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MTV Getting into Music Download Business
Pranjal writes "According to this article at Economic Times, MTV is getting into the music download business. MTV chief Tom Freston announced on Monday, the service would debut within the first half of next year. Looks like the online music download business is heating up."
Witness the fad of the 2000's - online music services.
You know which one will survive? The one the RIAA sets up for themselves.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I learned two things:
- MTV's music download service will "compete with iTunes and everyone else"
AND
- "MTV will also be competing with a relaunched Napster and recently launched BuyMusic.com"
Wait, make that three things: there's no way to get back the five minutes I spent reading that article.
1. Have mp3s to download not wma rubbish
2. Be cheap
3. Let people in the UK use it please!
4. Have a mix
5. Dont just market it at helpless teeny boppers
6. Please, pretty please
Electronic transmission of text has been easilly available for several decades now, yet people still buy stacks of paper with words printed on them.
As long as owning an album one a removable storage media means actually owning that copy, people like me will pay for it when the music is good enough to be worth buying.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
How long before all the music is gone and replace with divx formatted recordings of psudo-reality show?
There's a major difference between music and text, however - people greatly prefer reading newspapers or books because of portability, legibility, etc. By comparison, there is little or no difference between listening to a music CD and music stored in some other medium like a HD or Flash card. Once they resolve the licensing issues this will become a no-brainer. It sounds like iTunes is making good progress on that front...
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Yes and no.
The difference in quality between an MP3/WMA/OGG/whatever and an uncompressed format like CD-Audio is noticable instantly to people with sensitive ears.
Without a huge increase in bandwidth in the near future, people are still going to want some kind of physical medium to listen to uncompressed, deliciously tasty audio rather than compressed, semi-delicious audio.
evil adrian
Wait...did you just ask for MTV to NOT pander to helpless teeny boppers? Dude, that's their market!
Am I missing something? I haven't seen any indication they would offer MP3's. Let me know where you got the info. I've been looking for MP3's. I can't play WMA9 DRM stuff in my car MP3 player. My car also can't play any streaming format.
If they are offering a useful format, please reply to this post!
The truth shall set you free!
Here's why: the iPod.
The iPod has serious street cred (and market share) amongst MTV-watching teens. For MTV to make their service acceptable to the record companies, it will have to have ham-handed, crippling DRM. For MTV to make their service successful, they'll have to make it work with the iPod, arguably the most popular/cool MP3 player amongst their viewers (I mean, OMG, 50 Cent had one in his video!!!)
Without both sides of that above equation in place, the service will be a failure right out of the gate. And with the iTMS now available for Windows, it's not in Apple's interest to assist a third-party music service by making the iPod work with it. People will have a more seamless experience with their iPods if they just stick with the iTMS, and Apple will make a few more bucks out of it that way.
So, the MTV online music service is analogous to a racehorse that drops dead while being walked to the starting gate.
~Philly
Truly sitting around the artist collective in our double breasted suits drinking cognac has been destroyed by these perpetrators.
But you do bring up an interesting point: folks here seem to equate freedom of musical choice with a better preception and appreciation of music. I remember reading an article on the illegal cd market in Mexico and although it seemed that Mexicans were buying more music the problem was that they were becoming even more fixed in their tastes.
It's one of those "if you never hear anything new how do you know you'll like it?" things. I think that is the greatest shame about MTV and all this P2P stuff. People can get that one big single from that one novelty (to them anyway) band and completely ignore the rest of their body of work or any tangentally important work.
All this new technology and it seems that everyone's view of the world is getting smaller.
What is music when you despise all sound?
With all these services cropping up, I'm beginning to wonder about the limits of the interoperability (and longevity) of the formats used for the files I buy (rent?).
I can go out to any CD store, and I can bring my CD home and listen to it in any CD player from any company. This will remain true long after CD is supplanted by the Next Big Thing (TM). It's not difficult to find a record player, although they're not as omnipresent as they once were. It takes a little more work, but I can find someone to sell me an 8-track player or a reel-to-reel, too. Worst case, I can build one with the right components and little know-how (that I don't happen to have).
When I buy a song from Itunes, its in a proprietary format I can only read with apple's products. That's fine for now (they're great products), but what am I going to do 10 years down the line if Apple gets out of the music business. The selection is a little more flexible on the WMA-based music side, as Microsoft is licensing the format and its DRM to anyone and everyone, but ultimately, you can run into a lesser version of the same problem.
I don't want to have to install 10 different proprietary music players and buy 10 different portable devices just to shop from 10 different online stores. And I don't want my purchases to become useless just because a company goes out of business or drops its music player/sales line - or because I switch operating systems or even upgrade to a new OS revision that isn't supported.
For now, I'll stick with ripping my own CDs to unprotected MP3s (sorry OGG, I have a nomad). I'll reconsider once (if) everyone settles on a defacto standard for a format that's not too restrictive to but useful.
Anyways, just look how the napster craze hit music... not books, or music, or anything else. Even if we can't agree on an explanation for that, music is obviously in a uniquely vulnerable position.
I'm not sure why the RIAA and Labels are being so anal with some companies and not with others.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
This all strikes me as dot-com redux: Let's sell stuff, and figure out later how we're going to make money from it.
I can see why Apple is in the music download business, even given the terms that pretty much limit profitability to the labels. For them, music downloads are sort of a loss leader/tailer to extremely profitable iPod sales. Other music download companies, unless they own the music they're selling and thus can keep the royalties, are going to have a very hard time making any money on this.
Let's say they are able to squeeze maximum efficiency out of the business, and somehow are able to attain marginal profits of about 10 cents a song (US). If they manage to sell 100 million songs a year, that comes out to a measly $10 million profit. That's not nothing, but what's the investment required to get here, and what're the ongoing costs to maintain that level of sales?
The numbers I've seen bandied about in the press don't look so promising.
The problem is downloads are essentially a commodity product. Yes, they could compete on quality and levels of DRM, but that's up to the labels, not the download companies. For Apple, downloads help sales of their non-commodity product, the iPod. For AOL, downloads will drive sales of their service. For Microsoft, they will drive sales of WMA licenses.
That's why I predict that only Apple, AOL, and possibly Microsoft are going to be long term players in the market, and that's because they don't need music downloads to be profitable, but to drive sales of their other products. The others will stay niche players or eventually get swallowed up, perhaps Roxio-Napster by Samsung, and MusicMatch by Dell.
And even though MTV, unlike those two, doesn't actually need to make money on downloads, I don't see what they gain that they can't get by just partnering with one of the other services, like AOL is doing with Apple.
This is not going to go well, as its been noted MTV doesnt play videos anymore except for TRL and late night. What is more disturbing is what they have done with MTV2. During the day, it seems to be competing with BET for the rap and R&B market. To hear anything else, its always late at night and at weird times. Any show that plays anything slightly out of the American mainstream, like 120 minutes or AMP has to be shown at a time people like me are either asleep or watching a live concert somewhere. Now they want to sell me music online? Nope, sorry, your brand name stands for the same sort of Clear Channel homogenization that I can't stand. I'll stick with iTunes.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
I think that "stealing" mp3's was ultimately a situation that needed to change. But, it loosened up the whole industry and got people listening to all kinds of music that they wouldn't have otherwise. Music became interesting again because it seemed to be back in the peoples hands and out of Casey Cassim and Dick Clarks hands. It got people interested in music again. It was culturally a great thing. Suddenly every DVD and CD player was wired for MP3's. This happened well before there was a "legal" way of getting MP3's. Besides making your own which just seemed stupid if you already have the CD. I think the future of music is going to suck. Slowly but surely all the new channels of distribution are going to be controlled by money hungry execs. Its already the case. Within a few years the RIAA will have an online music store too.
My karma is getting better everyday.
Yeah, right. This will fail, big time. First of all, the M in MTV hasn't stood for music in over a decade. They have shows featuring complete idiots doing mindless crap (Jackass, any Real World or Road Rules), celebrity-obsessed losers, and hardly ever shows a full music video without having some crazed Teenie Bopper screaming about how much she loves the artist (TRL).
No, the M in MTV stands for Moron. Why? Because only complete morons tune in to it anymore. MTV hasn't been worth anything since the day they decided that Rap and R&B were more important that the genre that made it the cable giant it is: Rock. And when they do talk about Rock, they usually only mention these dime-a-dozen Pop Punk bands.
MTV Sucks. All should either look into the new Napster or just deal with iTunes. I wouldn't trust MTV's judgment of "good music" any further than I can throw Carson Daley...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
MTV didn't get to where it got by playing music, they got to where they are by playing MUSIC VIDEOS
I don't understand what MTV has to do with music. Now if they were selling crappy reality tv shows online then I would understand.
Outdoor storage sheds and pet kennels
I'm not gonna argue with you that RealOne Player is shitware, i'll wholy agree with you there. Its not that bad though, you can turn off most of the real annoying stuff within the program and its easy enough to change the Evntsvc and RNdal bits from *.exe to *.old without affecting the player.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."