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Napster To Campaign Aggressively Against iPod
rocketjam writes "Forbes reports that Napster plans an aggressive marketing campaign against Apple's iPod as part of its subscription service full launch later this quarter. Napster's service uses Microsoft's Janus technology to enable DRM protected music files 'bought' through subscription services to be transferred from a PC to a portable music player. Napster CEO Chris Gorog said the company is betting heavily that their monthly 'all you can eat' subscription service will win the battle for online digital music services, claiming, 'It's exactly what consumers want to do. Napster To Go is very similar to the P2P experience.' He believes the best way to market the service is to emphasize its advantages over iTunes and its iPod-only compatibility. 'We're going to be communicating to people that it's stupid to buy an iPod.' Maybe I'm too old to get it, but I fail to see the attraction of paying a monthly fee for as long as I want to have access to my music." Of course, if Napster To Go supported iPod, they'd have a much larger install base to convince to use their service, instead of still pleading people to buy a portable player with compatible DRM installed.
according to napster ceo chris gorog, speaking to nma at midemnet this week, his company is betting heavily that the monthly 'all you can eat' subscription model will win the battle of the digital services, rather than the download strategy currently pursued by apple's itunes, which has around 70% of legal download sales
...insist on one that comes without M$ DRM garbage.
All they have to do is just make it so that if you stop paying the subscription you still keep the songs.
That would be a very attractive deal that I would consider.
Simon.
So as far as I can tell, you pay a monthly fee to "rent" your music.
I understand DRM is evil but at least I own the digital files I download off of iTunes.
I would have no problem paying to access "my" music every single month. After all, if I buy two CDs every month (my average), then you could argue that I already pay $20 per month to feed my music habit. If this costs the same but gives me access to any music then I would subscribe in a second.. After all, I will pay for the ease of someone else managing my CD collection. --Brian
Let's really do the math.
2 years. $15 bucks a month $360
2 years 15 songs a month that you buy at $.99 ea $356
In year 3 you stop buying music,
Napster you have zero songs
iTunes you have 360 songs, that will play on your PC or Mac or, iPod.
Total long term value of Napster $0
Total long term value of iTunes $360
Note this assumes both sides always carry backwards compatiblity.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I would consider it if the service was not rental. Plus, having the songs tied to a device sucks.
Users have been hungering for digital rights management for some time. It's about time an upstanding company like Napster provided users what they want - restrictions on the media they purchase.
(This message brought to you by the RIAA)
I'm a big tall mofo.
This sounds to me like a marketing message that will fall on deaf ears. Do people really care that iTunes is only iPod-compatible? After all, most people have an iPod. To the average consumer it's not iTunes that's proprietary, it's anything that can't play on an iPod that's considered incompatible. You can't really point at the defacto standard, that people know and love, and scream "proprietary, proprietary!" Proprietary it may be, but it's a convoluted and diluted message that that will just confuse consumers. The iTunes marketing message is "Cool, and hip, and all your friends are doing it." The Napster marketing message is "we're not proprietary?" Someone needs to go take Marketing 101.
Apple can do it too. Why not?
I'm not a fan of Napster's model, but I'm also not a fan of paying $1 for 128kb/s music with DRM on it.
Its medium fidelity for high fidelity prices.
What's worse, is I can't sell the songs to somebody else.
I know Apple fans hate when I say this, but just because Apple isn't as bad as the others doesn't make them good. It just makes them less bad.
The iTMS music store isn't a good deal for anybody except Apple and the RIAA members.
I will stick to my iPod Mini I purchased last week. Does there service even compare to iTunes in the amount of music? I would never go with them because of the DRM'd player, but I am just curious if they have the library that iTunes has.
Home of the midwest loser - www.say-10.net
But I don't see the point of buying DRM'd music at the iTunes store that costs as much as the same music on a permanent medium without any DRM. If you want to buy an album, it's usually cheaper to buy the CD.
Napster CEO Chris Gorog: "We're going to be communicating to people that it's stupid to buy an iPod."
By saying this, he's essentially implying that everyone who owns an iPod is stupid. I don't see any iPod users being persuaded to switch to Napster's service thanks to Mr. Gorog's opinion of them, but considering the size of the iPod's market share, Napster needs to court current iPod/iTMS users, not denigrate them.
Besides that, stupid people are his target market-- who else would think paying $15 per month FOREVER (or your music collection disappears) is a good deal?
PDiddy says "Vote for Napster or DIE..."
Obviously that would change would make the service attractive to customers, but it would ruin their business. All you'd have to do is subscribe for a month or two, download all the songs you want and then cancel your subscription. They get a few tens of dollars in exchange for possibly several thousand songs, which presumably they have to pay the record companies for.
Their marketing strategy is not working. They've been voted as having the worst ad during the Superbowl and more imporantly I think their argument just isn't reaching anyone.
"$10,000 to fill your iPod vs. $14.95 per month with Napster"
So.. you download 10,000 songs from Napster in the first month, then cancel your subscription straight away and they are supposed to let you keep all those?
Doesn't sound like a great business model to me!
Is the iPod just a case of marketing? No. Sure there is plenty of marketing involved, both traditional and word of mouth. But once a person gets the iPod, they tend to like it. A lot. They personalize it in their minds. It's "their" iPod. It's very successful not because of the commercials but because the end product delivers, and often delivers more than they expected ("it knows what I want to hear more than I do!")
So Napster can throw as much money as they want in commercials, and bad mouth iPods as much as they want. They'll convince some people. And a subset of them really will be happy, for they can listen to all new music all the time and thrash through thousands of new songs. But a lot of people who buy the Napster marketing pitch will notice two things: 1) They have to keep paying forever, no matter what, or else they lose it all; and 2) They have to give up their iPod, something they've grown attached to.
The Napster reality won't live up to the hype for most people. In contrast, the iPod reality exceeds the hype for most people. Do the math...
So I skimmed through the article and saw no mention of what the restrictions are on the files received through this service. Granted, this is Forbes so I doubt they much care. Is anyone familiar with what sort of restrictions exist on these "Janus 'enabled'" files in comparison to iTunes files?
ie. Can you burn them to CD? If so how often? How many devices can the file be used on simultanously, etc.
Now the best we can hope for is something like that Lindows fellow set up. $.88 and no DRM just a good ol MP3.
For now I will stick with Allofmp3.com The Russians got it right on that one. It's cheap, you can choose the format you want, and no DRM. If someone in the US were allowed to do the same thing (even charging double allofmp3's rates) tons of music would be sold. TONS.
I list to internet radio stations on Real or shoutcast on XMMS.
You can pick up just about every public radio station in the US.
So you get to fill your whole music player for $15 (cause you won't pay after the first month, will you)? Doesn't sound like a fair solution. What I think would be more in line though is if you stop paying, you get to credit your subscription to x number of songs. So, if I pay $15 / month, quit after 2 months, well, then I get to keep 30 songs or something.
Calling people that disagreed with them "stupid" sure didn't help them in the past election.
I am not saying it will but the story submitted missed out on the fact that people already pay reoccuring charges to access to stuff that they can get free elsewhere.
Examples:
Cell Phones : The amounts people dump on these is stupendous.
XM/Sirius : Can't get reception unless you pay.
Cable/Satellite : Same again. Sure you can get it another way but your paying for a package.
This type of service will do fine for those out there who want music for the house, many people overlook this application, or just want to stay current on their "mp3 player" without buying music they may not play again next month.
My problem is that I like to make MP3 CDs for my car. With iTunes I have to burn all my purchased music to audio CD format and rip it back overlaying the purchased version otherwise iTunes will not let me write the song to CD (no AAC to MP3 direct conversion allowed - I am curious if they don't block burn to CD - rip back one day).
If a car MP3 player played DRM protected music I think services like Napster will take off like wildfire. The key to success is to open many ways to play this music your purchased. A portable MP3 player should be able to be defined as "my car" just as much as "my RIO" (fwiw I used to have an iPod - but it DIED! - I may get another one day)
So... Where is Apple in all of this? I am not sure, but preventing other players from synching up with the iPod is still a major flaw. It might not hurt them now but like the mid 80s proved superior items only go so far. Competitors will find the key to taking you down and you will get buried unless you act. Apple lost a good thing before and they seem to be on track to eventually do it again.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Telling your customers they are stupid is never a good idea. Actually believing it is worse!!
Subscription-based music downloads have been around long before iTunes, yet the iTunes music store flattened them. And now Napster thinks that adding portability will be enough to dethrone iTunes?
As the Ticos say: "Y yo con los ojos azules."
.. And inevitably fail.
You heard it here first.
I'm sure they'll dump enough money on a 'sales campaign' to give any ad agency an orgasm. In the end you know it will be futile. Too many greedy entities that want their cut, no one thinking about actually giving consumers a product that they want or can use.
I honestly thing apple has chance to succeed with itunes/itms/etc because they seem to actually care about end user experience.
Users have been hungering for digital rights management for some time. It's about time an upstanding company like Napster provided users what they want - restrictions on the media they purchase.
(This message brought to you by the RIAA)
Napster is jumping in a little bit late... Apple has already graciously been giving users DRM for a while now. And the irony of your joke that users would actually rally around a company for giving them DRM is that Apple users actually do just that. Just read ANY old slashdot story about iTunes DRM and you will find 100's of +5 insightful comments about how great DRM is as long as it's from Apple and how happy Apple users are that Apple serves them up DRM.
They won't do that, as then you can pay 15 bucks, get 80 thousand songs. Then cancel. Which is the opposite of what they want you to do. Which is pay them 15 dollars a month FOREVER!
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
"value of iTunes $360"
Actually, the value is $0.
Before you argue with me, remember the traditional way to set value is to sell it and see what the open market brings. EBay is great because it generally establishes the real market value.
But iTMS won't let you do that. You cannot transfer music to anyone else (and BTW, I can when I buy the CD)
So by this measure, the value is the same. $0.
And while I'll grant you there is a viseral appeal to thinking you "own" the song, you really don't in iTMS.
The flip side of Napster is that you have to pay, but you get a large selection that you can take to the gym or commuting, but you lose access to it. In that respect Napster is more like a radio service.
I wouldn't pay a dime to either service because I consider them both a rip-off.
However, new music will come out.
:P
Not to mention, you'll find "new old music" everyday.
I'd most certainly keep subscribing for more than 2 months, even though the first months would be downloading-craze-filled.
As long as I could keep the songs after Ive cancelled my subscription, if I choose to do so in the future, I'd most likely subscribe to a service like this for a long time. This type of subscriptionbased downloading has been what Ive been looking for all along since the "buy your music over the net"-thing started. Too bad that it's still not exactly what I want, but its the closest bet yet. Too bad that they'll use MS DRM scheme, that totally ruined their chance of having me try it out
Napster:
So... what "advantages" are Napster touting, again?
P2P doesn't wipe out your collection when you stop participating. iTunes is much closer in that respect. Once you pay the $0.99/song fee you just got something at least vaguely resembling a property right.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
It goes both ways, you know. It doesn't seem to me to be a very good deal for the consumer, especially since in my opinion they are likely to fail, and when they go out of business, all your songs go poof. Unless I am missing some clause that allows you to keep the songs should they go out of business.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
It states repeatedly that you can get MP3's to put on a Napster-supporting MP3 player.
From what I understand, their service and players are using WMA, with DRM of course.
MP3 != WMA. These are both very specific things. Had they just said "songs", or "music" it would not be an issue. They chose to say MP3 and I fail to see how thats not an outright lie. That oversight alone could be the nail in the coffin for them.
Phillips had similar issues with the RIAA labeling DRM-enabled CD's as official "Compact Discs." Phillips owns the rights to that name, and since the DRM broke the ability for those disks to play in many players, Phillips felt it was damaging their IP to claim they were CD's. They sued and won.
once you go slack, you never go back
What happens if napster goes under? do i lose access to all my music?
Oh, that's right if iTunes was to shutdown i'd still lose all my music once i deactivated my computer after they go out of business.
now how exactly is napster better?
Here's a thought that came to mind...
Napster is attacking Apple's iPod while promoting DRM and subscription-based music collections. Didn't Bill Gates at one time make statemaents to the effect that someday software would be a subscription-based service?
What would one say if I were to say that Napster is starting to take the attitude towards music that MS is taking towards software? Could Napster be striving to be the MS of the music download industry (without the aspects that could give its strategy muscle, like money and market share...)?
Just a thought...
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
You can also end up having paid for music you no longer like. If you never end your subscription you really don't lose out. I have over 1800+ songs in iTunes most of which are from CDs. I have another hundred or so CDs I still haven't ripped. What is the value of those songs to me? About nothing. Actually they are not worth a dime to me as I don't listen to them, let alone rememeber them. Value is all in the application and in some cases the immediate only matters.
Also with Apple, if you lose your music due to HDD crash, fire, theft, etc you may not be able to get it back. They authorized me to redownload my songs ONE time (I lost a weeks worth of purchases due to a crash - I was able to get a few back that I had already transfered to my iPod - but not all). So where is my value should I lose all my purchases and iPod in a house fire? Talk with iTunes and see their policy. I still cannot unauthorize my original HDD/PC because they won't let me. The only way I fully recovered was that I did have a back up of a major portion of my purchased music on DVD.
Key to keeping iTunes worth your investment - back up purchased songs on multiple media types and don't keep them all in one place! Otherwise you can lose your entire investment.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I've got three iPod's now, with a fourth one on the way (a 1GB Shuffle). I'm not paying a subscription fee to listen to my iPod's, and of the 1400-odd songs currently on my iPod, a grand total of about 20 have come off of the iTunes store. I only buy things that I would probably never want to actually own in CD format from iTunes. If the music is good enough, I'll buy the CD and rip it. If it's not good enough, I probably don't want to hear it, anyway.
I use a 250GB external FireWire 800 LaCie d2 extreme to archive all my CD's in Sound Designer II format with Toast 6 Platinum and then rip them to 192KBps AAC's for the iPod's. With this strategy, I calculate that I can fit *at least* 400 CD's on this drive, which happens to be approximately the amount of CD's that I currently own.
And, I keep a full installation of Mac OS X on my iPod's, so I can boot up machines and fix hard drives. The Shuffle on the way will replace my USB keys for quick file transfers between Mac's and PC's. With 1400-odd songs on a 40GB iPod *and* Mac OS X, I still have somthing like 30GB of space left (and 300 more CD's to rip).
I don't need or want to support Microsoft's overly-restrictive Digital Restrictions Management scheme. The subscription model is doomed to failure--just look at satellite radio! Meanwhile, Apple has proven that the iTunes Music Store is a viable business model, with over 250-plus million sales to date.
Napster's pathetic Super Bowl ad was the lowest ranked of all the commercials shown that night. Need anyone ask why?
And what happens when you decide not to pay the subscription fee? No more music.
Apple's DRM is reasonable. Maybe you're too dense to realize that. It's also easily strippable which lends to it's favoritism by consumers over that of Microsoft's DRM.
So really it's users rallying around the best legal option the record labels would submit to. No major labels sign on to plans without DRM so you have no point.
I am confused.
First off, their marketing department seems to have caught a bad case of retard.
Second, how are songs for personal mp3 players property? I can go to a museum, take a photo, and print it out for my personal use ( which i've done ). If I'm not distributing mp3s, why can't I listen to them? I'm not making any money off of them at all.
Why is P2P less viable than any of this, disregarding RIAA silliness?
that would sure be attractive, but i can't see how it would make economical sense.
Well, if you look at it as they aren't ever your songs, but instead, you have access to all of their catalog while subscribed, then maybe it makes more sense.
Many people like to collect things, and the model kind of goes against their natures I guess.
Ideally, you wouldn't download at all. You'd have instant streaming from a wireless device. What do I want to listen to today? How about a little William Hung. Well, here you go. She bangs, She Bangs! Of course, that isn't what they are selling. Maybe in 2020.
I'm going to laugh my ass off when some 15 year old releases a hack that strips the DRM out of these Napster songs. Millions and millions of "rented" songs will become permanent non-DRM overnight.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Subscription services (Napster et. al.) are doomed for the following reasons: 1) People who love music, usually have a certain library of artists they want to 'own' (do I want to buy all the Neil Young or Led Zeppelin or whatever or rent it for $15/mth forever). 2) People who are not into music won't want to pay $15 a month to listen to/have access to a million songs. 3) The people inbetween will borrow/rip/copy their friends music. Nice knowin' ya Napster (your welcome for the free marketing advice)
If you fling enough shit, does the smell go away?
Napster was dead before it was even announced- but because it has a lot of anti-apple investors it can waste money, and continue to fail slowly.
There will always be people who just 'don't get it'-- but it seems that in the case of the iPod/iTunes, people understand it- they recognize it is better. So the Napster/Microsoft model of selling crap products to people who don't know the difference isn't really panning out for them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Napster needs to emphasize that they support both the 99 cent portable downloads (iTunes style) AND the subscription service.
I almost agree with the Napster CEO... Why buy music from iTunes when you can buy the same music, with a non-DRMed hard copy (used cd) for less?
If you like to listen to lots and lots of music and you don't want to bother with managing a large collection of CDs or iTunes files, then Napster makes sense.
It actually promotes something that Apple is thought to have a monopoly on: simplicity.
On the other hand... it also hurts simplicity by forcing a choice. Do I buy an iPod and subscribe to iTunes or do I buy a Napster compatible device and subscribe to it? For me the answer is neither, I don't need a glorified walkman.
Unfortunately for Napster, the answer for a huge number of other people is "iPod's are soooooooo cool, my friends have one, my dog has one, I want one!"
The Napster model is a subscription to put as much music as you want on your player.
Not, "Buy the songs, then pay us $15 to play it." Rather, "Subscribe to the service, and throw as much music as you want on your player." You're not buying the music, even in the CD/ITMS sense of, "I paid for the right to play this song as much as I want."
"9.99 for an entire album compared to ~20 at Best Buy"
I don't mean to be rude, but who pays $20 for the album at best buy?
I mean, at worst, you buy it at Costco for $12 or Amazon for $13.
If you can wait a few days, then you buy at BMGMusic (where I average $8/CD after shipping) or used, where I can frequently get CD's for $5-6, even relatively new ones.
You like to say $20 for a CD primarily because it justifies the $10 price for iTMS, which is a poor deal considering (a) Only 128kb/s fidelity (b) no liner notes or information on the artists (c) you can't sell it when you're tired of it.
Does the fact that iTMS is iPod-only make it a nonviable service? Is Windows-only software nonviable? When you are marketing towards a very large section of a market, it's okay if your product isn't for everyone.
With that in mind, it should be obvious that I will never use a service like iTunes or Napster. Why? Because, for one, no matter how you stack it up, they are impersonal. With a CD, I can buy it and play it wherever I want. With either music service, there are severe restrictions on how, when, and where I can play it. Want to play those songs you downloaded off of iTunes or Napster on your expensive 7.1 surround-sound entertainment system? Tough cookies; you're restricted to either your PC or your iPod.
Either one is also somewhat expensive. iTunes costs at least $12 for a full album, which is about the cost of your average CD, but you also have lots of added external costs: the time and bandwidth it takes to download the songs, even more time if you want to upload it to an iPod, and the cost of HDD storage space. You're also not getting the packaging that a CD provides. Napster... I don't even need to mention, since if you plan on keeping your music for more than a year you will most likely be spending much more than if you decided to purchase a CD.
And all of the above is assuming they have the music that I want in the first place!
No, I think I'll keep my CD's, thanks, until the iTuneses and Napsters of the world can give me music I want, the way I want it, at a price that can better that of CD's.
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
All they have to do is just make it so that if you stop paying the subscription you still keep the songs.
/. post but if you're correct. My fears of the iTMS-killer are over. You have to pay as long as you want your songs? Noone who realizes this will buy into it esp since I can't use my iPod. It just sounds stupid.. like paying for radio.
I definatly didn't get that from their ads. i wasn't sure from the
Anyway I'm betting people will try to sue them over the confusion. Doubt they'll win anything but I see many many complaints being lodged against them for that.--
The Wolfkin
It's a lot closer than that. Rhapsody (Listen.com) do that today on the PC platform.
;)
Check out the 3GSM conference starting Monday for movement from the mobile side of things
Definitely not 2020 - more like 2006/7.
Exactly, even with cable TV the consumer could tape their favorite shows and have all the content, the subscription model depends on customers continuing to want new content. This model is just inconvenient and silly - like most DRM it works in the fevered imagination of marketing and fails the "will this irritate the customer" test.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
So the whole idea is that files cannot be played anymore after a certain time and date, right? How does Microsoft think this will work? Obviously the media player will have to have some kind of internal clock but how will it be protected against tampering?
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
I can see how this can bite the average consumer in the ass when they realize they don't get to keep thier songs. Nothing is stopping the technically inclined from taking the DRM'd WMA and making MP3's out of them. I haven't looked yet, but there is most likely a tool (or one can easily be made) that will make WAV file from the audio out, and convert that to an MP3 and name it the same before the .mp3 as the original WMA. 15 dollars for the first month will get me a lot of songs ;p
...You get a huge selection of music at very competitive prices (especially if you buy a full album at US$9.95 per album), even if some of the major labels are yet to be represented on iTMS.
People forget that music downloaded from iTMS can be burned onto CD-R discs, which means you can play them on most CD players out there.
Because of the success of iTMS, I wouldn't be surprised that we'll see all the major labels supporting iTMS within the next 24 months.
2) You can use paypal to ensure your CC number doesn't go to the Russian mafiya.
3) I'm still using the 10 dollars I paid about 6 months ago, and I download a lot of music.
All you can eat? Isn't that incredibly risky?
If the DRM is cracked, then their entire catalog could spill onto the P2P networks in a single day.
They set up DRM to be a single point of failure that would cause a sudden, spectacular implosion of their business.
I already have all the music I've ever wanted. And I've even paid for it. And, you know, I dont have to pay a monthly fee for it, it wont go away when some company goes bankrupt, and I can move it where I want it.
So what is the sales pitch? I can see the improvement for them, but where's the improvement for me?
Never tells customers that they are wrong to like a product (the iPod in this case).
If you bought an iPod and they told you're stupid, how would you feel?
> communicating to people that it's stupid to buy an iPod."
By saying this, he's essentially implying that everyone who owns an iPod is stupid. I don't see any iPod users being persuaded to switch to Napster's service thanks to Mr. Gorog's opinion of them, but considering the size of the iPod's market share, Napster needs to court current iPod/iTMS users, not denigrate them. Besides that, stupid people are his target market-- who else would think paying $15 per month FOREVER (or your music collection disappears) is a good deal?
Apple in the past ruined itself comparing corporate PC users purchasing IBM equipment to lemmings - stupid creatures just following each other to fall from a cliff. That ad was perceived as offensive and was never aired again. So this might be a wrong step from Napster. On the other hand, it is easy to cheat customers, which ARE stupid on the whole. In Germany you have the highest mobile phone tarifs in the world, but people sign new contracts binding them for at least 24 months, and having them paying anywhere between 20$ and 100$ a month, because they get the newest cell phone for a couple of bucks. And this is different from North America: you pay VERY high prices for placing calls, sometimes up to 2$ a minute to call a mobile phone with another network provider... but you get the mobile phone for "free" paying "only 20$ to 100$ a month. It MUST be a deal... So, if Napster can sell the message well, they can win the battle. It would not be the first time that the stupidity of the average person wins over common sense.
while some of these are songs they have "purchased" from ITMS, most of them are NOT.
So right now everyone I know is NOT paying ANY monthly fees AND they have a large library of music to choose from, what incentive do they have to subscribe to Napster?
Oh, they don't have use that awful iPod anymore! There's a good reason.
*cough*
I like microcars
I can take a 10 minute trip into town, buy any CD I want (or if I was feeling particularly lazy, buy a whole load together on eg. play.com) and do whatever the hell I like with it. I manage my own rights.
Do you see what I did there?
A friend of mine is a drummer in a minor alternative band and recently released their second album.
He doesn't own an iPod and has never yet used iTunes but was telling me that the deal was quite good. Something like 90 of the 99 cents goes to the band. I am not sure if this is all bands get this deal or it is used encourage smaller labels.
Anyway, I wonder how Napster fairs in regard to the smaller bands. Does napster keep track of what songs are being played each month so it can reward artists appropriately? If it does, isn't it an invasion of privacy?
It would seem Apple has an advantage of this symbiotic relationship between iTunes profit and iPod hardware profit so they have the latitude to reward artists greater.
They are already doing this. They had a commercial at the super bowl, with a picture of an ipod + 10000 songs = $1000, then napster + 10000 songs = $15/month.
He spelled BMG wrong.
Online music stores like the iTunes Music Store are like real world record stores. Subscription services like Napster are like record clubs. While both have their place, I think that - just like in the real world - music stores are going to get the lion's share of the market.
no way, i get my music free on the radio, i will never pay money for music since music is not an important enough part of my life...
You also didn't pay $15 for your entire music collection (I'm assuming). The price is the improvement for you.
People seem to forget that, even when "purchasing" music, even at $0.99/song, you don't really "own" the music, just the right to play it on a portable device, burn it onto a CD or two, and play it on a few machines that you own... and a significantly "upgraded" machine is considered a new machine. Upgrade enough times and, with most of the DRM software out there, you can't have your music any more.
Second, when most consumers purchase an iPod, they are purchasing a device that will, within 2-3 years, need to be sent in for "repair" because there is no removable battery. Genius! A $250-$500 device that lasts 2 years and will need "repair" for something that is, what I consider, a design flaw - whether you do it yourself or send it to Apple. This is what really burns me up about the whole iPod/iTunes marketing campaign, and about DRM in general. It's all about impermanence. I still have CDs I bought back in the 80s. I have an old CD player from that time, too. The player and the music are still "working" as expected almost 20 years later - and it's in digital format.
Don't get me wrong. MS hasn't really gotten it right either - same restrictions (actually, usually the restrictions are worse), and most (not all) of the players compatible with its DRM technology have non-removable batteries.
I have bought songs from iTunes, BuyMusic, and MSN's music service (hell, I've even tried Wal Mart's service). If you think your DRM music is even semi-permanent, you are mistaken unless you burn to a CD - but only if Mr. DRM will "allow" you to do that with music you "own." But, if your final product is going to be a CD from purchasing from iTunes, you'd be better off just buying the CD outright.
My 2 cents.
The reason why the IPOD sells is not price/performance. Its STYLE, and coolness and the ease of use (software and hardware).
There have been players that are MUCH cheaper on a price/performance ratio than the ipod/ipod mini. Apple knows how to appeal to people's emotions and that is why they sell. NOT a cold rational evaulation of the "features".
These are the same people who look at the Mac Mini and try to put together a Dell for the same price and exclaim the Mini is not worth it....but they don't take into account the look, feel of the hardware and the robustness of OS X vs windows.
Why dont they try to innovate instead of going against something, do they never have any ideas ?
I'll buy an Ipod just because of this, because i'm tired of the "killers" and "competitors"...
If I used Napster with my iPod, then the firewire wire that connects my iPod to my computer would be worthless. And I paid $40 for it!
Let's do the math
iPod - $200
DRM - ?????
Firewire cable - $40
Songs - $.99 each
Months - $15.00
Sum - 200 + 40 = 240
240+99=?
Months are too expnensive!
Answer = iPod very exensive!
The problem with Napster vs. iTunes is that the cables needed to connect them are love and harmony, but they dislike each other.
Computers are very useful but sometimes they cause rivalries. Just look at all the people who use vi and all the people who use emacs. They hate each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Apple's Spotlight is going to ROCK THE HOUSE, though. It has everything a music lover will like--like the ability to easily find songs.
I think that we are judging too soon.
when they go out of business, all your songs go poof
The point is that they're not _your_ songs, but that for $15/month you get the ability to legally listen to whatever tracks (that they have the rights to) for that month. Think of it as a membership at Netflix - you pay a certain amount per month and get [theoretically] as much as you want to watch, but you don't get to keep it. Whether the market will decide that this is something the public is interested in for music remains to be seen.
There is the option to buy tracks and keep the forever just like iTunes. But just like iTunes it's about $1/track in the US. The whole point of the Napster to go is that you can get thousands of tracks and switch them around as you like, which is great for people like me who listen to hundreds or thousands of songs over the course of the month. My online music habbit would cost me around $80/week from iTunes. It's not great if you just want to listen to a handful of them - it's clearly cheaper over the long run to buy the CD or download the perminant copy from your choice of vendors.
... Go to www.allofmp3.com. The following might sound too good to be true, but just go check it t out. It's an online music store (run by a Russian company) where you:
... all up to CD quality.
... *looks it up*... 2241 songs weighing in at 11.33 Gb.
1) Have the choice between Mp3, WMA, Ogg, Mpc, FLAC, Monkey Audio, Mpeg - 4 AAC (iTunes compatible)
2) Pay by the MB.
3) Have a library almost as large as any of the US services in the market (and much better as far as back catalogue is concerned).
4) CAN BUY MUSIC LEGALLY, at least in my country. I checked and had checked by representatives of the Austrian music industry, they grudgingly conceded that yes, it is legal for me to buy music there for a tenth of what it costs me at home.
I have spent over 140 dollars there in the last six months. But those 140 bucks bought me over
Heck, you can even pay using PayPal. There is NO reason not to use this service. Economically, music is a luxury. Lower the price for luxuries, and sales go orbital.
You don't understand the market. When you filter everything through the "Does it play ogg? Is it on Linux? Does it have DRM?" filters, you miss the point.
Middle school and High school kids are interested in the hits now. They won't be interested in today's hits a few months from now. Paying $15 to listen to today's hits - where those hits change weekly or monthly, would be a good deal to them. They don't care about keeping them forever. They want the current hits. For the price of one CD a month, they can always have the current hits on their mp3 player.
For them, this is a good deal. Middle school and High school kids don't care about DRM.
Peace
perhaps theres a timer of some sort in the file? If a month goes buy without you going online and logging into their system, the file is no longer usable.
once you go slack, you never go back
So hmmm let me see I can buy beautiful clear uncompressed CDDA without DRM or I can buy sweet sounding AAC (not bad for single tracks) or I can rent fart in a bath lo fi sounding WMA? Which will I choose? Well clearly as I am getting old WMA will remind me of the old days of Long Wave Radio. No thanks Microshaft. Napster is actually quite a nice application. However WMA sucks and the UK prices are a rip off!
...when they can't even do simple math?!
10,000 songs on iTunes does NOT equal $10,000.
99-cents x 10,000 = $9,900.
dumbasses.
Most of you guys are acting as if you "own" the files you download on Itunes. It too has DRM and has a limitation to the number of Transfers/Burns you can perform.
I am just curious as to why anyone cares so much that Napster has introduced a subscription service. Seems to me that more options = better. I bet all this angst is coming from the fact that it was Napster using WMA DRM 10 and not Apple with its AAC format that did this first.
If you want to "Own" your music then go out and buy your music from a CD store. If you want to fill your player with music, then choose a good online store. To me Napster right now has the better option on filling up my MP3 player.
On the 12th day of my Napster2Go service, and I'm certain of paying the subscription.
iTunes interface and implementation just doesn't compare with the ease (and improved looks) of Napster.
AVI video of Napster2Go usage can be seen here.
It's true most people want to "own" their music, but are you really going to listen to it again? I'm the type who listens to a playlist for a month or two, until practically sick of the music and wanting new. Napster2Go is probably trying to cater to people like me best.
If there are songs you'd listen to in the future, Napster2Go still entitles subscribes to 99 cent per song purchases.
Maybe what Napster should do is give long-term subscribers a discount to music they've downloaded, and wish to purchase. Or maybe discount older music. There must be some way to compensate so Napster can attract the mass.
'Fears' of an iTMS killer? iTMS is a wonderful thing, but would it really wreck your world so much if someone else came up with something better (apparently this isn't it, but hypothetically)?
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
All they have to do is just make it so that if you stop paying the subscription you still keep the songs.
Yah that's a good business model. Pay one montly fee get all the music for free and unsubsribe with your massive collection of digital music.
I can't see this working. People don't want to keep paying for ever to listen to music. If I quit the server I want to keep the music I've "purchased".
Who's leg do I have to hump to get a dry martini around here?
I think Napster subscription service could be a great deal for very many people. There are already more than 100,000 subscribers to subscription services like Rhapsody for $10/month, and this seems like a much better value. I won't do it, because I own an iPod, but if Apple offered a service like this I might try it for a few months. I mean, HBO is $12/month. Would you rather watch HBO or have a bottom-less pile of music to listen?
Not to mention, this is a fantastic way to discover new music. Some people probably spend $50/month on music, and with this service, you could sample music more economically.
Do the songs go away when you stop paying? Sure they do, just like HBO stops working, the TiVo turns into a doorstop and your cell phone becomes a paper weight. I don't know if Napster will succeed, but I think it's silly to dismiss it out of hand. It may not be for everyone, but if they could get 10% of the market, that would be enormous. And is Apple announced a competitive service tomorrow, they'd have 500,000 subscribers by Monday.
One CD a month at give or take $15.99/cd, over the course of a year.
You're still paying the same amount with Napster, difference is you get all the music you want, except, once you stop paying, the music goes away. So if after 14 months you have a catostrophic circumstance appear and can no longer afford $15.99/mo, then that's $220 down the drain.
If you can't buy a new CD this month, then you still get to keep your last 14 CDs.
...and that's all there is to it.
Ah, you must have missed the "Moore's Law" clause in the fine print. No worries, they put it in really quite small words, very easy to miss. For your convenience:
So, as you can see, you'll eventually get access to your music back. Perhaps sooner (possibly even long before Napster goes under, depending on algorithmic weaknesses in their DRM), perhaps later, probably not quite legally, but it will happen, eventually.
This is of course a story worth running on the front page. But, damn, there's a lot of astroturfing in the comments. Hope you all will enjoy your first free month of Napster service ... and your eon in Purgatory. :-o
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
it's amazing to me that while the dot-bomb killed off programmers and rank and file employees, while executives keep making more and more...for this?
good businesses are built by innovation, not by looking in the 'what's hot' section of the paper to come up with ideas...
a few years ago, while everybody and their brother was trying to figure out how to be the 'next Napster,' Apple was busy innovating, and that's why they are the lead dog in this race...
meanwhile, my wife and i, who are stupid enough to own 3 iPods, and 30,000 songs (some bought from iTunes) will never be stupid enough to subscribe to Napster!
good luck--see you on the way down, Gorog...
I'm a "vimer" and was a "emacser". I do respect "emacsers". It is a matter of "choice". Do not put everybody in the same basket, please. I perseive that those who hate each other are the most vociferous, but are far from being the majority. I think you were misled by those vociferous people, namely that in my opinion you are in the matrix and not me ;). I perseive that most of vimer and emacser do not hate each other and respect each other a lot.
People expect to not own songs they hear on the radio, so this would get people to think about what Napster adds over radio, instead of thinking about how their music stops working if they ever cancel.
Ahh how they have forgotten Divx the circuit city-lawyer venture. When Divx went belly up, anyone taht got sucked in to their 'lifetime' plan was left with unplayable media.
So napster, please feel free to duplicate that success!
You wish that was true, but you know it isn't. You know very well that users have praised the [b]leniency[/b] of Apple's DRM, not the fact that they are using it.
For those of us (all 5 of us) who are trying to find a way to enjoy portable music *and* keep it legal, this seems quite attractive. I've ripped my CD's (I posit that this is legal), and I buy a CD from time to time, but I spend more money on iTunes these days - more than $15 / month. If I could spend that same $15 / month and get access to zillions of songs it seems like a better deal to me. I don't really care if I "own" the songs, what I care about is that my music budget is giving me the best bang for the buck.
BUT, I've got a pretty big investment in iPods. I've purchased 6 so far - one was stolen, one hit a tile floor and broke, and 4 are in use - by me and the other members of my family. Do I have to start over w/ new hardware? When I'm looking to upgrade I may have to look at the competition - maybe it won't be so lame by then.
If I'm any indication of the market for music (market defined as "people who pay money for goods and services"), Apple needs to look at this ASAP, or risk losing their main customers. This is the first real threat that I've seen for the iPod.
How many weeks, or days, after thay start this will a crack for the DRM be released that lets you do just that? Worst case, the analog hole will always let you do it via speaker output->line in.
how great DRM is as long as it's from Apple
No, DRM is great if it keeps the content providers complacent enough to keep providing their content, whilst still allowing the consumer to remove its restrictions legally and without undue effort.
Since you can burn your purchased tracks with Apple's DRM to CD, legally, it meets the above definition of "great". And as long as copyright laws exist, and therefore record companies exist, you're not going to get professional music legally under any better definition of "great". Deal.
Reasonable for a cabal of astroturfers who've achived moderation status, mind you.
I say no, but say the same to Napster and iTunes.
But I have this personal prejudice against anything Apple that goes back decades. Us old-timers are like that about litigious companies who hire the best lawyers at the hint of competition.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
If Napster provided Lossless Streaming in addition to having the ability to download some compressed Windows Media files to my portable device I would consider this. I wouldn't mind paying $15 a month or so for every title imaginable at the click of a button, but crappy compressed music won't cut it in my listening room. We need a service that can make the grade with my stereo setup and also work with my portable music player. As I have spent $15K+ so far on just a two channel setup I expect nothing less. So it's back to the cd store for me where I make lossless archives AND make lossy archives for my Rio Karma with my hard earned money. If only someone would do this for me to ease my pain of ripping.
Not to mention, Napster's selection is pretty weak. Where is Mayhem, Burzum, Folkstorm, Lustmord, etc...
Suckers!
I can't understand why any self-respecting geek would buy an iPod. These things are all about "looking good/cool" while sacrificing sound quality to inferior formats...
Inferior formats like AIFF, the native format of CD-based music? All iPods except the Shuffle support it, you know. The average song in AIFF format is about 40MB, so you could fit quite a few CDs worth of music onto the larger iPod models and not traumazite your fragile little ears with 'inferior formats'
People like you are why "audiophile" is basically a synonym for "pretentious asshole."
It's exactly what consumers want to do
You fucking cunt
Janus came out last year in May.
/. articles to pick through:
.com.com articles, all the comments on both threads, and THEN come back to this one, head a'burstin' with knowledge! :D
We have two
Microsoft Preps 'Janus' Music Copy-Prevention Scheme
Microsoft's Janus DRM Software Officially Unveiled
Now, go read both
Seriously. If you bought music from iTunes or Napster or any of the other services out there, you wasted your money. The only thing you bought was permission to use a bundle of bits on your hard drive, and that's it. Not only that, but you paid FULL price for a song encoded with a LOSSY compression scheme! Sure, if you're just looking for one or two tracks, I can see the attraction, but for buying an entire album? STUPID! You paid full price but do you get a CD? Do you get album art you can hold in your hand? Do you get to listen to it whereever and whenever you want?
No?
Shoulda bought a CD.
Napster's all-you-can-eat service seems like it's a pretty good deal, but you have to keep paying them to keep listening. $15 a month isn't awful, and it's probably a good way to hear new music, but you can't burn it (without extra cost or, if you're trying to avoid paying the piper, without a lot of extra work) and you can't take it with you. You're tied to Napster just as surely as you'd be tied to Apple if you were buying tracks from the iTunes Music Store.
The only way to avoid this "vendor lock-in" is to BUY CDS. They're cheap if you get them at used stores, and if you really want to do things on the cheap, check your local libraries.
My iPod is full of tracks I've ripped from CDs I bought and borrowed. They work just fine. Any MP3 player will work as long as you avoid "special" formats like AAC and WMP.
How long will it be untill some kid cracks the DRM?
It would be safer to try to protect nuclear secrets than the holy grail of unlimited free music from teenagers.
The script kiddies will be up dday and night working on the crack for this.
Buh Bye Napster !!!!!!!!
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Dear God, don't these companies get it? Any restrictions on the music I download will NOT make me want to pay for them, and tying music to specific types of players (yes, Apple is included here) will also NOT make me want to pay for them.
You can compete with free, but ONLY if the service you offer is much more desirable than the free version. I have not seen anyone do this right yet.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
As pointed out here in an article by Pamela Jones, Napster is supporting the entertainment industry in it's lawsuit against Grokster. If successful, the Hollywood lawyers will have effective veto power over all new distribution technologies. Think about that. Dont subscibe to Napster. Don't let your friends subscribe. They are evil.
I have never done it with NETFLIX disks, but many people do it, there are many discussion lists about this on the Internet. Just install transcode and the necessary libraries (libdvdecss, etc) on your favorite linux distribution and you are ready to go. You may already have the libraries installed for DVD playback under linux.
I predict that in the next 6 months someone will provide a crack of Janus that allows you to steal the subscription music and let you keep it after you cancel your subscription. With a 14-day free trial of Napster that means you could steal all the music you want to fill up your MP3 player for free.
If the crack would allow you to convert the locked WMA files into unlocked MP3 files then you could even load them onto your iPod and not expect future firmware upgrades to make the songs stop playing. When the record companies see this they are sure to pull their music from a Janus service.
Hymn may let you "steal" purchased music from iTunes Music Store, but someone has to at least buy the music. The music is only stolen in this case when you share the files with your friends, but this just isn't the same threat to the record companies as a Janus crack.
A Janus crack would allow you to steal exactly the music you want (not limited by what your friends have), without having to hassle with the P2P services. You can do it by yourself in a couple of hours and how would anyone be able to identify you as having abused the service?
So.. you download 10,000 songs from Napster in the first month, then cancel your subscription straight away and they are supposed to let you keep all those?
/. profit thingies.
Doesn't sound like a great business model to me!
It does to me, they get their $15 once or twice a year from you and a billion other users. That's, well, hell...you do the math.
And it costs them what? Bandwidth?
This is what's been missing from all those
#3. Practically give away something that costs you almost nothing.
loyalty above all, save honor
One of the major problems with the Napster business model is that they are trying to change the attitudes of people who never have paid for a subscription before. Cell Phones have always required a subscription, and people percieve value in what they pay for (communication whenever, whereever, cheap long distance). Cable/Satellite (and you could probably throw DVR subscriptions for Tivo and RePlayTV in there) and XM have always been subscription-based, and while they supplant free TV and radio, enough people percieve them as superior to be an advantage.
Contrast that with the market for online music. Right now, there are two "business models" - all you can steal, ie Kazza/WinMX/eMule/Torrent) or pay and keep the song (iTunes). If you like being legal, you do the second, if you want to amass a bunch of music without paying for it, you do p2p. With Napster, you get the advantage of getting a lot of songs - but you don't get to keep them. I think that is going to be a hard sell for Napster to overcome, because it combines the worst of both worlds - costs money but doesn't get percieved value in return.
I have blog like everyone else
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You can't really point at the defacto standard, that people know and love, and scream "proprietary, proprietary!"
/.ers crying about Microsoft being proprietary. I guess you are calling them all lame?
You can't? Then why are all the
Mod me flamebait, but you can't have this both ways just because you Like one proprietary company and dislike another.
So subscribe for one month every year or so. Get all the new songs for a tiny price.
They could EASILY prevent this by simply imposing a limit - say 50 tracks per day, 500 per week or something - who would object to that?
That was classic intercourse!
TROLL
TROLL
TROLL
TROLL
TROLL
and your work is done for the day!
I like microcars
I used to love that service. $9.95 a month for unlimited downloads. It wasn't mainstream music or labels (which sucks anyways IMO) but a lot of small labels. I subscribed for a few years until they ended the unlimited downloads and went to a much stricter and useless plan (x downloads for x dollars a month). The unlimited downloads was great for trying out all kinds of music. I still have hundreds of MP3 cds downloaded from them and one my albums is still available online and enough people download it with the new plan that I make a decent amount of money off it. None of the MP3s are DRMed either.
In the end it all comes down to one thing for me: I like Apple, iTMS, and the iPod. I don't like Napster, never have... especially their, it's not our problem approach. Now that they've gone legit - don't argue with that by the way, I don't care - they expect everyone to think they're still great because their name is Napster, even though now they're trying to make a ton of money when before their premise was to share for free. Give me a break. At least with Apple, they've always been in it for the money.
The fear is somewhat justified becuase of Apple's decision to make iTMS songs proprietary to the iPod. The iTMS customer is "locked in" to Apple and therefore it would be in there best interest for competitors to be defeated. If iTMS/iPod becomes a bad value proposition, they've burned their investment in Proprietary DRMed music.
i love it when people can't see outside their own perspective. you really are clueless aren't you? what you propose is so open to abuse, you might as well just put all the songs on an ftp server, and ask people to send donations. not only does it hurt when companies refuse to deal with reality, it doesn't help when we have geniuses like the parent poster, who also refuse to accept reality.
You dont need a CD to convert AAC to MP3. You just need to convert it to AIFF on your harddisk first. then you can transcode it. Yes. that is two steps but you can write an apple script to do it auomatically. the AIFF step does not lose quality so the transcoding is effectively a single step. To prove this to yourself just do the following. open iMovie (not iTunes). pick any protected AAC song from the library and addit is a sound track. now look in the iMovie folder that contains your new movie. Voila there is the AIFF file. Now drag this into iTunes and transcode it to MP3. Now automate this with Applescript. Install the script into the iTunes services and viola you have a new menu item in Itunes to convert any protected AAC to mp3 with no more loss of quality than any other trascode. alternatively you can just use DVD John's hack to break the AAC protection, though that might have some watermarking issues that someday could crop up in the future if apple wanted to get ughly about it
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I don't understand why everybody is crying about the various details of this technology, i.e. not being able to keep the songs afterwards. The comparison of this to Netflix is a perfect example.
I willingly pay $10 a month to have access to a massive music library available through Rhapsody. I can only listen to the songs at the computer, and once I cancel I no longer have access to those songs.
For $5 more, I can switch to Napster and have unlimited access to all those songs, PLUS I can take them along with me wherever I go. Sounds like a freaking deal to me.
If I were paying for each individual song and then I lose them once I cancel, *then* I would be pissed. But considering that with Napster To Go, I never owned the music in the first place, what do I have to be pissed about?
I think this is an awesome technology...the best thing to hit music subscription services.
It is obvious you don't have iTunes, for if you did, you would note that the music is ON YOUR COMPUTER! RIGHT THERE ON YOUR HARD DRIVE! Not someplace else, placing you at the mercy of internet connections and the long term viability of the whoever is letting you access thier computers' music files. Music you yourself downloaded from ITMS, along with Music from other sources that you added to the iTunes library. Yours to keep and make CDs of! Imagine that! Further, Apple long ago solved the "what if I buy a new computer and need to transfer my iTunes Music library to another computer?" delimma. Heck, they even went as far as to let you move the library to another hard drive on your computer, whether it is internal or external. The diff between Apple and Napster and Sony, and MS, and everyone else who tries to grab a piee of the pie, is that Apple actually thought about it from ground up from the perspective of the USER, not from the perspective of the RIAA or Marketers, or any of the other quick buck artists.
Maybe you Apple fanboys are too dense to realize that Apple's DRM is functionally equivilant to everyone else's DRM. Reason: They are all the RIAA's bitches.
Take it a step further.
Choice is good, competition is good. The Napster model holds no appeal for me; the iTunes model has some appeal; and niche players that serve up non-DRM MP3s by independent artists have some appeal.
But that's just me. Others will differ, and it's a big enough world for there to be something for all of us.
I don't want there to be one grocery store, one shoe store, one car brand. Why should I hope for one music retailer, online or not, to be dominant?
Music is a huge business, and there is room for all of them to co-exist. I happen to like Apple's products, but I don't think they should be the only thing.
I understand that Napster can't let you keep every song... but why not let you keep $15/month worth of songs if you decide to cancel? Say you cancel after a year and Napster lets you keep $180 worth of songs (of course song "value" could vary for some), that wouldn't be all that bad. You get to sample any kind of music when your subscribed, but if you cancel you can select the songs that you really really want to keep.
Interestingly, when this service comes out, someone will create a way to grab the songs "in transit" can save them. There will be lawsuits under the DMCA, and it could quite possibly lead to a challenging of the Betamax case, since the analogy is so close:
In Betamax, the court ruled that time-shifting of content supplied over a subscription service is fair use.
With Napster, the exact same model wold be in place. It will be very interesting to see how it goes.
I'm guessing they've worked out a special deal with the labels/publishing companies and they're paying a dramtically reduced royalty for music rental. Probably something closer to what radio stations pay to ascap and BMI.
Publishing royalties are ultimately what caused EMusic to discontinue its all-you-can-eat service.
Napster's service uses Microsoft's Janus technology to enable DRM protected music files 'bought' through subscription services to be transferred from a PC to a portable music player.
Digital restrictions management doesn't "enable" transferring files to an external device, USB or Firewire does. DRM prevents you from doing it under circumstances where you could otherwise.
Let's do that.
In year 3, if you stop buying music, with iTunes, you've received 360 songs that are most likely top-20 overplayed fluff or songs for which you listened for 30 seconds and magically determined you liked the whole 4 minutes. With Napster, you could have listened to 120 / 5 * 30 * 24 = 17280 songs (listening 2 hours/day). The averaging sampling cost is therefore 2 cents per song. Even at a dismal 1% hit rate, you discover 172 new songs.
Long term value of Napster: Whatever discovering that new music was worth (minus the additional cost of actually buying the CDs :) )
This is not to say I will actually subscribe to Napster. I won't. I'm still miffed at Roxio for forcing a Microsoft tax (Required Windows 2K or better) to switch to Napster. They also misbilled me and it was pulling teeth to get my money back (had to cancel the CC and use the CC company to fight for me)
The point, however, is that value is a matter of persepective and doing a value analysis simply based on cost misses the point that value = benefit - cost - risk. So I could actually argue Napster is lower risk and higher benefit (from being able to sample) than iTunes; while iTunes has some better and longer benefits at similar cost (which shows it too has positive value).
You haven't purchased it, you purchased the right to listen to it for a bit.
If you want to purchase, it's still the same old $1 per song.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
"Maybe I'm too old to get it"
That's exactly right mr. CEO; you are to old to get it...
You have a service, you want people in the market to use it, people in the market love the iPod, so why excluded it? Your just shutting yourself out of the market.
My sig is as boring as you...
Napster is making a mistake, I believe, in aiming such a service at everyone when it will only really make sense (in general, I know there are exceptions) to a very young crowd... i.e., a very young and tech-savvy crowd that doesn't usually have a lot of disposable income and can find music via other, less reputable methods.
Apple is catering to a crowd that doesn't mind paying for its music whereas Napster (and other subscription services) isn't. It's not hard to see why subscription services haven't really taken off, even though they look like a great idea on paper and appear to have all kinds of advantages.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Napster isn't being completely honest about their so-called all you can eat music policy.
I noticed the launch of this idiotic campaign in a commercial that aired during the Super Bowl.
Didn't the market already DE-SELECT this sort of business model from surviving?
I seem to recall a whole slew of post-Napster1.0 music download companies going out of business becuase nobody wanted music on a subscription basis.
Maybe I'm just mis-remembering.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
WTF are you talking about? The grandparent post doesn't say anything about Ogg, Linux or DRM with regard to this service. To me it appears to say, plain and simple, having to pay in perpetuity for something that most people want to keep is asinine and will be a failure.
Middle school and High school kids are interested in the hits now.
I was in middle school and high school between 1985 and 1991. Guess what time period a great deal of the music on my iPod is from? Do you think any kid that age today will want to end up paying Napster $3600 ($15 * 12 months * 20 years) to have consistent access to the songs that bring back fond memories of his youth from now until 2025?
In short: Fuck, no!
Most people don't change-- they hold dear the music from when they were growing up. My parents' listened to oldies stations on the radio because they liked the music from the time when they grew up. They thought the music I listened to was shit. I still listen mostly to stuff from the 80s, when was growing up, and I think the vast majority of today's music is shit, compared to it. There's no reason to think that this cycle will stop with the kids today-- though the idea of hearing Britney Spears on an oldies station in a couple decades is rather amusing.
~Philly
"Obviously that would change would make the service attractive to customers, but it would ruin their business. All you'd have to do is subscribe for a month or two, download all the songs you want and then cancel your subscription."
If that model works for porn sites, why wouldn't it work for music sites? They both face the same problems, notably getting enough money from website visitors to pay for the content. And they tried and discarded the "lock-in" proprietary solutions many years ago, something which music sites are only just starting to experiment with.
1. The profitability and viability of the entire Napster venture is dependent upon the security and integrity of Microsoft's DRM software. If you're going to pick one company in the world upon whose security practices will determine the future of your venture, and you pick Microsoft, you might as well cash out now.
Interestingly, the iPod shuffle is about the cheapest & smallest 512MB / 1GB player out there. I've looked high and low for a cheaper / smaller player with that much memory, but couldn't find one.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
"As long as I could keep the songs after Ive cancelled my subscription, if I choose to do so in the future, I'd most likely subscribe to a service like this for a long time."
/.
/end rant
Is this a rhetorical staement or are you under the impression that this is what the Napster service is or what they are planning to do?
If so you're missing the point - YOU DO NOT GET TO KEEP THE SONGS. YOU DO NOT OWN THE SONGS. In a subscription service YOU WILL NEVER GET TO KEEP THE SONGS. That's the point of their buisiness model and their DRM.
This is getting to be like an apple thread where people would mention over and over that they are waiting for an X86 port of OSX or a cheaper, say, $500 Mac (oops, lost that excuse...)
If you think your model is such a great idea, why dont you start a company and give it a shot?
Because it hasn't worked and won't work. itune sells at $.99 per song and makes the tinyest profit after a couple of years... you think $14 per month for thousands of songs per subscription/month is even worth the time you took to post?
I cant wait for all the suckers to go out and sign up for Napster (sic) then start whinning about how f*scked up their files are either because of the M$ DRM or a hardware issue and now "their" music is "gone". Lets just hope said snivelling doesn't make it to
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
I am almost certain they have to pay the RIAA per download.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
I think everyone replying to this thread is missing one key point so I'm replying to the parent.
Consumers, in general, as compared to us techs and those used to technology, versus those who are well trained into consumerism, will buy a subscription based listening experience, not thinking about owning the music, hook, line, and sinker. Does anyone know how many people already subscribe to such services, both consumer and business, in other technologies? Think satellite radio, cable radio stations, sky angel, et cetera...
To those that don't understand the nature of the beast, understanding what can be done with a computer, it is already standard practice for them in other markets. Why would this market be different to them? They'll want to listen to music on their computer, they'll find a service based on those that are shoved at them, some call this advertising, picking the most shoved one, to try first, and not think twice about it.
Not that it should be that way, but that is the nature of consumerism. The herd will always go that way. Businesses know how to capitalize on it. We have been trying to teach the herd and stop them for a while. So why do we try?
Well, I would say it's time to pull ourselves away from them. We have the ability, all of our talents combined, to make music, videos, programs, biology, space craft, et cetera, as a community. Why should we care about the rest of the people if they don't care themselves?
Let's start in honesty the revolution that can change the world. We don't need the help of anyone else but ourselves!
My sig is as boring as you...
This means that in order to play any Download after the end of a Subscription Month, you must log on to the Service so that Napster can renew your rights for those Tracks. The Client will count the number of times that you play a Download, including while you are offline, for royalty accounting and analysis purposes.
In addition to that, you need to plugin each device at the end of the month to "renew" the tracks. I'm sorry but most folks, who aren't Slashdot readers, tend not to read this stuff and will probably be really pissed off at the end of each month when their PC works and one of thier "Plays for Sure" compatible players does not. I'm dying to see how disasterous this turns out.
I used to use them. I downloaded LOTS of stuff, but a)they SEVERELY limited the number of tracks you could download and b)I got a nasty email from them when I "downloaded an excessive amount." I was trying to replace the mp3s I had downloaded in their newer higher bit rate VBR instead of 128kbps. But with the stupid monthly cap, stupid rules, and really, lack of a decent selection, I ditched it.
Now they continue to spam me, too. I get "Please come back!" offers from them, despite my unsubscribing from them repeatedly.
emusic sucks.
Mod this guy up! Clear, precise explanation of economic theory with personal opinions labeled and reserved for the end. We need more of this on /.
(Yes, I have some reservations about "mod request" posting, but it does seem like I get 'em when I don't need 'em.)
"There are hundreds of game theorists at the gates, sir, and they want to hold an election!"
True, but as I already have that music, and thus will not be downloading it, I wont be paying $15 per month for all the music I've ever wanted, I'll be paying $15 per month for new music. Which, if I wish to keep both getting and keeping that music, I'll have to keep paying.
The entire idea is, of course, entirely in line with the payola/MTV/one hit per week fire and forget pop music think rampant in the music industry. They want an advanced pay version of a radio station.
They completely ignore the vast number of people who collect music according to their own taste over a longer term, for whom this deal is exceptionally bad.
I have a MP3 player that is CD based. I've yet to find a online music store that will let me use my mp3 player.
I got a CD based player because it offers 700mb at a time, and with a 50 pack of CDs I've got 3.5gb of mp3 playing for only $70 (CDRs+MP3/CD Walkman.)
In my car the CD Changer (10 disks) is also a mp3 machin, I've got 7GB at my fingertips (and well integrated into my head unit) for only $300 ($525 if you count the head unit.)
The current systems of online music sales are totaly worthless to me because of the DRM built in. My CD changer can't connect to the internet and validate a current subscription. It can't do DRM.
My only options for mp3s are to rip my conventionaly recorded tracks, download free(legal) tracks from the internet, or go to the darkside and run the risk of RIAA lawsuits.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Examples:
Cell Phones : The amounts people dump on these is stupendous.
XM/Sirius : Can't get reception unless you pay.
Cable/Satellite : Same again. Sure you can get it another way but your paying for a package.
All of these are subscriptions to things that are fleeting and cannot be obtained otherwise.
You can't get on-the-go conversations with your friends, family and local fire and rescue teams in a non-subscription form. And your conversations are not meant to be kept. You pay for a month of service, not for products.
You can't get 24 hour news and weather without cable, and you don't really need last month's news or weather to be kept.
Subscriptions work for intangible services, not for things that can be hoarded.
You can't take the sky from me...
Apple has proven that the iTunes Music Store is a viable business model, with over 250-plus million sales to date.T
Subs work. I think I'd call Rhapsody's ~700K subs per month @ $10 a reasonable success. Real has around a 30% Q-on-Q growth rate. And its radio-like license model means that it gets to keep far more of each $10 sub.
Let's say Rhapsody keeps (say) 40% of its revenue. That's ~ $30m per year.
Let's say Apple gets to keep $.05 of each song. At 1m a day that's ~ $18m per year.
So you see, the subs business is a good one to be in. Add in the revenues from the satellite subs, Napster's 200K monthly subs, and the fact that the telcos are salivating to offer music subs services and aggregate the billing, and you see why the subs business is hot.
Napster may never eclipse Apple's pay-per-download download license gross, but its net take from the subs business could eclipse Apple's iTMS net.
Da Blog
I enjoyed the Rhapsody subscription model until I bought a portable player. Napster To Go seams to fix that problem and dare I say it, since Microsoft license their DRM I'll have more choice of where I can play the music.
Better flight searching coming soon.
The key to success is to open many ways to play this music your purchased.
Subs do work. I think I'd call Rhapsody's ~700K subs per month @ $10 a reasonable success. Real has around a 30% Q-on-Q growth rate. And its radio-like license model means that it gets to keep far more of each $10 sub.
Let's say Rhapsody keeps (say) 40% of its revenue. That's ~ $30m per year.
Let's say Apple gets to keep $.05 of each song. At 1m a day that's ~ $18m per year.
So you see, the subs business is a good one to be in. Add in the revenues from the satellite subs, Napster's 200K monthly subs, and the fact that the telcos are salivating to offer music subs services across multiple devices profiles and aggregate the billing, and you see why the subs business is hot.
Napster may never eclipse Apple's pay-per-download download license gross, but its net take from the subs business could eclipse Apple's iTMS net.
Da Blog
Renting music is for suckers. These losers are doomed to fail...
The Napster reality won't live up to the hype for most people. In contrast, the iPod reality exceeds the hype for most people. Do the math...
Subs do work. I think I'd call Rhapsody's ~700K subs per month @ $10 a reasonable success. Real has around a 30% Q-on-Q growth rate. And its radio-like license model means that it gets to keep far more of each $10 sub.
Let's say Rhapsody keeps (say) 40% of its revenue. That's ~ $30m per year.
Let's say Apple gets to keep $.05 of each song. At 1m a day that's ~ $18m per year.
So you see, the subs business is a good one to be in. Add in the revenues from the satellite subs, Napster's 200K monthly subs, and the fact that the telcos are salivating to offer music subs services across multiple devices profiles and aggregate the billing, and you see why the subs business is hot.
Napster may never eclipse Apple's pay-per-download download license gross, but its net take from the subs business could eclipse Apple's iTMS net.
Da Blog
at least I own the digital files I download off iTunes
No, you don't. Try selling them to someone else. Try gifting them to your family, or your heirs. They are not your property.What you are doing is licensing them from Apple with a pay-per-individual subscription license fee of $.99.
Da Blog
No target market
Subs do work. I think I'd call Rhapsody's ~700K subs per month @ $10 a reasonable success. Real has around a 30% Q-on-Q growth rate. And its radio-like license model means that it gets to keep far more of each $10 sub.
Let's say Rhapsody keeps (say) 40% of its revenue. That's ~ $30m per year.
Let's say Apple gets to keep $.05 of each song. At 1m a day that's ~ $18m per year.
So you see, the subs business is a good one to be in. Add in the revenues from the satellite subs, Napster's 200K monthly subs, and the fact that the telcos are salivating to offer music subs services across multiple devices profiles and aggregate the billing, and you see why the subs business is hot.
Napster may never eclipse Apple's pay-per-download download license gross, but its net take from the subs business could eclipse Apple's iTMS net.
Da Blog
"And this is different from North America: you pay VERY high prices for placing calls, sometimes up to 2$ a minute to call a mobile phone with another network provider..."
Most mobile phone companies in the US are steering towards a flat rate plan to call anyone in the country. I pay $45 a month (taxes included) for Verizon and can call anyone in the US with no additional fees. Quite frankly, anyone paying more than that *is* stupid.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
The Supreme Court actually did not even really consider this issue in the case, contrary to popular belief. Their ruling was supported by the lower court's finding that such time shifting was probably legal, and that approximately 75% of Betamax owners were using them only for time shifting, that that, therefore, the machines had been show to have significant non-infringing use and Sony could legally manufacture them, as doing so did not constitute interference with copyright holders' rights.
The decision has nothing at all to do with whether or not you can record programs to save them forever. Both sides in the case stipulated that such use of a VTR would constitute an infringement of copyright.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Off the top of my head:
eMusic
MP3Tunes
There are also a number of individual artists and labels that sell ordinary MP3s you can use with your player, as well as a number of places offering free sample tracks.
selling ongoing at a rate of 1.5 million a day
Really? The best estimate I've seen is 1m per day tops. It may approach 1.5m within a year, but it's not there yet. And the net is around $0.05.
Subs work better as a revenue model than Apple's pay-per-individual-license. I think I'd call Rhapsody's ~700K subs per month @ $10 a reasonable success. Real has around a 30% Q-on-Q growth rate. And its radio-like license model means that it gets to keep far more of each $10 sub.
Let's say Rhapsody keeps (say) 40% of its revenue. That's ~ $30m per year.
Let's say Apple gets to keep $.05 of each song. At 1m a day that's ~ $18m per year.
So you see, the subs business is a good one to be in. Add in the revenues from the satellite subs, Napster's 200K monthly subs, and the fact that the telcos are salivating to offer music subs services across multiple devices profiles and aggregate the billing, and you see why the subs business is hot.
Napster may never eclipse Apple's pay-per-download download license gross, but its net take from the subs business could eclipse Apple's iTMS net.
Da Blog
I did a search on their page for "Beatles" and it said: So then I did a search for "The Beatles" and it says: That's going to be a deal breaker there for a LOT of people, besides the fact that they basically lied to me on my first search.
I've been using Napster for the last 3 months and it's really not a replacement for buying cds or buying permanent songs over the internet--it's much more useful as a music discovery tool. I can decide which artists are actually good before I go ahead and buy cds (which have better sound quality than mp3s/wmas). I haven't bought a single cd that i'm not disappointed with since i started using napster, and i've found at least 5 new artists i like. I also don't see how rental of songs for a montly fee wouldn't appeal to someone--online music downloads are at least .79, and i've already downloaded ~4000 tracks from napster, and 3*$15 = $45 flat fee for those 3 months, while downloading each track would have cost $4000. For me, the fact that they're only temporary downloads doesn't matter, simply because the value is just too great, i also save money by not buying bad cds, and i dont expect for napster to become bankrupt or me to cancel my subscription anytime soon.
The only thing you bought was permission to use a bundle of bits on your hard drive, and that's it.
When you buy a CD, you're paying for the permission to use a bundle of bits on the disc. The only real difference is that they give you the disc, and it's a slightly different bundle of bits.
Not only that, but you paid FULL price for a song encoded with a LOSSY compression scheme!
Actually I didn't. I paid less than full price and I got less than I would have buying the CD. I got it a hell of a lot faster though.
Do you get to listen to it whereever and whenever you want?
Yes, actually. What I think you *mean* is that I can't listen to it *anywhere* and *everywhere* that I *could*, if it were ripped from a CD. There is a pretty significant difference in those two statements.
I don't necessarily disagree with your criticisms of the music stores, but (as Napster will soon learn), calling people stupid is no way to get your point across too them.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
I don't get why cosmo7's post was modded Funny?
Did the mods also think Twilight of the Idols was a comedy tour-de-force?
If apple steps up and explains the difference to the masses between a 'perpetual lease' and what itunes/ipod offers, the Napster trademark will experience a 2nd death.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Apple's DRM is reasonable. Maybe you're too dense to realize that. It's also easily strippable which lends to it's favoritism by consumers over that of Microsoft's DRM.
That's odd; I thought Apple was more popular because it was associated with a company beloved of cool types and rabid fanboys.
Of course Napster will blow it, but I think it's about time that someone aggressively competed with Apple. This may bring some goodies to us, consumers, like for example iPods supporting 24 bit / 96KHz audio, and songs encoded straight from artist's final mixdown, or different versions of songs (most artists have many versions of their songs, most are unrelesed), or something else, i.e. the stuff you can't get on half.com at $5-8 per CD. How about independent artists? Why did Steve Vai choose to open his own store? Why isn't Apple all over this incredibly gifted fellow?
I think consumers understand that Napster doesn't work with iPod and that's all that matters, especially since Napster is making it clear in their commercials with targeting the iPod as being bad.
Alienate your potential customer base 101. Dude, look at the sales of iPods, there are freaking MILLIONS of them out there, no other player comes close.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Instead of attacking the iPod and Apple they should be going after the people who havent used iTunes. Apple has street credit, Napster has lost what it had long ago. Satellite radio alone should sink their subscription service. I would rather have a portable satellite player as the face unit can be plugged into the car, boombox, or home station, or carried around.
Abandon all hope ye who enter here...
In fact, Apple barely locks you into anything. Want to convert your music and save it to a CD? Go ahead. Want to download MP3s for free? They'll work. Etc.
You forgot one: Want to switch from Mac OS X to Windows, or vice versa? Go ahead. iTunes exists for both platforms, and your iTMS DRM'd music can go with you easily-- just authorize the new computer.
If you're a Windows user, good luck trying to migrate to a Mac and take your DRM'd WMA files from non-Apple online music stores with you. Windows Media Player for the Mac doesn't do DRM (or much of anything else, for that matter).
Microsoft is way more guilty of lock-in attempts than Apple.
I'll accept the premise that you'd want to "update" it with some new songs. I just don't see it happen on Napster. I presume you'd go like:
1. Go crazy on Napster for a month
2. Buy single must-haves on normal store
(time passes)
3. Filler crazy on Napster for a month
Basicly, Napster would get the shaft very quickly, and only get hit-n-run subscriptions.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't have a windows machine, but don't software sound cards that just dump the song as a wave still work(thus taking it a straight D-to-D conversion)? It hurts the quality a little(to re-encode it) but who wants their music in a WMA format anyway?
Hmm, kind funny, legally downloading music so you can steal it later? he he.
Quazi-Legal site
http://www.allofmp3.com
I've used them for quite a while now, and that is my only affiliation.
--sig fault--
Because this is what they ARE offering:
$15 a month to download and listen to as many songs as you want
AND
for $1 dollar buy only the songs you want to keep
This is what they actually offer... if they were smart and marketed it this way... it would make much more sense to the average consumer. They would then appeal to the people who may want to hear a whole album and only pay for the songs they like.
Their marketing department needs to be fired.
It's funny how MSFT and Napster keep saying "What people really want is a subscription service" but what they mean is "What WE really want is recurring revenues, so we've deluded ourselves into thinking that's what people want without bothering to ask them."
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
First of all, let's start with the branding.
Everyone knows Napster; it's a great "brand" amongst computer users. So far, so good.
Clear headed executive: OK, I'm listening. Tell me more.
What is it known for? Unlimited free downloads.
Clear headed executive: "Hmmmm."
Ass kissing sycophant: We have a plan for that. We can leverage the brand, which is really associated with music, and get a head start on our competitors. When I say music, I'm still talking unlimited music here. All you want. It fits.
People who think downloading (for free) is "wrong" have a poor, perhaps negative, impression of the brand, while people who love the brand, don't pay for music.
Clear headed executive: Whoa. What was that?
Ass kissing sycophant: It's nothing, CH. We got Super Bowl ads. We got Blender ads. We got CNN talking. We got a plan for all that. We can change the image.
Clear Headed executive: So, you mean to tell me we bought this great brand, with awesome consumer awareness. But, in order to use it, we have to re-invent the image with massive advertising. What the f*ck did we buy the brand for if we have to spend the same money to use it as we would have to create it in the first place? And, aren't we bleeding red ink right now?
Ass kicking sycophant: [left room, packing desk.]
I think that iTunes and Napster are just targeting different groups of people, with quite different music listening habits.
There are people, like me, who listen the same groups for years, collect their albums (in my case in vinyl!), know their history etc. This kind of people would never rent music, an album for them is something they want to have in their collection and listen forever.
On the other hand there are many people who treat music as fashion, watch the latest hits on MTV, buy only singles (who needs an album to hear just one song), know only 2-3 hits from each group, change favourite group each month, etc. For such people the ability to hear all new hits with a fixed subscription is very appealing whereas song expiration doesn't matter. Nobody listen to the same pop hit after a month.
So I think there is room for both systems. Indeed Napster also provides pay-per-song sales (they call it Napster Light, see bottom of page). And I won't be surprised if I see Apple launching subscription services in the near future.
..The point, however, is that value is a matter of persepective..
/. tradition), and then I read the rest of your post and found myself in total agreement :)
I agree. I have found a lot of music that I used to have on cassette or LP and purchased from iTMS because it was a hassle/more expensive to find a CD from some specialty shop. I also purchase songs of artists I already know I will listen to over and over or on a recommendation from friends whose music taste is compatable (that's how I "disovered" the Old 97s). iTMS has a much greater value to me personally.
If I were a top-40 drone, Napster would be of much greater value. For some iTMS is way to go, for others it's Napster. It all depends on whether you buy music for lengevity or just want to ride the wave of the "hip new sound". I tend to think that overall the online music market may become a better place because of the different choice of models.
So ultimately I agree that value in this case is entirely based on ones perspective. At first I was going to rebut the first paragraph only (in true
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
Of course, if Napster To Go supported iPod, they'd have a much larger install base to convince to use their service, instead of still pleading people to buy a portable player with compatible DRM installed.
I think you have that backwards. Surely you mean if the iPod supported Napster To Go they'd have a much larger install base to convince to use their service, as well as pleading people to buy a portable player compatible with iTunes DRM.
I have an iPod and I use iTunes, but the thing I don't get is that when Microsoft propose DRM, the sky is falling but when Apple do exactly the same thing with the addition of the fact that to play back your music you need a software player and a portable device that you can only get from them, then this isn't criticised. Bizarre.
In a recent Fortune interview, Steve Jobs basically laughs this off and outright says Napster will fail. People want to "own" their music. Apple has actually done some research into how people form part of their identity through their music collection, and how distraught they are when they lose it due to losing their iPod, hardware failure, etc. People will feel like they're being forced to pay Napster forever to hear music they feel they already own. And because of the aforementioned identity issue, people will take it personally.
This is going to completely die. Apple has the right idea. Just pay $0.99 and you've got the song, even if you never buy another song from iTunes again. I don't want to feel tied down to Napster forever.
It seems that basing your business model on telling iPod users that they are stupid for using an iPod isn't very smart.
...and somehow, people seem to think that getting fucked by both companies at the same time, would be bliss... as threesomes go, this is NOT the way to go..
Even on flat plans, U.S. cell phone companies often charge you more for calls made from parts of the country outside a pre-defined calling area. Sometimes there's a rational (to them) reason for this --- you're roaming on another provider's network --- but sometimes it's just a way for them to increase your bill.
The scam in Europe is a bit different: The phone companies charge a lot for calls made to cell phones (sometimes ten times as much as for calls to landlines). This can come as quite a shock when you're calling from outside the country and don't know the special area codes used to identify mobile phones.
otherwise, I'd be shorting their stock the
whole way to zero.
This whole "rent music" deal will go over
like a lead balloon.
The consumer market has repeatedly rejected
these schemes. I fail to see how napster is
going to overcome Apple's momentum in this
space.
I'm hard-pressed to pick who has the worse business model between napster and SCOX.
--chuck
Napster needs to court current iPod/iTMS users, not denigrate them.
How would Napster do that? Apple doesn't let anyone else use their DRM. Apple has everyone with iPod's locked into using iTunes as an online music store, and they aren't going to give that up. Real tried, and they lost. The only way Napster could court iPod users is to sell non-DRM'd MP3's in their store that the iPod will play. And that's pretty unlikely.
iTunes DRM isn't liberal enough. It breaks the most basic kind of interoperability: You can't listen to music on a non-iPod mp3 player.
Still, at least there are fixes available (hymn and iOpener). AFAIK, there's no equivalent fix for Microsoft DRM yet, but that's only because so few people use it that no-one has bothered to develop one.
Obviously, people listen differently to music. Personally, I don't have to listen/own to the "latest hit songs" right at this minute. If I really like the music, I'll still like it a couple months from now. In fact, most of my favorite songs are from the 70's and early 90's. Anything that can't last a couple month is not worth owning. So, for me, it makes no sense continuing the subscription. I'd just subscribe for one months, download everything I remember to like then cancel it. Repeat the process every 3 or 4 months. I don't think the ability to keep songs past the subscription help Napster at all since they'd have to pay monstrous royalty. It'll ruin them, not that I care, really.
I'm paying for this subscription, but what happens if new bands come out I like and those bands aren't carried by Napster?
Do they expect me to pay for another subscription?
Or will this be like cable, where it starts with all the good stuff on 10 channels, then they add on extra 'channels'. You can keep the same 10 channels, or pay extra to get the new 20 channels.....
Except the good stuff is now spread across 30 channels instead of 10, so your service continues to degrade unless you pay ever more.
Or if that didn't work, they could try, say, one song per 99 cents.
Dude, fuckin' read the thread before injecting a half-assed rant in midstream, okay?
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
If your sole source of music is buying it online, (as in, you are young, and have not amassed a huge CD collection/mp3 collection), then the Napster subscription is a far better deal.
Assuming their math is cooect (I will not double check), it would cost you around $10,000 to buy enough music from iTunes to fill your iPod. Now, 10,000 / (15 / month) is 666 months, or 55 years. That means that you'd have to listen to that same set of music for 55 years before you break even with the napster subscription.
Sure, there is a commitment, in that if you cancel the subscription, you lose the songs. But over the long term, it is much cheaper.
People are working on the assumption that you would download the same amount from iTMS and Napster. You wouldn't! You cannot just compare them side by side in a simplistic way. But hell, let's try it anyway.
Napster - $14.95 a month
iTunes - $0.99 a song
If you decide to spend that $14.95 a month, then with iTunes you can buy 15 new tracks a month, and keep them forever. With Napster, you get unlimited new tracks a month, you can delete them and get them again without losing money, you can get an artist's entire back catalogue just to see what they're like without risk etc. etc.
If people aren't willing to pay for something which they will have nothing out of when they quit paying, then why are MMORPGS so successful?
The AC must be one of those liberal Applelitists or a rightwing Macubplican. You know, everytime you fail to buy a song from iTunes instead and buy it elsewhere, Steve Jobs kills a kitten.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I read somewhere that almost 70% of the employees at the Redmond WA office of M$ own iPods... chalk one up for Mac making a decent portable device... /me goes back to listening to his iPod
That is true about the iPod part, and I've posted so earlier on this subject. However it is not necessarily true on the part of electronic music distribution. And now that I think about it, there is a conflict here that will have to battle itself out: let them download music to the popular player and keep the music, or go with the streaming model. This in the end is probably why the iPod is unsupported; they want to go with the streaming music model and buck the current trend.
My sig is as boring as you...
I don't think any digital music provider has music from The Beatles, at least not AFAIK... That whole legal dispute between Apple Records and Apple Computer is keeping them out of the iTunes Music Store. Maybe, because of that, they're avoiding online music distribution altogether?
Oh, really? Well, with "100's of +5 insightful comments" (your words, mind you) in "ANY old slashdot story about iTunes DRM," it should be damned easy to find an example. Please, provide me with a link to one. Just one.
The point is not "how happy Apple users are that Apple serves them up DRM," it's that the DRM in the iTMS is very lenient, and doesn't actually restrict the overwhelming majority of people from doing anything they want to do with their tunes other than offer it up on P2P and the like.
But with cable TV you are limited to the small subset of the entire content library (all the movies & shows ever made) that are broadcast while your subscription is active. You can't just decide to watch a specific movie or show and then tape it, unless it happened to be on the schedule already. With the new Napster service, you'd have access to their entire library at once, which is an important difference. The closest cable TV currently gets to Napster's model is pay-per-view, but this is still limited to a very small number of programs.
"I pronounce this DOA."
I think that this Moose wants a piece of the iPod pie: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd =1&item=5751320096&ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT
"not iPod!"
So you get unlimited songs for 55 years for less than $10,000 with napster or get 10,000 songs to keep for $10,000 with ipod/itunes?
Also what prevents you from circumventing the DRM by using one of those USB based Sony minidiscs and rip everything in digital quality?
Worst case scenario they can't DRM the ear phones so you can just rip in analog qualtity.
Sounds like a very good deal to me.
I don't follow your argument. Let's say that I own an iPod mini and I shop at iTMS, and I've bought 100 songs. So I've spent a total of $349 plus tax.
Now "something happens" to make iTMS/iPod a bad value proposition. What? What could happen?
Wallmart starts selling all their Windows DRM songs for $.50? How has this devalued by purchase? There really isn't a market for previously purchased songs, where I could recoup my investment, like one can with physical CDs, so it's not like the bottom dropped out on my "investment". I can still enjoy what I purchased.
Apple goes out of business and stops selling iPods (God forbid). Again, how does this effect my enjoyment of my purchase? I can still listen to the music on my iPod. If the battery eventually wears out, I purchase a replacement from a third party, like I was planning to anyway. The DRM songs won't stop playing because Apple no longer exists. The DRM isn't subscription based. The music doesn't die after a month. And I can still load MP3s onto the iPod.
Those are the only two examples I can think of, and in neither one do I "burn my investment".
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Which is more than you get from napster, which leases you the right to listen to the music, as long as you pay the subscription fee.
I believe Napster has several licensing options, one of which is similar to Apple's: a pay-per-individual-license fee. Then you can download the tune and store/playback without paying any additional license fee.
Da Blog
It's quite impressive that you manage to post the EXACT SAME MESSAGE 10 times without any of them being moderated as Redundant.
And I believe it's quite amazing that several different people exhibited such sheep-like behaviour that they managed to post essentially the same Apple fanboy message ("iChoonz Good! Napster Bad!") and get modded up every time. It's like a bleedin' cult meeting.
Da Blog
Aha! You see! You see! Gorog has a point.
:)
You don't understand his logic. Therefore, you are stupid. Hence, the digital player you buy is iPod. As the result, you won't subscribe to his service. Consequently, you don't give him money. That means, you failed to understand his logic. So, you are stupid and you own an iPod. QED.
ok. . . I'll bite. So how exactly are you getting this 40% profit margin for these subsciption services? Considering you're assuming Apple only makes 5% profit? What's going to cost apple so much more? Certainly not bandwidth- their sales model is very efficient in that sense. Unless their advertising is that much more expensive, or they have a really piss poor deal with the record companies, I can't see where their profit margins would be that much lower.
Ideally, you wouldn't download at all. You'd have instant streaming from a wireless device
It's called a radio.
This couldn't possibly have anything to do with Samsung's Napster brand MP3 players of course.
I'd be surprised if the RIAA left that much money on the table - they'd argue that if Apple can make a living with such a low margin
Because the subs model is based on radio broadcast royalties, not unit royalties, and the slice left for the "broadcaster" is much, much larger. They use different licensing schemes, ASCAP vs RIAA. They settle for different slices of the pie.
Da Blog
I can't see where their profit margins would be that much lower.
Because licensing rates for broadcast and pseudo-broadcast media are much, much lower (ASCAP) than individual per-item licensing fees (ala RIAA). You really think Clear Channel pays $0.30 *every time* it plays a Britney song?
Da Blog
Well, in Europe they introduced a concept called "interconnection fee" to make, as they put it "competition easier". in fact, every provider has to pay something to the provider of a number which is called from his network. So for every call there are fixed costs, which cannot be then covered by a flat rate. New providers are at a disadvantage, since the customers of the other larger networks can profit from cheaper tariffs for calls placed within the network. A customer of a new provider will pay on average MORE to call, and people calling him/her will also pay more... This allowed the big networks to VERY SLOWLY increase the prices up to a crazy level... This is made worse in Germany by the fact that customers "buy" the cell phone for a small price and then are locked with that provider for 24 months at least.
In Italy this system never got foothold, because, simply, italian customers are smarter than german customers. In italy you buy the cell phone, you pay it full price, you put in it a sim card, and then you phone. The tarifs are always much lower than in Germany - sometimes as low as 25cents (20EUROcents) per minute, even for calling outside the home network.
CRAZY: if I want to call a finnish colleague from germany, and the call is so urgent, and I am out of office, so that I must use the mobile phone, it is much cheaper to do that with my italian prepaid card than with my german contract...
I don't necessarily disagree with your criticisms of the music stores, but (as Napster will soon learn), calling people stupid is no way to get your point across too them.
Well, how about this: it's FOOLISH to buy digital music.
Better?
Napster is dead. 'Nuff said.
I'm a happy iPod owner and I have no interest in renting my music, but here are the numbers. The last number is how many years you'd need to subscribe to break the $10,000 mark.
I guess if someone spends more than 180/month on music every year, year after year, this might be a good deal. But you really got to wonder, how long will napster be around?
12 m * $15
= $180
$180 * 20 y
= $3600
$180 * 40 y
= $7200
$10000 / $180 per year
= 55.555555555556 y
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Whether it is a better system or not, it is too late. The commercial and the campaign telling people that what they just bought and are just getting into big time (ipods and itunes) are needing replacement.
So, you're going to be walking around in 10 years with the same iPod? Might be kinda funny in a retro-sort of way, but eventually there will be other products with better "value propositions" and they may not be Apple-compatible.
Actually they've increased it to five computers, as indicated in their support document here.
If beatles is important enough to be a dealbreaker, wouldn't you already have bought the CDs and be able to rip them at a much higher quality anyway? The whole buying-internet-music is for songs you don't already have, and wouldn't care so much about if you bought a new computer, forgot your password, lost a hard-disk or something (say, bought WMA songs and did the apple-switch for example).
They are comparing renting music for one hardware player to buying music that works on another?
I don't see how you can even compare the two... especially if you already invested a few hundred dollars in a hardware player. Your music service is already decided if you own or do not own an ipod. Either ITMS or not ITMS (possibly napster)
So in reality Napster's (I really hate calling it napster) competition isn't ITMS if you already own a non-ipod player, its the other music services.
I see too many problems with Napster/Janus. End-users want to _own_ their own music, not rent it. I have no clue what the Napster CEO was talking about by saying that the subscription service is just like current P2P. Current P2P allows you to _own_ the song. You don't lose the song if you don't' continue to pay for it. However that is exactly what Napster and the MS Janus crap does. If you don't pay, you no longer have access to content, even the content that you have ALREADY PAID FOR.
First let me say that I am 32, married with two kids. I don't own an iPod and don't think they are "cool". However, I remember what it was like to be a teen and if I was currently a teen or a young twenty-something, the iPod would be the only choice of a "cool" player. All the other players are just such crap. That whole garbage from MS about being able to download from "many sites" means crap. iTunes/iTMS/iPod seem to give young music lovers just what they want. There is really no space in that market now for anyone other than Apple. Maybe MS and the others can market to the 40+ market, however, they wont get back the young market. Especially by pushing more restrictive DRM on them. Seriously, WTF is Napster and MS thinking? What young music lover is going to switch from a service like the iPod/iTMS where they actually get to _buy_ the music to a service where they only get to _rent_ the music and if they don't pay, they lose it all?
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
There isn't exactly a watermark (unless Apple is being very secretive about it), just some metadata in the headers that says the file was bought from iTunes and identifies the purchaser. There are tools that can edit or remove this metadata, but hymn and iOpener don't do it automatically.
All that this means is that music files made usign hymn and iOpener can, in theory, be traced back to a particular iTunes customer. This was a deliberate choice by DVD Jon and the other hackers, as they wanted to restore the same kind of fair use that people get with CDs and analog media, not enable anonymous P2P file sharing.
People pay $40 a month for cable tv. I don't get why people can't pay $10 for ulimited music. Comcast is now touting "on-demand." Napster is basically on-demand with unlimited choices. You choose what you want to listen to, when you want to listen to it, and you only have to pay $10 a month to receive those benefits. I have signed up for Napter, and by the end of next week, I will have probably downloaded around 1000 songs. At iTunes prices, that $1000 dollars, or just over 8 years worth of subscription fees with Napster. And, I'll be downloading music constantly. In the end, what is $10 worth? Two means at McDonald's per month? If you can't pay that, get a new job.
I'm not sure that I understand where this "Value = benefit - cost-risk" equation thing came from. From what I remember, the term is "cost-benefit analysis," not "benefit-cost-risk analysis." Now, my degree is in public admin, not economics (though I believe I have a fair background in that from my studies).
The point is, the cost should come before the benefit. Prudence suggest that you consider the cost of something first, or the required amount of initial investment. You must know whether you can make the investment before you can determine if said investment will yeild to you a benefit.
Example: The new (item X) costs only $15! That's great! Wait, do I even have $15?
At this point, the consumer must determine if he can bare the cost before deciding what the benefit of the investment would be. Thus, cost then benefit. IMO.
The risk in this case (if you choose to include it, although I believe it's implied) is the difference between the cost and the benefit. So to separate it as in the previous equation is confusing to me, but I'm sure others see what is being illustrated.
Semantics aside, I really like this whole "Let's Do The Math" activity. I want to explore it further, so I will. For ease of use, let's assume iTMS songs cost $1.00 each.
$1 in iTMS = 1 song
$15 in iTMS = 15 songs (approx. 1 album, more or less)
What's interesting is that there is no time frame applied to these charges. Not per month, per week, or per day. Just whenever, at the time of purchase. But it's ONE TIME PEOPLE! Buy it, it's yours. Minute to minute, day to day, month to month, year to year. You have the option to back up your purchases in multiple locations, so protecting your investment is in your hands. If you hate the iPod, then you lose one of your storage options. But you can still burn the tracks and store on other computers. There's little to be said for lack of backup options.
$15/mo in Napster To Go = 1/10/20/30/80,000 songs
That's a lot of songs. People like to note how much you get for that $15 (80,000 songs at least), but can you listen to that much music? What about half? A quarter? You can't spend your entire month listening to music. Then what happens?
Another $15/mo in Napster To Go to listen to all those songs you didn't get around to listening to last month, plus all the new content. If you don't pay it, you lose everything you were listening to PLUS everything you hadn't listened to yet. And what if you only have time to listen to LESS THAN 15 songs one month? The baby's sick. You worked overtime. PC crashed. Went on vacation. Got a divorce. Serious accident. Floods. Fire. Famine. LOCUSTS!
Needless to say, lots of stuff can get in the way of your listening hobby. You need to know that your music will be there when you have time for it, and that you're not a slave to a timetable for listening.
It's your own damn fault if you buy crappy fluff music. Would you buy the first car you saw b/c of the color? Or the first thing on the menu? Make informed choices. There is a free service out there where you can listen to the entire song before you buy it. It's called the radio. Maybe that's absured, because you're a slave to finding the songs you want to hear, but how much time do you spend around a radio? In the car? At work? Got one at home? The supermarket? Call and request a song. Unless you have very eccletic taste in music, they'll probably play it. There's a radio station for all kinds. College stations love to play a little of everything, and they need your patronage.
Or try live stuff. There are free concerts at schools and universities all the time. Great performances by talented individuals, both amature and professional. You'd be surprised at the range of music available. And used CD services are great. Start a club with friends to trade music and listen to different things.
But this is about convenience, right? So here's my point: if you buy the music on iTMS, it will be there after you bought it. One time
Forget the monthly re-activation chore, it's tin-foil hat time!
You can't take the sky from me...
BuHahahahahahaha!!! I got moderated flamebait for that? I'm the biggest Apple Zealot there is. I met Steve Jobs at MWSF, and I kissed his ring, right before security threw me out onto Howard Street. I'm planning on buying a shuffle just so I can shove it up my ass and then tell total strangers, "Hey, I've got 240 songs . . . .up my butt.
I'm also both an Applelitist and a Macublican. So there. =P
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Not really "forever". They will eventually raise prices on singles/albums that will make you pay pennies per play. Pay per play is their goal.
I've yet to find a online music store that will let me use my mp3 player.
You do realize that the "Burn Disc" button on iTunes is more than just there for shits and giggles?
Step 1 - Import songs you have in iTunes / Buy songs from iTMS
Step 2 - Create playlist
Step 3 - Click "Burn Disc"
Step 4 - There is no step 4, you're done! When you clicked "Burn Disc", depending upon your preferences, your songs were:
(a) converted to AIFF and burned to a standard Audio CD
(b) copied as MP3 or converted from DRM'd AAC to non-DRM MP3 and burned to a data disc.
Isn't this what you are looking for?
- Tony
The other difference between cable TV and music is that, as has been pointed out time and time again, people typically watch most movies once or twice, while they'll listen to music many times. Which is part of the reason why subscriptions for TV shows and movies works, but while subscriptions for music may fail.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
So, you're going to be walking around in 10 years with the same iPod? Might be kinda funny in a retro-sort of way, but eventually there will be other products with better "value propositions" and they may not be Apple-compatible.
Well, by that reasoning, anytime you spend money on anything that doesn't give you a return that you can value in money, you've "burned your investment".
That's why I walk around naked. I'd spend money on clothes, but they'd wear out, or I'd get fat, and then I'd just be burning my investment. It really sucks how these clothing manufacturers lock you in to buying clothes, even if you don't follow fashion.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I don't know why you got modded down for that, because you're right: iTunes files are great for listening to! Come to think of it, DVDs are pretty useless except for watching and putting in your DVD player. Food is pretty useless expect for cooking and putting in your stomach. Clothes are pretty useless except for wearing and putting in your washer...
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
How much is a film or piece of music worth to an individual, Well the recording industry seem to think lets say £15 is the value of a CD, but whats it take for somebody to earn that money maybe 4 hours of thier life perhaps cleaning toilets.
now somebody will agree to this exchange and presumably they find the enrichment of their life from purchasing said CD worth the Exchange of their time and labour
certainly we all make this decision when we decide to purchase a CD.
Now if this CD disapoints and its actual value is not worth the time and effort expended to the individual to buy it, what recourse does this individual have, none what so ever. You do not get the opportunity to return an item of music or film period.
However the internet makes it possible for the individual to listen to and evaluate a potential purchase. In the 21st century we are all patrons of the Arts, and we get to choose who we reward for enriching our lives and how much by
lets put it this way, how long should britany spears expect someone to clean toilets to enable her to have a far better standard of living than the people buying her music.
should the artists feel any guilt for what their fans have to go through to reward them for their music?
downloading p2p might be considered by some to be immoral but the true value of music and film is in a hard to measure thing- the value of the experience to the individual. Is a CD of music worth a tenth of somebodys weekly income ? Also for somebody extremely rich are they rewarding an artist enough for the enjoyment that the artists work brings to them.
because when it comes down to it an artist wouldn't be able to pursue a career as an artist if people were not prepared to sacrifice some of thier lives for the artists benefit.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Napster should broaden its horizions out of the PC community and into the Macintosh community. Macintosh users are avid music buyers as evidenced by Apple building and sustaining a service business out of its own user base and then expanding. Napster does not have any such consumer loyalities and other attempts at their business model have either failed outright or topped off shortly after debut.
I think you're missing part of the issue, too, though you make a good point. I (might) pay for cable TV, but I sure as hell aren't going to subscribe to Napster.
Why?
Because I can't 'own' a lot of the TV shows I like to watch.
Yeah, a lot of shows come out on DVD, but not all of them. I can buy a cd of anything on the radio and some that aren't, but I can't do that with the TV. That's why people will pay for cable, but be a bit more shaky on the music subscription.
I do agree with my sibling, however...the anti-iPod stance seems kind of stupid to me. Yes, the most popular player is bad, try us instead!...
Napster flunked out of Target and Walmart selling CD's and is about to take it's last hurrah before plunging into the swan dive of oblivion.
Don't buy their stock!
Vista, the single biggest argument for Desktop Linux! It doesn't "Just Work"(TM).
I think the Ipod is a crappy deal anyway. Same with napster... The hardware is too expensive and the actual use isn't much better than what you can get form other manufactuers. The worst thing about these devices is all the extra costs that keep coming after your wallet.
Your parents were wrong, but you are correct when you take exactly the same stance in relation to your generation of music. I'm 19 and I think that modern music is absolute shit compared to the 80s.
With only a handfull of exceptions, the best modern rock bands have a very similar sound to one of the great bands of the 80s.
Actually, they have to pay whoever owns the rights to the songs, which would be the record label(s), the artist(s), or someone else who happens to own the rights to a particular piece of music.
The RIAA is paid membership fees from all of its member companies. They don't actually collect money from royalties or digital downloads or anything like that.
Sinch
OK, that's it, buster. Turn in your slashdot card. You're not supposed to read beyond whatever pisses you off enough to reply with a flame. And acknowledging that another perspective is valid, let alone that there can be even more than one sane point of view. Tsk tsk.
What are we coming to?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Think of it as a membership at Netflix
Horrible example. Music and movies are experienced differently and have a very different level of reusability. The standard rental analogy is a confusing one that doesn't present a sensible case for music rentals.
This won't ever succeed using a video rental model, but I could see it succeeding in specific contexts - like offering temporary music loading at gyms for a fee.
Does anybody here rent DVDs of movies or TV shows? If you could download and watch an unlimited number of DVDs or even TV shows for 15$ a month, would you do it? Or, would you whine and complain saying, "Oh, but if I stop paying, I can't watch those shows anymore. Wah wah." For those of us who listen to a wide variety of music, the Napster deal is great. I've been a member of Napster's all-you-can-download service for about six months. It is freaking awesome! As soon as I can get a compatible player (or a firmware update is ready for mine) I'll be loving Napster To Go. Welcome to the future. Bye bye iTunes. iLosers See ya.
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo
The other problem is that _most_ people don't want to rent music. Sure "we" like to rent movies, since you usually only want to see a movie once or twice. However, I know that I like to hear my favorite's songs many times. As a 32-year-old, I don't want to have to pay every month to listen to Pink Floyd, I want to buy Pink Floyd _once_ and listen to them when _I_ want on _my_ terms. I already own most of the Pink Floyd albums I love, and I ripped them to Ogg/MP3. I really don't want to pay for the _same_ content again and again.
There is currently also the other problem that Napster/Janus _only_ works under MS Window and MS "blessed" devices. The MS compatible devices on the market equate to crap market share. Most of the portable device users out there bought the stylish iPod. Napster and Janus do not work on that device. Until it does, most of the music purchasing community will never accept Napster/Janus. As someone who has been in the technology "scene" for many years, I can certainly say that from a purely technical perspective, there are better devices out their than the iPod. However, from a stylish/ease-of-use perspective, nothing comes close to the iPod. The iPod is what the "music generation" wants. So for the foreseeable future, the only options will be services that are compatible with an iPod. The only services that I am aware of that work with an iPod are iTMS and the Real Music Store.
I am sure that the MS Janus framework will have some place, just not in digital music. Janus will probably be used in crappy DRM'ed DVD content that is "allowed" to play X number of times on your PEECEE.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
"People purchase (or rent) music solely for its utility: i.e. in order to listen to it. Unless they are a collector of rare or old albums, they do not do so not because it has any intrinisic monetary value."
And so by that reasoning, Napster is a better deal, because I have the utility of 80,000 songs, by paying $15/month.
To do the same on iTMS, I would have to (assuming I'm 20 and I live until I'm 85) pay $105 a month to get the same "utility" for the rest of my life.
I mean, if you're all set on trying to put a utility value on songs.
Go even further. Lets say you buy those CD's for $10 each (a pretty typical price for people who buy hits and don't pay full price). Lets assume you had to buy 350 albums to get those 360 songs.
I'm out $3,500. Ouch. But as I get tired of each song, I can sell them for, oh, $5 each, so my cost is $1,750. If I assume I enjoy those songs for 10 years, then it costs me....Hmmm about $15 a month.
See? You're pulling the same stunt that car dealers use to "prove" that leasing is cheaper than buying.
I'm saying the whole idea of renting music (and I consider iTMS renting) is bad for the consumer.
On the other hand, the only thing that might make iTMS worthwhile is HYMN, so you strip the stupid DRM off it, and then give copies to all your friends. If they do the same, you can build a decent song library for 1/10th the cost.
Sounds like crap to me. Kazaa offers a much better deal.
"9.99 for an entire album compared to ~20 at Best Buy"
****
I don't mean to be rude, but who pays $20 for the album at best buy?
I mean, at worst, you buy it at Costco for $12 or Amazon for $13.
If you can wait a few days, then you buy at BMGMusic (where I average $8/CD after shipping) or used, where I can frequently get CD's for $5-6, even relatively new ones.
You like to say $20 for a CD primarily because it justifies the $10 price for iTMS, which is a poor deal considering (a) Only 128kb/s fidelity (b) no liner notes or information on the artists (c) you can't sell it when you're tired of it.
Owning is a valid point, but that's only because there is no TV publisher willing to sell shows to the public right now. They are more interested in grabbing as many people to watch their channel.
The reason for this is because of their business model. They have an advertisement based business model (for the most part) so they have a stake in user ratings and density. If they took a different model and starting distributing to the public, would that change your perception? It's not like this is out of the question.
However, with the advent of vcr's, computers, tivo, and the like, it's not impossible to record the programs and then distribute them or save them for later. It's not like this option is out of your, the consumers, hands.
It's just a mind set.
I'm setting up a TV VOD for an entire city right now through their utilities department. We are using a different business model not reliant on advertising. Shows will be sold piece meal via downloads an at a monthly fee. The customers of this entire city will have this option; the same as music.
The world is changing. Can you give me a clear reason why TV is different from music now?
My sig is as boring as you...
i say beat the system.
It's an attractive offer and it only takes a couple of geeks to horribly mangle their product.
Sure, those DRM'ed files can't be played - but who said you were gonna use those in particular?
Being a coward I haven't RTFA but I imagine that they allow you to burn to cd.
I imagine it wouldn't be IMPOSSIBLE to set up an 'atapi cdrom' that 'burns' straight to disc and simply have a ripper that'll get it out of that one.
Genious, I tell you!
Might take me a couple of months tho.
you have no clue how the drm works do you? Your music will only work as long as you have an active subscription.
In year 3 you stop buying music... Napster you have zero songs... iTunes you have 360 songs that will play on your PC or Mac or iPod.
I totally agree. At this point, iTunes is likely to appeal to the vast majority of music listeners. However...
There may be a way for Napster to one-up iTunes and still keep the subscription-based model (and associated recurring revenue) that they're so keen on: Allow your $15 per month subscription fee to be used as credit towards single song purchases from Napster (i.e. 15 songs per month). Above and beyond that, you pay $.99 per song. If you don't use your "credit" for that month, it disappears (like cellphone minutes).
This is good middle ground for those who want to own the music and those who want the library of a subscription service. Each month you're a subscriber, you get to keep 15 of the best songs you heard that month. If your subscription lapses, those "credited" songs are yours forever.
On the MS/Napster side, the worst they'll do with any given customer per month is iTunes-like profits for 15 songs. (side note: I suspect that the average -- stress average -- iTunes customer buys fewer than 15 songs per month, so this is already relatively brisk business). If the customer doesn't elect to use their "credit" for that month, then they make more money.
They'll probably operate at break-even or loss for the first few months (everyone will use all their "credit" for the first few months), but eventually they'll start coming out ahead -- remember how you got Netflix thinking you were going to watch 12 movies a month? Six months later, you found "Legally Blonde 2" buried underneath some magazines on the couch. Netflix wins. Same idea.
This kind of hybrid plan is the only thing that might seriously tempt me away from iTunes. It's also the only plan I can think of that is economically viable for both sides.
It doesn't take a team of people millions of dollars and months to shoot a porn movie, let alone a porn clip, let alone a set a photos. Give me 10 cute girls, a digital camera, and a week or so, and I can throw together a pretty professional website with lots of content for next to nothing.
Seriously... give me 10 cute girls and a digital camera...
"Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me."
CD is my property, CD becomes family member's property.
But if this putative relative ever plays that CD and listens to that song, then that is a copyright violation. Likewise, if I can prove to a court that you gave them that CD with full knowledge that they were going to play back that song, then you are guilty of contributory copyright violation. You may as well have shared it on Kazaa.
Da Blog
The real market for this is people who want to listen to a song for a little bit, but then never listen to it again. This way, they don't pay 99c for that song that they got tired of. They instead pay a small fraction of that to try whatever music fits their mood.
This model will allow people to test the waters of 'different' music without having to pay every time. It could result in people expanding their horizons to listen to music they never would have tried if they had to pay per song.
In fact, it seem very similar to other technology markets such as wireless connectivity or text messages. When I was forced to "pay per message" or "pay per bite" I rarely surfed on my phone and sparingly txt'd. Now that I pay one fee for unlimited bandwidth on my phone, I'm synchronizing my mailbox every 10 minutes and truly enjoying my improved productivity and freedom.
don't software sound cards that just dump the song as a wave still work(thus taking it a straight D-to-D conversion)?
Perhaps, but I seem to recall hearing that MS's Janus makes use of a "secure sound path", meaning that it won't play unless the player, the OS, the driver, and the actual hardware all promise not to let the user have access to anything but the end result (usually, analog line-level audio).
Though I may have overstated it - Perhaps they just have that as a sort of ideal target, but the current implementation falls far short of it.
Hmm, kind funny, legally downloading music so you can steal it later?
Yah, it does have a certain irony to it...
Who knows... I personally prefer my digital music as lossless CD rips, but for filling (at least temporarily until I can find original CDs) all the hundreds of one-hit-wonder gaps in my collection? Seem like a pretty sweet deal...
This is NOT legal except within russia
If corporations are free to arbitrage minimum wage and environmental standards between different countries with captive labour markets and so produce things dirt cheap and then import them into higher-wage countries, then why do you honestly think that consumers shouldn't have an equal opportunity to game our brave new globalised world? If I want to buy legally licensed music produced in Russia and then import it for my personal use into another country, why shouldn't I? What you're saying is a version of imperialism, that somehow the US-based RIAA licensing mafia has more legality than a similar Russian-based licensing mafia.
Da Blog
"Of course, if Napster To Go supported iPod, they'd have a much larger install base to convince to use their service, instead of still pleading people to buy a portable player with compatible DRM installed."
That has to be one of the most ignorant statements I've ever heard. Apple won't license their DRM (as flawed as it is) to competitors and they won't support protected WMA. The music industry isn't about to let anyone sell downloads without DRM. Of course they could be like Real and hack it, but then Apple and their fanatics would accuse Napster of having the ethics of hackers and threaten legal action. To my knowledge Apple's DRM doesn't support the rental model.
even disregarding the questionable legality of the allofmp3 music in the United States
So you're saying that if I buy a legally licensed CD manufactured in Slovakia, and then sold in, say, Copenhagan, then that CD becomes illegal if I carry it into the US? Or are you saying that if I download a track from a euro iTMS store and then carry my iPod into the US that it becomes illegal?
If corporations are free to arbitrage minimum wage and environmental standards between different countries with captive labour markets and so produce things dirt cheap and then import them into higher-wage countries, then why do you honestly think that consumers shouldn't have an equal opportunity to game our brave new globalised world? If I want to buy legally licensed music produced in Russia and then import it for my personal use into another country, why shouldn't I? What you're saying is a version of imperialism, that somehow the US-based RIAA licensing mafia has more legality than a similar Russian-based licensing mafia.
Da Blog
If I were a top-40 drone, Napster would be of much greater value.
Isn't it the other way around? Napster allows you to sample absolutely huge amounts of different music for $15 a month. Lots of differents artists, genres, singles and albums. Everything in the catalog. That sounds far more orientated for people with diverse tastes in music.
iTunes is really more for the people who just want to listen to singles (which would include "top-40 drones"). IIRC, Apple's sales data backs this up (most iTune users stay away from albums). I know that's why it has yet to seriously interest me - it would be way too expensive for me to seriously explore the diversity of music I am accustomed to. (I haven't bought into Napster yet, either, for the record. But it is more appealing as of now.)
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
$15 a month for essentially an unlimited free trial (until you quit the service)
Someone remind me what "free" means again. O h yeah, not having to pay money for it. So that would mean $15 a month is not free.
It's dubiously legal at best inside Russia, and is not legal outside of it.
So you're saying that if I buy a legally licensed CD manufactured in Slovakia, and then sold in, say, Copenhagan, then that CD becomes illegal if I carry it into the US? Or are you saying that if I download a track from a euro iTMS store and then carry my iPod into the US that it becomes illegal?
If corporations are free to arbitrage minimum wage and environmental standards between different countries with captive labour markets and so produce things dirt cheap and then import them into higher-wage countries, then why do you honestly think that consumers shouldn't have an equal opportunity to game our brave new globalised world? If I want to buy legally licensed music produced in Russia and then import it for my personal use into another country, why shouldn't I? What you're saying is a version of imperialism, that somehow the US-based RIAA licensing mafia has more legality than a similar Russian-based licensing mafia.
Furthermore, ignoring my colloqial use of the term "mafia", what proof do you have that the people behind allofmp3.com are involved in illegal, coordinated activities? From my point of view, only the RIAA has been sued under the RICO for racketeering.
Da Blog
you just plug it into a wall socket on one end, and then plug it into an audio device on the other (via either 3mm stereo analogue cabling or via mini-Toslink optical cabling, which is well suited for a 7.1 surround sound system)
You know, real high-quality players have digital outputs and inputs built-in to the device. Apple saw fit to disable the TOSLink interface specified in the PortalPlayer reference design. If you can only add reasonable quality line-level and digital output to an iPod using dongles and clinky hacks then it's not a high-quality device, it's a lowest-common-denominator playback-only toy.
Da Blog
Steam rankles me for exactly the same reasons. I can't bring myself to get into a product that is unuseable without an active network connection- a connection that absolutely DEPENDS on the server on the other end being in a good mood. Rather I want to play online or not.
Yeah, there are supposed benefits to Steam.... but what if Valve took their ball and went home?
I do that all the time. It's called to burn a CD!
Just because it *looks* like a store-bought CD doesn't mean that it can be treated like a store-bought CD. If this putative relative ever plays that CD and listens to that song, then that is a copyright violation. Likewise, if I can prove to a court that you gave them that CD with full knowledge that they were going to play back that song, then you are guilty of contributory copyright violation. Do it enough times to exceed a $2,500 barrier and you have violated the NET Act and you are a Federal criminal looking at 3 years in Federal prison and several millions of dollars worth of fines. You may as well have shared it on Kazaa.
Da Blog
Actually iTMS makes a pretty big profit. IIRC it's about $.08 per song. And bigger ones would be possible if it weren't for the RIAA etc. middlemen. The marginal cost for producing songs for download like this is *tiny*. If they use torrents or something, it becomes *zero*. Artists don't want much money, enough to live on is all they need because they don't expect to be able to do that. So $14 a month is doable. Very doable.
I am trolling
Er, yeah. Apart from the whole paying for it part. So Napster compares renting your music for a fee (and losing it if you stop paying) to getting it for free (and keeping it forever), and follows that up by implying that if you have an iPod, you're stupid. Fucking moron. Way to drum up custom!
Or does he mean there's a tiny chance of the RIAA sueing you if you use Napster?
You must think in Russian.
...you purchased the right to listen to it for a bit...
Why purchase it when you can get it for free? It's called radio. If you record the music from the radio, it will not disappear after you turn the radio off. There is also subscription radio and you can record from that and keep the music after you cancel the subscription. Some radio station even have request programs where they will play songs you ask for if they've got them.
All theory is gray
The point is, Napster and Apple are not worried about /. nerds, ACLU members and audiophiles. They are marketing towards people who dont care about quality or digital rights and just want convienent easy access music. And for those people, these services are definatly appealing.
/. nerd and an audiophile. It dosnt bother me that the music is not mine, cause if I really wanted to keep it I would spend the extra time to download it, or if you're less of a 1337 hax0r, you could go and buy the CD.
I speak from experience, my girlfriend is a Penn State student and thus has had unlimited access to the Napster library for awhile. Does she care that she cant take the music with her? No. But she does care that she can listen to almost any song that she wants anytime she wants as long as she's on a computer. Even I must admit that Napster is nice, its easier to find and listen to any song instantly on Napster than to download it off a P2P app, and I'm a
So what service is better? I have not personaly used iTunes but the subscription service definatly appeals to me. For $15 a month you can listen to a vast collection of songs as much as you want long as your arround your computer, and if you have a variaty of portable devices, you can take the songs with you. No you dont get to keep the music really, but, at least for me, if I really liked an album I'd be happy to buy a CD or a CD Box Set rather than pay for compressed songs to be sent to my computer and stored forever on my hard disk.
>If so you're missing the point - YOU DO NOT GET TO KEEP THE SONGS. YOU DO NOT OWN THE SONGS. In a subscription service YOU WILL NEVER GET TO KEEP THE SONGS. That's the point of their buisiness model and their DRM.
It is so indeed. In case you're missing the point, the new idea is that it's pointless and stupid to own songs.
The iPod model is that you pay X dollars for the player and then spend incrementally (as long as you own that iPod) on Apple's Web site (to buy songs) - perhaps Y dollars every month.
The Napster models is that the expensive player doesn't matter - you just spend Y dollars every month.
To a person who buys some 15 songs a month, Napster and iPod would cost about the same.
If you buy more than 15 songs a month, it's cheaper to subscribe to Napster.
All you can eat the Napster way.
Sure, you don't own any of the songs, but what does it mean anyway - if you really want to own some songs you can buy them (for course, as a Microsoft user, not from Apple, but from some Microsoft-compatible store) and use Napster for the rest.
It's still cheaper and better than iPod's way as it gives you more choices.
> start whinning about how f*scked up their files are either because of the M$ DRM or a hardware issue and now "their" music is "gone".
That's the iPod user's problem, Napster users won't have such problems.
One thing that most people don't understand is that it is indeed stupid to own songs because all that copying and burning is so redundant and waste of time.
With today's technologies, all one needs to have are playlists and the music can be downloaded from wherever.
Apple, actually, did great so far, but it's easy to see that their product was evolutionary (they did right what others have been trying for years) but in its essence, iPod automatizes things that are so 90's - hoarding MP3s.
With Napster's service one will not have to carry around an MP3 player - you'll be able to play your music from wherever you are - at work, at home, from your mobile phone, or your walkman. That's the idea.
...Can you give me a clear reason why TV is different from music now?...
Certainly!
Most videos are watched maybe only once, sometimes twice, but a good piece of music get listened to over and over until you find yourself humming the tune at odd moments. Music also is an accompanyment of other activities, such as driving a car. Video generally requires your full time attention so you can get the story line. Do you really want to pay someone FOREVER again and again, so you can listen to your repertiore of favorite songs whenever and wherever you want? Record your favorite songs from the radio for free and then they'll never cost you any more after that to listen.
All theory is gray
You can't burn a playlist with ITMS songs as a MP3 disc. Try it, it won't let you... You can only burn as an Audio-CD or Data disc.
Why do you think Napster won't have the same costs that Apple does if they let you keep the music? It basically breaks down to bandwidth (which I think it's fair to say Napster will pay more for, given the estimated downloads per month they can expect) and royalties.
The math is really simple: By your number (I have no idea about the $.08, but for sake of argument lets use it) it would only take $14/$0.92 = 16 songs per month for the costs to outweigh Apple's pricing scheme. The only possible way Napster can make money with this service is that they don't have to pay full royalties: a condition that is no doubt only acceptable to the RIAA precisely because the songs only work as long as you keep paying subscription fees. The RIAA isn't giving the songs away here...they just take their cut in the form of montly installments.
In a subscription service YOU WILL NEVER GET TO KEEP THE SONGS.
It depends on the subscription. Audible.com has a subscription plan where you get two audio books per month for $20/month. Your choice of book, and I haven't found a book no matter how long that counted as more than a single selection.
I've cancelled my subscription a couple times and went for long periods without it and I've always been able to download the audiobooks I recieved on the subscription plan as many times as I felt like. Their software allows CD burning (even through iTunes), and I've ripped the CDs it creates to MP3 just fine.
Admittedly it's a fairly special case as the subscription in effect gives those subscribed to it a ridiculous discount on specifically purchased books, but it is a subscription nonetheless.
not legal to keep a collection of episodes of a program (or a collection of songs) to watch them as many times as you want...
Both sides in the case stipulated that such use of a VTR would constitute an infringement of copyright.
Bull. I call you on that. I've read the Betamax ruling. Lets see a link where anyone "stipulated" or otherwise says that building a permanant tape library for multiple viewings infringes copyright.
It's true that the Supreme Court only directly addressed the fact that "timeshifting" is non-infringing, but the Supreme Court explicitly recognized that many people were keeping "libraries" and never hinted that it was in any way infringing.
Making a personal recording of a TV show is not copyright infringment. It does not magically become copyright infringment when you watch it a second time or the hundreth time.
It is a mistake to suggest Y and Z are copyrigtht infringment simply because the Suppreme Court only addressed that X is fair use. Stating that timeshifting is fair use is like tossing a dart at a map and stating that that point on the map is fair use. If you understand how the Supreme Court reads the map and why they stated that timeshifting is fair use, then it's not very hard to look at the map yourself and see that the nearby point of saving and rewatching the tape also lies inside fair use territory. There are certainly some very difficult and grey areas of the fair use map, but this isn't one of them. There is no copyright-infringment coastline dividing these two points on the map.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
add the files to your mp3 player, cancel the account, and still have them on there?
provided you bought one of there ripoff 5 gig players, that is.
Sorry, but hasn't this already been tried? And hasn't it failed miserably? And what ever happend to the msn music store? Wasn't it supposed to crush Apple too? Guess not eh, heck even I could have predicted that one.
-- Bored? Check out my Portfolio
Sounds like crap to me. Kazaa offers a much better deal.
You're so very right. No legal operation will ever be able to compete on price with an illegal one. Your parents must be so proud that their child has become such an astute thinker.
i'd rather use michael robertson's new service, mp3tunes. http://mp3tunes.com you are downloading mp3's with no drm. you own it to do with what you will.
Enjoy Every Sandwich
Music and movies are experienced differently and have a very different level of reusability.
True. But radio existed for a long time, and would prolly actually still be doing well if they hadn't been gobbled by megacorps that turned them into computer generated playlists with 10 songs. There's plenty of music that I enjoy listening to from time to time but would never buy, even for $1/track. The music rental music is also great for people like me because I can listen to a wide selection of stuff at work without having to carry CDs around all the time. It's also great for checking out music before buying it without being stuck listening to short clips at online stores or trying to hear over the general din at a music store. I think it's great to read a review of a group someplace and be able to check them out right away with no delay or financial risk that I'll get a CD I don't like.
As I said, whether there's enough people like me to make it worth to companies is still up in the air.
He made a mistake in saying $349, I think he meant $348 plus tax for 100 iTMS songs ($0.99 ea) playing on his iPod mini - think about it, you'll figure it out.
I'm not tying my credit card number into a .ru site. Notice any suspicious charges yet?
I can recharge the battery in my iPod.
iPod's battery lasts only 18 months
You can indeed sell or gift your harddrive and your files on that harddrive to anyone you like.
Give your theory a try. Try advertising for sale a bundle of your iTMS "songs. Go on.
Da Blog
Don't forget that Napster going out of business or not, this is probably an offense under the DMCA.
Yes, but this pay-one-price DRM still isn't good enough. It still isn't want we really really want. What we really want is a DRM system that takes a pound of flesh each time we play a song!
....that would make a FORTUNE on the diet circuit!
Heay wait a minute!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Did they train you to begin a refutation by insulting the other party?
Please explain to me how you can consider allofmp3 legal? The website's been running for several years now. I'd think that were it illegal, it would have been shut down by legal action by now. The fact that it has not leads me to think that its legal status is reasonably solid.
Da Blog
Most people don't change-- they hold dear the music from when they were growing up
I'm still a teenager, and I think most of the music that is released now is shit. Same with most of my friends...it's all shit.
Is there anyone out there that can do some research on who buys it?
1. Advertise! 2. ... You know!
3. PROFIT!!!!!
http://slashdot.su/
Apple's DRM is reasonable.
You have a strange definition of reasonable.
You see, in MY oppinion, anyone who would claim to send an innocent and non-infringing person TO FUCKING PRISON for playing their own files with their own music player IS NOT REASONABLE.
No major labels sign on to plans without DRM so you have no point.
Ahhh! Now I understand your position! Competitors in an industry (who collectively hold monopoly power) conspire in a restraint of trade to deny any sales to some market for a half decade... and then finally lift that total restraint of trade and replace it with a conspiracy to prohibit non-DRM sales to that market, then whatever minimum DRM level they conspire to impose is by definition "reasonable".
By your logic their DRM-crippled crap only reamins "reasonable" so long as they maintain monopoly power and maintain the conspiracy to prohibit any alternatives.
It ceases to be "reasonable" the moment there is genuine free-maret competition. The moment one of the major labels breaks ranks and competitvely steals away marketshare and profits from other RIAA members by offering a better product that they public actually wants, or by the ongoing growth of indy music sales of non-crippled products the public actually wants. The moment that happens they ALL have no choice but to abandon their abusive restraint against such products, abandon their and attempt to distort the market against the free-market competition forces which ensure the public gets the est possible product. They too would have no chice but to ALSO offer the better product or face extinction. There is simply no way a DRM-crippled product can survive in the face on non-crippled free market competition.
Once alternatives do exist in free maret competition then your beloved DRM-crap-system is no longer "reasonable", it cannot survive at all. It only survives so long as a conspiracy with monopoly-power can distort and defeat natural free market competition.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Considering how 48kb/s with AAC is slightly less than CD Quality (Groove Salad for example) I don't see what the problem is with the quality. I've spent over $300 at the iTMS and every album sounds just as good as actual CDs.
Linear notes or information? Do you want music or a biography?
I will give you the last one as a point. I've never resold a CD I purchased so I wouldn't have thought of that.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
The current systems of online music sales are totaly worthless to me because of the DRM built in. My CD changer can't connect to the internet and validate a current subscription. It can't do DRM.
You can buy from bleep.com, beatport.com, nufonix.com, and maybe a couple others i forgot off the top of my head. they sell vanilla mp3's. the selection is pretty narrow, mind you
-mkb
One could arguable say that what you propose as a "small" change is actually a massive one. But then, feel free to start a service like that yourself if you think it would work. I'm sure you'd get a lot of people to sign on, right before you went bankrupt lol.
"The subscription model is doomed to failure--just look at satellite radio!"
Dude. Hate to break it to you, but satellite radio is exploding right now.
And with the FCC f'ing with regular radio, in 5 years, FM will sound like AM today. Only in stereo.
Maybe you haven't heard of 'real' p2p. Everythings free don;t waste your money on this shit.
Bzzzt, No Sale!
Maybe if they didn't cripple the product, I might be willing to buy it. Get back to me when the DRM has been removed, or reliably cracked, and I might be interested.
errrr no. you can only listen to the music when your subsribed.
" The Russian mafia is a major producer of child pornography."
Last year, the bush administration said terrorist were behind all the pirate software and music.
Now its child pornographers.
Who's the boogeyman next month?
In year 3, if you stop buying music, with iTunes, you've received 360 songs that are most likely top-20 overplayed fluff or songs for which you listened for 30 seconds and magically determined you liked the whole 4 minutes. With Napster, you could have listened to 120 / 5 * 30 * 24 = 17280 songs (listening 2 hours/day). The averaging sampling cost is therefore 2 cents per song. Even at a dismal 1% hit rate, you discover 172 new songs. First off, you've discovered 172 new songs - that you can no longer listen to without going and buying them somewhere else. But also, not everyone used iTunes the way you're describing. I buy very little top-40 stuff off of them; I mostly use it to buy artists that I've discovered through other channels, whether radio, browsing CDs in a store at those listening stations, a friend's music collection, or even browsing iTunes. Yes, there's a risk with only getting 30 seconds, but if you listen to all the samples from an album you can probably decide if you're going to like that artist in general or not, and downloading one or two of their songs will probably cement it. Maybe the perfect solution is to subscribe to Napster one month a year, use that month to explore lots of new music, then go buy it all on iTunes.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
"Your friends knowingly violate the law? "
Yes. Most of them speed, most of them give me copies of their CD's or software they bought. One or two steals office supplies from work. A couple have admitted to cheating on their taxes.
They must be just awful people!
I've been on Napster-to-Go for a week and I love it. Sure, with iTunes you "own" your music but how do you find good music in the first place? With Napster, I've been downloading tons of albums and songs that I now get to try as much as I like. When the subscription runs out, I will either renew (for $15 why not?) or permanently buy the songs I like. That's the kind of choice I never had with iTunes.
Good Luck Napster!!!!
For my friend you will need it,
signed,
Steve Job's pet banana (yes folks, the big hairy one).
I don't buy singles on iTMS because they're a bad deal. Albums, on the other hand, are a much better value.
Why do the habits of other people prevent you from buying albums, if that's what you want to do?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
of course if the music business is as bad as the riaa claims that few tens of dollars will be more than they would have gotten from the hordes of pirates stealing all their music. /sarcasm off
i see this service being useful primarily to people who listen to pop music. people who are always wanting to listen to the new singles that come out on the radio. folks like me? i don't see how it can or will ever make sense. and no, i don't listen to much in the way of music on the radio as it's pretty much crap (and the same crap on every channel thanks to monolithic radio companies).
i have an enormous music collection. on my 40gig ipod i have it filled with less than 1/3rd of my music. i don't buy cd's very often but when i do i buy them a bunch at a time. my tastes are very wide and eclectic. i also listen to my music in a half a dozen different ways. ipod while walking or driving, computer at work or home, mp3 cd player when i need to play standard discs not just mp3's.
my music collection is a part of me, my identity. it is a culmination of years of picking through racks, dusty nooks in cd shops and discovering artists way before they were famous.
i don't like the idea of renting something as personal as music. i like to have something to show for my effort, to show for my money. this service seems like the primestar digital satellite service of music. sure it worked great for some folks (folks who couldn't afford a directv system or didn't want to worry about equipment maintenance and installation) but in the end better services came out and it died. i suspect this will end up happening with napster too.
the reality of the situation is that the ipod sells because it works great, is easy to use and also it looks great. it is cross platform and has a huge community behind it. napster wants us to believe that the player doesn't matter (much like primestar did). fact is that it does matter and judging by the sales of the ipod most people seem to understand this.
btw, i also think that napster's ads are very misleading ($10k to fill an ipod) because who do you know other than maybe a little kid that doesn't already own a pile of cd's they listen to? there are advantages of renting (ie, houses, cars, music), but in the end you have nothing to show for it other than a pile of bills and little else. i guess there will always be room for the beige box market, even in online music stores, but count me out of it.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
"Maybe I'm too old to get it, but I fail to see the attraction of paying a monthly fee for as long as I want to have access to my music."
The commercial has a simple graphic showing iTunes+10000 songs for iPod= $10000
Napster+10000 songs for non-iPod player = $15/month.
Do the math
Are you a Russian citizen or a resident of Russia? No? Then the licensing of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society does not apply to you as a foreign national.
Really? So you are saying I am not allowed to buy CDs from Europe or Asia? You are saying that if I license a track from a download site in, say, Ireland, and load it onto my iPod, and then transport the iPod to the US, that that constitutes copyright infringement?
does not absolve you of legal responsibility or possible prosecution any more than paying for Kazza would.
Kazaa has not managed to get licensed by any nationally recognised IP cartel. allofmp3.com has. That's the key difference. The WTO guarantees my right to transport goods and services between member countries providing they are legally originated in the source country, not proscribed in the destination country, and that any legal tariffs have been paid or legally established regulated goods quotas have not been exceeded. The US has not yet seen fit to levy tariffs or quanntity limits on mp3 imports to the US, and given the US's current antipathy to similar restrictive IP license schemes within France, that possibility seems remote.
Hopefully, the copyright laws of Russia will change soon causing "services" like this one to shutdown.
I see. So your idea of an IP license scheme is one where sovereign nations are not allowed to run their own affairs, but instead you act as final arbiter of what is legal and not legal for them. There's a word for that, and it's Imperialism.
Da Blog
I'm a bit puzzled by your increasingly combative tone. Unless you work for Apple, this is not a personal argument, so let's not try to make it one. In any case, I'll try to clarify once more, but then I'm done with this topic.
So you said one can always burn to CD to get around restrictions, and I said that this is not a good solution because of the loss in quality. You replied with, "Blah blah blah. CDs are "lossy" too. But they're good enough. If you don't consider [music storage format X] to be good enough, don't buy it." I think you misunderstand what I'm talking about. I'm not complaining about the fact that AAC is a lossy format, but pointing out that when you decode it and then re-encode it in a different format you loose even more quality, and you end up with a lower quality result than if you ripped an ordinary CD.
Whether or not that loss in quality is acceptable will vary between people; my point is that you have to damage the product in order make full use of it, like buying a record album that will only play on one type of player until you put big scratches across it. It doesn't seem like it would be a very satifactory solution to many people when they paid good money for the product.
I said that I hadn't tried iTMS and was only relating the experience of a friend. You said, "Strangely, this seems not to have stopped you from running off at the mouth about something you don't actually have any knowledge of. Maybe you should spend a minute thinking about that."
I spoke about the general deficiencies of services using DRM. Note, neither you nor other respondants really took issue with my characterization of the facts of the matter, but rather argued the restrictions don't really feel so oppressive. I was hoping others with more expience would provide more insight from the inside, and that happened to a degree. Anyway, I though we were discussing DRM not /. posting etiquette, so that seems irrelivent.
On the point of privacy I thought I made myself clear, but let me try one last time. The right to privacy is an important principle in US law, represented everwhere from the 4th amendment to the Constitution to decisions like Roe vs. Wade. The general purpose of this is to limit government and law enforement prying into our homes and private lives. DRM schemes charge your personal computer, which is in your home and for many a basic tool of day to day life, with being a sort of copyright policeman. I find this to be a fundemental violation of the idea of personal privacy, not because it sends information out to others but because it is an imposition of their powers in our private lives. I feel it's a bad path to start down, and it is not inconceivable that these programs will report on people (like other spyware) in the future. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile, so to speak. Until then they will simply be an intrusion and an obstacle to law abiding citizens.
On the question of whether circumventing DRM is a violation of the DMCA (if copyright.gov uses that term I will as well): I've already said IANAL, so I'll refer you to what the lawyers at the EFF said about it. Of course, my interpretation of the law (or yours) is largly irrelivant if I get sued for trying to use the music I payed for; I'm not independantly wealthy, so like most people I probably couldn't wait to be vindicated in the nth appeal and would have to settle (probably bankrupting myself in the process). One need only look at the Sklyarov, DeCSS, or similar cases to see that legal trouble is common for those who try to allow users to exercise their fair use rights, not to mention the situation between Apple and Real I linked to before. I'm not sure they'll ever go after individual users, but "you might not get sued for using your music" is not quite the guarantee I'm looking for from a music service.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
can't you put it on your friend's computer, then take it off of yours, effectively transferring all rights to that song to the friend?
Listen to what you are saying, You are not talking about the disposition of owned property, you are talking about temporarily sub-licensing people from your license.
Da Blog
Lets really do the math.
40G player stores 8000 5min songs.
It cost $8000 to fill the player.
at $15/month, this takes at 45 years not counting interest lost for buying the 8000 songs up front
"Besides that, stupid people are his target market-- who else would think paying $15 per month FOREVER (or your music collection disappears) is a good deal?"
People who spend more than $15 a month to buy music would think it's a good deal. I think I've identified 1 stupid person, however.
I never questioned the legality of the service operating with Russia but rather the legality of its use by non-residents of Russia.
Specifically, the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) guarantees the right of all citizens of all WTO-member countries. The Russian Federation's WTO status compliance almost complete. That will cement the rights of allofmp3.com to provide their service throughout all WTO member countries. Specifically, "intellectual property laws may not offer any benefits to local citizens which are not available to citizens of other TRIPs signatories". Therefore, local companies may not discriminate against non-nationals by refusing to provide services or implementing discriminatory pricing.
Da Blog
I am not saying it will but the story submitted missed out on the fact that people already pay reoccuring charges to access to stuff that they can get free elsewhere.
Examples:
Cell Phones : The amounts people dump on these is stupendous.
XM/Sirius : Can't get reception unless you pay.
Cable/Satellite : Same again. Sure you can get it another way but your paying for a package.
Mmmmaybe...but I'd like to point out that people are accustomed to owning their music. After decades of doing so, we want to own the records, tapes, CDs (and now song files) that we purchased, traded for or "acquired."
People have not been accustomed to "owning" unlimited air time for cell calls, radio broadcasts or TV broadcasts because that's how it's always been; there was little or no alternative. We only put up with the radio thing because it has largely been free, and we could buy our own copies of the music. And we are moving towards expecting to own something with TV as more and more shows wind up on DVD.
I dunno, I just feel like given the alternative, people will embrace the ability to own, rather than rent this kind of thing. (If I could buy a $400 phone and never pay for airtime, I'd almost always opt for that rather than the, say, $100 phone with charges for calls.)
No, you can't share it, much as you would wish otherwise. The license for each track is for *personal* use. So unless you live in a jurisdiction with community property laws, and you are married to that person or their are your dependent (and even then you're on shaky ground!), then depositing a copy of that track on a non-personal machione, ie a friend's machine, is a violation of the license and grounds for Apple to cancel your access to the track or all tracks. You buy a single-use, personal license from Apple. Not a license to run a small-scale lending library or group-buying scheme.
From the
Da Blog
Except most of those "great bands of the 80s" you speak of had virtually no airplay or popularity at the time. For all you know the guy was listening to Rick Springfield, Journey and Sheena Easton.
By this reasoning, anything I download off P2P is my property too.
Tell you what. No use asking me. Call Apple and ask them if this is true.
"I've spent over $300 at the iTMS and every album sounds just as good as actual CDs."
They don't. They're not even close.
They may sound okay on your earbuds, but earbuds are low fidelity. Computer speakers are about as bad.
If you can, play them back on a decent stereo in an A/B comparison. You'll be shocked at the difference.
Stream ripping will kill the subscription model one way or another.
I watched a friend sign up for a 30 day free trial of Rhapsody. He then proceeded to stream rip music day and night for a month using High Criteria's TotalRecorder software. When the month was up, he didn't subscribe and he walked away a HUGE number of albums. Interestingly enough, the CD's he burned using this method were recognizable by cddb's.
Here-in exists the problem. If Napster actually succeeds in signing up a large number of subscribers, theft will also rise exponentially. Eventually, the record companies will notice that one or two college kids are feeding and entire university campus with music and they'll pull the plug on the entire endeavor.
There are many stream-ripping programs available for every platform...indeed, I use Audio-Hijack Professional for OSX myself. Until this problem is solved/addressed, subscription based services will have a HUGE achilles heel.
Personally I'd pay $10 a month to listen to all the music I want. I can separate that from my desire to own the music by paying $0.99 (which I can also do on Napster). If I spend the same amount on both services I own more songs on iTunes, but I got to listen to thousands of songs on Napster. I like to listen to music more than I like to collect it, and $10 is worth it to me.
Don't forget that Napster going out of business or not, this is probably an offense under the DMCA.
To quote a recent Slashdot FP about Norway's new CD ripping law... "We are going to be a nation of lawbreakers if this law is passed in its current form."
Most Americans remain happily oblivious of the DMCA. Those of us that know about it, break it on a regular basis (Daily? It has such vague wording, that if you consider a physical CD as an "access control mechanism", ripping even your own music collection to Vorbis would technically violate it).
So, does it matter?
Right up there with the PATRIOT act; The establishment of "secret" laws that the public doesn't have the right to know until they break them, at which time they vanish without formal charges; And a plethora of other all-too-1984-like laws, this crap puts a great big neon sign over the US's continuing slide into totalitarianism. Aside from that, no. No one cares. We all break "stupid" laws daily, from speeding on our way to work to breaking the DMCA to "40%" of us "trying at least once" weed every now and then. Very, very scary world we live in, where most people consider the law a joke, but even worse, the laws do seem almost like a bad joke - And worst of all, the government actually puts people in prison based on those jokes!
Napsterius
I met a traveller from an American Land,
Who said--"Two vast hard disks of songs
Stand in my home . . . . On the floor, near at hand,
Half lost a quiet Zen Micro lies, whose disk,
still full of music, yet silent now
Tell of its owner well those passions fed
Which yet remain, saved on this lifeless thing,
The tunes that rocked him, the beat that led;
And on his monitor, these words he sees:
My name is Napster, download King of Kings,
A million songs: yo Poddies can jealous be!
No song or tune is heard. Round the decay
Of his computer system, soundless and bare
The missed subscription: no songs today."
The RIAA keeps saying that downloading is illegal. Now that they've got half of the country foolishly convinced this is an actual fact, they're going to ask everyone to run to Napster and iTunes to download music.
They're both trying RIAA music and you guys are arguing which one is the best deal.
Try DMusic instead. 60,000 songs. All free. No DRM. You can keep them forever. Erase the RIAA.
This is only one of the myraid of problems with a subscription-based service.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
Divx was the first thing I thought of when I heard about this Napters cluster f*ck. And we all know how well Divx fared.
> If so you're missing the point - YOU DO NOT GET TO KEEP THE SONGS. YOU DO NOT OWN THE SONGS. In a subscription service YOU WILL NEVER GET TO KEEP THE SONGS. That's the point of their buisiness model and their DRM.
Well, yeah, but mostly because DRM was the best they could do when the old format-shifting nonsense started to get old...
Maybe its me but 1st Microsoft calls me a thief for owning an iPod
now Napster is calling me Stupid for owning an iPod
I guess Myself and 70% of the Hard drive based MP3 player Users are all just a bunch of Stupid thieves
I am so glad I'm too stupid to figure out how Happy I am with my iPod.
So if I spend a few thousand on some fancy audio setup I may notice something? Well, crap. I guess I'll only buy vinyl!
See, I'm like.. just about everybody else who uses iTMS. I like listening to music. As long as it's not all hissy and poppy, it's fine. I need background music while I work. I don't use solid gold connectors that cost $500/ea. I pipe my computer music through an Aiwa stereo. I can hear it. It sounds fine to me. It's good enough.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
They actually *do* have tracks from The Beatles, but only two. They didn't lie to you.
Even iTMS only has about 10 tracks - better than Napster but by no means comprehensive.
The only way any of these buy-music-online services is *ever* going to storm the market is if they charge a *fair* price, *and* they allow you to convert the music to an open, non-DRM'ed format that you can play on any sort of device you want.
Until then, its all puffery, and the market for it isnt large enough to matter.
But if this putative relative ever plays that CD and listens to that song, then that is a copyright violation.
So is videotaping a TV program and then giving it to a friend, yet I don't see any reports about ABC/NBC/CBS busting up those underground videotape-sharing networks.
The odds of the RIAA and/or Apple getting annoyed enough to serve someone with a lawsuit because he bought a CD from the iTMS and then burned a disc to give to his Mom is ridiculously low -- almost as low as Napster actually being a threat to the iTunes Music Store...
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Largely because 9.95 isn't a good deal for a sub-CD quality album, especially with the added 'bonus' of DRM. Most of the music I listen to is non-RIAA stuff anyway, so the CDs aren't much more expensive ($12 or under usually - and oftentimes even cheaper than iTunes). The extra quality and the control I have over the music I purchased is worth the minimal extra expense.
But really what I want is just to explore new music nearly all of the time. Purchasing full albums is a pretty poor way to do that, functionally and economically - this was the point I was trying to make. I was bringing up the fact that people use iTunes mostly to buy singles, because that kind of service is designed for those people more than it is for music fans with more ecletic tastes...
The radio model is far better for what I want, and that's essentially what Napster is. (As are a few other competitors, IIRC.)
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
Exactly, it's the royalties that are the problem. But most of them are going to the middlemen rather than the artists. Bandwidth is a bit of a problem but not so much, torrent-type systems can solve it and it's getting cheaper all the time anyway. $14 a month for all the songs you want isn't going to happen while the music industry works the way it does. But it's possible, even with today's tech, and some day it will happen.
I am trolling
Even more importantly, "Napster's service uses Microsoft's Janus technology to enable DRM protected music files." If iPod was going to use Janus, would it have to change its name to iAnus? I think this Napster campaign is just FUD. There are more important problems with Apple to be concerned about than this. For example, did you know that "Apple Computers promote Godless Darwinism and Communism"? You can read the entire article by Dr. Richard Paley (a teacher of Divinity and Theobiology at Fellowship University) here. A true eye opener. The real important question is, should such subliminal propaganda be legal? (Disclaimer: iANAL)
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
If you have a choice of devices to listen to your tunes on, you should also have a choice of CD burners to use as well.
Napster To Go has this same feature (or something similar) and everyone is turning a blind eye to it all because of the darn rental model. GIVE IT A CHANCE FELLAS!!
" So if I spend a few thousand on some fancy audio setup I may notice something?"
No, a few hundred will do.
In fact, you can hear the difference on a decent car stereo.
But I think you're getting the point...you're admitting there's no difference if you turn it down low and concentrate on work. Yes. I agree with you in that case.
OTOH If that's the criteria, save your money and listen to a radio!
I clicked on the link, but I altered the URL so it didn't give you credit.
Does that irritate you or what?
The DRM on iTunes is a red herring.
Break it. Don't break it. Whatever.
At the bit rate they're selling you, they know that even if you break it, you've got the equivalent of a VHS copy of the master tape.
When the next big thing comes along, you'll re-buy it in another digital format. Tell us how that is "Terrific DRM".
Meanwhile, you're buying the same song over and over.
Oh wait...there's the guy with the CD...he buys it once and its good forever, and it costs roughly the same as iTMS.
But its not as convenient, but more importantly, Apple didn't say it was okay!
it's always amazing to me how otherwise independently minded geeks can fall over themselves to love Apple's velvet fist.
part of the DRM is that you can share the file with 3 people - so its not just your personal use. I can buy a song from iTMS and give it to 3 friends, no prob. It works, Apple allows it, They can then Burn it and do with it as they please. It is thiers.
Your faith-based belief in your right of disposal of the license does not reflect the your actual rights specifically and categorically enumerated by Apple in the ToS. You are licensed the track for personal use. You can distribute the playback source across several personal devices. You are allowed to *stream* said source file to other LAN-connected machines as long as no permanent copy is made.
you can, in fact, sell music you have bought from the iTMS, its been done. It was insanely complicated to do (especially considering it was only one song) but it was done via ebay
I'm aware of the exception that was made in this case by Apple, probably to avoid bad publicity for their velvet fist so early. Why don't you go ahead and try to sell a whole bundle of iTMS files. Acdvertise a "loaded" iPod. See how far you get. Think about it rationally: why would Apple *ever* alloow a secondary market in iTMS licenses to develop where it does not get a piece of the action. Apple itself could enable a secondary market (much like Amazon's used property section) on iTMS itself but then the RIAA would go ballistic. Consider that the RIAA has consistently sued large used CD resale chains over the past 20 years because its cut from used sales is insignificant or zero.
Da Blog
I don't see any reports about ABC/NBC/CBS busting up those underground videotape-sharing networks.
The only thing worse than silly laws applied systematically is silly laws applied discriminately. Maybe you're too yough to remember the 1980s, but when VCRs were new, there were quite a few legal contretemps regarding their use and purview. If giving your relatives dodgy 128Kbps AAC files transcoded into CDDA or MP3 is fine by you, then why not point them towards Soulseek or BitTorrent where they could get higher-quality rips of the music and enjoy the same legal status.
Da Blog
CAN BUY MUSIC LEGALLY, at least in my country. I checked and had checked by representatives of the Austrian music industry, they grudgingly conceded that yes, it is legal for me to buy music there for a tenth of what it costs me at home.
I live in Austria myself, and I would like to see who "conceded" what. I have made the experience that many customers of allofmp3.com consider it legal as long as they do not get sued.
Okay, so it seems to me that one of the major problems folks have with the iTMS is that the previews are only 30 seconds long.
Yes, it is a hassle to go look for that song in its entirety at another source (radio, music store, etc.)
And, as I said before, this is about convenience. We want to buy our music as soon as we know we want it. That's the M.O. for all these services, right?
So, for those of you that have a problem with the current iTMS method, a question: If the iTMS started offering full-length previews, as Napster will, would that change your opinion? Would you be more likely to purchase songs through, say, iTMS & Napster?
I think that the offerings of both music stores are equivalent. They must be, to be competitive. One cannot expect to get away with offering an inferior selection to the other, regardless of price/song.
Also, this is if you can handle using both an iPod and another type of player. You'd essentially be managaing 2 separate music collections. Perhaps your iTMS collection could be your top-40-fluffy-puff music (and don't lie; we all have at least a few songs that are in and out of that genre).
Your Napster collection could host your more ecclectic, bizzare, indie, or simply tasteful stuff. But would the two systems be more convenient?
BTW, I'm not promoting that these two services merge or partner in any way. Competition is healthy. iTMS was a monopoly, IMO. We need this kind of competition b/c it makes the end product better for the consumer (in a perfect paradigim).
The difference being you control what is played. And the quality of music is likely to be much higher (or lower, if you have poorer taste in music than ClearChannel does).
There is a great free access to music that most people do not use. I bet you can't guess what it is... I get about 10 new albums a week from this place. It's funded by *YOUR* tax dollars (US citizens) but most people ignore it's existence. Can you guess what it is?
It's funny how MSFT and Napster keep saying "What people really want is a subscription service" but what they mean is "What WE really want is recurring revenues, so we've deluded ourselves into thinking that's what people want without bothering to ask them.
It's funny how Napster is making enough money to pay for this advertising blitz... Apple is the leader with iTMS, and they say that they barely make a profit... how is little old Napster making enough that they have money to burn on superbowl ads and such. I think this smells of M$ bankrolls again funding an indirect attack on a competitor.
Do you really want to pay someone FOREVER again and again, so you can listen to your repertiore of favorite songs whenever and wherever you want? Record your favorite songs from the radio for free and then they'll never cost you any more after that to listen.
Absolutely not, but that's us. Other people will not mind doing so, because they don't understand the technology nor the options.
Also, Other people do watch a video, and more often a tv program, several times over, when the mood strikes them. Enter the rental business. Also you don't have to watch a movie from beginning to end in one showing. With scene mapping you can easily start where you last left off, or skip around.
Given that the technology exist, that you don't have to pay for a monthly subscription to a channel (or block of channels) to get the shows you want, when you want them, what's the compelling reason to pay a monthly charge and not own the show/movie versus paying a one time fee for the same and being able to own it, not to mention having freedom of choice to chose what you want to watch and when?
My sig is as boring as you...
The problem with comparing Napster to other subscription services is that it's not an apples to apples comparison. Sattelite radio and TV are broadcast - if you don't watch it or tape it, you miss it. With Netflix you know you have to return the dvd's if you want new rentals.
With Napster, you get the songs in a permanent form (compared to broadcast anyway) and don't have to return them. The most direct comparison I can think of is leasing a car, but no one has ever leased music before, and I don't think consumers will take to it very well.
Well thats OK if you only want to listen to them on that one iPod mini "forever". If you want to continue to play them on a computer or transfer them to another portable device in future you have to hope that Apple doesn't go out of business in case you ever reformat/reinstall/buy a new pc/mac/harddrive/have your computer stolen etc and have to reactivate iTunes.
You also need to keep a backup copy of your purchased tracks. Perhaps currently on CD-R/DVD-R or an external firewire drive. Writable optical media tends to only last 18 months, and most hard drives go out of warrenty in 3 years, so you will have to do a regular backup-backup onto whatever media is popular at the time, perhaps blueray next time and some sort of holographic media a few iterations down the line. Or you might decide to keep them stored on a RAID array in which case you need to pay to have it powered up continuously and have drives swapped out periodically
You'll also have to make sure you always keep a backup copy of Windows2k/XP/OSX so that you can run iTunes, even if only under emulation, on whatever hardware/architechture/OS is popular a few decades down the line.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
So Napster-To-Go is subscription internet radio, then.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
"...you get the ability to legally listen to whatever tracks (that they have the rights to) for that month..."
It's a radio, is what you're saying. But I get that for free with my car.
All I know is I don't RENT music. I am buying another iPod. iTunes is great, the price is right and the player is top notch. What else can you ask for?
Not legal in the US, asshat.
you have no idea how to follow a thread, do you? He's talking about if they were to allow you to keep the music post-subscription.
You could do it the hard way, or just get a Mac. LOSER!
Funny, every Beatles track I own came from a legal digital music provider. IT'S CALLED THE CD STORE, YOU FUCKING ASSHAT!
18 months?? Dude, stop buying the shit brand CDRs, there is a difference. Idiot.
You may not want it, but soon there will be just one brand and one store for everything. Say hello to Wal-Mart. Just recently there was an article in BusinessWeek about how they want to become a bank. Truly frightening!
Last time I checked, radio hasn't played a good song in about 12 years. Asshat.
You wrote that whole fucking post just to point out that you have a "girlfriend". Didn't you? Well, I DON'T BELIEVE YOU!
Do a true double blind listening test with A, B, and C (randomly selected copy of either A or B). You'll be shocked at the fact that you won't be able to consistently identify them. Any listening setup you want.
-- I speak only for myself
No it doesn't. If this were the case, what would stop you from subscribing for a month, downloading 10,000 songs, burning them, and quitting the service, keeping your 10,000 songs?
Somehow I don't thing it works that way. With iTunes you can burn your songs to CD at any point, because you have bought them, not subscribed to them.
.... one that beats out iTMS and Napster, believe it or not.... GNUTELLA!!! Free!!
Need I say more?
Check this out:
You pay $275 for the Creative 60GB player
Then you pay $0 to use the 14 day free trial of Napster To-Go to load it up with 60 GB of audio.
Then you discontinue the Napster service and for $275 you have 20,000 (60GB / 3MB) songs to listen to whenever you want.
Thanks Napster, I guess you _still_ are the source for free music after all!!!
(I'll stick to iPod and iTunes, thanks anyway)
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
This would kill it for me even if I was excited about their subscription model: they're only compatible with WinXP and Win2000.
Screw 'em.
Nice marketing idea they have there, though, implying that the huge number of iPod owners are idiots. That'll win them a lot of love, too.
I think there should be a Slashdot poll for how long it'll take before someone cracks MS-DRM they'll be using for Napster.
I'm curious how they're going to prevent persons from downloading 20,000 songs, stripping the DRM, then cancelling the account. Or stream the music and re-encode as standard MP3. Or something along those lines.
Sure, you don't own any of the songs, but what does it mean anyway - if you really want to own some songs you can buy them (for course, as a Microsoft user, not from Apple, but from some Microsoft-compatible store) and use Napster for the rest.
I guess you never heard of iTunes for Windows or that the iPod is compatible for windows. Now if you are referring to using MS DRM, then you are correct an apple product will not get you very far down that road (but then, who really wants to go down that road?).
It's still cheaper and better than iPod's way as it gives you more choices.
I do not see your arguement, both require you to use their software/hardware setup to access the music. If you do not have an iTunes compatible product then no iTunes, but at the same time if you do not run Napster's software then no Napster. Most work environments are going to frown on running a Napster client at work, especially because of Napster's past history with the RIAA.
Apple, actually, did great so far, but it's easy to see that their product was evolutionary (they did right what others have been trying for years) but in its essence, iPod automatizes things that are so 90's - hoarding MP3s
There is nothing wrong with hoarding MP3's. Personally I would like to have a something to show for all the money I am spending, and having the MP3 file in hand ensures that I will be able to use the music later independent of the company I bought it from. In the Napster model, you basically become Napster's bitch because if you quit handing over cash the music flow stops. At least with the Apple model, once you pay the man you get to walk away if you choose to (burning a CD and storing it).
Voting them all out of office, now that's change I can believe in.
So was this a violation?
I see no mention of iTMS files there. Looks like regular mp3s to me. And as for the legality, why not call up the RIAA and ask their opinion:
1.888.BAD.BEAT
Da Blog
Being a coward I haven't RTFA but I imagine that they allow you to burn to cd.
You imagine wrong.
If you get 10 cute girls, let me know when you're "done" with them.
Well, you could do that, or you could recognize that Apple is quietly working on everyone's side by making the encryption layer as simplistic as possible required to placate the RIAA. If you don't like the DRM, rip it out. It's not that difficult. I've even seen artsy-fartsy types get through it unscathed. Get the tracks you purchased in a relatively forwardproof format.
The other major alternative is MS, and we know they'll come down like a ton of bricks on anything that could possibly stop them from suckling at the RIAA's tit. MS get licensing fees up the ass, and the RIAA pushes MS solutions on hardware vendors like you wouldn't believe. Therefore it's in their best interest to act like a 900lb gorilla (which they can do because of the Windopoly) on anything that threatens their ability to gain marketshare.
Got a cool tool that lets you rip the DRM out of various MS formats? Better have good lawyers - or release it anonymously and pray they don't hunt you down. Even overseas sites aren't beyond the influence of that gorilla. They'll waste money on fruitless lawsuits just to placate the RIAA. As comparison, once HYMN went overseas Apple gave up because they knew it to be fruitless. In cases like that MS has just kept hounding people, even if they're no longer involved in the project (the old DOJ/DEA/FBI/etc routine - hurt the people you can to influence the people you can't hurt).
What makes you think that ClearChannel is the only choice in radio? ClearChannel doesn't even exist outside the USA. Even inside the USA, there are better stations.
My point was that for $15/month until I die, I would want to have access to anything I might want to listen to. I don't own any Beatles albums and I only have a couple MP3s from them. However, I'd want to be able to listen to anything that struck my fancy at any time for the price and that definately includes some Beatles.
Oddly, if you switched to a Mac your WMA songs would still play. Microsoft makes a Window Media Player for Macintosh, but you would be much better off just converting any WMAs to MP3s before switching.
Let's say that instead of buying those 350 albums to get your 360 songs, you bought those 360 songs from iTMS, over those same 10 years. Then you paid $3/month, instead of $15/month. Of course. Obviously. AND you still have the songs, unless you elect to try to sell them, or give them away. (Apple has publicly stated that selling iTMS music is cumbersome and probably not practical, but is still legal. You're welcome to assume that they were lying when they said that, but since I'll just challenge you to prove it, you've got an uphill battle.)I can't imagine in what way you could call iTMS 'renting'. You pay once for the song. You never have to pay again. You keep it, and the right to play it or listen to it, forever. The only way to define this as 'renting' is to completely change the meaning of the word 'renting' to include this.And here we find the crux of your argument: 'I know how much music should cost and so I should have the right to decide how much I pay for it, and iTMS doesn't let me do that.' As a musician, and a friend to professional musicians, let me say that while I don't appreciate the RIAA's view of life, I don't like yours either.
In fact, I'd be delighted if I could sell my tracks on iTMS for $0.50 and get 1/2 of that for myself. (I sell about 50 albums a year these days (at about 15 songs per album), so it's not like that would cover recording expenses, but oh well, such is the life of a folk musician.) But, of course, people like you believe that you should be able to decide what my creative output should sell for, and how it should be used.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Don't forget that if this model is successful, there will be the inevitable time when the $14 dollars per month will no longer pay the bills. Or worse, Napster may need more profit, or Microsoft may need to charge a higher fee for their DRM. Either way, your access to their music will likely cost more in the future, so in essence, you will have to pay a royalty on music you never owned or believed you owned at an earlier time and cheaper price.
No, not really...
One thing that most people don't understand is that it is indeed stupid to own songs because all that copying and burning is so redundant and waste of time.
/.er you sure don't seem to know much about the speed of tech innovation. In any case this is analogous to renting vs. buying a house: buying is more of an initial expense but it ends up being cheaper in the long run and you have something to show for your money.
With today's technologies, all one needs to have are playlists and the music can be downloaded from wherever.
No, it is stupid to not understand that the minute you drop your subscription you lose all your music forever. In other words you are stuck with the same service for the rest of your life. For a
Apple writes: "The iTunes Music Store lets you quickly find, purchase and download the music you want for just 99 per song. You can burn individual songs onto an unlimited number of CDs for your personal use, listen to songs on an unlimited number of iPods and play songs on up to five Macintosh computers or Windows PCs. And the iTunes software works so smoothly on both platforms that you can share music with any combination of Macs and Windows PCs on a local area network and regardless of whether you're running iTunes on a Mac or PC."
That statement is enough to blow everything Napster said in that article out of the water. I read the quote and I was like, "Since when is there a subscription for iTunes?" Either that or I've really been screwing Apple all this time at 99 cents per song.
I love how Creative and Napster tell people that ipods suck. It seems like they are basically going up to people and saying, "you only think you love your ipod, really you want one of our [dell,creative,rio,other dumbass company] Jokebox player. They just dont get it. people really do like their ipods... why? because they just work perfectly. Stop trying to convince the public that they dont like their ipods, that would be my first piece of advice for creative (etc.), my second would be consentrate on products not advertising. The third thing i would say would be, napster, just stop trying, your service blows, you are no longer cool.
and where are the loyal defenders of p2p who like all the music you want = $0 and you own it.
pissing off metallica is fun.
Mike
No worries, all that's needed is one of those 're-imaginings' currently en vogue.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
You must've missed yesterday's story about them?
:)
Music Site AllofMP3 Under Investigation.
But of course, that only matters if you really believed they were completely legit to begin with. People I know just seem to treat it as a paid Kazaa with much better quality files. They know that even if it was legal (which is already doubtable), artists aren't getting much (if any) money. They just don't care
It is obvious when you think about it, but people forget. When the poster I was replying to says "Because it hasn't worked and won't work. itune sells at $.99 per song and makes the tinyest profit after a couple of years... you think $14 per month for thousands of songs per subscription/month is even worth the time you took to post?" he's wrong. It won't work with the current RIAA system. But in the end, it will work. Yeah, I'm just stating the obvious, but sometimes people need reminding of it.
I am trolling