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MP3tunes Offers Music Service Without DRM
ThinSkin writes "Former MP3.com chief and Lindows CEO Michael Robertson will reenter the music world next week with MP3tunes, a service that promises music without DRM restrictions. MP3tunes hopes to attract users who are fed up with restrictions on copying music from sites that use digital-rights-management techniques, such as iTunes."
Because we are a different audience. Many people will go for iTunes music but the smart people refuse to use the DRM. This is a different market segmeent.
Can refusing to buy the label's music really change things? I doubt it. I agree with the first poster saying that the format under which music is released is not a very good indicator of quality. Although I don't like how the major labels do business, me not buying a CD, or even thousands of people like me not buying their CDs will not change things. They have a financial incentive to screw over the artists and the consumers, thus, I believe, degrading the music that they are related with. Until that financial incentive is removed, things can't get too much better. The consumer politics approach only addresses specific symptoms of a problem, it doesn't deal with the root causes.
Sig is a crazy old German guy.
I gotta say I agree with you, too.
But even in a DRMless world, there are going to be some "fat cats", as it were. Even if the labels are toppled, in a manner of speaking, there will still be some groups that are the "best" to be associated with - for exposure and money. The people who have the best connections, the biggest website, the hottest PR folks (anything that penetrates the mainstream will have amazing PR). And all over again, it repeats: it won't be an even playing field, and never will be. And once the groups that give the best centralized exposure (which translates into money) - the ones who rise to the top, competitively, which means they'll have some folks with good business sense - get big enough, they might be looking for ways to stop people from stealing their shit too.
I'm not sure property without locks and keys - and penalties for breaking them - can even survive (at above some very basic level, and certainly not as a market leader) in a free market system, and it may in fact be fundamentally incompatible.
At a very basic level, I guess you could say this is "capitalism" vs "socialism" - again, not using either of those terms pejoratively - and the the disparity between those positions is dramatic. Perhaps grassroots efforts can at least shed light on the truth of content protection and DRM: it can ALWAYS be broken by pirates, and it ALWAYS hurts honest customers.
What you probably are is someone who doesn't know the difference between data rates and sampling rates.
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The only way a service will compete with Apples dominance of the online music market (mindshare) is via Brand and Marketing.
Its a red herring - if a competing service starts eating significantly into Apples market share on the basis of not using DRM, Apple will simply shrug and do the same.
Until a competing company is cooler or offers a significantly better service than Apple, they will not have any real effect on Apples dominance.
Im not really fed up with iTunes. Ive got a lot of high quality music videos i pulled off for free. Some songs that came with a pay pal account. Some that were handed out free each week. Some more I traded for my friends pepsi caps. Ben&Jerry's gave me a few more. I think i also might have bought a song or two at some point. And none of them are DRM'd. Hymn is pretty damn easy to use. Its a lot less trouble than driving to a record store and then having to rip the cd once ive paid for it.
Honestly, it doesnt really bother me to pay $1/track for songs every once in a while, but I haven't got any space on my 40GB iPod (none of which, might I add, came from kazaa, napster, or any other 'illicit' download service), so I'm not in dire need of more music at the moment.
I wish it wasn't Robertson that was at the head of all of this, because I would always like a non-DRM music service to succeed. But Robertson got to where he is (insanely rich) by stepping on everyone else back in the late 90s. For example, he did things like stealing tons of bandwidth from a university FTP search project (which, at the time, was at ftpsearch.ntnu.no) and putting it on his "filez.com" site to sell advertising there, never giving any credit to the people who created the search. He also squatted audiograbber.com (Audiograbber being the name of a now well-known CD ripping program... at the time it was still up and coming) and for a long time refused to sell it to the creator of the software, instead directing it to MP3.com where he was advertising for competing programs. I could go on and on. He's just an ass who exploits people. I ran one of the larger MP3 sites around the time when MP3.com was still new (when it was just a garbage list of software, without any real content of its own), and so I managed to talk to him a few times back then. When I took my site down he was waiting like a vulture to buy it up and forward it to MP3.com, but I wouldn't sell...
Enjoy.
Compromise in the name of convenience is what makes the world go round. If every person insisted on getting their way all the time and refused to give up because the were absolutely right, then we'd all be up to our necks in quarrelous, obnoxious loons who are more interested in stroking their own egos than in being productive and going about the business of their own happiness...
Oh sod it all...
I have come here to chew memory and kick ass... and malloc() is returning a null pointer.
At the standard rate it works out to $0.25 per song. Much better than anywhere else that's legal.
I've been a member for over two years. It's great. Once you realize that just because the major studios christen a song #1 doesn't make it good and start looking at some of the GREAT music that independent labels put out you see what a rip off the other places are.
I understand the need for ratings, as well as the mentality of radio listeners (precisely why I don't listen to radio). The problem is, they must have heard their favorite songs for the first time somewhere, and generally it's the radio. So, answer me this: When an artist that obviously lacks any talent or musical inspiration, and is quite clearly a manufactured pop star (Ashlee Simpson, Britney Spears, etc.) starts making records, WHY DO YOU PLAY THEM? Once people hear them, they'll want to hear it again, because it was played on the radio...
Major radio (and media at large, MTV is just as responsible) outlets are just as responsible for their artists tastes, as their artists tastes are for their playlists. It's a sickening cycle, but this crap is introduced to the public by the media outlets, not by people buying CD's on a whim and then requesting it on the radio.
Radio *does* feed listener tastes. But so do sales and live performance, TV, MTV, club play, and word of mouth.
Which is why we play currents. Carefully, in adult formats. You'd be surprised how interested we are in local CD sales. Our current-based station -- a lot of them, at least -- pay a lot of attention to things like Soundscan. It's a service that tracks how many units of what are moving in the stores.
We can't see who (age, etc.) is buying what, so sales info is a bit limited in its usefulness. But sales often lead airplay, and we can sometimes see hits coming before they really break big on the radio.
This is really a GREAT observation you've made, and a legitimate challenge to how we radio people look at our industry. I think you'll see our company and others address the issue over the next few years with a new crop of formats and variations old ones. This is already happening: Clear Channel developed a new gold-based Hispanic format last year that's doing very well, and my station is a new Adult Contemporary hybrid.
Rock is at an interesting crossroads right now. CHR has already shattered into several families of current-based formats. Soft AC has hit a brick wall (the core audience is rejecting the new music now). Country is long overdue for a format fork.
The advent of PeopleMeter audience measurement will also pressure us to innovate.
It could end up being a very cool time to program radio stations.
I'm with you on wanting to edit Slashdot posts after they're posted.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
"Either they buy you out, sue you into oblivion, or both (think mp3.com)."
.agrippa.
Being as someone that worked for MP3.com since almost its beginning, I think I'm ok in saying the following:
1. Beam-it was a legal crapshoot, we knew this, and we lost. The day it was announced at a company meeting almost everyone knew we were going to get the shit sued out of us for doing it. There was a small legal gray area in copyright law Michael Robertson tried to exploit.
2. If not for losing hundreds of millions of dollars on lawyers/fines for doing Beam-it, MP3.com would probably still be in business today.
MP3.com's own stupidity lead to its downfall, not the RIAA. In fact, in an alternate universe, its probably still serving up Big Poo Generator while slowly burning through $400 million in IPO money.
I really hate to admit it, but you've got a point.
Still, I stand firm with my belief that the best path is to make it as easy and uninhibiting for the consumer to get music through any means that works best for them, and that more money should go to the artist.
Publishers aren't really needed for the publishing part these days. Many artists are selling MP3s on their own websites. The publishers main purpose is advertising the artist and backing up the production of the product. With falling costs of production, publishers are becoming little more than over-egotistical advertising firms.
Should some Madison Ave firm get 70% of McDonald's profits because they draw in the customers for them?
The main issue here is less "How much should they get", and more "Who is working for who". The artists traditionally work for the publishers, but it is the publisher who should work for the artist.
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
Downloads should be as cheap as possible, simply because distribution is so easy, in order to get any given artist's work exposed to as great an audience as possible. I'm prepared to pay for good-quality, well-tagged downloads, organised the way I want them (which is exactly what AllofMP3 does, bar creating playlists), but I'm not going to pay as much as I would for a CD. If I get a CD, I can rip it to any format I like, play it on any device I like, and I get something _physical_ (a box, a shiny bit of plastic, and some cover art) which I still think is important. (But maybe I'm getting old.)
Apple makes less than $0.10 per song sold on the iTunes music store, quite a bit less than the $0.35 estimated by http://www.downhillbattle.org/itunes/. Check out this article instead: http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5088849.html. The key quote being:
Still, even those optimistic about the market don't see Apple getting a major boost to the bottom line.
"At a profit of less than 10 cents per song, the music store does not represent a major income opportunity for Apple," [analyst Charles] Wolf wrote in the July report. Still, the company could benefit from increased iPod sales, he said.
I've never hearde one person complain about the DRM - except here on Slashdot
I just spent a couple of hours trying to recover DRM keys for a friend of mine who didn't know enough about digital audio to uncheck the "protect my content" box in the 'rip' dialog of Windows Media Player.
Over the previous year he'd built up about 20 Gb of ripped WMAs until one day Windows decides that it can't find the licence key for any of his tunes. This wasn't due to a hardware change or even a Windows Update (ironically it happened right after listening to an autoplay-DRM audio CD, but I can't pin the blame for sure)
Anyway, his files are now 100% useless. Sure, he still has the CDs and can rip them again - but my god that's a lot of wasted effort for a couple of hundred CDs.
Last week he didn't even know what DRM was. He does now, and I don't think he likes it much.
I mean, how do you constitute major label? Granted, we all know the big ones. But do you actually keep track of the gazillions of record labels, big and small, who gets bought out by who etc.?
Simple- I never buy CD's at all. I long ago finished collecting all the old music I'll ever need for my life. Small artists who I support, also support their fans- by making money off of their CONCERTS instead of their RECORDINGS, and by releasing lower quality, but still good, recordings for free on the web themselves under the Creative Commons License. To me- it's the only way to insure that I'm listening to what I consider to be good music. YMMV- if you listen to music for reasons other than why I do for instance (the only new music I've supported recently has been people like Baby Gramps and Complex Numbers- people who actually have something to say with their music other than "Look at me I'm a big rock star out to make millions")
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.