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'."
Thank goodness it is Warp Records I get to reward for avoiding DRM, and not K-Tel.
Unencumbered, high quality digital music. With an explicit 'we choose not to treat customers like slime' policy. This is the sort of service I've been waiting for.
iTunes didn't cut it on either point, but it was moot anyway since I'm forbidden from buying from them in the first place due to geography.
Newer compression schemes may be superior to mp3, but as far as accessibility is concerned, mp3 is hard to beat. Nearly anything will play it with absolutely no hassles, including (most importantly for me) your average linux distribution and the iPod. The only thing that would make this perfect would be if there were an option for downloading the music in a lossless format, so one can recode to one's prefered compression scheme.
Now the only question is, is there anything there that I want to listen to?
This is closer to a model I can live with. I'm sorry after having lived through the heyday of free downloads it is going to take a new price point for me. I think a subscription model with unlimited downloads and no DRM is more in line with what i would pay for. I am one of those people who feels no guilt with copying. To support artists I'll go to there shows. Props for being DRM free though.
I would like to salute the ashes of american flags, and all the fallen leaves filling up shopping bags.
Uhm, not exactly.
Warp was (and to some degree still is) THE pioneering label for experimental electronic music. Aphex Twin, who you might not have heard of, is definitely a major influence in a lot of music today. With the increasing use of synths in modern music, you can even hear Warp's influence in music that isn't strictly electronic.
I think it would be fair to say that Warp is the "Blue Note" of jazz music, but I admit that I don't know much at all about jazz, so that might be a dumb thing to say.
Warp records (and Brian Behlendorf, head of the Apache project!) are even responsible for the name of the genre on the label. It's called "IDM" which is short for "Intelligent Dance Music", a name that sounds incredibly stupid and pompous now, especially since much of the music categorized in that genre isn't danceable. But in a post to his new "idm" mailing list back in 1993, brian said he made up the name because of Warp's "Artificial Intelligence" compilations.
Anyway, Warp isn't a major label, but it's defintiely one of the huge, influential indies, so it's nothing to sneeze at.
Well, why bother commenting if this doesnt affect you? As an avid fan of Squarepusher, Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin and the like, I am overjoyed to hear that I am able to hear some of the rare tracks.
To say that this isn't a major breakthrough is wrong. It's a record label, maybe not a HUGE record label that wants to rake in all the money it can get its grubby hands on, but a record label none the less. They are opening up the audio archives and allowing people to hear songs that probably only a few have heard.
And on that note, this is the perfect chance for people to preview these artists. Who knows, maybe they will start to like Intelligent Dance Music?
Simple as that. They're trying to do everything we've wanted to see in online music. Support them, and show that it CAN work.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Oh come one! They've got "Meat Beat Manifesto"!!! They were on the freakin original Matrix soundtrack! Have you been living under a rock? How about Nine Inch Nails? You've heard of them right? They've been on MTV and Much Music!!! (I admit, NiN isn't quite up to the same standards as some of the other artists here, but you must have heard of him!) They've got Philip Glass, who has written tonnes of music including an alternate operatic score for Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast". (which owns Disney's version BTW) He also scored the Qatsi trilogy, but those are art films. Well out of your baliwick obviously.
Electronica isn't everyone's cup o' tea, but it is one of the few musical genres that is currently exploring new possibilities at an explosive rate. (Unlike Rock, Pop, Metal, Country, Rap, etc. which each have a little going on in the fringes, but have mostly stagnated.) Electronica is also one of the genre's that most music stores neglect to a shameless degree. Even when you can find the CD's you want, Electronica is often priced well above most other genre's. The prices on this site are simply fantastic by comparison!
Aphex Twin (Richard D. James) is... unique. Some of his stuff is simply amazing. He creates truly original music that's pushing out frontiers left right and center. Then, every once and a while, he gets the urge to actually sing some lyrics... Ye gods!
I wish the milkman would deliver my milk, in the morning.
I wish the milkman would deliver my milk, when I'm yawning.
I would like some milk from the milkman's wife's tits.
I would like some milk from the milkman's wife's tits.
I would like some milk from the milkman's wife's tits.
.
.
.
(He goes on for a while. You get the picture.)
Let's just say it's a good thing that he usually keeps his yap shut and leave it at that. It just goes to show that musical and poetic genious don't always go hand and hand.
Auterche is another great electronica band that was, coincidentally on the Pi soundtrack with Aphex Twin and a few others. (Great movie despite the bad math.) There is a tonne of stuff here that I'd love to be able to buy legitimately. Frankly, if this service offered music in a lossless format I'd be blowing a wad on it. Perhaps in the future...
I agree with the choice Warp records have made. There will always be people who would buy the records because they really like the group. Sharing music/art is the best way to increase the popularity of an artist.
Its too bad that a lot people tend to look at the money instead of the art. Fame and respect I think are more important than money to an artist, if they have those they will have power to change the world.
I personally respect artists/singers/thespians/.../programmers that do it for the art and not from the money. The Internet is the best thing that has happened to them as it gives them a low cost way of broadcasting their talent and get themselves known and respected by their peers.
But money has its purpose too, here are somethings I would do to make money.
What warp is doing is also respecting the people. Sure some of them may be sending them out to P2P networks, but Warp save money on dealing with legal costs.
This money can be better utilized in advertising themselves.
If I was Warp, I would work with radio stations to add a blurb at the end of music radio stations use to go to their website.
Some of the lower end or archived music that is not making too much money I would put on P2P networks as long as they will provide some advertising spaces on their clients. Or the name of the song. With authorization from the artist of course. But I will not give any money to the artist at that point since its not really something that I can make profit on, but at least it will give the artist more exposure for little cost, because we'll just be putting it up on a low end, low bandwidth server probably on a home DSL line and let P2P do its work. We'll just add the ed2k hashes on the website. We would tack in information about how to go to the website within the file names and the ID3 tag.
I would work as the middle man between an artist and concert halls or restaurant gigs. Basically add an extranet for smaller concert halls and restaurants to request artists and artists can put their availabilities on the system, kinda like a scheduler.
I will also partner with an auction site such as eBay to sell products related to the artists.
I would also provide a utility that would provide the creation of custom made CDs which contain songs for an artist or maybe more. Perhaps release it as a Java WebStart program so I do not have to deal with a lot of bandwidth costs for running a webapp.
We would put in information about the song on moodlogic as well, its best to have the correct information from the source.
Its Artists "on demand"
Archie - CIO-for-hire
The catalog is a bit light on the options but there's definitely some tasty aphex twin in there and some prefuse73 and others. The sections currently are:
The check out and download was quite simple: Most of the detail below...
1. Registration was quite easy. just name email address and password.
2. they're taking paypal and mc/visa and SMS text message.
3. They report as you put things in your cart. "Total download size" of my purchase in XX.XX MB and Estimated download time (via 512K DSL/Cable)in MM:SS. The 512k DSL measure is actually accurate for my connection so I'm not sure if they are sniffing or if that is just a metric they decided to standardize on.
4. With my purchases, (indeed the old Aphex Twin stuff (good stuff BTW)) I tried to use paypal and got a " Waiting for a paypal payment report..." in the checkout pane and it kept refreshing but reporting nothing.
5. So I bit my lip and hit the back button (I'm using Mozilla 1.6b). and amazingly enough was actually back at my Paypal Credit/Debit Card option.
6. Checkout was pretty standard and very straightforward with a few unusual options I wasn't used to (I'm from the U.S. so maybe some of this stuff is normal in the U.K./Europe)
7. Interestingly theres the follow card descriptions in the dropdown. Electron Eurocard Mastercard Visa Visa Debit
8. Expiry date are xx Month and xxxx year which is nice unlike the annoying (to me anyway) spelling of the month option
9. There is also a "For Switch and Solo cards only:" Section with "Start Date:" "Issue Number:" fields
10. Strangely you then only have the option to add this information you've filled out to your profile.
11. You then loop through a more normal check out where you can select the card you want to use from a dropdown or add a new card (presumably you'd loop through what I just went through)
12. and you get "When you select 'Process Order' below your card will be debited with the total amount of $X.XX" info and are given a process order button.
13. The frame refreshes and you get "ORDER CONFIRMATION" message and "Your order has been processed succesfully." and a "DOWNLOAD YOUR ORDER" option.
14. It chugged a bit then spit back my dowloads as one big zip or as each track. with the following info below. "Click on the links above to download your tracks. PC users: You will be presented with a 'Save As...' dialog box, use this to choose the location on your local hard drive you wish to save the file too. MAC users: By default tracks will download to your Desktop, unless you have specified otherwise in your browser preferences."
15. I selected the ZIP option and the frame reloads with a bit of chugging then
"ZIPPING YOUR ORDER" "Your order is zipped and ready for download..." "Once your order has started downloading then you may continue browsing the site."and a "DOWNLOADS" button to click.
16: the Download time was respectable even with the site getting slashdotted and every IDM geek, all of which are plugged into computers incessantly (ahem... unlike myself. That's why I'm so tan... or something...), checking it out at the same time.
17: oh also, across the top nav you get the following options: LOGGED IN AS emailuser@emailaddress.tld - LOG OUT - YOUR ORDER - DOWNLOADS - PREFERENCES - FAQ - HELP - That's pretty much it. Damn well done I'd say.
Heil Sig! -Rob
I got this album off Emusic last year, and now it has crawled inside my brain and won't get out. I'm not big into electronic music, but I listen to a lot of stuff, so I figured I'd add this. The first few times through it doesn't seem like much of anything, but then it gets hold of you and won't let go.
I got several different Boards of Canada albums and eps from Emusic, as well as music by other Warp artists. (They were available on Emusic back when I had an account, I don't know about now.) So I'm legal. I don't need to buy these albums from the Warp website. But I also know that Emusic paid the artists basically nothing, so I figured I'd head over to the Warp website to pay a second time for some records I've really enjoyed.
Before I got to the website, I decided that the sweet spot was $5. I'm willing to pay -- A SECOND TIME -- $5 for each Boards of Canada album I downloaded from Emusic. (Since Emusic had no download limit back then, everyone on the service, including me, was basically downloading everything they could find -- hey, I found some bands like Boards of Canada!)
But when I got to the Warp website, the price was $10. No way. Vinyl cost $5 when I was growing up, and there's no good reason music should cost any more than that now. It costs less to produce now, and it costs less to distribute. $10/album is too high.
So Boards of Canada has my admiration, and I appreciate what Warp is trying to do, but $5 is the point where my wallet opens up. I guess I'm just not in the "target audience," even though I like the music.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
What I want to see, (and if any of you venture capitalists out there want to pump some money into it, contact me through slashdot) is [story follows]:
When I lived in Indonesia a few years ago (well, about 20) we used to go to the [pirate] tape shop. We (that's the entire family, mum, dad, me and definately baby brother) would spend hours in the Delta tape shop listening to music at a table on headphones, deciding what of that music we wanted to buy, and then buying what we liked (prices were cheap). I was 10. I bought Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk, the Chipmunks, Hall and Oates (I am ashamed of that one), Hooked on Classics (a bit embarassed about that), Queen, the Police, The Who, and more music than the average 10 year old would find difficult to imagine, both in terms of quantity and quality. It was a nice social event, and I have very fond memories of it.
Now. I have recently fixed up my old CDs to live on a new 30gb hard drive and a dedicated ogg player - old p100 laptop with the jukebox running as root so that ogg123 can run nice -20 or whatever, so I'm sold on digital formats for music rather than having to rely on one piece of removable media per artist or compilation. However downloads do not cut it for me. Me, and most of the rest of the global population are stuck on dialup or no convenient internet access whatsoever. But, we would benifit from the digital revolution.
So: what I want to see is a shop with a load of tables and a load of headphones [you can see where this is going], in a real bricks and mortar shop where you can listen to potential purchases burn CDs, save to removal media, save to hard drive, your iPod and so on. You sell your tracks or albums at a reasonable price, you turn your shop into a social hub, and you can carry an enormous back catalogue, beyond the wildest dreams of music stores as they currently exist. More by using tools like debian's apt-proxy. As far as I can see, this would be like a licence to print money once you get the labels or the artists on board.
So, what would it take. A few terabytes of storage. Cooperation from a critical mass of music distributors. A couple to a few months of time for a small team of programmers.
So, who's going to do it. I'm available as a consultant.
"...we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." B.Spears 2003
...why is Drukqs a corrupt "copy protected" CD in Germany? Was it re-mastered by another company beyond Warp's control or something?
OK say you have 400 CD's.
Keep good enough record and you can buy them back from the insurance when some shite steals them.
What if the bugger steals you computer with 400 CD's worth on your hard drive?
Thats like 4-6 grand worth to get your collection back (assuming 10 song per CD on average)
With the insurance I have I'm SOL.
What about yours?
Quack, quack.
Doesn't really matter who their bands are, they are still doing stuff for the best interest of us (they dont really need to). Artists do need to start somewhere, and MP3's are the best way, the RIAA tries to punish smaller artists. If all the smaller companies do something like this, the amount of variety on our radio's once again will be massive, instead of the same 20 songs being played over and over again, the ones being pushed by the big companies. So, no matter how small the music distributor, this is great for us and all musicians, because maybe for once we wont need to put up fully with the teeny boppers choice of music on the radio, because everyones choice of music will become broad enough that we wont just be listening to what the major music companies shove down our throats
That should have read "Richard D. James". He uses several aliases including Caustic Window and Polygon Window which are also featured on Warp Records.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
As a long-time Warp/SKAM fan, I couldn't be happier to see something like this both for them and for us. Also, it looks like if you're running IE on Windows (and presumably at least some other browser/OS configuration) you can also stream every one of the audio files, so the whole thing is even "listen before you buy".
As an avid mp3 trader, I can see myself using this a lot. Stuff I could only find before @128k bitrate (not good enough), or wasn't able to find, etc.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
From the FAQ:
Q: I AM IN SOUTH AMERICA/ALASKA/THE NORTH POLE, DOES THAT MATTER?
A: As long as you have an internet connection and a fairly modern browser (Internet Explorer 6, Safari 1.0, Firebird 0.7) you can access and use Bleep.com anywhere in the world, whether using an Apple Mac or a Windows based PC. Lots of bandwidth and a fast connection obviously helps too
I wish all the CDs I bought were like that.
That's strange, I some of the early Pulp L.P's were on Warp Records, but I can't find them on this site. They were the rare classics that I couldn't afford when I was really into them at Sheffield Uni in the early 90's.
As one of the most famous bands to have recorded for Warp, it is a bit surprising that they don't sell Pulp. Come on Warp, sort it out, I'm ready to buy.
Magnatune is a social experiment of sorts which may or may not have good music. I don't know. However, the fact I don't know whether they have any good music does say something.
Warp Records, meanwhile, was for quite awhile the most important and progressive group in electronic music, and while I haven't been paying enough attention as of late to know if they still hold this label, I know for certain they continue to push the boundaries of the art.
Perhaps they are not "first" at this particular thing, but they have been offering significant amounts of downloads as samples of parts of their albums for years.
And if you do want to get into a pissing contest of which label "got it" first, my nomination would be Astralwerks. They had, in like 1995 or some shit, I don't even remember, back around the time Dig Your Own Hole was released, before MPEG Layer III even *EXISTED* and when MPEG Layer II was a format almost no one used, realaudio offerings of absolutely huge swaths of their catalog. For most of their releases about that time, you could listen to about half the album without buying it. They also ran a web newsletter letting people know when they'd put up more music, and they'd periodically do one day events where you could listen streaming to entire albums on the day they were released. This was essentially my introduction to electronic music, and I seriously think it helped them-- it led to me buying a decent amount of Astralwerks stuff even though I had to do a decent amount of searching for it at the time...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I noticed they only carry Warp's catalog in MP3 form, although the Warp Mart online CD/vinyl service also carries SKAM, Rephlex, and many others. Too bad, I was hoping to pick up the tracks that weren't on the Caustic Window compilation due to copyright or some other nonsense.
:)
It will be interesting to see if they release the unreleased Aphex stuff, like Analog Bubblebath 5, or Melodies from Mars, both of which I have on mp3, but poor quality. I would most definatly buy high quality VBR versions.
I own most of the Warp catalog in analog, record form. I think the tracks sound harsh and thin on CD. Autechre's albums in particular, sound nice, full and meaty on vinyl, come out with messy treble and anemic bass on digital. I belive one of Autechre's releases even says "Incomplete without record pops and clicks."
I most definatly WILL use the service to download the rare albums I don't own. Hangable Auto Bulb is almost impossible to find in the states, and the second version is even more rare.
I wonder if they would sell T-shirts digitally? Still looking for an AFX one
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
plaid and squarepusher are also on this label. i hope they'll put some rephlex stuff on there soon.
Quite right. In fact the track "Come to Daddy" should be the RIAA themesong. "I want you're soul... i will eat your souuullllll." I can't recal the other track names off hand, but this CD is good.
Selected Ambient Works Volume 1 is good. Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 is off the wall insanely good. Compeletely different, stylistically from Volume 1. I think Vol.2 is what the parent was talking about in terms of "Whale Music". I think it was reviewed once as "if the monolith in '2001: A Space Odyssey' could make music, this is what it would be". Download both "CDs" of this album and listen straight through. Great to code or paint to.
Druqs has some crazy stuff. a lot is not that great, but track 10 disc 1 "10 Mt. Saint Michel Mix+St. Michaels Mount" is very fast, very cool, and very loud.
Then you can always download Aphex Twin's Pacman or Tetris remixes... rule.
Ok I just spend 100 Euros on the store...
LFO
Boards of Canada
GAK
F.U.S.E.
Aphex Twin
Jimi Tenor
It's great, for my part - I love it!
In fact, that's precisely what gets me to buy music:
... I don't BUY any music, either.
1) download MP3 with interesting title
2) decide I kinda like it
3) decide I want to hear more
4) download everything I can find by same artist
5) put them all in my playlist and get addicted
6) buy every album I can find by said artist
Interspersed with "tell my friends about it, who then go do the exact same thing".
This is exactly how it went when I was DJ'ing where I could tape any album I wished, too. Tapes and MP3s are okay for everyday use, but for archival purposes, I want the real thing.
OTOH, when I have no good way to freely sample AND become addicted to someone's music (there being no radio to speak of here, and steaming on dialup is not realistic)
Note: short clips have never once addicted me to an artist. In fact, I find they're more annoying than useful.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?