Slashdot Mirror
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."
Are these 5 million indivually-packaged 99 cent songs, or are they including songs shipped out under subscription plans as "sales?"
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!
If HP had stayed by Napster's side, I wonder how much more successful things would have been... It is good to see more companies adopting online music downloading for a price, while the RIAA campaigns against it, however it would be nice to have some stiff compatition against iTunes. Remember, competition is a good thing..
Since Napster has a subscription-based service in addition to selling individual songs for a fixed price, what does "5 million songs sold" mean? TFA is useless for this. Are they counting the songs that people download under the monthly-subscription model as songs? If so, it's not quite as impressive, no?
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
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.
You know, I don't care as much who comes out ahead in the online music store wars, just as long as they are seen as a viable alternative to purchasing shiny plastic discs at the mall.
I just got an iPod mini on Friday and was playing around with iTunes. I NEVER intended to pay for digital music, and always expected I would just get it from Kazaa, etc. But when I saw how easy Apple makes it to buy music, I was hooked. I spent about $35 on music, and this is someone who buys 1, maybe 2 cds a year. Things are only looking better from here.
"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 $1 a song."
It's important to note that you still have to pay if you want to burn a song to a CD or otherwise use it outside of your computer. You do, however, get to use the song on up to three computers. Just a point of clarification because the article might lead one to believe that for a subscription fee you get unlimited downloads to use as you please and you really don't.
Keep Smilin'!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Why buy a car? There's loads of them in the street - take whichever one you fancy!
Sorry, but I'm still not turned on to the idea of online music downloads.
Sorry, but there has to be some more incentive for me to buy into the system.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the arguments are very old in this post, and it's all been said before. But nothing's being done, and I'm still not being converted over. Considering how much of a computer user I am, this is rather surprising.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
More importanly, how many of these songs *don't* suck!
Yes, this is Humor!
So are they even, um, breaking even? Given what Steve Jobs said about iTMS and iPods...
"I seem to have mastered a certain amount of control over physical reality."
Who cares how many songs they sell if they're not making enough money to survive. Hell, their parent company has be laying people off recently.
You'll never shut down the real napster!
The original generic sig.
iintegration with portable devices must play a key role in the download volume
Forget that.. it's the fact that Napster forces use of the MS DRM that keeps me from using it.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
Because all that Pepsi *really* makes me have to pee.
The question is, how many people bought the 90 seconds of silence for $.99 track off Napster aswell
GeekLeak.com - Silly name, serious geeks
Competition is a good thing, because is should lead to lower prices. Unfortunately, when there are only a few suppliers, collusion, rather than competition, is more likely to happen.
my endian is bigger than yours!
However, I think the "Napster" branding is an odd decision. Who is still likely to go to napster.com in the hope of finding free music, seeing as it was shut down for years? And in terms of brand image, Napster always stood for getting-something-for-nothing, so isn't it a bit like launching a legitimate online software store called "serials.ws"? I wonder what Shawn Fanning would make of it, as it was his nickname in the first place.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I sincerely wish Apple would do something like this, espescially since I believe they would save a bit on credit-card processing fees (see one of my earlier posts).
They could even do this without cluttering up the iTMS interface by keeping the same "buy song" button. Just have any songs bought be charged against pre-purchased credit before it goes to your credit card on file.
- Neil Wehneman
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
A week or two ago, I saw at a gas station, on the rack with all those plastic phone cards: Napster cards.
It seemed like a clver idea. On the other hand, I was not inspired to buy one at the time.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Did each song generate 0.99$ 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!
iTunes, Napster, and others probably have a lot more to do with decreased usage of Kazaa than the RIAA lawsuits. Eventually Kazaa just becomes too much of a pain in the ass to use considering the alternatives.
Perhaps some accounting type can shed some light on how so much money can be spent on a market that, for the foreseeable future, is only going to generate a million or so after royalties. Haven't we left magic money fairies behind us in the dot com bust? Or are the respected economists of the 80's back to haunt us.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Google has some applicable cache hits.
Mercury News | 02/19/2004 | Smiles fade at Napster
It is my pleasure to serve you caches, for I am a bot.
Apple has admitted that it makes most of its money off of Ipod sales. Where is the similar secondary market for napster? Maybe they are coming out with the NPOD but right now they have to be losing a huge amount of money!
I never thought I would see the words apple and 56% market share in the same sentence.
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.
This reminds me of an episode of the dear departed Drew Carey show. Lewis had just returned from a discount music store, "Music by the Pound" that sold those really deep-discounr CDs no one wants.
"I got the shopping cart, got a few pounds of rock, a few pounds of classical...."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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.
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.
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]
Here's my problem with iTunes.. If you format your computer and did not back-up your downloaded music you have to PURCHASE it again. I believe if I'm paying for music online and do not receive a CD that I own a license and should be able to re-download it again for free. This was a nice little shock after spending $50 on music then losing it. Napster will re-sync your collection if your hard drive crashes, etc. No fee, just hit re-sync and it will download it all again for you. But you are still able to back it up if you choose to. This problem with iTunes will definitely stir some stuff up in the future when some average joe's hard drive crashes and he loses $300 worth of music. It's about the same as someone breaking in your car and jacking your life-long CD collection.
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.
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
Maybe we need to distinguish between *integration*, which is a fine thing, vs. what you actually get today, which is *lock-in*, that is, exclusive integration with only one brand.
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 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.
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
Has anyone tried Rhapsody? If so is the selection and/or quality up to par? I've been considering it for a while now after seeing it running at best buy. 10-15 bucks a month to listen to unlimited songs, and .99 cents to burn a song onto cd(which from there could go on to whatever mp3 player you're using..). To me it seems like it gives the best of both worlds.
"There is no real right or wrong, just what the majority accepts at the time."
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.
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" 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.
I agree with you somewhat. I have bought only a couple of "albums"off of iTunes. White Stripes were one. Didn't think the compressed format would be noticeable on their style of music.
I HAVE noticed however that the AAC's I have downloaded are very good quality, even at 128. And some of my CD's that I have ripped at higher bitrates sound worse. So that tells me that some CD's just aren't recorded too well to start, while iTunes AAC's were recorded off of master recordings.
So the recordings I download may actually be of better quality than many of my CD's. But its still the principle of it that I would like to be able to download a FLAC or AIFF of a song just to ease my mind a little.
They showed how a Celine Dion CD is now louder then a Van Halen cd released in the late 80's because the average "loudness" has been increased so much between then and now.... I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
If the CD's get any louder, the next global war will be fought with Styx and 'Stones.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
This is not 'news'. It is a slick piece of PR from a desperate company. Since the launch of pay-per-song Napster, the parent company Roxio has seen its share price decline from $11 to $3.50, a 68% decline. Yesterday the stock hit a 52-week low (amid a generally happy NASDAQ environment). For this company to generate a mere $5mm in revenues in 3 months can only be described as an unmitigated failure, as the market price of ROXI clearly demonstrates.
/. need to treat corporate PR with a healthier degree of skepticism.
The editors of
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=roxi
1) When Napster gives a marketshare number, the Slashdot masses go on the offensive and try to tear that number apart. When Apple gives a marketshare number, we accept it without question, despite the fact that they are well-known for their questionable sales tactics and misleading facts and figures. Does this imply any sort of bias? Open your eyes and take a step back, you'll start to understand what's happening here on Slashdot. A seemingly grassroots groundswell of support for Apple and their brand of proprietary software, and a seemingly grassroots groundswell of disdain for the GPL.
.Mac accounts, for example.
2) People here are also attacking Napster because of its DRM as opposed to Apple's DRM (which is like saying "I much prefer the Guillotine to the Gas Chamber, they really thought about my comfort in designing it"). However, the most interesting part of AAC is that it is an open-ended DRM, which is to say, it can be strengthened after the market has widely embraced it. Think about it - right now, Apple gives you nearly limitless freedom to pirate, copy, share, and distribute files bought from iTMS. They say the RIAA is good with it. Does that sound like the RIAA to you? Apple admits they lose money on the transaction, hoping to make it up in iPod sales (yes, this is the same Apple who is now charging for iLife).... In 2-3 years, when they have cornered the market, they will change the terms and conditions of sale, just as they did with the "forever free"
Right now, Apple listens to their customers. They do this because they are fighting for marketshare. When you reward them with a monopoly, they will become a monopolist in attitude as well as fact. The goal of Apple and the RIAA is not to beat MS' DRM format, the goal is to beat piracy and kill open formats. And they will, to a large extent; with their hardware and software lockins -- this is quite possible and, in fact, probable -- and is the same idea MS has with their Longhorn / Bios / hardware anti-piracy lockin.
I know you love Apple, but sometimes you have to protect yourself from the ones you love.
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
Unfortunately, weedshare seems to be another DRM format not supported by my hardware.
How many times do I have to say it. My hardware is unable to install your required software.
Stick to industry standards that the hardware already supports. There isn't much out there that can't play MP3's. Very few people are selling MP3's.
Clip from the site,
System Requirements:
A Windows 98 or later PC and a current media player that supports the Windows Media Format. We also recommend a broadband Internet connection, as Weed files average around 5 MB in size.
That leaves out my car jukebox(MP3), my CD jukebox (MP3's only) Winamp on the PC, Living room DVD player (the main audio playback device) and my MP3 player.
Paying a premium to buy music that plays only on the internet connected PC and it's junk speakers is not my relaxing sound system of choice. Don't try to sweettalk me into burning CD's. Why change format twice to get it to a CD MP3 jukebox?
I see no need to burn a CD just to rip it.
Somebocy get a clue and sell tunes in all the popular formats. Those who want Apple format can have it. Those who want MS format WMA can have it. Those who have MP3 jukeboxes... Well we are waiting...
The truth shall set you free!
The story that Apple realizes profit from the iTMS not by selling songs, but by driving iPod sales is a good one, and no doubt there is a lot of truth to it, but I think it is foolish to take it at face value.
Right now, its in Apple's interest to make sure iTMS appears like an unattractive business to get into, because it discourages potential competitors, and the investors who might fund competitors. Meanwhile, the iPod story keeps Apple investors happy.
In time though, as volumes increace, as their initial investment is recouped, as they improve efficiency and lower costs, and as they negotiate better terms with record labels, their story will likely change.