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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 is it not okay to buy CDs, but fine to buy music piecemeal via the internet? I don't want to give the RIAA my money, and distribution via the net doesn't change that at all. I buy the few CDs I want at concerts, in the hope that I'll still get legitimate music and the RIAA will get less money.
Hypocrisy sucks, pick a stance and stick with it.
--
lds
Something in the back of my head is echoing that soft warning that I always hear when I think of wal-mart. Watch, they'll undercut and dominate this market place too.
Wal-Mart is going to be the Microsoft of the general retailer consumer good and grocery markets, I swear.
The only down side in reading the review, is that it's highly windows-centric. The reviewer fails to point out obvious things like the fact that iTunes works seamlessly between Windows and Mac platforms (while most of the other services break completely). Besides that, it was definitely a good read.
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
It's called Kazaa. They have tons of MP3s, games and p0rn all for free! They're just giving it away. It's great.
BTW: Hot Tip! Check out that Metallica band. They have lots of stuff on Kazaa and it all rocks!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
"File Type: Songs bought from Napster were available as protected .wma files ripped at 128 k."
Great, not only is only 128k, it's probably lower quality than OGG, and I'm guessing that if you're computer hard drive were to fail (likely) you would lose every song you 'bought' because the license file is probably tied to your OS in some way.
Maybe paying $10/month and using it like a radio station wouldn't be to bad, but letting people think that they 'bought' the song when you have no ability to make back up copies is stupid. Yes it mentioned burning it to a CD, but that would be an extra step re-encoding it back into the PC, and the quality would be lower.
The idea of actually paying for music online is still regarded as satirical by some?
Ive said it before and ill say it again, cdbaby.com kicks ass. They let you listen to 2 minutes of 5-7 songs off an album to see if you like it, if you do buy it, if not go on to the next one! All their albums are reviewed by the editors to give you description of what the music is like. Plus, after your first purchase, they send you a free cd with each purchase thereafter (usually a mix cd which is pretty good.)
Disclaimer: all though this read like an ad, its not. Im just a satisfied customer.
This is a great alternative to emusic and such pay for play setups where you waste a quota trying to find music you like.
What I find interesting is that some songs are available in one service, but not others. So if you think of downloadable mu$ic as equivalent of a physical music store, it's not quite, becase a CD is a CD, and no matter where you buy it, you can play/rip it anywhere, on anything (capable of playing CD's, that is).
So there's still an insentive to buy CD's. But not as much, not enough to keep CD stores in business, I would not be surprised if they start closing soon. After that happens - what do you do to get a song that's only available from one service, but not the other?
Will there ever be a way to buy once play anywhere?
Until they realise that people don't want to pay for music per listen - but buy the right to listen to a song as many times as they want, whenever they want, in whatever format they want - these online stores are never going to be very successful.
If I have to deal with one more WMA file I think I'll go nuts.
The simple fact is, most people like to have a 'hard' copy of their favourite music, and the only reason that many don't buy them is because of the price.
If it were $5 a CD I would buy every album I liked (and I would buy a hell of a lot). What they really nede to do to increase sales is introduce some sort of 'decent' rewards program, where the more often you buy music, the cheaper it is for you. (not the crappy buy 4 CD's and you can have one of these UNHEARD of bands albums!)
P2P is winning not because people *want* to steal, but because the prices of CD's are too prohibitive for many people, and many find it offensive that the bands get so littl of the profit!
They need a policy change, NOT a retailer change.
This is interesting because I just read on CNN that 2004 is to bring loads of free music Could it be that the business model of the way that music is sold is changing due to all these online stores?
I wanted to buy a book on tape as a Christmas present for my offline mother, but I didn't want to pay for express shipping to receive it in time. Amazon.com referred me to an online download at Audible.com. "Great," I thought, "I'll buy an MP3 file and burn it to CD."
I rushed into the purchase without reading the fine print. I didn't realize I was buying a proprietary "MP3 quality" recording and not an actual MP3 file. I didn't realize I had to download Audible.com software to listen to and manipulate the audio file.
The audio software failed to recognize my CD burner, so I requested and received a refund. I was miffed at not having an MP3 file and the prospect of spending time with a tech support person to route around a problem that wouldn't exist if I had been given an MP3 file to begin with.
As luck would have it, I bought the book on *CD* from the manufacturer for only $2 more, plus $6 standard shipping, and it arrived today.
Online Features? What exactly DO we need in features? Near CD-quality, not very restrictive DRM, a good selection, and a decent price. Searches, reviews, and recommendations would be cool, too. You can get most of that in a record store with a knowledgeable music buff on the other side of the counter.
:)
What you don't get is the rustic appeal of going into a music store and enjoying the crowd and ambience. It's not the same when you're quoting NIN lyrics to a friend while passing by people who are shopping the contemporary christian aisle. Not the same as being able to watch people in goth clothing walk by. Not the same as being able to say "Chris I-Suck" (Chris Isaak) in public.
Shop online for convenience, but it's still an experience. Brick and mortar stores still have something to offer. If nothing else, it makes getting music a social event instead of a personal thing. If you're the type to get the latest Britney Spears album, though...you may want to buy online and save yourself some ridicule.
From what I have read, about 45% of the final sales price of a CD is based on retail, manufacturing and distribution costs. If that is so, then the current online offerings actually raise the profit margin to record labels and the RIAA without benefiting the artists at all. Should I be grateful? I think not.
There is tremendous potential here for artists to go directly to consumers. The costs of setting up a digital recording studio are no longer prohibitive, though they are not trivial. It is reasonable to expect that sites will spring up soon enough to provide the infrastructure that independent artists need to distribute their music and collect on the sales with a reasonable overhead. The current online stores seem to be a last ditch attempt to maintain control by the music industry. Nothing surprising there, but we should think very hard about whether we want to support a timid change when the potential for radical change exists.
The Fast Company article is excellent! I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Wal-Mart.
Anybody know of a good review of the EULA's of these stores? I think that's a pretty important part, and this reviewer seemed to kind of gloss over that part, perhaps not having read them all (understandable.)
I don't know if you've noticed or not, but everyone and their brother is setting up their own freakin' online music store. If they all offer nearly the same exact content in the same exact form, why should I go with one over another? The online music market is still in its infant form, and it's already becoming saturated with too many stores. Coke setting up their own music store? What the hell?!
I find it laughable that people would actually spend $1 to buy a song. That's insane. For a full CD, you're almost talking $15...for songs I can only listen to on my computer...in a lousy format...and I don't get any case, media, or art with it. Thank you, I'd rather pay the $13 and take my music wherever I want to. Does anyone else find it shocking that these stores are actually able to stay afloat?
Let's give it a year. I'd love to see an "online music store" year in review next December. Who will stand and who will fall?
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.
"Who does not want to use iTunes? .wma files. Someone with a digital music player other than an iPod. Someone who wants streaming music"
Someone who wants a player to listen to their
Dammit you mean all that streaming music i have been listening to in iTunes was in my head the whole time. Well at least im a lot more creative than i thought i was:)
If you don't like the RIAA don't buy music. You should note that the record labels pay the RIAA, you don't directly.
Note if you have a song from a band and you didn't pay for it the RIAA isn't getting money, but neither is the band.
The band might only be getting a little bit from the sale, but they signed with an RIAA label and a little is better than 0.
If you like the music support those making it.
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).
The issue at the end of the day is this - when I go on Kazaa and download a song - what format is it likely to be in?
128kbps Listening Tests Results on HydrogenAudio:
Link
If you don't like the RIAA don't buy music
Spoken like a true RIAA propagandaist..
What about indie bands? Oh thats right, they aren't signed with the RIAA and thus don't get any money, so therefore its not music in your world.
The article did have some good information but I found it was not consistent throughout. Some features were listed as pros for certain services, but not mentioned for others that also had that feature. For example: He mentioned that one allows for gift cards, but failed to mention so does itunes. He also said musicmatch offers cover art with the downloads, but failed again to mention itunes also does. I think it would have been better if there would have been some type of chart that listed all the features and simple indicated if that service had them or not.
Some of the readers of this site still fail to realize this is not the Borg hive-mind.
SOME people are boycotting the RIAA. SOME people aren't. We all post on slashdot.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
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.
The problem with all the online music stores is
Don't think that the RIAA doesn't "get it". They do. They just don't want you to "get it". "It" being music at a reasonable price in the format you want without restrictions on how you can use it.
The RIAA's (their members', actually) business is based on control. They want to control what you hear and how you hear it. Without this control, their entire business model breaks. If any old artist can self-publish online (or be published online by a 3rd party for a reasonable fee) with world-wide exposure
Everyone knows what the public wants:
- Roach
You obviously want to buy your music through eMusic, which is one of the services covered in the article. They work with independent artists, which should be obvious when you see that they distribute the music as unrestricted VBR MP3s.
Their service also allows non-US users and explicitly supports Linux.
One of the indie music directors from the online college radio station linked below in my sig has bought tons of music from eMusic. If you've ever known someone in that position, I don't think I need to say anything else.
You shouldn't "hope" you're not buying RIAA-backed CDs. It's pretty easy to tell at many concerts; if the band is good and their CD is between $5 and $10 (or even $15), it's not from the RIAA because they wouldn't be allowed to charge that little.
(I read the article earlier today and emailed some corrections, but I read BBspot every day).
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
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.
... hope you don't have a scene like this in your house on xmas morning ;) (sorry, just had to slip this link in somewhere! it's none of my business what you spend your money on, and i agree with you on the value thing).
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
I see a lot of people complaining in this story about restricted formats, money still going to the RIAA, and Windows-only. None of you read the article.
eMusic gives you unrestricted VBR MP3s at well under a dollar per song. They deal largely with independent artists who are not beholden to the RIAA, which is a big part of why they can offer these distribution terms. They also explicitly support Linux, as well as Windows and Mac OS.
"But I don't like that music!" Well, you _should_
Yeah, it takes more effort to find music, but I've been on both sides of the fence and I've found the indie side to be far more rewarding. Bands like Enon, Quasi, El Guapo, Freezepop, Call and Response, Stereo Total...they will probably never hit mainstream radio, and there's absolutely no good reason why.
With a band like Freezepop, you don't even need an eMusic! Their CDs are cheap, and you can download full MP3s of many of their songs from their own site for free. Lifestyle, a side project of one of their members, has an entire album's worth of tracks that basically fall in between the first and upcoming second album. All for free.
There's plenty of crap in indie too, of course. Here, I'll have to give a blatant plug to the site linked in my sig, wmbc.umbc.edu. We are currently on hiatus until the spring, but you can listen to the automated music stream that usually fills in between live DJs. You can also look at our Top 30 chart, which is actually a representation of the 30 albums the DJs chose to play the most, not a pre-mandated playlist. And hey, we use Debian! And our music database software is available on freshmeat!
See, you can discover independent music the same way you used to discover mainstream. There are many other stations like ours (and I'll admit that some are probably better). You could also take eMusic up on their 50 free tracks offer, or check out cmj.com, where most college stations report their top 30. I'm almost positive you'll find something you like, and you don't have to feel bad for buying it.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
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).
The author could have either tried to make a more apples-to-apples comparison by measuring the service against that other other sites on their first week out, or at least summarized at the end of the walmart review making the callout and saying "I should review it again in a few months".
Personally, I'm taking a wait and see approach -- I suspect their catalog and feature set will both grow substantially over the next few months. Yeah, sure, the explicit lyrics will still be edited out, but since I don't listen to much music like that it won't really affect me much.
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.
Just wanted to point out another option if Clear Channel pop isn't your thing. Audio Lunchbox carries an interesting line up of indie label music, the file format is unencumbered, and songs are $.99. The have "bulk" rates, too, if you purchase a "lunch card".
http://audiolunchbox.com
I haven't bought anything yet (and I have no relation to the company), but I'm keeping my eye on it.
-h3
I've been using Rhapsody for over a year. I love it.
First, you can do all the normal stuff you'd expect from an on-demand streaming service; make playlists of songs, add entire albums to your library, listen to pre-programmed channels, or create your own channels by selecting a list of artists, etc.
The sound quality is high and the connections reliable. It's not for dial-up users. You need broadband.
In addition to streaming the songs most can be burned to CD for 79 cents/each. I seldom use this feature. I use this gadget to get the audio from my PC to the stereo while streaming.
Here's what really makes Rhapsody valuable to me: The Rhapsody desktop app integrates the Muze database, the same database you'll find at music store kiosks for doing searches. With this you can do searches by artist, album, and song title. Also, for each artist you see similar artists, influencers, and followers, all hyperlinked together. I can spend hours just following links among artists, finding music new to me that I'm more likely to like.
Music is also categorized by genre, with a playlist of typical songs for the genre and a list of albums and artists considered important to the genre.
A small negative: I'd like to see the ability to search by genre and include boolean expressions in the search.
Price: $10/month ($8 if paid quarterly). Not bad.
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.
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
When you get tired of your eBook being locked in a propretary DRM, you can just burn to CD and re-rip (with iTunes). That's why I like iTunes and the ITMS, because I know even if Apple folded tomorrow I would still be able to convert songs to whatever format I liked at my leisure without worrying about music expiration. Wait until some of these services start folding... sure MP3 books would be nice but ITMS gets, as the engineer in the classic joke would say, "close enough".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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!
I've downloaded a lot of songs from iTunes. The quality is quite good actually. I have also burned my entire CD collection to AAC with 192bit rate. I can't tell the difference. In fact, I think some of the downloads from iTunes sound better. It might have something to do with them creating the AAC files from master recordings.
It now makes me wonder how much quality is in the CD's we buy. I'm still trying to determine if some of my older CD's from the 80's have begun to sound worse over time. Or were some just not recorded very well to start.