Slashdot Mirror
Emusic Relaunches - Cheap, DRM-Free Downloads
An anonymous reader writes "Emusic.com has relaunched today. This is important for several reasons. 1) They sell MP3s. No DRM. I can play them on my Linux box or wherever. 2) They are encoding at 192Kbit/s VBR. That's near CD quality (and how I rip my own CDs). They are focusing on lesser known independent music and providing some editorial content to separate the good from the bad. I see lots of great jazz, classical, and folk/country stuff in their library. 4) Subscription rate is 9.99/month for 40 tracks. That is $0.25 a track. Much cheaper than everywhere else. It's near my pricepoint. This is the first online music store that I will seriously consider. (And actually the first that I _can_ consider since I'm a linux user.)"
Here's the link to browse their catalog!
Stupid promo redirect.
...welcome our Cheap, DRM-Free Music Downloading Overlords!
Friends help you move...
REAL Friends help you move dead bodies... ^_^
...if for no other reason than to encourage this kind of service.
:)
I haven't even seen the catalog yet.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Ummm yeah... submitted by an "Anonymous Reader", not by the owner of emusic at all, right? /wonders how much that cost.
are they hoping you might forget to pick up all 40 of your tracks? odd.
allofmp3.com is still superior
-- oh.... so..... sleeeeeepy.
That is $0.25 a track. Much cheaper than everywhere else. It's near my pricepoint. This
First it was anything but $0.99/track is not cheap enough. Then $0.99 is not enough,.. Now people are not even willing to spend a whole quarter for a song? I think there are some people here who will still be complaining when they are free, just because they aren't encoded at a high enough bitrate!
What the hell is wrong with that frizzy haired old lady? She's moving her head like her old man is back there giving her the business.
The iTMS was the only online music store that really had me sit up and take notice. Now eMusic is making me do the same thing.
iTunes is nice since it's cheap per song, but the selection, though huge, misses out one some less mainstream, more niche genres. eMusic seems to fill in the missing areas pretty well (although still not enough psychedelic trance) and provides DRM-free tunes. This company could go quite far.
For most consumers, though, I think the price-per-song versus a monthly price could still be the deciding factor.
I had the "Platinum" membership- and to tell you the truth despite my very non-mainstream tastes, they didn't have a whole lot that I liked. Also, I hated how their electronic music was organized (there was little-to-no Drum and Bass/Jungle in the Drum and Bass/Jungle section!) Additionally, a 30 second sample (taken from the first 30 seconds!) of a 10 minute electronic music track (that takes 2 minutes to build up anywhere) is a use-less way to "try before you buy."
Additionally, there are too many Live recordings (read: poor sounding recordings). For example, they have a bunch of The Selecter tracks, but they're all live. Sorry, I want to studio versions.
I hope its useful for you. But I paid my money, downloaded some good tracks, a bunch of bad tracks, and walked away.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I cannot search their collection without first registering (free albeit). Why should I register without knowing what they have first? Sorry, I am not a potential customer.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
How about Epitonic for free music downloads! Free, legal, and something that everyone will like.
Aside from the countless (and growing) number of iTMS ripoffs, this is a unique offering. DRM-free, cheap, and high quality? Wow.
The only caveat is the lack of mainstream music. Although this should not bother anyone with a decent taste in music *grin*, the lowest common denominator is what sells (a la Britney Spears, White Stripes, ad nauseum). The big, greedy mainstream record industry would never allow their music to be unprotected...
-- n
Welcome back emusic! You've been missed.
CD quality is 1411 kbps. Certainly 192 is higher than the commonly seen 128, but at less than 14% of CD quality I wouldn't call it "near" CD quality. 320 kbps, which is the highest my chosen ripping software will go, is still roughly 1/4 CD quality.
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
In Canada, Futureshop.com has a pretty good service and it's only 99c per song. I imagine Best Buy probably has something similar in the US.
their selection is still small. the unreleased and worst of all your favorite artists (plus those annoying interview discs), and peole you haven't heard of yet (some of which, trust me, you're better off without experiencing.)
I got my membership, one month free when I bought my neuros in March of '04. I just recently canceled it, because I felt I wasn't getting $9.99 out of the service per month. Canceling was a breeze though, not like the usual - find your reg id that was sent to you months ago, blah blah. It was simple.
Well.. not to say anything bad about the quality of the site.. but.. they have Moby as a featured artist. Man that guy is scary.
Boxing Equipment Reviews
is MP3 Search. They sell tracks for $0.10 and no DRM either. Worried about giving your credit card to them? That's why I use a Virtual Account Number instead.
I encode at 256 or 320 VBR.
No, no, I'm lying. I encode with ogg, set at quality 6. That's not bad, but it still isn't CD quality.
If you have a *good* stereo (no, your computer speakers, or a headphone pluged into your soundcard does not count), you'll hear artifacts if you actually have the real source. In addition, mp3's at moderate quality always sound "flat" to me.
I'll wait until someone offers lossless quality downloads. Until then, I'm far better off buying used CD's...at $3-$5 a CD, it's a far better value.
When Emusic.com had unlimited MP3's for something like $14.99 a month and I was a subscriber for a couple of years. Then they "relaunched" with monthly limits and I jumped ship. I was willing to try new music when there wasn't a limit, but as soon as there was a ceiling, I stopped experimenting with the music in their catalog and dropped the service.
Now, they're "relaunching" again with what looks like a smaller catalog, the same monthly restrictions, etc. I'm trying to see how this is better. Most likely an attempt to appear as a "new" alternative to iTunes, et al when in fact they've been there all along and are actually on a downward spiral.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
I'm an anonymous user because I'm advertising on Slashdot for my own company! I figured this would make the main page because I said "no DRM" and "Linux" in the blurb. I did happen to forget the magic words "Apple iPod" though... Bummer.
192k VBR is nowhere even close to CD quality. Yeah, your ears clouded by your mind might be telling you that it's CD quality but it's not even in the same ballpark. No MP3 is close to CD quality. Yeah, they're acceptable and probably sound better than iTMS' tracks but they are NOT CD quality.
Subscriptions are a joke. I am forced into buying $10 worth of music (40 tracks or not) when I might only want 99 cents worth.
With a main page that reads "Start downloading your FREE MP3s today and take two weeks to decide if you like eMusic. If you're not 100% satisfied simply cancel before your trial period ends and you'll never pay a dime. Keep the 50 FREE MP3s as a gift for checking out eMusic." something worries me. Perhaps because it sounds something like BMG or Time Life Home Videos. Any "club" subscription sounds like a scam.
I don't like the fact that they claim they have "the highest quality MP3s" when they are only using 192 VBR. As far as I know that's not the highest they can go... A quick search for "Grateful Dead" came back with nothing. A lot of other crap but no Dead. For the blurb to claim that there is a lot of music seems like a marketing lie.
Keep the advertising off the main page. Yeah, that goes for the iPods too.
Have they fixed their linux client? In the glory days of emusic, when downloads were unlimited, the client was compiled against some weird library that only red hat and mandrake had. They provided the library and a wrapper script for the rest of us, but I never could get it to work quite right. It would load, but couldn't fetch anything without a proxy server. It wasn't all that much fun.
If they've fixed the client I'm willing to give emusic another try. The selection is good enough that it's worth $.25 a track, and obscure enough that you're not likely to find it cheaper anywhere else.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I think this anonymous post was an advert.
Emusic used to be $9.99 per month and unlimited downloads, over a year ago. It was an absolutely amazing service and had me thinking that the world of digital music could be great for all parties.
I was wrong. Last Fall Emusic was bought out by some other company who changed the policy to the $9.99 for 40 or 50 tracks and its been that way for over a year. I cancelled my subscription.
After the annoucement was made, but before they switched formats, they pulled horrible stunts like not actually allowing you to download unlimited music (per their contract) but putting some aritifical cap on your downloading. They also used to incriminate people for downloading too much even though there was a unlimited deal in the contract. I started to lose respect for them.
I don't think there has been a relaunch. I think there is an executive at Emusic trying to get more business via Slashdot.
If you are reading this Emusic executive, bring back the old unlimited format (even at a higher cost)! Honor your contracts!
can't sleep. clowns will eat me.
I was an emusic subscriber for the earlier part of this year, and it was pretty darn good. My only complaint is that I ran out of stuff to download. That is why I cancelled my account. I'm a big fan of indie music, but I found that there wasn't quite enough to keep me going. And new releases don't show up very quickly.
But, the revenue sharing program does give 50% to labels/artists, so I found that if I did have extra credits in a month, I would download albums that I had once (illegally) downloaded. This made me feel better about myself.
I lasted for about 9 months on the old emusic, and it was $100 well spent.
I was an Emusic subscriber, but they kept jerking around the users. They continually changed the terms of the service. And their support for Linux was pathetic/nonexistent. What confidence can you have that the service you subscribe to is the service you'll eventually get? They've changed horses in midstream several times in the past; why should I think they aren't going to jerk me around again? Has there been a change of management? That's the only thing that would make me think about going back.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
Uhh...
Nelly == Good Music
Brittney == Good Music
???
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
Free music has been available for a long time and easily available with napster. And look at what that has given us do you really think that the pop40 is the best music out there or do you think that maybe the indy stuff and the guys who know how to put on a show are the best out there, music is more then marketing its an art form and like all art forms people pay for good quality, not everyone but enoght of us will pay those artists what they have earned.
Slashdot would NEVER post anything that was the result of any sort of favoritism. You sir are a troll.
No strings, fair price.
Screw iTunes, screw their DRM (I don't care how squishy and cuddly a name it has), screw their prices, and screw Apple and their collusion with the RIAA to make iTunes seem the only option.
Go eMusic and other truly *progressive* means of distribution.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Ummm, this doesn't sound all that different from their last Re-launch. I was a subscriber when they were $9.99/month for unlimited downloads, and let me tell you how much I loved that (and how much stuff I downloaded). I am not a fan of this new model, but that might be because I already downloaded 8 gigs off of them for about $50.
/. crowd, but I never looked too closely at their third incarnation (the flat monthly fee was their second). This new launch might be different, but it sounds a lot like the last one.
Their selection is a combo of new, indie artists and great old jazz artists. There is a lot of techno, too. If you are into jazz or techno, or just like listening to interesting indie bands it is worth it.
This story, though, doesn't sound like anything more than a PR dump on the
IANAL, but I play one on
The poster has forgotten my favorite quasi-legal russian music service, http://www.allofmp3.com/
They have no DRM what so ever, so it's great for you Linux users. Also, it's based in Russia, so it lends itself to those classic Slashdot "In Soviet Russia..." jokes. (In Soviet Russia, Music DRM You!", sorry, the lamest I could come up with)
It also has the most complete catalog (including Beatles), is priced right at $0.01 US per megabyte, and has a multitude of on-the-fly encoding options, including ogg Vorbis, Flac and mp3 up to 384 kbps. (however, I think FLAC and other "premium" encodes runs you $0.05 US per megabyte).
Suposedly it's perfectly legal under Russian copyright law, as long as they compensate the artist directly. Perhaps it's just paying for illegal music downloads that you could otherwise get off Kazaa.
Across the Stars (Hot Grits Remix)
You might be interested in http://magnatune.com/ as well. It's also DRM free and half the money goes directly to the artist. Also there is no subscription fee.
We whine and bitch endlessly for and end to stupid, pointless DMR schemes. We pine for non-propritary formats. We wail when downloads are expensive.
And we complain when someone tells where it is.
You guys rock!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
This is the same crap as the last time i heard about them. They changed their model to from unlimited downloads to 40. A very small percentage of their catalog is decent. Most of it is simply horrible, and 40 shots in the dark are not worth $10. I use love their service, but it required that i download about 400 tracks to find something I really liked.
I didn't even realize they were "re=launching." Nothing has changed except for the UI since we ditched them. This story is just an advertisement.
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
Metallica: 0 Music Albums
Foo Fighters: 0 Music Albums
Franz Ferdinand: 0 Music Albums
Modest Mouse: 0 Music Albums
Kid Rock: 0 Music Albums
Bare Naked Ladies: 0 Music Albums
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
I guess I'll just need to labor on under the oppressive yoke of iTunes' Draconian Rights Mangle-ment (get it? DRM! Hyuk!)
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
A few recommendations:
- Pop/Rock: CCR (Most popular mainstream artist.)
- Folk: Black Twig Pickers ("period instruments" recorded on front porches and sitting rooms.
- Bluegrass: Blue Highway and Doug Dillard
- Children: Ralph's World (Best children's music anywhere and even adults will like it.)
- Other: Best of College A Cappella
Plus, look carefully (search other user's lists) and you can find some 1 track albums. An album for $.25! They are usually nature, experimental or live albums.Wow, that is a great world occupied by some if 0.25 is near the price point for song. For the rest of us, we tend to pay 15 dollars for a cd, of about 10 songs, which is a $1.50 per song give or take. At a quarter a song,that is $2.50 cents for a cd, which means the editor basically wants his music for free.
It is ok to dream people, but honestly, shouldn't realistic expectations be part of the equation some where. The current offerings are about 1 dollar per song, or about $10 dollars for a cd, which is a savings to the consumer. There is a thing called fair price, afterall. I guess some are not happy until the cost reaches 0. Now, that would be nice...
My two cents,
-Iowa
"He who laughs last, didn't get the joke."-Cap
This is the first online music store that I will seriously consider. (and actually the first that I _can_ consider since I'm a linux user.
That's not entirely true. You can buy from Bleep.com, and it's basically the same thing. Non-DRM 192kps MP3s. You just have to like their selection (mostly electronic music on Warp Records). It's been up for a while now, and you pay per song (or album), not a monthly fee (which I prefer).
I did, however, get a whole bunch of George Carlin, T. Monk, and other collections before I jumped. That same stuff would take a year or two at 40 tracks/month.
Crappier music because it is not as well known as Britney Spears? There are plenty of artists that the music labels have not picked up because they are not mainstream enough. They make great music and you may find some of these gems on sites that feature independent music.
How the hell am I supposed to download anything from them, when I can't even load the registration page in less than 60 seconds.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
(please refer to subject)
...where I come from, the presence of Moby in the catalog would be considered a good thing.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
What? No Dead? That will be their demise.
http://www.lipservicemusic.com
Doors: no
Boston: only their last album
Rush: no
Zappa: one obscure collaboration
Springsteen: no
Allman Bros: no
Beach Boys: one obscure CD
Nirvana: no
Guns and Roses: no
Jefferson airplane: no
All in all, this is definitely not a site catering to mainstream rock tastes. Maybe that's why they don't allow searching of their catalog before signup. Now let me hit send and see how long it takes before the first, "Dude, your musical tastes blow," flame.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
ALB has been brought up before. It's more expensive, but you only buy what you download. All indie, no RIAA. I buy from them religiously and love their selection.
pricepoint
:-)
Another infection on the English vocabulary. I love it when people criticize "utility cover" as double-speak, then are the same people who fall for marketing droid words like this one. Everytime I hear 'pricepoint' I envision some slacker student waking up in the middle of a economics lecture, hearing only that word then writing it down. A couple of years out of Cardinal-Direction State U., the same person wakes up in the middle of team meeting and blurts this word perfunctorially. The next thing you know, it is dogma.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I used to download all sorts of songs off mp3.com for free. Ya, they were only 128kbps non-vbr, but that was better than the crappy Xing encoding that was all over Napster at the time. The only thing bad about mp3.com is that I had to sort through all the shit. Finding a good song was like finding your wife's diamond ring that the dog ate.. There were a lot of good songs, though.
Now, we have the same thing and it's only $9.99 as opposed to free. Wonderful. Is it just me or does it seem like the Internet is trying to charge us for things we used to get for free? Once people are used to getting things for free (as in songs), it's very hard to get them to pay unless a new feature is added that outweighs the opportunity cost.
People need to realize that the next big music business model is small music. Bands will have to post their songs and fans will decide if they're worth paying for. The big music will be left to selling concert tickets and controlling the radio that no one will listen to.
We are a capitalist system and antiquated business is supposed to get phased out or adapt. Clearly, big music is not adapting. This smaller label might be able to sell songs cheaper for a bit, but it will be a select audience and will never explode.
I welcome the demise of big music. Music is art which is optional. Art is for the masses. They can't force me to buy their art even if they force a tune to get stuck in my head. Perhaps I'm just completely cynical, but I just can't see this smaller label having any chance of succeeding in the long run since it is still based on the current 'failing' (failed, imo) business model, only cheaper.
All I can say is 'good luck.'
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Say what you mean. You will never buy songs online. Saying 'every song ever' just sounds stupid.
Even if this is an advertisement... either paid to OSDN or by sending pizza to Taco... its a pretty dumb thing to do if your business has a history of unhappy geek customers.
I read the first couple of posts "hey, this looks interesting", but when I got around post 30 and the "emusic used to be unlimited but they didn't honor their contracts" a few neurons fired, and now I remember who these guys are.
Moral: If you are going to try "advertise" on slashdot, you better have a spotless history, because we are better at digging up dirt than the Washington Post armed with an auger.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
It is nice to know thay still use LAME version 3.92
Do not know what preset thay use, I prefer -alt-preset standard
Nothing to see, move along folks.
1 &categoryID=1198
and notify us of your intention to cancel your subscription
prior to November 8, 2003, your EMusic subscription will
convert into EMusic Basic. Under EMusic Basic, you will be
billed $9.99 per month for access to the service with no
minimum monthly commitment, but you will be limited to no
more than 40 downloads during your monthly billing cycle. "
I can't believe this makes 'news'. This is the same old crappy E-music as before.
For those who don't know, E-music had high quality VBR MP3 titles for download. Most labels would not license to them, so their catalog consists of mainly out of the maintstream / lesser known labels. In exchange for this less than up to date collection, they allowed unlimited downloads. That all ended in October 2003. First those who had the audicity to load up on the unlimited songs in large quantities quietely had their accounts cancelled.
In Oct 2003, part of the email they sent was the following:
" In order to respond to these ongoing challenges and maintain a compelling service for our valued customers, EMusic will be making a number of significant changes in the coming weeks and months. As part of these changes, we will be discontinuing the unlimited service plan and replacing it with a new service offering.
Unless you visit the link below: http://help.emusic.com/cu/index.cgi?cmd=step2&st=
So you can see, nothing has changed. Browsing their catalog the selection appears to be the same limited catalog. Their price point hasn't even changed. In fact, their same website stills has the same 'sleaze' factor. Information on the costs and limitations are not easily available from the front page. Clicking - sign me up for a trial - doesn't give much details until you give personal information.
The same limitations remain from Nov 2003. If you hit your whopping 40 tracks download in the month, thats it. There is no per song fee for each song over that.
Like I said, its hard to believe this qualifies as news. I wonder if someone was cleaning out their email and say Emusics email from Sep 2003 and thought it was 2004?
They have Gwar AND Dropkick Murphy's. Those were the two bands I missed the most from the iTunes Music Store.
Has anyone tried AudioXtract ?
I haven't seen it mentioned here yet, and it costs $50, but you can record up to 8 streams from internet radio stations to mp3 files. It fills in the tags and doesn't record dups. They claim it is legal, same as recording from the radio. Let it run 24/7 from the right stations and your library should fill up quickly. As long as you keep them for your personal use there shouldn't be any legal problems, right?
I am the last person to "promo" a record label, but I can't believe I haven't seen it on slashdot yet.
Magnatune
Free mp3 streaming of the entire catalog.
If you want, pay $5-$18 (you choose!) for an album download (40+ minutes) in mp3, ogg, wav, or whatever it is you like. Artist gets 50%.
If you want a physical cd, pay $15-$30 (something like that.. you choose!) and the artist gets 100%.
There is *no crap* in magnatune; all of their members are peer reviewed. It's solid.
I don't work for them or anything, I am just a very happy customer!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
"Since late 80s when he backed a death sentence to the author of "Satanic Verses" Salman Rushdie, Stevens' music was boycotted by many radio stations in Britain, USA and elsewhere"
I saw them at the Roseland in NYC for a Halloween Show. Best line ever:
'This song goes to all you guys who ain't gettin' laid. And that is every fuckin' one of you.'
Yeah. I like iTunes a lot, but I am keeping an eye on EMusic. Looks good.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Would like you to cite some source (any will do) that actually shows that this was done, rather than insinuates it, or repeats a rumor of it happening. I wish we could "through" people out who don't like to think things "throw" and just spout off idiotic nonsense without even thinking about what they are saying.
Gigatracks has independent artists and albums with some really great music. They review the artists fairly and allow their music to be downloaded through the site for free. Definitely worth a look. I've found some good stuff there.
60 percent of the time, my comments are right everytime.
Now let me hit send and see how long it takes before the first, "Dude, your musical tastes blow," flame.
So do you have a Cheryl Teigs poster on your wall or Bo Derek?
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
As a former subscriber I can say they are worth it depending on the type of music you listen to. If it's strictly mainstream then forget it. For me I spent nearly all my time in their classical and jazz catalogs. There's plenty of good stuff including lots of historical recordings by great artists/conducters etc. I was upset when they changed their pricing model. Being able to download all the tracks you wanted (well it was actually ~2000 per month but me being dial-up I never came close to the unspoken cap) was certainly nice but we all knew it wouldn't last.
Check out the link to browse their catalog that someone posted earlier in the comments. It definitely doesn't sound like much if you're used to downloading all you want from p2p. But if you already use pay sites it's a very economical way to try new music.
And as for why I'm not currently a member it's all economics. I plan to join again in the near future.
Oh and again if you're a jazz fan (especially if you like the great jazz pianists like Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Jelly Roll Morton etc) then you'll really like the service.
Good looking out! The fact that "House" and "Hard House" are different major topics is good. The fact that they differentiate "techstep" from "hardstep" is great. And there is a category of "acid" under "breaks", right where it should be.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I'll be glad when your kind are gone.
The USA needs a service like this with no DRM. Even if the price was doubled to $25 for 1 GB of download, it would still dominate. The RIAA should be thinking wholesale like Walmart, Home Depot and Lowes. Instead of selling one song for a buck, sell 20 songs for $0.05. It doesn't cost anything to resell the song since it is just stored as a file. No duplication or media costs. If a popular song was downloaded 10 million times at $0.05 that would be $500,000! Not bad for just one song. Release this type of service to the world an you could easily get 100 million downlooads for a song, that 5 million bucks off of just one song.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
No more money for you RIIA!
The allofmp3.com music store is cheaper and far superior in user experience. You get to choose your encoding from a bunch of DRM-less formats and at any bitrate, both CBR and VBR. Then you pay by the file size you download. USD 5$ gets you 500Mb. And you can listen to their entire library for free at low quality before you buy. Plus its a no-bullshit website/company, and you notice it constantly. I'm sure some of you will value this last point.
(I am only affiliated with allofmp3.com as a happy customer.)
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
Pfft... Forget it then!
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
Of course, looking at broadcast, apparently giving them truckfulls of money and letting them lead the high life also has the same effect. Go figure.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What I don't get is why music stores ask such a high price for their downloads.
If we assume that allofmp3.com doesn't pay any royalties, they seem to have a business charging 0.01 to 0.02 USD per Mbyte for their service.
Add about 0.10 USD royalties per song to this and you have your pricepoint. Yup that's between 0.15 and 0.20 USD per song for mainstream music.
Anything above that, and you are definitely being ripped off. Still feel good paying over 1.00 USD to the coke-snorting suits at the RIAA per song? (I live in Europe 1 EUR > 1 USD)
Magnatune and AudioLunchbox also provide non-DRM formats (ALB has your choice of mp3 or Ogg Vorbis). ALB also frequently has sales, or gives away free songs, and while single tracks are normally a buck, whole albums don't go above $10. As others have pointed out, $10 a month is only a better deal if you actually do download at least ten tracks in that month. There just isn't that much good music out there -- better to pay only for what you do get, rather than what you might get.
Pancakes is the better part of valor.
Hmm.. let's see: Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Wes Montgomery....
Yep, these guys knew nothing about music..
I hope my sarcasm is showing..
...richie - It is a good day to code.
....not be bound by a monthly subscription.
Maybe I don't want 40 downloads every month?
I would rather pay a full buck per download if it means that I can download exactly as much, or as little, as I want.
The new eMusic is close, but not quite there.
Magnatunes also focuses on independent artists. When you buy, you get to choose pretty much any format you want, including uncompressed.
This is the way to go.
...Don't get that if I have to put in my credit card details before seeing the product, I aint gonna be putting in my credit card details. Doesn't matter if they promise to refund it at a later date.
You pay $.01 per megabyte. A typical CD seems to run about one dollar.
I make no assumptions regarding how legal this is.
The site is in Russia and the credit card processor is in the US. I "charged" my account with $15 and I've downloaded about 15 CD's so far and I still have about 4 bucks left. They have EVERYTHING and you choose the file format and type of encoding. It encodes the files in real time when you order the song(s).
I'm stocking up because I assume this won't be available for long.
Full disclosure: I have no connection with the site other than as a customer.
-Lee
At first I was going to blurt out "OMG! That beleaguered company Apple is going to go out of business!"
But then I started thinking about it. $0.25/song is good. But as the article stated, " They are focusing on lesser known independent music", which means the record labels probably don't have their hands in this music. The labels take a whopping 70% or so of Apple's $0.99, the artist gets some, leaving Apple with a few pennies. My point being, if Apple were to include these same artists in their library, they too could cut the price down to a quarter.
At any rate, competition is good and I'm curious to see if eMusic will be known as the place to go for hard to find music, if other music services will follow suit, or what.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
that I've been using are both based in Russia.
n geencode_mss=ENG
http://reg.allofmp3.com/shares/setencode.html?cha
($5 per 1GB of downloads)
http://3mp3.ru/eng
($5 per month unlimited downloads)
The music is in plain MP3 format, isn't it? How could it not work?
...when you buy digital music such as this, what proof do you have that you really own it?
I've got a large collection of music in mp3 and ogg formats on my laptop, ripped from my CD collection. I've often been worried about going through international customs at airports and having some over-zealous security nut decide to search the contents of my hard disk drive and then fast-track me to death row for DMCA infringement.
Now, at least with my mp3 collection, I can point to all of my CDs (well, at home) as proof that I own them. But if I were to buy mp3 files from emusic, what proof do I get that I really own them? Are emusic keeping records of all purchases and will they be willing to provide
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
I think allofmp3.com is still a better deal.
You pay by MB or about $0.03 per song. Fits my shopping style.
Check out warp records' store - http://www.warprecords.com/bleep/ - new labels are being added every now and then. With a flash enabled browser you can preview the entire tracks (play/pause and seeking). High quality drm-less vbr mp3s (including mp3s of rare vinyl only releases).
I had an account with them when it was near unlimited downloads. I still have an account with them because they have good stuff and are still a lot cheaper.
You guys can bicker about the encoding rates, but they're pretty much as good as all of the other popular online music stores minus the DRM.
As for the price/subscription model. All you have to do is download 10 songs and you've broken even with the iTunes store. Hell, subscriptions can be good, it'll force you to listen to something new instead of that same Journey/Rush/Britney crap that everyone else has on their DAPs. Think about it, you're paying less, you can copy the tracks (remember how you could make mix tapes with music you bought?), and they carry A LOT of independent music.
I know I sound like I work for them, but it seems like they're not getting a fair shake. Try buying the almost every Pixies song recorded in one place for so cheap. I dare you.
They've got almost the whole 4AD catalog, most of what Mordam ever distributed (PUNK ROCK!) and a lot of jazz.
Maybe emusic isn't for everybody, but if you ever listen to new stuff on your own or buy more than one indie rock/punk rock/jazz record a month, then you'll be completely satisfied.
Is it just me or does it seem like the Internet is trying to charge us for things we used to get for free?
Yeah...I remember the good ole days. Remember going to the binary bboards and "downloading" the pictures. Then I finally got UUEncode and could download the ~really big~ pictures. So you grab "babe_pt1", "babe_pt2", and "babe_pt3", merge them as you get ready to see some hottie and then realize you just wasted all that time putting together a picture of someone's pet pig. Such innocent days...and free.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
there was a slshdot article a while back. that eMusic was changing business models. most people jumped ship. i did. $9.99 a month wasn't bad with no restrictions, so when you finally get around to spending some time experimenting you could just download anything to make up for all those months of forgeting to download anything at all. Wasn't much anyway. when we were all notified of the changes i donwloaded everything i thought would be worth a shot and dumped the service. deleted most of it. my suggestion is to get it for about 6 months tops and you'll be able to download everything worth while. though now you have to be sorta picky.
Magnatune and allofmp3 both support a lot more formats, including lossless and MP3's using known-good lame presets. 25c per track? I'd rather pay more for something good.. pretty please?
Note: these are Google cached as the site seems to be slashdotted.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I use Audio Lunchbox, which lets you download in both 192kbit MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. I've also poked at Bleep, which currently supports MP3 and is thinking about FLAC.
Both of these are DRM-free and will give you files that work on Linux (or BeOS or PalmOS or an Amiga or a Newton or whatever).
That screwed us once by getting rid of the flat rate subscription model?
Now it seems like they're offering the same unknown [good or bad] catalog but at 25c a track, assuming you use your monthly allotment.
Pass, thanks!
--D
i've been using it for 3 months now...put simply it rocks, indy music, cheap downloads, no drm....
you can't find everything your looking for there but its the best music download out there right now in my opinion.
no way affiliated with audiolunchbox.com, unless you consider rabid fan to be an affiliation.
--DRM free
--mp3s and ogg vorbis encoding (most tracks can be downloaded as ogg, there are a few that are only mp3s I think)
--independent music
--similar price scheme as iTMS
--bigger catalogue than emusic (in fact, most of the good stuff from emusic's glory days is on audiolunchbox.com)
--did I mention the no DRM
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
I used to use Emusic. Their quality of service went from excellent to non-existant in a small time period. I couldn't download the majority of the tunes that I wanted. I think they had just been bought out by another company around this time. I waited a while, but eventually cancelled my subscription after getting no help from their support.
I mean just because a cd sells for $15 at retail center A and then the same album retails online at retail center B (with DRM and lower quality encoding) for $5 less doesn't mean doesn't make B a good deal. The author is obviously saying he's not comfortable paying $10 per album and I think there has been more then enough posts pointing out that the cost of manufacturing and distributing a compact disk is out of balance with the retail price.
The only thing I'd fault the author for is failing to mention another mp3 (wav/flac/ogg) retailer:
allofmp3.com
Aside from not using DRM of any kind they charge by the megabyte, for a 192k encoded album I pay on average about $.70. And they sell all the Top 40 crap everyones alway complaining groovy company B can't provide.
If more music companies considered pricing more similar to allofmp3 (if record companies let them) they would easily make up in volume what they lost in premium. Paying pennies for good music is better economics then paying nothing for low quality rips via p2p.
Quack, quack.
Some encoders and some decoders support higher bitrates producing what's called "free-format" MP3's. Allofmp3 use this to store their lower end source material (i.e. the non-lossless-sourced music which makes up most of their catalogue) as 384kbps MP3's they can transcode to your chosen bitrate.
:/
They should have spent the extra 60% on storage and just used FLAC (good choice for a transcoding service; it decodes very fast), but I guess it's difficult to make a good cost-benefit analysis of that when you can make significant savings on things 99% of users won't even understand, never mind care about
No, there is another that even provides ogg vorbis at q6, in addition to mp3 at 192.
AudioLunchbox
Cheers
/g
I'm still plodding through the 20+ GB I downloaded before they "relaunched" and am discovering fantastic alternative bands from the early 90's that I'd never even heard of before, but now love. Sorry Emusic but you were great while you lasted.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Why pay $10 for a mere 40 songs when you can pay $10 for 1 gigabyte (from a much more massive catalog) on sites like club.mp3search.ru and allofmp3.com ??
"...near my pricepoint"
Twenty-five cents a SONG is NEAR your pricepoint? What the fuck is your pricepoint? Free? A paltry two bits is out of your price range? Three bucks an album seems unreasonable to you?
I agree... it's taking me forever to listen to samples and d/l music. Ugh. I'm a Mac guy and was actually thinking about this service pretty seriously. However, as mentioned before, the monthly subscription method doesn't work for me. I don't download THAT much music.
Their pricing plans...
* eMusic Basic: $9.99 per month/40 downloads
* eMusic Plus: $14.99 per month/65 downloads
* eMusic Premium: $19.99 per month/90 downloads
Yes, it works out to as low as 22 cents a song. But I still won't be using this service. At least, not until you can buy by-the-song.
I can't guarantee there will be 40-90 songs I will want in a given month. If the majors won't support it-- which would mean not just the new crap I could care less about, but just about every song from the 60's, 70's and 80's I would want-- then I foresee downloading a lot of new independent stuff I wouldn't otherwise care about, and probably would never listen to. In the end I would likely be paying $10 a month for a handful of downloads... And they don't even stack, so if you miss a month, they're gone...
Then again, if my tastes leaned towards indie rock and eclectic compilations-- meaning, if I was still a 23-year old hipster-- then I might check it out. So, good luck.
my password is private, but unchanged.
0.99 is way too much for me, IMHO, as I like to listen to a lot of songs relatively few times per. 0.25 is more like it. 0.10 is probably closer to the true value of your average song.
For the record, if TV were pay-per-view, I wouldn't spend more than $0.25 per commercial-free half-hour one-time-view. It doesn't sound like much, but any more than that and the prices take it above cable and rental. Again, 0.10 or less is closer to the value of your average TV half-hour show.
Well, it doesn't matter. The RIAA and MPAA have made a career of charging exorbitant prices for what is mostly crap-not-worth-the-time-it-takes-to-watch/listen, whilst royally screwing the artists, good or bad. As the IP laws strengthen this will only worse, and will probably only give them more ways to screw people (such as purchasers of blank media). Your tax dollars at work.
Most folks aren't bothered by piracy of this sort, because most people correctly consider recorded entertainment to have little or no intrinsic worth - the sort of thing that once upon a time you could buy for a song. If they really do like it, they pay.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
(And actually the first that I _can_ consider since I'm a linux user.)
5 49/26021>iA review</a>).
Actually, no.
Allofmp3.com (<a href=http://www.infoanarchy.org/story/2004/4/30/2
Quotes:
"You pay by the gigabyte; 1 gigabyte costs $10."
"Legal"
"You decide the quality"
WE DON'T NEED NO BLOG CONTROL.
For electronica fans, Bleep sells good quality MP3's from Warp, Ninja Tune, and a bunch of related labels. They're generally just over a buck a piece, and their preview tool is excellent. Many of the tracks are not available on CD, so this is the only way of getting a digital copy without going through the incredibly painfull process of ripping vinyl.
yes the emusic download manager sucks donkey balls. it almost made be drop my subscription when they introduced that thing. fortunately they *removed* the requirement that you use it a few months ago. you can now download tracks directly again.
2) They are encoding at 192Kbit/s VBR. That's near CD quality
No, that is not near CD quality.
Even the mighty 320 Kbps, top of the scale for most apps/players I've seen isn't near CD quality.
Yes, I can hear the difference, albeit not on the crappy speaker of my Mac at home or the Dell at work.
No, I never said I'd pay $.99/track, and $.25/track might be OK for a lot of things, but I try not to settle when I purchase music; it is too important [to me].
Hmm, ok, apparently a non-mainstream mix - worth a look then. Some interesting artists doing celtic fusion stuff these days you don't find easily. I'm also fond of (very) early music.
So, browse to Folk, quick scan shows no Irish, Scottish, Celtic etc but British. A click reveals five albums by George Formby.
Falls off chair.
Must be shome mistake shurly, so back up to Folk, notice British/Irish. Might be better, heads down.
More albums, but nothing really of any interest. Universily the sort of stuff you can pick up for a couple of quid on permanent sale. The occasional thing I might listen to, but very few and far between.
Off mainstream Magnatune are far better. http://magnatune.com/ Anyone who has the incomparable Belinda Sykes and Joglaresa on their list has to be worth a long look
the stupid broken emusic download manager is no longer required. creating that beast is the worst thing they ever did; they're not a desktop software company and it shows.
This does not look like a relaunch to me either. Emusic changed to this format last year from their very nice $9.99 unlimited download format. I have a lot of gigs of MP3s that I downloaded from Emusic over the couple years I had a subscription. Once they went to the 40 tracks for $9.99 I dropped them. I also rake in a decent amount of money from an album I have on there (Isomorph) and am considering joining up again once I search the catalog and see how much new stuff they've aquired in the past year.
Les Fleur by 4 hero.
That'll be me buying the CD and ripping it myself... Again...
Anyone else find that legal MP3 download services rarely have what you want?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
the RIAA and major labels artifically prop up CD prices. the artists get jack and shit of the CD sales price if anything at all. the industry is designed and run by layers of lawyers and middle men all claiming a cut for required "services" nobody in their right mind would pay for in the first place.
.25c a track and give the artist even 5 cents of that and they're getting more than they would from a track on a CD.
sell at
...sells unencumbered oggs and mp3:s, both around 192 kbps, your choice to download both or either. (I usually just go for the vorbis.)
I hate plugging stuff but it's a really small company, they don't seem to do much advertising, and, first and foremost, noone seems to have heard of them, and they deserve better than that. They've been great to me and they have stuff that's often hard to find on p2p.
AllOfMp3.com is $0.01 per Mb, and they have *everything*, legally, at any bitrate, in any format. There's a link on their page somewhere to translate into English (from the parent company's Russian)
That is $0.25 a track. Much cheaper than everywhere else. Except allofmp3.com, which sells songs for about $0.02 a track. Yay for our comrades in Russia. They are encoding at 192Kbit/s VBR. That's near CD quality Nah, 320 is near-CD quality. To my ear, 192 still sux. Oh, and allofmp3.com lets you choose your own encoding rates, the only site I've seen so far that allows up to 320.
my probelem is that I listen to alot of inie music, I go to penn state and get napster for free, but they don't have any music I like. And when I could buy a fugazi album for 8 dollars that has 16 songs, 99 cents a song is a rip off.
So if i buy a cd i can mold it into any digital format that I want, I support the artist and i have a backup copy. Util there is an online music store for me then i will go with that, for now... well i really dont care.
Um, yeah. Legal... LOL... good luck when the Russian government shuts them down and the Russian mafia makes off with your credit card.
I haven't even seen the catalog yet. :)
I thought I would check this service out quickly. I trusted them with my name, email, street address, and credit card #. Hopefully that won't come back to bite me in the ass. Anyway, I hadn't seen the catalog before giving out this info either. It didn't seem to be available from the free trial page I arrived at. Feeling adventurous, I took the plunge anyway.
As I suspected, the music selection is extremely limited, and of pretty terrible sound quality, despite being encoded at relatively high bitrate. The first thing I tried was a Bob Marley track "Sun Is Shining" from the "Natural Mystic" album released on the Avid label (not Island Records). It sounded like a cassette dub... really awful. It was MP3 encoded at 154kbps VBR, so the source must be the problem. I went to Amazon to check if this album was legit, and one of the comments there said it was a bootleg, and to avoid it since proceeds would not go to the artist's family. Strike One!
Wanting to be fair to the service, I only went for tracks of their "Featured Artists", figuring that they would have some quality control going on there. Bob Marley was a "Featured Artist", so they deserved that first strike. The next artist I tried was Moby. I thought it would be less likely that they would be ripping off an artist who was still alive... Well, I clicked on the "Moby" link and waited. And waited. Mozilla says: "Waiting for www.emusic.com..." After a few minutes, I gave up trying to score a Moby track. Strike Two!
Ok... I'm starting to lose hope. Let's give them another chance. I tried Willie Nelson next. Hmmm... still nonresponsive. Could it be that they've been slashdotted? Somehow I wasn't seeing thousands of slashdotters whipping out their wallets like I did, so I tried another strategy. I logged on from another machine. All of a sudden, things are pretty snappy again. Hmmm... what's up with that? Anyway, I tried perusing the classical selection. I couldn't really find anything exciting to listen to, and the search was difficult because they have everything arranged by sub-genre and album name, instead of composer. I did settle on a track from the piano recital of some dude I've never heard. It was ok I guess, but no way am I staying with this service I thought. It's just too lame. Strike Three!
Ok, game's over, or so I think. I click on the account link and wait. And wait. And wait... Oh Phew! There's the account page. I quickly click on the "Cancel" link. Still slow, but I'm relieved when the next page comes up asking the primary reason why I'm cancelling. All of the reasons are equally enticing, things like "I'm having technical problems" and "Not enough music in my favorite genre." I settle on one and click on the "Cancel My Subscription" link. Then I got this message:
Your eMusic account has been set to cancel at the end of this billing period. Your credit card will not be charged again (emphasis mine). If you have any downloads remaining, you may finish downloading them until the end of your current billing period.
Wait a minute! I thought this was supposed to be a free trial. If those mofos charged my card I'm going to go ballistic! I'm not so sure this is the kind of service that I want to encourage...
It looks like PURE CRAP to me.
The graphics look retarded and the don't have shit for songs. I tried looking up two discs that itunes does not carry but this place did not even have the artists at all let alone some of their earlier work.
What did turn up in my search were sound effects. 90 percent of the hits were sound effects. Is this the bulk of their 500,000 "songs"?
I found this while searching for some death metal last week. $15 per 1GB of music, in MP3 format, 192kbs, no DRM. Sounds pretty good to me!
http://mclub.te.net.ua/
Websites like Discogs already offer discographies and band information for almost every signed musician out there for free. eMusic could establish a longterm contract with Discogs to continue providing that data.....
.......
Remember the old Audiogalaxy.com? They provided the "Other people who downloaded this also downloaded this..." -- that was the greatest feature of that site. I found ridiculous numbers of new bands/artists I probably would never have been exposed to.
Immediate speedy download won't be all that hard to do once the cash begins to flow. Or maybe they should find a way to use a BitTorrent type protocol to help balance their load and lower their overall costs.....
What he's asking for is not all that unrealistic.
Heck - I'll add another standard requirement as well: valid and proper ID3 tagging
I also believe that a company offering this as a service should start NOW before someone offers an illegal equivalent utilizing BitTorrent - almost like Suprnova.org
what about allofmp3.com it only costs 1c/MB. bargain. plus u can get all sorts of formats; mp3, aac, wma, lossless like flac and others. all drm-free
I read somewhere that all of the profit that is currently made in the record industry is based off of music fans buying an average of 6 compact disks per year (I guess they average that, some buy more, some buy less). But the point is, if heavy music buyers spent an amount of money on downloads that roughly equaled six CDs, the same amount of money would still be changing hands. And if they did it right, I guess even more money would change hands.
/. about the Russian site, I nervously joined it. In only a couple of months, I have spent 25.00. I have downloaded lots of stuff I used to own on cassette but got stolen from me in a break-in at a place I used to rent. I downloaded a lot of stuff I have on albums, but can't listen to anymore.
Now here is my experience with that dubiously legal Russian site vs. my experiences on itunes.
I have downloaded two songs from itunes. They were free because I won the songs in the Pepsi give-away. I wanted to buy some and even looked quite a bit...but there was nothing that really jumped out at me.
After seeing a post on
There is enough there that I could easily spend 10.00 a month and download stuff just to see what it sounds like. I enjoy the service so much, I would probably spend more money in a year than the price of six regular-priced CDs.
If record companies could only see the light, there is a ton of money in a legal site that equaled or excelled over that dubiously legal Russian site.
And I can tell you, I was never a heavy user of P2P, but I hardly remember what that was like after using the dubiously legal Russian site. I can't imagine having to go back to it, either.
If nothing else, I'm glad the site is there to provide some competition to the US/RIAA monopoly.
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
"I'll stick to iTunes"
Yes, because it has the magic apple trademark on it.
Allow me to quickly tell you why iTunes is a bad deal, and I'll pre-provide your stock excuses.
1) Apple iTMS has fairly intrusive DRM. I can't move it to any aribtrary music player, I must use the magic Apple branded music player
-- your answer:
I never notice the DRM, the iPod is the best, and anyway, burn it to a CD and then re-rip it. Sure, it loses a ton of quality, but I only listen on earbuds, so even FM sounds pretty "boss" to me.
2) 128kb/s AAC music is not CD quality
-- your answer:
It sounds fine to me. Anyway, you can burn it to CD, and then it is CD quality.
3) Its expensive, a CD costs $10, whereas CD's are routinely available through used and record clubs for $7/CD
-- your answer:
I only listen to a single at a time, that way I only get the cream of the crop. For example, I can get the Ashlee Simpson single, and don't have to buy the rest. Isn't she hot?
Lets face it, if those limitations existed in any other music service, you'd crucify it. But you think you iPod is magic (I Have an iPod, and its, mediocre), you think iTMS is actually the best hope for music, and ultimatey, you think Apple is fighting the good fight for you.
I think you're just a naive fanboy. No offense.
And actually the first that I _can_ consider since I'm a linux user.
"Linux" is capitalized, moron.
"but since when did 'quality' (however you define that) increase in a linear fashion alongside bitrate?"
Not linear, but bitrate is related to quality. The only people who disagree are those with a viewpoint they're trying to push.
Please be honest and say "My ears and/or equipment can't tell the difference".
But 320kb/s is much better quality than 128kb/s. That's undeniable.
Except that emusic was around before apple's music store and back then it was all you could download for a monthly fee. For those of us that were subscribers back then, its hard to look at this version of emusic with any enthusiasm.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
---
I read somewhere that all of the profit that is currently made in the record industry is based off of music fans buying an average of 6 compact disks per year (I guess they average that, some buy more, some buy less).
---
No offense, but "reading somewhere" doesn't make for a good argument or make it true. Most of the "music should be free" arguments come from people who have not contributed a thing to the music scene or have rode it to the top. It's funny that Courtney Love speaks out so strongly now on her rights, but didn't complain about the record company spending millions and millions of dollars transforming her public image from the drugged up widow of a musician to a pop star (though she's done a pretty good job of reversing that...).
The easy way to defeat your "same amount of money so why not" argument is in your own statement. Despite the fact that you could buy the majority of the tracks you referred to at one of the online music companies, you went with the dirt cheap, illegal source. Rather than making sure that the artists get some kind of money for their work and that the label gets some kind of money for their investing in the artists, you funnel money to either the russian mob or profiteers. So long as people like you will take the cheapest (or free) way out of a situation, regardless of legality or ethics, your argument will not work. The ease and cheapness of digital transmittion sees to that.
But if you want a longer version, here it is: going to an all-you-can-eat version doesn't work because it would require a significantly higher budget because a greater number of artists would have to be compensated.
The way the labels work is that they gamble on a number of artists. Some make it, some don't. The winners end up subsizing the losers, but that's part of the gamble. The vast majority of the artists never make back the money that the label put into them - browse the dollar bin of your favourite record store and marvel at how many groups you've never heard of.
Before you go off and ramble about how evil and bad this makes the label, consider this: One of the bands I've worked with hit the level that their past two albums sold ~50,000 each. Minus manufacturing cost, promos and the like, they were prolly making about $10 profit on each CD. $1 million split 5 ways over three years isn't bad. And yet, they just recently chose to sign on with a large indie label where they'll make much less per CD. If the label didn't provide real tangible benefits, why would they do that?
But back to the all-you-can-eat, the way that the winners and losers is determined is based on how the CD sells. The winners pay back the money invested in them, and then make their living off the rest. The losers pay back part of the investment, but never sell enough to recoup. The rest of that investment gets paid out of the record company's cut of the sucessful artists' sales.
However, if you made downloads free, the number of winners would shoot up dramatically, simply because there would no longer be any incentive not to download anything that had any interest to you. Even if the total pool of money stayed the same, dividing that by a larger number of artists would cut the payout. And unless you are a professional musician, don't tell me that it's easy to work a full time job and be a great musician. I work with great musicians, and they work their asses off to make the music that they do.
---
I have downloaded lots of stuff I used to own on cassette but got stolen from me in a break-in at a place I used to rent. I downloaded a lot of stuff I have on albums, but can't listen to anymore.
---
OK, so you've used the service semi-ethically (you're not taking into account that remastering an album for CD rather than tape or record costs a fair amount). If you trust most of humanity to do so, I've got a couple bridges to sell you.
---
There is enough there that I could easily spend 10.00 a month and download stuff just t
I'm reading the comments on this story and it seems no one has actually explained what the "relaunch" is about. Basically all it is that they have hired a new editorial staff, changed the interface, and added some new stuff like ability to see what other people are downloading. The "new" eMusic is simply a marketing push for an existing service that's been going for quite a while.
That said, I've been a subscriber of theirs for a couple years now, and I've been very happy with it. I had an account back when it was still unlimited downloads, and while I was a little pissed when they changed over to the more limited model, I stuck with the service. I don't know their reasons for dropping the unlimited service, but I assume it was because bandwidth isn't free and they couldn't afford to continue like that.
I've seen comments complaining that eMusic's selection is crap. If you mean it has no major labels, then yes, it's crap. However, that's not what they're aiming for. From their site:
"eMusic is the only digital music service entirely focused on serving the needs of independent music fans and independent labels. "
With that in mind, they have an excellent selection and they frequently pick up new labels. I have yet to run out of things I want to download, and I'm on the highest plan (90 songs a month). For me it's boils down to the ability to get music in the mp3 format and to find new interesting music.
Anyway, just wanted to put in a slightly more informed 2 cents...
Sounds fair, when you consider the actual costs of production and the real return from a cd, the online drm versions are a total rip off.
Also the internet provides opportunities for scale.
Do the manufacturers of ipods etc expect their customers to pay drm prices for 10,000 songs?
I prefer the Russian site because I am paying but getting it at a fair price.
I was about to post this question "Can retail stores, radio stations, and other groups that buy for-profit broadcast rights use stuff downloaded from these online vendords?"
Reading the parent post, it seems like the answer is "Yes". Remember, KCTL is a radio station - they're paying royalties annually through some sort of professional license. Similarly, stores that play RIAA owned music are supposed to buy licenses as well - ~ CAD 40/mo in Canada. I don't think RIAA cares how they get the "media" so to speak.
Whether or not the Russian site is illegal for non-Russians who "import" the music over the Internet... I have no idea, nor am I a lawyer.
The easy way to defeat your "same amount of money so why not" argument is in your own statement....Rather than making sure that the artists get some kind of money for their work and that the label gets some kind of money for their investing in the artists, you funnel money to either the russian mob or profiteers. So long as people like you will take the cheapest (or free) way out of a situation, regardless of legality or ethics, your argument will not work. The ease and cheapness of digital transmittion sees to that.
Well, there are plenty of places I could have gotten the same music for free. However, I chose to part with hard earned money because they do things the way it should be done. If an American company offered an equal service, I would give them an equal amount of hard-earned money. In fact, I used emusic.com back when they offered unlimited downloads, and I probably spent 100 - 200 dollars with them before they choked and started to suck.
The fact is that the Russian site does pay the artists some money, too. So they, the artists, aren't getting filthy rich off of it, so what? I personally don't give a rat's ass. I don't mind if they make a nice living, but the reality is that the days of the filthy-rich superstar are coming to an end. Thank the lord! They can work for a living just like everyone else.
As far as funding the Russian mob: smoking pot supports terrorist, piracy supports terrorist...it all makes for good soundbites and you need to work something in about protecting the children or something! {g}
Oh, and the numbers used about the current amount of profit in the industry coming from music buyers purchasing 6 CDs per year came from a very legit source...I just can't remember who wrote it so I can't give a source. Just because I didn't give a source does not mean I read it on the onion.com!
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
Hmm, I've been using them for 6 months now... no worries. What's a $300-limit credit card for; if not this kind of stuff?
I've heard other slashdot users talk about having had an account there for years with no problems.
Cheap music. Finally at a price I can feel good about. I was able to stop pirating, and find the music I wanted (most of it) encoded at a common quality... Works for me. Perhaps the site is just an RIAA pilot project to TRAIN me to pay for music? hehee
Was wondering since the 192kbps vbr was mentioned if they are using true stereo encoding or joint stereo?
Some encoders do joint stereo fine (newer lame builds) but others mess it up.
As someone who got in on the ground floor at www.mp3.com the first time (and has since had his music relegated to the basement ) because of MP3.com's sale, I find this very exciting. I remember when The Orchard was ONLY selling CDs from their own website and thinking "man that sucks, I'm better off setting up a server with my own stuff on Kazaa" but now that's all changed. If you want to market your indie music online (and get into the www.emusic.com family), The orchard is the way to go.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with, nor have I ever been affliated with www.theorchard.com, but I will be joining now that I have found this link. Thanks Slashdot. I'm also not affiliated with Emusic (yet). Now my life has meaning.
-- Cheers!
- Playlists: If you listen to music in the background while you work like I do, then you've come across this problem. You heard a song you liked, but didn't look at its name before the next one started playing. How do you find out what you heard so you can buy it? Magnatune doesn't offer a playlist of the stream on their site.
- Searchable Database: Since there's no playlist you decide to search for the song. But you can't. There is no searchable database on their site. You must listen to each individual song in whatever catagory you think the stream was in while crossing your fingers and hoping you'll find it within the first 50 or so... Too much work, IMO.
- Customer Support: You really want that song, don't know what it was called and can't find it on their site, so you send an email to Punky, the Emailclown. The problem is that he doesn't respond. Any email stating "I am looking for a song played at x:xxpm write before (name of song I did catch). I have money and and prepared to give it to you." should elicit some sort of response - even a canned one. I've sent several. Even followups weeks later. Nothing.
I purchase music at Bleep [bleep.com] and Apple's iTMS. In contrast to Magnatunes, I have emailed Apple on several occassions and received replies. Both Bleep and iTMS allow me to search their catalogs. Magnatunes doesn't seem to want my business, so I'll spend my money elsewhere.I see Magnatune praised a lot here. Some of you even rave about them. But do you just select music randomly and get lucky? Or do you go there with certain musicians in mind? Aside from using them as a proof of concept in the noble fight against the RIAA, I just don't see how anybody who doesn't have a lot of time on their hands can use their service..
Fun with Inkwell | www.coo
Emusic's call to fame was unlimited downloads at a flat rate. For me, it was a simple service. All the music I want, don't ponder if a band is good or not, get it and listen to it. They would have continued to get my dollar every month just like netflicks does. Then Emusic put a low cap on the number of bands you can buy. Basically, they decided to charge $0.25 a song... which made the way I enjoyed listening to music worthless.
Look, I am not a music fanatic. I don't ponder laboriously over which CDs to buy. I don't read reviews, and for the most part I put absolutely zero effort into sifting the shit away from the worthwhile stuff. I treat music exactly like TV. I don't have favorite TV shows, I simply sit down on occasion and watch whatever happens to be on. I never sit down for a regular show. The only regular shows that I sit down for are the ones I get from Netflicks.com that I watch at my own leisure. To put it bluntly, there is more then enough entertainment out there that I don't want to waste my busy day having to look for it or sift out the shit from the worthwhile stuff.
If the Internet used the stupid pricing schemes that the music industry uses, that is to say that you have to pay open a webpage instead of a flat rate regardless of how many webpages you open, I wouldn't use the Internet.
Until someone uses a less asinine pricing scheme, I have all but given up on music. At best I go on the occasional downloading spree in a P2P. I am more then happy to shell out a pile of money each month for a service that simply gives me a massive bank of music to brows at my leisure. Until someone responds to what the market obviously wants, I will just spend my money on other media. There is a reason why Netflicks gets my dollar and Blockbuster doesn't any more.
This is nothing. Try http://mclub.te.net.ua/
Songs range in quality from 128kbps to 382kbps, but it's only around $0.10 per song, and it uses direct download of MP3s so it works with any OS. Also has many mainstream bands. All but two of the bands I listen to are there. Still legal music.
If you aren't paying for the printing, shipping, storage, and stocking fees on a normal CD, why should you be paying 1/1 the cost of a CD in wal-mart? A cd with 20 song would run me $5 from that site, but I can pick it up in a record store for $9.99? I don't think I like that idea... Not when I can get the same thing for $1.60 at around 15 other places (I.E. MP3 with no special software requirements, works with *nix). How is that site news?
What I want to hear about is a site that sells music in q-5 ogg format, because then you don't lose so much high and low data.
I did the same. signed up for the free thing, 50 downloads. then let that spill over into 1 month at 9.99... cancelled after that because I wasn't keeping up. But then a couple months later, signed back up, and your account is still there, lists of what you've already downloaded,, etc. So when you get hankering for new music, browse their site again, sign up for another $10 stint, and grab 40-50 more tracks... cancel at will. Seems like a decent way to go.
btw almost all of matador's bands are there - some really good stuff (yo la tengo!) And discovered Mogwai there too - really not bad for the little bit that I've paid.
Ok. The most recent version (July 20, 2004) of Law of the Russian Federation on Authors' Rights and Related Rights reads:
Article 39: Use of a recording, published for commercial purposes, without the agreement of the manufacturer of the recording or the performer
1. As an exception to the provisions of articles 37 and 38 of this Law, it is permitted, without the agreement of the manufacturer of the recording that was published for commercial purposes, or of the performer whose performance was recorded in the recording, but with the payment of royalty:
1. to play the recording publically
2. to broadcast the recording
3. to transmit the recording over cable for general access
1.1 [liberal translation] Starting on September 1, 2006, the "play the recording publically" part no longer applies.
2. The collection, distribution, and payment of royalties from part 1 of the current article is done by one of the organizations which governs the rights of recording manufacturers and performers on a collective basis (see article 44 of the current law) in accordance with the agreement between these organizations. If this agreement does not provide otherwise, the royalty is split equally between the recording manufacturer and the performer.
3. The size of the royalty and conditions for its payment are determined by the agreement between the user of the recording or the union (association) of such users, on the one hand, and the organizations that govern the rights of manufacturers of phonograms and performers, on the other hand; in the case where no such agreement is made, the size of the royalty and conditions for its payment are determined by a special organ of the Russian Federation.
The size of the royalty is to be determined for each type of use of the recording.
4. Users of recordings must provide to the organization mentioned in part 2 of the current article the data containing precise information about the number of uses of the recording, and also other information and documents necessary for the collection and distribution of royalties.
Here is what ROMS (Russian Society for Multimedia and Digital Networks) has to say about this matter:
ROMS gives you [the content provider] the opportunity to make a single licensing agreement with ROMS instead of innumerable agreements with each of the copyright holders. According to this agreement, the user must pay a royalty that will be distributed to the copyright holders, and to provide information about the recordings used, while ROMS guarantees (as long as the user fulfills all of the contract obligations) to settle any possible monetary claims against the user from the holder of copyrights and related rights.
As far as I can tell, ROMS only distributes royalties to its members. Thus, if you are really losing a lot of money from Russian sites, I suggest you look into ROMS membership.
Links: http://www.roms.ru/, http://www.copyrighter.ru/full/apispnew.htm
Anyone else have the linux client segfaulting? Also, it seems to be one major version number behind the windows/osx clients, and appears not to have been updated in about a year...
There's an article about the legality of allofmp3 in the Sydney Morning Herald, at http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/26/10828314 75556.html (registration probably required). Note that it's in the context of Australian law.
Quote from it follows:
We sought some advice from a Melbourne barrister and contributor to these pages, Simon Minahan, who practises in the area of intellectual property.
His opinion: "There's probably nothing to stop the individual from downloading this material for private use. For end users, the issue is a basic question relevant to acquiring a reproduction of any copyright work: has the rights owner consented?"
Even if allofmp3.com's asserted licence is bogus, says Minahan, "the end user would seem to have a good basis to argue that he is an innocent infringer, which would mean he isn't liable to damages, although he would still be liable to an order requiring him to destroy or deliver up any copies and an order requiring him to refrain from doing it again."
Well, they owe slashdot one customer, I guess.
... ... works
.M3U file to be the album index for the player. But you can make it use filenames with the track number prefixed ("01-title.mp3 02-title2.mp3") so that you can play them in order - or make an m3u file.
I clicked through, signed up for the free period (which involves giving them credit card stuff and remembering to Opt Out if you don't want to go beyond 2weeks/50 downloads) and browsed around.
The "download manager" does make things easier, and is offered as a Linux RPM. Which sent me on some "install fun":
1) convert-to-debian-with-alien, install with apt-get goes fine;
2) configuring Opera to run "emusicdm" for ".emp" files --
3) it runs but can't connect
4) a visit to emusic's help which quickly yields the advice to install the "NSCD" daemon...
5) "apt-get install nscd"
6) apt-get deciding to load in libraries
at some length
You don't need it, by the way, but it allows such tricks as downloading an album with one click.
Also, you have to configure your browser to run XMMS or whatever for ".m3u" files, which are not text lists of track names, but rather the file type of the 30s streamed samples...wierd.
And the album downloads don't come with a real
They have *some* well-known titles. I'm listening to Dizzy Gillespie as I type and have a Creedence Clearwater Revival oldie that's one of their top downloads at the moment.
But I can see if you don't want unknowns, you'd run out of things to download fairly fast unless you have broad tastes.
The question for me, is "Between the well-known ones and unknowns I like enough to spend two-bits/track after hearing a 30s sample, can I use up my 40 per month happily?" Yes.
(One amusing psychological effect, though: as a fixed price per track, in effect, I find myself resenting albums with more than a couple of two-minute songs on them and thinking "good deal" about 15-minute jazz or classical tracks...cheaper by the minute! Heh. Silly.)
I don't need every track on earth or unlimited downloads anymore than I need a lake of of water to scoop up a cup from. A bucket is fine, I can only drink a cup at a time. 40/month about matches the time I have to browse and get to like new music.
And the $10/month is maybe half (at most) of what I'm spending on music now. One less CD per month, in return for nearly 4X the music, and the ability to shop with 30s samples, which a record store doesn't give me.
It's a deal.
It's still illegal if you are not a resident of russia. The artists and labels get nothing. You are paying to download illegal music.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
It was called "Napster."
...as somebody who actually pays artists' royalties from EMusic, iTunes, and physical CD sales, let me point out that the royalty payments are about 15 per track from eMusic, as compared with 65 from iTunes and about 40-55 from most of the other music download outlets. Multiply by, say, 12 songs per album, and artists are making only about $1.80 per album sold on EMusic...
As an avid audio enthusiast (read: dogwhistle ears!), I'm led to wonder why people are still using sub-optimal encoder settings. I encode everything with LAME --preset extreme , which usually rounds out to 200kbit average VBR, and sounds good enough that I don't ever complain.
I see monkeys on the filesharing nets still doing CBR 128, which makes me want to cry. Sure, 128 was good enough when all we had was a Pentium-90 and 32mb of ram, just barely able to decode stereo in real-time, through a noisy SB16 and 6-watt Labtec desk speakers. That was ten years ago. Now that I can burn a CD-RW with the latest objects of my aural affection, and cruise around with a kilowatt of in-dash mp3 goodness, the bar has been raised significantly.
Yet it is easier to type "lame --preset extreme %1" than "lame -v -b 96 -B 192 -V 2 -h %1"
*phew*
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Subscribed yesterday, now the server seems to be down... I noticed articles about emusic on other (german) news sites (golem, heise). Seems that they underestimate their publicty. Also, I couldn't find how long the trail period is.
Quick, alert the media to your shocking discovery! When sampling a large number of people, they will place differing values on the same product or service! Those who don't value the product or service at all will even refuse to pay anything! What is the world coming to!
Search 2010 Gen Con events
The web site implementation and staffing issues are problems with their business model in the sense that implementing those would take money, and Magnatune's "payment optional" system and their inability to fund the production of music (meaning that they can only distribute music from artists who have the means and talent to record and engineer their own stuff) limits their talent pool. By comparison, the iTunes Music Store is far more feature-rich and has better selection because they've gone the more traditional "payment required" route. Score one for Apple's accountants and analysts; perhaps they know how to run a business after all!
I think Magnatune is absolutely great and I wish them the best of luck. If the "music should be free, artists who expect payment aren't really artists" contingent of the Slashdot crowd wants to encourage this sort of model, then perhaps some of them can volunteer their time to develop and install the playlist / search features you described, or (better yet) volunteer their time as unpaid e-mail customer service staffers for Magnatune. If musicians are expected to use their time and talent free of charge for the greater good, then Slashdotters with this expectation can make the same commitment. Here's Magnatune's contact page to help everybody get started.
In summary, I agree with you. Slashdotters commonly chant about how the big record labels are pursuing a broken business model. Well, Magnatune's issues are evidence that the business model that many Slashdotters would like to see ain't that hot, either.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
actually there are already a comparable good mp3 online store such as www.mp3search.ru and they don't required a monthly fee and it's legal
Is anyone else getting a "Download Failed (Cannot Connect)" error with the (rediculously out of date) Linux download manager?
25 cents a track and on Linux too! Get out! That is wicked cool! They are definitely targeting a unique and growing market... Plus... it says on their site that you can get 50 MP3s Free just for checking it out!