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Making Money Selling Music Without DRM
phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica's Nate Anderson has an excellent writeup on the rise of eMusic and how they're suceeding despite their unwillingness to hop on the DRM bandwagon. From the article: 'The Holy Grail of online music sales is the ability to offer iPod-compatible tracks. Like the quest for the mythical cup itself, the search for iPod compatibility has been largely fruitless for Apple's competitors, whose DRM schemes are incompatible with the iconic music player. For a music store that wants to succeed, reaching the iPod audience is all but a necessity in the the US market, where Apple products account for 78 percent of the total players sold. Perhaps that's why eMusic CEO David Pakman sounds downright gleeful when he points out that there's only two companies in the world that can sell to them--Apple and eMusic.'"
Mindawn.com, magnatune.com, studiodownloads.net, disclogic.com, digitalsoundboard.net. There are many more. All work on the ipod. All lossess or (compressed if you want that) no drm. Admittedly the selections is small, but I'd rather have a thousand stores with lossess music and no drm than one store with a large selection.
I'm an Emusic subscriber and love them, but there are LOTS of legal services out there, these days, selling good ol' MP3s (or even FLAC/OGG) with no DRM
We keep a full list of them at cdbaby.net/dd-partners (in 10 languages!). Though that list is meant mainly for our musician clients, it's a good permalink for a constantly-updating list of digital music sellers, with a short description of each.
You bet eMusic is looking forward to the Slashdot effect ;)
But we should also give credit where credit is due and mention that Magnatune (http://magnatune.com/) has been doing this for years. The buyer chooses what he wants to pay per album - in fact, if you're a cheap bastard, you may download a full album for as little 5$ in the format of your choice: MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC or AAC.
And I love their motto: "We are not evil." Now, where else did we hear that phrase?
Just
But some of us couldn't help but think, "Oh, you mean like Emusic?"
Correction, some of us couldn't help but think, "Oh, you mean like Emusic, only crippled?"
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
..of companies that make money selling digital music without DRM, look at just about every company that has sold CDs for the last 20 years. It's not like the model hasn't already proven itself. Even the big media companies know they can profitably sell unDRMed stuff, because that's how they became big media companies. DRM is a "solution" looking for a problem.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Don't waste your time with the eMusic provided *nix download manager; there is an excellent opensource alternative written in Java called "eMusic/J" (though it's developed by a third-party):
http://www.kallisti.net.nz/EMusicJ/HomePage/
This article makes it seems that Apple compatibility is holding back companies from selling music online. An iPod will play MP3s. The problem is that the studios will not allow anyone to sell music online without DRM. FairPlay was Apple's solution to this problem. Apple doesn't want to license it, and that's their choice and right. So these companies don't have many choices, but Apple wasn't the one that created the problem. They found a solution that works for them.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Which bizarrely has not yet been posted here.
http://www.emusic.com/
Three Squirrels
All of MP3 may be "somewhat" legal in Russia but it is fully-non legal for Americans (or Canadians, Australians, and anybody else who is lives in a country that's signed on with international copyright laws) to buy music from them, as it says outright in their terms of service.
I don't see any mention of Canada there, just a vague statement that it's up to you to figure out whether it is legal in your country. In fact, Canadians have a right to make copies for private use. This is what the levy on blank media pays for.
It's a little sickening how you got modded up to 5 just buy throwing a lot of legal verbage (in links no less), none of which actually makes your point.
.99/song off iTunes, when your "in the know" friends have been paying .9-.25/song.
Your own first links that you cite point out that phonographs, legally copied, are allowed to be imported. Then you point out that downloads are not physical items, and declare phonographs a "red herring".
This is the real point, that NONE of your legalese refutes:
These songs were legally produced in Russia; in Russia, downloading an mp3 and listening to a song are considered about the same thing; the reason the allofmp3 songs are so cheap is because you're basically paying to hear it on the radio (when you consider how many of us used to tape our favorite songs off the radio as kids when we couldn't afford to buy the cassette, this practice isn't that revolutionary).
If the RIAA doesn't like having its music sold at the rate of radio tunes in Russia, it's free to stop doing business with companies in Russia, free to stop accepting royalties, etc.
NOTHING in the links you posted implies that legally produced mp3s that are legally purchased and imported for personal use have been found illegal. Certainly, if you did something like share the files around with your friends on bittorrent, that would be a different story.
But thank you for throwing up that MOUNTAIN of irrelevant legal verbage to disguise the fact that you resent having to pay