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Digital Music Stores Reviewed
Kozz writes "If you've thought about trying the new Napster 2.0, or perhaps MusicMatch, or even WAL*MART music service, you really need to read this review at BBspot.com. Brian takes a break from his standard satire fare and writes a comprehensive review not only of the previously mentioned stores, but also of BuyMusic.com, eMusic, Apple iTunes, and RealOne Rhapsody. It breaks down the features of each service, the prices, restrictions, general pros and cons, and really gives you an idea of which one(s) you should try depending on your needs."
Why didn't you use iTunes? Most (all?) audible.com content is available on the iTunes Music Store and iTunes has excellent support (in my experience) for CD writers.
The Fast Company article is excellent! I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Wal-Mart.
Actually, if you don't back up iTunes songs, you can't download them again, even on machines that are authorized. I bought an audiobook ($18), went to lunch and when I got back, my hard drive had crashed. When I went to Apple and asked where the link to download music I'd purchased was, I was informed that I would be allowed to download it again, but to be aware that they were doing me a favor and it wouldn't be allowed again.
So, if you buy from ANY of these stores, be sure that you're first action (even before listening) is to burn it off to disc.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
apple has a fairly liberal usage/rights policy with their music. but, there is an easy way to overcome this. after downloading an album, burn the album to cd, but choose to burn an audio cd. next, you'll need cdda2wav and bladeenc (or lame, not playing favorites here) easily obtainable at fink, or on any linux box. after you burn the cd, pop it in the computer. from a terminal, simply run cdda2wav dev=/dev/cdrom etc. then when it's done, run bladeenc on each file. (make a perl, bash, applescript, etc, to automate. i'm thinking of writing a cocoa wrapper for it.) you're left with 128kbit mp3's. sounds fine. so, you can use your mp3's wherever you'd like. is it something granny can do. no. is it 37337? hardly. i gotta figure that apple knows this. they can't be that stupid.
i don't know if you can do this with any other service. this alone makes iTMS a great choice. i know with any windows media format you're gonna have lots of restrictions.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Forget the 40 song limit -- it used to be 'unlimited', which in practice meant 2000 tracks a month.
At one point the download manager files were an open format, and they encouraged third party download managers...
Then they decided to encrypt the files, and to their credit released download managers for Windows, Mac and Linux at the same time.
Unfortunately all three were riddled with bugs and oversights. To this day the reliability of downloads is decidedly sub-par.
If you do use EMusic, there's a perl script available which will decrypt the files and launch wget for you -- it's far more reliable than the official download manager.
But personally I ended my subscription when the new limits were introduced... more because of their lousy approach to customer service than anything else. (They actually had the audacity to remove the message boards completely when they announced the changes).
No need to VNC - Poisoned is an OS X frontend to giFT, which can connect to the Kazaa FastTrak network.
A Minesweeper clone that doesn't suck
128kbps Listening Tests Results on HydrogenAudio:
Link
Copyright. Lets take the Beatles as an example. Apple Corps (the record label) own the Beatles tunes, the recordings of these tunes are licensed to EMI Europe for sale through out ECMA, and to Capitol Records (basically EMI again, but a legal entity in it's own right). Sony own the lyrics.
So, a record label usually owns the rights to a particular recording of a tune, the tune itself belongs to someone else and the lyrics and belong to a third party.
Now US record companies (even though they tend to have European branches, or they are owned by European labels) only have the rights to sell recordings within the US (and maybe Canada).
So when iTunes, MusicMatch, Walmart et al deal with the labels they are only licensing the rights to resell the tracks in the US. If they sell outside the US, they're breaking their license agreement. Want to know why you can't search on lyrics in stores? Because they'd need to license the lyrics from yet another company.
Why is this such a pain? Mainly because the US labels won't share with Europe, and vice versa. Each region has to show its own profit, and sharing is bad for that. The licensing and royalty rules are horribly complicated, I've spent a lot of time doing various reporting tools for music promotional sites to cope with this.
unsigned? i think you mean non-riaa-signed. there are lots and lots of non-riaa labels run by folks who sign bands because they like the music, not the sales projections.
if yr looking for non-riaa music, try:
cd baby
the associatio of inedependent record labels
riaa radar
southern records
your local college radio station
or my local college station
that should keep you busy... and the riaa labels idle.
2 1337 4 u!
Ok, first off - let me say I'm totally lost as to why some idiot labeled your post as a "troll"?! I guess they're just gung-ho about seeing the local record stores die, in favor of virtual online shops....
Ultimately, I think the entire landscape of music sales is changing. That means, retail music stores need to rethink how they sell their music, and online stores will do so too. (Does anyone really believe we need as many online music stores as we have popping up all over the place? It's just a "Quick! Hop on the bandwagon!" fad, which will soon end with only a few survivors.) The good part is, the survivors will truly be "best of breed" and ready for the "real world" of day to day retail sales.
To me, the core issue is much like sales of books. Amazon.com does a pretty good job of handling online book sales, yet it doesn't replace all of the local bookstores. In fact, we saw some merging of the real and the virtual (EG. Barnes & Noble) - which is arguably the most sensible thing for a business to do.
There's MUCH to be said for "instant gratification". Used properly, this concept can benefit either a web site or a real "brick and mortar" store. For online stores, this means realizing you'll ALWAYS lose a certain percentage of sales because people don't like waiting to receive product in the mail. They want it *immediately* after paying for it. It also means it's smart to make as many things available as "instant downloads" as possible (but even then, a percentage of folks won't be impressed, if they don't have the bandwidth to make a nearly instant download practical/possible). For the real stores, this means keeping a really good inventory of product in stock at all times. If the best you can tell a person is "We can order it for you!", it's little more than a nice way of saying "Nope! We don't carry it, and you may as well go elsewhere for it."
Retail stores have the potential advantage of winning almost all of those "instant gratification" purchases - but only if they have the selection *and* provide the pleasant experience that beats the online shopping experience.
So no, I don't think the "record store" has any reason to become extinct -- but it needs to understand the competition and what areas they're better/worse in.
That's not true -- with Wal-Mart's music downloads, you can only listen on one computer. I downloaded a song on my laptop, then when I copied it to my desktop and tried to play it there, I got this "License Acquisition" dialog box:
So it's pretty clear to me that I'm only allowed to play a song I downloaded on one PC (although I'm allowed, according to the download page, to back it up to a couple other computers, whatever they mean by that).
You can buy some music that is RIAA free. The site RIAA Radar helps you avoid paying indirectly to the RIAA.
RIAA Radar
Or you can pay to download Music with no DRM that is RIAA free from MagnaTune.
MagnaTune
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
"WMA - depends on the Music Store, for example, WalMart... if you format your hard disc / change your PC, you cannot play your music on your box. The music file is tied to a license which is downloaded the first time you play the music IIRC."
Windows Media Player has a neat little feature called "License Manager" which lets you backup/restore the license.
"Derp de derp."
Depending on where you live that may or may not be a problem. In countries with lax copyright laws or no specific deals with other countries/trade blocs you can do whatever you want with a copyrighted song. If you live in Europe or North America you have far fewer rights to works copyrighted in other countries. If you're in Canada or the UK you can't sell a work copyrighted in the US but not in your country. The owner in the US can get in touch with whoever handles copyright problems in Canada or the UK and have you persecuted to the largest extent they can manage. The same goes for a work copyrighted in the UK but not in the US. The owner in the UK can get in touch with the FBI and have them come after you at their leisure. European and North American countries tend to respect their trading partners' copyrights even if they don't necessarily support their enforcement or specifics.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
How can anyone possibly consider Musicmatch to be a decent MP3 app?
Musicmatch came pre-installed on my XP system. I was stunned at how clunky and buggy it was...it lasted a few weeks before I tossed it for Winamp, which was subsequently tossed for iTunes.
I don't know how the slashdot crowd has slept on this one so long but there is a service called Audiolunchbox that has DRM free music available for download. It's all web based so it is platform independent and the files are available in OGG or MP3 formats (192k variable mp3 and level 6 variable OGG i do believe) and the kicker is that all the labels are independent...i hope everyone picks up on this and soon
Had a minor teething problem with their Linux service. The MIME type thing is straightforward enough if you know what a MIME type is. In Konqueror, you also need to enable "run in terminal" to get the download manager to display. I didn't have a working NSCD on my laptop. However, I do have BIND on my firewall box which pulgs into the broadband cable.
/usr, as opposed to /usr/local. If you're running Slackware, LFS or Gentoo that's not likely to be a problem, but I can see problems creeping in on systems with a militant package management system.
;-)
Problem I noticed so far: the supplied installer wants to put files in
Also, I can't seem to apt-get the missing NSCD package. This may be totally unrelated to the eMusic installation, of course.
Still, it's nice to see someone making a brave effort to support Linux; their hearts are in the right place, and I'll be giving them plenty of feedback. Anyone know if you can get barred for editing cookies
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!