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Barenaked USB Drive
CryptoKnight writes "The Barenaked Ladies are releasing their next album via a reusable 128 MB USB flash drive. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article: 'Rather than distribute via CD, DVD or download, the Barenaked Ladies are making their newest selection of songs, videos and exclusive material available on a USB flash drive. Nettwerk Music Group is releasing Barenaked on a Stick beginning today, says the Hollywood Reporter. It plays on PCs, Macs and any other audio product with a USB port -- like some car stereos -- and costs $30.'"
I'd buy this thing...
$30 for some songs?!?
Can I pay more for one without Barenaked Ladies songs on it?
Great music distribution method. Perhaps some SD and other memory card-tricks will follow.
Psst - I went to the web site and there are no naked ladies in the band
I lost my sig...
They're charging $30 for an album with compressed audio? No thanks.
-Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I dont' care what people say, compressed audio sounds different/worse than straight recordings. If they are compressing their entire CD down to 128M I wonder what the compression rate will be? I'm also curious if I can buy their USB drive and then receive via download, mail, or other the high quality, non-compressed tracks. Does anyone else agree?
Generation Trance: What generation are you?
A USB stick is more expensive to make than a CD, whcih you can just stamp. Either is more expensive than just sending bits over the wire.
For a one-album set of songs, I don't see this working except for the novelty, unless it's billed as "128 MB USB stick (with Barenaked Ladies songs)" instead of "Barenaked Ladies songs (on a USB stick)." It reminds me of school fundraisers where you're selling tickets to an event with candy. It's always easier to sell people candy with a ticket as a bonus than to sell them a ticket with candy as a bonus.
On the other hand, for 29 songs, the cost should really be compared to a 2-CD set. At that point, $30 isn't that much more than $25.
Probably because on top of all of the content, you also get a REUSABLE USB STICK! It doesn't actually sound like a bad deal if you actually stop and think about it.
The reason I don't buy from online services is I refuse to pay money for lossless codecs. If I am paying for music, I want to get all the bits, and then determine for myself which lossless codec I use to compress the song.
I would hate to see situations like this, where albums are only avialable in a lossy format, become the norm
Download my free songs!
Girlfriend: Hey, what do you have on that flash drive?
You: Barenaked ladies...why?
SLAP!
"Barenaked on a Stick" describes what it'd be after I formatted it.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
RTFA:
"This 128 reusable drive contains 29 songs, including the band's 2004 "Barenaked for the Holidays" album, in MP3 format along with live tracks, in-concert spoken quips, album art, photos, videos and more."
Reusable. MP3 format.
I may actually get it. Granted, 128MB isn't nearly large enough for my BNL boot collection (~2gb or so), but I could use a memory key and $30 isn't too bad a price.. Here's hoping _McDonald's Girl_ and/or _Lovers in a Dangerous Time_ are on there...
"Why would I spend $30 to get an album on a USB stick when I can get an album on CD for $16 or on Itunes for less than that?"
iTunes is DRMed. Also, according to TFA it has 29 songs plus extras (videos etc).
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Barenaked has always been a great band that does things a little different.
In this case the sum of the parts is greater than the items. Sure the music can be delivered cheaper and a memory stick is cheap. But the willingness to try something a little bit different just to see what happens is worth some applause.
By the way, these guys produce good music. They are worthy of support.
Think of it. With this device you can keep 128MB of raw data under there.
Hah! I just made you say underwear!
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
Everyones complaining about the price, and yet no one is happy that mainstream bands are staring to use technology in a cool way. Also, if yourtoo lazy to RTFA.... "This 128 reusable drive contains 29 songs, including the band's 2004 "Barenaked for the Holidays" album, in MP3 format along with live tracks, in-concert spoken quips, album art, photos, videos and more."
Yay, I have a sig.
Oops, I don't refuse to pay for lossless compression! I meant to say I refuse to pay for lossy compression.
Preview is a good thing!
Download my free songs!
Hey, while travelling in France I was taken to a small wine shop that sold wine in bulk; bring your container, they'd fill it up from what looked like a gas hose. Wouldn't it be nice to do the same with music and your flash drive? As long as there will be physical buildings where people go to buy their music, it would be great to avoid all the shipping of the physical media.
Plus I'm sure the music publishers would pass the savings on to us consumers.
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
The term seems more than a bit outdated. Will there be any cool graphics on the USB stick itself? Could be quite a collectible if the edition is truly limited.
It costs more than a CD ... And if everyone released music like this, I'd have 128Meg USB drives laying around my house all over the place.
The audio's lower quality
It doesn't work in my car
That's only slightly more practical than releasing your album on the first 600 meg of a 500 gig drive, for $200 each.
This sounds like a unique idea for releasing an album and if they pack it with goodies, I certainly won't complain. Including in-concert banter is a great idea, as that's always one of the things I've missed when I listen to a recording - there's less energy in the studio than there is live. They do offer downloads or CDs of most of their live concerts, for a price, which is a fantastic offer I've yet to actually *try*.
What worries me is that it'll be a little too easy to *lose* your music from that drive. Maybe that's a small worry, since you'll *probably* be able to back the music up on your own. Still, it just means that now I have to create a CD of it in order to listen to it in my car. Too many "ifs" to make me feel totally comfortable with purchasing this (even though I totally will). Plus, it'll look like hell on my CD rack. ^)_(^
Heh. I suppose what would've been an even better gimmick would be if they had released this USB drive in a package that includes a blank CD with artwork specific to this album. Then you could record it yourself, or even use the disc to record your own mixes. Include a little album artwork on the USB stick (front/back covers) and you can print out a pretty CD for your shelves if you wanted.
Brendan "Beej" Dery "Only in Canada, eh?"
R. T. F. A.
This 128 reusable drive contains 29 songs, including the band's 2004 "Barenaked for the Holidays" album, in MP3 format along with live tracks, in-concert spoken quips, album art, photos, videos and more.
MP3 format == non-DRM'd format. Now, the article could be wrong, but that's what it says. I have no reason to doubt that it will be MP3 format though, as BNL has been making MP3s of their concerts available for years now. Say what you will about their music (though I happen to really like them), but they've stayed true to keeping their music unfettered with DRM crud.
RW
TFA sez MP3, which AFAIK is w/o DRM.
To me that reads as "people being trained to attach little black boxes of music to their computer, with the eventual intention of DRMing said boxes". If people are trained to attach arbitrary boxes to their computer to get music/films, the next step is to have those boxes "streaming" the audio/video straight to a Trusted Output Device [tm]. This probably wouldn't stop piracy, but it'd make backing up your media nigh-on impossible, since you'd no longer be able to copy directly.
This fits in well with plans to make Windows Vista only play DVDs at full quality using the aforementioned Trusted Output Devices [tm]
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
If I am paying for music, I want to get all the bits
Are you getting all the bits even when you buy a CD? Nowadays, most pop music is mastered through a limiter and a saturator to make it sound louder on portable CD players. Sending the signal against the -1 and +1 rails discards almost all the information during a drum hit, making the end result much less natural and less "punchy". See also loudness race.
It costs more than a CD
The audio's lower quality
You get about 3 times as many songs as you would on a CD.
You can burn it to CD.
This is like them releasing it as an iTMS exclusive, except:
It's not DRMed.
They throw in a 128M flash drive for free.
AAAHHHHH!!! HELP! I'm being attacked by acronyms!
"The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote" -- Kosh
So don't buy it. But if you like the music, they're giving you 2 CDs worth of songs for the price of 2 CDs in a smaller, less scratch-prone format. I'm not sure why you're being a dick about that.
NO WAY!
I hope to god that AOL adopts this distribution method!!!
;-)
Well, if they included the 3rd and last paragraph to the story, you would have seen this ...
... only thing I'm wondering about is the quality of the tracks, 29 songs and videos on a 128MB drive?
"This 128 reusable drive contains 29 songs, including the band's 2004 "Barenaked for the Holidays" album, in MP3 format along with live tracks, in-concert spoken quips, album art, photos, videos and more."
I think if you are a BNL fan, this would be well worth it
In the "grasping at straws" department we also have Harvey Danger releasing their next album as a 12 three-and-a-half-inch floppy box set. Also the Goo Goo Dolls are planning to cut a new album on recycled AOL CD's...
Perhaps some SD and other memory card-tricks will follow.
Secure Digital cards support the SDMI copy-protection spec (secure from you, not for you), thus opening "a Pandora's box of new marketing possibilities".
Stick to MMC (MultiMediaCard), which is essentially SD minus the copy-crippling mechanism.
"The problem with our economy is that our budget is balanced by people who aren't" - A.E.N.
RTFA, the stick has 29 songs, video clips, commentary etc etc etc. NOT just a regular album
This is interesting to me because I think it's a glimpse of music distribution in the near future. No, I don't mean that USB sticks will be the medium of choice in the near future, I mean that music will be released *without* CDs or even DVDs. There's a certain camp of DRM apologists who say, "but I can always just buy the CD and rip the songs myself if I don't want the DRM from the iTunes music store/Napster/whatever, therefore the DRM on those services is OK." Those people don't seem to understand that in a time when CDs are painfully hard for music companies to control (just ask Sony), their sales are plummetting, and iTMS has shown that people are willing to buy DRM-infected music online in large numbers, the days of getting new releases on CD are numbered. If I were a music exec (eew, slimy!), I would be just itching for the day I could do a full-DRM release without releasing CDs at all.
By the way, I *do* understand that in TFA the tracks are unencumbered MP3, but my point is about the limited future for CD distribution. No slight against BNL is intended, though I'm not thrilled that they're only distributing lossy encodings.
-DA
Oh, and by the way, here are a few stores where you can buy unencumbered music electronically:
www.magnatune.com (lossless even!)
www.bleep.com (lots of great electronica, including Boards of Canada)
The Barenaked Ladies publicists/marketing cooked up a winner here. The truth is that none of us, bar some small minority care about BNL, but it made it to the front page of slashdot. This is called a Press Hit. Their publicists are getting a fat check on this one.
We seem to enjoy missing the point, so we start arguing about whether other bands will follow. I will put this in for kicks:
Some might, but upping the distribution costs that much is not profitable long term since consumers wont pay $30 for the same thing everytime.
2*31*37*263
"Well it's been five hundred weeks since you listened to me..."
I think it has more to do with the fact that most people have no idea what "lossily compressed" means. As far they're concerned MP3 = music file. They aren't aware of the existence of FLAC or OGG files, let alone that they have any benefit over mp3s.
Oh, Edmund, can it be true? that I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest green?
The German punk band WIZO did this a while ago. They claim to be the first to do it.
From their site:
"WIZO-STICK-EP" is the first USB-Memory-Stick from a band, that comes already packed with songs and lots of other data for the use on your computer. You' ll get:
- five brandnew Songs as high quality MP3s,
- one exclusive "live in Japan video clip" (only available on the "STICK-EP"!),
- loads of funny WIZO pics,
- the lyrics to all songs, including chords for guitar,
- one great photo contest (sorry, only in german!),
- cool multimedia menu for your web browser!
The price is 15.90€. I don't know the current USB-stick prices but that doesn't sound bad, especially since it has the band's branding which is relevant to their fans. A more detailed page can be found here (in German).
parasight.de
Are you sure you're talking about the same meaning of "compression?"
I know there are two different kinds of audio compression (as evidenced by Wikipedia's disambiguation page), and they can sit at various points in the production chain:
Maybe it's because "less scratch-prone" is a nonsensical argument. I've got more than 300 audio CDs, and none of them have any visible scratches (as far as I know, anyway) - scratches on the CD just aren't something you're concerned about when you buy music.
Sure, you get a free USB flash drive when you buy this thing, but seriously, it's not worth the price difference. One store chain here just had a sale on 512 MB flash drives for 20 EUR - that's 5 EUR for 128 MB, which is nowhere near the extra 15 USD you'd pay for the flash drive here compared to the CD.
What you *do* get is music in a lossy format, which is a genuine disadvantage over a CD. Why didn't they use FLAC instead? Sure, they might have used a larger drive then, but at least then it just *might* have been a good deal when you compare the price to what a USB flash drive and a CD cost, together.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
This represents a milestone in consumers getting what they want. 1) This may be the first time a major band sells copyrighted mp3s without DRM 2) This is the first album on media that can be rewritten to since the tape deck 3) I convert them to mp3 to play in my car anyway I only hope this will be a hit and more bands follow suit.
The Barenaked ladies have always been at the forefront of using tech to get their music out there.
I've bought their last three CD's online (including a solo project by Steven Page) with great ease and little expense. The last two were available in flac format so no lossless problems there. They even came with all the album artwork and lyric sheet info available in PDF format.
When 'Maroon' was released they were one of the first bands to provide dummy versions of the song on file sharing networks. (You could download a 40 meg uncompressed file where the song started up but then to band members came on and started shilling their CD in a good natured way over the top of the tunes)
When 'Everything to Everyone' was released a few years ago, I recall trying to get a copy of it from a file sharing network because here in Australia I couldn't get my hands on the CD for months. They flooded the network with all the tracks from the new album without the vocal tracks, so I had to wait. Now, because of their embracement of selling on the web, I don't have to.
Maybe it's because "less scratch-prone" is a nonsensical argument. I've got more than 300 audio CDs, and none of them have any visible scratches
There's no way to respond to that except to say, "No, it's not." And it's not. Maybe if you had fewer CDs, you'd have more scratches. Not that scratches, themselves, actually pose much of a problem until your sister tosses it in the back seat of your car and leaves it there for a few days while her friends sit on it. USB drives are safe from that. And while it's unlikely that that will ever happen again, it's still a check in the USB column.
Sure, you get a free USB flash drive when you buy this thing, but seriously, it's not worth the price difference.
There isn't a price difference. 29 songs = 2.2-ish CDs = 30 bucks.
What you *do* get is music in a lossy format, which is a genuine disadvantage over a CD.
People download songs all the time and feel fine about it. I, personally, can't tell the difference between 128kbps MP3 and a CD, which is why I'm pro-this. And again, if you don't like it, don't buy it. Nobody will hurt you for it. I'm sure CDs are going to be around for at least another week or two in any case.
Why should I pay $30 for COMPRESSED music! It seems that the music industry took a giant step backward in audio quality! Generation "iPod" is happy with compressed music. Of course, with the crap that passes for music these days (including BNL!) I guess it doesn't matter.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Barenaked ladies also sells full concerts online too! You can download any show from some of the more recent tours, either MP3 for download, more for a CD, or (in some cases but not all) just a little more for FLAC.
The MP3's are really decent too, 192k.
The great thing is the concerts are not just the songs, but also the extras (like the impromptu raps) - which are really the whole reason to go to BNL concerts in the first place.
Nettwork is also the company that came out proclaiming something along the lines of them never using DRM on any CD's released by the artists under them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is a terrible idea. Only a small amount of people actually own computers and know what a flash USB drive is, let alone how to transfer the songs to a CD. I think that they are seriously overestimating the computer saviness of society on this one. I know a lot of people that would think this is a good idea. But I'm a big geek, and so are all my friends. We're definitely not what you would call average. If I want MP3s, I'll buy the CD, and rip it to MP3. I'm not going to pay $30 for mp3s on a device I may or may not end up keeping the songs on. I like CDs because they provide pretty much permanent storage, as long as I don't scratch them, and I don't have to worry about losing the music when my hard drive dies. I don't see any advantage over offering the music in this format over a standard audio CD.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Barenaked Ladies' previous album Maroon contains 12 tracks at about 47 minutes of music. I ripped the CD to MP3s with a bitrate of 192Kbps resulting in about 65MB. That's just over half the available space on a 128MB USB drive.
Just for the sake of argument (this is Slashdot after all) let's say that they release an even bigger album on the USB drive--a full hour of music. That gives us:
That is not bad at all. Considering that 192Kbps is very good quality and 256Kbps is considered to be at least CD quality audio (there should be no noticeable artifacts even to the most astute listener), this sounds like a good deal.
If I were to guess, I'd bet they encode the files with a constant bitrate of 256Kbps. Using this bitrate they could fit about 65 minutes of music on the 128MB USB drive.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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First RIAA is bad because they release CD's with DRM to stop us from ripping MP3's. Now BNL does this, which is obviously a slap in RIAA's face, and most of the comments here are pissing and moaning about stupid media or lossy codec?
Damn, folks. Make up your minds.
If you like the music, $30 for better than two albums is a pretty fair price. If you would rather purchase a different format, maybe suggest it to them in a constructive manner. You might be suprised.
- If we aren't supposed to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat? - Steven Wright
The reason I don't buy from online services is I refuse to pay money for lossy codecs.
Then you're just being silly. "Lossy" refers to the data stream, not the sound. "Lossy" does not mean that the sound is audibly inferior or that you could hear the difference in a blind test. In fact, I've administered such tests to a few fellow audiophiles and proved that I could create a "lossy" MP3 that is audibly indistinguishable from the original recording. (The tests I conducted involved skilled listeners in their 20's and 30's using a Rega Planet CD player through Sennheiser SR-325 headphones and a Creek headphone amp. They selected the music. I encoded it to MP3 and then brought it back to WAV. I recorded a CD with several copies of each track - encoded and virgin. They were unable to detect the difference and their results were, statistically speaking, no better than a coin toss.)
That said, most of the online services have substandard, low-bit-rate recordings which do sound audibly inferior to CDs. That's the reason to boycott those services, not because the codecs are lossy.
Your post shows (yet again) why a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
"Compression" -- ie lossy data stuffing -- is a totally different thing to "compression" -- ie fiddling the freqs to make a CD seem "louder". I can understand why you'd be confused, since they use the same word for both. Kinda like "bad" meaning "bad" - but also, if you're Michael Jackson, meaning "really really good". English is a bitch like that. "Bitch" as in "bitching" -- it's a vital feature of all languages that words can mean more than one thing.
And far from being a common thing, the misuse of the kind of compression you are wailing about is usually limited to the worst of the worst of throwaway pop music.
Most artists, labels, studios, and mastering engineers are, literally, psychotic about maintaining sound quality, which is one of the reasons a CD that's even just averagely mastered will beat your "well mastered cassette" any day of the week and six times on Sunday.
Simply _playing_ a cassette stretches the tape and starts scrubbing away at the data. And that's not even to mention the difference in dynamic range. From the article that you linked to yet obviously didn't read:
"[with CDs] consumers could purchase a recording in a medium whose dynamic range exceeded that of $20,000 professional tape machines."
You know, this technology could be used to distribute porn, too... ;)
I thought this was becoming the way of the future anyway. Its not uncommon for mp3 players to come with albums already loaded, so I dont see why it is a big deal for people to want to distribute their music on a flash disk.