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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."
Am I the only one not busting a nut at the chance of paying $0.99 to download one song? Or $9.99 to download an album? To me this is hardly an improvement over current pricing. Maybe it's just that the stuff I listen to isn't typically available (live trance sets) but I really can't see paying much more than $0.25 for a single downloadble track. Maybe $0.50 if I really enjoyed the artist.
Casual Games/Downloads
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
I wonder how RIAA will take notice (rest assured they will take notice)? Will they view it was a threat and try to buy out these independent artists to close this down, ignore it, or see that it actually works?
I'd like to think they'd know a good thing when they see it but I'm not that optimistic (or naive depending on your viewpoint). I'd lean towards them trying to buy out any independent artists who make it big using this method -- and with the way the current world works (money == good) they'll probably succeed.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Looks decent.
With this, my good friend's band could have a revenue stream finally.
Hey, that's my password you are typing
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
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.
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 |
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Let me be the first to say that this company is dead!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Here is another service along the same lines and even less evil: Magnatune, "we are not evil." Pay as much as you want (within reason, natch'). There is not a huge selection yet, but maybe if more peeps start buying from them....
Well, we only have 12 indie artists so far. Canadian indie stuff... anyway www.hearsaymusic.ca! mp3s 1 dollar Canadian (192kps)... 30 second samples (128kps). And in contrast to what indiepool (Canadian puretracks' indie thing) does, we do not charge anything to get onto the site, and encoding. We take a share of the sales.
Cheers,
Daniel
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
Daniel
http://people.cinn.ca/daniel/
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?"
I've already purchased two albums from them, pict.soul and Error. What's interesting is that both are available from the iTunes Music Store as well as from Audio Lunchbox, at exactly the same price (here and here). I buy plenty of music from the iTunes Music Store, but I am willing to go a little bit out of my way to avoid the DRM if I can get the same price without it.
They take PayPal too, so I didn't have to enter credit card info into... anything at all.
Open music is what Magnatune.com sells. From the site: "All songs are available in MP3, CD-quality WAV, OGG, FLAC and MP3-VBR: download whichever formats you like." The best part is you can download and audition the music, then decide what you want to pay, if anything. "Magnatune lets you choose how much you want to pay for your downloaded album. The more you choose to pay, the more the artist makes, because at Magnatune, half goes directly to the artist, while the other half supports Magnatune." They are also members of the Creative Commons.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated in any way with Magnatune.com. This is just a really cool idea whose time has come.
For a buck a track I want some nice artwork, maybe some printed lyrics a piece of plastic that I can out into a player. That way I can rip the songs myself and CHOOSE what bitrate to use.
Some occasional free posters and stickers would be nice too. Music buying has sucked since the death of the 12" vinyl album. Consumers are getting less and less while paying more and more, and record companies (and even indies) are keeping all the benefits and savings that result from new technologies fro themselves.
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
has a great selection of FREE music (live and studio). Look under Archive.org -> Audio -> Net Labels.
there's no place like ~
All MP3s are encoded at 192 kbps variable bit rate (VBR). Ogg Vorbis files are encoded at a variable bit rate (VBR) "quality 6"
:'(
4. Can my cousin in Italy buy songs from you?
Yes. Anyone in the world can download tracks from us.
Damn I'm running out of excuses for not paying for music
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
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
...that's like a buck fifty American now?
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
If you have the same problem, save the m3u file, copy-n-paste the contents into your browser. It would then launch winamp and I could preview the songs. I don't know if it was Winamp's problem or not, but what a PITA. Instead of streaming it, why not just link to the partial mp3 itself? Sheesh.
Now on the service, I wish it were a little cheaper, but I might check them out. I have been mass downloading songs from MP3.com, burning them to a CD, and listening to them in my car. (MP3 capable car CD player - best thing EVER) It is kind of cool to hear indie artists, but you do get a lot of garbage in there too, just guys in their basement. But it is still interesting.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It wouldn't be so bad if you owed royalties when you bought the music. I mean when you buy a song then its your to put on any media. Let's say right now CDs are popular. Tomorrow it's going to be, say, Memory Sticks.
Now if the vendors could figure out how to make money and when you buy the music you can listen to it however you like and not a simple one time download but its your to move to various media, always own, sell, etc.
I went though many tapes because the tapes failed over time. It seems I should own the rights to listen to the music upon purchase.
Seriously, get over it.
Free downloads make so much more sense for a band trying to reach a wider audience.
Most people will only pay for music that's already "made it". They like that song thats always on the radio, "who are those guys? Im gonna get that CD."
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
www.furthernet.org
live recordings from artists who allow taping at their concerts, all free, all legal, & theres *some* big names in there too
www.magnatune.com
indie record label. their motto is "we're not evil" you can download music, or pay for it (you determine the price to a degree) and if i recall properly i first heard about it on slashdot
I think now would be an appropriate time to mention that if you're into independent artists, and you like physical media, check out CDbaby.com. Tons of great independent artists, good prices, and a good portion of the money actually goes to the artist.
:^)
Plus, their shipping notice email is cool.
You probably shouldn't click this.
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.
Uhm. Audio Lunchbox gives you that when you buy an album. The MP3s + Oggs, artwork, and lyrics.
But don't believe me, see for yourself
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.
Sounds like Audio Lunchbox is a lot more fair to the artists than iTunes and other online music stores are.
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.
This music store comes through where Apple failed for me. I download iTunes, and I wanted to like it, I wanted to possibly save for an iPod, but the store interface was crap. I don't feel I'm alone on this, but here's why: There weren't enough categories. There were no ties between like bands.
Audio lunchbox divides the music up so much better. It has hardcore, four metal subcategories, a bunch of rock categories and even a seperate punk category (these are just my tastes). iTunes, from the searching I did, would label all this "alternative/rock". By doing this, it was hard to find bands that don't have radio exposure and thus hard for me to buy music unless I wanted the radio top 40 garbage.
//Blessed are they that run around in circles, for they shall be known as wheels.
To add to the emusic idea.
After looking at the Punk and Rock sections of the audio lunchbox offering. Emusic has a very large number of those releases that are being offered at cheaper rates. Not to mention the site design and features are much better. I don't think the audio lunchbox people even started to look at an effcient site design. So far browsing it has been akin to pulling teeth.
Emusic also does not use DRM. Their files are "alt-preset standard" LAME encoded mp3s.
For anyone looking for independent label releases online I would stress Emusic as an excellent place to start.
I reviewed this music service (among many others) at Breakdown Industries and it stacked up very favorably. Note that the reviews are biased toward independent artists (i.e., RIAA-free).
Read the review here..
Magnatune offers a multitude of formats including Ogg, MP3, WAV, and FLAC.
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.
You really can't tell if you'll like the music by listening to the free previews that pretty much everyone gives you? eMusic does 30 seconds, and I think iTunes does too. I'm not sure about the others, but I think Magnatune even lets you listen to the whole song, or listen to a big streaming audio feed of everything they have.
o m/o rds.com/d byramen.com/
You could also listen to radio stations which play those sorts of music. Blatant plug: WMBC radio, in my sig, plays a good deal of it. We also have shows that suck, of course, but you're not going to like everything our DJs do, and vice-versa. See, indie artists have radio stations and review sites too; you just have to look a bit harder. That goes along with it being less expensive and restricted.
Indie CDs are generally less than those by major label artists, and the indie musicians get to keep more of the money. But $2 is pretty ridiculous; it's not as though these artists don't work as hard on their songs as major-label ones, or as though the songs aren't as good. Many of these artists will let you download a song or two from each album in unrestricted MP3 format; The Archenemy Record Company is pretty generous with this.
Some URLs to get started:
http://wmbc.umbc.edu/ (shameless plug)
http://www.cmj.com/
http://www.allmusic.c
http://www.archenemy.com/
http://www.warprec
http://www.tgrec.com/
http://www.fuele
http://www.luakabop.com/
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Magnatune has been mentioned before, and it offers entire albums from $4-$18 (it's up to you how much you want to pay), free access to streams of the music you want to preview, and you end up purchasing two downloadable .zip files: one with pre-compressed .mp3s, and one with WAV files(!) -- and no DRM whatsoever.
I've bought two albums to date (mrEpic and Brad Sucks) and recommend them both highly. Enjoy!
QTConvert allows you to fix that problem concerning the DRM issues, without having to burn to CD first. An MP3 export component is available (based on LAME and in early beta, but it does at least produce MP3s) here. Note that you will need to also download the LAME framework there, too. It's all free and sources are available for the component and framework. This is all OS X only though. If someone feels like porting the component to Windows, be my guest.
I'm still in development on these things, but have to spend some time on putting food on the table for awhile. Then I'll get back to these.
Regards,
Lynn
http://www.allofmp3.com offers DRM free at 1cent a megabyte and appears to be perfectly legal as well. They also support multiple bitrates for mp3, ogg, wma and other formats. I can purchase anywhere from 15 - 20 full albums for $10. I don't see any music service beating that anytime soon.
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
That said, if Outkast were not on a major label, and if they had a place where I could buy merchandise - whether it be cds or other "stuff" - I probably would throw some bucks their way. Maybe so with Pink as well, although probably not with Alicia unless they offered a $3.95 hat pin or something.
I feel obliged to share - period. If that means sharing "intangible" assets because I'm broke, so be it. If it means sharing my income with the lady who does my laundry for $30 a week when I'm perfectly capable of doing it myself, that'll work too. I have a whole stack of Linda's CDs here I bought for $6 each from a Russian retail outlet. Do I think Linda got ANY money from my purchase? No - but I really wanted the music and $6 a pop is cheap enough it doesn't hurt my bottom line so if I should find a LEGITIMATE contact where I can make sure Linda gets paid, she'll be getting some cash from me - and it definitely will be more than $6 for each of the 8 discs I have.
Meanwhile, because I'm all but certain the CDs I purchased were pirated, I have no reservations about ripping them to 320kbps mp3 and plastering them all over usenet (in fact, many of them are probably still on your favorite nntp server).
I really think price is irrelevant when it comes to such things. I downloaded a CD of MP3s from usenet a couple of weeks back that quickly became some of my favorite new tracks. When I went online to search for the artist, I was pleasantly surprised when the trail led me right back to the GPL community. So now I can choose how much I wish to reward the artist and download essentially perfect copies (FLAC, WAV, etc) of every track. I can even license the work for my own commercial use with a few mouse clicks.
Linda... and Pink... and Neil (as in Young) are you listening? That $18 selection has your names on it - just give us the chance.
Magnatune have a whole collection of non-mainstream music, with a particular emphasis on classical stuff (which suprised me a little initially). They offer FLAC encoded audio providing you actually pay up (the mp3/ogg are try before you buy too).
Perhaps audiolunchbox can be persuaded to go the same way. Its certainly nice being able to burn full quality CDs of the music I bought online.
http://www.magnatune.com
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.