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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.)"
...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.
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!
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.
Yes, that's the business model, it seems. At first glance, it seems like a perfect deal, until you realize that maybe you don't need 40 tracks a month, and maybe just one or two. But guess what? According to the Slashdot summary, you're still gonna get charged the $10 a month. This is for those heavy music buyers. I'll stick to iTunes, thank you very much.
A blog like any other.
Uhh...
Nelly == Good Music
Brittney == Good Music
???
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
Does 320 kbps *really* sound 75% worse than a CD? No, not really. "perceived quality = f(kbp) is a non-linear function, and the rates you're talking about are very much in the flat part of the curve.
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!
Yes, it will favor heavy-downloaders like you, and it does appear economical from that POV. However, I don't know how they will make money, besides from the people who don't buy all 40 tracks. Between paying royalties and covering their costs, is there really that much left over to justify their operation? Last I checked, Apple and others broke even, even at four times the price; their motivation was to sell hardware, where the real profit margins lay.
A blog like any other.
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.
320kbps vs cd qualtiy and it is nearly impossible to tell the difference, even on really good speakers. Any difference you can tell will not be 75% difference between the actual source.
Major label bands have their (outdated, some say) distribution model. Indie bands don't have as many resources, and have to work harder to get thier music out to anywhere outside their local touring area.
This provides a means of doing it that's 1) cheap for the consumer, 2) not giving it away, and 3) not trying to control the use of the file.
I wouldn't want to see big-name bands on systems like these, because they'd push out the lesser known/indie bands, and the major labels would probably force emusic to use DRM'd files, which would defeat one of the big pro's of this service.
allofmp3's legality is questionable, at best. Besides that their behavior isn't ethical, even if legal. They are exploiting a loophole in Russian copyright law that allows for the broadcast or cable transmission of music without authorization of the copyright holder. It can be interpretted that you downloading a file over the Internet is only a special kind of broadcast or transmission, and that you happen to be "listening" to it with a device capable of recording it. It is not clear whether under the laws of the US or Europe that this is illegal, but could easily be made so. Allofmp3 legal? Maybe. Ethical? No
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.
Urr.. yes.. 1411 Kbps UNCOMPRESSED
You are aware of compression, aren't you? y'know.. that whole MP3 thing? I know it's lossy, but it would be rather pointless if MP3 at 14% the bitrate was 14% the quality of uncompressed - you might as well just drop the uncompressed bitrate.
IMO MP3 at 128 is listenable, but a bit on the rough side, and if I was paying for MP3s I'd want them to be at least 160
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
here is what it will take for me to pay for music:
1) must host every song ever, available for immediate speedy download in more than a few different formats/bitrates
2) a query tool (genre, artist, date of release, lyrics, etc) at LEAST a simple search utility
3) when I select a song I want to see the list of "other people who selected this song also selected.."
thats it.. first site to implement these 3 features gets my money. I don't care what it costs.
iTMS has items #2 and #3. Every song ever? Come on, nobody has ever had that, nor would anyone want to. It wouldn't be worth the disk space to store or even the cost of electricity to rip the hundreds of thousands of old albums that will never, ever be purchased by anyone again. And nobody but geeks ask for multiple encoding rates ... the same Slashdot audience that whines about 99 cents being too much to pay for a song. Not exactly the target market businesses want to cater to.
I'm not suggesting that you personally are doing this ... but some people in the past have made deliberately unachievable "want" lists for online music distribution as a justification for pirating music. (And before you ask, yes, I have downloaded music that I don't own; I can rationalize it [not available except on vinyl and I don't have/want a record player] but I know that it doesn't make it right.)
I can say "I won't buy a satellite TV system until it has a.) 1000 channels and b.) costs less than $9.99/month." I can refuse to buy a DTV or Dish system because it doesn't meet my criteria. But it doesn't justify my going out and pirating satellite TV. The point is that you can sit on the sidelines of the legal downloading market for as long as you like, waiting for your wishlist of features, or you can use what's available to you now if it's good enough. Just don't use "it's not quite the way I want it" as an excuse for doing something wrong.
Again - not saying the parent poster is doing this. But just throwing out a little cosmic karma caution to those who may be doing it.
"95% of all Slashdot
Why steal when you can buy cheaply?
Why pay anything when you can pay nothing?
Techncially, with a lossless compressor you can get down to ~ 700-1000 kbps and still have CD quality. The thing with MP3 is, yes, it's not technicalyl CD quality, but can you tell the difference? The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between a 128 kbps MP3 and the source. For all intents and purposes, for them, a 128 kbps MP3 is CD quality.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
I would have had no problem paying more for Emusic, or even paying more on a per-track basis, if Emusic had stuck with a model I could actually use. I listen to a lot of music, and 40 tracks / month is completely asinine. What if I run out of quota in the middle of an album? Oh, tough luck for me I guess? No. I take my business elsewhere.
No pricing policy will ever suit everyone's needs, but these folks have chosen one that appears to work for them and their clients.
I see plenty of clients posting here for whom it didn't work. They were subscribers, the model changed, and they jumped ship. That includes me. Emusic could have continued getting my money forever with their model, even if they had raised their rates, but they changed to this asinine limit, and now they get $0 of my money instead of the $20, $30 or $50 a month I would glady have paid. "It's called being in business," my eye.
If you only want one or two tracks a month, this is not the service for you.
Neither is it the service for you -- anymore -- if you want more than a couple albums per month. Or if you mind downloading half an album then waiting a month for the other half.
First, I'd like to see some confirmation on that, because it sounds extremely dubious; a lack of comment is more likely because it's not prejudicial.
Second, I can read the law, and it's pretty clear that it's illegal unless the US copyright holders are authorizing allofmp3 to do what they're doing. The authorization would have to be made under US law; a Russian compulsory licensing scheme would not suffice.
Given all the totally erroneous claims about allofmp3 being legal floating around out there, I'm pretty suspicious of anyone claiming RIAA has endorsed them.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
When I become interested in an artist on Magnatune, I can never find a web page for that artist off the Magnatune site. Is that part of the contract with Magnatune?
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
I reward musicians by going to concerts. That is where they make their money. Unfortuately, most artists have sold out to the RIAA to become "rich and famous".
Also, the RIAA take away an artists copyright and then almost always give the artist a _lower_ cut of the profits then the RIAA gets. That is pretty sickening to me. In the end the only people to blame are the artists who let their talents be whored out. If all artists stood their ground and did not give up their copyrights, the music world would be much different.
If I were an artist I would have no problem with selling a digital _copy_ of my work for $0.02 - $0.05 each. I would be touring to make the big bucks and have a steady revenue stream from selling digital copies for almost no cost.
Talent will always be awared well. If you want to be an RIAA groupie and believe their FUD about the need to charge so much for a stinkin digital _copy_ then that is your choice. I will not beleive that FUD. The reason the RIAA wants to charge so much per digital copy is because those middle-men (who contribute nothing to the artistice process) want to get their fat-cat salaries. The RIAA puts their hand into the pie and take the _majority_ of profits and do creative accounting to show how little is left over for the artists. Then they give us the song-n-dance about the poor artists. Eliminate the RIAA and artists would make much more money, get the majority of the copensation and music would cost much less.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
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.