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Universal to Offer Music for Free
wild_berry writes "The BBC reports that Universal Music has signed a deal to make its music available for a free and legally-licensed download. Available from a new music site called SpiralFrog, the deal will allow users in the USA and Canada to listen to Universal's music, which Reuters' news site reveals is paid for by targeted advertising, but no details of possible community or playlist sharing features of the SpiralFrog service. Is the immunity from litigation enough to make up for having targeted advertising on each page and not being able to write the music to CD or a portable player?"
Well, that's good news.
Now if only I were a fan of some of Universal's Artists.
Guess I'll have to wait and see if the big companies follow suit.
My work here is dung.
I've tried to take a stand against ads myself. I'll subscribe to whatever I need, as long as I don't see ads. The way I see it, subscribing to slashdot (for example) puts money towards content and away from useless ad people. The only ads I want to see are when I do a google search. That's it! I'd rather subscribe (or even better, donate). I'm sick of the ad culuture, and it's got to stop. I won't be using this free music source because I already subscribed to Urge (plays for sure). At least more of that money is going to artists. With this, you have all sorts of ad brokers taking a cut.
So when they realize we are able to copy the music, what happens?
Yes.
Ads are only a minor issue, I have seen ads all my life I know how to ignore them.
The proponets of free content will whine... but this way the record company gets what they want (money) and the consumer gets free (of cost) music.
Nothing ever has been truely free, if you aren't buying (or stealing) something someone else is paying to put it in your hands for there own reasons. That is the way the world has worked for a long time.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
Cost isn't the main issue I have with digital music. Freedom is the main issue.
I want to be able to play the music that I purchase on whatever device I choose. Period.
If I can't do that, then I won't participate in the service.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
What they are really saying is that they will let you try listening to their music without paying for it first. If you want to do anything with it, you have to pay.
Which isn't a bad idea, acutally...
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I wonder how long it will take them to work the ads into the audio files themselves. 3 minutes of music sandwiched between 2 30 second commercials is probably inevitable.
TFA doesn't say anything about whether or not the music in question is DRM-encumbered. I see no reason at all to believe that it won't be.
So while the music may be free as in beer, it'll likely only be free in the most limited sense of the word.
Thanks, but I'll pass.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
RTFA, please. At least the first sentence:
Universal Music, the world's largest music company, has agreed to back a new venture that will allow consumers to download songs for free and instead rely on advertising for its revenues.
This is a big deal.
Who says that users will not be able to put the music on their portable media players or burn the tracks to CD?
The submitter, wild_berry, who, surprise surprise, is yet another Slashdot submitter who fails to understand the articles cited in his own submission. Neither of the articles cited contain any mention of such a restriction.
I've wondered how long it would be before a consultant somewhere said, 'you know, we should adapt or we risk dying', and this is what it is, finally a company with a financial interest in the matter is sitting down and trying to hash out an idea of how to make the new medium work for them.
I will probably go watch some ands and not hear the music (as it will probably require windows) just to show support for a company that is taking some initiative. I hope it makes them billions of dollars and all the other companies sit and wonder why they didn't think of it.
Is the immunity from litigation enough to make up for having targeted advertising on each page and not being able to write the music to CD or a portable player?"
As if you even needed immunity from litigation, or you had some intrinsic right to this music. The only people that need immunity from litigation are those breaking the law
Here's a content producer. They want to GIVE you their content for free online, in a distribution model simliar to one that most of slashdot has been having wet dreams about since Napster 1.0 was released. Shit know when you got it good and stop your bitchin lol!
If someone wants to give me something for free I'm not going to whine just because they want me to do a certain thing with it - free restricted music is better than no music at all...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
I can finally download Lindsay Lohan's albums instead of being THAT guy who buys them at the store. Now, if we could only get Hanson to sign with Universal the circle would be complete.
I say we just grow up, be adults and die.
Pay vs adverts?
What most people will continue to do is ignore itunes and spiralfrog and simply continue downloading the music for free.
Deleted
Free music *check*: ads *check*: crappy artists *check*:
If it looks like a duck.... then yeah. its not too much different than radio.
This is an attempt to bring the old business model of terrestrial radio to the Internet. It's no different than listening to a commercial radio station's Internet stream, apart from the lack of cheesy locally-produced ads for Slappy's Bait Shop and Ice Cream Stand.
For those unfamiliar with Terrestrial Radio, it's that thing with all the monopolies that is being pummeled by the more interesting stuff on Internet Radio and Satellite Radio.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Why hasn't the product placement concept come to music yet? Since people are downloading music for free from all kinds of sources and there is no stop to it, why not put the advertising in the music? I can't imagine that Brittany Spears would complain about having to incorporate "Coke" or "Victoria's Secret" into a song. Here is an example product placement in a popular song:
I am going to the corner, gonna buy some iPod bling.
Would you pardon me if it's a black 60 gigabyte t'ing
Good golly, miss Molly, sure like to ball.
When you're rockin' and a rollin' can't hear your momma call.
--- What?
Now the artists have absolutely NO WAY to recoup royalties from their label. Since the money generated from this service is derived from Advertising, and NOT the sale of the music, the artist is officially screwed. If some artists had the power they could re-negotiate their contract to include this, but since most are locked in (and still trying to pay back the massive advances from the label) they won't.
I have nothing clever to put here...
AAC is NOT an Apple-only format. The Fairplay DRM that Apple uses on their songs purchased through iTunes is Apple-only, but non-DRM AAC is available on any music player that wants it.
It's called an FM radio. I have one in my car, and it downloads music to my brain whenever I drive. Unfortunately, my brain seems to have a problem with the "delete" function. I can't delete that copy of "Hollaback Girl" I downloaded a few months back. Not only that, my mental media player is stuck on repeat right at that part with trombone slide. Someone please help!
All together now, AAC is an open format the DRM layer known as FairPlay is Apple only
What is the usual chorus of self-justification we hear from pirates?
"I pirate to try out bands for free - I buy new bands all the time by discovering them this way, so I should be allowed to pirate because the artist makes money!"
"I only get stuff I wouldn't have paid for anyway, so no one's losing money anyway."
"I want to listen to music where I want, and if I can't pay and maintain all my rights, then I won't pay and will simply pirate the music!"
Well, since this is free and semi-portable (i.e. any web-accessable computer, but not your car/at the beach), none of the above arguements hold water - you can try out bands for free (I'm not taking the bait on arguements over what version of the word 'free' we're using...), you can try out stuff you wouldn't have paid for anyway, and while you can't listen to it anyplace-in-space, you aren't losing rights you paid for (since you didn't pay.)
This looks like a good thing, and a smart play from the music industry - attack piracy justifications by making them irrelevant. If it's less-than-perfect by your definition, you don't have to play, and the topography of the game doesn't change (other than undercutting piracy justifiactions.)
Keep in mind that piracy!=filesharing!=breaking DRM - all those aspects are separate (and I'd argue, straw men against this specific point.)
Be careful of your thoughts; they could become words at any minute...
In my opinion, the article's concept is likely to have a good impact, but on many levels. I think it is important to see that if this isn't directly successful, it may be the precursor to something much more successful.
First, free music is pretty cool, especially if it is from known artists (although I have amassed TENS of fans from many countries and sold TENS of CDs and a hundred or so downloads from iTunes et. al internationally while giving away more than half my catalog on price-optional sites like iSound.com, pureVolume.com, and audiri.com). Free music as incentive for something else is a model that is evolving pretty hard right now, but I bet it will stick around for a long time.
There are lots of examples where successes have occurred with ad-driven services: broadcast TV; "free", ad-driven internet provider services, tons of "free" web sites and site hosting, etc. I don't know that the average John and Jane Q. Publique will mind the ads in this case... time will tell.
A Big Record Company is trying something fairly broad with "free" music. This is a positive step - trying to redefine oneself in business is akin to survival. I think it was W.E. Deming who said, "It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory." So, perhaps this record label is trying to change for its betterment.
A Passionate Independent Musician
Hilarious. A record company finally offers free downloads, and what responses do we see on /.?
"Horrors! I won't sit thru ADS to get free music!"
"It's encumbered with DRM! Help, I'm being repressed!"
"Bah -- the artist selection sucks!"
Ever heard the saying, "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth"?
Satellite Radio (XM at least) music channels are broadcast without Ads over both airwaves and online.
User listens to music for free, but there are ads. Where have I heard of this before? Lots of Internet radio around, like Pandora, that nominally doesn't allow the music to be captured, played on a portable device, etc., except if you find where the files are cached, and rename them to SomethingUseful.mp3.
Really nothing to see here, except for the fact that Universal now realizes that music being heard leads to music being bought.
Audacity lets you record a stream and redirect it to a .wav or .mp3 (with free plugin).
"The incremental damage done to a record company (since that's the focus of the article) is quite correctly thought of as insignificant by the individual performing the copying."
What do you mean by "quite correctly" ? The only head of a record company I've known ran an indie label with ten employees. At around the start of the P2P explosion he was paying himself about $25K a year. When people started sharing his music in lieu of buying, he had to lay off of his friends.
Naturally, that was his problem to deal with, and not anybody else's, and it was his sole responsibility to deal with the "people want something for nothing" maxim combined with the explosion of P2P. But nonetheless, he indeed had to cut costs and fire some of his friends. This was not insignificant to him, nor his friends whom he had to lay off. The fact that more people got to listen to his music was not enough.
Pirate or don't pirate -- I don't care what people do. But we should not make the mistake of assuming that the economic impact is "insignificant" if we opt to P2P in lieu of buying.
At any rate, I have another question for you. If piracy is economically insignificant to record companies, then why are they doomed to go out of business?
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.