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Warp Records Reject DRM, Go Bleep
DJ Phase writes "Warp Records, an independent label for electronic music (featuring artists such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada), has made their entire back catalog available thru Bleep, a new digital download service. Individual tracks are $1.35 for those of us in the USA, with EPs and full albums in the $4 to $10 price range. You can download Aphex Twin's rare, groundbreaking Hangable Auto Bulb EP for $4.29. To quote from the FAQ: 'We are at present the only store to offer very high quality MP3 files,' and 'Bleep music has no DRM or copy protection built in. We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals'."
I skimmed through the whole list of artists (which includes a number of artists that don't have a whole album, only one track on a compilation CD). I'm not an expert on music in general, and especially not on dance/techno/electronica/whatever the heck this stuff is, but I have only heard of two of the 'bout 100 artists they even list.
This is all well and good and The Way It Should Be (TM), but it's not exactly a major breakthrough on the scale of iTunes changing formats, or Vivendi Universal offering MP3s, etc.
They wouldn't regularly be pirated and be resold if they weren't already pirates themselves.
I plan to buy atleast two albums from this place tomorrow when I go to work and can download them faster.
I like the genre already, and I apperciate the token respect.
at least these guys know NOT to bite the hand that feeds 'em.
if an indie can do this and still keep a good eye on their bottom line, maybe some of the behemoths might take a few pointers and realize that some reasonable control over distribution is far better than no control at all.
very sensible. big up warp!
For continuing to be groundbreaking in everything you do.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
...artists I've never heard of want me to buy their music because they're not using DRM. Uh, that's nice.
If you don't like any mainstream radio music and indie stuff is your cup of tea, that's fine - whatever sinks your sub. I happen to enjoy mainstream rock music and do hear new songs that I enjoy via the radio. For the amazing cost of free, you can experience new music almost anywhere, on a cheap dollar store radio, on a audiophile Hi-Fi set or in your car. Sorry, sitting in front of my computer trying to discover new music by taking time to download things I may not like is not as efficient as listening to the radio while I am already doing some other task, like driving.
The problem is that the recording industry behaves like a bratty child with a lot of really cool toys when it comes to the tracks they play on the air... "Sure, you can play with the ball, but only when I say you can! If you listen to me beg for ice cream for hours, you can play my Nintendo, but only after we play electric race cars first!"
I've always felt that if they play it on the air, I should be able to add it to my collection for free. Judging by current P2P usage despite the RIAA's legal attacks, a lot of people still seem to feel the same way. We want the music we HAVE heard with control to listen to it as we want, not music we haven't heard.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
All of there music is on every P2P service. I don't see what the point is of DRM because all music and movies are always on all P2P services. The only people they hurt with DRM are the honest ones.
I would like to salute the ashes of american flags, and all the fallen leaves filling up shopping bags.
There are people who are acting badly and there are those who aren't.
Many of the RIAA/MPAA actions hurt both groups indiscriminently.
I'm not pirating or reselling their music but their aggravating "copy control" measures means I can't use CDs I buy with my Network Walkman.
I'm not pirating or reselling their movies but their irritating red dots spoil (to some extent) my enjoyment of their movies.
It is unnacceptable for them to be damaging legitimate users in this way. Not to mention the insanity of devalueing their own product in the process. I am not a criminal and won't be treated like one. I therefore do not buy any such product except in rare situations (eg LotR, I'm seeing Radiohead in concert later in the year so actually listening to the CD first is a pretty good idea). I used to buy about 4-6 CDs a month. Since this "copy controlled" stuff started showing up in Australia I have bought precicely three and only the Radiohead one has DRM.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
At first glance, I guess the reason Wrap Records (and most electronic music (EM) companies/artists I imagine) and artists do not complain too much about music piracy and some what embraces it, lays on the nature of the music itself. I believe most EM artists earn their salary through live shows at clubs, festivals, radio appearances, etc, rather than cd sales. By allowing the public to get to know the artist's music, if the fans like it, the more popular this artist gets, the more people at EM events, the more money for the artists. Because EM is not as big as most other genres, in most cases there is not enough budget to manufacture an image for these artists, so talent and popularity, based on the quality of the music itself is what determines the artist's success. Unlike most mainstream music, electronic music focuses on the music itself rather than the artist's image.
:D
Then again, it might just be because most EM comes from Europe (specially Holland, Germany) which well is very open about the whole music piracy issue
[alk]
I actually know at least one song they're selling (since it's on the Pi soundtrack), and would actually be interested in buying the album it's from (to start with), and I've bought high quality mp3s without DRM online (from Magnatune.com) previously. However, the site immediately required resizing my browser and clicking randomly to do anything. And the thing to play a song is flash. I suspect the site is also somewhat slashdotted at this point.
I'm their target market, so far as I can tell, but their site design is too much of a pain to deal with.
For a busy site, there is a huge difference between customers downloading an album in 40Mb of MP3 and downloading an album in 350Mb of FLAC or whatever. They would need way more bandwidth, way more disk space, way more infrastructure.
Considering that most people couldnt tell the difference, it just wouldnt be worth their while.
that they succeed, because if they fail, DRM really will be unstoppable (not technically, of course).
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
What's misleading is the claim that they're the first to do what they do, implying that nobody else has done it better. In truth, Magnatune provides a source file that can be downgraded to a high quality MP3 if you desire to do so, while this service is claiming to be the first to provide high quality MP3s...
Magnatune provides the technically better file, Bleep provides the ready-to-use file that most people would convert their Magnatune files anyway... so Bleep's claim of "first" is pushing aside Magnatune on only a technicality, not a dramatic difference.
That's very impressive, as long as they don't insist on gouging customers for bandwidth. It shouldn't cost more than $2 tops to transfer a full 24-bit album uncompressed.
This is the future of digital music downloads, at least for real music enthusiasts and hardcore fans: get the original masters, higher quality than CDs. I can't stress enough that this is a good thing.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Vinyl cost $5 when I was growing up
In what year were you "growing up," and what was the median wage then?
and there's no good reason music should cost any more than that now. It costs less to produce now
What makes you think that? Production (not reproduction) of copyrighted works is a process of research and development, and historically, R&D has been labor-bound. Promotion is also labor-bound. The price in dollars of labor will tend to rise over time; see "cost-push inflation" in any economics book for the details.
--Quality encoding, even if it is VBR.
wtf?
VBR is the only way to go for a high quality/size ratio, and the only settings that would be better than --alt-preset standard is preset extreme (which doesn't really gain much in quality, only size) or just flat out 320kbps (preset insane). both these settings would add a lot to the file size.
and, yup, lame 3.90.3 is best lame version for use with the presets. so they absolutely know what they're doing.
this is as good as it gets for mp3, if they want to do any better they'd have to encode with flac...
btw, take a look at the forums over at hydrogenaudio.org
I now have yet another site to show to people so they can see how not to integrate Flash with a site.
Hover-scrolling arrows for text? Navigation elements mysterious and small? Strange layouts that are hard to read, regardless of how big or small your browser window is?
As much as I thought DR was cool in high school, they have not changed one whit since 1997. They are just too cool for you.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Second that! Actually, I'm downloading Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works II" as I type this.
-=- 4ntifa -=-
I will even - and lean in close here, peckerheads - pay for stuff that I already downloaded for free just to get the aforementioned nice ID tags and bitrate quality I want, not to mention knowing the artists get their due. Yup. And seeing as I would have paid for those tracks I'm not about to go throwing them on a P2P - they're mine.
Also, I'm not in the continental United States but last time I checked my currency converts into USD just fine but you won't take it (I'm talking to you, iTunes). So here I've been, out in the cold, clutching a fistful of dollars, my nose pressed up against the glass of Apple's spiffy new online music store unable to get in. Then along comes Bleep. Not only do they have stuff I couldn't find on iTunes (Boards Of Canada) but - get this - they will actually sell it to me. So I bought, and I'll keep on buying. I bought songs I had already downloaded for free. While looking for those songs I found more stuff I didn't even know I wanted and I bought those too. Hell, while downloading the big-ass zipfile I went back, had another look and now I have TWO big-ass zipfiles to download.
So in closing let me sum up: treat P2P like what it really is - free advertising and marketing info - embrace it then make the damned music available to buy at high quality and DRM free. Do you really think the success of iTunes is because it has DRM?? Do you know what would happen to sales if the tracks on iTunes suddenly went DRM free? Sales would remain constant, and would even pick up as the word got out to ornery pricks like me who just won't touch anything with DRM in it.
But you won't do any of it and Apple and other non-luddites will eat your lunch.
Bite my balls Dinosaurs,
Angry of Sydney
In many cases, the criminals are better off than the customers. Of course, in these cases the criminals are also known as "executives"
Okay, I just went there for the first time. Now, their artist selection is small. Probably too small to go anywhere. However, from a technical standpoint, they are *spot* on. Besides offering music in the format folks want, they even provide a free Internet radio station that you can listen to. If you hear something that you like, you can zip over to their web site and buy it. That's a damned intelligent system.
If I were them, I'd put out a patch for Shoutcast/Icecast in xmms and talk to the Nullsoft folks about doing the same for WinAMP to stream a "buy it" (or at least "for more information on this song") link along with each song. When a song's getting streamed, the user can just click to bring up a page in their web browser to let them buy the song (or album containing the song, or whatnot). That'd make it ideal for folks who want to sell these things. I think you'd see a lot more try-before-you-buy Internet radio stations.
May we never see th
I would prefer that non-Americans were treated as potential customers too. Otherwise, especially with rare stuff, they might have to remain reluctant criminals.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
I believe potential criminals should be treated like customers too.
While your line sounds funny, it's actually true, since a potential criminal is not a criminal, ie. innocent until proven guilty.
However, while the label deserves credit for not blindly following the myopic behaviour of the big labels and not supporting the police-state behaviour of the RIAA, the system they operate is at heart still wrong. Artists have no business passing ownership of their work to a third party for all eternity, as this just feeds that greed machine and is the real root of all this evil.
There once was a need for placing oneself into perpetual slavery in some circumstances, but that no longer holds in these days of inexpensive small-batch pressing and easy online presence and distribution. Studios and labels nowadays need be no more than technical and promotional subcontractors, not feudal barons squeezing their serfs dry as in previous decades.
The arithmetic of musical serfdom is just plain scary.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Now the only question is, is there anything there that I want to listen to?
I would go so far as to take 20$ from my wallet and pick the least objectionable $20 worth of stuff just to be able to use the example to fsck off the DRM weenies. In fact I probably will.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Being able to tell the difference is really besides the point. Lossless is better simply because it's an exact duplicate of the original, master digital copy. If you have the original master, you can make first-generation mp3's or convert to any other audio format with just a few clicks -- and you can always go back to the master. It's the holy grail. Vendors will advertise this advantage, and it's only a matter of time before the public gains at least a basic understanding of lossless vs. lossy compression. (A good analogy for Joe Sixpack would be CD-quality audio vs. analog cassette tapes.)
As you said, the only thing holding lossless back is bandwidth and disk space. Eventually, when bandwidth and disk space get big/cheap enough, lossless will take over. Lossy will stick around for a while, but as time goes on its uses will be eclipsed by the evolution of bandwidth and disks.
Between this and a couple of other companies mentioned in posts, it sounds like a couple of companies have learned something:
Customer service is the difference between low piracy at a reasonable price and high piracy at any price.
You can acquire music anywhere. You can easy use P2P or copy a friend's CD - the latter has good value as a promotional tool.
But when you treat someone as though they are already a criminal - that they need to protect their music from activities that the end user typically considers legal - the value of music at any price drops. No one can argue that iTunes is unsucessful, but they have a tricky balance - enough DRM to protect against illegal use while allowing quite a bit of fair use. Sadly, this will not last forever. A new tool will come out, or record companies will change terms, or something. Enjoy it while it lasts.
I now respect Warp Records. I'm a sucker for customer respect (part of why I'm satisfied with working at Wal-mart while I'm in college - because they too show genuine concern, at least at 2597 (my store)). I don't even think I had heard of them, but now I'll check out their site. Maybe buy a tune or two.
With only 16 bits / 44,100 Hz you lose a LOT of information. Not being able to tell the difference IS the point.
There's not a bit of flash in tht site. The hover-arrows are all javascript.
Don't be so quick to comdemn flash, if someone wants to create a horrible website, they can do it using anything, even just lots of frames. Flash just gives them more options.
As an example of a "good" flash site, see www.homestarrunner.com. They make creative use of flash, but the pages are still linkable.
Your credit card information wants to be free.
Not to start any trouble here but... Have you ever used Ogg or looked at the codec and/or source? It is superior and compresses better while retaining the same quality as mp3. The developers are extremely intelligent and ogg is being used in many places because of its benefits. EA Games used ogg in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, ogg was used in Soul Rever 2, and in Unreal Tournament 2003. Many developers are starting to realize that it is superior. Linux is arguably superior to windows (and please no comments on GUIs) and Microsoft hired thousands of people to develop that. Just because its free doesnt mean its bad, that is a common misconception. Microsoft can hire whoever they want but they can't compete with brilliant minds across the globe collaborating to produce something better for free. Microsoft uses a ton of free source code for various things and government agencies, like the NSA, have shown that Linux and BSD are more secure and reliable. It's fairly simple to prove that Ogg is of superior quality when you put the codecs side by side.Its one thing to argue about someone's opinion on whether or not something sounds better, but you can't argue anything when comparing codecs. Its clear which is the best, and it just also happens to be free.
Regards,
Steve
Listen for yourself
Or heres the documentation proving it.
This is cool, and definitely a step in the right direction. But for $9.99 I can buy a used copy of most any album, and get full quality sound and the cover art package (which is important to me, although my tastes aren't primarily in electronic music, which seems to often have pretty sparse packaging). If they were selling MP3/ogg singles for, say, 50 cents or less, I would probably buy a bunch as a replacement for things like Kazaa, which are mostly try-before-you-buy mechanisms for me. Still, way to go Warp.
Now, when Relapse Records gets on board with this, I'll be all over it. Those old 7" splits are fucking hard to find.
Just trying to open someone's head! I mean "mind!" Open someone's mind, um, to the possibilities! With explosives!
I understand what you're saying, but as far as the consumer is concerned, the consumer product is the master lossless copy.
That's true, but my point was that technologies like AAC can reproduce the original signal more accurately, at any given bitrate, than a so-called "lossless" encoding like FLAC. Whether that original signal is a high-bitrate master or an analog soundwave is sort of beside the point.
Suppose you encode a ten minute song with FLAC at 44.1kHz/16 bit (downsampled from the original), and it comes out to 50 megabytes. Assuming you had the original master available to work with, you could have preserved the signal much more accurately with an AAC at 669 kbits/sec, which is what the size of that FLAC works out to.
As you say, of course, most consumers don't have access to the original master. But that's no reason to proclaim that "lossless" encoding is the be-all and end-all of audio compression. If recording studios released music compressed from the original masters with AAC at 669 kbit/sec, the accuracy of sound reproduction would definitely beat FLAC at the same bitrate.
yours
i'm sorry but this is actually a VERY well designed page. check warprecords.com for more examples of TDR's genius