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.

Comments

Yes but what if we don't run Windows....

[miknight]

...or want files in .wma format?

Re:Yes but what if we don't run Windows....

[hype7]

...or want files in .wma format?

then do what everyone else does when offered WMA files.

Just say no.

The first to take on Apple was BuyMusic.com in July. It expected 1 million daily song downloads. "We're not achieving that at all," says BuyMusic CEO Scott Blum. "I've spoken with my competitors, and we're nowhere near (Apple's) numbers."

-- james

RIAA still does not get it.

[argonaut]

Yet another nail in the RIAA coffin. When will the RIAA and other organizations realize their outmoded distribution methods and crazed sue little girls and old women tactics will not save their business? How many times must we say this and flex this opinion where it hurts them most, in the wallet?

Re:RIAA still does not get it.

[Green Monkey]

Huh? This service, and others similar ones such as Napster 2.0 and iTunes, are legal services that put money in the hands of the record companies whenever you purchase a track. So I'm not sure why this would be considered a "nail in the RIAA coffin" - the companies that comprise the RIAA are making a pretty penny off Destra Music, iTunes, et al.! People buying music from online vendors certainly isn't going to put the RIAA out of business...

Don't believe the advertising

[femto]

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'.

Re:Don't believe the advertising

[CrystalChronicles]

yup, not to mention the bonus content on some singles like videosclips, screen savers etc. It almost seems like RIAA/ARIA wants this to fail just so they can say 'look we offered a music service and nobody bought. we're going to have to sue more p2p software and lock the cd format up even further'

Re:Don't believe the advertising

[eclectro]

For those that are curious, at today's exchange rate; .99 Australian dollar = .74 USD

and

1.99 Australian = 1.48 USD

Good idea, but....

[bckrispi]

I've always had issues with setting a fixed rate per track. A full movie soundtrack may have 30 tracks on one disk, many of which are brief ( 1 minute) segues. In this case, it would cost you twice what it would do purchase the full disk through retail. OTOH, you could grab some progressive rock concept album that has five 15 minute tracks for five bucks. Albiet, a great deal for the consumer, but perhaps not so for the artist.

Re:Good idea, but....

[zem_11]

Why not offer a whole album option? Say $10-12??

Not a "mix it yourself" selection of songs but the same as you'd get buying a CD. That way both the many * short-tracks and few*long-tracks are covered. That way both the artists and consumer is happy... what you mean the label doesn't make much on the deal? Damn!

In either way its a start for us Aussies ... in a few months other services will be coming on line. Til then I think I'll sit back a bit and watch the catalogues grow and hopefully the prices drop.

BTW, I even saw a couple of free promo tracks, so its not ALL $1.99. Then again City Rules by Daniel Merriweather isn't my thing :^(

Re:Good idea, but....

[lpret]

However, here in the US, we're starting to see new CDs under 10 dollars. I just picked up a Coldplay CD for 9 bucks (US of course). I find I only buy CDs now for the liner notes -- sometimes there are some good bits that are thrown in them.

All that to say, if you're going to offer an album for download, you'll have to do better than 10-12 dollars. Maybe 6-8?

The fundamental flaw...

[doublebackslash]

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.

Re:The fundamental flaw...

[rock_climbing_guy]

OK, how about this:

I'd just like to point out the fact that using encryption and spoofing addresses and ports are methods for hiding your actions and keeping secrets. Remember how Janet Reno said that they needed to crack down on encryption because it made it "difficult for us [law enforcement] to do out jobs?" Remember the Clinton administration's "Clipper" chip initiative to have the government keep copies of all our encryption keys so that they could snoop on whoever they please?

These methods of hiding what we're doing will not bode any better with the RIAA than they did with Janet Reno's Department of Justice. Face it: the guys and gals over at the RIAA believe that they are entitled to collect money from us for music. They will hate this. I imagine that their push for draconian laws against techniques such as encryption would make their push for the DMCA look like a cakewalk by comparison. However, I hope that as they did in the past derailing the "Clippr" initiative, people will be able to see how this organization wants to restrict our freedoms. I believe that there are far more people who would be concerned if they wanted to outlaw encryption than are concerned about the DMCA.

Will these services be the end of lossless music?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Oxymoron?

[blowdart]

Well there's limited by IP address (unreliable) or checking the address of the payment card.

A better question is why is music on-line limited to one area? The answer to that lies in the painful way rights are issued to record labels. For example, Capitol in the US own the rights to Beatles recordings, EMI own them in Europe. Setting aside that Capitol really is EMI, Capitol cannot grant the rights to sell "Let it Be" to a company based in Europe, only EMI Europe can.

It gets even more complicated when you start looking at the copyright on lyrics, which may belong to someone else altogether.

Re:sample music

[shione]

ah crap

I renamed the file to wma when it finished downloading and when I right clicked it it said:

Protected Content
Can't play on this computer
Copy to CD not allowed
Copy to portable player not allowed
Copy to an SDMI-compliant portable player not allowed

When I try to play it in Winamp, it loads my browser and takes me to wiredrecords.com

then I fired up WMP and it wants me to 'update my digital rights management installation'

I'm using the version WMP that comes when you update XP with SP1.

oh well so much for trying this 'freebie' out. I'll stick to un-DRMed music thanks

I'll wait for iTMS.au

[rogerbo]

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.

Re:Will these services be the end of lossless musi

[Zog The Undeniable]

Because even people with 512K broadband (OK, you may have an l33t 2 MBit pipe) may balk at the prospect of 50MB per song. Granted, 256k and 384k MP3s are becoming more popular with faster connections.

Just paid for and downloaded a song...

[rixon]

For the record:
- it was easy to find the song
- easy to sign up
- easy to pay
- easy to download
- easy to play (after media player updated itself with the DRM stuff)
- easy to burn to audio CD

The web site's HTML needs work, though.

Overall I enjoyed the experience. It gave me the "hey that's cool" smile.

Oh and yes I know I'm supposed to hate it 'cos it's DRM WMA. Know what? If I can burn it to a red book CD then I'm happy.

DRM

[HalfFlat]

I dislike DRM, but I dislike it a whole lot more when its proponents just straight out lie. Quoting the DestraMusic site,

DRM (Digital Rights Management) is the process in which digital content (audio, video or documents) is securely delivered to consumers over the Internet.

Bullocks.

Of course as others have said, the service itself is insulting: $2AU per track for lossily compressed (128mbps!) music that I can't play on my non-Windows computer, or use on my iPod. Thrilling.