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Oxfam Launches Music Download Service
rahaydenuk writes "The BBC reports that Oxfam is backing the Big Noise Music website, which launches on Wednesday and will offer 300,000 songs for download. 10p of the 75p or 99p charge to download the songs will go to Oxfam and the service will be available across Europe."
..a link to Oxfam, a development, advocacy and relief agency working to put an end to poverty world-wide?
once apple decides to open itunes out to the european market, will anyone be able to compete with that?
How much is that cost per song measured in "cups of tea?"
10p of the 75p or 99p charge to download the songs will go to Oxfam And what percentage of the remaining 65p/89p goes to the artist that made the song, again?
The real question is what formats do they support, and what kind(s) of DRM are used.
Y'know, you blow up one sun and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water.
This is more like it, I'd nearly feel good about using this service. Cool.
Windows only, IE only - judging by the other services they run.
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
The real question is what the hell is a p? Is that like a gil, or something?
Tracks will cost between 75p and 99p, with 10p going to Oxfam. Acts featured include Coldplay and George Michael.
"Artists will see their music help some of the poorest people in the world," Oxfam's Adrian Lovett said.
10p for the poor, a large portion of 75p to 99p to the record companies, a itty bit of the rest to Big Noise and the artists.
In short, helping the poor helps the record companies. Just give 10p to the poors in your area, or to the local charity, you'll feel better...
So I'll post what I was going to say as a reply. My post details each option (buying or giving the money directly to charity) and what benefits the latter option brings to you.
Imagine you have 7.50GBP.
You could buy 10 songs from the service. Oxfam gets 0.75. The artists get hardly anything. You get a crappy WMA file infested with DRM.
or
You download 10 songs from the internet and donate half the money you were going to spend directly to oxfam. Oxfam receives 3.50GBP (500% increase). You recieve a high quality audio file which will work on a variety of systems and contains no DRM.
Which would you choose? For legal reasons, I will not provide an answer. Of course most people will choose option 2 and keep the money for themselves but that's not the point. If you really want to help a charity there is always a better option than bowing down to a company.
I am a musician. Always have been.
Make albums. Record other peoples. etc.
I support Oxfam, but I am starting to feel like some kind of object. Everything I make will probably end up in some kind of big discount sale. A few more years and it will be commonplace to get media with a thousand records on it. Probably as a free gift along with your petrol.
It makes records seem like the free coupons you get when you buy the right brand of detergant.
It's kinda sad.
As one of the people who help maintain oxfam.org.uk - please be nice to the server - The server runs linux/apache/php combo (although the main pages are plain html).
Unfortunatly the main server is scheduled for an upgrade - to a loadbalanced combo, rather than the current single box. (which has not happened yet) as it is currently quite heavily loaded. - especially when UK wakes up..
Dont forget there are nice big Donate Now buttons on all the pages. (It's a very good cause) - with great people who use open source alot..
Taking PHP to the next level: phpmole, php codedoc, php-gtk pear installer, DataObjects for php, ldap schema viewer and
10p each track to charity is all well and good if the songs were say 20-30p each, but 75p to 1 quid? I don't think so. I may as well just go into Oxfam and buy a couple of quids worth of old cloths or whatnot, then all the money goes to Oxfam.
Until a digital music service offers me MP3s at a reasonable price all my money is going to the Russians
When iTunes Music Store came out selling tracks for 99 cents a pop, I prophesized that any European version would sell tracks for 99 pence per track instead of the equivalent of 99 US cents, or even 99 EU cents. All of the stores which are coming out so far have proven this true. Let's see what Apple does, but I can almost guarantee they'll go in at the same price point.
As a comparison, 79 pence is approx. $1.38, and 99 pence is approx. $1.74. With most UK digital music stores hovering around the 99 pence mark, that means Brits are being charged 74% more than Americans on average. Oh well, I guess nothing changes, and as typical we'll all keel over and accept it. If UK salaries were 74% higher than American ones you couldn't complain, but it seems to be the other way around, still.
And even can't tell us the price in euros ?
Or they start in GB and plan to expand later ? But why starting with a 60M people market when they are more than 250M people in euroland ?
good luck
Look at the number of music download services that are referenced in the article. Every damn company has to have one it seems. If anything this will guarantee they all fail because nobody wants to have to go to a number of different sites, figure out how to use them and be disappointed none has all the songs they want. As long as iTunes has a similar sized catalogue to the US version all these little crappy sites will only be a help to iTunes consumer acceptance.
VAT can be as high as 25% in old Europe
Sales tax is rarely beyond 7% in the U.S. (and even that is too high). Some states have NO tax (NH, DE, AK, others).
Instead of complaining about the entrepreneurs or charities who want to make music available to you in a convenient manner, please vote por politicians who advocate lower taxes, or kindly shut up.
The next pasture is always greener
How many pence out of the 99 is going to the Exchequer? Because in Florida, exactly *zero* sales taxes are paid on iTunes purchases.
The next pasture is always greener
VAT (i.e. sales tax) is 17.5%, so the tax man gets 17.5p of the 99p. So, the site actually gets 81.5p of each 99p sale. Which is $1.46, so we're still paying 46% more.
It might be worth looking at thttpd (or some other lightweight nonblocking IO based server, there are quite a few) and running PHP as a FastCGI daemon; you get significantly better performance serving static files, keep the httpd's lightweight by keeping PHP out of them, and can loadbalance the PHP stuff across servers should you wish. Any database servers will thank you too, since it helps keep the number of PHP instances down.
:)
The main thing holding us back is the lack of decent URL rewriting support in any of the other servers we've seen. Luckily at just 16 requests/second nominally, we can cope
Straight dope has an excellent article on this : .99?
The Straight Dope: Why do prices end in
To extrapolate slightly from the article, just imagine the sales pitch as being able to buy the track "For under a dollar!", "For under a euro!", "For under a pound!", or even "For under a Dinar!". For a Kuwaiti Dinar, this is approximately $3.35 - eek!
Only to the latter the expression would probably be recognized as being expensive. To the rest of us who hover around relatively low values, it seems cheap either way. It's about the price of a mars bar at an airport (expensive in its own right, of course) - except that you'll enjoy it longer.
Most people who labor in a "service" market leave no mark. Most of the software I have written in my life doesn't or will not have any hardware to run it on any more.
If you get paid for your work and not copies of your work you will be better off in the long run, since, (to paraphrase), in the long run, we are all dead anyhow.
Enjoy what you do. Make a living at it if you are lucky, get wealthy at it if you are absurdly lucky.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Go here to purchase music and give the difference to Oxfam.
Not only will you be getting clean MP3s, you'll be able to help more people with the money you save.
Obviously the RIAA and their friends, "the nice people with lawyers" (hint hint) don't want to lose money so how long is it untill they post Oxfam out the market? I can't say I donate alot to Oxfam (maybe 10p or whatever my change is after buying something gets dropped into their box) but it seems to me like no company is going to just let them wander into the market(along with napster all though no one would use that any more) and let them take a nice big chunk of it.
Not to mention I doubt many people will want songs by "Dave McNoBody" while the other groups can supply more mass produced shit 12 year old girls adore.
Nice try Oxfam but Slashdot just raped your budget for the year on bandwidth alone.
--- [Insert intresting Sig here]
Last time that site was mentioned here it was offline for nearly a month. I had five CDs in the encode queue when the site was slashdotted last month and I was only able to start downloading again little more than a week ago. Had great service with them for months (years already?) and one cover story blows them out of the water for more than three weeks. I'd prefer if you'd go back to keeping this our little secret... at least until I get the rest of my Shakespeare's Sister and Moloko.
I've never used it but it seems like a great idea. What do you think?
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I get it, you clearly need to think a little harder.
I'm being a little grim, but of course a lot more than 17.5p goes to the tax man.
;-)
Probably about 30% of what goes to the artist also goes to the tax man (in income tax), another bit will go to the tax man in terms of the VAT the artist spends on items (don't forget his car tax!), some of the money that goes to the record company also goes to the tax man in corporation taxes, employer NICs, and taxes on interest on money in the bank
I'd love to see such statistics actually worked out properly and put into graphic form. I bet the tax man ends up with his hands on at least 75% of the national wealth through all of the various taxes, double taxes, duties, and so on.
Yes of course, I do do the same fiddly work with things on the Mac. I can burn a CD and re-rip (which you cannot do with all WMA protected files).
One protection is stripped, conversion to other formats is very easy in iTunes - one menu item, and you have an MP3. I can batck convert my entire library from the command line with one find command. I don't need to screw with a WAV or third party plugins.
That's what I'm sayng, that all around WMV is a far more annoying protected format. To start with it's not clear what protections might be used. Then any means of conversion involves a lot of convoluted steps.
With ITMS, I get a DRM file with predictable properties and restrictions. And if those restrictions are unacceptable to me (for instance, sharing restrictions) I can remove them easily.
I leave my files protected at home because I have no need for them to be unprotected, and at work I can unprotect files for sharing so everyone can listen to the full ibrary of songs. Very simple.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
can I donate my unwanted "legal" music downloads to them to sell on at a cheap rate??? like I can do with my unwanted CDs, DVDs, books and the like...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
With 300,000 tunes, this seems more likely to be a case of labels agreeing rather than individual artists. IIRC, iTMS opened with something like 200,000 songs.
Tracking down thousands of artists (some of which, I assume, are dead) to ask if they would donate songs or allow songs to be sold would be a huge project. If artists were donating, I'd expect maybe a few thousand songs.
To top it off, the labels own the recordings more than the artists in most cases (unless they get a sweet contract).
"...the web site's music selection is expected to consist entirely of songs written by Bob Geldof."
Isn't it Windows only, and Media player only?
I sure wish Apple would open up over the pond and give OD2 come decent competition for mutliplatform..
Registered charities don't have to pay VAT (sales tax). Presumably tax will be factored into this service, as most of the money goes to the record companies, but Oxfam will be able to get a VAT return from the Government on their share.
--This is a self-referential sig--
Surely the thought of helping starving artists who can only afford one Learjet should be enough to make people buy music, rather than solving world poverty?
So, when the chancellor says he's adding 2p to the price of a bottle of wine, he's really adding 2p+VAT.
Personally, I'd get rid of VAT. It's a real waste of businesses time. One part of a supply chain has to charge it and then the next part claims it back.
I'd vote for any government that would promise to simplify the tax system too. Get rid of National Insurance, stamp duty, beer duty, IPT and rates and make it a graduated income tax.
Thanks, but I'd rather have my 17.5 pence back than see the government spend it on Yet Another Failed Computer System.
If you guys actually read the article, it says it's just another OD2 (On Demand Distribution) outlet. There's nothing new or exciting about that. I guess it's nice that some of the money is going to charity instead of lining record companies' pockets, but when you get right down to it this is the same old WMA based service that's being peddled by MSN, HMV, Coca-Cola and a million others. Pity there doesn't seem to be a way to un-DRM version 9 WMA files at the moment (FreeMe doesn't work any more, it seems).
For what it is worth, Oxfam is run by a group of marxists. If you don't believe me, do a google search on "oxfam marxism" or "oxfam marxists"
So, you consider converting WMA->WAV->whatever to be more cumbersome than burning in iTunes, ripping , and converting? I don't.
No, I consider your WMA conversion more annoying than clicking on a menu option to "convert to MP3", after I have already stripped the DRM from an AAC file (which involved no intermediate files and can be done in batch by an automated process, in seconds for any number of songs).
The DiskWriter plugin is not third-party. It comes with Winamp. Made by Nullsoft.
They shipping WinAmp with many PC's these days?
To be fair, you'd also have to download iTunes for PC's so you have a point.
And why should iTMS DRM be more predictible than WMA? Apple, as well as any WMA-selling online music store could change their restrictions at any time. Still woulnd't affect the songs you have already bought, though.
They could - possibly. Which is different than a world of services that TODAY offer files with different protections for WMA files. If you give me any m4p file I can tell you exactly what can be done with the file. If you give me a WMA file, I can't even tell you if it's protected much less what the limitations would be on a protected file without checking. If you're downloading from a store you may not quite know what you are getting.
And as you noted, with an ITMS m4p file I'll never have those restrictions change, while with a WMA file a store might decide later on they don't like your current restrictions and revoke some or all of them!! Let's say some watermarked music comes up with an ID that matches your downloaded music, a company could easily revoke the rights to everything you downloaded from them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley