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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?
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.
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!
They're charging $30 for an album with compressed audio? No thanks.
No, they're charging $25 for a USB memory card and including a double album of compressed audio for $5.
"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.
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.
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.
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!!!
;-)
There's also videos on the thing. You don't know how much will be devoted to songs.
It's called answering a question without being a jerk, try it.
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
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:
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.
Considering that you have broadband, you get the content faster and without the physical waist.
That's weird, having broadband and fast content have increased my physical waist.
All available data suggest that regardless of any of this, the sun will still come up tomorrow.
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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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."