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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."
In case you've forgotten, the record Labels are evil, because:
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
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.
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If you want non-brand-name music for $0.25 a song, try http://www.emusic.com, which offers 40 songs for $10 a month. It used to be unlimited, but they cut back awhile ago.
You have to hunt for the good stuff, but overall, Emusic isn't bad. No DRM, either.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
Here use this link to be sure. RIAA Radar
You can be sure that the music you purcase doesn't support the RIAA efforts.
"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."
And here lies the problem. Some people enjoy gambling, some people don't. It never sat well with me that I could walk into a record store and gamble my money away on some unknown CD I have not heard. I dislike the idea even more now that I have seen the alternative in the former E-Music and peer to peer.
Simply put, I will spend X number of dollars each month. It doesn't matter how much music is out there, I have a set amount of money I am willing to spend. I don't want to gamble one wasting my money on things I don't like. I don't even want to bother researching the music to improve my odds. I simply want to listen on my own time, and if I find something I like, keep it instead of deleting it.
Until someone accomidates me I am simply going to follow the path of least resistance. E-music used to be that path. I happily shelled out my money and downloaded and listened when I had the chance. Since E-music when to their foolish new pricing plan I have simply gone back to peer to peer applications. The advertised service means nothing to me. I simply want to download music at a fixed price and forget about it. I don't ever want to sit there and make a judgement call as to if I am wasting my money by buying one song or another.
Hurray for independent labels and no DRM, but stuff like this is for someone else. I'll stick to stealing.
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/
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.
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?
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).
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
Sounds like Audio Lunchbox is a lot more fair to the artists than iTunes and other online music stores are.
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.
try http://www.emusic.com, which offers 40 songs for $10 a month.
If you're already an emusic.com customer, and you find emusic.com's "My Collection" page to be a slow, tedious, pain in the ass, and you'd prefer to download to your local harddrive an HTML page showing every album you've downloaded from emusic.com with links back to each album page at emusic.com, get this free program for Windows, Mac, or linux:
Get Collection.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
(Actually, if I wanted a song from this store, it would not be a factor. 192 VBR MP3 sounds just fine on my iPod... but there's at least one of you OGG cheerleaders saying the exact same thing about your favorite codec on Every Single God-Damned iTunes Music Store and/or iPod Thread, so I figured I should return the favor.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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." -
There's even more than paper and bookstores. A lot of other people go into writing a book. My book, which goes for about $40, had an editor, a copy editor, a typesetter, an indexer, an artist for the cover, and a small army of reviewers who received honoraria. The postage alone when we were doing the final phases of reviewing ran into the hundreds of dollars. In the end, yeah, I get about five bucks a copy.
Mind you, this is a technical book from a major reputable publisher (Addison-Wesley), so it got the luxe treatment. Fiction would get a different treatment.