Slashdot Mirror
Costly Music Store Coming to Cellphones
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The new Sprint Music Store is the first legal music downloading service you can access right from a cellphone, and Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg gives high marks to the interface, download speed and playback quality. But he criticizes the 'stratospheric new price for the legal download of a single song: $2.50.' Sprint justifies the price because of the convenience and usability of its store. Mossberg responds, 'I believe something else is at work here: a lethal combination of two industries many consumers believe typically charge too much. One is the bumbling record industry, which has been seeking to raise prices in the fledgling legal downloading market even as it continues to bleed from free, illegal downloading. The other is the cellphone carriers, or, as I like to call them, "the Soviet ministries," which too often treat their customers as captive and refuse to allow open competition for services they offer over their networks.'"
Does this line mean that Zonk went to the WSJ and cut-n-pasted this article into slashdot as though someone submitted it, or did someone from the WSJ actually submit this to slashdot?
Either way, I'm not sure I like the precedent. (Seeing as how WSJ is subscription-based.)
My other car is first.
When you think about the ridiculous prices people pay for ringtones it's not that crazy. So maybe it'll work for the songs that you just HAVE to have right now, but otherwise why wouldn't you save a few dollars and just wait till you're home and get onto the iTunes store?
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
The other is the cellphone carriers, or, as I like to call them, "the Soviet ministries," which too often treat their customers as captive and refuse to allow open competition for services they offer over their networks."
Should be The other is the U.S. cellphone carriers... since competition works and takes care of this in all other markets.
In Sweden downloadable music for cellphones is 9 cents (0.69 Swedish Crona) per song from ComvIQ.
Second: No-one outside the U.S. will ever buy music just for their cell phones. Everyone over here uses SonyEricssons excellent K750 or W800i , syncing them with iTunes and MacOSX using scripts like iTMW or apps like Dreamsicle.
Third: I bet a case of beer that SonyEricsson will include iTunes in their cell phones during 2006. The demand is huge and they know they will have to do it, sooner or later. Nokia will also include iTunes as soon as they realize how Real sucks bigtime.
Am I the only one who sees this statement as falsely implying that all free downloads are ilelgal as opposed to those not authorized by the copyright holder/on works in the public domain, or is it just me?
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
This type of high pricing is increasing the copying of music and other illegal activities ..... if these songs are priced properly then i think it will help in stopping piracy.
i work for money, if u want loyalty, Go get a Dog.
is that the plan might actually work. I mean, on a per minute basis, it is actually a better deal than ring tones. Who is buying this stuff and why are they buying it I have no idea. Where's Darwin when you need him?
Consumers will determine if the 2.50 is a lot of money for a song. Many consumers decided that forking $2+ for a ringtone was well worth it.
Okay, the occasional ringtone someone has to have, I can see someone paying for.
But to listen to half-assed quality tunes on a device not made for that and probably sucks the batterylife of said device, I don't see this thing suceeding in pulling in regular customers to make decent revenue.
Who'd pay 1-1/2 times iTunes price? Which is already overpriced considering what I can get some used CDs for on amazon.com or ebay or half.com, etcetera.
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My other car is first.
Are there any j2me bittorrent implementations out there and are they any good? Are there any competent trackers with wap support?
I was thinking of wether or not the piratebay (and it's equivalents) could be a less costly alternative.
Mobile warezing might just be the next big thing (tm).
When it comes to mobile phone downloads, $2.50 is surely a bargain. Contrast this with the prices some people (enough people) are prepared to pay for a 30 second clip of music as a ringtone or a postage stamp size image of their favourite sports star. As if that wasn't bad enough, think of all the people paying 0.50 a pop to enjoy quality content in the form of up to 160 bytes of text.
Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
Watching for RIAA to pay off... contribute to their congress critters in exchange for law(s) banning tune uploading software for cellphones. Then the only way to get music into a cellphone is through inband download from these stores.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
The computer version of the songs can be played only on three PCs What exactly does this mean?
Compared to the old iTunes prices it looks like a ripoff, but a lot of CD singles cost up to twice that. It'd be easier to buy these than go to a bricks-and-mortar store for them.
On an equal playing field these downloads could take off like crazy and potentially kill those stores' sales. After all, many people are gullible enough to pay $3 for a MIDI ringtone that the sellers ripped from someone else's website...
That leaves the option that the downloads are infected with DRM. I'll let someone else pay for the privilege of finding out how this one violates fair use.
at least in Europe. If people pay up to £ 3 or 5 for ONE ringtone, having a full song for $ 2,50 is a better deal for them. Then again, once they will start to use iTMS enough, I think they will quit purchasing 5 ringtones... Cannot wait to have a Nokia N91. That will have sweet download programs... bye bye paid ringtones and music.
Only Old North Koreans need a Soviet Ministry Of Cell Phone Music.
The illegal downloading is what's making the industry bleed, not the fair use or public domain transfers.
Reality is the ultimate Rorschach.
That's only half the price of a ringtone!!!!
In Soviet Russia music phoned you
This might be the first in the US... but its miles from being the first available elsewhere in the world. Usually the US is a mobile backwater that lags the rest of the world by around 2 years or so, in this case its around about that mark again.
Japan and Europe have had legal download services for a significant amount of time either via 3rd parties or more recently directly, when it was being talked of as "what is next" in this market.
So like Sprint now do NFL, Europe has been doing Football (Soccer) goals for 3-4 years. TV on your mobile... yup got that... loads of crappy shit you never want... got that... and you'll be getting it soon.
Its expensive over in Europe too against iTunes et al, but that is down to the "convenience" factor (and normally lower quality) of the mobile downloads.
But "first"? Not by a long chalk.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
People who use ringtones deserve to pay too much.
In the context of Doc Searls' interesting essay about communications carriers in general, this is called bundling and it's a classic example of vendor-lockin.
Sprint couldn't just give you decent Internet access and have you go out onto a competitive net and find your own music vendor. They have to try to tie you to their own over priced service. To many carriers, a free and openly competitive Internet puts puts them out of the game by reducing them to what they really are -- nothing more than carriers. Expect more of this in the future.
Calculate the cost-per-play of ringtones vs. songs. Ringtones would probably be in the thousands of plays over a few months, while most songs would not be played more than a hundred or so times.
So a full song might be larger, but it is also costing you an order of magnitude more in therms of use you get from it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have Sprint, four lines, and about 1100 minutes a month, with web, etc. The whole shebang. Covers the family very very well. Ringtones, games, and so forth? Next to impossible to get decent content outside of the official site of Sprint and their partners. From them, expensive and much of it ongoing in cost. Very limited collection. I really don't need to listen to Brittney or Fifty or whoever and their latest glittertrash noise.
However, through places like 3gupload.com and so on, as well as some devious techie kiddies and their apps, it is possible to get a ringtone like the old original Hamsterdance on my phone without paying an arm, a leg, and the rest. I already pay that monthly for my service, I don't get nearly enough service to justify that price I pay, and they really should cut me a better deal than that, but if they won't, oh well.
Better solution would be a Windows based PDA phone where I could put on just about any file I liked and hack it sixteen ways from Sunday (thank you MS for putting the SDKs and IDEs out so easy to get) and never think of the proprietary nonsense that the carriers gladly adopt with every phone model. Did people think that Sprint grudingly accepted Sanyo's idiocy of their platform design? They want it that way to charge you for proprietary limited availibility crap like this.
Like I said, there are ways around it, and Sprint needs to grasp that but just when they were making progress towards coolness, they seem to have been infected with the Nextel "we can be as closed, inaccessible, non-standard, and insane as we want" virus.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
You know what is the sad thing, their isn't a single Industrial Rock band that has a celluar ringtone. All they have are these top 40 bands with annoying songs that fracture everyone elses' concentration. If at very least, you would think their would be a Nine Inch Nails ringtone. But no. NIN is not even on iTunes as it turns out, and Trent Reznor is a Mac user. Yet there all all these sucky emo, rap, bubble-gum manufactured pop/punk/country music.
On the other hand, what is the point of downloading ringtones especially from someone other than you mobile phone carrier? These Jamster and Zulutones people have the same content as you're phone carrier except they add spyware and hack into your phone for personal information.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
As the mad scientist laughed, the lightning gave life to the creature.
- It's alive, Igor, it's alive...
- What is it, master?
- My greatest and most evil creation. Behold...
RIAA' BELL! *THUNDER*
$2.50 per download. When a cd costs about $12 - $18. That means even for a cd with 10 tracks, the cost is $25. So, they lower their distribution cost to almost nothing and raise the price?!?!?! This is crazy. If they want people to not download the songs for free, why don't they make it affordable. If they charged a reasonable fee (like $0.25 per download, people would download songs like hotcakes around the world). Imagine the worldwide market of say 1 billion internet users and rising as opposed to the few people who will actually download this stuff.
No Sigs!
The extortion I face when it comes time to add any content to my phone is the primary reason I'm dumping T-Mobile in January.
My Sidekick 2 has been quite useful to me, but the damn thing is locked down hard and T-Mobile rarely even updates the content catalog, while not even offering the same broad selection that they provide to every other phone they sell. SK2 users don't get T-Zones. We get a literal handful of tracks/message alerts, 90% of which are ghetto. By "ghetto" I mean for example, the following is virtually all of the alerts they offer:
"Baby Girl You Got"
"Attention All Pimps"
"Baby Mother"
"Message Dog"
"Check Yo Messages Cuzz"
"Massage Message"
"Only Pimps Get 40 Or More Messages"
"Paging The Pimp On Premesis"
"Remind Ya Playa"
"What Time Is It Playa"
"You Supposed To?"
"Pimp To Da Strip"
While the music section is 90% rap/r&b.
When it comes to applications, you can count on 3 new apps/games every few months.
I find it pretty insulting and rather pointless. It wouldn't be too hard for them to offer more, and more varied offerings, but they have resisted the considerable pressure to do so. If you are going to lock it down, at least give me something worth buying.
The Sidekick 2 is horribly out of date anyway. It's been almost a year and a half since the hardware was refreshed, and nothing is on the horizon. I don't really want to spent $400 on a replacement, but I'm not going to sign up for another year of being spoon-fed content on an obsolete phone. I know companies will charge whatever the market will bear, but I think that there is a large section of the market outsde of the "Teenagers and college students living off of Mom and Dad's wallet" that feels a bit neglected.
The other is the cellphone carriers, or, as I like to call them, "the Soviet ministries," which too often treat their customers as captive and refuse to allow open competition for services they offer over their networks.'
Does anybody else see the irony in this statement? The cellphone companies have built their networks through the process of captialism, and now many, in the name of capitalism, advocate the forceful opening of these networks so that 3rd parties can take advantage of the work done by the cellphone companies.
nobody's going to use this service because the truth is that people don't want their music player inside of their cell phone. cell phones are more often than not tied to the service because of 2 year contracts, and they are disposable trash to most people, whereas people want to keep their MP3 players for a long time (they cost more than CD players, hold more music, so they should last longer)
of course, since the nano came out, it'd probably be just better to tape the nano to the back of a normal cell phone that just makes phone calls. you probably wouldn't tell the size difference anyway. then you could have a real music player and a real phone instead of a compromise.
companies seem to hold this myth near and dear that having multiple devices is always inconvenient.
...when dealing with monopolies.
Copyright creates one such monopoly. Since marginal cost is nil, marginal revenue alone controls pricing; as opposed to the efficient pricing based on the intersection supply and demand. This basically means that the prices will be whatever rich kids with the most disposable income will pay, and the rest of us can go to hell.
Since D.I.Y. production is ever more feasible, and the joy of creating music negates any costs to making music, it's obvious that the efficient, market clearing price for music is free.
Maybe it's just lack of competition, but sometimes I have to wonder if there isn't too much Floride in the water or oxytocin in our milk. What explanation is there for so many people willingly opting for these awful deals? Some common choices made in spending and voting seem to defy logic. Our overall absurdity-threshold seems to have been raised somehow.
I guess tunes could be more expensive. I wonder how many 160 Byte text-messaged UUencoded segments would be needed to transfer Alices Restaurant?
"Sprint justifies the price because of the convenience and usability of its store."
In other words, folks, NOBODY BUYS MUSIC! They pay for the CONVENIENCE of accessing what they view as FREE music!
Sprint's price will prove to be too high, of course - the sweet spot has already been demonstrated by Apple to be "under a dollar".
But the point has now been made by a major corporation - NOBODY BUYS MUSIC!
The only reason people spend money for music is the CONVENIENCE. Only for the few decades when there was no ability to record music at home - i.e., during the early days of phonograph records and no tape recorders - did people EVER PAY for music. They paid to LISTEN to music - not the same thing at all! They paid to go to concerts, or clubs, or wherever an artist was performing.
People will pay for a performance by a live person since they know people don't work for free.
People will also pay for an object that lets them listen to music wherever and whenever they want - whether that's a cassette recording off the radio, or a ripped CD on an iPod.
But they will NOT pay for music itself!
Get a clue, music industry and artists! Change your business model!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
If you are so deaf to quality music that you're prepared to listen to it on those crappy phones, with their crappier headphones, and PAY for the priviledge, then you deserve to pay stupid prices. Trust me, they are all pretty bad, we are about to launch a music store for phones in australia and so i've tested a lot of them. Some of the phones' audio output is atrocious. Actually our service is more suited to the mobile space, as we only have unsigned artists and it only costs $3 a month for the users. Its going to be a great way to promote indie bands and groups.
Or their customers are skewed heavily to an "urban" audience.
Very interesting.
When you think about the ridiculous prices people pay for ringtones it's not that crazy.
They pay this because cell phones are set up to be a closed platform, so that people can't transfer ring tones onto them. If people could just copy audio to them as easily as they do with a computer, there'd be no market -- there are *masses* of excellent, free, downloadable alert sounds for computers.
The cell phone providers don't want to be *data transfer providers*, as ISPs are -- you pay us $N, you get M amount of data each month, and your software can do whatever you want. That's a competitive market, and much less money is involved.
I'd love to see regulation out there that requires cell providers to allow *any* device (open platforms, maybe something running Linux, whatever) to connect to their network on a flat service rate, or metered based *only* on data provided. The current system is reminicent of the Bell hardwired telephone monopoly back before Bell was made to open up their phone system to any phone devices, as long as those devices didn't disrupt the network.
The fact that SMSes are more expensive than voice data on a typical US plan, for example, is absurd. This kind of screwball valuation only happens in the presence of a seriously non-free market. The incentive should be to use the loose-latency-requirements, low-bandwidth-required SMSes.
I'm one of a tiny handful of people that just won't buy a cell phone because of the fact that cells are magic black boxes run by a monopoly -- I want to be able to write (and download) my *own* alarm clock/scheduler/voicemail/etc stuff, without paying "application-level fees" to the cell provider.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Back in 1984 (how appropriate), evil Judge Greene dismantled the AT&T monopoly. Instead of a benevolent Ma Bell guiding hapless consumers through an ever-more complex world, we entered an area of free-for-all market. Ma Bell was split into 6 entities. Suddenly, there were multiple telecom providers! Phones sold in stores instead of rented! Competition! Falling prices! Granted, the USA then experienced an unprecedented telecom boom. But telecom stock went into the crapper.
For almost two decades, this orgy of consumer felicity continued unabatted. Then, fortunately, the Clinton administration issued the 1996 Telecom Act, which watered down Greene's edict and allowed a wave of mergers to take place in the telecom industry.
Now, only two telecom companies remain, having absorbed all the baby Bells. We are finally seeing prices climb and customer service go back into the abysses where it belongs. But it was a long, hard road.
(Yes, it was sarcasm. Thanks for noticing).
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Solely for the purpose of comparing... 3 mobile network as been selling music for sometimes now. Tracks are priced from 0.50 pences... The average price is 1.50 pounds though
Nokia 6230
Plays MP3s and it has uncrippled Bluetooth, I just copy tracks over from my PC and away I go.
Unfortunately, it seems there are always a sufficient number of suckers out there to keep "services" like this profitable, even if they're getting hosed. Eventually, people will wise up, but I guess the cell phone market hasn't quite reached that point yet. What I find especially amusing/sickening is how you have to pay extra to send text messages, even though they consume a mere fraction of the bandwidth that voice does. If this were about the industry saving money, they'd encourage text messaging by making it more economical for the consumer. Obviously, it's not about that.
But God demonstrates his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us - (Romans 5:8)
$2.50 for a whole song? Will there be a sale on 20 second ringtones?
This story reminds me of why I very recently left Sprint for a less painful cell phone company. I lived in Nebraska when I got my first phone, and Sprint was the big kid on the block. However, the crippled phone, horrible customer service, and nickle-and-dime tactics made made me only stick with them because they were the best of a sad lot. After moving to Chicago last year, I dropped them and moved to T-Mobile. Wow was I impressed - the bluetooth features on my phone weren't crippled, they have an almost realistic developer community, they don't try to charge you to add your own pieces to the hardware you bought. I suppose Sprint will pick up some people from this for the same reason they got me (they are the only ones doing it right now), but I'm also sure somebody else will do something like this in a more realistic way soon enough (if people want it).
I, however, don't see any need for such a service.
Posted from the wireless couch.
the linesmen and women out there climbing poles and string, uh, wait.
Why the fuck are we being 'surcharged' for access?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I'm impressed.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Seriously these guys are professionals, they know what they are doing.
I mean would you tell Sony what DRM to use?
Think about it for a second. People are spending insane amounts of money on what? Ringtones. They're paying at least $1.50 for a credit, and all they get is a MIDI copy. Spend two credits and yes, you can get the real audio sample, but it's still only a sample, not the whole song. That's around $3 for a twenty second clip if you're lucky. When you think about that for a moment, $2.50 doesn't really seem all that demonic.
Then you take into account what your network charges you to be online and downloading, and the ringtone becomes relatively cheap again. Know what? It's all way too expensive, and should be avoided until prices normalize (when the RIAA/MPAA gets their heads out of their collective arses).
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
Let's not forget the costly subscription prices on non-multiplayer games for Sprint. That I still do not understand.
Mind you, I switched Samsung phones and I lost out on the ability to play multiplayer Bejeweled. I still to this day don't know where that game is on my acconut.
Wait until you hear what the RIAA is planning next. Next year, it plans to push through legislation that makes its music treated as a "special property" with specific rights for RIAA companies.
The upshot is that you must be licensed to hear any particular song, and if you hear it without a license -- even against your will -- you will be auto-licensed on the spot and owe money for it. The fee per song is supposed to be something like $2, although some in the music industry are pushing for $2.50/song.
How will they auto-license you? How will they even know? The RIAA claims to have some new patent-pending technology that makes this automatic.
-Well ...only one in one thousand !
-Let's see : $2.50 x (# customers) / 1000 .....Hey! it's profitable !
-Let's go for it...
Who are these people that need MP3s on their mobile phones? Let them charge $10/song, only idiots are going to be affected anyway.
How many ringtones do you expect the average ringtone-happy user to have active at the same time?
What is that number if these are ringtones you have to *rent* (you can only rent, not buy, many rigntones).
Whatever the DRM on iTunes and such, at least you do get to keep the track for "ever".
So:
ringtones: Instant Gratification for disposable fashion items
music tracks: A collection of long-lived "goods"
Still think $2.50 is a good idea?
Look at Nokia's models. For their series 60 phones, the compiler is free and access is unlimited. Nokia even paid Borland to release a free version with a built in compiler for use with its series 60 line of devices. They'll work on any GSM network (T-Mobile, Cingular, AT&T) and I think some others as well. If Borland isn't your choice, you can even develop with open source tools or use the visual studio plugin. Even with open phones available, many people still chose other devices because $2.50 isn't much money to them if it saves them some trouble. As far as data transfer goes, T-Mobile at least offers an unlimited plan for GPRS.
If you don't want to buy a phone, that's your choice, but you're wrong in saying that all phones are closed.
Base level phones are pretty good (no idea if that link will work). Just get one of those, let the "dumb" consumers throw away their money on whatever they want, and find some other unfair market to complain about. Maybe in 3 years some Southwest Airlines of the cell industry can come in and kick ass... but where they'll get billions to build their own network, I'll leave for the reader to figure out.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
What stops you using a different device?
Unavailability of compatible "different devices" in the United States, perhaps? I've looked but failed to find any providers with decent coverage in the United States that advertise SIM-only plans or any place to buy a SIM-less GSM phone in the United States.
Until the Sprint music service phones come with loudspeakers, a car connection kit, or music sharing
It has a headphone jack. If your car has a tape deck, a $10 tape adapter turns a headphone jack into a car connection kit.
Unless they make them themselves.
And copy them from the computer to the phone how? Network providers in the United States often lock all phones included with service plans so that the phone's built-in USB or Bluetooth capability is turned off, and SIM-less phones aren't readily available in the United States.
Wow! This sounds awesome:
But he criticizes the 'stratospheric new price for the legal download of a single song: $2.50.' Sprint justifies the price because of the convenience and usability of its store.
Oh, so the songs are all DRM free??
Or is he just talking out his ass?
*checks article*
The high costs don't stop there. The new music store can be accessed -- so far -- on only two new high-end phones, from Sanyo and Samsung, which cost more than $200, even after rebates. Even then, if you want to store more than about 32 songs on your phone, you'll have to spring for a larger memory card, which costs anywhere from $25 to $100. You have to pay at least $15 a month for a data plan that allows you just to access the music store, though you also get other services.
Not only that, but the Sprint store imposes more limitations on the use of the songs than Apple does. You can play downloaded songs on only one phone, and the song files can't be played back on a PC.
Ehh... Not only is he talking out his ass about convenience. As Linus would've said: He's on crack.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The company compares this to paying more than usual for milk at an all-night convenience store, or for hot dogs at a ballpark
The hot dog argument is the telling one...as the vendor inside has a monopoly just as Sprint does.
"Playa" (PLAH-yah) == dry lakebed.
"Playa" (PLEY-yuh) == eye dialect for non-rhotic pronunciation of "player", slang for one who maintains multiple sexual relationships.
Cingular and T-Mobile use SIMs. They're on GSM.
Verizon and Sprint are CDMA, so they don't use SIMs.
However, I think that the GSM providers lock the SIMs.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Second, people pay a great deal of money to see a concert that is mostly lights and mirrors, when an equally talented musician could be seen for much less, sans the flash. Why do people pay so much for these concerts?
Because they're under 21, or they have children under 21, and they're allowed in. A lot of the less flashy concerts are held in venues that depend on alcohol sales for their revenue, and state law dictates that these venues may not admit minors.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of gullible and slavish customers out there who will pay $2.50 a song and not complain. Look at all the morons who pay $2 per ringtone and have to pay that every three months for each one because it expires at the end of that period. In the immortal words of P.T. Barnum, 'There's a sucker born every minute.'
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
There's a sucker born every minute.
sulli
RTFJ.
Sprint says its higher price is justified by the convenience factor, the ability to buy a song on the go, when the impulse strikes. The company compares this to paying more than usual for milk at an all-night convenience store, or for hot dogs at a ballpark
This is the kind of stuff that make me furious. What do they mean exactly by "justified?" (Assuming that was the actual word they used or the author's close proximate.) These guys don't even bother anymore with the usual, expected, hackneyed excuse relating to the "cost basis" for the service; instead, the ONLY reason is pure and simple arrogance. We'll charge $2.50 because we think the consumer is flat-out stupid, and the "justification" for that is these other widely acknowledged, classic consumer rip-offs that folks apparently fall for; the sort of unscrupulous profiteering behavior that we could only envy - until now. Comparing this to the launch of Apple's Music Store from the not-so-distant past, I can't believe how remarkably stupid these guys apparently are, not to mention the contempt they have for thier own customers
$2.50 a song that's even more restricted than Apple's Music Store and doesn't sound as good? Because blatantly ripping off consumers is the new game now at Sprint Headquarters? Fuck you Sprint. Seriously, Fuck You.
You misspelled Verizon. Given how they cripple phones and make the only practical choice be their own services, as well as silencing critics, the title is quite apt for Verizon.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Yeah, but the idiots make the business model viable, which screws over the rest of us!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This will sell very well. All the 14 year olds racking up a 200$ a month cell phone bill text messeging will now have something else to waste money on.
Ive already seen it starting - A month ago someone had a cell phone and 5 seconds of a horrible green day song was repeating for 5 minutes.
Pure speculation just for funzies. This is an off the wall-tinfoil hat-from my naturally suspicious mind angle on this article, and some others lately of similar nature. Perhaps all these new music download deals of the obviously bogus and overly high priced genre are a scam. Disinformation put out for a longer term desired political and economic effect. A little public "See,we listened, here's your net downloads!", while in the background they are *expecting* them to fail, planning on it, so they can continue to lobby congress and engage in media propogandizing for even more draconian anti file sharing and more hardware lockdown laws. Similar to them more or less forcing iTunes to go up in price soon. If anything, if they were serious, offerings would be getting cheaper and cheaper as tech advances make it possible and as you can see in the electronics tangibles markets- except for music and movie offerings for some strange reason....
Do these jokes even apply anymore?
At the very least you should have used past tense.
I'd wager that it'll be nigh impossible for ordinary users to transfer songs off of Sprint phones, and if you end your service with them, you lose the songs as well.
That is, the $2.50 only gets you the song on the phone, and nowhere else.
I'd also bet that if your phone is lost/destroyed, you have to rebuy the songs as well.
The cost of renting, with the risk of owning, at the price of both put together.
Plus the fact that the 3G songs are encumbered with DRM such that you can't migrate, or export the music off the particular 3G that first "bought" the music
It's even worse with ringtones, you don't even download them to your phone, they get stored for 90 days on the network, then vanish !
Don't these people get it ? We want interoperability for the digital content we purchase.
Now, I didn't read the article, or even the comments, but from what I can tell, it seems like the title should read:
Costly Music Store Coming to Die on Cellphones
Sprint has offered music as ringtones for their phones for a looong time now. But, if you've got Sprint and you want music, then you want Vision. And if you have Vision, you have a $5 monthly credit towards anything you purchase through the phone from sprint, mainly being games, web apps, and ringtones. So Think of it as two free songs per month. You may say that it's a $5 discount, but if you don't spend it, you don't get it back as a discount on your monthly bill.
I haven't even mentioned the Retroactive Copyright and Patent Act, which the RIAA and other big-corporate interests are still penning.
In this doozey, all American artistic works and inventions which have fallen out of copyright or patent will be divvied up among the largest corporations -- for the purpose of "guardianship" of the works.
Meaning that all work that has fallen under public domain because of expired copyrights and patents will no longer be ownerless.
There's no word on what would become of current work by non-corporate individuals which is not copyrighted or patented -- for instance, that song you wrote last night -- but some writers of the bill want to automatically assign copyright/patent to one of the corporations, again for "guardianship."
The phone companies are doing what they do best. Run
a monopolistic business. Right now they are making huge
profits off of things like ringtones, wallpapers, games, music,
etc because they control the way consumers can access these things.
What other type of device do you own where the content is controlled
by the place you purchased the device from?
There doesn't seem to be any way to stop this because they have
huge lobbies in Washington passing legislation that is favorable to
them.
And..guess what? They very much desire to control trade on the
internet in the same way. So if it it isn't stopped here and now, expect
things to get much worse.
Anytime competition is artificially stifled the consumer will suffer.
That pricing model is insane. If the average CD has 10 songs, it will cost me $25 to download a CD worth of songs. But what's more crazy, is that people are going to do it. And what's even crazier than that, is that the record companies are going to use it to go back on Apple and say "we are selling tunes for $2.50 through Sprint, this is irrefutable proof that you need to raise your prices." In reality, it proves nothing except that people are stupid and don't realize what they are spending until they get their bill at the end of the month.
Personally, I have a hard time justifying spending 99 cents on a track through iTunes. It's not that I cannot afford it, it's just the principle behind it. Basically I'm giving 2 or 3 cents (best case) to the actual artist, while a bunch of greedy bastards get rich by screwing the very people that keep them in business (both consumers and artists). This has been gone over a million times here before, so there's not really any need to explain this further.
I haven't purchased a CD in roughly 3 years. I listen to satellite radio, and I go to shows when the artists I like are in town. BTW, satellite radio is a great way to find excellent artists that are not signed with RIAA labels.
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Actually the plan is even cheaper now. If you have signed up for auto-pay (where the minium balance is automatically updated when you run out) you can pay just $15 every 90 days for phone service. If you use the phone only every now and then, it really can be about $15 for three months.
That plan is a little pricy for use, in that you pay $.25 for the first three minutes of any call. But for me I still end up paying only about $15 every two months of so as I just use the phone a few times a week.
I used to have a "cool" phone. The Sony Ericson, bluetooth and internet connection for my laptop. But then I found that internet connection did not work everywhere. I was paying something like $50 a month, and the phone was not even a subsidized purchase! I got super sick of the bills and decided to dump the whole lot.
Someday in the distant future I may find the calling to get something like a WiMax service for my laptop - but for now I'm very, very happy to have got off the fixed monthly merry-go-round of cell phone plans.
As a word of warning the Virgin Mobile plan was the ONLY pay as you go plan I found that was not actually $30 a month (read the charges, some demand a minimum of that much per month even if you don't use it). That may have changed by now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It also helps that I'm never traveling by driving cross-country through long deserts with no call boxes and don't have to get help in such emergencies. It also helps that I strongly hate talking on telephones in the first place. The whole family has learned that even if I'm *leaning* on the phone and it rings, either somebody else gets it or the machine does. There is a name for this phobia/aversion, and some Slashdotter will doubtless post it's name in the followup.
Thanks, dipshit, I'm sure the grandparent had no idea.
It will take off for a while, then people will sense being gypped, then they will go pre-paid - if they can.
The first generation of mobile users were irresponsible, and wondered why their first bill was 500 bucks.
Like the first credit card, is is easy to milk victims who don't handle the folding stuff, or kids who must get their fix now.
Know what? The first phone with a 'buddy' or 'share' button will kill this short term rip off fad dead. Maybe peoples Chinese made 'skype' handsets will grow a share button in the future. Conventional telcos - enjoy your last hurrah, the bell rings.
Maybe Starblicks will toss in a free skype phone at every table, and sell their own 'stuff'.
The real issue is what is music? Like a busker who butchers soundtracks, music pigopolists who want $2.50 for strumming a few off-key bars, destroys the artists work. They have been real quiet what the artist gets paid for this hike too.
The other half is deceptive advertising - you are not paying for song -- renting is the right word. Honesty in advertising would be nice. If you don't play nice, can't expect the punters to play nice when the penny drops.
HTH.
You're abused by your telco? Bugger off elsewhere. Don't want to pay $2.50/song, then fucking don't do it...
"some dumb fashion slut who wants your wallet, not your seed."
$500 is peanuts. The fact that you even think it's worth mentioning tells me you have absolutely no idea what's really going on there and your seed therefore isn't of a high enough quality for most "dumb fashion sluts".
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If you're pissed at the high price and lack of access to meaningfull, cost effective services on your cell phone,then lets look at some constructive options. The biggest challenge to breaking the control that the phone companies have is that the phones sold are generally locked to a specific network and contract term in order to offer a low price. Remember, the majority of users are non-technical and would have no idea how to browse beyond the applications offered on the deck by the phone company, let alone be sophisticated enough to unlock a phone from the carrier network. There are plenty of applications out there available for free, it just takes the effort to hunt them down. If every parent knew that there are free games and ringtone alternatives, do you think they would be happy paying the $200/mo. cell bill for their Kid? The phone companies have managed to build profitable little ecosystem that is focused on delivering brand name entertainment through the phone without much room for independent titles delivered through their provisioning services (which are contracted out naturally). Enough of the rant...how can it be fixed?
Thank you, but $2.50 / song! Unbeleivable. I just bought a smart phone (on the FedEx truck for delivery today), of which I plan to put a 1GB mini-sd card into it, then simply download the music from my Yahoo Subscription onto it. All of that is gonna be pretty cool. Paying $2.50 for a song at my convenience is just dumb to me. I equate it to using the ATM your standing next to, and consequently getting charged a $2.00 fee, rather than walk you happy-ass across the street to use your bank's ATM at no cost. (obvious glaring errors in the analogy, but for the most part it boils down to what I already own and/or wanted to own anyway - cool phone and music subscription - and the time it takes to compensate for the convenience of dial-a-song whilst paying an arm and a leg, comparatively, for it.
What's the name of your plan? I've been trying to find a cheap mobile service for years now, but I'm really confused by the terms of pay-as-you-go plans like Virgin Mobile.
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Here is the description of plans.
I use the "Minute to Minute" plan - I had that a little wrong as it's $.25 for the first ten minutes - of the day though, I had thought it was the first three minutes of any call ever. It's $.10 a minute after that. But like I said I don't really use it that often.
I had my old cell phone number ported to it, worked fine.
You can just buy any phone and select one of those plans to go with it. Note that you can either register a credit-card with them to automatically "top up" the service (which is how you get a $15 every 90 day plans) or if you prefer to do it as you go, you can top-up through the phone via credit card.
Note that the service is somewhat more limited than other phones I have had - mostly in-between large cities on small back roads. I was visiting Alaska and never once, not even in large cities like Anchorage, did I have service. That was rather a bummer.
Another bummer is that no Virgin Mobile phones support bluetooth. I would love to be able to upload contacts/ringtones and have the same cheap service. On the other hand the phone I have (K9, now discontinued I think) does have the most useful feature I've ever had in a phone - built-in LED flashlight!
Another note is they ask you to top-up when the balance is at $5, but if you think about it it's really better to wait until your balance is empty and let it auto-fill. Otherwise you can hit the 90-day limit sooner and be forced to fill before you've used up you $15/$20.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I was surprised to see it back myself when I looked again!
Yes, the web site is very cheesy. They are targeting an MTV crowd, which is great as it's a crowd that may not have a lot of free money to dump on Virgin Mobile. I don't understand why no-one else is offering a similar service for adults; with all of the other pay-as-you go plans you may as well just get normal service.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't have one either, never have and most likely never will. We notice more and more that we're the only people in the whole bar/coffeeshop/park/etc that aren't talking on phones.
I think they make people rude and our society sad.
I've asked people politely to stop talking (in a theater, at the movies, one time in the library when she was yelling into the phone) and not very often do I get an apology or a cessation of the call. Usually I get the finger. One time I took a man's phone who kept talking and talking at a movie right in front of me. Stupid neon blue waving around in front of my face and stupid details of his life loudly being beamed at me. I gave it back after the movie even though he offered to beat me up for interrupting his call.
Call me an angry jerk, but I'm glad these fucktards are paying $5 for a ringtone and hope to jebus they pay $14.99 for postage-stamp movie downloads. It's just too bad the money goes to cellphone companies.
Man, you really need that seminar!
> Unfortunately, unlike "drugs", most of society is duped by the advertising of such companies to see the true evil that lurks... Some clothing companies such as "Old Navy" seem equally evil...
I can understand, at least, how the telcos are virtual (if not actual) monopolies still that rip us off, and are harmful at least in that sense.
But dare I ask what Old Navy ever did? I confess complete ignorance to any wrong they've created, and am quite curious as to what they might have done?
I looked back and really did word that badly! Yep, .25 a minute. But again if you are just using the phone a few times a week you are still way better off than with most plans.
.25 a minute so I wouldn't fault them as much as other cell phone companies.
I think actually the Virgin website is pretty clear in the decription of the plans and it being
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley