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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, but if you go a month without buying two CDs, nobody comes to your house and takes away all your other CDs.
After all, I will pay for the ease of someone else managing my CD collection.
You must be one lazy motherfucker. How hard is it to unwrap a CD, rip it, and stick it on a shelf? Even if you keep your collection alphabetized, we're talking minutes per month.
$10,000 to fill your iPod vs. $14.95 per month with Napster
My iPod is pretty full already, $0, largely due to songs I downloaded from Napster a few years ago.
Oh? I was supposed to delete those?
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
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?
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?
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.
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.
So you're complaining about iTunes? 9.99 for an entire album compared to ~20 at Best Buy or some other store? If the CD you purchased for ~20 breaks, does the store let you get a free copy of the album? Nope.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
> I have another hundred or so CDs I still
>haven't ripped. What is the value of those
>songs to me?
Of course those cds still have a value to you,
drop by your local used cd dealer and it's money
in your pocket.
Maybe one of these services could consider a plan where if you rented a song for a set amount of time, it would become "yours", or at least unexpireable. That way I could experement with new artists, and get rid of them the next month, but my favorites would stay on my computer if I ever decide to stop subscribing. Another idea is to have the subscription rental service, then have discounts on "buying" the music you rent. For instance, $15 a month for unlimited rental of music, and $0.49 to buy any one of those songs.
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.
Er, even if (and I say if) you are right that it's only 1 cent profit per song, Apple have sold 250 million songs to date, and are selling ongoing at a rate of 1.5 million a day, or ~ half a billion songs a year.
I think a 10-cent profit is more likely, making their yearly projection $50 million, which is hardly pocket change...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
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.]
The "geek"lure of iTunes is that you CAN take all your songs out of iTunes and put them to normal, standard playing CDs if you want to. Apple has DRM to keep sloppy people from being stupid and sharing everything on line, but normal "fair-use" is mostly supported.... so Apple's store makes up for the DRM with convinenance of per-song purchasing in your 'jammies during a blizzard....
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.
No, they can't do that because this new campaign implies that buying 99-cent songs is "stupid."
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.
'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".
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.
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...
Just a quick nitpick...
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.
Actually, that's not exactly true. There is an option in iTunes that will allow you to deauthorize your computer, so that if a machine is going to be reloaded, serviced, what-have-you, it's not going to take up one of your five allotments anymore. If you forget to deauthorize a machine and have already wiped it, they even provide a web-based form which allows you to deauthorize it without being on the machine.
There's an Apple knowledge base article which explains it more here.
Just my $.02...
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!
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
Hmmm....give my money to the Russian mafia.....or give it to the RIAA.
Well, the Russian mafia won't use that money to sue my friends. So, yeah, I think I'll get my checkbook.
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?
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
"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.
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...
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
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.
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 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.
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.
..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"
Yeah, they changed their plans a *lot* too..
"eMusic offers three subscription plans:
eMusic Basic: $9.99 per month
40 MP3 downloads per billing month
Unlimited transfers
Unlimited CD burning
eMusic Plus: $14.99 per month
65 MP3 downloads per billing month
Unlimited transfers
Unlimited CD burning
eMusic Premium: $19.99 per month
90 MP3 downloads per billing month
Unlimited transfers
Unlimited CD burning
Once you are an eMusic subscriber, you will continue to be billed monthly until you cancel your subscription. "
When i was a subscriber, they implemented these changes and forced you onto one of the new plans - but they would not let me cancel until my 12 month subscription was up. *THAT* pissed me off to no end. They completely yanked the All-You-Can-Eat, limited it to 40 mp3s per *month* and then said "No, you cannot cancel. Bugger off!"
Unbelievable gall they had. I wrote them, told them how upset I was about their nerve, and cancelled the credit card that it was billing.
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
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.
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
Try gifting them to your family, or your heir
hrrrrmmm..
run itunes
->make playlist
->burn-to-cd
->give CD to family member
apple gives me a license to burn music to CD, CD is my property, CD becomes family member's property.
hackers of the world unite!
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.
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
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.
Sounds like crap to me. Kazaa offers a much better deal.
You mean, cable TV? No, I don't. I don't rent DVDs either; new DVDs don't cost much more than than renting them, and I have a backlog of purchased DVDs to watch.
The same applies to "renting" music I wouldn't want to listen to a lot. Because that's what Napster is: a system for listening to music you don't really want to listen to that much. I have more than enough music I want to listen to, to fill up my hard drive, let alone my portable music player.
Even if I had the disk space to store music I don't want to keep, I wouldn't want to pay for the privilege of doing so.
If I want to hear music I've never heard before, I will:
1) listen to the radio
2) listen to a friend's music (something iTunes makes easier than Napster appears to, but CDs make easier yet)
3) listen to previews on iTunes or mp3tunes.com
Music I want to listen to, I buy. I'm sure some people will enjoy the Napster rental service; but personally I can't see paying a monthly fee so that I can listen to music I don't enjoy enough to buy.
Jerry
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.
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
>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.
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.
Leagally you are wrong. By law you are the owner of the file on your harddrive. It is your property. You can indeed sell or gift your harddrive and your files on that harddrive to anyone you like.
Now where things get messy is the DMCA which may or may not cause a problem for the NEW owner of those files to decrypt and play them. I'd like to note that DMCA anti-cricumvention law is potentially unconstitutional and that in the 7 or 8 years that it has been on the books it has NEVER been upheld in court against anyone. Not once.
But reguardless of the DMCA mess, the legal FACT is that you owner of that file, it is your property, you can in fact sell it, and it does in fact become the legal property of the person you give it to.
As the law explicitly states, and as the Supreme Court has explicitly stated, the copyright holder's property is in the the copyright itself - the rights of copying. He does NOT have any ownership of the information itself NOR ownership in any copy he has sold or given away. Once he sells or gives away any individal copy he has no property rights in that copy. That copy is the property of the new owner. Of course the new owner of that copy does not aquire any rights of copying.
Ownership of copyrights and ownership of individual copies are two entirely seperate things.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
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!
Well, not if that family member is a close family memeber.
Here's the official answer from the local ASCAP. It's the same in most countries, maybe not the USA (DMCA?).
#include "coucou.h"