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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'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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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).
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
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....
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.
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
"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.
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?
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
(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.
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.
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 - $1.00 per song that I keep. This is obviously the more complicated system, but I think it's just about ideal.
(2) A website where I can sample songs (maybe a part at low bitrate) and get intelligent recommendations. Then I just buy what I want. I would prefer to not have a monthly cost, since sometimes I tire of a service and I don't like to have to go through a cancellation. But, I would be willing to pay up-front (like 5 or 10 songs) and then choose the ones I want later (I know that saves on transaction costs for the merchant).
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
There's one big problem in buying music from the net: reselling. After I get bored with my cd, I just sell it away. With mp3s, I'm not able to do that. Printable covers make this problem even worse: I probably shouldn't be able to sell a self-burned cd? There will be tons more of illegal cds in second hand. Don't get me wrong: I don't work for RIAA, but there's real problems in distributing music in electronic format.
in short. It should be a simple, open format (even ogg if you like ;), should be about 1$/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
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.
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.
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
...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...
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
Can't stress this one enough... I'm sick of sites that say I have to be running Windows (I'm on a Powerbook G4/OS X Jaguar... At least there's Virtual PC for those sites.) As for the whole MP3 thing.. Good luck.. AC
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.