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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."
Everyone else is an also-ran for the forseeable future, IMHO. It'd take a pretty big hitter (and Napster aren't big enough) to break it, with a significant investment. Frankly Apple are doing what the RIAA etc. should have paid someone to do a long time ago...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
They did not sell any to me. I was looking to buy some songs, but Napster's meagre catalog did not have them. They were only available via "outlaw" p2p.
If the RIAA is going to stem piracy and make money, they should actually take some effort to sell the music.
Why buy a car? There's loads of them in the street - take whichever one you fancy!
Sorry, but I'm still not turned on to the idea of online music downloads.
Sorry, but there has to be some more incentive for me to buy into the system.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the arguments are very old in this post, and it's all been said before. But nothing's being done, and I'm still not being converted over. Considering how much of a computer user I am, this is rather surprising.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Taking a car like that is theft. Downloading (creating a duplicate of something) does not meet the definition of theft.
If you want a comparable situation, why don't you find a nice shiny Porsche parked along side the street. Build an exact replica of this car, and drive off in the replica.
Apple == You own data.
Napster == Your rent data.
Who want's to do that?
Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"
Competition is a good thing, because is should lead to lower prices. Unfortunately, when there are only a few suppliers, collusion, rather than competition, is more likely to happen.
Did each song generate 0.99$ or are these from the University contracts allowing all students to download at will. This is a huge difference. Does anybody have the contract details of the University deals? Is it a blanket fee or reduced charge per song? If students get 'free' unlimitted downloads and are all on T1/T3 lines, of course, 5e6 songs are easily downloaded. This is not surprising.
Hey, leave comments about my mother out of this!
What isn't viable to me is paying for poor-quality sound. Music with a full dynamic range (classical, some jazz) suffers from lossy compression.
Online music stores will be viable to me when I can download the same sound quality that I can buy on a disc from a meatspace establishment or from Amazon and MyMusic.
- - -
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I can't use it here in the UK (*). Napster is ok, but I still find the depth of tunes is not really to my tastes, plus I own and iPod, so WMA files really don't float my boat when it comes to music on the move.
Add to that the DRM issues and to be honest, I don't really want that much hassle when I decide to upgrade/reinstall my PC, so in the long term, both iTunes and Napster won't do it for me I'm afraid. Call me a stick in the mud, but I'm not supporting anything that deprives me of my basic consumer rights.
So, I tend to support smaller non-DRM'd operations like Bleep, which is worth checking out if you like your coffee table electronic music...
(*) I've always wondered why global record corporations have so much problems sorting out global rights, which is apparently why iTunes is not happening outside the US.
Ok I'll try to look over the simplistic nature of your comment and explain why:
1. Ease of use - No more trying to track down songs and not being able to find them for months. If I see it on iTunes, I can have it right then. This is especially good for full albums.
2. Good quality - No more 56kbps mono files mixed with 192kbps stereo files. No more shitty rips with skips in them.
3. Uniform ID3 tags - Nothing pisses me off more than opening up an MP3 I just downloaded and seeing the album name or artist name is "++{Ripped by tHe eNfOrCeRz}++" or something equally lame.
4. Probably some other stuff that I can't be bothered to think of at this time.
In the end, it's worth it to me.
I disagree. Average three songs per user is a huge amount when considering that probably all of these songs are available via eMule and others for free.
Also the "7-day free trial" must have made a number of curious people register without purchasing anything. So I'd say an average *money paying* user has purchased an album's worth of music.
Don't fool yourself into thinking CDs have 'full dynamic range' of sound. CDs are a compromise, just like anything else. No, they don't have lossy compression, but they do have limited range. While the AAC files on Apple's music store use lossy compression, it's a much better technology than the 10 year old mp3 format -- and the recordings are made from the original tapes (they are not CD rips).
Recording sound is all about compromise. Don't base your judgment of one format over another based on a single word like 'lossy'. Listen to a few songs on the music store and let your ears be the judge.
The great thing about the heyday of Napster/Kazza/others was the great availability of rare recordings-- Live Rush stuff, really old Pink Floyd, hard to find CSNY. The record companies have made it so, once again, we are not "allowed" to listen to this great stuff.
I checked out Napster just today. $9.99 a month and $.99 for a download. Big whoop. If I want to buy an album its still going to be $10-$20, depending on how many songs are on it, but now I get to pay an extra $9.99 a month to have the privilege to download.
IMHO, if you only download a couple of songs without getting the album, you are missing some great traks (b sides). Of course, this is only true to real music, not the boy band and rap crap that is popular these days....
[FromTheMorning]
Agreed, its well known ITMS doesn make money *PROFIT* on its music sales directly. If this is true and volume doesnt matter. Napster has to be bleeding.
Frankly I would think ITMS would have better negotiation ability for costs as wel. Napster just doesnt seem to me as having the ability to get a the best deal. Given their history and all.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Crapster has been trying to get me to download "5 trial songs" ever since they got back into business. If I downloaded these, would they count toward Crapster's running total? That's not a terribly fair assessment if you ask me...
:wq
I view this pay-per-download thing just as a painful transition to a better world.
The technology has advanced enough to enable any Johnny B to make as many copies of digital anything as he wants. No RIAA, DMCA, CIA, or YMCA is going to stop the inevitable.
Wrong strategy: Instead of pursuing those who try to profit distributing fakes to people and are the big players costing the consumer as well as the author rights owner, the reseller and the producer big bucks, companies try to maximize their current net gain by restraining the choices of the regular Johhny B. As if the mainstream and biggest selling hits were immortal works of art that need to be treasured in vault rather than a day-to-day fad, only to be forgotten if not accessed in the same month.
Right strategy: Adapt. Face the fact that for a product to succeed, it must be cheaper and better than something one can-do-himself in his home.
The age of expensive CDs is over. Vynil was cheaper to buy than to copy, but people always liked to use cassete tapes for copies - who was nuts enough to pursue that?
Customer will, eventually, stop at some point to let themselves be squezzed out of every penny. Not to mention the third world who is quick to pick on some of the technology, but much less willing or able to follow royalty and copyright practice.
Prices will have to fall, be it media sets or download options. High prices and limited access are only a road to oblivion. Furthermore, new inventions may well push current technology out of the market.
What you describe is not like someone breaking in your car and "jacking" your lifelong CD collection. It's like you got high, took it to the dump, and threw it in.
No one's forgotten that, because they never knew about it in the first place. People do know about the iPod. See the difference?
You can download music from a service like eMusic in VBR MP3 format. However, the first half of your point 2 negates point 1. Record labels who own "popular" music will not, in the near future, offer music on the terms that you want. You have to stick with labels who still value music more than money.
As for point 3, your "or better" stipulation is silly, as most music from the past 30 years was not mastered in anything higher than CD quality.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
What they've been selling is revocable licenses to decrypt. When they go belly up, a lot of people are going to find that out the hard way.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The problem is different. If you want to get the best out of iTunes, you have to buy an iPod. For Napster, any MP3 player will do. So a customer for iTunes means almost invariably an iPod sold. A customer for Napster doesn't mean anything for them in terms os hardware.
Write boring code, not shiny code!