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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
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'.
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.
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.
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
"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.