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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
allofmp3.com is already amazing. super low prices and i can get most of the music in ogg q5. :)
After 3 years of boycotting music and not buying any, I finally started using iTunes 4 months back. Since then I've purchased 10 albums. I tried MusicMatch and looked at Real, but honestly iTunes is the most user friendly.
I wouldn't pay for any downloadable music that wasn't CD quality and storable to as many CDs or MP3 players as I wanted.
TT
>'What would the perfect online music store offer you?'
FREE MUSIC!
Allofmp3.com already has FLAC, Vorbis, and VBR MP3 files for the taking. They're DRM-free and play on anything.
I would happily pay $.99 a track for what Allofmp3.com offers. Of course, they only charge $0.01 per megabyte.
Of course, Allofmp3.com is probably illegal, at least in the US. But the RIAA should learn the lesson that the MPAA has learned:
Give people the content they want (movies, some of them costing $100s of millions to produce), at a fair price ($15 DVDs), in a format that's convenient (DVDs have good quality and nonrestrictive DRM) and there will be no incentive to pirate your content.
The author's idea of a music store is pretty much aligned with my own, except for one thing - I'd like to have the ability to (for an additional fee even) download the .wav file.
.wav just gives me that warm fuzzy "I can do whatever I please with it" feeling.
Then I can do whatever the hell I want to with it. Yes MP3 and OGG are nice, and yes FLAC is lossless, but the ability to download a
Ah, yes, and I'd like the ability to download the track I purchased 3 times, just in case. Making sure I could grab my music again if my hdd fails would be an extra warm selling point too.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
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.
How Napster used to be.
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
http://www.magnatune.com
I'm not affiliated in any way other than to love what they do. I've listened to lots of stuff, including their streaming mp3s of entire genres. I have bought a couple of albums from magnatune, and still listen to it today. It's been a long time since I've been into music this much.
-Jim
Celebrate Excellence!
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.
Guaranteed sound quality, and the ability to re-download any track I've ever purchased. (Ya just never know when ya might lose it.)
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."-THG
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'.
It has to have CD quality or better, no DRM, and substantially cheaper than buying on CD.
No fucking way am I gonna pay a buck a song and ten bucks an album for downloads unless I really like the work and can get pristine quality. Thus far I would say Magnatune does it best: you can listen to anything they have (and you can actually hear it because the quality doesn't suck) and, if you want to buy it, you can set the price and download it in high quality formats. I've bought a few albums there and have actually found myself going back to buy a work again because I decided I liked the work more than I thought and I felt bad about being such a cheap bastard.
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.
1) Submit story to /. /. community critque existing Music stores /. about new music store
2) Have
3) Implement Recommendations
4) Submit story to
5) Profit!
Magnatune is incredible -- if only they also had Opera, I'd never have cause to listen to anything else.
I listen to the New Age and Electronica shoutcast stations from Magnatune on Rhythmbox petty much all day and night.
For people who like new music -- and it's *good* music, too -- Magnatune is probably the best Internet resource.
You choose what you want to pay for an album ($4 minimum, $8 suggested, the sky is the limit) and 50% goes to the artist. You can download full-quality WAVs, MP3, OGG, FLAC, AAC, and I think there's one more. You can also download all of the album art in PDF format, so you can write your own CDs as they would be from the store, minus the DRM.
I usually get the WAV zip file, then compress it to OGG/Vorbis for my computer and write the WAVs to CD for my car.
-Jem
Recorded music isn't worth anything to me anymore. I'll pay to see a concert or buy merchandise if I am compelled to do so. But unless it is for a ridiculously low price, say a dollar a month for infinite music, then its just not worth it.
Even if I did join some service, almost none of the music I listen to would be available. I listen mostly to groups like machinae supremacy, who give their music away for free anyway, classic rock which I already have on vinyl and thus am legally allowed to have mp3s of, ocremixes, and foreign music. It might be possible to pay for some of the foreign music on some of the services, but either I wont be able to read it or it wont work with Linux or it will costly ungodly amounts of money.
In conclusion I would actually pay for music if.
1) Every song ever recorded was available.
2) I could choose my format and bitrate freely.
3) Absolutely no DRM encumberance.
4) Works with Linux.
5) Super cheap, we're talking pennies or half pennies per song.
It's a good thing not too many people feel like me. The record companies would be screwed.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Magnatune.
MP3, Ogg, FLAC, you name it. Listen to entire albums before buying, if you like. Most artists allow some discretion in how much you pay, depending on how much you like it and/or how much you can afford. Artist gets 50% and, IIRC, they retain full copyright.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but these guys really do Get It. Give 'em a whirl, they deserve it.
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.
Asking Slashdot what the perfect store to buy music should be like. It's like asking the American Cancer Institute which cigarette has the best flavor.
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.
Admittedly, there's nowhere near as wide a choice of CC-licensed music right now as there is of RIAA-style proprietary music, but that doesn't bother me. There's been so much music recorded through history that there's no way to ever listen to it all, and everything I've downloaded from Magnatune has been excellent. There's enough selection there to keep me happy for quite a while. I've completely lost interest in RIAA music and haven't bought a CD from a record store in years. (I've bought a few directly from performers at live shows, but that's about it).
If I purchase an album digitally, I'd still like to download a PDF/Flash/something of the album art and liner notes. It's important content that the artist (or perhaps the label) feels complements the music, and that's why they are sold together. Although I'm puchasing music in a different format than a jewel case, I still want the same experience.
I really don't think most of the people who post care if artists get paid. I mean, look at the comments on this board. They want what they want when they want it at the price they want it--which is--essentially, free. And they create all manner of tortured justifications for why they shouldn't pay for music. The RIAA is evil. New artists don't produce any good music (but it is evidently good enough to download and listen to). A dollar is too much for a track. I don't like DRM. And on, and on, and on. But essentially, these folks have discovered that they can "share" music with relatively no consequences, and they don't care if the people who make it get paid. Drumroll please, and cue the "The RIAA doesn't pay artists either" justifications. And don't forget to mention that anyone who has this opinion is a shill for the RIAA. All I'm saying is that I, for one, like music. And much of the music I like is/was released on RIAA labels (much wasn't). And the music and artists I like are capable of releasing albums with 10 or more good songs (I always wonder about the people who find only 1-2 good tracks on an album--what kind of crap are you listening to, anyway?). And finally, for me, a dollar a song is not a lot to pay for something I may listen to and enjoy hundreds of times. But I accept that my views are not shared by everyone.