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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."
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that one of the original arguments against Vorbis adoption was "But all the MP3 hardware out there uses a dedicated MP3 decoder chip, so they can't just 'upgrade the firmware' to support Vorbis", along with countless other arguments that deal with the fact that in any given project, 1 codec is easier to deal with than many.
Well, because we now have MP3, AAC, and WMA, all becoming popular, that means that instead of hardcoded support for 1 format, any company that's serious about making music software or hardware is probably going to want to support a plugin style architecture, which means that supporting a 4th, 5th, 6th, etc, format becomes much easier, so things like FLAC and Vorbis have one more barrier to entry removed from their paths.
The Free desktop that Just Works
See to me, dealing with Quicktime for Windows or any Apple software on Windows is more of a PITA then going to the mall and buying a CD.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
In my opinion, anyone who downloaded Creed was a loser, not just for this year.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Yes, we'll all start to whine and complain but there is no way to stop it.
Without DRM to whole business chain of the entertainment industry is fucked. So they'll enforce it.
With this background fact, you won't wonder that OGG was turned down. The encryption shemes will make sure that the song only play on certificated players. However a player which supports formats which can be used to illegal copies will never get such a certification. So the manufacturers will avoid these formats at all cost.
When you watch this development the original movitivation of the OGG development team seems to very naive and economically clueless. While there might be some niche applications for OGG, it will be useless for the downtrodden masses. Basically the development of OGG has merely an academic value.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
MP3.com declined, as far as we're aware the music archive that was at that site is now dead, and so is the site itself.
There's a bit about it here if you're interested.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The best portable music device is the metal plate in my head! Too bad I only get the Fiesta music station... :(
Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into business for themselves.
How come there was no mention of Emusic on the loser list? They switched to a much more restrictive user agreement and had a mass exodus of their subscribers.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
For choosing WMA, for endorsing WMV.
Why?
Because Microsoft isn't a team player. There is no real technical benefit to WMA or WMV: All the 'next gen' codecs are better (ogg, wma, aac) than mp3, so the only real advantage to WMA is secondary.
Do you trust Microsoft? I don't. By using WMA, you give them more power and more clout, and like any big organization with the power to dictate international and national standards... I don't trust them. Unless of course you *like* paying taxes. Instead of money, though, Microsoft collects in marketshare and power.
Anyway, I hope you like living in a Microsoft future... I'm trying to avoid that, myself.
GPL Deconstructed
Because on my box I've got vorbis files, but there seems to be a distinct lack of ACC and WMA files.
Ah, I get it. You mean little room left in the commercial, RIAA endorsed online music store field.
What has that got to do with an open source solution? Is there "no room" for Linux because of all the money Apple and MS are pouring into their operating systems?
Open Source means will continue to serve very well for Open Source ends.
KFG
FuckedCompany.com has a nice little blurp on it, as well as the letter sent out to users. See the current mp3.com homepage for a cheezy rendition of mp3.com's future.
Celebrate Steak and a Blowjob Day!
Huh? If you're married to Linux, you probably go the whole open-source, patent-free hog and go with OGG. And if you're married to MacOS you probably like iTMS and AAC.
Wait.. You mean you can't afford $300.00 of disposable income to throw giddily at an MP3 player or other unnecessary item?
Right, and I'M the loser.
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
Great, just when we get the trolls content here, ANOTHER website stirs them up.
Ok, just so it's put down, please select your Ogg/Vorbis argument from the following menu:
1) Ogg/Vorbis is supported by (obscure mp3 player). Why should I get that (*drool*) new, affordable iPod?
2) Ogg/Vorbis can work in a DRM-based business model! Here is how: Step 1: Get five candles and a live goat.
3) Ogg/Vorbis is the best. Me and my four friends will not buy anything that won't support that. I'm sure Apple will be shaking in their boots from this ultimatum delivered from my parent's basement.
4) Hey! Why don't I just convert the mp3 collection to Ogg/Vorbis?
(Followed by: "Idiot: those are both lossy mediums."
Ok, I'm done.
Joe
In God we trust. Everyone else keep your hands where I can see 'em.
From the article:
The big winner is Apple for dominating MP3 portable player sales and the dramatic success of its iTunes service.
The dramatic success is Apple using its iTunes service to promote its iPod. iTunes has made a miniscule amount, purely a leader for the iPod. The iPod was here before iTunes, iTunes was envisaged as a way to make iPods more successful. iTunes was as much as a breakthrough on the music distribution scene as MP3 players were on the musical device scene were, but iPod deserves the praise, if iTunes weren't here another would have filled the gap, iPod and other MP3 players created the inertia and it is them that should get the praise.
karma karma karma karma karma chameleon, you come and go, you come and go.
MP3 was won.. long before WMA appeared. It offers transparency on all but a few special samples at around 200kbps, and with storage getting cheaper, slightly more efficient codecs (Ogg Vorbis, for example) don't offer enough of an advantage for most people to move. I won't touch WMA with a long barge pole.. just because you made the (mistake IMHO) of going over completely to it, doesn't mean anyone else has to. Go read some very informative discussion at Hydrogenaudio.org for specific technical reasons not to use WMA.. other than being from Microsoft etc. Of course, there is a danger that many people will use WMA just because MS make it easy for them to get into it... but why that's a reason to advocate WMA, i can't imagine. It's unlikely MP3 support will be dropped in hardware any time soon I think... i'd be more worried about your sound quality and portability of those WMA files.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
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.
The consumer - we get sued, screwed, and DRM'd out of our right to enjoy the music we purchase the way we want to.
Of course the player back then would have been a Rio for sure. In fact if you remember, Diamond pioneered the idea not only by releasing the product, but by fending off an RIAA lawsuit that challenged the legitimacy of such products! (Of course the iPod is DRM'd so maybe it doesn't really owe to this legacy).
The iHp-120 is a winner too and it plays Ogg.
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.
Just as every cassette left in a car for a fortnight is destined to turn into a 'Best Of Queen' album, every discussion of digital music on Slashdot must eventually become a polemic re: Ogg Vorbis.
No, the only reason to use WMA is if you're married to Windows. You won't get much use out of it outside that little circle...
I'm being facetious but it's true!
Any and all Linux users can use the full suite of Apple software under Mac OS X; all you need is a Mac. Sure, that forces you to run OS X, but at least you can run OS X under Linux through MacOnLinux.
And the BSD folk will have to settle for OS X itself, which is a flavor of BSD...
The desktop software produced by Apple isn't free, as in beer, or free, as in liberty, but free as in concession: You give and they give, and both win.
Or you can run Windows under VMWare...
Apple's goal is not OS equality (which is why they don't offer their software on all OSes, as that requires tremendous QA resources) or OS alternatives... they only care about making money, and making happy customers. That's it.
If you want to be an Apple customer, you need Apple product. That means hardware+software, or Windows+iTunes. They aren't a charity, any more than you are.
GPL Deconstructed
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?
I just wanted to say that Napster and Gnutella have reinvented how I view music.
Now when I want a piece of music, I have it, and with my computer, my laptop, my MP3 player, my computer at work, and all my friend's and coworker's computers, I can listen to it wherever I go, with no worries!
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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
To be honest, it is one of the stupidest names I have ever heard. I'd feel embarassed about telling someone about my "Ogg Vorbis" collection.
As I recall, someone developed a plugin for Ogg Vorbis support in iTunes. Seemingly, the introduction of AAC should of done nothing to detour the popularity of .ogg. Of course WMA is a different story.
Why would I buy it for? I don't think it's worth buying an expensive MP3 player in order to listen to crappy songs. One way or another, I refuse to encourage the RIAA.
Dear Slashdot Anonymous Coward,
You owe us for 7500+ song playback licenses. Also, cease and desist the use of your mind.
Thanks,
The RIAA legal team
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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.
The iPod is not DRM'ed for MP3s. And for AACs, I don't think its DRM'ed either, but rather, the DRM is in iTunes.
The iPod is just a firewire harddrive that plays whatever files it find in its iTunesDB. I don't really see how they could even do any DRM with that setup.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
No! Not wma! You're forever locked in! Any day now you'll get an error message saying your entire collection is lost. Or the horrid lossy compresion will degenerate to static noise. All I can say is hurry up and switch to Ogg Vorbis. Even if you have to buy another portable music player, it's worth not losing sleep over your music collection as I used to do before Ogg saved my life. And while you're at it, get rid of that windows crap and download linux.
Remember: choice, freedom, open source.
And if you disagree with me, you're contributing to the capitalist pigs profiting from something that should be given away for free that could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. I am an ogg user, and this is my manifesto.
"Motion Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3"
It just rolls right off the tongue...
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
For example, iRATE Radio is a free (as in speech) downloader that fetches MP3s from websites that provide free, legal downloads. It uses collaborative filtering to learn your tastes and select songs based on the ratings of other users who like the same kind of music you do. iRATE's database of MP3 URLs has 46,000 tracks registered.
My article has a Creative Commons license. I urge you to copy and distribute it. In addition, I'm looking for help in translating it to languages other than english. The first such translation, to Romanian, was performed by an incredibly helpful fellow named Ciprian Mihet: Legaturi catre Zeci de Mii de Download-uri Legale de Muzica.
The article also discusses what you can do to make peer-to-peer filesharing of music legal. That's a realistic possibility, considering that more Americans share files with p2p apps than voted for George Bush in the last election.
That's why I want to get every US p2p user to read my article before the upcoming US elections, in November of this year. I want copyright reform - meaning much more than just the repeal of the DMCA - to be a central issue in the upcoming election.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
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...
Excuse me, but how does DVD sales going up correlate with "winning" because of mp3s? Isn't it true that every year more and more people own DVD players, in the home, on their computer. So lets see, "Oh, DVD is a winner cause the sales went up. MP3 is the cause of that!" What kind of conclusion is that? If more people own DVD players compared to last year, naturally DVD sales are going to go up as well.
What's more, it's Free Software, dual licensed under the GPL or their "binary only" license. If you pay for it, part of it will even go to the EFF and Xiph foundations. Check out the OggS project page.
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
There isn't a version of QuickTime or iTunes for Linux and Open Source folk can't even build something compatible since these are closed source, proprietary, etc.
Yes, it's such a shame that nobody can build an open source, interoperable quicktime library. Damn Apple and their closed, proprietary formats. *rolls eyes*
True, DVD is lossy, but at least get the facts straight: DVD uses MPEG-2, not MPEG-4, and its resolution does make sense in the overall scheme of things, since it matches that of its usual destination, a TV. Also, DVDs can encode movies using progressively-scanned frames and simply mark the video stream to be telecined into the interlaced output that most TVs need.
...the spread of the bars on the graph represents the uncertainty of the results, so (even according to those who performed the test and discussed it on HydrogenAudio) it's only fair to declare that one codec is conclusively worse than another when its entire spread lies below another codec's spread. Therefore, the only thing that's for sure is that MP3 is worse than the others. I don't know which samples favor which codecs, but a different set of test samples could have yielded slightly different orderings of the non-MP3 codecs.
That being said, market share is far more of an issue than sound quality.
A few comments on the winners:
>3. Archos
>Continues to own the MPEG 4 video portable
>business with the release of the excellent
>Archos AV320.
Everything I've read/seen/used leads me to believe that the device has an an awful UI. Featurewise it is excellent, but that doesn't necessarily make it an excellent product. Plus, it's %$@% expensive, even for what it is.
>A peek at the future where services like Napster
>and iTunes may soon sell digital files of
>individual TV episodes for $0.50 each
Right, except that iTunes will use some sort of apple-specific (a la ACC) format that won't work on Archos' players, and since you've just told us that iTunes is going to kill everyting in it's path, what's the point?
>7. Roxio
>A healthy promotional campaign along with the
>name recognition has propelled the new service
>to a clear number two to iTunes in the downloads-
>for-sale game.
In what universe is it reasonable to even begin to figure out a number two in this space? It's in its infancy right now, and the landscape three or six months from now probably won't look much like the landscape today. That's even assuming that we ignore the fact that *all* of these services currently lose tremendous amounts of money for their owners, and many will probably soon cease to exist. Napster's new portable player has zero traction right now, and they're still looking down the barrel of the iTunes-AAC-proprietary go-to-hell gun.
A few comments on the losers:
>3. WMA Format
>Even though its use was way behind that of the
>MP3 format, Microsoft's WMA was still a clear
>number 2 - until iTunes came along. Within the
>first few weeks WMA went from place to show,
>supplanted as Apple sold millions of tunes in
>their proprietary version of the competing AAC
>format.
(...)
>The codec wars have started.
No they haven't. There is no codec war. There is an Apple vs. Everything Else , or an AAC vs. Everything Else war. Continued dominance of the iPod is the *only* leverage that Apple has for AAC. I've noticed that absolutely nowhere in this list have any of the new worthy iPod competitors even been mentioned (except briefly in passing) and the author simply assumes the continued massive dominance of iPod, backed up by very little evidence. Also, he completely ignores the flash-based player segment of the market, which is the gigantic monster moneymaker - not HD players.
Don't get me wrong - iPod will still dominate the HD space for a while, but not much longer. There are too many cheaper, better alternatives out there already. Has it not occured to the author that Apple is making the classic Apple mistakes with the iPod?
>6. Ogg Vorbis
>Before iTunes there was only one major digital
>music format - MP3. WMA was a very distant
>second and Ogg Vorbis looked to parlay its open
>source origins into a wide open market and
>become a heavily utilized commercial and non-
>commercial codec
ACC, ACC, ACC! The idea of Ogg Vorbis DRM is almost an oxymoron, and therefore ogg's suitability as a medium for online music sales was always considered to be zero for anybody who had even the faintest idea what they were talking about. Ogg Vorbis is currently a niche codec, but it fills its niche nicely (and will be even better if it can become less of a CPU hog and therefore more suitable to portable devices.)
I'd also like to point out that this guy rambles, as have many others, about the horrible "licensing fees" for mp3 and wma, with respect to portable players. I don't even know where to begin with that statement, other than to say that it's a well-crafted bit of FUD (yeah, go ahead, flame away)
The truth of the matter is that these licenses barely impact the bottom line on devices costing as much as HD players. They are more of an issue with flash-based players, but this author aparently is not aware
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?)
I'm just a bit suprised to hear people actually have entire music collections in WMA format. A search of my Windows partition (no point looking for them in Linux) has discovered... three, all of which appear to be the "sample" files that come with Windows XP! I can't remember ever even seeing them on any legal indie music sites like BeSonic, or in peoples collections in any filesharing programs. I don't think I've ever listened to a WMA net radio station - all the good stuff seems to be on streaming mp3 and ogg. Where, in all honesty, are you people getting them from? I guess I'm out of the loop.
-"I still believe in revolution; I just don't capitalize it anymore." - srini!