theme albums where there may be a song or two I could do without, but because their lyrics reveal more to the theme or story, I still find myself unable to skip the song itself when listening to an album. And we're not talking about old albums here. A lot of the ones I have are from the 90's or the current century.
Now, I may be in a minority (in fact, I'm sure of it), but I like my music that way. The death of the album entirely would, for me, be very much the death of my current style of music. And I'm not looking forward to that at all.
Most people may want their single song buys, but please, remember us concept album fans once in a while. They still exist, really!
I'd like to buy a song, and get the track from the album and a live recording or two. Maybe even a different mix of the song.
Selling me a song, and giving me a couple of versions of it is something I personally would be very interested in.
Even better would be if another band does a cover of the song, and I get both. Advertising for another band! I don't listen to much radio, and usually find new bands from some cover they did (usually when starting out) of a band that I already like.
Bah!
$6 for download access to everything a particular band has ever created for 1 year. Make the band come up with all this stuff so you can advertise it.
When the next album comes out, raise the price a $1.50 for a year of access to everything. Eventually when your band eclipses Led Zepplin (many price increments), you should offer one price access to everything, and individual album download/purchases.
When we have a good album together my band is planning somthing like this.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
Use a P2P service for distribution! Take something like BitTorrent , possibly add some functionality so you can have multiple and/or queues downloads in one window, and just sell users the link to the torrent! If you're worried about people freeriding (though of course they'll be able to freeride later when the song gets on other networks, as it unfortunately will), then encrypt the files and sell the keys and a program to decrypt them!
OK, maybe that's not the greatest idea, but there's a lot of potential in P2P. Try to save yourself the bandwidth. As for format, a lossless codec (with this P2P would be an obvious step for the huge files) and high quality bitrates in a variety of formats (OGG, MP3, AAC, &c.) would be nice. Also, I love the idea of the CD labels and jewel case insert prints. I would certainly buy into that.
I can't tell you what it will cost to implement, but I'll tell you what I'd pay. If someone with a catalog like CDBaby's offered: $10/month - Tier 1 * an MP3 or OGG Vorbis stream (perhaps filtered by genre, but even as a simple shuffle of titles), and provided it without DJ's and commercials annoying me. * License to download and burn one or two of the songs that I heard and enjoyed on the stream. $15/month - Tier 2 * Stream plus one album of downloads per month $25/month - Tier 3 * Stream plus one physical CD per month. * Perhaps some additional downloads
90% of everything is crap. Also, crap is relative.
We've had the greatest success in enabling artists to sell music online.
Our system had the highest ever Billboard ranking for a digital single in Madonna's American Life. A feat we again duplicated for Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac.
We are the little guy.
The music must be good.
The music must be cheap ($.50 or lower per track, $6 or less for an album with 12 or more songs)
I must be able to hear the music before I buy it (30 second samples, low quality 32 mono pieces, whatever)
Here's something that might be interesting to you. Because you're selling indie music, you need to have a reccomendation bar for the tunes, so that the customers can enter in notes about the songs that you cant, like: "This band sounds like Rusted Root." or "We saw this band live, they rocked.'
In order to get people interested, you might also want to encourage bands to provide free samples.
-- Funksaw
"As you know, if you can sell music in a format such as MP3 you eliminate the costs of packaging, shipping, handling."
Yeah, and as we also know, the ability to distribute music on the Internet eliminates the need for anyone to make money doing it. Free distribution on the net gives musicians the exposure they would otherwise get from selling CDs, but without need to shackle themselves to the terms of recording contracts. Perpetuating the record-company business model is completely unnecessary.
Certainly it's nice if he deals directly with some musicians. That way they are sure to make some money. Maybe the labels this guy is dealing with are all "good" indie labels that don't tie musicians down to exclusive contracts or lay claim to song rights, and will actually give musicians some of the money from the mp3 sales. But that remains to be seen.
If pay-for-copy mp3 distribution succeeds then the big labels will eventually end up owning it, and we will be up to our asses in copy-protection schemes, locked-down hardware, court cases with ridiculous damage awards, etc, etc.
The pay-for-copy music business carries too much heavy baggage. Let it slip away into the void where it belongs.
a CD with normal songs, plus MP3s on the CD, Plus lyrics on the CD and artwork on the CD.
That, and I'd like an artists entire discography on one DVD/CD in mp3 format to make it fit. Even indie bands sometimes have more than one cd.
Another idea for you is to make a cd burning machine kiosk and put it up at local hangouts.
I'm sure everything else will be said by others. good luck.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Cost: A cd costs $10-15 and has 9-15 tracks.
The punter is not getting a physical object and that has a massive psychological effect. I'd say at most half the price per track of a CD song.
Quality: If you know you're downloading an MP3 you know that it's lossy. If you know it's a high quality VBR (i.e has high bitrate when necessary, and not when not), and you know you don't have golden ears, then you'll be a happy customer.
I'd buy if I got two versions of the music: the version I use when listening on an audiophile quality stereo, at home, when enjoying the music to its fullest; and secondly, I'd want a really gritty quality version that is low bandwidth and mostly representative of the music, with a short clip of audio at the end of each song giving the WWW for how to buy the original.
That way I could distribute to my friends low grade versions that prompts them to buy the originals, and I don't have to feel guilty about discovering a great band and wanting to share the joy of music to friends and family.
The high quality versions could be upwards of 10mb per song, the low quality should be less than a meg or so. Really dirty. If someone likes what they hear and are inspired, each song will tell them how to buy the good quality ones.
Just an idea. I know I'd be more likely to buy online if that were the case.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
Sometimes, there comes a time when technology eliminates something in our world. A few years ago it was common to cross the Atlantic on an Ocean Liner, The Airplane made Ocean Liners obsolete. It was common in the 1950's to take a train when traveling long distances, today most trains hauling people loose money on every passenger. A few years ago when getting gasoline for my car a young man would hop out and ask which grade of gas and start pumping, now I use my ATM and pump myself. I go into Home Depot, get a bucket of paint and a brush, walk up to "self checkout", use ATM and I'm gone. The Music "industry" is over! It's gone forever. It is not because of Napster, or Kazaa or Bearshare or Limewire, oh yea, don't forget good old FTP. . it is D I G I T A L! The fact that you can take analog (music, movie, Image) and convert it to DIGITAL makes it portable and FREE! The 12 biggest companies in America in 1900 were American Cotton Oil Company, American Steel, American Sugar Refining Company, Federal Steel, Continental Tobacco,General Electric, National Lead, Peoples Gas, Pacific Mail, Tennessee Coal & Iron, US Leather, US Rubber. Only one is left and they aren't doing anything close to what was generating their revenue in 1900 (GE was installing Lighting and Power systems in Cities). When you drill down to the heart of the matter it is the ability to convert someting from "analog" (old technology) to "DIGITAL" which turns every business model upside down. Any business that deals with or works in an Analog world is toast, digital will eventually catch up to them. OK, how do you sell MP3's. Use the King Gillette business model. Give away razor's to sell razor blades. It works everytime. Here is an example. Bruce Springsteen puts 10 high quality MP3's on a disk, along with other multimedia, images, videos etc. He also puts a unique number on the disk and gives them away, FREE!. Nike, Fender Guitar, Budweiser, PETA, and a dozen others put images, music, jingles and any other content they want on the DVD (forget about CD's, their finished, I just put 1000 MP3's on an Audio DVD and installed an Audio DVD player in my Car my Home DVD player already plays Audio DVD's). You market to all segments of the public. Low tech person puts DVD in player and gets automatically taken to multimedia presentation and menus, middle tech person can browse DVD and view whatever they want. High tech person re-encodes DVD, takes what they want, deletes what they want and skips past the "advertising." Users can go to Bruce Springsteen's web site and login, give info about themselves if they want and can enter the unique code from the DVD. They get a discount ticket to a concert, a free water bottle or whatever. When they go to the concert, they put their ticket in a reader and get more advertising and a discount coupon on an Apple IPod, or disks with more media etc. It just keeps going on and on, advertising, selling, cross marketing everything, but the bottom line is that the "song" is worth nothing! it is DIGITAL, it is gone as soon as you record it! Bruce Springsteen makes money by cross marketing and touring, selling concert tickets, t-shirts, whatever. Is this a multi billion dollar industry, maybe, Bruce probably won't go broke, but the big "Analog Industry Music, Movie Giants" are gone, just like the Titanic, a useless pile of analog junk on the bottom of the digital ocean.
Cheap: $1 for a song, maybe $2 for several mixes of the same song. Buy the whole album at once for 50 cents/song; $5-8 total. Offer to also ship a pressed CD with liner notes and lyrics for $3 more.
Convienence: Filesharing with MP3s is popular because you can burn a CD, transfer it between all of your MP3 playing devices, and listen to it as often as you like. Music isn't like a toilet (RIAA not withstanding). Two people should be able to use it at the same time. There should be no restrictions on my music listening when I pay for it.
High download speeds: Filesharing has a serious weakness that you are typically downloading at 1-5 KB/sec. Make sure your servers can sustain 100+ KB/sec. My time is worth money. I'll gladly pay money so I don't have to spend time rummaging through strangers' hard drives.
Previews: Offer either 64kbs streams/downloads for free to preview every song, or at least a minute of excerpts from the song so that you can get a good feel for the sound. The RIAA is already flooding Kazaa with preview files, but they upload slowly, aren't labeled clearly and are just as badly organized as the rest of the music (*sarcasm*).
I can download two minute trailers for upcoming movies. Music frequently just has art on the cover by someone other than the musician. Useful for porn, not useful for music.
Cross-reference music by popularity. Show other artists and songs that were also popular with people that liked the song I'm looking at. Clear Channel is killing music diversity in this country. I want to find and buy new music, not the crap that gets played on 4 different radio stations 10 times a day. I'd like to find artists from other countries. E-mail me when my favorite artist releases something new. Send me weekly links with music that is similar to other stuff I have bought before.
Add extras: Give free lyrics and pictures with the download. Especially with a full album. People like to be able to put a face to the artist.
Diverse selection: Indie labels are screwed in this regard. The RIAA labels should have set up their own pay-to-download site a few years ago. They should have at least set up listening stations in every store with more than 1000 CDs. Walmart has them, but they carry very few CDs, and you can only preview a limited selection. 250 gig hard drives are pretty inexpensive now. There is no excuse for not having a secure music server with 5000 albums in every Best Buy (and other major music retailer) in the nation.
Most importantly, remember that listening to music needs to be fun, easy and a good value. There are tons of entertainment forms. Music is just one of them.
Here's what I care about, roughly in descending order:
Usually, the first one by itself will make or break my purchasing decision. It is always a necessary condition, and sometimes a sufficient condition. The rest are increasingly less and less important, to the extent that I don't really care about the last three in any meaningful way.
Could someone elaborate on this one? Haven't heard of it...Do people walk in...hook their own iPods to a Mac in the store, and d/l stuff off it to put on their home boxes?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
1/5th of a metric shit-ton ;-)
". Or unlike the Linux Camp where its expected that you are be treated as a fucking sleeze if you don't give away the entirety of your work where others with better marketting skills are free to take what you've done and sell your work as if it were their own (its all about the service, BUT if you are an inept geek with no social skills, do you REALLY think you are going to know how to service your users -- or are you just good enough to write a damn good program that a million other geeks find useful)."
Wow, thank you for showing me just how inane some people can be. I use Linux, i have to honestly say I dont own any pirated material. I own UT2k3, NWN, NWN: Shadows of Undertide, Tribes 2. I actually *buy* my cds. Plus have you even read the GPL or any of Richard Stallmans essays. Guess not. No one can specifically sell your work without giving you anything. Yes distros sell tons of free(as in freedom) apps but those are packaged, what your buying is service, support, and setup tools and the like. If you tried to sell Gnome specifically you would *have* to acknowledge it by including a copy of the GPL and saying who the original coders were. And you could only make money off providing services with Gnome or for media of shipping, packaging, installer, etc., not selling Gnome itself as a licensed product. That is against the GPL, licenses. Like Microsofts 4-5 year mandatory license they put onto companies and countries. No one takes anyones work and sells it as their own. If they did they would be in breach of the GPL and liable. What companies like Red Hat do is charge for "distributing" free software. Its not selling it in the same sense.
75% of all statistics are made up!
You ask about formats turning me on or off towards buying- well, here ya go. Format should not have ANY effect on the desire to purchase, but it WILL have an effect on that 'after the sale' feeling, which will probably lead to more purchases (if you are lucky)
Why? Because if I see some format being offered as a proprietary DRM format, I'm not gonna buy it. If I see it at 128 kbps, I'm not going to buy it. If I see it at 320 kbps, or 100% VBR then I'm likely to consider it..... and if the sound quality is good on my stereo and it has all the appropriate tags embedded for volume leveling and lyrics.... I'll even like it.
To the note about subscriptions, I'll never do a subscription for the very reason that it's a royal pain in the ass to cancel.... burned once, forever shy.
Someone else already mentioned that CDs are too expensive, so be sure to offer your MP3s at a reasonable price point (50 cents/song seems reasonable).
The other issue is consumer rights. Once the consumer buys the MP3, they should be able to do whatever they want with it, unlimitedly, as long as it is for personal use. They should be able to make as many copies of it as they want, onto as many devices as they want, and convert it into any formats they want, as long as they are not giving copies away to people or reselling them.
Not saying I have any idea how to solve that issue, but that's clearly what consumers expect, and they won't readily settle for anything less.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
I'm the community outreach homey for BitPass, the micropayment company which was mentioned on /. a couple of weeks ago -- Scott McCloud is using it to sell online comics.
I also use BitPass to sell my album, Love Songs For Bastards. You can listen to a lofi (48kbps) preview of each song, and if you like it you can buy each MP3 for 50 cents or the entire seven song EP for $3.50 -- which also includes Flash-based liner notes that look kinda cool. You can check it out to see how it works here.
So far, it's selling pretty well, all things considered -- I've made more money in two weeks of selling it online than I would have if I'd signed to a label, because I'm keeping the majority of the revenue from each sale, and I don't have to split it with anybody. Most of the people who've bought the album seem pretty happy with the payment system. If I actually had the time to
In re: value added features...well, uh, I've got Flash based liner notes. I know, I know, maybe not the most exciting thing in the world. But future releases will include music videos both QuickTime-based and Flash-based (I love the idea of abstract videos), press reviews, etc. etc.
From now on, I'm not going to be releasing "albums" necessarily. When I finish recording a new song, I'll put it up on the site. If I have a bunch of songs which are somehow thematically or aurally connected, I'll release them all at once, which is sorta like releasing an album, except that you'll still be able to buy them separately.
I think this is the future of music distribution. Not just BitPass, which kicks ass, but self-release via the Net. Then again, I hate record labels.
Good luck!
I'd hate to tell you but literacy is not what he would be well on his way to. I believe what you're referring to is grammar.
See: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=literacy
See also: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=grammar
Thank you for playing and enjoy your stay at "you've been bitch-slapped" hotel.
Wow! You REALLY don't know how to read do you?
Yeah, that was a troll but not my original arguement.
I didn't say anything about Linux users being pirates. I said that about the Windows Users. The hardcore Linux users won't buy non-GPL'd works -- or at least will snear at them when they have to.
As for GPL -- no, you don't HAVE to give it away for nothing. BUT say you put it out and charge $20 to your first user that buys it and gets the source. They also have the rights to redistribute it any way they want.
The GPL has no authorship clause. This is one of the reasons I actually prefer the Creative Commons licensing because you can specify that in there. You may own the copyright to your code, but NOTHING in the GPL forces you to keep that in there (or anything else). I believe there is a version of the GPL up for debate that actually does this.
I have personally seen code taken by bigger companies and used with little credit to the original owner. Yeah -- you get get the Source and look it up, but these folks were MUCH better marketters and ended up making a good deal of money off of something they threw in a nice package and slick GUI. If you are talking writting a front end to something like a Firewall where it is a CLI based product, but you simply create a simple to use config maker that throws arguements at that product, there is NOTHING stopping you from not releasing the source to that application...which someone else could recreate from scratch, but if they wanted to be dicks about it...copyright could come into play. Heck, and thats straight forward GPL and not even talking about LGPL because the application technically doesn't interface with it other than telling it to start up (hence why one can make a closed front end for GCC as MANY others have done...I believe VisualC++ could use the GCC from the last time I used it...does that make M$'s product in violation of the GPL?).
We've seen it all the time on Slashdot...at least for the last 5 years I've been on this site. OpenSource developer gets pissed off someone used the GPL exactly how its intended to be used by Stallman and the programmer packs the cats and closes the doors and then the community cries sour grapes.
Anywho, I think you need to check out the GPL a little more before you bow before its teats. Its a good document and was designed with good intentions, but its not perfect by any means. And with as many folks that think its infallible, the religion keeps Linux out of the mainstream (for the most part).
Someone should mark this and the parent as off topic.
Dearest Fuckstick,
Please refer to the following entry from dictionary.com
"literacy ( P ) Pronunciation Key (ltr--s)
n.
The condition or quality of being literate, especially the ability to read and write."
I belive even you would be able to recognize that knowing how to capitalize falls under the ability to write.
Now run along and return to your studies. If you complete all the exercises from Chapter 2 of your remedial "Dick and Jane" primer before 2:30pm, you shall be rewarded with a stick of spearmint-flavored gum.
The only thing determined here is that people really don't want to pay for an MP3 album. I personally think that you're better off giving away a few sample MP3s and then selling a traditional CD.
But of course, to prevent piracy, when I go home and play my music on my system, he won't be able to listen to my music anymore unless he decided to buy some of it himself.
I question your business model. You think sticking a bunch of obscure bands on the Web is enough to get people to show up with credit cards in hand? What's your DEAD TREE publicity budget? What zine sites are you trying to get coverage for? Tried to get any dead tree music magazines to discuss your exciting new concept.
A product that isn't the equal of CD audio quality should not be sold at a comparable price. 256K or faster .MP3 or .OGG format is probably worth paying for.
Apple is managing to sell tracks despite merely being better for broadcast quality, but they've got enough leverage to get major labels to deal with them, they are big enough to call a press conference and get the press to show up.
Just what have you got?
The guy who said don't make a major financial committment to this project is right on. I'm not saying dump this, but... figure out what the hell you're selling and who to.
Tech Public Policy stuff
The problem with selling unknown music is that nobody wants to take the risk to pay for music they might not like. If I download a song and listen to it, I've spent several minutes and haven't gotten anything out of it. That's bad enough if I'm not paying anything for the experience.
What you'd ideally like is to give the music to everyone who stops by, and collect money from everyone who likes it. After all, you're probably not going to make a significant amount of money off of people who don't like the music (at least, not long-term), and people who do like the music should feel some obligation to pay for it.
One way to do this would be to require a PayPal account (or something of the sort) to get an account. With an account, you can download songs for free. Once you've downloaded a song, you're asked whether you liked it. You can have up to five songs you haven't rated yet, and then it won't give you more until you've rated those songs. Furthermore, you can't say you don't like more than a third of the songs you've downloaded. You're charged 99 cents for each song you say you like. Of course, if you've already rated a song, you can download it again without anything happening. The artists get to see what you said. You can also change your mind about a song later (you have to pay if you like it and haven't paid before, of course).
So practical upshot of this is: you get at least 33 cents for each song you send, except that each person can get 5 songs without paying. You get more than 33 cents/song if people tend to like your music, up to 99 cents/song. People who are actually fans will probably not refuse to pay, because the artists will know.
Of course, sending 5 songs to people who might never pay anything goes under marketting, much like radio.
Anyone up to starting a project on this?
Say, a new archive extension and some apps to muddle with em? How about a variable compression format? (hack gzip) Leaves MP3's uncompressed but compresses everything else?
Just need a standard format for listing the included documents and mp3's and such. Would be quite simple overall.
Heck, shouldn't be toooo hard to write a plugin for xmms and the like that would play the mp3's from within the archive (seeing as they're not compressed with the documents and all).
I can see paying 99 cents a tune for mp3 files, *providing* there are no strings-- I don't ever have to come back to the site again for any reason if I don't want to and it only costs me the 99 cents for the mp3 I wanted. There are going to be hundreds of sites with tunes that may not be available anywhere else (legally, anyway), I'm certainly not going to subscribe to them all, in fact, I won't subscribe to any, because I know I will get stuck having to pick from only their catalog. If you want to get me back to the site, you'll have to do it by providing mp3s that I want, not because you've got a "record club" mentality that's designed to lock in my dollars when quite possibly I'm only interested in a couple of your mp3s. If you don't want my onesy-twosy business, too bad, there's millions of me out there who could justify a single purchase or two but no way in hell would sign up for a "subscription." If you can afford to ignore that kind of business, more power to you, but you won't be getting any of my dollars.
I.e, at the beginning of a song, the DJ voiceover would state something like "Coming up, here's (song title) by (author) on the (labelname) label." Toward the end of the song, the song volume mutes a bit and the voiceover states "This was ... ". The voiceovers should be mixed with the opening and closing of the music so its not easily edited out, as well as saving time and bandwidth.
In short, when the customers queue up a bunch of these to listen to while they are working, the experience will be damn near identical to listening to the radio, except the customer called the play list. The artists can enjoy "Clear-Channel" style exposure for damn near free, while the consumer can free himself of "Clear-Channel" domination. The customer can choose what he wants to listen to, not be forced to conform to some corporate play list. The artists make it on their merit as artists, not on who they pay off to promote them. I think the present system is awful unfair to a lot of artists who have talent but not much money. Maybe the customer could even pull down a play list of suggested music for different tastes ( i.e. new age, trance, etc. ).
You know how music is. So subjective. What one likes, its blah to another.
The idea is that if someone likes something passing by, they are free to open the player window back up and flag it for replay, retrieve others by that artist, ones like it, or download/purchase the full clean track sans voiceovers.
Something has got to be done about ease of purchasing too from the payment standpoint.
I don't think there are that many of us out to do the labels in by cheating them, but I think there is a helluva lot of us out there who will do damn near anything necessary to sample the music before we commit to purchase, given the subjective nature of the product and the warlike animosity currently going on between the labels and their customers. Personally, I would *want* the DJ style voiceover because I may queue several hundred random songs I find, and have no interest in holding a display window open so I can monitor the current selection playing.. I am doing other work, and if I hear something I like, I would like to be told what it was. In addition, I feel the voice-over would "soil" the work sufficiently to encourage those that wanted the work for their serious collection to purchase it. After all, its in my best interest too that people support the artist. If not, the artist will cease to exist. No one wants that.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
The MP3 format is owned by Thompson/Fraunhofer. You would be unable to legally sell in this format without an agreement with them. The legal mess that is MP3 is the reason Ogg Vorbis was created. There may also be legal issues with the copyrighted album art.
Yes, and you can do the same thing from apples stores over there airport network!
The positioning seems to be off, they're all showing up on the left side, and not under their menuitem.
aside from the rhetoric surrounding media, the artwork, or the "tangible" portion of the product.
with the advent of mp3 recordings (by the way, i have given away ALL OF MY CDS - i am 100% digital now), the physical artwork is the only part i miss. instead of distributing TIFF or TGA files for the "cd-case", why not just send the online buyer a very well designed postcard or booklet that is NOT designed for a cd-case. some sort of pamphlet/graphic piece that can contain the lyrics (when applicable) or related photography, artwork, graphic design, etc.
to me, if i were to buy mp3s over the internet, receiving some sort of tangible product in the mail to augment the mp3 would enhance the purchasing experience substantially - espescially if it's LIMITED QUANTITY! this sort of thing would have intrinsic value and would make me feel much more connected to the artist.
my 2 cents. blah. (and wine).
My price points are as follows:
US $0.75 for a new release ( 3 months)
US $0.25 for a release over 6 months old...
I want to choose high bitrate, or lowbitrate. I understand that there are bandwidth charges, so if I decide to come back later and get the other version, I expect to pay - but get a 10% discount for my repeat business (on the same song, same version (sans bitrate)).
If the download aborts for WHATEVER reason, I want:
1) A complete credit
2) A chance to redownload the song
3) You to offer to burn it on a CD and send it to me at no additional charge.
I would like the ability to see the entire repotire of the band/musician available - by the track. No restrictions. Let me do what I want with it once I've paid for it (except for reselling it...).
If I choose to download an entire album, give me some sort of discount or some goodie to sweeten the pot.
Provide *Everything* they have. Unreleased tracks, recording sessions, concerts, studio tracks, "bootleg" stuff (vis a vis The Dead).
Offer CD covers/artwork at US $0.10 per side...
Forget the subscriptions, and "members only" bullshit. Let me put songs in my cart, download them, and enjoy them. In return, I'll come to you as my primary purveyor of music. And because it's so cheap, I'm likely to tell my friends to stop being cheap bastards and pay for their copies, rather than going "halfsies, or thirds" on a CD and copying it for everyone.
In short - you're fair to me, I'll return the favor...
Remember to encode the mp3s with "lame --preset extreme". Anything less will introduce loss or artifacts that are noticable on a halfway decent sound system. (i.e. s/pdif out to a receiver over $500 and speakers over $1k). Of course the customer won't notice if they don't have the original copy. Consider distributing a lossless format such as FLAC as well. Purists will insist on it.
If you must distribute constant 128kb/s mp3s, encode with "lame --preset cbr 128". 128kb/s mp3s from any other encoder sound bad. (Or any bitrate from most other encoders, really). With lame, the difference is only noticable in a deliberate comparison or with music the listener is very familiar with. (not counting classical and certain electronica).
Wouldn't it be odd if this guy was an RIAA or label drone?
One of the first music album I bought was Dire Straits "Brothers in Arms". It was a LP. Some years after, I bought the cassette and then the compact disc. I won't buy it online.
A quality music webshop should offer the right to use whatever sound format is appropriate at any moment in time and without added cost - except the cost of media.
If I buy a mp3 rather poorly encoded today, should I pay the same price for a better quality file one year later and again some years later for a new super audio format and so on.
This situation (change of media) is happening now with the DVDs. Lots of people are renewing their collection of movies at a high price.
The media companies are using this scheme for selling more by releasing "collector" DVDs, "re-sampled" CDs, etc. With digital music this would be easy for them to go further.
I won't buy 2 or 3 times the same music.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
(Pardon the all-caps up there, please - but that's a huge pet-peeve of mine!)
One of the biggest headaches I've gone through with my MP3 collection is editing incomplete (and often flat out incorrect) ID3 tags.
I have a Rio Empeg Car player - and it supports a number of nice features such as playing songs by they year they were recorded. When 90% of the people passing around MP3s don't bother to fill in the date - it makes that feature pretty worthless.
So yes, I'd be willing to pay money for good quality MP3s of music I really liked, assuming they contain all the proper info. (Album covers can be added as thumbnail graphics to the MP3 files themselves now too. Many players don't support the feature, but it doesn't seem to affect their ability to play the files properly.)
one thing you cant reproduce is the artwork on the actual CD, stickers just dont cut it =\
With many "indie labels" sales of 100,000 for a single record would a break-out hit. Labels on this scale would be lucky to have one of those a year, many will not have one this year (or next year). And yet thats what you'd need to get 5,000 online subscribers, figuring about a 5% conversion rate which is being overly generous.
Yes but its all about talent. 100,000 sales means you have talent although we arent talking 100,000, I was thinking more around 20,000. I know websites which have more than 20,000 visitors.
You seem to confuse total album sales with subscribers for your pet service over and over. You would do well to realize that many fans of a band will buy the record at a live concert or store, never go to the website, and wouldnt care less about what you're trying to sell there.
Thats because anyone who would pay for an Album would pay for a subsubription, or at least the majority. Whats the difference? Money is money, consumers who like you will spend money on you, Album sale or subscription, it doesnt matter, to the consumer they base their decision on the value they get per money they spend.
Lastly, if you are going to run around saying "if you can't sell 20,000 records your music must really suck bad" or whatever it is you said, you should really re-evaluate they way you judge and appreciayte art. One of my favorite CD's of last year "A rough mix..." by steinski sold only a few thousand as i understand it but it has been critically aclaimed and is without question both thoroughly enjoyable and pushing the genre.
Unlike you I actually make music. If you are talented, theres the internet, theres P2P, theres no reason why you shouldnt have people from Africa to Japan listening to your music. Because you have over a billion internet users as a market you are telling me you cant sell 20,000 subscriptions? if you cant its because YOU SUCK.
Just because you think something is critically aclaimed does not mean its good. Sure its art, I'll give it that, but people dont want to pay money for it because it sucks, and music that sucks wont get subscriptions just like they wont sell CDs, it doesnt matter the model, if you suck you dont sell.
Also if you are going to run around saying things like album sales == suck/not suck in a way that claims that a huge amount of indie artists must suck, I'd like to request that you play us some of your own music. Get my point... shut the fuck up about it.
Most indie artists DO suck, just be honest here.
The main reason indie artists who dont suck cant sell is because like you, they are too stupid to try new models, they are dumb and think people want to go to an obscure record store and buy their music before ever hearing any of their songs.
WRONG, you have to be good at marketing as well as making music, if you arent good at both you just plain suck. I dont hear any other businesses or industries acting like this, trying to get slack, if you dont market your stuff on P2P and spread it around the web, no ones going to buy it. IF you dont have a loyal base of fans, no ones going to buy your shit no matter HOW good it is, you could have the best record ever create but if no ones ever heard it, it sucks.
It sounds to me like you may have developed some OK musical taste lately and have gone to see a few unsigned bands but your head is still stuck thinking that music is mass market and that indie means only having one video on mtv2. A vast majority of the world's music is made on a relatively small scale.
I know alot about the music industry, more than you. Both my mother and father were musicians, I myself make music although I am not sure I can claim to be a musician because I havent made much money. All I can say is I know how it works from experience, so shut the hell up and go back to your programming job, thats what you do right?
In summary: Please stop posting 100 times trying to act like you know a lot about the
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Finally someone who knows a bit about the industry.
I agree with you exactly, thats what I was trying to tell these goofballs before they started talking to me like I dont know my shit.
I also notice theres absolutely no response from these goofs on your post.
The point I'm trying to make is, the industry is evolving, its not static, these people seem to think that selling CDs and getting airplay on the radio is the only way to make money, P2P has changed the game. You now make money by being popular on P2P and then touring the world via popularity, you can also draw hundreds of thousands of people to your website to listen to your music and if they like the samples they hear you might be able to convince them to subcribe.
I dont think people want to wait weeks for you to ship a CD, I dont think people will find your CD in a store so thats not even an option, yes people do sell CDs, but if you want to truely make money you should profit off your fans and popularity, and sell your CDs at your concert.
Of course, we have alot of programmers on this site who ignore anything musicians tell them, they are programmers and only respect "proofs" and numbers, as if you can actually prove a business model thats brand new. P2P only came about recently, musicians just now have the ability to have millions of fans without a record deal.
Most musicians wont have millions of fans, but if you have talent you CAN.
Liam Lynch is doing very well, and hes not with one of the big record companis. Hes signed to S-Curve. His songs are popular only because of the internet. http://www.s-curverecords.com/
People want to ignore the fact that your marketing ability is just as important as your music talent.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
excellent point.
this sort of thing is being done with stock photography, where different liscenses are automatically created and sold online. Doing this for music would be a boon to filmmakers/tv producers etc.
here's the senario;
- a band I like has 30 second samples on their site, and is selling the album online
- I purchase the album so now I have all the tracks on my HD. There's one song I think a friend would love
- for 25 cents I can purchase a token, which can be emailed to my friend
- friend uses token to download full track, just as if he had purchased it.
- friend purchases 2 more tracks which triggers a refund/credit to my account for the token
while it looks like a track has been given away, the 2 additional sales would not have been made if it hadn't. If I simply emailed the mp3 to my friend, I'd be in copyright violation, and there would be less publicity for the site
Downloading will go for most people....but if you're like me, changing linux distros and hard drives from day to day :P, you want your music on a physical medium, weather its vinyl, CD, or 8 track tape...okay maybe I would prefer MP3's to 8 track.
MP3s and OGGs can be real handy because they're easy to transfer and carry (in a player), but nothing beats owning it in a physical medium.
Whats your idea genius? Whats your business model? You seem to be so much more knowledgeable, have some guts and speak.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Phish tried to let people redownload shows. They found people were using the site as a virtual hard drive, and downloading shows repeatedly. Bandwidth was through the roof, so they cut it down to a 48 hour window. Though if you emailed the webmaster and explained your hard drive took a crap, they'd probably let you redownload the show(s).
Kenneth H. Rosen's Discrete Mathematics and its applications is also the text used at Concordia University in Montreal. I would say that the book does lack explanation, but the sulutions manual really complements the book. Every odd problem is worked step by step, main concepts as well as strategies are explained in detail, more than enough to make the average CS student happy, and its only 50$ canadian...
Use the free P2P distribution systems and abandon the RIAA.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
So.. after reading through about half of the drivvle posted so far, I decided most of you have absolutely no clue about the Record Industry, how it works, or what the actual profit margin with the "99c" method really is.
;)
So, as someone who actually has not only researched it for the fun of it, but for the salvation of ones business:
1) The 99c model is inherently flawed. A large part of because how the 99c is distributed.
2) Read Billboard Magazines (www.billboard.com) latest issue, there's a great article on the price distribution of the 99c and what's actually going on. Most of my findings are reflected there. Note: The article I'm referencing appears to only be available via the Paying Member section or the actual physical article. Second Note: If you're serious about the Music Industry, you should already be reading this anyway.
3) I'd lay money down that by next February a bunch of the businesses trying to outbid Apple and get into the fray will be out of business -- and definitely so within 2 years. I'd also lay down money that Apple will have raised its price by over 10c -- the nearest price that makes any form of sense is $1.49/track.
4) In order for ANYONE to make a worthwhile profit off of the 99c model they would have to sell approximately 200 MILLION SONGS per WEEK. That means nearly 2/3rds of all Americans would have to purchase 1 song per week (current population of the US: http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/popclock) Believe me, that's a LOT. So you're saying 100,000 people are buying 5 songs/week (500,000 songs/week). If we go with that estimate, that's still 40 Million people or nearly 1/8th of the US population. That's a lot of people once you take off those w/ actual purchasing power and then those that desire music/etc...
5) The theft model of music appreciation will not entirely replace the industry -- if it did, there would be almost no new music (keep that in mind) -- except the truly dedicated. You can kiss goodbye to Ashanti/Snoop/KD Lang/Bjork/Art of Noise/Britney Spears/etc. There's a certain level where the theft model will balance out and will maintain a certain number of people fluxuating in/out at a steady rate. Sure it'll go up/down but that's the nature of it. We aren't seeing anything new here, it's just much more obvious because of the ease of the theft.
6) Good luck
M/
Include an .m3u file.
Have you been DaMa9eD today?
SwiftCD does CD on demand. Just upload the artwork, and send them a copy of your audio CD or CD-R. They handle fulfillment including the merchant credit card side, just link your site to their order page. If you want to see how this works in practice, check the URL in the sig. The store section including band merchandise is totally outsourced.
No charge up front, but the tradeoff for using them is that for something with the look/feel of a commercial CD, you're going to have to charge what major labels do to even make a few bucks per CD.
A high price, but I think a fair one given what you don't have to do to sell CDs. The tradeoff is one-off custom production and paying for them to collect the money, make the CD, package it, and send it as opposed to doing it yourself and paying for and storing a CD inventory.
An alternative if you either had your CDs pressed at a commercial vendor or are capable of making high-quality CD-Rs including packaging is to look into CDbaby, that means you can offer CDs at much lower prices, but the tradeoff is the obvious one, you have to make the CDs yourself.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Not withstanding DCMA legal language, I'm excited about this. Many a time I've listened to a streaming music radio station and wish I could have bought the song on the spot. If I manage to catch the name I now go to iTunes and buy it.
I'm wondering what DRM scheme you will use to keep people from buying and then turning around and sticking it up on a P2P platform?
Sell uncompressed audio and I'd buy it. I have no interest in MP3 as I can't play it in my CD player car or home, or DVD player and I'm not going to change them just for that purpose. My home audio system is orders of magnitude better than the speakers on the computers, so I won't play MP3s there either.
But very often I've wished I could just buy a song I liked without the entire album. I can burn it onto a CD myself (CD single) or get enough of them and make my own album. Don't need liner notes, artwork, etc. We have 500+ CDs and no longer store them in the jewel case as it takes up too much room.
grammar Pronunciation Key (grmr)
n.
1. The system of inflections, syntax, and word formation of a language.
2. The system of rules implicit in a language, viewed as a mechanism for generating all sentences possible in that language.
This definition is much more specific than that of "the ability to read and write". As writing does not require the ability to correctly form a sentence within the boundaries of a specific set of rules-aside from the forming of letters-grammar is the correct word. As capitalizing the first letter of a sentence is part of the rules for generating all sentences in the English language (and may not be necessary in other languages - even though they still have the ability to write) it is a grammer issue, not a literacy issue.
Thank you for playing, and please refrain from the practice of name-calling when attempting to win an arguement.
>sure a loyal fanbase of mac users will pay, they pay for anything made by Apple.
Why do you think THAT is?
Brain Damage? Ignorance? Stupidity? Or maybe they offer a good product? Maybe they think of the consumer as something other than their enemy that needs to be ensnared & manipulated? Perhaps they actually try to please the consumer, offer them something convenient & effective.
I'm getting kind of sick of mac bashing. Think about what you are saying.
p2p has been the easiest way to get music up to now. I've tried it, and itunes is far easier and worth the money. No, I'm not rich. But it's still worth 2/3 the price of a cd to download what I want & know I'm supporting the artist and be guaranteed of the product I get.
I can also think of 20 ways they can offer a better product with slight modifications to the current model. Sucks to be you if your OS never gives you this kind of service.
Don't come crying to me.
They "invest" tens of million of dollars in very weak boy- and girl-bands which largely appeal to young children who have no money to spend on music, and the feeble-minded of poor musical taste.
Is there any wonder that people would rather no pay for this superficial, disposable music?
If I had children and they wanted to listen to this sort of stuff, I wouldn't buy the CD, because I know that in 2-3 months time, it would be gone and forgotton : outgrown. I'd let them download the .mp3 or .ogg off the Internet.
I like my music at 44.1kHz, 16-bit stereo on a robust plastic disk, with no lossy compression. I buy quality music that I'll still be listening to in 10 and 20 years time.
Stick Men
MP3 is nice for portable devices or a mega jukebox, but if I buy music I want quality. Sell me the album as an APE file with cuesheet which I burn to my own CD or convert to MP3, ogg, or AAC for portable devices. Of course offer just the lossy compressed formats for people with low bandwidth, but I have the bandwidth so give me something lossless if I want it.
There have been a lot of comments about what format to offer the music in. I'd recommend making the tracks available at reasonably good quality bitrate MP3's (or OGG) and FLAC - nothing else. Why? The majority of your audience that doesn't really care about the technical aspects of encoding quality will be satisfied with whatever bitrate MP3 you give them. The rest of your users (like me) will have very specific opinions on how the music should be encoded, from format to bitrate even specific encoder options. You're never going to have enough formats and options to keep all these people happy! Just offer a decent quality version and absolutely lossless FLAC and let the "audiophiles" decide for themselves how they want it encoded. Everyone will be happier this way :-)
Uh, SIR, I'm sure you can realize, if you try, that the overly-technical definition that you've brought into the discussion is irrelevant. Grammar is more specific than literacy, sure, and in fact may be considered a subordinate aspect of literacy, which does nothing to detract from my original contention that capitalizing the first letter of a sentence is part of "reading and writing", and therefore falls under the definition of literacy. Is it part of grammar too? Sure. IRRELEVANT.
I'm sure we can keep this a mature debate among adults, Mr. Poopypants.
There's no doubt that bits online for media could very well be the future of distribution.
I don't think anyone has put together a working model at this point.
You are on the right track from the tone of your query.
After all the financial stuff has been taken care of the succes or failure is going to hinge on the customer experiance.
I hate subscriptions, I don't mean dislike, or annoyment, I mean hate. Like many other folks I am often required to pay subscriptions for things I only use occasionally.
The folks selling subscription services love it initally, as they can predict a minimum revenue stream that will exceed costs, but in time they find it as much of a problem as it is a solution, because it's hard to increase sales when your typical customer is unlikely to be using what they are paying for.
My prefered method, as a customer is a minimal annual membership fee to help keep the lights on, but not so high as to destroy the incentive for sales.
Just a cover fee if you will.
Then say 2 free drinks as a thank you for the cover fee.
I don't mean 2 free drinks like in a bar, since the cover is annual and customer incentive disappears with the next mornings light.
More like the way Radio Shack used to provide batteries every month.
The cost of the battery card did not come close to covering the real value of the batteries, but it was incentive to get Dad and the kids into the store for another sale.
It worked!
Then some bean counter got in and figured that money could be made directly from those batteries (that you could buy anywhere) and they should charge for them, and blew the sales incentive for the customer to come in once a month.
A discount for the whole package (MP3, EP, LP whatever you want to call it), is fine but I think the advantage of ondemand online electronic delivery is the ability to provide individual selections, something that really hasn't existed at brickandmorter since the death of the 45.
Well, not to rag on a fellow white-trash honkey, but you've got that backwards. :b
/20X0/2, but books will always teach you more about proper english. Still, 6074 |_0\/3 /. f0/2 0853/2\/1|\| 73h 3\/3l|_|710|\| 0f |_4|\|u463!!!!!11
;D
"You're" is actually a contraction of 'you' and 'are,' while "your" IS the english second-person posessive adverb.
I'll give you a tip: computers do
Now tell me where I screwed up my school-boy L337 5P34K.