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Legal Music Streaming Site Launches In France
An anonymous reader writes "The French website Deezer.com has struck a deal with the SACEM (the French equivalent to the RIAA) and is now legally providing Internet users around the world with more than 100,000 full songs, streamed on demand and without restrictions. The site, formerly named Blogmuzik.net, had had to close down last March under pressure from the recording industry."
no more of that 30 second preview nonsense- listen to the song if you like it you add it- no restrictions on the number of songs/artist like finetune either. hmmm guess the RIAA can't do shit about it now can they?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Merci pour les emissions gratuits, mes amis!
Information and music just wants to be free.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Are these the same innovation-stifling, reactionary French I keep seeing on Fox News and in the business press?
I mean, free music? That REEKS of socialism. I, for one, am enough of a proud American to do whatever the music lobbyists of this greatest country in the world demands of me.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
So err does this mean the RIAA has surrendered to uhm France? Doesn't this rip a hole in the time-space continuum or something?
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While I am not one of those people who claims to be able to tell the difference between 192kbps and 256kbps MP3s, a sampling rate of 32kbps is obviously degraded even to my aging ears.
So how do artists get income through this scheme? Surely they must get something for their efforts... (have not RTFA)
What's the catch?
There has to be something in the small print somewhere.
The innovation stifling french were the ones who brought modern government method of the republic to the world, starting around with ideas of the likes of voltaire, rousseau and contemporaries. and united states of america, the first country to be founded by those new (and by that time's standards probably very socialist in your understanding) and popular ideals. i bet you would call them 'socialist' and demean them, gratifying the king if you were to live at that era.
Read radical news here
I get in, i type in "smokie" and voila, 14 songs pop up, groovy too. i click, and it plays, and it plays well, and it doesnt even require one single bit of anything - it has its own player in the site and plays well - actually at the same time with winamp playing some other thing.
its fast also.
Read radical news here
The only thing Pandora asked of me to "prove" I'm in the US is a zip code. So I gave them one. I'm not in the US and I'm still using it with no problems.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
When you register they go through the motions of applying a secure sign-up process by not activating you until you've clicked the activation link in the email they send you. But with the activation link being deezer.com/confirm.php?email=, why bother?
Oh, and after you've clicked the link they email you your password in the clear.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
sometimes you vaguely remember a song you dont have and need to find it. or test out some pieces before buying them from somewhere. this thing will work great for it.
Read radical news here
A bunch of freedom fries, please.
Looked for a couple of songs using opera, didn't find (not unusual) but could not back out.
Maybe the content will increase in the future. The songs I was looking for were in french so I thought they might have them.
I hope this is the start of a trend.
welcome our french music-streaming overlords.
Let them eat cake!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Phnglui Mglwnafh Cthulhu R'lyeh Wgah Nagl F'htagn!
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
Dear Pandora Visitor,
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
We believe that you are in Canada (your IP address appears to be XX.XXX.XXX.XXX). If you believe we have made a mistake, we apologize and ask that you please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com
If you are a paid subscriber, please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com and we will issue a pro-rated refund to the credit card you used to sign up. If you have been using Pandora, we will keep a record of your existing stations and bookmarked artists and songs, so that when we are able to launch in your country, they will be waiting for you.
We will be notifying listeners as licensing agreements are established in individual countries. If you would like to be notified by email when Pandora is available in your country, please enter your email address below. The pace of global licensing is hard to predict, but we have the ultimate goal of being able to offer our service everywhere.
We share your disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding.
Sincerely,
Tim Westergren
Founder
Yes, I know I could use a proxy or use several other clever tricks to waste my time trying/succeeding, but if other countries are providing the content without me having to make the effort to break disagreable american laws, it is clearly the american internet entrepreneur's loss.
You might have missed this, but imeem.com has been offering free streaming of music from Warner Brothers as well as many smaller labels for some time now. It's all advertisign supported and in reality it's more like 'youtube for music' where music gets checked on upload to see if it's licensed and if it's part of the deals they've signed then any user on the site can hear it full length.
Period XD
SACEM is the French performing rights organization, equivalent to either ASCAP or BMI in the US, or SOCAN in Canada. They're not a lobby group comprised of commercial record labels. They collect royalties from broadcasts and performances on behalf of French musicians.
Light the blue touch-paper and retire immediately.
wowser. At first i thought this was a bleh. idea. But so far i've listened to a lotta music i've been intending to for ages just sitting here at work. legally for a change too. Internet radio is ok. but after 3 songs i generally through my headphones down in anger as they put something crap on:( The library so far is impressive (IMO)
You might have missed this imeem.com has been doing this for a while, as well as the usual selection of indie labels the massive news was that Warner Brothers music has basicly given them streaming rights to their catalog which includes hundreds of mainstream artists. All advertising supported and free (well I guess you have to sign up for an account)
I want all this stuff back online. I want the guitar tabs
and all the stuff that the RIAA has bullied people about for years
with no consideration of fair use.
I could give a crap about little pussy agreements with governments.
Fair use is dead and thats killing the internet
Thanks to Universal to order Deezer.com to stop stream their content due to a lack of communication between them. For more information (in french): http://www.freenews.fr/nat/5144-presse-deezer-com- universal-acte-3.html
The little history is Neuf Cegetel, french ISP, sign a contract with Universal allow their subscribers to download and listen DRM protected music.
Deezer.com was associated with Free.fr, another ISP (one of the most important in France), after a strategic "Joke" in press by Free.
Now Deezer get the feedback of Free.fr actions.....
Please Universal: let us listen free music!
I hope my english is not that bad! =)
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I did the same, and they sent an email a few months back saying they knew I wasn't in the US and they were being pressured to cut off access from certain countries by a set date. Pandora stopped working on that date.
It's really sad for the RIAA, since Pandora was the only way they could bleed any money from me (from Pandora's pocket, of course). I thought about finding a proxy server to bypass their filters, but decided that if the music industry was going to be that obtuse about people giving them money I couldn't even justify sending them additional pennies by proxy...
Colour me unimpressed. First track, and it pauses every 30 seconds for 2-3 seconds (I have 24mb/s of downstream), and the interface is kinda sucky. Still, on the political front, great news.
This would've been really cool had it come out about 5 years ago, but today, with all the music videos available on YouTube, who wants to stream the music when you can get the whole music video? Still, I suppose the library might be a little greater, as you can get more than just some of the major, popular songs that music videos are made for,... But still,...
Same here (so far at least) in the UK. Listening to it right now. Although I haven't logged in for a while, so they may be updating their lists of non American users.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Ummm... let me be the first to point out that SACEM is NOT the French equivalent of the RIAA... at least not if they are allowing "more than 100,000 full songs, streamed on demand and without restrictions."
But maybe the RIAA will take a lesson from this and come to their senses and convince their member companies (themselves) to come up with and/or support more viable Internet distribution methods as a business model instead of their current "Sue 'em all and then some more people for good measure" attitude. In addition, their Internet Royalty Arm (SoundExchange) is still leaning the exact opposite way (making such things costly, and waffling back and forth between forcing the websites to add encumbering restrictions to the content - ie: DRM). While SoundExchange seems to be/have waffled on some of that, they are still a far cry from what SACEM seems to be allowing and setting up.
Hopefully this will prove to be enough of a viable business model in France that the RIAA/SoundExchange will take note and head down a different road than their current one...
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
I'm pleased to see that the Europeans are again taking a jump ahead of the colonials.
These days I pretty much exclusively get my music from http://www.jamendo.com/ where all the music is free (and much of it is pretty terrible, by the way, but there is also some excellent stuff.)
After observing the *AA fiasco, I've decided to vote with my wallet. Nowadays all my financial contributions are volutary. Jamendo provides me with a way to pay however much I like for the music I like, and just about all of it goes to the artist (for a change.)
Go the French!
10001001111001110110011000011101110
Nah, the RIAA wouldn't be that devious, would it?
People who upload music are supposed to have permission from the copyright holder. That means 98% of the mainstream music hosted on their site has been uploaded without permission. No, seriously, this site is just as legal as YouTube.
Sig
Same here, they detected my country of origin (IP based, presumably).
I had to tunnel my ip traffic to pandora back to the US to be able to listen.
If you still want to listen, just use one of the free proxy servers on the net.
For example: Pandora Proxy
SACEM (Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musiques) have been working with the RIAA to shut down allofmp3.com in Russia. SACEM's boss claimed that the Russian's only had rights to exploit the RAO catalogue on Russian territory. Presumably SACEM only has rights to exploit their member's catalogue and then probably only on French soil. According to another article the agreement will be signed in the next few days. As France is a part of the WTO etc. I assume the RIAA will take Deezer/SACEM to court if the agreement exceeds their rights.
Where do http://www.last.fm/ and http://www.projectplaylist.com/ compare to deezer?
I downloaded some of the files and played them in Winamp.
Winamp's file info box is telling me that a file is a MPEG-1 layer 3
320kbit, 48000Hz Stereo and the others are MPEG-1 layer 3
192kbit, 44100Hz Joint Stereo
It seems that they encoded different files at different bitrates.
SACEM is NOT the french equivalent to the RIAA !
It is the equivalent of the US-based BMI and ASCAP, and that makes a big difference : SACEM manages the rights of songwriters / composers / publishers, NOT the rights on actual recordings.
This means that what Deezer.com did is a first, necessary but not sufficient step, and at this point they would merely have the right to have someone perform those songs again and re-record them, then stream the result!
What they have yet to do, is to get a deal for the actual rights to the recordings, with the real french equivalent of the RIAA : the SCPP (major labels) and SPPF (independent labels). Not the IFPI (as I've read in another comment) which is just an international club of the RIA*'s.
And that's where it becomes tricky : the Deezer.com announcement comes 2 days after Universal Music France teamed up with France's 3rd largest ISP (neuf.fr, with whom they share the same parent company, Vivendi) to launch a heavily marketed, Windows DRM-based, unlimited music offering.
France's 2nd ISP, Free, probably the most innovative, net-savvy, and the last independent one, immediately decided to promote Deezer.com to steal Neuf's thunder.
Now, Universal is saying Deezer.com is illegal, and they're threatening to sue them and any entity that would overtly promote it.
They are technically right, but obviously you have to read between the lines to understand the real motive behind that potential lawsuit...
Same here. And I know of at least one other person in the UK using Pandora.
From what is said in the French press and on French news websites, Deezer's music catalog is far from being 100% legal. They have a few agreements, but for most of the songs they have at best *contacted* the corresponding recording company.
They have a temporary agreement with the SACEM, till December 2007, with the SACEM having the ability to make it stop even sooner if they want. What makes me think this thing won't last, is the fact their agreement is based on the promise that their service is the first one where the user can listen to the music without the data being downloaded on the user's system, and without the user having the ability to record it.
In other words they guarantee that there's no way for user to record a song and listen to it without using their service. Hello there, Total Recorder and similar applications.
____
nico
Nico-Live
I see alot of posts above complaining about slow streaming and buffering, but I have to say here in the UK it seems to be working fine. The whole song loads up in 50 seconds.
Actually Deezer is still negociating with major and indie record companies, according to an article from mainstream newspaper Le Monde (in french). The deal with SACEM was just the beginning of a long process, IMO. In addition, a flaw in the streaming system has been discovered, allowing users to directly download mp3 from the site, according to the same article. Bet this is not going to help the negociations.
Durn. Thanks for the info. I only started using it a week ago. I guess I'll stop using it now before I get used to it and build up many playlists only to have it taken away.
Well, bon jour Deezer!
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
ESCAM instead of SACEM?
Experts arguing about connection to DMCA and the RIAA suddenly vanish.
The site worked great a not long ago, but now seems to be loading more slowly. I guess the popularity of this service may make it near unusable if they don't work out their bandwidth issues.
The SACEM ("Societe des Auteurs Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9_des _auteurs%2C_compositeurs_et_%C3%A9diteurs_de_musiq ue) is the organisation that takes care of collecting and managing artists' fees.
Everytime you use a song from someone else (play it with your band, use it as a DJ...), this is where you have to pay in order for the artist to be rewarded.
This explains why they were able to strike a deal with them. Majors (Universal for example) are actually not happy about that site and are menacing to sue them (the deals are not signed yet, but the site is already up and running).
That's not a nick, that's my NAME.
Joan Baez performing a cover of "No woman, no cry" live here.