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EMI May Sell Entire Collection as DRM-less MP3s

Posted by Zonk on from the and-away-we-go dept.

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.'"

17 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Recent EMI News by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting
    First off,

    EMI has been pitching the possibility of selling its entire music collection to the public in MP3 form ...
    Not quite, they're looking to sell it to a service. If my tax dollars were paying for all of EMI's music to enter public domain, I would imagine a lot of people wouldn't like that idea.

    Recently, I learned that EMI will be allowing music videos to stream freely to UK, German & French users through AOL.

    Also--possibly in relation to this--EMI's top legal counsel, Charles Ashcroft, has stepped down after ten years with the company. There's been a lot of internal restructuring so I wonder if these no-DRM propositions are on the way in or on the way out.

    From the article linked above,

    EMI, which is the world's largest independent music company, reported revenue of £867.9m and £62.7m profit for the six months ending 30 September last year.
    I'm assuming that those profits are primarily music based so what amount would you have to offer the world's largest independent music company to be able to release their MP3s without any form copy protection? It's difficult to consider anyone being able to afford this.
    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:Recent EMI News by Divebus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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 /. won't survive first contact with facts.
    2. Re:Recent EMI News by uradu · · Score: 5, Interesting

      > If my tax dollars were paying for all of EMI's music to enter public domain

      Who the hell is talking about that? You're reading things into it that aren't there.

      On a different note, if EMI is seriously considering selling unencumbered music, I would suggest they buy allofmp3's back-end software, or they develop something along similar lines along with a similar sales model, except of course more realistic pricing that hopefully actually compensates the artists. I personally consider up to around $5 an album for 128Kbps MP3 an acceptable price, any higher than than and downloads almost completely lose their attraction. Future pricing models simply HAVE to take into consideration the quality-per-buck aspect, otherwise it won't fly long term. Paying $10 an album for considerably lower quality than what you get on a CD from Target or Wal-Mart at the same price simply won't fly. Besides, offering a tiered pricing model also gives them the chance to zero in on the sweet spot of the market.

    3. Re:Recent EMI News by antonyb · · Score: 5, Interesting
      The internal restructuring is on the back of extremely bad financial results. Its also worth noting that since the CEO and CFO stepped down, a deal has been struck with a Chinese ISP which comes off the back of a failed legal action by EMI to sue the same ISP for linking to illegal downloads. EMI internally, believe it or not, has a fairly enlightened view of mp3 & DRM, but have been hampered by their old-fashioned board of directors. I think they're likely to be the first to ditch DRM and sell unfettered music downloads.


      ant.

    4. Re:Recent EMI News by Daniel_Staal · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
    5. Re:Recent EMI News by SkunkPussy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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!!!!!
    6. Re:Recent EMI News by psykocrime · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      Exactly. Personally, I'll happily pay to go to an official service, with high quality mp3 downloads, where I can quickly search by artist, song-title, album, etc. and find the exact track I'm looking for, know that what I'm getting is what is actually labeled, know what the quality of the file is, etc. As long as the files aren't DRM'd and the price is reasonable. Why waste time with p2p networks where you never know exactly what you're getting, download times are inconsistent, etc?

      Hopefully if the labels go through with this, they follow the "long tail" approach and put plenty of obscure tracks up as well... demos, b-sides, live recordings, unreleased tracks, etc. Give music fans what they're looking for and they'll pay (well, some of us will anyway).

      --
      // TODO: Insert Cool Sig
    7. Re:Recent EMI News by pla · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    8. Re:Recent EMI News by Bright+Apollo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The translation of this concept from Russian to English, of course, is "Allofmp3"

      -BA

    9. Re:Recent EMI News by shark72 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "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.
  2. Someone has to be first by gravesb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  3. Compression by skriefal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is a good first step. Now start selling the tracks without lossy compression! 99 cents per track for FLAC downloads and even *I* might be interested.

    1. Re:Compression by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      I am willing to accept zero loss. Until the music industry can get its act together and have the band play a concert at my house for 99 cents a song, I refuse to pay. Those of us with high-end auditoriums in our garages don't want any of this lossy sampled stuff. Good day to you, sir!

    2. Re:Compression by stud9920 · · Score: 4, Funny

      An average audiophile will find a FLAC tune worse than the equivalent CD.

  4. Re:To paraphrase Johhny Dangerously... by ElleyKitten · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "My father sold his entire music collection to the public in MP3 form without Digital Rights Management restrictions... ONCE."
    It's not like the music sold with DRM doesn't wind up on pirate sites anyways. All it takes is one person to convert a song to mp3 and it's all over the net. Might as well give your paying customers the benefits of mp3.
    --
    "What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
  5. Competing with Apple??? by ryanduff · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
    Not according to the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/business/media/0 9online.html:

    EMI, which releases music by artists including Coldplay and the Beatles, has discussed various proposals to sell unprotected files through an array of digital retailers, including Apple, Microsoft, Real Networks and Yahoo, said the executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
    Don't be confused by the submitter's opinion. Moral reasons vs competition was mentioned nowhere in the linked Associated Press article...
    In the manner of Steve Ballmer "FUD! FUD! FUD!"
  6. "Excuse me! Old man coming through!" by pandrijeczko · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Hey, EMI!

    How about you just *continue* to release albums in the best digital sound quality possible (i.e. on CD) and just make the price of those a lot more reasonable?

    Then all of us out here in Consumerland can rip the CDs to whatever format is appropriate to us and not go into fits of hysterical laughter when a Beatles album that was recorded 40 years ago appears in a shop with a £15+ price tag.

    If people want the option of picking tracks from albums in a lossy format, then let them have it - but if theire lives are so damned hectic that they cannot find the time to listen to an album from start to finish, then they are not the true, CD-buying music enthusiasts anyway.

    And if people start whining about "only 2 or 3 good tracks on an album" then suggest that they do a little more research into music and go find some better music.

    --
    Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.