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New Online Music Service For Australia
arb writes "Destra Music is the first online music retailer to open its doors in Australia. Currently their catalogue offers over 100,000 tracks priced from 99c (Australian) and they hope to have half a million tracks available by mid next year. Purchasers will be able to burn the songs to CD and copy them to portable devices. The tracks are available for purchase through online partners, such as JB Hi-Fi and Sanity Online. In what is believed to be a first for online music retailers, vouchers will be available in stores so you will not need a credit card to purchase online." Sounds like competition for Bigpond Music's download service, and also dealing with DRM'd .wma files.
I just visited the site and every track I saw cost $1.99. Presumably there is at least one song on the site that costs 99c, so they can say 'from 99c'.
There is a chink in their armor, the forced windows useage and new generations of file shargin under development.
Newer file sharing protocols will be fully encrypted (making traffic mnitoring illegal at best),
Be de-centralized to the point of being pure p2(No big intorduction server to take out, or central company to go after),
Use dynamic ports and protocols that disguise their packets,
Use spoofing, so that noone knows who is getting what file exept the sender and the reciver, and the reciever dosn't know where its coming from, and vice versa,
Spoofing is in a round fassion, with multiple hops, and multiple agents seting up different hops, so the packet round trip is HARD to follow (I know, bandwith is precious, but if you distribute the send across multiple agent chains, this ain't so bad),
And Searching won't reveal who has the file (more spoofing) keeping share-ers annonymous.
This is the basis for something that I'm planing right now, long way off, but these are the keys to the next gen P2P network. Once in the wild, there is no way to take it down. =)
I hope such a system sees the light of day.
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
I would prefer a subscription service where you only pay a monthly fee for unlimitted access to content.
Most people think you can only have a streaming service for subscription systems which is not correct. You can still download DRM enabled tracks since sites could revoke the license if you didnt pay your monthly fee.
This would be much better than paying per download. Companies only have one value to justify, that of the music base as a whole, instead of trying to establish value at each individual trak sale.
I don't believe the business model of the future is selling tracks online although the licenses will be sold (ie for commercial broadcast or public playback such as in clubs) for artists that decide to charge for commercial use.
Most music will be free for most people and the artists will make money through sponsorship, merchdising and concerts.
Beings aspergers AND pulling chicks... I enjoy the challenge!
Where's the added value? At least they could offer you a "buy 5 get 1 free" deal, or maybe unreleased tracks.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
1 USD = 1.35 AUD
1 GBP = 2.35 AUD (1 GBP = 1.75 USD)
1 EUR = 1.65 AUD (1 EUR = 1.23 USD)
(Currency values taken from http://www.x-rates.com/.)
So those 0.99 AUD downloads are equivalent to getting 0.73 USD downloads from the US iTunes music store. Not bad at all.
The 0.99 xxx artificial price point is good news for Aussies, but I can't help but think Brits (and, to a lesser extent, continental Europeans) are going to get shafted when similar stores appear for us - 0.99 GBP is 1.62 USD (and 0.99 EUR = 1.22 USD).
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Am I the only one who has issues with paying for approximations? If I'm going to burn it to a cd, there's no reason it should be lossily compressed just so I can decompress it and have a lower quality recording than if I had bought the cd. If all of these services offering lossy music catch on, the uncompressed cd you can buy in the store now may become a distant memory. You would think that the RIAA would love this just as the MPAA liked MPEG2 for dvd.
Folks, the whole point of digitizing music is to prevent errors from creeping in!
lemme see,
* butt ugly interface
* three pages of dance/electronic music with a grand total of 27 albums to choose from!
* WMA only
* no support for MacOS or Linux
* no indie music
And why would I be interested again?
Rather than just stocking the stuff you can buy in any mall why don't online music retailers specialise in stuff that is hard to find? Eg set up international music store per genre eg a psytrance store that sells globally. I can't walk into a record store and buy this stuff cause no one in Sydney stocks it so I either have to steal it off soulseek or order physical CD's from overseas retailers and wait. I would think it would be much easier to obtain international distribution rights from more obscure independant labels as well.
1) WMA only, which means no iTunes compatability, and no iPod which I desperately want.
2) $2 AUD a pop, screw that, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to expensive.
3) No mention of bit-rate used and source. (yes I read the "info" section and was unable to find it)
4) The web page looks shit, which does not bode well for the future!
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
So this "new service" works out to be about the same cost as a NEW CD, only
This is a "service" in the same sense as what stud horses do to mares when they're in season.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
When will you guys quit beating this dead horse? The RIAA isn't going ANYWHERE. If anything they've gotten much stronger in the last 5 years. Personally (and I'm sure I'm joined by many people here in this regard) I had never even heard of the RIAA before they sued Napster. I'm also sick of hearing the "time to find a new business model" people. If you were a shopkeeper and people started breaking in and stealing your stuff every day, wouldn't you want to have the criminals punished who are taking your stuff without paying? Why should you have to find a new business model when your current one is current valid... sell stuff people want in exchange for money. Obviously people WANT music or they wouldn't be downloading it for free... they're just too cheap to pay for it. That's what it comes down to in the end. You know it and I know it.
Yes, to start with, I'm an aussie, so this is kinda cool for me, being that it's local. Not cheaper, I point out (US$.99 is still less than AU$1.99, I couldn't find *any* songs for $0.99) but coolier.
So, I downloaded the demo one, and it came up with all the WMA DRM crap. I bit the bullet and installed all the DRM stuff that WPM9 wants to throw in, and played it. Woo. two weeks of listening to this demo thing. Lets see how hard it is to remove the DRM.
Hard. Very hard.
Freeme just doesn't work - it's getting a totally bogus content key, roughly 85 bytes long, as opposed to the usual 7. This is the first time that I've *used* freeme, being that I try to avoid non-open stuff, but it seems to be borked. I've compiled from source to ensure it wasn't a compiler error (Well, it still could be, ms vc6) and read the Technical of freeme, but it doesn't seem to work.
Could someone possibly clue me up on what's going on?
--snippy--
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\MyProjects\freewma\Debug>freewma -v c:\daniel.wma
Found DRMv1 header object.
Found DRMv1 header object.
Found DRMv2 header object.
Found KID (eO34+zbpuEm1e08JBtl1Ug==)
Starting to look for license.
License file full path: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\DRM\drmv2.lic
BlackBox library to use: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\DRM\IndivBox.key
Keystore to use: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\DRM\v2ksndv.bla
Created BlackBox instance - extracting key pairs
Public key 1 x: 309b232d07c8760d393524e4ce4f21eecc6c3a10
Public key 1 y: 08d86239f8d892cd54ffedee368387c1869d2a1d
Private key 1: a7e9d6e62fc3921e8fd22a58fbeff849e678baef
Checking license with PUBKEY 309b232d07c8760d393524e4ce4f21eecc6c3a10
Matched public key! Proceeding...
Bytelen is 20
Bytelen is 20
x.d[0] is 85
Decrypted content key is too big! - I would usually die here.
Content key: e1 11 e2 e5 82 d7 58 b2 9a f8 63 8d 90 32 ff a8 6f 35 83 fe 96 89 9
7 9c ef 18 fc 7a f7 18 4b b5 bf 58 92 0d 12 bb 24 00 00 00 00 94 fc 12 00 0d 4c
40 00 28 25 43 00 28 68 88 00 30 69 88 00 a0 fd 12 00 a0 fc 12 00 00 f0 fd 7f cc
cc cc cc cc cc cc cc cc cc
Opened output file
Starting to process data packets
644 packets of length 5976
|The 'Lameness' filter decided that a row of hashes here is bad| 100%
--snippy--
Note how the content key ends in a whole pile of cc's? I've got a sneaking suspicion that MS have updated something to break freeme, but, it a subtle way. The found public key and calculated public key are the same, which makes me think the private key is correct, but..?
Hopefully someone with more crypto knowledge than I may be able to offer some assistance.
Schlock Mercenary.
"DRM is not only taking away our freedom, it flawed by design as well."
Not to be trollish, but the ugly fact is that when one says "DRM takes away my freedom," it means "DRM takes away my freedom to violate somebody else's rights." "Rights" being the "R" in "DRM."
Unfortunately, today's laws say that only the rightsholders of a book, piece of software, or a piece of music have the right to say how it can be distributed. If a record company or an artist will only release their wares in a rights-managed format to protect their investment, that is, until the laws are changed, their prerogative.
Can DRM be inconvenient? Hell yes. But if it comes down to the creator's right to control how their work is distributed, vs. your "freedom" to ignore those rights, the law will usually fall on the side of the creator.
Anyway, what would change the music industry's stance on DRM is the success of a legal download service that offers DRM-less content. Launching such a service would require a huge leap of faith from the rightsholders, and it would also require that a significant portion of the subscribers to such a service follow the honor system and redistribute said content illegally. Unfortunately, the record industry has plenty of evidence (the widespread piracy on the P2P networks, for example) that the honor system does not often work well on the Internet.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
"But it does take away MY freedom of fair use."
Exactly. As I said, it's an issue of their right vs. your freedom, and when both go up against the law, their right will typically win. This is my point. I am aware that it causes inconvenience. And, there are plenty of analogs to this: for example, the right to own property can impede your freedom to go anywhere you like.
Just because copying media for your own personal use (to use on your portable player or in your car, for instance) is legal, if the rightsholder doesn't want you to do this, it's their prerogative.
The good news is that the free market economy tends to take care of folks who put too many restrictions on their copyrighted works. I and many others refuse to buy CDs with copy protection, because they won't even work in one of my car's CD players. Music download services that have easy-to-live-with DRM (such as Apple's) will do better than services that do not.
Ultimately, DRM is a compromise that allows the widespread legal distribution of content. iTMS, Napster, and the rest would likely not exist if they hadn't been able to give a reasonable assurance to the rightsholders that their content would be protected to a certain degree. Sure, we can complain about DRM being inconvenient, but it sure beats the alternative.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Very good points indeed. Just as it took several years for the recording industry to get the whole CD thing right (good remastering, decent pricing), online music distribution is in that "getting it right" phase. DRM and file format standards still need some tweaking, and I still think there's some room to move in pricing models.
This is exactly why I'm not taking the "sky is falling" approach and shrieking about the imminent death of the recording industry. They survived the CD transition and they'll survive this one. It just takes time.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.