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Napster Sells 5 Million Songs
mattmcal writes "CNet reports that Napster has already sold 5 million songs. The number is impressive despite lagging behind Apple which maintains a 56% market share according to SiliconValley.com. The integration with portable devices must play a key role in the download volume which Apple has also developed for the mini iPod."
"Gorog said he resists comparisons with other subscription services because of incongruities in the way subscriber numbers are reported. But he expects the business will mature as users realize it's cheaper to pay a flat fee for access to 500,000 tracks than to pay $1 a song."
It's important to note that you still have to pay if you want to burn a song to a CD or otherwise use it outside of your computer. You do, however, get to use the song on up to three computers. Just a point of clarification because the article might lead one to believe that for a subscription fee you get unlimited downloads to use as you please and you really don't.
Keep Smilin'!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
According to the press release it is seperate. They've broken up the revenue streams in to categories, sold downloads and subscriptions are seperate.
LOS ANGELES, Calif. - February 23, 2004 - Napster(R), a division of Roxio (Nasdaq: ROXI), today announced that it has recently become the first PC-only digital music service to sell over five million downloads. The Company also announced that it has served hundreds of millions of page views since its late-October launch and has attracted over 1.5 million basic and premium members. Napster, which generates multiple revenue streams from a unique combination of single and album downloads, prepaid download cards, premium subscriptions and the licensing of its popular brand, is expected to generate at least $20 million in music sales in its first year.
>To me, $0.99 per song is still a jack. If a track has 13-15
>songs per album, that's $13 - $15 for all the tracks on the CD.
>Considering that I get no artwork, no packaging, no permanent
>format, that's a rip off.
Picked at random: Maroon 5, their album Songs about Jane. 12 tracks. Album price, $9.99.
If you buy each track individually and end up paying $12 instead of $10, that's your choice.
Most people can't tell the difference between a quality MP3 and a CD; because they aren't listening that closely.
It wouldn't be too hard to study this, hook someone up to headphones, blindfold them, and play them identical excerpts from a CD and then MP3 and make them guess which was which; or just say which was "better quality."
What?
Downloading can be theft, only if the original copy is destroyed when the downloaded copy is made. That way, the operation meets the "taking" requirement of the definition of theft.
However, I've never heard of a downloading system that does this.
shutup. an amiga lover hey. with barely a thousand active users you're complaining about apple only having half the market of music distribution? how blind are you people?
It's AAC not ACC and if you buy an AAC track you can convert it to mp3 and then be cross compatible with EVERYTHING. can't do that with the horrendous DRM on most other services.
Tell me what's Amiga's market share again? go on tell me I dare you.
Usually I like to interject my own thoughts, but I will let the numbers speak for themselves:
4/28/2003 - iTunes Music Store for Mac launches
5/5/2003 - iTMSfM sells 1 millionth song
5/14/2003 - iTMSfM sells 2 millionth song
7/22/2003 - iTMS sells 6.5 millionth song
10/2003 - Napster launches
10/2003 - 300,000 Napster 1st week sales / 1.5MM iTMS sales same week
10/2003 - iTMS for Windows launchs (~13MM songs sold to date)
12/9/2003 - iTMS sells 20 millionth song
12/16/2004 - iTMS sells 25 millionth song (2.5MM/mo.)
2/2004 - Napster sells 5 millionth song (1.25MM/mo.)
On the bottom 1/3 of this page is a chart and analysis of the numbers too.
WARNING: My two cents -
Interesting that while Apple's numbers are much higher than Napsters', and Apple had to overcome the initial proof of concept that it would even work, so many REMAIN critical of the service.
Interesting still is that those same critics won't even spend a few dollars to give iTMS a *TRY* before they ink their mal-informed pens.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
You can now get $15 prepaid iTunes cards at Target stores as well.
1. The most expensive option (per track) is $10 for 40 songs per month. They show you the album cover, but that seems to be all you get.
2. The file format is lossy, but it's also VBR MP3, which can't be distinguished from CD quality audio by many people.
3. DRM is a bitch. That's why they don't use it. Also, much of their music is available to those outside of the U.S., which is something almost no one else offers.
So what's stopping you? I know that a lot of your "favorite artists" may not be on there, but wouldn't you like to support artists/labels that are willing to give you music on your terms? You can preview any track, and download your first 50 tracks for free.
(As an example, if you like synth pop, go to freezepop.net. Download the free MP3s. If you like them, you can get all 4 of their CDs for $32 [or buy them individually, of course.] Lyrics are on their site. This is the kind of band that gets my money.)
Don't like synth-pop? I can recommend something else. There are plenty of bands out there making great music who actually want you to hear it.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
One good thing about CDs is that you can rip the audio and mess with it however you want. Encode it in any format, put it on different players, whatever. On the other hand if you transcode some music that's already been lossy-encoded, the results are bad.
CDs are a compromise, just like anything else
They're a pretty good compromise though. It's the principle of not wanting a lossy-encoded version; just knowing that you're listening to something 'inferior' can be enough of a problem.
The main problem with CDs seems to be clipping from what I've read. ie. if the CD is mastered so that the loudness is increased, the highs and lows just get 'clipped' when they hit the limit of the CD. I remember seeing a waveform of a newer Metallica CD on a website somewhere, and the whole thing was pretty much flat, instead of clear peaks/troughs on the tracks. So the sound is loud but you lose clarity. Or something like that.
AAC doesn't seem much better than MP3 at the moment either. Still going under a lot of development. But who am I to say - a decent MP3 eg. encoded with LAME sounds perfect to me.
the recordings are made from the original tapes (they are not CD rips)
Cool. I kinda imagined an Apple employee sitting somewhere with a huge stack of CDs next to a Mac... one after the other...
I don't listen through headphones anymore, and I haven't bothered to test this way. But through my generic, consumer grade, multi-vendor component system I've found that a 192bit .mp3 encode is a good compromise between sound quality and file size.
In most cases I can't tell the difference between 192 and 256. Or 192 and a CD.
For bands that I really like (Rush, Dream Theater, etc) I'll encode at 192. Also this seems to work out well for reissue/remaster type CD's. Most of the sound seems to be captured in the encoding.
Older CD's and bands that I don't like as much I'll encode at 128. I don't care if Bob Dylan or The Stones sound a little tinny. There's not too much interesting going on in the music anyway. But it's nice to hear the songs.
Oh yeah, here's a great way to play mp3's through your stereo. I have nothing to do with these guys except that I'm a satisfied customer.
wbs.
Huh?
I keep seeing this over and over. Everyone seems to have forgotten that Napster does have a hardware mp3 player. Samsung makes it, but it carries the Napster name, and you can bet they get a piece of each sale.
I buy what I listen to. I discard what I don't.
If you look on my computer, you'll see mostly songs extracted from CD's I own, and Remixes which are free.
I have absolutely no qualms whatsoever with downloading music for free. Doing so has been the source of every purchase I have ever made music wise. Maybe there aren't as many people like me. Or maybe the music industry should re-evaluate the fact that the $1200 or so in music I have comes from discovering it in a free medium.
In the end I end up buying music that I like and appreciate anyway.
If I had no honor whatsoever, I wouldn't own any CD's. They would be all burned CD's lined up along my wall.
Nice try, but my honor is in tact.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Some rips are from the master tapes; some are from the CD. I don't know if there's any way to tell. As for the clipping problem with CD's, that is not inherently a problem with the CD format itself. It is a problem called the "loudness wars." Basically. record companies want their CD's mastered to be extremely loud on the radio with the reasoning that the louder the song is on the radio, the more the listener will pay attention to it.
CD's do have a limited range, but it's not that limited. The problem is incompetent engineers mastering a CD so that the maximum volume is reached almost constantly, creating the clipping effect and taking away dynamic range. CD's from the early 90's are a lot quieter, but you can really feel the loud parts and make out a lot more dynamic in the signal. Think of reading something in all caps and no punctuation vs. reading that same thing with proper punctuation and capitalization. In the former case, your brain receives no queues as to when it should "pause" or take a breath. Everything is the same, so it's more difficult to tell one part from the other. Same deal with music levels. Since the loudness wars have broken out, that dynamic range has disappeared and the only time a song isn't playing at peak volume is when it's fading out. It's really unfortunate.
The "problem" with CD's is the 44.1 K sample rate. A 22KHz sound wave only gets represented by two bits, and with many of the crappy early digital encoders from the 80s, it might not even be sampled from alternate peaks of the wave.
Of course, the typical American geek's hearing pretty much ends around 16 KHz (at best), so you could do as CD zealots do, and insist that anything above that frequency doesn't really matter... except it does, because of the way it colors overtones, which are what gives most sounds their timbre. If you put a typical music-lover in a booth and make them listen to a double-blind test between a live microphone feed of a singer with piano accompaniment, and the same live feed where everything above, oh... say 17 KHz is filtered out, they will spot the difference.
However, most of people's concerns about the compromise of "the digital sound" turned out to be unfounded. Early CD players (and some of the cheaper ones today) sounded too bright and tinny as a result of inferior D/A conversion algorhythms.
When an LP is "cut", the low-frequency waves are dialed way down in amplitude, because otherwise you would have a grove that moves outside the stylus's range of motion! A pre-amp in the turntable (based on an industry standard established by the RIAA) boosts the bass back up again. Unfortunately, this electronic equalization results in massive, boomy, slightly unnatrual bass. Through the 70s, the stereos which did the best job of tweaking LP sources to sound natural gained the reputation of being the best playback equipment. Listening to a good-condition LP on a top-notch 70s "hi-fi" stereo is an extremely rewarding experience.
When CD players arrived in the early 80s, the same stereos that played back LP recordings with a "warm, rich" sounded bright, harsh, and shrill when playing back the same recordings on CD.
Over the years, better logic, better error-correction, and better playback components (as well as better digital encoding in studios) have all resulted in CD's that sound every bit as good as LP's.
In the late 80s and early 90s I was a total LP bigot, but to not change my position these days would be ignoring the evidence given by my own ears. Hearing "Dark Side of the Moon" on a $300 Rotel CD player through high-quality speakers is every bit as satisfying as hearing the LP on a $4000 air-baring, laser-guided turntable, if not more so.
So yea, CD's are not a bad compromise at all.
However, 99% of the time I'm listening to music, it's either on a portable player, in my car, or at my computer desk. In those environments, AAC is not only good enough, it's very difficult to notice the difference between it and the CD.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It wouldn't be too hard to study this, hook someone up to headphones, blindfold them, and play them identical excerpts from a CD and then MP3 and make them guess which was which; or just say which was "better quality."
Be very careful setting up this test - acoustic studies have shown that people tend to choose the louder of two choices as being the one with "better" quality. You must match the sound level exactly to get a fair comparison.
Been there done that.... trashed a box after downloading a few songs. The music wouldnt even synch to the iPod or back from. Couldnt use an iPod extractor to get the music back to the computer.
I emailed Apple iTMS and explained the situation. They tweaked some settings and my music was available for download and reauthorizing onto machines free of charge.
iTMS support said they normally do not support such a request, but since they responded within 1 hour of the original email request with a positive response, and within the another hour to mysecond email requesting that users should be able to deauthenticate machines from within iTMS, I think they would be open to assisting us blockheaded users.
This post deserves a higher score. Let's put this in perspective: what's being touted as an "impressive achievement" is actually a total failure. TOTAL FAILURE! NOT "IMPRESSIVE ACHIEVEMENT"! I know this sounds like flame bait, but actually it's just the facts! Look at ROXI's stock price! This company is FAILING! This is like, maybe, one quarter to one tenth of the songs they predicted they would sell by this time. If ROXI has $5 million of revenues a quarter, then the whole enterprise is a complete disaster!
/.er posts it, and we read about their "impressive achievement".
& z= m&q=b&c=
Instead, ROXI sends a press release (direct from corporate HQ) to the newswires, a clueless
Get a clue, people!
Here's a link to see what the market thinks of Roxio's "impressive achievement".
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=ROXI&t=6m&l=off
For ANYONE who thinks their iPod will re-load their music back to a crashed Mac: NO, it does not work this way. IF you want to preserve your music, BACK IT UP to other media (another hard disc, DVD, CD's if you must) If your machine's disk crashes, and you re-format, upon connecting your iPod, the system will tell you that this iPod is set to another machine. From now on, do you want to sync with THIS machine? If you say yes... then it will sync with your empty machine, which has a "NEWER" database with no songs; i.e., it will synch both the iPod and the Mac/PC to nothing. Back up! Rely not on the iPod. This is a severe misconception.
The next pasture is always greener
The point is that this is not even a story. It's just corporate cheerleading from a failing business.
/. even put this on their website? More importantly, why wasnt THIS press release posted:
Why did the editors of
Reuters
Roxio posts wider third quarter loss
Wednesday February 4, 4:33 pm ET
LOS ANGELES, Feb 4 (Reuters) - Roxio Inc. (NasdaqNM:ROXI - News) on Wednesday posted a wider quarterly loss on continued soft sales of its digital media software to consumers and manufacturers.
Santa Clara, Calif-based Roxio's third quarter net revenue fell to $18.8 million from $26.4 million. Its net loss for the third quarter was $25.6 million, or 92 cents per diluted share, as compared with a net loss of $9.2 million or 47 cents per diluted share.
In late January, Roxio consolidated and restructured senior management as part of its pre-announced plan to cut spending at Napster, the online song-swap pioneer it relaunched as a legitimate online service.
READ THE LAST PARAGRAPH! This is a failing business!
If you can get them to ask the wrong questions, you dont have worry about the answers.