Posted by
Hemos
on from the striking-deals-abroad dept.
nfras writes "News Ltd is carrying a story about how Australia's largest (and government owned) telco has done a deal with Warner Music to sell music online. It will use Windows Media format and will be similar in pricing to US sites."
Waltzing Matilda
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Funny
The bad news, they are only offering versions of "Waltzing Matilda", Mad Max theme songs, and "Beds are Burning" by the Midnight Oils. "Men at Work" are still holding out on the contract.
[...] with the cost added to users' internet service bill [...]
There's a lesson to be learned here: large ISPs offering their "own" services can handle micropayments easily. And it's a lot safer than using credit cards.
AOL was doing that in 1994. Same with Prodigy etc.
-- I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Very Good
by
cubicledrone
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
These are all good announcements because it means there will be more competition, lower prices and higher quality. The music will get better too as more bands start distributing electronically.
Oh, and Apple has now sold TEN million songs from iTunes.
-- Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Tracks will be available in the Microsoft-developed.wma format. The levels of copyright protection afforded by the service were "at a level where we are very comfortable with it," he said.
I just can't understand the insistance of so many online music retailers to go with WMA instead of a more popular and widespread format like MP3. It can't be because of a fear of pirating -- this isn't going to help keep new (downloadable) music from Kazaa and the like because there are still too many simple ways to circumvent it, starting with looping your analog output back into your line input, and all it takes is a few people to realize this before the music gets out "into the wild".
In the meantime, it's just one more annoyance for their paying customers. Old mp3 players tend not to support WMA, and there's also the distastefulness of your music being tied to a Microsoft proprietary format, which have a tendency to have backward-compatibility issues (ever try migrating Office documents between versions?) and to be changed without much customer input. Given these issues, I don't think their security would suffer much by going with mp3, and it would be a good selling point for their legit customers. All in all, I see this as an annoying trend towards a business model where companies continue to try to impose their controls on things you've already paid for, rather than just letting you have full use of your purchases after you've forked over your cash.
-- The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away...
"It can't be because of a fear of pirating -- this isn't going to help keep new (downloadable) music from Kazaa and the like because there are still too many simple ways to circumvent it, starting with looping your analog output back into your line input"
Yes, but it's still an extra hassle. If a user has to go through all that trouble just to share their music on Kazaa, they're less likely to bother. At the very least, the music isn't going to get auto-shared when the user first installs Kazaa and gives it permission to scan their system for mp3s.
Also, P2P works the best when lots of people have identical copies of a given file. By forcing people to reencode the song to make it shareable, they're reducing the efficiency of getting the song via Kazaa.
I do wish people would stop opening these sites and saying that only people from one particular country are allowed to use them. What happened to the Internet being an International resource?
When you have to comply with the laws of every country and state you do business in, you tend to keep things simpler by limiting your market.
-- I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
"Similar in pricing to..."
by
91degrees
·
· Score: 2, Funny
We get that in Europe too. It means "More expensive than..."
Yes, you've heard this before
by
orthogonal
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Not to beat a dead horse, but the proprietary windows format doesn't play on my portable MP3 player. And it ties me to Windows in a way I don't want to be tied. (Speaking of dead horses, Slashdot's been moving about as fast as one for the last week.)
But this you probably haven't heard before, from the linked article:
Telstra says BigPond Music will become Australia's largest music download site. Single tracks and albums will be available for download in early December, and will not count towards broadband download caps.
Yes, it probably will become Australia's largest (legal) download site, because Telestra BigPond will be both music vendor and ISP. In a triumph of vertical integration, users will continue to have download limits for Telestra's competitors, but will be able to "avoid" extra charges (which I'm sure will be built into the price of the music) for Telestra's own music site.
Now I know that download limits, and extra charges to go beyond those limits are pretty much unavoidable in Oz, but it strikes me as anti-competitve to lift those lmits for the ISPs favored affiliates.
And I worry that if this is succesful in Oz, we'll begin to see it elsewhere: high speed big pipes, for example, connecting AOL's users to Time Warner's offerings, and -- what an unfortunate coincidence! -- crappy connections outside the AOL-Time Warner group of companies. Or, no download limits between, perhsps, Verizon and eBay, but don't expect the same quality of connection, to, oh, Slashdot.
Of course, this will all be put over as "special benefits to our customers", providing "expeditetd access to the most requested web sites", but it's a short step from "special relationship" to the ISP turning its customers into another commodity to be rented -- "we have 10 million eyes with 5 million credit cards" to the highest bidding affiliate.
They Already Had A Legal One
by
perimorph
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
They already had legal ways to get music online.
One of them is called "Independent musicians who want you to download their music from websites".
And another is called P2P networks, which the recording industry didn't manage to get shut down, and despite all the noise they make, still haven't managed to show as being illegal in a court of law.
Re:Price?
by
David+Gerard
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That's $2 Australian, which is about $1 US, i.e. it's about the same price.
What this ignores is that the cost of living is much lower in Australia, so AUD$1 in Australia feels like USD$1 in the US.
The Internet may be an International Resource, but copyright varies wildly from country to country, and the copyrights and distribution rights for music, in particular, tend to be owned by completely different entities depending on which country you're in.
It'll be interesting to see what kind of restrictions are on the files.
Australian copyright law is fairly draconian compared to the US, and doesn't allow "backup" copies of music, videos etc, only some software.
If they provide an iTunes-esque scheme that allows the tracks to be burned to CD and played across multiple computers, consumers will actually have more legal rights with their downloaded tracks than they do with real CDs.
Slashdot Mirror
The bad news, they are only offering versions of "Waltzing Matilda", Mad Max theme songs, and "Beds are Burning" by the Midnight Oils. "Men at Work" are still holding out on the contract.
[...] with the cost added to users' internet service bill [...]
There's a lesson to be learned here: large ISPs offering their "own" services can handle micropayments easily. And it's a lot safer than using credit cards.
These are all good announcements because it means there will be more competition, lower prices and higher quality. The music will get better too as more bands start distributing electronically.
Oh, and Apple has now sold TEN million songs from iTunes.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
No thanks, I'll pass. WMA format and all.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
In the meantime, it's just one more annoyance for their paying customers. Old mp3 players tend not to support WMA, and there's also the distastefulness of your music being tied to a Microsoft proprietary format, which have a tendency to have backward-compatibility issues (ever try migrating Office documents between versions?) and to be changed without much customer input. Given these issues, I don't think their security would suffer much by going with mp3, and it would be a good selling point for their legit customers. All in all, I see this as an annoying trend towards a business model where companies continue to try to impose their controls on things you've already paid for, rather than just letting you have full use of your purchases after you've forked over your cash.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
I do wish people would stop opening these sites and saying that only people from one particular country are allowed to use them. What happened to the Internet being an International resource?
Follow me
We get that in Europe too. It means "More expensive than..."
But this you probably haven't heard before, from the linked article:
Yes, it probably will become Australia's largest (legal) download site, because Telestra BigPond will be both music vendor and ISP. In a triumph of vertical integration, users will continue to have download limits for Telestra's competitors, but will be able to "avoid" extra charges (which I'm sure will be built into the price of the music) for Telestra's own music site.
Now I know that download limits, and extra charges to go beyond those limits are pretty much unavoidable in Oz, but it strikes me as anti-competitve to lift those lmits for the ISPs favored affiliates.
And I worry that if this is succesful in Oz, we'll begin to see it elsewhere: high speed big pipes, for example, connecting AOL's users to Time Warner's offerings, and -- what an unfortunate coincidence! -- crappy connections outside the AOL-Time Warner group of companies. Or, no download limits between, perhsps, Verizon and eBay, but don't expect the same quality of connection, to, oh, Slashdot.
Of course, this will all be put over as "special benefits to our customers", providing "expeditetd access to the most requested web sites", but it's a short step from "special relationship" to the ISP turning its customers into another commodity to be rented -- "we have 10 million eyes with 5 million credit cards" to the highest bidding affiliate.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
They already had legal ways to get music online.
One of them is called "Independent musicians who want you to download their music from websites".
And another is called P2P networks, which the recording industry didn't manage to get shut down, and despite all the noise they make, still haven't managed to show as being illegal in a court of law.
What this ignores is that the cost of living is much lower in Australia, so AUD$1 in Australia feels like USD$1 in the US.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
They're not selling, they're renting. See Microsoft's example of Subscription Models for why.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The Internet may be an International Resource, but copyright varies wildly from country to country, and the copyrights and distribution rights for music, in particular, tend to be owned by completely different entities depending on which country you're in.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
It'll be interesting to see what kind of restrictions are on the files.
Australian copyright law is fairly draconian compared to the US, and doesn't allow "backup" copies of music, videos etc, only some software.
If they provide an iTunes-esque scheme that allows the tracks to be burned to CD and played across multiple computers, consumers will actually have more legal rights with their downloaded tracks than they do with real CDs.