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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."
Heheeh. You think THAT's bad? Look at what the BPI did to cheap CD's on the internet. They make the RIAA look like a drugged out PTA meeting. http://www.sheffieldforum.co.uk/showthread/t-6362. html
Uhm...Isn't your .sig a Yoda comment?
I have signed up to Rhapsody due to the advice of so many slashdotters. Well, not to mention my Napster trial sucked due to so many "buy-only" tracks.
I thought it would be crazy for me to keep the subscription service for more than 2 weeks. To my surprise, I am listening to new stuff every day for the 6 months. Subscription still going unbelievably strong. That's like $120 spent on music... I know I wouldn't buy 12 CDs in 1 year. My only worry is that I run out of stuff to listen to eventually.
Ahh....but....if the outhouse costs a quarter, and the extra-splintery log over the snake pit is free...and, well, you only get bitten by the snakes on the arse every once in a while.. But these two aren't totally analogous. Downloading music illegally is pretty easy. But, after you have iTunes all setup, using the Music store is more seamless. a) Zip the music down, grab your iPod, and go. Instead of, b)search for it on the illegal file shares, get 250 results, find the result that was RIAA hacked, download it, move it to the mounted storage device that your MP3 player shows up as, get in your car and start driving on a long trip to Zimbabwe before realizing that the awful noise you are hearing isn't your cell phone having a siezure... This is more to my point I suppose.
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
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
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.
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'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. :-)
I agree with your main point, but where do you find all your CD's for that cheap? Most stores that I have been to sell CD's mainly for $14-18, depending on how popular they are. However, the strangest part is that prices on CD's usually go up as they get older and harder to find. I personally like how iTunes has (more or less) adopted a flat pricing system, regardless of how much they could gouge people for the most popular, or most hard to find, music.
Although these could all be rash generalizations on my part, I admit.
int cents = 0;
cents += 2;
It depends on what type of music you like of course but I want whole albums. I also want physical media. If nothing else, physical media has second hand value.
"I'll be so glad when you vinylphiles finally all die out.
:)
...only on excellent vinyl playback equipment. It tends to be tougher to produce a mechanical device like a turntable cartridge with the same level of consistency that can be expected when producing ICs and the like. That (along with other factors like simple supply and demand) is why decent vinyl playback stuff tends to be quite a bit more expensive than decent CD players do. I have a reasonably high-end turntable and I enjoy using it tremendously... but I have to admit it wasn't cheap compared to digital gear in its league.
Hey, I tease.
But seriously... Nyquist and all that."
Nyquist and all that? All that the Nyquist theorem says on the subject is that a sampling audio system like PCM should, in theory, be able to reproduce signals with frequencies up to 1/2 of the sampling rate faithfully. But in the real world, there are at least two problems with that:
1) The low-pass filters used on the signal path are physical devices, not theoretical concepts. As such, they can't be absolutely perfect... they introduce phase distortions and begin attenuating at frequencies somewhat lower than 1/2 Fs.
2) Even if the filters were "perfect" (not attenuating or introducing phase distortion until 1/2 Fs, at which point the attenuation becomes infinite)... well, the jury is still out on whether 22050hz (the theoretical upper bound given the 44.1khz sampling rate of CDs) is really high enough. There's some evidence to suggest that even if we can't "hear" frequencies above 22.050khz, they can have an effect on the way we perceive lower frequencies that we can hear.
Just to be fair to both sides of the argument though...
"CDs are still far worse sounding than vinyl."
To return to the digital downloads aspect of the article a bit though... I have to completely agree with the poster who shuns download services for poor quality. The only times I've extensively used iTunes were the Pepsi free song promotions, and if I found any songs I really really liked... well I went on Amazon or to my local record store and sought out the CDs to re-rip as DRM-free Apple Lossless. Better sound quality and the ability to use the format of my choice will make CDs the clear winner in my book for a long time to come.
-Frank
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.
I think it probably is. A 99 cent song is still a lot less than the "$12+ for the entire CD just to get the song" situation we have now. Some will still download the entire album, but not all. I'm also guessing that impulse buying will increase.
So what happens now? They dump all their money into Britney, and you download the 1 song they hype on TV. They then go and browse randomly - possibly downloading from other artists which the company doesn't really market. This all depends on them having music that's worth listening to, so I imagine that in the short term they aren't going to make as much, until they give the customer a wider array of _good_ music to listen to.
Nope...it is not. All that is currently offered, is lossy recorded material. I'd love to buy stuff online, but, until they offer a lossless version of the music, that gives me the same abilities as I have when I buy a CD :to play on any player, and to rip to lossy formats on my own choice for poor listening environments (car, portable for gym)...then, I'm not interested.
Actually, the main reason I've not bought many CD's in recent history...I've pretty much got them all now!! I also find very little new music coming out that I find worth buying.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........