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The Perfect Online Music Store?
brace asks: "With the proliferation of online music sales, more and more companies are jumping onto the bandwagon and trying to sell you downloadable music. Some of them do a good job, some of them are just bad at it. The question I have for Slashdot readers is essentially 'What would the perfect online music store offer you?' Should it have OGG and FLAC tracks, as well as MP3? Would you rather pay per-song or per-month? Would you want the option to purchase hard-copy as well (like the actual album, or even band merchandise)? Should the song samples be 30 second downloads or full-song streams fed on-demand? Is a radio station important for an online music store?"
"Personally, I'd like to see a store that has a 24/7 internet radio station, on-demand streaming, $0.99 downloads (and $9.99 album downloads), links to purchase actual albums or merchandise, and with MP3, OGG, and FLAC support. I'd also like to see the artists being paid more than 10%..."
Personally I think it would be great if a music store kept the files in wav format and encoded them on the fly so you could choose any format you like (caching the popular options). Sure they would probably have to charge more, but I think it would be worth it.
Oh and no DRM please, I like my music without bullshit.
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
Look at it this way, there are two groups of replies to this:
The Slashdot Crowd...
They're going to demand support for all of the Ogg contained codecs.
They're going to demand no drm, even optionally, so while you'll probably see AAC as a general format, you wont see fair-play.
You'll see the classic mp3, of course.
The price is going to have to be far less than 99c, since so many people here resent all things associated with the Apple store. I'm thinking what, 30 pence will please you guys?
The Normal Crowd...
For everyone else, you know what the perfect music store would be? The iTunes music store with basically a few additions:
There should be some ability to purchase at least some songs (i.e. certain classical pieces) at a higher bitrate.
There should be the ability to purchase files for more than one player, so that may mean something like WMA.
There's probably more, but I think these are the key points...
"Stumble before you crawl"
Personally, I like buying CDs from Amazon. The prices are good, I have yet to find any DRM, I pay no shipping, no taxes, and usually get my CDs in about a week. I can then rip them to any format I choose.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Give me a choice of Ogg Vorbis or FLAC, give me the choice to pay an "all you can eat"-type periodic subscription, or a per-song price (with a discount for an "album's" worth of songs). I'd like to see this store backed by artists who actually get a large chunk of my change, not by huge music conglomerates. The obvious one: I don't want any DRM on the files themselves. A supported Linux client is a must, of course (or a web interface). 30 second preview clips are good enough for me to decide if I like a song enough to buy it.
So, as you might guess, I'm not buying any online music anytime soon...
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
That is it off the top of my head.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
bleep was just about perfect. Because it's direct to the record label, about 50% of the sale goes to the artists (which is fantastic in my books). You simply pay for the sale, maybe an entire album, and get a ZIP file containing the high quality MP3s that have been lame encoded with VBR. Very proper. Looks proper, sounds proper. So yeah, that's about as perfect as I have seen!
* Lossless compression scheme and a cheap program to encode it to any other format.
* 50 cents or less pricing per song
* GOOD MUSIC SELECTION (ie Beatles, Beach Boys, U2, Led Zeppelin)
* EVEN MORE GOOD MUSIC SELECTION (Rarities, B-Sides, Live Shows, exclusives)
* Indy artists
* Less 50 cent, nelly and timberlake on the front page
* Reasonable DRM (none)
* Audiobooks
When I find music worth buying, I seek it out in my local, privately owned music store. These little stores are often owned by people that love music and they really need help to keep the money in the local economy.
After I purchase my real, shiny CD I rip it to MP3 and stick the CD on my shelf. If my hard drive crashes and burns, I've got my hard copy right there, waiting to be re-ripped.
I just don't see the appeal in buying music online in the way proposed. My idea of buying something involves actually having a physical end product, otherwise it's just called 'renting'.
It should have the ability to give you back what you bought in the event of a computer crash.
2) Cash anonymity. [1]
I could not care less about any other details, ogg, mp3, ect, ect.
[1] If I walk into a music store, get a CD off a shelf and pay with cash (tinfoil hat arguments about face recognition systems or ATM bill number records aside) I can expect a certain level of anonymity. Ill buy online when I can expect that level of anonymity. (aka never) No one has my permission to record what music I listen too, what books I read, or what video I watch piriod, and that includes credit card records.
Yeah, but it's illegal* to use (at least for Americans). So it's not noticably better than free, illegal alternatives.
*Yes, it's illegal to download from them. This is because downloading is reproduction, not importation (which is also generally illegal anyway)
Before disputing this, please read 17 USC 106; pertinent definitions in 17 USC 101 (in particular 'phonorecord'); Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 75 F. Supp 2d 1290, 1294 (D. Utah 1999); A&M Records v. Napster, 239 F.3d 1004, 1014 (9th Cir. 2001); and 17 USC 602(b) (which is totally independent from 602(a) and any exceptions in that subsection).
-- 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.
What I want is what I get on a CD: lossless music without DRM. (stupid attempts at copy protection notwithstanding.) At that point, your pricing is going to determine how much I'll buy. If you're at 99c per song/$10 per album, I'll buy some... if you're at $5/album, I'll buy a heck of a lot more.
For me, at least, $5 is about the sweet spot.... it's low enough that I'd buy four or five albums at a time, and I don't think I'd buy any more if they were cheaper, since you can only listen to so much stuff. At $10, I'd guess that my total dollar value of purchases would be much lower, because I'd have to think about each one a little. At $5, it's an impulse purchase... at $10, it's less so.
Even www.allofmp3.com isn't THAT cheap; lossless files from them usually run about a buck apiece. If they were cheaper, and their selection was broader, I'd buy a lot more, but I'm still pretty happy with them as it is.
www.allofmp3.com shows that the infrastructure can work. But it would be hard to duplicate here, because the record labels here want to charge a lot more for stuff. Somehow, I suspect they'd want to price it so that original CDs were actually cheaper; their perspective will probably be that lossless DRM-free files are 'more' than what they give you on the CD (since it's easy to copy). Unfortunately, almost any customer would think of electronic-only delivery as 'less', and wouldn't be willing to pay as much. I certainly wouldn't.
Overall, allofmp3.com is running about $10-11 for a lossless album, and I've bought a few of them. So I am a real potential customer. Get that price down to $5 or so, and I'd buy a boatload of music that I wouldn't otherwise.
Question: Why can't I use the iTunes Music Store outside of the US, UK, France, or Germany?
Answer: Because Apple has not secured the copyrights for the songs they sell outside of those 4 countries.
If having the distribution rights in one country were enough to allow you to distribute worldwide, you can damn sure bet Apple would do so. They wouldn't deny themselves a revenue stream like that.
Just because the RIAA hasn't commented on it, it doesn't mean it's it legal.
Since some of my CDs are nearing twenty years, and I am encoding all of them into Apple lossless, I'd like to think a decade out. Much of my music has never been really used until I have been burning them into iTunes, and while lossless is great, the availability is probably more important. Digging through a couple of thousand CDs prevents one from using the music. I will likely re-encode all of the CDs (3 of 12 boxes to go) into 256 AAC when the variable bitrate version is out with quicktime 7.0. This will give me about 120 gigs of compressed music, which will be usable on whatever Pod is around in 3 or 4 years. 128 AAC or 128 LAME is just not good enough.
So, before I begin purchasing music online, it has to be at least 256 AAC quality, reasonable (meaning easy to disable) licensing or non-restrictive DRM, and a better selection of music. Until then, I'll buy CDs, burn them and give away or sell the worthless shell to somebody else.
I do have to say that most people do not purchase as much music as I do, and that a certain amount of it needs to be freely available at lower bitrates. Streams are great, but smart playlists loaded on demand (RSS-ish) would be great. They could simply be automatically disposed of afterwards.
Indeed, under Canadian law, using AllofMP3 is probably legal insofar as one has the right to download (but not share) a copy of the music. But there's no point in doing so, because it's every bit as legal to use $P2P_APP_OF_CHOICE in Canada to download for free.
In the US, on the other hand, it's just as illegal to download from allofmp3 as it is to download from the p2p service, so there's still no point in using allofmp3, unless you really enjoy giving your credit card number to Russians running a service of highly dubious legality.
I fail to see how that case you cite relates.
l ofmp3%20legal?y /34512.htmlr eadID=1110&messageID=4945&start=-181
so I guess I guess I can post links to bugs bunny to support mine.
is buying russian liquor illegal ? is buying a russian fur hat illegal ? no.
http://www.museekster.com/allofmp3faq.htm#Is%20Al
http://www.technewsworld.com/stor
http://news.com.com/5208-1027-0.html?forumID=1&th
2 friggin seconds on google and your little soapbox is destroyed
My dream list:
... fairly low quality is ok, as long as it isn't HORRIBLE quality.
$0.49 song pricing
$5.99 album pricing
(there's absolutely NO mfg cost and distribution costs are pretty low, this is completely affordable for the fat gluttonous record execs)
60 second stream
I couldn't care less about a radio station.
Pay per song/album. No subscription BS for me. Individual pricing makes atrist payment much simpler.
File formats: DRM is going to have to be there to make it have a chance of happening, so that limits the file format options...
AAC
If universal DRM were applied to other formats, I'd be interested in:
MP3, FLAC, perhaps OGG if I felt really stupid
Selectable bit rates of 128/192/256/384
Accurate and complete info tags for everything as well as album art for the formats that support that (AAC).
Discount for hard copy purchase. Half the cost of your downloaded files applied to purchase of physical CD. Don't make me pay twice for the same songs, just charge me for mfg/distro costs. Half credit doesn't come close since the industry rapes us on CDs, but it's a compromise I think people can live with.
and finally...
The largest selection known to mankind!
I want to be scoring a Hat Trick in Hell while body slamming Lucifer on a goal run before I can't find a song or album I want.
The flip side, of course, is that it's illegal and the artists don't get any royalties, and it is a fair bit slower than other networks - the best way to use it is queue up a few albums (>5) and forget about it.
That means that unless the copies made would have been legal had US law applied at the place where they were made -- and therefore, since only the US copyright holder has power under US law, he would have had to consent
Russian copyright law grants the holder the exclusive right to distribute and reproduce the work. Russia is a signatory of the Berne Convention, so if allofmp3.com is operating legally within Russia, they already have the copyright holders' consents.
Russian copyright law is as worthless as Moon-Man law within the borders of the US. Copyright law is national. Which is why they can have whatever they have within their borders.
Since I'm talking about US-located downloaders breaking the law, Russian copyright law is not a part of this discussion.
so if allofmp3.com is operating legally within Russia, they already have the copyright holders' consents.
No, they have either a) compulsory licenses so that they can reproduce legally without consent, or b) consent of the RUSSIAN copyright holder. Who very well might not be the same person as the US copyright holder.
And from what I hear, it's the former. Even they seem to admit it.
I dunno why you point out the Berne Convention. It doesn't play into this.
-- 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.
If you rip the data from the CD, it's theft to then resell the CD to somebody without destroying your copy.
;)
For example, if you have Microsoft Word, you can't just install it and then give away the installation media.
doesn't matter if it seems really cost effective, it's theft.
hell, why not just cut of the middleman and shoplift your music from Borders Books, rip them, and then drop off the "worthless shells" in the middle of the night in their video returns box?
talk about 128 LAME. that's just really really lame dude. wait till people are ripping off your hard work.
probably not something you have to worry about
you wouldn't, by any chance, be a RIAA astroturf artist would you?
...
I'll I keep hearing from your side is lots of FUD (russians are scary, woooooo) and little compelling reason to avoid their service.
Again I ask, why doesn't RIAA close the loop? That is to say apply pressure where they have some power -- hear in the US! Why don't they get an injunction against credit card companies to disallow US customers from paying via credit card to AllofMP3? I'm very confident that AllofMP3 would stop illegally distributing music to me if I didn't pay them. The credit card companies have active business presences here in the US so RIAA should have no problem getting to them.
Instead of RIAA simply cutting off AllofMP3 (which I confidently assert is the single largest distributor of online music to US citizens) from US credit card payments they choose piddly ass cases against grandmothers and teenie boppers as a scare tactic.
Ignoring the easy shot against the big fish in favor of making examples of people who'd rather lose and settle out of court than win in court and see their life savings consumed in legal costs suggests to me that the big fish isn't the easy target you make them out to be
P.S. I'll be sure to post here on slashdot as soon as RIAA whoops my ass for being an allofMP3 customer.
Cheers,
--Jonathan
"if the record companies would trust people to do the right thing and stop calling us all thieves they could make a LOT more money. If I can buy a used CD for five bucks, rip it and get the quality I want, why the fuck would I pay twice that for the download? Magnatune gets it... the others don't."
The empirical evidence runs counter to your opinion. The iTunes Music Store does absolutely gangbuster business, and they have very little trouble signing up artists, compared to Magnatune. They charge a buck a song, and they don't use the "payment optional" system that Magnatune does because they don't need to.
In this context "getting it" means being successful, and it looks like Apple gets it just fine. While Magnatune is a terrific proof of concept and I wish them a long life, their relative unpopularity serves as an interesting counterpoint to the chorus of Slashdotters who point out that the traditional retail music business model is broken.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
"There media app downloads the songs for you in the background, the tunes are dirt cheap and they have a good (but not excellent, at least in punk) selection."
Its easy to be dirt cheap when the price of adding a new song to the server is around $16.95 + worldwide shipping from Amazon.
Its dirt cheap because they don't pay the artists. More than that, folks like me that get paid on points (regardless of the fact its a quarter of someone elses half or a percentage of a point) don't get paid -- especially when some of us take chances on more unknown artists knowing that if we do great work, we might get paid later -- while if we do shitty work, we probably won't get anything.
The fact is, folks like Downfuckinghill Battle scream about artists get only $0.10 a song (which is actually a higher percentage than most get from anything sold at BestBuy or WalMart), while the same folks bragging about this are willing to fuck over everyone in the music industry because they are trying to fucking save us from ourselves.
Personally, I have a job doing research that keeps me afloat. Music buys me gear, gets me into parties that geeks like me should never be allowed close to, and puts some pocket change in my wallet. And yet, I've worked on shit that was high profile enough that I know friends of mine have ripped the shit off a P2P site -- and honestly, thats what I consider allofmp3 -- just an illegal operation running under laws that are not quite clear in Russia and not up to the technical reality of today nor intended to be used in the way they are, and actually even illegal for them to sell outside of their borders -- let alone illegal for you to download outside of their borders as well.
I've taken a look at the site and it pisses me off. Music as a commodity and not an art. Buy it in bulk. You aren't paying per song, you are paying per the bandwidth. Want higher quality -- its more money to download. The artist gets exactly the same percentage of the sale -- NOTHING.
Honestly, as a musician and technician , I can hear the difference between MP3s, AAC or WAV but I don't care. I buy the music not for the quality, but for the content. Audiophiles have always gotten on my fucking nerves. If you weren't around when it was originally recorded, you are getting no where near the original quality, so it doesn't matter. This is why we go to see concerts and why I don't get tired of seeing the same band a few dozen times a year (well the fact that they pay me to be there is beside the point -- I'd have been there with simply the invite and the travel reimbursement).
What would be more important that quality to me would be all the lyrics and artist notes to the song. Cover art? its nice, but not integral to the music. Lyrics, notes -- definitely important and can make the difference between a good song and a great one because it sets the mood and context.
Past that, iTMS is perfect for me. And I just checked -- it looks like its got my friends band's bio pages up -- maybe one of these days they will have their own customized mini portals as well one of these days.
you wouldn't, by any chance, be a RIAA astroturf artist would you?
...
Nope. My dislike for them and for uninformed statements are about level, so it's an interesting tightrope. Read my history, if you want. The RIAA sure as fuck ain't going to pay a Canadian to post on non-RIAA related topics on slashdot. But while we're dodging the discussion in favor of silly acusations, how do I know you aren't a front account posting on slashdot to drum up card numbers for some crooked russian outfit?
I'll I keep hearing from your side is lots of FUD (russians are scary, woooooo) and little compelling reason to avoid their service.
I'm not employing scare tactics, just common sense. If one is going to break the law, why not do it on p2p for free? Why pay someone halfway around the world to accomplish the same goal? It's just as illegal, and you're opening yourself to the possibility of credit card fraud. The mere fact that they'll sell music to you demonstates that legality of action is not their primary concern.
Instead of RIAA simply cutting off AllofMP3 (which I confidently assert is the single largest distributor of online music to US citizens) from US credit card payments they choose piddly ass cases against grandmothers and teenie boppers as a scare tactic.
You could assert that, but please provide proof if you want to discuss it as a serious fact. It seems to me that allofmp3 is nowhere near the buzzword that napster/kazaa was; it's utterly obscure to the general public. It's your assertion, back it up.
Why don't the RIAA shut it down? How can they? It operates in fucking Russia, and they probably have the Russian distribution rights payed up; only their foreign distribution is likely illegal. Unless the operators pull a Skylarov and show up on US shore, the RIAA probably can't do shit. They can't subpoena the server logs, they don't have legal standing there, the State Department probably has a million things better to do than pester the Russian authorities about it, and the Russians probably don't give a shit anyways. But that cuts both ways. They decide to fuck with your credit card, good fucking luck getting the Russian police to give a shit about it.
They went after the teeniebopper and Grandmda distributors. The RIAA never filed a case against a downloader, ever; all the kazaa suits were against people dumb enough to check the "I want to be a supernode" box. So if all you're doing is downloading and not uploading (which is, after all, all you can do at allofmp3) again, I ask, why give your credit card to a foreign corporation of dubious legality? You're just as unlikely to face prosecution downloading for free off a p2p network. You're still breaking the law, either way, but you're absolutely right in that you'll probably never get "your ass whooped" over it. Why pay, unless you're buying into the scam that allofmp3 is running, the delusion that it's a legal service.
Ignoring the easy shot against the big fish in favor of making examples of people who'd rather lose and settle out of court than win in court and see their life savings consumed in legal costs suggests to me that the big fish isn't the easy target you make them out to be
In fact, I have never suggested they were an easy target, merely that them distributing to the US (and US customers downloading from them) is illegal, and therefore redundant given the availability of the material for free through other avenues here. None of that in the least suggests that they are an easy target.