Slashdot Mirror
Legal Music Downloads Increase in 2005
GraWil writes "The CBC is reporting there is marked increase in legal music downloads in 2005. American internet users downloaded 158 million individual songs from January to June 2005, compared with 55 million during the same period in 2004; during the same period, U.S. CD sales decreased by 7%. According to Peter Jamieson, head of the British Phonographic Industry, "the record industry has enthusiastically embraced the new legal download services ... and now we're beginning to reap the rewards". In the UK, sales of seven-inch vinyl singles were also up 87% on last year."
OMG!! teh downloads are bringing down our profits!
I wonder how they conclude these things anyway when they have no clue how many songs were downloaded in the black market to begin with....
I bet you the illegal music traffic tripled as well.
If I had the time I could probably prove that broadband connections increased in number, prices fell, newer technologies connected more people, etc...
This is a piece of not-so-well crafted corporate propaganda.
Broken Hearts are for Assholes. - Frank Zappa
that only 14 seven-inch vinyl albums were sold in all of England last year.
[http://it-tastes-so-good.blogspot.com] Are you hungry?
This was inevitable. The popularity of illegal music sites was a clear example of how many consumers loved the idea of downloading digital music. Most people didn't do it to cheat artists, they did it because they had no choice. Now that the labels are catching on they will be rewarded with huge profits. Now if only the TV and movie industry would catch on. There is big money to be made off legal movies and shows, just wait.
Voice your opinion!
I guess the natural connection between downloadable music and 45 RPMs has finally been realized in the United Kingdom.
Huh??
Isn't this the same british phonographic industry that was criticising BBC for offering legal classical music downloads? So this means that they like legal downloads, as long as it is not free. Great.
"According to Peter Jamieson, head of the British Phonographic Industry..."
Gotta rehash own brain... read the above as According to Peter Jamieson, head of the British Pornographic Industry
http://zeikfried.no-ip.com/
Dumbledore dies in the new harry potter book
When it's easy to do it legally (aka the iPod), people will do it legally. Why?
Not because people have a great amount of respect for the law, but because we have a great amount of respect for the easy.
The thing to realize is that both sides not only believe they are working towards the greater good but are objectively doing so even with radically different and diametrically opposed 'solutions' to the problem.
It really puts things in perspective to realize not only that each side is right but that there is more to be gained for each to sit down and figure out what to do with the deer in the forest rather than constantly fighting over territory and methodology.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
huh? give ppl a way to give you money more easily and they open their wallets? imagine what could have been if they had embraced the internet back in the 90's instead of fighting it tooth and nail. just like audio tapes, just like video tapes. they fought so hard to stop these scary, uncontrolable, make-copying-easy technologies. and they turned into cash cows.
Help yourself, it's free
Also people are known to like not having to pay.
I know I would pay for a service where if I paid a certain amount of money I could get access to a BT tracker that was distributing DRM-'ed video files. I wouldn't mind signing up for a "pay-by-the-show" format, in case I miss an episode. Especially now that my favorite shows(Stargate SG-1, Lost, etc.) are trending towards more arc-ish storylines, so I won't get lost with the story. Granted, most TV programming doesn't have enough story to make these kinds of things worthwhile. I mean, why do I care if Jerry gets eliminated on Survivor 2000:The Last Place on Earth We Haven't Filmed In Yet?
Is this because of the blackout US had earlier on the year?
How could it be 158 million legal American downloads over six months, when Apple claims about 250 million iTunes sales over the same period (albeit world-wide)? Also, at about $1 per song, the total sales are still a very small percentage of total music CD sales, so we've still got quite a way to go before CDs are history.
I just tried Napster again yesterday for the first time in over a year, but it still suffers from all of the problems that I had with it last time.
The catalog is incomplete, to really replace Limewire, it has to offer ALL of the songs I want. That includes some pretty obscure songs. Basically, my personal library is 1,500 songs or so off of Limewire. Napster's whole library seems to show about 750,000 songs. The legal library is 500 times the size of my own, but I don't like one in every 500 songs, probably only 1 in 1,000, if that, so there are huge gaps.
DRM sucks. It basically turns digital music into something that can only be effectively used while sitting right in front of the computer. I want a standard format (MP3) that I can burn to standard audio CDS, use on my Rio MP3 player, and burn to data discs that will work in an mp3 cd player, or my set top dvd player. DRM makes much of this impractical. Of course there is the argument that everybody would just steal the MP3's provided by the service. But why bother. If they cost $1 each, and I could do whatever I wanted with them, and they were good quality, not to mention legal. I wouldn't hesitate to skip the Limewire hassle and just by directly from them.
And where in the hell is the quality that was supposed to be associated with the pay services. What is stopping Napster from offering up the songs at 512k instead of the paltry 128 that they seem to be using now (yeah, wma makes a difference, but I still want bigger files). I would be happy spending even $2 per song for 512 DRMless MP3's that are legal. Instead, the stuff Napster sells sounds the exact same as the MP3's that came off of Napster 1. Not what I was expecting. I want 14mb downloads at 5mbps+/second, and why not, except for the size I can get everything else off of Limewire.
Further, I have to boot into Windows to use Napster or itunes (not counting pymusique). I don't like doing that, and I really can't play drm'd wmas under linux.
Limewire is still the best option. It's fast for a Java Application, it runs on anything with a virtual machine, can easily max out my download bandwidth, and I can use the files however I want. Of course, most of the files aren't legal, but the legal files can't do what I want so what good are they?
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
To me is seems that the fact there were/are many illegal download services, the record companies should have been trying to introduce legal services from the very start instead of trying in courts to stop a service that people demonstarted they wanted.
;)
If they introducted the services themselves in the first place, I would have expected for them to get a bigger cut of the profits so it still surprises me today in the cut throat business world that it has taken so long for these people to wake up to the market demands.
Cheers
Speaking of legal music downloads, a band with music in the 2005 release of War of the Worlds has their song available for download. A small portion of the song is in the movie, when the Tom Cruises kid is walking out of the truck with his headphones on toward the beginning of the movie. Pretty cool for the band to offer it from their site for free.
You can get the song here. This is direct from the bands site, so I bet its legit. The bands name is Capstone.
http://www.capstonemusic.net
so where the freak is iTunes AU???
I'd really love to be into this "legal" download sensation but noone will sell to me (and if it doesn't work on my pod I'm not interested).
There are people in this community who will continue to lobby against legal downloads no matter what the terms or what technology is used. I swear, sometimes I think that if Linus himself started a company that sold no-DRM OGG Vorbis songs for a penny a piece and you got a free blowjob from Natalie Portman with every 10 purchased tracks that we'd still see posts on slashdot justifying P2P piracy because we didn't get to pick out Natalie's outfit when she showed up at our parent's basement to deliver.
There are people who read news like this who are encouraged that market is beginning to respond (as markets always do) and there are people who read this news and get grumpy because it just got a little bit more difficult to continue to rationalize their greedy piracy.
How did you react?
I agree. When iTunes first started doing its thing, a lot of people griped that they didn't think there was a large enough difference between the cost of a CD and the cost of a downloaded album. They argued that you're not getting a physical product, and you're getting a lossy copy, so why does it still cost $9.99 (never mind that this is, in some cases, nearly a 50% reduction.)
I never saw it that way. I always thought that the convenience and the speed with which I could acquire the album more than made up for not getting the CD, and not having a perfect, pristine copy. I had a Paypal balance a number of months back, and debated using it on Ebay, to acquire several albums, or on iTunes to do the same. I chose iTunes - even though I might have been able to get more albums, plus liner notes & the original CDs, through eBay. Why did I choose iTunes? Because I wanted the songs on my iPod that day.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
they sold a few million of them in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
I wouldnt download music from these services anyday. Why? The quality is just too bad. When I get a CD, I listen to it for the quality of sound not because of price. For me, I would rather buy music and get a better sounding product, than download.
"the record industry has enthusiastically embraced the new legal download services ... and now we're beginning to reap the rewards"
More like:
"the record industry was lead by the balls kicking and screaming into download services...and now we're beginning to rape the rewards"
CDs are still far worse sounding than vinyl.
CDs may sound better than most MP3 files "find", but CDs sound worse than records.
Apple has posted record profits ($320 M) for the third quarter. Apple shipped 6.2 million iPods in the quarter. Also sales of computers were up 35%. It seems that there really is a halo effect.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
I've experimented with three of the top mp3 downloading services: iTunes, AllOfMp3 and Napster. And of the three, AllOfMp3.com was clearly the fairest with the best selection.
.99 cost per track which is a little expensive. Nice interface though.
I guess calling them "music" downloading services is more accurate, because iTunes distributes songs in the mpeg4 format (I'm guessing only the iPod can play mpeg4's, because my MuVo mp3 player won't). Other annoyances include a circa 20 mg application I had to download and install just to have the privilege to shop at iTunes, the rather weak selection (I was looking for tracks off the new Seether album "Karma and Effect", which they didn't have) and lastly the
Napster is so friggin' annoying, from the splash page to the pathetic selection (unless you like rap like R. Kelly *gag*) that I had to bail. They too didn't have any of the tracks I was looking for.
Happily, AllOfMp3.com did have all the tracks I wanted, and each track costs about 12 to 20 cents! This is by far the best deal I could find. The "catch" is you have to commit $10 from your credit card, but I easily got more than an album's worth of music I really wanted, and I'll continue to shop there for all my fist raising, head banging needs. The interface was simple enough to navigate (could be streamlined more, but I'm nit-picking) and I was able to download in mp3 format at various levels of quality. Highly configurable. IMHO, it's the best music download service on the internet.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
I think we're missing the true tragedy here - the lawyers. They're going to have to go back to...pursuing justice!
"Enthusiatically emrbraced!??"
My Mother fucking ass is what they've enthusiastically embraced you fokin paid dipshit! Have you forgotten all those lawsuits? You asked for this one buddy.
Where's my free iPod!? Until then, I'll settle for a kiss...
I'd buy music if I could find somewhere that sells to Australasia - and that is actually legally allowed to sell these files. And no, don't point me to that dodgy Russian MP3 retail site. Until then KLR it is. :-)
Most people didn't do it to cheat artists, they did it because they had no choice.
Please stop perpetuating such utter nonsense. They CLEARLY had a choice, but simply refused to exercise the required displine. I exercised that choice (and still am). I have no regrets whatsover, and I can honestly say I played an honorable game, even if the RIAA is a greedy whore of an organization.
However it was this guy's last name -- Jamieson -- that confused me.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
"the record industry has enthusiastically embraced the new legal download services ... and now we're beginning to reap the rewards"
Only because they were dragged kicking and screaming into it. They have done EVERYTHING in their power to prevent even the LEGAL downloading of material. In addition, they have used their might to stop or at least slow down acceptance of new media devices. I need only point to such debacles as:
- The Cassette tape
- The DAT/Cassette DAT
- The CD-R
- The digital MP3 player (remember when they tried to stop those?)
- The Napster ruling
- Internet Radio
Etc... In short, they hate any technology they do not have 110% control over. If the music industry thought they could charge by the minute, they would.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
when M$ charges $300 for XP everybody cries foul. but charging $1 or so per song is also too expensive in my mind. Apple got ~50 million songs downloaded @$1/song. Bring prices down to reasonable limit 1-5 cents and legal downloads will take off the ground.
This sig doesnt exist.
I got my Vinyl here and my mp3's to play on the vinyl here.
Music Industry Profit Model for new distribution methods.
Step 1 - Ignore.
Step 2 - Start noticing people like this new method and prefer it over the current model.
Step 3 - Sue everyone out of fear.
Step 4 - Start encountering resistance.
Step 5 - Start realising that it could work.
Step 6 - Devise new models using the new method.
Step 7 - Push it out into the mainstream and realise larger profits than before.
Its been that way for centuries (eg piano rolls, cassettes, etc). Thank goodness we finally got to Step 7 for music downloads now.
Now to wait and see how p2p services eventuate. I think we are somewhere between Step 3 and 5 so far.
That would be funny if it weren't for the fact that dance music and DJs are even more popular in the UK than in the US. Technics turntables are probably more common there than BMWs. And that's just with the young, popular music buying crowd. I'm sure a lot of their parents still have phonograps around too.
Hands up! How many read "Peter Jamieson, head of the British Pornographic Industry"
I don't need a signature.
Sales of singles have been on the decline for years, long before downloading became an issue, but nobody really cared much because album sales were still strong. Now we all know that most albums contain maybe 2 or 3 songs we want to listen to and the rest is filler. Yes there are exceptions but not many. If the shift in legal music sales is away from shops to online distribution and people no longer feel the need to buy an album to get the songs they want then what's the point of making an album? What's the ROI if only a couple of tracks actually turn a profit? Is this part of the reason the "Music Industry" is afraid to move online? Bands get corraled into deals that give them money up front that's then used to pay for everything including studio time, producers etc etc. If the costs to manufacture your profitable product (a track) is slashed and you no longer waste time on unprofitable "inventory" doesn't that empower the musicians? You don't need all that upfront money to make an album because you won't be making an album.
when M$ charges $300 for XP everybody cries foul. but charging $1 or so per song is also too expensive in my mind. Apple got ~50 million songs downloaded @$1/song
It's worse than that. Apple has sold just about 495 million songs. Half a billion dollars. See the links below.
http://www.apple.com/itunes/500million/
http://www.apple.com/itunes/
is support sites like eMusic. They off high quality, legal, non-DRM mp3s for 22-25 cents (depending on your monthly plan). Right now they are offering 50 free downloads from their very unique catalog (of which you can cancel if you like, but I'm sure not going to). Some of the stuff you can get from iTunes (so it's cheaper from eMusic.com) but a lot of you can't because it's from mostly independent labels or back-collections. If you like great music no-one's heard of, this is your site. The user-base seems pretty knowledable about what's good, so their "list" feature is nice. They also have incorporated some social networking/clustering features which allow you to see who your "neighbors" are with common interests. Supporting a site like eMusic, allows them to expand their already great selection, so check them out: eMusic.com. At least try it out, get your free mp3s, and then decide. They are offering 50 free because they believe that once you try it, you'll want to continue using the service; it's the best kind of advertising gimmick there is: offering a good product.
Its nice because the russians can't get your credit card number, and the money is paid to paypal which is relatively reputable.
That one made me laugh. I'm not sure which is the funnier word, enthusiastically or embraced.
Nice try making it look as if the industry was the one which ushered in the age of downloadable music. They did everything to stop it and when it steamrolled them over, they 'accepted' it and made it look like it was their creation.
I wish I could warp to another universe, Trance Gemini style, where there was no napster, no kazaa and no BT and look at how enthusiastically they had embraced it there.
http://www.allofmp3.com
http://www.allofmp3.com/>
allofmp3.com is the best stuff. select your own bitrate, fileformat and generate the price and size you want personally and individually....
best store there is...
support allofmp3 and dont buy and pirate shit you dont need. teach those greedy music/video industries that its your money that keeps them alive....
teach them capitalists and evil people on this world. all they want is power over more and more people and kill and suppress and enslave other contries and folks....
I would be happy spending even $2 per song for 512 DRMless MP3's that are legal.
.99 is pushing it for most stuff.
I'm not trying to be contentious with you, but I do want to clarify to any/all the suits out there who own online music services that $2 per song ain't cool with everybody! I find even
But it's legality is quite dubious
From your very own link:
Museekster: The number one question for everyone that hears of Allofmp3 and MP3search is: "Are these really legal services". Can your clarify the situation on copyrights in Russia?
Roms: Yes, the sites you mentioned conduct their business legally and are licensed by ROMS, in full accordance with Russian and international law.
It is legal. OK not everybody is happy about that, but it's the law. Lots of laws have supporters and protestors. How is that dubious?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
When you're financialy killed like you and I are, you gotta make the cutbacks. Paying for music would be top on my list for such cost-cutting.
However, if you live in Canada, don't worry about it anyway. Music downloading is not illegal in any way, as determined by the courts. Copyright infringement? Maybe, but copyrights are never read, unenforcable and nebulous in regards to their legality.
I recommend checking out AllOfMp3 if you either can't find the song you want on the p2p networks or want to download legally. It's cheap, it operates in full accordance with Russian and international law and super user-friendly. You don't even have to use your credit card number. Instead buy a prepaid code from XROST/PayPal and enter that code into allofmp3.
Just a thought. I know what it's like to scrape by!
So I guess it depends on how squeeky clean do you want to be???
Or maybe whether you believe ripping off artists by copying their music is a good thing to do? There are plenty of alternatives (magnatune for one) which are DRM free, and you can still buy CDs. Most people however don't care, so long as the chance of being caught is vanishingly small. Same thing happens in nations without an effective police force; anarchy and those who can take, take, and fuck the rest of the world.
Unfortunately people are most of the time amoral, and until music providers can appeal to their self-interest it's not likely they'll choose to stop copying music.
Once more, they've got you just where they want you, using their terminology and so gradually succumbing to their way of thinking. This article is not about measuring LEGAL downloads at all, but about measuring PAY-FOR dowloads. P2P filesharing networks are used to download immense quantities materialy legally: public domain material, stuff that's out of copyright, tracks released by bands who active encourage downloading. Most recently and visibly, of course, the BBC's Beethoven symphonies. None of this important traffic is counted under the heading of "legal downloads" because none of it lines the pockets of the RIAA and their buddies. But WE DON'T HAVE TO PLAY ALONG with their fiction that nothing that doesn't give them money is legal! Please, folks. Let's get our terminology right.
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
your about 40 minutes too late. and somebuddy all ready made the reference to jenna jameson too.
I just found this site today and can't believe that there is any way it would be legal in the US. It seems pretty industrial strength, as it uses Akamai to host all it's content, but I can't understand how they are able to host all the copyrighted content. http://www.id1g1t.com/search.php
Am I the only one that keeps reading that as the "British Pornographic Industry"?
When iTunes and other services like it were first introduced, wasn't the music industry complaining about losing profits because of individual song downloads and fears of people stripping the DRM and redistributing the music?
Now they want us to believe that they were driving this change and are finally reaping the rewards of their efforts?
I think it is more like, they were forced to embrace legal music downloads once they realized it wasn't going away.
Vinyl records are very much making a comeback, particularly among teenage audiophiles. Doing a quick search on Amazon for 'vinyl' promptly reveals all number of new LPs - the most recent Manic Street Preachers album, for example, saw release on vinyl. I prefer vinyl to CDs, myself, so I'm certainly not complaining.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
Your paying for allofmp3, who returns nothing to the artists/publishers and just puts the profits in there own pockets.
It your going that unethical route anyway (which you should think hard about, being a worker, I enjoy be compensated for my work), I suggest you just pirate the stuff and not provide the Allofmp3 the profits. At least p2p your peers aren't getting rich off you.
For me, I really don't notice the difference between downloaded tracks and the tracks from the CD - sometimes I've purchased both.
You could probably tell in some parts, but it would take a careful ear.
Basically, I am happy with the roughly $5 discount per album to get files that are only marginally worse quality than the CD. I'm even happier getting a $10 discount off the album to just buy a few tracks that I like and skip the rest of the CD.
Many people seem to agree judging by how succssful it is...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The big problem with legal downloads is that the downloader doesn't know what the music will sound like until it is actually downloaded and played. Which takes a long time and consumes a lot of bandwidth. Internet downloading is very inefficient way to become introduced to new music.
What the music download sites should do is get the 'artists' to agree to put one of their (hopefully best) recordings (3-5 minutes max) in MP3 or OGG format on a DVD-ROM. These DVD-ROMs can hold about 1000 songs in high-quality MP3 format. Blank DVD-ROMs are selling for about $0.40US each now.
People interested in new music would contact the New Music Artists Association NMAA and order one of this month's DVDs sent to them in the mail for a few dollars. With a thousand songs on each DVD, hundreds of new artists can get their music exposed to hundreds of thousands of people without signing away their future earnings to the currupt music recording distribution companies, the RIAA.
All the heat generated over downloading really masks the real fact that downloading is the worst way to become exposed to new music. The limits of bandwidth are really a gift for RIAA. People get quite discouraged with the whole concept of new music through downloading after getting five or six tunes over a dial-up connection and finding none of them are of any interest.
But then again, the RIAA (and by this I mean the companies funding this group, of course) is not interested in promoting new music. They want to continue to get the endless free money that comes from selling the same old recordings over and over again. It's like being a lumber company in a magic forest where the trees regrow a hundred feet overnight after being cut down.
To be fair, it's the record companies who provided the studio, the gear, the recording engineer, the promotional tour, the TV commercials, the encoded music to send to Apple using their "iTunes Producer" app, and the radio spots to advertise that music.
Yes, the inevitability is that artists will do all this themselves, but right now, record labels are still untouchable when it comes to promotion.
Most people didn't do it to cheat artists, they did it because they had no choice.
No, I'd say most people pirate music so they don't have to pay for it. They're not "forced" because they "had no choice." You make it sound like they're victims of something, downloading music with a gun to their heads.
You seem to have invented a statistic from thin air, claiming "most people" weren't pirating to pirate. Get real. There are "ripping groups" solely devoted to releasing albums before their store release dates.
There isn't some idealistic movement behind piracy. No culture movement or revolution going on. It's very simple--it's people using their high-speed connections to get stuff so they don't have to pay for it.
The most bizarre thing is the way they justify it--sticking it to the RIAA when they're really sticking it to the artists they claim to be standing up for. The artists willingly signed their RIAA contracts. I doubt any of these pirates have actually talked to any artists about it before downloading their music for free.
Yahoo! Music Unlimited
Actually, it's my wife's subscription. She first started buying music from iTunes because she was afraid I'd get busted for downloading music illegally (I have a security clearance, and for the record, the polygraphers don't care. I fessed up to all my digital crimes: downloading music, copying software...yeah, that's about it. I told my polygrapher and he said, "great, now let's talk about real crimes"). At $0.99 a pop it gets expensive and she likes a lot of music.
For her birthday I got her a Creative Zen Micro and a subscription to Yahoo Music Unlimited. Sure, it's an annual payment but for $60/year she has access to a growing catalog of music. None of the tracks are fake either, like you find elsewhere these days. She has no need to burn CDs (I also got her an FM transmitter for the car) and the Zen Micro comes in chick-friendly colors.
I may subscribe to the service myself in fact...there's a lot of good music I wouldn't mind having easy access to. Unfortunately I can't bring the player into work...only store-bought pre-burned music CDs can be brought in.
You know, I'm sick and tired of people bashing on the quality of downloadable music, at least when it comes to iTunes. I've compared the audio quality of multiple tracks in CD, Ogg and M4A formats. Not suprisingly, the Ogg file and CD track sounded identical. But the biggest suprise was the loss of quality in the M4A file was miniscule. I know I'm not the biggest audiophile out there, but if I were to play that track again in a random format, I would not have been able to pick out the format unless I had the others to compare it to. I decided then and there to toss my Ogg Vorbis collection and re-ripped all my CDs to M4A, to allow iTunes to be my permenant audio jukebox.
And *whoosh*, there goes any hope of you having a sensible position. "I'm poor, so the law shouldn't apply to me"? Rationalization, plain and simple.
It's made even more egregious by the rest of your post, which summarizes to "I can only afford some of the luxuries I want, so clearly I shouldn't have to pay for additional luxuries."
Whatever happened to personal responsibility? Whatever happened to budgetting? Does that mean I think you're "greedy"? Well, let's look at the Google-supplied definition:
Excessively desirous of acquiring or possessing, especially wishing to possess more than what one needs or deserves.
You certainly don't need cigs, online games, or new CDs. Unless you can give some kind of rationale for why you deserve music you've decided isn't one of your financial priorities, then the definition fits.