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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?"
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
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
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!
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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.
"This is so not the way to go."
:-)
Don't listen to this guy!! Or rather, do listen to him, and others as well
What I mean to say is that the market for music is rather diverse, and you will probably end up catering to a subset. Yes, some people like physical CDs. If you can manage to let such people select tracks, burn the CD for them, stick in a nicely printed sleeve and ship the physical thing to him for $15, you could capture this part of the market.
But... there are plenty of people (like me) who do not care one bit for the physical product. I have lots of CD's, which I only play in my car stereo that I plan to replace with an MP3 or MiniDisc player anyway. I buy the CD, then rip the songs off it. I play my music from the computer at home. In the car or on the walkman I like to compose my own albums rather than play the prepackaged ones, so I use custom-burned CDs or MiniDiscs.
My point: do a proper market study to find out who your customers actually are, and what they want. I seriously doubt that you will find one "way to go" or that "this is so not the way to go.".
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Check out Emusic. They are still doing things mostly right.
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.
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
Which end of you did that number get pulled from? I'd like to know before I touch it. Can you provide examples of several non-RIAA bands that have managed to set up fan sites that have 20,000 subscribers at $12 a year? Note "several", because "any good musician". If it's that easy, let's see the examples.
Every band starts unsigned, and many end up hitting it big before being signed and have rather large fanbases (in the tens of thousands) before signing with a major label.
Examples:
Both have since signed record contracts worth in the millions of dollars...but only because they spent years touring out of a van (or an suv with a guitar and a road manager) and playing concerts for $5 in cafes and bars getting their name out the old fashioned way
You see, many good musicians/bands have to get popular via their own means, grow a fanbase, provide a website that informs new fans about tour dates, provides an email list/group, and offers songs to download. Only then do these bands/artists get offers to sign record contracts...its not the other way around unless you are a cookie cutter manufactured pop band created to provide 2-3 years of sales and nothing more.
My Sig is Sauer.
My $.02...
As a "retired" professional musician I can say that band sites work as marketing tools, and that's about it. Set up some audio streams, list tour dates, show bios, etc... All of that works great. Selling tunes on the site has been a large waste of time. Selling CD's online isn't easy either. Mainstream bands have the world of oversized record labels behind them, and their sites are a more trusted venue to send your credit card info to. The majority of bands out there, however, are middle tier and even though have labels, aren't getting radio play on ClearChannel. They're selling music one show at a time. The shows are where the bulk of CD/merchandise are sold. Websites probably generate 20% of revenue, at best.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
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
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.)
I completely agree. Just having a Napster-like service where you have to pay a fee per-song will probably not work. I like having all of my songs on a hard drive so I can listen to them while I work, make long playlists, etc. However, I would never pay on a per-song basis because there is no percieved value in one .mp3 file to me.
.ogg format too.
On the other hand, if you had a subscription service where somebody could download whatever they wanted for a small monthly or yearly fee (less that $10.00 per month), and include the other improvements mentioned in the parent post, then you might have something that people would be willing to pay for.
I think a setup like garageband would be a great way to start.
One way to get me to pay would be to offer the files in
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.