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Comparing Online Music Offerings
hype7 writes "The Wall Street Journal has just posted a comparison of the three main legal music download services: Apple's iTunes Music Store, MusicMatch and Napster v2. The review covers the pros and cons of each of the services, and concludes with: "I'm sure all three services will evolve and get better, and others will enter the fray. But, for now, iTunes is the best choice on Windows.""
To my mind this is by far the superior service. I get to listen to anything I want as often as I want for ten bucks a month ('cept for the Beatles, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Elton John's Blue Moves.)
The only downside appearas to be that I can't take the music on the go, unless I pay 70(?) cents to burn a track, but since I'm a shut-in who's always sitting in front of his computer anyways, what's the diff?
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Yet this discussion completely sidesteps one of the aspects of Napster (1) and the like -- that they were international. From almost anywhere in the world (assuming internet access) you could get music, that was itself from all over the world.
It's open or nothing. If you want the roughly $1k per year that I spend on music, then they way to get it is to sell me standard CDs, FLAC files, wav files, aiff files, or very high bitrate Vorbis files.
This little piece of the market has spoken. Don't complain about lost revenue, if you're not selling.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
None of them are as good as just buying the damn(hopefully non-copy protected) CD's and ripping them yourself. (Hopefully with the good, sweet, cleanness of Ogg Vorbis). Fuck DRM
Yeah because I love having to buy a whole CD when I just want one song for $12! I don't know about you but I'd prefer to spend that money on 12 individual songs that I actually want and burn those songs to a CD then buy 12 separate CD.
Except you just paid $17 for 1 or 2 good tracks, a couple that are so-so and nine that are garbage.
Just so you all know I'm not an Apple hater, I own a 30GB iPod and I love it. I also use iTunes for Windows and I've already bought a couple of albums. I agree with the article that iTunes is the best jukebox and music store for Windows, but isn't this the same author that gives every single Apple product a favorable review? It would be nice to see reviews from an unbiased source.
I like Apple products quite a bit and I'll probably buy a 15" G4 PowerBook in the next couple of weeks, but something that really bothers me about the Apple culture and the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field is that it seems like the Apple zealots love any product that Apple releases, regardless of how good or bad it is. Steve Jobs could shit in his hand and sell it as the iShit for $999 and Mac fanatics would be lining up around the block to buy it.
Appreciation of a good or well thought out product is one thing. Blind zealotry is quite another and I see entirely too much of that in the Apple world.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
"but is it *yours to copy* once bought? ...
Both the Supreme Court and the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 say 'yes'"
Depends on what you mean by "yours to copy". You can copy music to another device to listen to it (e.g. RIP a CD to listen to on your PC or MP3 player). You can't (legally) make copies for friends (or strangers, come to think of it). When you buy a book, you have the right to use it any way you like; burn it, sell it, etc. But you don't have the right to make new copies of the book. The trick is that with digital media, "copying" went from being a difficult, expensive thing (set up your own printing press) to an easy, cheap thing (RIP and burn a CD, email a file, etc.). So in 1970 if you told someone "you bought that LP and you can do what you like with it" nobody would have thought that you could set up a record plant and publish copies of the record. But with a CD and a PC on the internet, you can effectively do just that. The hard part is figuring out what to do about it.
"by the AHRA we pay for those copying rights whenever we buy blank audio CDs"
In the US, no. In Canada, apparently so (for personal use only).
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Don't hate the playa, hate the game.
You must look at this from a realistic perspective.
1. The major record labels - meaning the people who control the content - will never release their "property" without DRM. If Apple wants to provide music online, it must do so at the whim of the content "owners". Hence, DRM. Otherwise iTMS is Napster v1, and we all know how that turned out.
As a matter of opinion, I find 'Fairplay' or whatever it is Apple calls its DRM method to be quite fair, to me. I can play all my music on my computers (laptop, desktop, work desktop) and devices (rev1 iPod), burn CDs, and so forth. I've been using iTMS since its inception, and have no complaints.
2. Apple has to balance their costs and resources, and the resources of their paying customers. Sure we all want uber-high-bitrate encodings. Remember that Apple has to push out all that data, and ensure the highest-possible success rate. I also assume they pay for their bandwidth, like everyone else. Moreover, many of their customers are probably still on dialup. In order to work, the experience has to be as close to instant as technologically possible. Like all things in technology, it's a balance. Until your uber-bitrate song fits in under a meg, it went with what it had that fit its requirements and needs.
Again, as a matter of opinion: P2P blows, people lie, allow bad rips, disconnect halfway through (mom's coming! quick, disconnect!), whatever.
3. The notion that one day this will all go away is a very fair criticism. So do the smart thing: burn to audio CD. You aren't prohibited (provided you don't try to turn that shiny G5 into a duplication studio). And getting around the DRM by re-encoding isn't all that hard (google it). iTunes enforces no DRM on user-ripped material, as WMP did at one point (could be turned off, IIRC). DRM applies only to content it re-sells.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Hmm, do out the math a bit:
Apple reported under the mac only service roughly 500,000 song downloads per week (according to a Cnet article from when the iTMS was released for windws)
Assume an average download size of 2MB per song you get 1,000,000 MB per week or roughly 1000 GB of bandwidth per week. Would you care to guess how much 1,000 GB of bandwidth/week costs?
Then keep in mind that you still need to pay the Artists, and the producers, and the record lables (as much as we hate them, they still get paid). Somehow, $1 a song does't quite seem like a rip off does it?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
"What do you do in in the year 2030 when nobody makes players for your multi-gigabyte collection of AAC files?"
Hmm - 27 years in the future. All the 45s I had from 27 years ago, I could play them if I still had them, and if I still had a record player, oh and if I still listened to the same music.
What was your point again?
Right now most new releases at Best Buy are $9.99. Most if not all of these CD's have at least 10 songs on them. So for .99 (or less) a song I get a full CD with a jewel case and album art work etc. & I can rip it to my hard drive or MP3 or Ogg or IPod.
.99 for a song that has worse sound quality, will only play where they tell it to, comes with no liner notes or art and can not be converted to use on most of the audio devices I have?
.50
So why would I pay
Let me know when I can download the CD Audio file for
http://www.kubuntu.org/