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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.
I've purchased 134 songs so far from itunes. Every time I have purchased songs from them the download has been fast(i am on a DSL) and the quality is amazing..Selection is great but i wish they more stuff from the 80's.
Now with books and personal playlists and gift certs, they have made it even better...
the best part is that the artists get their share...whether you agree its a fair share is a different matter since apple did not write the contracts between the record companies and the artists...
I will tell you this though... whatever they are getting from itunes is way more then they are getting from Kazaa downloads...
If you rip with AAC in iTunes it attaches no DRM to it at all. Also AAC > OGG.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Here's the deal with the burns. You can only burn the same playlist 10 times. So say you download 20 tracks from the music store. You can only burn those 20 in that exact same order 10 times, but if you switch the 1st and 2nd song you get 10 more burns and so on and so forth. I've also heard you can just delete the playlist and create a new one, but I'm not sure if that works or not. Anyhow heres how Steve Jobs puts it. Unlimited burning of individual tracks, 10 burns per playlist.
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.
You should try the Riaa Radar
It shows you which labels are not affiliated with the RIAA, and thus are 'safe'
The path I walk alone is endlessly long.
30 minutes by bike, 15 by bus.
I don't know about anyone else, but personally, I'm not using one of these things until they stop putting restrictions on the file usage.
You know, when Steve Jobs announced that "Hell froze over" when iTunes for Windows was announced, he was just kidding.
Are you suggesting that it even takes Microsoft a few tries to break something too?
When they're trying to do it on purpose. They then need a patch to make their bug work, because it's too buggy.
Both the Supreme Court and the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 say 'yes'. And, in fact, by the AHRA we pay for those copying rights whenever we buy blank audio CDs.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
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
has there been any converter program written? like aac2mp3 or wmf2mp3 that will move through the encryption?
also i would be curious to know what security each of these 'stores' have in place, seeing how you are using their app to go over the network.. would be interesting to see if any concerns arose from shortcuts to meet promo deadlines..
--even a broken watch is correct twice a day.
"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).
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Give me a break. The RIAA does not speak for the entire music industry, and there are plenty of great independant labels and pseudo labels (such as CD Baby) that whole-heartedly disagree with the RIAA on many levels. Even before the RIAA was suing its customers it was fucking over the artists, many of whom have become basically indentured servants to the 'big 5.' Personally, I haven't bought major label music in years, just because I think that in general it isn't innovative. Here's who I *do* buy from:
Beta-lactam Ring
Elevator Bath
IDEA
Wholly Other
And last but not least, the best independant distributor of anything ever... Forced Exposure
Maybe partying will help...
No it's not. You only say that because it's cheaper than the massively inflated price of most retail CDs. And even that's changing - Universal's new pricing virtually destroys any cost benefit to downloading, outside of the price of gas to drive to Best Buy.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
I won't pay a penny for it until it supports Ogg Vorbis.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
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/
The fact is, once you buy music over iTunes, it *IS*, indeed YOURS. You are dismissing far too quickly the fact that you can burn it onto a CD and play it onto an unrestricted amount of devices. Many other "unlimited" services out there have DRM built-in stuff you download from them, but you can only play your music as long as you pay the monthly fee to listen to it. Apple lets you actually OWN it. And yes you can play your music on as many computers as you want, just not an infinite number of computers simultaneously. It does make perfect sense. Nobody controlls your iTMS-purchased music. It merely attempts to duplicate in a digital format hoops you would normally have to jump thru in the past to copy music you owned onto another medium, without the loss of quality. The only people this DRM model hurts are people who want to freely distribute their commercial (not freeware, not shareware) music to people who didn't pay for it.
Unrestricted digital music formats simply cannot live as "for sale music". Such formats will always either apply to free, shareware (a-la Magnatune), or pirated music. THAT is the issue. Now, don't blame Apple for being the first company to bring the world (well, the U.S. in practicallity) the first and only online store to offer a business model that mostly sastisfies all parties involved, in a very friendly, convenient interface. If music is to legally be sold in a digital format, that digital format NEEDS to have some sort of digital rights management. I challenge you to prove otherwise. If you want to blame somebody, then blame your favorite artists for going to big record labels in the first place, versus recording music on their own and making their music available for free on the internet as mp3's. Blaming Apple is non-sensical. Apple has managed to curb the record labels' hegemony and make it play nice with the consumers. Not only that, but Apple's online store ALSO allows independent, smaller record labels (such as CDBABY) to play with the big guys, and Apple has even dedicated an entire portion of their online music store to surface indie music and raise awareness to it.
Now if you stop and think about it, this is HUGE for indie music: It works this way: Big record labels promote their own music big time via the big AOL and PEPSI hooplah, and tell everyone to go buy music from the online music store. You suddenly get hoardes of average joe-blow consumers looking at the iTMS and wondering ... OoOOoo, what's that "indie music" thingamadoodle? Gee lemma check it out.
I like the principle behind Magnatune, i think it is valiant and worthy effort which definitely shows what the Internet is all about. But face it, artists that want to make it big-time (and i do mean BIG) NEED record labels. why? because it's a whole package: Record labels get your music PROMOTED. Until your music is promoted, it ain't worth shit. It's sad, it's infuriating, but it's true. Because right now people spend more time in front of the TV, listening to the radio, going to the movies, walking and driving the streets while passing hundreds of billboards, all of this courtesy of ClearChannel, than surfing the web for cool, original, worthy artists that are different from what the mass media shoves at our face.
There is a market for indie music, but the largest market still remains popular music owned by record labels. Apple will allow the first one to grow, and enable consumers to get what they want from the second one.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Artists don't get a penny, not a single one, from everything sold at BMG. They negotiate flat fees with the lables directly for the use of their catalog, and thats the extent of it.
A user downloading 10 gig of music over WinMX, finding two CDs they like and going out and buying those on a whim gets more money to the artists than buying $1000 worth of CDs from BMG.