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EMI May Sell Entire Collection as DRM-less MP3s
BobbyJo writes "According to the Chicago Sun-Times, EMI has been pitching the possibility of selling its entire music collection to the public in MP3 form ... without Digital Rights Management protections. According to the article, several other major music companies have considered this same route, but none as far as EMI. The reasons, of course, have nothing to do with taking a moral stand; EMI wants to compete with Apple. 'The London-based EMI is believed to have held talks with a wide range of online retailers that compete with Apple's iTunes. Those competing retailers include RealNetworks Inc., eMusic.com, MusicNet Inc. and Viacom Inc.'s MTV Networks. People familiar with the matter cautioned that EMI could still abandon the proposed strategy before implementing it. A decision about whether to keep pursuing the idea could come as soon as today.'"
One of the big four has to be first. Maybe if one takes that big first step, the rest will realize the folly of DRM and follow.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
Somebody has to do it but first, the music "sharing" (pronounced "stealing") problem still needs to be solved or EMI will be very broke, very fast. I don't think the "honor system" has been completely worked out (or is it "honour system"?). Second, I wonder how much one of the majors would charge for a lifetime, unencumbered digital music license? Otherwise, this is a very exciting development. Competing with Apple would be less a factor since the iPod is the cash cow (not the iTunes store) and the iPod is an MP3 player first and foremost.
Most of the stuff on
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
To get the honor system to work, they need to make it very easy to buy music. Easier than finding it for free. People will sill 'borrow' from friends, but if it is easy enough to find and buy music through them, then most people won't make the effort to find it for a lower price.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I wouldn't pay 5$ for a 128kbps mp3 album when I could down 192kbps VBR for free. 128kbps mp3 isn't even worth listening to, unless you're into poetry/other spoken material
I would however pay £5 for a high- or very high- quality mp3 album.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Somebody has to do it but first, the music "sharing" (pronounced "stealing") problem still needs to be solved or EMI will be very broke, very fast.
Why?
DRM-less music has existed for longer than its DRM-encumbered counterpart. The web, Napster (v1), Kazaa, AllOfMP3 all made every album ever released fairly easy to get free or cheap, without any DRM.
And yet... The music industry still manages billions of dollars in sales per year.
How can that happen? It only takes one copy, right?
What the RIAA, MPAA, and apparently you need to understand, most people consider themselves basically honest. People want to "do the right thing", and they want to support their favorite artists.
People do not, however, like getting "burned" buying an album of crap with one overhyped single on it.
You basically have two kinds of music downloaders... The first group (which I consider the vast majority) downloads a few tracks to check them out, and if they enjoy the music, they'll buy the album. The music industry should court these people, not take them to court, because they count as customers (if they don't get too pissed off at the antipiracy measures put in their way). The second group will download anything and everything the can, and wouldn't dream of paying for music. You can fairly call them parasites, but their behavior (and how little they actually buy) wouldn't change in the least if the MP3 fairy came along and made it physically impossible to pirate music. So, as much as the industry may hate them, they have no effect on sales, whether given free reign to download, or whether DRM eventually proves effective in stopping them.
I would actually add to that one more pseudocategory, the "potential" customers... These people fall into the first group but currently can't afford to actually buy much music. Many college students fall into this category. Although they may superficially look like group #2 at their present station in life, in a decade they will start replacing their collection with legally obtained copies, to the great profit of the music industry.
So, does the industry need to address the "problem" of try-before-you-buy, or embrace it? Since we don't already all have a complete collection of every song ever made, despite the ready availability of them, I'd say "no". This problem exists only in the closets and under the beds of media company CEOs.
The translation of this concept from Russian to English, of course, is "Allofmp3"
-BA
"The translation of this concept from Russian to English, of course, is "Allofmp3""
Exactly. And since the EMI catalog would presumably include album art, it would make it that much easier for Allofmp3 to bolster their library.
The gotcha here is that customers want a "fair price," and many people have mentioned that since allofmp3 sells for less than $0.10 per track, that's a "fair price" and anything else must be henous profit-taking. The reality is that in the US, the minimum mechanical royalty payment by law is about $0.07 to the songwriter and lyricist (not to mention royalties for performers, bandwidth, credit card processing, and all the expenses that happen when people who draw salaries touch the product somewhere), so if your net cost per track is greater than $0.10, you can't break even no matter how many you sell. And as noted in the article, EMI netted eight points of profit last year, so they don't have a lot of room to play with.
People mentioned ease of use. The thing is, the people on the pro-piracy side have pretty good designers and coders, too. No matter how good Apple makes the iTunes interface, BitTorrent clients and sites like allofmp3 keep getting better, too.
What this means is that people will always find a moral reason to pirate. EMI releases their catalog in MP3 format in a variety of compression rates and with album art? Sorry, chaps, allofmp3 will give us the same thing, and they're $0.10 (lower than EMI will ever be able to sell at unless the law is changed), so EMI must be the greedy fucktards here. The iTMS is easy to use, you say? Sorry, bittorrent clients are just as easy and have just as much eye candy; thus iTMS et al. have clearly dropped the ball and we shouldn't give them our money.
I mentioned the law requiring minimum mechanical royalties. A few months back, the record companies actually were trying to change these royalties, and to say that it did not go over well with the Slashdot crowd is putting it mildly. If the law does get changed one day, then many people will certainly use the logic that if the record company isn't paying the artists, then they shouldn't have to. EMI is big and evil; allofmp3 is the our friend since they've been selling cheap, DRM-free music for a while now. Guess who will get the average Slashdotter's money?
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.