Slashdot Mirror
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'."
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.
You might not have heard of them, but lots of people have. Lots of people who might not be avid Slashdot readers or care much about the issues usually discussed here. And they're artists who -- until now -- haven't generally been available on other download services. For those of thus who like the stuff Warp puts out, this is a good thing.
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.
That would explain why you haven't heard of most of those artists. I couldn't name you any Country Music artists other than Garth Brooks... that doesn't mean a thing.
For continuing to be groundbreaking in everything you do.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
You mean *you* haven't heard of these artists. I've been listening to experimental electronic music for, hell, more than a decade, and I own most of the CDs that Warp ever put out. Warp is like the grandaddy of the "intelligent electronic listening music" (IDM, EBM, "braindance", whatever) and it's cool to see this. Some of that old vinyl goes for hundred's of $$$.
It would be cool to see this stuff on iTunes too but this is great.
Yeah I'm heartbroken that I can't download Brittany Spears from the service. Instead I can buy the really cool bands that I listened to as a young teenager. I can't help you if you haven't got taste. Maybe you should invest in some of the files offered on the service.
The point is that this is the way that songs should be sold on the internet - whole back catalogues offered by the labels themselves. Maybe one day we can have some API that will let companies offer many labels' music from one site, but right now the lowest-common-denominator approach taken by Apple and others will not promote competition and better deals for customers.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
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]
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.
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
By that I mean, for a start:
- No. Flash-intros I have to click "skip" to even see the site are not cute, nor do they "brand" you as anything but an annoyance.
- It's perfectly acceptable to have text be text. You don't actually have to make all your text-links in the form of small gifs with text on them.
- We don't actually *need* a "unique" navigation-system on every site. A menu across the top, or along the left border will do fine thank you.
- Not everyone has the same font-size configured. If your design looks fucked in anything but the size you use (i.e. elements come out ontop of eachother) your design sucks.
Look at the Really successful sites. It's no accident that they all follow all of these rules, more or less. You can fully utilize Yahoo, Ebay, Slashdot and Etrade without being forced to deal with any of this crap.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
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.