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Audio Lunchbox: Music with no DRM
An anonymous reader writes "MacCentral just posted an article on Audio Lunchbox, an online music store dedicated to music by independent artists and labels. ALB offers all of its music in DRM free MP3 (192 kbps) and Ogg Vorbis (Q6) formats with iTunes style pricing and a completely web based and platform independent delivery system."
3 cheers for ogg vorbis support!.
I didn't think I'd see it happen. THIS is a service I'll support simply due to that feature alone.
After the clamouring for ogg support that all other stores outright reject, I can see big things for these guys
Of course these are the little guys. They will have a very hard time with the big boys of the music industry trying to squash them. (They view them as a threat... like they view just about everything.)
The only thing that will decide if they can stay in the fight is if their business model pays off. If it does, small, independant producers to nudge out the bastards that run the show right now. Which brings me to my next point...
Buy music from these guys! Find something you like and buy it. If you're not sure what to buy, buy from several bands and try them all. If you don't like any of it... buy a lot anyway! Help them give the boot to the established (bully) companies out there.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
In case you've forgotten, the record Labels are evil, because:
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
Am I the only one who doesn't bitch about 99 cent pricing? Bitch about the DMA all you want (I'll be right there with you) but don't bitch about the pricing.
How much work do you think goes into writing the average book? A new hard cover typically goes about $20-$40.
I'm not suggesting that it's as hard to make an album as it is to write a book but there's at least as much creative talent at work here. That sort of talent deserves to be fairly compensated. Could you or I do it?
If you want to bitch about something bitch about RIAA taking 90% of that $0.99 when all they did is market the artist in question. The $0.99 itself isn't the problem.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
This is great, especially compared to iTunes, which uses a crippled non-standard AAC format that requires the kludgey solution of burning to CD and then ripping to OGG or MP3 in order to have useful files that you can listen to.
The quality of Ogg and MP3 is pretty good (certainly better than radio) but I want to be able to build an online music collection that is comparable in quality to my offline one; i.e., one that does not suffer from the high-end noise that the lossy formats have.
Otherwise, I might as well go back to vinyl.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I don't know.. I'm not a fan of iTunes in the least, but I do like the idea of DRM free MP3s 192 Kbps and Ogg Vorbis Q6. I would like to see more of the money actually go to the artists though, instead of apple's piddly couple of cents per download. I mean that just encourages the rape of musicians (I'm not talking about pop musicians that sell millions of songs, but smaller bands that barely make do).
Let me help those of you who may not know... it costs a lot of money to write and get a good recording of a song. If I were to only charge 25 cents for a recording that cost me $500 of my time, it would take me 2000 copies, versus perhaps 500 copies, to get at least to a gross return on my investment. What makes this website cool is that the artist doesn't have to sell as many tracks as they otherwise would, because the artist is getting a bigger payout than pretty much anyone offers. Considering that this is the case, is it worth your 99 cents to get the track? Yes, because that 99 cents goes a lot farther towards helping that artist than it would for say, Britney Spears, who probably gets a tiny fraction of that sale and could really care less. Oh yeah -- she doesn't write her music anyways, so it's kinda moot to discuss her, but you get the point.
stuff |
These days with $0.99 you can't even buy a meal.
For $0.99 you get a song for a lifetime.
Sounds like a bargain to me.
The only ones who really win are the VISA and MASTERCARDs who get a cut of EVERY sale anytime one of them is used. Why else does Apple bunch up all of your purchases made throughout the day to a single transaction at night???
If they could implement a credit style system, pre-pay if you will, they will be able to avoid the 30 cent (or more) per transaction overhead and lower prices. Maybe if when you set up an account, you buy a $20 credit or so, similar to how iTunes does it with their gift certificates (which only makes Apple MORE money since they don't have to pay the transaction fees on gift certificate purchases -- and they don't pass the "savings" on to you....)
More options are always a good thing, especially with DRM-free formats.
What exactly do you mean by "Don't touch this button?"
Keep in mind that
/. readers this is a nice place to find new things to listen.
a) they are being slashdotted now, slowing down their site
b) They are INDIE artists, you won't be able to search for things that are "mainstream" and expect to find results. The idea is finding new artists here, rather than massively promoted RIAA ones.
c) Music isn't cheap to produce. I think their pricing structure is really quite fair, and they probably can't afford to lower prices. I'm more than willing to pay $1 a song for music I like. Music is music, is doesn't matter to me if it comes from a major label or not, if it's actually good.
Maybe this service isn't for you, but for a lot of
Am I the only one not busting a nut at the chance of paying $0.99 to download one song?
Precisely!
The problem is the same one that kept me -- a fan of classical music -- from ever making many impulse buys of classical music in record stores.
It's difficult to tell a good CD from a bad CD without first listening to it.
With Indie music, the problem is compounded: a bad recording of Bach's The Goldberg Variations is still a recording of Bach's The Goldberg Variations. A bad recording of a bad Indie composition called "Crumpetty Crumpetty Bug-a Lug-a Bomf" is an irredeemable waste of 99 cents.
Back when eMusic.com allowed unlimited downloads, this wasn't a problem: I could try out an artist I'd never heard of, and if on listening I didn't like his work, I was out nothing more than the time to download that album. Now that eMusic.com limits me to 40 tracks per month, I'm stuck with the same problem as in the record store: how do I apportion my limited resources without getting burnt?
The safe answer to this quandary is to only purchase music that you know well, or is popular, to some definition of popular. "Popular among listeners of folk music" doesn't result in my getting pablum as bad as "popular among 15 year-old girls", but using either definition of popular means that newer, less knowm and Indie artists won't even be considered for purchase.
The other answer is to spend a lot of time reading reviews, asking advice of other listeners, and otherwise doing research; the problem is that that's costly, in terms of time, too. How much, exactly, is getting good Indie music supposed to be worth to me?
So when I see stuff like Audio Lunchbox or MagnaTunes, well, I like the idea but I'm inclined not to part with my money, for fear of buying bad music. Since I already know that anything by Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger or Wilhelm Furtwangler will be good, my inclination is to spend my money on CDs by these well-known artists.
As a consequence, I'll avoid the bad Indie music but I'll also miss the good Indie music.
But I'd be far more willing, as the parent poster suggests, to take a risk on Indie music if the risk were smaller: at $2.00 per album I'd be able to get five albums for $10.00, as opposed to one for $9.99. If the odds are that one of those five would be good, then I'd have the same number of good albums for the same price: one good album for ten bucks.
And having found a good album, I'd be willing to pay somewhat more for another album by that same artist -- though I still probably wouldn't be willing to pay what I'd pay for Bob Dylan.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Why the hell would I wanna pay $10 for an MP3 download when I can buy the real thing (including postate) for $11-$12, or used on Ebay for $7-$9.
You go to the site, look around, sample some tunes, and download/purchase the ones you want. Cuts out the whole, "go to amazon/ebay, purchase, wait for delivery" phase. Perfect for todays instant gratification based society.
The reason people download music and not books is that it is cheaper and easier to download and burn to a CD. If you buy a hardcover for $40, you're paying $35 for the medium, not the content.
With peer to peer, the medium has been made enormously cheap. Why are we paying $.99 for a track (equivalent to store prices) when their distribution costs are all but eliminated (bandwidth + servers are much cheaper than stores, staff, shipping, and packaging).
Lossless does not mean the recording is lossless with respect to the performance; it means that once it is digitized, it has been compressed with no further loss of information. The whole point is that if you have a FLAC version you can convert it to whatever format you want without the transcoding artifacts you would get from lossy to lossy.
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
From http://audiolunchbox.com...
192 kbps VBR MP3 Audio Files
I'm confused...which is it? 192Kbps or VBR? And if it's VBR, what quality?
I'm somewhat disapointed that out-of-print stuff isn't available through here though. They distribute albums on Epitaph Records, but none of the albums no longer produced are available. I think this would be a great way to let people get ahold of those old albums they can't buy any more, since it involves 0 cost for the label to provide the mp3s.
Emusic on the other hand offers at least some of the out of print albums in DRM-free mp3 form. Unfortunately, I tried their service once and found the quality of mp3s sorely lacking...one album I downloaded crackled audibly through the whole thing.
Artists need to be compensated, but I agree with the parent poster. The value we get from a single track != $.99. I think what bothers me about it is the mp3 is intangeble. If I went to the used CD store and spent 8 bucks on a CD, I'd have something I could resell if I got sick of it. If I download, say a whole album, for $9.99, I can't transfer ownership to anyone else. It seems like downloading songs is more like a service than purchasing a product. Don't get me wrong, I love the mp3 format, but I think I'll save it for converting my music that is purchased on CD's(used CD's because I'm cheap)
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Why are you such a cheapskate? 25cents a song, come on!
Albums at $10 is the right price point, you're seriously suggesting that an album should cost less than a magazine or a big mac meal at McDonalds? Less than half of the cost of one ticket to the movies?
Think about it in terms of value, an album can give you many hours, even years of enjoyment. If you can get CD for $10 in the shops then fair enough, do that. Most of us tend to find that CDs are more like $13-17 these days.
If you really care about the plastic case and book so much then you'd be happy to pay the extra. Myself when I realised that I spend most of my time *listening* to music and not admiring the case, I realised that online music stores are an excellent alternative to going to the shop.
I think you've missed a few points.
First- is 192kbps a low bitrate? What music download service gives you a better MP3 bitrate than that? Heck, which one matches that? That's what I rip my own discs at...
Second- "Full Price"?!? Compared _maybe_ to iTunes... which is still probably the cheapest service when you correctly account for subscription prices and real-life buying habits.
And oh, did you notice no DRM at all, not even FairPlay's relatively user-friendly DRM flavor?
Oh, wait... I just noticed you want only artists you've "heard of" i.e. "been spoon-fed by MTV and ClearChannel"... sorry, I didn't realize I was replying to the post of a stupid person.
Seriously, there are some great bands on this service, several of which YOU may be too lame to know about, but *MANY* of which I have heard ( and like ) and would like to see in my local music store or promoted on iTMS. "Death Cab for Cutie"... rockin'!
Wait... now I *know* I've just responded to a troll... seriously, you've never heard of Offspring, Patsy Cline, Billie Holiday, Ray Charles or any of these other bands I see in the "archives" section on the bottom of the main page?!? What, the Offspring isn't current enough for you? Or not big-name enough? How about Bad Religion? Or is it true that you want Britney and nobody with talent will do?
I'm going to tell all of my iTunes-using friends about this site. I hope it does well. I don't buy much music, but before I buy another CD or download from iTMS, I'll be checking this site.
Actually, I do it and I have friends running two different, fairly well known labels (they get play in mags like AP or on the front page of insound.com). And to me, $0.99/track and $9.99 is too much. The last time I ordered CDs, $10 was the average price. All of them were new, I even bought a couple of cartel albums like "The Cars" (why buy the Strokes ripping them off when the original is so much better?) The time before that I bought something like 9 albums and 6 EPs for like $75. So actually $10 an album for lesser audio quality, having to buy my own CD-Rs and putting on my own artwork is really a pretty poor deal. I think artists and labels need to be able to set their pricing as I'm certain many of them would be much more aggressive, just like they are with physical album prices. There's a lot of hope for indie music to gain marketshare through the web but you can't beat the cartel by playing their game the same way they do.
A) Most of the independent artists that will be available through sites like this are NOT RIAA artists.
B) While $.99 may be necessary to cover the cost of Marketing Blitzes, Big Budget Studio time, Advertising, Printing and Distributing an album to your local record store, I think its feasible that independent artist spend considerably less on promotion and 'the machine'. If everyone adopts prices that don't reflect the actual costs involved in bringing the music to market we just end up with a new version of the old system. A lot of artist still are focused on GETTING THEIR MUSIC HEARD so this whole money argument is marketing talk as far as I'm concerned.
Industry music may be a different story, but I love and am VERY familiar with independent music and artists. I've got no trouble with sending 10 bucks off to support an artist I like, but I usually get a fancy printed album and what-not that added a little more value. If a download (of a 192 bit track?) is going to cost some money, fine, just don't charge me as much as you would for a CD, after all, its not the same thing.
Quack, quack.
Apple passes on something like ~70cents per song to the publisher. For those "pop musicians that sell millions of songs", most of that generally gets absorbed by the record company.
However, if the "smaller bands that barely make do" that you claim to be concerned about are with a decent indie label (like CDBaby, or any of the other indie labels on the iTMS), then they can get alot more of that money.
Apple pays the artists plenty, as long as the artists don't sell their souls to RIAA middlemen first.
What exactly do you want Apple to do? Refuse to sell any music from any labels that don't give their artists a big enough cut? (thus assuring that said artists get no money whatsoever from iTunes)
You are a cheap bastard. For fucks sake, it costs at least 50 cents to listen to a song on a jukebox, and you only get to listen to it once! This way, you own the song forever. You can make copies for your different devices, share 'em with your friends if you want, and you can buy whole albums for $9.99, which is a bargain compared to the cost of CDs. Plus, the artists aren't getting screwed.
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
Yes, but you still need to record, mix and master the music. This requires the use of expensive equipment and spaces.
While some of you probably think the mastering stuff that comes with protools is swell (even though you are mastering in your bedroom over cheapo Genelec monitors) and even though you think you can use SM57's and built in preamps for recording everything, generally consumers like music that is recorded in a sonically well-architected environment by a talented engineer, mixed in a equally good room with a good mixing engineer with some good outboard gear, and mastered in a sonically perfect room with some very specialized tools.
All this costs money. And if you are laying out that kind of cash, you need to move lots of volume, and the only way to move volume is by doing publicity which also costs... money.
Lower prices - well you get what you pay for. I can make a cheap recording of a great song on my $400 multitrack and a few $70 SM57's. But you ain't gonna want it even if it's free (unless you are my grandma or someone equally unobjective).
We aren't living in a 100% virtual world just yet.