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Universal Offers iPod-Resistant Music
dprovine writes "Universal is now offering music through Spiral Frog as free downloads supported by advertising revenue. But according to Daily Tech, the files being offered won't work on iPods. 'The move to not allow its content to be played on iPod's appears to be a clear snub by the Universal Music Group, similar to NBC's recent move of its television content from iTunes to Amazon.com. Apple has not commented on this development. For many, though, SpiralFrog.com presents an intriguing new business model that may present a legal alternative to file sharing or spending large amounts of money on CDs or paid download services, such as iTunes.'"
or less.
come on. let's get real here.
universal is gonna get owned.
How can it not work on an iPod?
MP3 is a clearly defined standard. These files either are, or they aren't, mp3's. If they are, iPods will play them. If they aren't, then they shouldn't be sold as MP3's.
sig?
This is a great service. Well, it's great as long as you only listen to music sitting in front of your computer. And don't use a Mac. Or Linux. And don't mind paying for music that may one day dissapear because the service has been discontinued or you move to a Mac or Linux.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Now Universal just look like idiots. One can easily argue the business sense of delivering content in a price-controllable way. Business 101 - when the demand increases, limit the supply and profit by increasing the prices, or changing the delivery mechanism to make more money on the same supply. Demand for downloadable music has increased while CD sales decreased, thus the allegory.
The stupid part of this idea is removing 70-80% (the share of iPods in the portable music market) of the market for your product. Just try to buy a gas station and switch to only selling ethanol and see how well that works if you need an example. The phrase shooting one's self in the foot comes to mind, but the recording studios seem good at that.
How many times will it take the various media conglomerates to finally learn that any DRM they try to shove down the throats of their customers will be broken fairly quickly by those same customers? They create some digital lock to protect their content, but they have to provide the keys somehow to the end-user so that they can access the content, and there are plenty of very intelligent people all over the world willing to work on breaking those locks with the provided keys.
We see the rise of another doomed business.
Of course it won't work on iPods, they're using DRM-out-the-ass WMA files that won't work on any OS but windows and players made by companies that bought into the Plays for Sure nonsense that not even Microsoft themselves use.
So it's free, so what. You get a combination of advertising and no control. I'll stick to my usual of buying CDs and ripping them to AAC, even if it means less music overall.
Well, there's probably a similar thing going on here... they're either working a deal or have a deal with another provider to try to exclude Apple's products. Aside from conversion to one format then to MP3, it won't be more than a day or two before someone has a standalone program or plug-in for an existing one that will do the conversion.
OCO is Loco
Here's an even easier way, download it from a P2P network in the first place.
The RIAA still doesn't get it. People can already get this stuff for free. The question in the consumer's mind is would they rather make sure it is 100% legal, or would they rather the music was convenient, i.e. works everywhere on all devices and can be transferred between machines and will still work if you switch computers or reinstall your computer. WMA is too painful to use. Nice try though.
For $0 a month in cash, I can download a sizable selection of music to my Playsforsure (Creative Zen Vision M) music player, but I have to spend my rare and precious time watching advertisements. Right off the bat, the real economic cost of this service based upon my opportunity costs is over $50 per month without exaggeration.
Or, I can pay $15 a month for Rhapsody or Napster and not have to spend my time being subjected to advertisements. $15 a month, which, and let's be honest, is not a lot of money to have access to a library of millions of songs.
My cynical take: this service is essentially an advertising gimmick by its financiers to draw people to superior services, such as Rhapsody. The increment from $0/month to $15/month is not too much at all for the tremendous jump in convenience.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
It seems to me that Universal et al see "downloading music for free" as the entire problem. They somehow don't understand that the biggest reason to download music for free is to put it on your mp3 player. They may have provided free music downloads, but DRM'd music is useless, and won't solve the problem.
For everyone jumping down Universal's throat for "snubbing Apple", it should be noted that this is no different than what Apple is doing when it restricts iTunes downloads to Apple-supported hardware. Yes, there is some DRM-free music available on iTunes, and I applaud them for it. But Universal is snubbing Apple about as much as Apple is snubbing Zune and every other music player out there that it refuses to license Fair-Play to, including the Linux operating system. There is absolutely no reason to believe that this had anything to do with their recent contract spat with Apple or that this wasn't coming out regardless of how their negotiations turned out.
- Stealth dave
Evil is as eval("does");
It's called radio.
Now everyone will talk about how great free music is, but then they'll complain about having to listen to advertisements. This, of course, will lead people to pine for some service where you could pay to listen to radio without advertisements.
Yes, cut out the millions of iPod users. That's how I would make something successful!!
Let's see how great this thing really is in 6-12 months with ads, DRM and limiting the product to not work on the #1 portable players.
I predict yet another failure in the pipeline. This product is about catering to the recording industry with the customer as an afterthought.
Same story, different URL.
The music industry really baffles me. First of all, what average consumer really knows which label their favorite bands are with? I'm sure most people are like me, and really don't care which band is with who. And when these labels start fragmenting how consumers are able to get music, it will just confuse the consumer, and just push them towards piracy.
The music industry really baffles me. First of all, what average consumer really knows which label their favorite bands are with? I'm sure most people are like me, and really don't care which band is with who. And when these labels start fragmenting how consumers are able to get music, it will just confuse the consumer, and just push them towards piracy.
I once dated a guy who worked for Universal in their licensing department. I guarantee you Universal doesn't understand that the average consumer has no idea what label an artist is on. When you work for a company like Universal you hear these entertainment names constantly, and it gets hard to separate that constant work related input from what you know about an entertainer from the non-work world.
In the end Universal is crippling itself. This isn't new for Universal. They were one of the last studios to begin moving their film archive onto DVD, they also just released DVD's with out even so much as a menu (ie, zero special features) you put the disk in, watched a couple previews you didn't want to watch, and then the movie started.
Universal is a company that has consistently put out the absolute minimum in frills, done the least possible it could in order to sell the item, all the while charging a premium for the DVD. This goes for Movies, and now more recently for Music. In the end they want to charge the CD price premium without providing the CD level quality. Apple won't let them screw their customers like that and so Universal is cutting off it's own nose to spite it's own face.
In the end we can live without the labels, and unfortunately Universal hasn't learned that fact yet. There'll always be great music out there, with or without them.
According to this article iTunes now is the third largest music retailer with 10% of the market (Wal-mart at #1 has 15% of the market.) Considering that Apple has nearly 90% of the digital music players market, Universal's attempt to move it's catalog onto Amazon (which is ranked #4 in the US for music retail) may have been an ill thought out strategic move when matched with the fact that the files only coming in (non-iPod supported) WMA format. In this case it appears that Universal has overestimated audience demand for their music library. Screwing yourself out of 10% total music sales in the US could easily result in Universal not seeing another artist enter the top 10 sales lists until the iTunes boycott ends. Most of todays generic corporate created artists lack any sort of long term market draw or memorability without the corporate backed marketing and chart positions generated by sales. That is the significance of Universal's ill thought out strategy to force Apple's hand.
I could also go off onto a tangent regarding Malcolm McDowell's Tipping Point and how the "cool kids" likely to cause a tipping point effect for an artist are probably the "cool kids" who of course own iPods. An artist without the "cool kids" support is going to find him/herself increasingly less relevant to mainstream consumers. This of course is a harder idea to support with actual numbers, for me it's just a gut feeling that this decision is going to have that sort of anti-cool impact that could result in the wrong kind of "tipping point" (ie, people abandoning an artist.)
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
iTunes music doesn't work on non-Apple MP3 players, so isn't it only fair that companies would start selling non-iPod music?
If it seems unfair, perhaps there should be an equal amount of outrage directed toward Apple... right?