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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'."
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?
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
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
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