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%..."

Comments

allofmp3.com

[n0iz77]

allofmp3.com is already amazing. super low prices and i can get most of the music in ogg q5. :)

iTunes rock

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:iTunes rock

[dbn3]

[Listening to the new U2 single just bought on iTunes :) ]

Now that I am more than 10 years out of college, it is definately worth $0.99 to just get the song I want without trolling the p2p networks looking for music.

Besides, in recent years, if it ain't hip with the teen/college crowd, it ain't on the p2p networks. Those tracks that are there are of very variable quality -- you have to get several copies because some moron can't rip or encode correctly. It's just not worth the hassle.

Things I really like about iTunes:
- cost;
- quality;
- ease of purchase;
- the "others also bought" links let me explore things I haven't heard before; and, of course
- buying the single for a buck instead of a 10 track crappy cd for $14 for that one single.

Things I still am waiting for:
- broader catalogue (Madonna and The Beatles for two are still not available)

So, the obvious comments:

[The Only Druid]

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...

Easy...

[kelnos]

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...