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Labels Agree On Free Music Downloads To Cell Phones
An anonymous reader writes "CNet's Crave reports on a potentially revolutionary digital music service set to launch worldwide later this year. It's offering free, unlimited over-the-air downloads to cell phones, with music from all four major record labels, with no subscription. And the selections that users download get automatically downloaded to their PC or Mac. Rather obviously, the tracks are DRMed, but unlike the similar Nokia service unveiled last year to much disappointment, this MusicStation Max service will have exclusive handsets from LG and no additional fees to customers. This is a little similar to an idea talked about last year, but with all four majors on-board it seems to have greater potential."
I do not see the little detail of advertising in the write up. There is no free lunch, even for a pre-announced product (*vapour-ware*, cough, *vapour-ware*).
They will make money by sharing revenue with the mobile carriers. They have been struggling for ever to find a way to sell their data plans and now here it is.
The majority of people want to have four digital devices with them at all times: a phone, a PDA, a camera, and a music player. They also do not want to carry separate devices to do these things. So, they get bundled. A cell phone is a PDA/C, a personal digital assistant/communicator. The PDA/C allows the user to organize contact information, schedules, etc. The audio capabilities keeps the user entertained while travelling. The video capabilities allows the user to capture spontaneous moments, or take video notes (pictures of signs, etc). Oh, and it also allows the user to communicate. That means sending text, pictures, and of course, two way audio. Cell phones are starting to have internet browsers on them. In the future, look for them to have docking stations with full sized keyboards and monitors, as the cell phone and the notebook merge.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Bundling some sort of a music fee into digital items is not a bad business model. The record companies get their piece of the pie, consumers can get a set of appliances where they can have their music.
This actually isn't that different from the software model, pre-Microsoft. Software was ultimately bundled in with the hardware and service contract costs and so everyone could just sorta of copy software all over the place. Heck, Microsoft owes a lot of its success to this sort of model for Windows largely due to its lack of DRM. If Microsoft required the sort of authentication with DOS and Windows 3.1 that it requires for Vista, it is very doubtful they would be in the dominant position they are in today. DOS used to be $10!!!
Of course, this bundling sucks for Linux and completely free software, but one could envision a distro actually having a service plan with it for DRM content. If you throw in a few extra bucks, the content plan could actually be used to help fund further Linux development. Thus, tacking a few bucks onto teeny boppers wanting to get the latest Hannah Montana on a Linux box could actually be used to help pay for things like additional FireFox, Open Office and other Linux core applications development.
The one thing that really hurts the credibility of the music industry, aside from the obvious and vile thuggishness with which RIAA presses its claims, is that, the artist's share of the proceeds is rather small. In the CD / Vinyl days, a large cut for the industry was reasonable because of all the people that the business needed to pay to make physical copies. Now, with electronic distribution, there's really no moral reason why the artist can't get a larger piece of the pie. But as we have seen with the writer's strike, it seems that the content industry isn't really interested in promoting, well, the truly gifted people that make content, but rather, exploiting them, and that completely undermines any legitimate claim onto the advantages of copyright. The recording industry isn't really an enabler of artists, as much as it is more like the Islamic caliphs of old sitting on overland trade routes, exploiting them until the Europeans figured out how to sail around them and avoid the ridiculous surcharges.
To have an efficient capitalistic economy, you want to reward investment in people that actually add value, and record companies don't. So, having a more consumer friendly business model won't fix the problem. Record companies have to actually pay the artists a real percentage of the music sales. IF shareware distributors can thrive taking 10-15% of a sale, leaving artists with the lion's share, then so can record companies. The situation is different with movies, which are much more collaborative and capital intensive thing, but, even there, there's no reason that the principals of a movie can't get a bigger piece of the pie.
This is my sig.
First, phones have those features because the vast majority of people find them desirable. Not everyone wants them, of course, but way more than half. Each different phone has a full set of engineering, manufacturing, marketing and packaging costs, which are substantial and have to be spread across a lot of phones to make them affordable. Thus it's cheaper to make, package, and market 100,000 phones than it is to make 1,000 simple phones plus another 99,000 complex phones. It's basic economies-of-scale.
Next, very few phone features turn into service charges, and none of them are particularly easy to access. (Verizon is the most guilty party there, as they deliberately cripple phones preventing you from uploading and downloading media without using their pay-per-use network.) And sure, I can see the providers charging for Assisted-GPS service -- so don't use it. But I've never heard of a cell phone provider charging you simply because your phone CAN do something -- they charge when you USE their services.
As far as using the GPS in phones to measure traffic congestion? It's an interesting theory, but I doubt seriously that it'll go any further than an NPR story. Besides, your phone is constantly talking all by itself. Every few minutes it makes contact with the tower. Your cell provider already knows which tower your phone is near whenever it's powered on, so if you're that paranoid you should consider turning the thing off unless you're on a call.
Seriously, how inconvenient is it to have the camera? Does it turn on in your pocket, and make embarrassing shutter noises? Or does the calendar chirp at you when you're trying to make a phone call?
There are still a lot of phone options out there, including some pretty simple phones with large, easy-to-read screens for you old people who have kids on your lawns. I know because my mom wanted one, and she's old, and the kids are on her damn lawn, too. And you know what? Even she figured out how to personalize her phone, with a different ring tone and a new background picture and everything.
P.S. If you think cell phones are bad, it is nothing like cable pricing. Cable is very different in that each and every channel they deliver to a subscriber has a price tag that they pay on your behalf (and extract from you), and the bundling of "super-basic" channels with their "premium" channels equals truckloads of extra money for everyone but us. So if you want Sci-fi in HD, well, you can only get it with the "Premium-overly-complex plan" with hyperbundling including unwatchable crap stations like the Faux News channel and the Oprah channel. Mistakenly applying that pricing logic to your cell phones would indeed give you the nightmare of charges that you seem to be imagining.
John
I'd just like to point out that at&t / Cingular do indeed charge you based upon your phone's capabilities, not simply data usage. Case in point there is MediaNet Unlimited (unlimited data for crippled phones that only have a built in browser), BlackBerry (unlimited data for BlackBerries), DataConnect (unlimited data for laptops), and PDA Personal (unlimited data for PDAs or phones with QWERTY keyboards); all of these (except DataConnect) also have two-tiered pricing depending on whether your device can tether to a laptop. This was all very confusing to me when I signed up for a plan with my own unbranded phone. I just wanted unlimited data; I could not figure out why in hell there were 8 different prices for the same amount of bandwidth. It's all designed to go with the device you buy. In other words, if you buy phone with features X, Y, Z, they only offer data plan A. If you buy a phone with features X, Q, T, they only offer data plan B.
You may have a point, there. DRM on expensive items doesn't work, when the alternative is a free unauthorized download. However, if legal downloads become dirt-cheap, but locked to a device with DRM, the situation might change. DRM will always be crackable, sure, but if you can easily buy music directly on a mobile device at a reasonable price, it could well appear worth the cost to avoid the hassle of getting on a computer, finding what you want, downloading the stuff, and loading it onto your device after potentially having to convert to another format as well. If the pricing is low enough, the user might not even mind having to pay again to download the media onto a different device.
This certainly goes against how we're used to consuming media right now, but if the industry's plans are to provide their services like described above, it would at least explain their stubborn insistence on DRM. Instead of selling a product once at a higher price, they would sell it many times at a lower price. If they're smart, that is. If they're not, they won't bring the pricing low enough and their downward spiral will continue.
If you do go this route, be sure to purchase albums from independent artists and labels.
If you DO plan on purchasing RIAA-stuff, at least buy used copies. You don't want to feed the proverbial bears if you don't have to.
In fact, these particular bears I'd love to see die of starvation. Oops - is that sort of comment going to get me in trouble with the animal cruelty people? I mean it figuratively, of course.
No real bears were harmed in the posting of this comment.