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MP3 Winners and Losers for 2003
An anonymous reader writes "Richard Menta over at MP3newswire.net just posted his annual winners and losers list in digital music for last year. The big winner is Apple for dominating MP3 portable player sales and the dramatic success of its iTunes service. Napster savior Roxio and the small independent record labels also made the winners list. The losers list include SonicBlue and MP3.com. Interestingly, Ogg Vorbis made the losers list, not because of the codec per se, but because iTunes has both catapulted the AAC format to number two and stimulated Microsoft to pour more of its efforts ($$$) into WMA and the iTunes clones, leaving little room left for the open source alternative. The 2001 and 2002 winners list are worth a look too and each have links to that year's losers list."
I once visited mp3.com when they we're still going strong. They had something like 400 employees and very luxurious buildings with graffitti on the walls and everything.
They were having a talent show there, and I expected to see some of the thousand of bands they had signed up performing. Unfortunately, it was the employees themselves who were the talent. With the bosses performing their own poems and so on.
I feel sorry for the guys working there, as you could smell the money being burnt everywhere you went, and they probably had no idea they were already dead.
This was almost 3 years ago, and back then they had already been working for six months on the next generation music-selling tech that they are currently advertising on their site.
The point to all this is: Don't employ 400 people unless you are generating huge amounts of cash.
Will code a sig generator for food
I don't really think Ogg Vorbis is a loser this year, in fact I think otherwise. It got tremendous exposure from being the main audio format in RH, and a lot of open source big wigs are pushing for it. It at least caught my attention, all my CD rips are now in Ogg Vorbis format.
As a game developer, using ogg vorbis as a royalty free, open source audio decoder rocks. I can use it on the two platforms I care about (mac and pc) for free. Booyah.
OGG is not an academic project. It really is very efficient and very nice sounding, far better than WMA or MP3. I admit, I have not tried AAC. And DRM may be coming, but it sure as hell isn't going to stay. Look at Region Coding... It's being phased out as people realise that it is in fact a way for companies to weasle money out of people when they could in fact buy the same product, from the same manufacturer and artist, several months earlier in the case of the UK, and at a lesser cost. Needless to say, DRM will be a bad idea, as it restricts not only where the user may use the data, but when, and also from which agent they purchase it - they will HAVE to get an authorised version from the publisher of the music, and have to get permission to copy it to a CD, or their iPOD or the tape for their antiquated car stereo (yeah, I still have a tape deck). I will go out of my way to buy a higher quality CD rather than a rubbish quality MP3 off the internet. 128Kbps MP3's really are awful if you have spent more than a fiver on your speakers. 192Kbps OGG (equiv to at least 256Kbit MP3, or maybe more) preserves almost everything, and until companies get real and start providing lossless music downloads, I'm sticking to buying CD's. Sure, I may still download music, but as I think the radio is awful quality, and the adverts are sheer annoying waffle, I feel good knowing that by downloading (I admit, pirating) these tracks, I am exposing myself to their music, and consequently may purchase more.
Take four star mary, I got interested in them back in 2000. I listened to one of their tracks that came on a compilation album. I liked it, so I downloaded a track or two more. Still, I liked it, but wasn't happy with the quality. Knowing they are a small time band, I went out and bought an album. I now own both the albums, and some merchandise, and have seen them live. I'm sure this rings true with other too. Downloading one or two tracks doesn't harm the artist or the industry, downloading an entire album when you like their music and could have afforded buying the CD DOES. It's down to the guilt of the involved party on whether they should contribute or not.
It's all about what people deserve, and if the recording (and indeed, movie) industry want to force us to pay through the nose for it all, they're going to have egg all over their collective faces when users start looking for alternatives. iMusic only works because it's cheaper than buying CD's, and doesn't force you to commit to one format - Microsofts way would more than likely commit to WMA.
To go back to my original point, with the right word of mouth techniques, OGG could go far. Really far, especially as it can't be stifled like WMA. You know what I mean, and you know it makes sense. It's not bad business, it's good business. Trust your customer, and they're more likely to make a return visit!
But all the MP3 hardware out there uses a dedicated MP3 decoder chip
I have an idea. How much sense would it make for a company to make a Vorbis-only (or perhaps Vorbis/FLAC-only) hardware player? Before you all scream, here is my line of thinking of why it might be a good idea:
* Primarily, no expensive license issues.
* Vorbis-decoding can be done using only integers (FLAC too?), which must save some hardware costs.
* It popularises the Vorbis/FLAC formats.
And for the burning issue of "what 99% of the population with music in other formats?". I would propose that the software frontend to this be able to transparently transcode your music from any format (using any software plugin available) to Vorbis (or FLAC if you don't want to lose quality), before copying to the device.
Benefits to consumer:
* Supports pretty much any format of music they might have.
* Would be very cheap to buy.
I don't think the loss of quality in transcoding will be so important, because after all this is just a portable device, not a portable studio. The only inconvience I could see to a consumer would be a slightly longer delay as audio is transcoded and copied, but at a suitable quality level, I don't think it could make that much of a difference. Of course, there wouldn't be any such extra delay if you were copying a Vorbis or FLAC file to begin with.
Saving on the hardware costs like that, and using software to handle all the numerous different audio formats sounds like a good idea to me, and so the manufacturer could probably sell it for a lot less than other players. And of course, we all know that Joe Average quite commonly picks the cheapest electronic device that does what they want, rather than worrying about its technical specs.
Any comments?
Buy a used CD. $5 bucks from locally owned store. You don't contribute to the artist that way I'm afraid, but you don't contribute to the RIAA either who would likely skim the artist's share anyway.
You've contributed to the local economy and supported the contiued viability of the used CD market.
Now you have a CD, a piece of property with attached rights that's worth. . . $5. You've reduced your liquidity but maintained net worth. You have acquired the music for free.
Rip it to whatever format you like and put them on whatever devices you like. All legal like so long as you don't trade them or the original CD. If you only listen to rips store the CD safely as a backup source.
Now, if you download 1000 ACC songs you've spent $1000 bucks and have a license. Not property. If things go badly for you in the future and you spend a year or two laid off you can sit around hungry and listen to your music.
$70 gets you the same number of songs on used CDs. If things go bad for you in the future you've got an extra $930 in the bank and property which can be liquified fairly quickly to get another $50 bucks if you want.
Whether or not you erase your rips is left to your own sense of ethics, so maybe you're sitting around still listening to your music too.
If you don't mind old vinyl you can do even better. It's about 50 songs for a buck if you shop garage sales.
KFG
Most don't have a clue what codec they're using (Windows doesn't display file extentions by default). You'll see Ogg more as it starts costing more to license the mp3 and AAC then it does to make hardware fast enough to play Oggs.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Elsewhere in this discussion somebody said they wanted to just pay a monthly rate for unlimited downloads. Vivendi is why that's a mistake. People sign up for cable TV mainly because they can get lots of shows that aren't available over the air. These shows used to be spread out over a lot of independent cable channels, but these channels got bought up by various conglomerates, of which Vivendi was probably the biggest. When Vivendi ran short of cash, they started cutting back on their programming. That's why the SciFi channel shows so many reruns of Tales From the Crypt. Of course, viewers didn't get any money back because Vivendi was spending less money to entertain them -- they were locked in.
If cable TV programming allowed you to just pay for what you want to watch, people could vote with their feet and it would be harder to screw them. But when it's an all-or-nothing service, you take what they give you.
Same with flat-rate online music services, like EMusic. Except there's even less competition in that marketplace, so the overall quality is especially low.
Apple chose to buy into the RIAA distribution model when setting up iTunes, and as a resul, is only breaking even on selling music and making its money back on selling iPods.
Instead of buying Universal and being able to bundle a few dozen albums with each iPod free and sell tracks for .25 each at a profit and use their ownership of content as a tool with which to club the rest of the content industry when negotiating per-download proces, they chose to pay bridge toll to the entire record industry and by willingness to pay all of their net income after expenses to the RIAA, reinforced the RIAA's business model and boosted the net cap of each RIAA company.
If they'd managed to leverage their content ownership into much lower download prices, they'd be selling all the downloadable tracks from other companies at a profit, and other computer companies would be using this to beat down prices when they bought their own major labels.
The RIAA labels are very definite winners because their net caps went up. Their attempt to prevent independent competitors from using the Net for promotion via P2P and Internet Radio is a lot less important in the short term.
Instead of spending some of the money they had in the bank, Apple turned digital downloads into a game nobody is going to be able to profit at legally.
Apple belongs on the winners list... at #8. They could and should have been #1, the major consumer electronics players would be on the winners' list, the general public would be on the winners' list, and the suits at all the major labels could have been on the top of the lus3rz list.
Will Apple stay a winner? How long can they sustain the iPod at the current inflated margins? If they can't subsidize iTunes because of shrinking margins, iPod turns from a win to a money-loser.
All it takes are some good competitive products, and Apple hardly has a monopoly on good or even visionary consumer products designers.
If Apple has to cut iPod prices to commodity levels to keep selling them, there go their margins and their ability to keep iTunes alive at a break-even or money-losing basis, more product sales mean more money-losing downloads and more red ink.
If this happens, and I think this inevitable, their short-sightedness will have cost them not only money, but a chance to turn the downloadable music market into a benefit for everybody not an RIAA label executive.
Apple could have made the consumer electronic industry a hell of a lot stronger and boosted their bottom line at the same time.
Instead, there's a pretty good chance that iPod + iTunes in a couple of years will make Steve Jobs look like a dickhead, not a hero.
Tech Public Policy stuff
The fact that ogg is free is what convinced me to encode my music that way. I don't have to pay for an encoder. I don't have to compile LAME. I don't have to worry about DRM screwing me out of my music in a way that media changes can only dream of. All I have to do is have a free OS on my device of choice and my music will not just sound better and take up less space, it will be mine on any media as long as I continue to transfer it with other free software. When MP3 and WMA change because the RIAA wants to sell it's music again and Microsoft has to force sales of their newly patched OS, OGG will be OGG. When there's no Windoze driver for your RIO, USB thingy, my Open Zaurus will still rock. Free is like that.
Your sig, In God we trust. Everyone else keep your hands where I can see 'em., has two levels of irony. First, WMA and MP3 are non free, closed and hidden. Second, I interpret it as the bandit's famous "Get your hands up!". You violate the first meaning and advocate the second. While obsensibly professing trust and openness you are deeply dishonest.
JoeLinus, I hope you waste loads of money and months of your life on WMA.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Any particular codec could be 0% of sales and still have high demand for players. Remember: a few years ago, no music was sold in MP3 format (and even today, very little is sold in that format), but there was (and still is) a huge demand for MP3 players.
Whatever codec that most people use to encode CDs, is the "must have" format for players. Right now, that is MP3. Some day, it could be Vorbis (though I don't see a trend in that direction). But one thing's for sure: it will never, ever be DRM-wrapped AAC or WMA. Those are guaranteed dead ends.
(*) IMHO, this is likely to remain the case for a very long time. It requires an above-average amount of foolish short-sightedness for a person to be willing to buy in a lossy format, unless the precision is extremely high (making the files nearly as large as using lossless compressors). It has to be possible to transcode to tomorrow's formats w/out adding significant artifacts, otherwise the format is "unsafe" in the future-proofing sense. Thus, the only serious competition that CDs face, is from codecs like FLAC.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Not one mention of the SliMP3 player. Almost a shame. (it's my favorite toy add-on with iTunes :)
My prediction for one of the big Loser for 2004 will be Emusic.com
What a fantastic service that has been completely gutted and destroyed. Thousands of folks PAYING for their music will now go back to p2p and the newsgroups.
Shame.
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
The iPod is, at least technically, inferior to other products on the market (iRiver, Karma, etc.).
iTunes is, at least technically, inferior to other products on the market.
The two products together are, at least technically, inferior to other options on the market in that they are exclusive to one another (dual package, proprietary crap, etc.).
The two are, as of right now, far more popular than any other combinations on the market. Why? Because Apple's marketing team has made the iPod the must have product on the market, given it a unique identity that is pushed EXTREMELY well, and bundled in iTunes as a "revolutionary" break through against the RIAA.
A tribute to the sheer success of the iPod is its popularity here on Slashdot. Slashdotters are open source DIY fiddlers enamored with all things freee and hackable. The iPod is, fcrom both a hardware and software perspective, TOTALLY closed. iTunes is essentially the music version of Microsoft's use of IE, employing a proprietary format created SOLELY to lock in users on their device.
And yet the Slashdot community has, despite all this, professed its love for the iPod in the face of all other more "Slashdot" friendly products (open source codec supporters, etc.).
Here's to you for manipulating even the technologically advanced Apple!
-rt
All Of mp3 - it's a store that offer music at $0.01/megabyte. They offer mp3,wma,ogg vorbis,mpc and acc formats. Some tracks are mp3 only, but they offer "online encoding" that lets you select format and bitrate (ogg vorbis up to 320kbit/sec!). If you use "online encoding" you pay $0.01/megabyte. There is also flat rate subscription $15/month/1000tracks but it doesn't cover "online encoding". They are a Russian shop but the site has English interface as well. I believe they were able to negotiate such low prices because of poor sales of RIAA music in Russia. RIAA just don't care about Russia (yet?)
As a non-performing songwriter, I am against what you propose. It may or may not benefit recording artists (I believe it wouldn't), but for songwriters, whose only means of income is the sale of media (CDs, MP3s, etc.) and licensing fees, what you propose would be extremely harmful. And I, for one, have no problem with paying $1 for an MP3 of Elvis Presley singing Heartbreak Hotel, even though he and its writer, Mae Boren Axton, are dead. If I like the work, a dollar is a very small sum to part with. Also, nothing is standing in the way of any independent artists releasing their own music (copyright-free if they want to), and posting it to be shared by anyone via P2P as you suggest. In short, copyright can be avoided by those to whom it matters and should have the choice: the creators. If you don't like that content is copyrighted, I urge you to protest. But a great place to start would be by boycotting consumption. Don't buy, download, watch, listen to, or read copyrighted content. That would be a meaningful protest.