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The New MP3.com: 3rd Time a Charm?
macdaddypunk writes "Two weeks ago, CNET unveiled Download.com Music (mistaken by some for the new MP3.com). A week ago, they told the press that the real MP3.com was open for business, yet the site itself still said "coming soon." Today, MP3.com is finally live, and off to a sputtering start. It's a combination of tech articles and a meta-search for major-label downloads. For example, with a single search you can find that 'Abbey Road' by the Beatles is not available for legal download at iTunes, Napster, or anywhere else. The tech content includes such gems as 'how to copy your old vinyl records onto CDs.' The real news is what it does NOT include: no free downloads, and no indie artist community. (As reported earlier, the former MP3.com archive of 1.7 million songs was instead resurrected by another independent music community). The new MP3.com's search results don't even include the 3,500 indie artists from Download.com Music."
Sorry to say, but while your vinyl record may be durable, if your record player broke down you would be screwed. Vinyl record players are really expensive and difficult to find anymore.
My father has a huge collection of vinyl records that he accumulated in his youth. They sat in storage for years until around 1996 when I bought him a brand new record player. I had a hell of a time finding one and I think it cost me $400.
It would probably be much harder now to find such a setup for that price.
-1 Redundant for you.
Actually I think that refers to a redundant post not a redundant statement within a post but your point is taken. But hey I worded it the best I could with the boss walking past my desk every five minutes ;)
I agree with the second part of what you wrote. I like the bands I like, RIAA affiliated or not. Used CDs do indeed rock.
Well I do agree that RIAA puts out a lot of noise pollution. I also agree that Clearchannel has ruined radio by playing "for the masses" playlists that never change (I can set my clock by the playlist of the local Clearchannel station that we play at the office) -- I suppose any large organization is going to stagnate overtime.
That said there are a few genuinely good artists that happen to be signed to RIAA labels. So whatta do? Download the music on P2P? Get a crappy (albeit free) copy compressed with lossful compression? I'd rather wait two weeks and pick up a used cd at my favorite local store. It's cheaper then buying a whole album off even ITMS (and for all my complaints about iTunes price isn't one of them --- I refuse to do business for other reasons) and I sleep better at night knowing that my money is going back into the local economy instead of some fat cat RIAA executive that could care less about me or my community.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You can check out my site (www.musicmobs.com for those with sigs turned off). There's a lot of RIAA stuff on there, but the entire site is constructed out of people's playlists, so really there should be any number of non RIAA bands as well (and there are). Just find a major label band that you'd like to find an indie alternative for, and start digging deeper through the related artists till you find something previously unheard of.
Read it again: he asks for resources for bands not signed to RIAA labels. RIAA != major. There are small labels that are members of the RIAA too.
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Crudely Drawn Games
I think (note that implies less than 100% certainty) that zerophase.net has what you're looking for. They're very independent and very into supporting innovative ways to (legally) share music.
$400?!
While it's not a forum/website with a list, it is a handy tool one can use to tell if an album is affiliated with an RIAA label or if you can buy it guilt-free: http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/
RIAA Members Check what the label of the artist you are listening to is and check if that label is on that list. So, if you have a choice, then try to buy cds from labels NOT in that list !
Maybe you're not aware of how major label contracts work, but the artist has to pay the costs of recording, marketing, etc., out of their royalties. The only thing the label gives them is essentially a loan, with an extremely high cost (loss of ownership of their creation, and serious doubt as to whether they'll ever get paid what they're owed). Some relevant links: Steve Albini's rant on how contracts work: http://www.negativland.com/albini.html A recent decision showing the RIAA owed $50 million in unpaid royalties to artists "they couldn't track down", like Dolly Parton: http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2004-05-04 -music-royalties_x.htm
And most importantly, the recent story of Marillion, who proved that you absolutely do not need a record company in this day and age:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/28/marillion_ comeback/
You haven't looked at the site, nor have you read the article submission. MP3.com's sole purpose is NOT to sell legal downloads, just like everyone else. They are a multi-purpose site. Digital music news, user guides, compatibility guides, etc. I, for one, like the site. I think it's got a lot of useful info, it acts as sort of a catch-all for user discussion, and it even looks good. I hope they succeed in at least becoming a good, central source for digital entertainment.
.mp3 format downloads, accessible through a web browser on nearly any platform, and 100% free of DRM and other nonsense.
I thought Apple Itunes, which looks like the field leader, was not making any profit at all, and was just using it as a tool to boost thier ipod sales.
I feel I have to address this since it seems to keep coming up. Apple might not be making any direct profit from download sales, and maybe neither is anyone else, but someone is, and that "someone" are labels. Given the notion that the business-end of the labels appear to be the least tech-savvy people on the planet, consider iTunes and the rest as the outsourced end of the labels' distribution methods. What I'm getting at is that the services probably aren't going to ever make the money they should in volume, but probably just enough to keep them around as another marketing tool for the labels'. It's like web-banners. You may never click on one, but if you see them enough, you're bound to become familiar with the service/product/etc. that the banner advertises.
Anyhow, wasn't one of the aims of the "downloaded music craze" to improve the quality of the product from the consumer point of view? Consider this: There's about seven or eight legal download services that I consider to be the "primary" services. Together, they make up a fairly large music catalog, and not of just pop music. I can buy a whole album's worth of music for considerably less than what I'd pay at a retail outlet, like a Sam Goody (nearly half the cost if you consider tax on a $17.99 album.) In nearly all the cases, I can burn a CD of the music, which means I can pretty much do anything with it after that. And for those of you that are running Linux, let me ask you this: would it kill you to go out and get a generic windows box, and set it up so that it specifically handles music only? I mean if you are that adamant about not using windows, then don't, but for christ's sake don't act like you have no other option. In most cases, if you don't like anything that iTunes or the like carries, then you won't be needing windows anyhow. Case in point: Audio Lunchbox. 192 Kbps
You have options, and it has gotten better. You still can't walk into a store and preview the music before you buy it, but you can with most of the legal download services. It's a pain in the ass nowadays to use P2P apps for downloads because it takes too damn long, even on my cable modem, mostly because I have to find it first, then I have to try and find a decent sound quality, and then there's the viruses, and what have you...99 cents, you have what you're looking for, right from the get go, it downloads fast, it sounds GOOD ENOUGH (I'm not an audiophile, nor do I care to be one, that's too much work for too little enjoyment)...it's basically a whole lot less of a pain in the ass.
I'm just trying to be optimistic about the whole "downloaded music craze" and hope that it only gets better as time progresses, because everything can stand to improve. If you ask me, we are at a much better place than we were 3 or 4 years ago. Granted we could have all gone without the bullshit lawsuits and the DRM/DMCA crap, but as history will tell you, if you can't learn from your mistakes, then you won't be around long enough to keep making them.
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
You don't need to be able to run the turntable at 78rpm. Just play the record at 45rpm and correct the speed digitally. sox is your friend. However, you really need a special stylus to track the fatter grooves of 78rpm records properly; the ones designed for microgroove {45 / 33 rpm} records do not touch both walls, but instead tend to dance about in the bottom of the groove and produce extra noise. On the other hand, the bottom of the groove is more likely to be undamaged {fat needles ride high}, so try it first and see what works.
You will require a sound card with a line input, and a preamplifier with the appropriate equalisation characteristic {for a magnetic pick-up cartridge} or a very high input impedance {for a ceramic cartridge}. Don't even think about using the mic input, even though in this case it doesn't matter about being mono: the equalisation is wrong for magnetic, and the impedance is too low for ceramic. To go from 45 to 78rpm use sox song_at_45.wav song_at_78.wav speed 1.733. Alternatively, if you have a very good sound card which lets you set the sample rate precisely, recording at 25442Hz will give the correct speed when played back at 44100Hz. The cut-off frequency will only be about 12.5kHz this way, but in practice this isn't such a problem as the old recording equipment had less bandwidth anyway.
Note you will almost certainly have to perform some additional low-pass filtering. Read the sox manpage and experiment. A spectrum analyser {hardware or software} will enable you to determine the bandwidth of the signal; anything outside there should be discarded.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
For example, with a single search you can find that 'Abbey Road' by the Beatles is not available for legal download at iTunes, Napster, or anywhere else.
You can find it for download here, in your choice of format and bit rate (up to 384kbps), DRM-free, for $0.01 per MB (and, BTW, when they say MB, they mean 2^20 bytes).
As I understand it, it is a legal download, though it probably makes the record labels angry.
(How is it legal? IANAL, but my understanding is that it works like this: Under Russian law, there is apparently no difference between broadcasting over radio and "broadcasting" over the Internet. allofmp3.com pays royalties just as though they were a radio station and thereby obtains the right to "broadcast" over the net. I'm sure the RIAA is trying to figure out how to close this loophole in Russian law, but they haven't been able to do it yet. Oh, and AFAIK there is no law against importing music files from Russia, although it may be the case that you're supposed to pay some sort of import duties.)
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