Slashdot Mirror
Would You Rent a Song For a Dime?
An anonymous reader writes "What's worse than a padlocking every song so that they will only play on certain devices? How about selling (renting) you songs that work on no devices? Astonishingly, this is what the music industry thinks we need. Warner Music is spending $20 million to back Lala, a startup devising a service to convince people to 'buy' 'web songs' for 10 cents each; these are then kept for safekeeping only by Lala with no download privileges. Industry insider Michael Robertson leaks the facts on this scheme, along with a seekrit URL so you can try it out."
If you can listen, you can save, and it won't be long before a hack for that is posted on slashdot.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
My major objection to DRM on music I buy is simple: if there is DRM on it, I don't really own it.
If I am renting the music in the first place, DRM doesn't bother me so much. Exhibit A is the Rhapsody online music service, which is essentially a flat-rate music rental service. I have discovered that I like Rhapsody very much. I am finding new bands that I like, bands I had never heard of before, much faster than before I had Rhapsody.
Depending on what you get, Rhapsody is $12 to $15 per month. If this plan really is a dime per track, that's a cheaper rental than Rhapsody. The big question is coverage. If the new plan only lets me rent the latest pop acts, I'm just not interested. (Rhapsody has over 4 million tracks, including all sorts of cool things: Herbie Mann flute albums, Bill Cosby comedy albums, progressive rock, etc.)
When Rhapsody helps me music I really like, I then go and buy the music on CD, so that I will really own it. I'd be happy to do the same thing with this new service.
Will the service succeed? I'd say that depends very much on the specifics. How do you pay them that dime per track? If they have a convenient way to add dimes to your account, such as selling gift cards in Best Buy, it might become wildly popular; if you have to jump through a bunch of hoops (agree to a 20-page EULA, pre-register, enter a valid credit card number, pre-pay in $30 chunks, etc.) most people will just say no.
Assuming it's convenient, would I "rent" a song for ten cents? Sure. Why not?
steveha
Disclaimer: I work for the company that owns Rhapsody, but it's not my job to sell it to you or anyone else.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
We so need to organize a protest at this one diner near where I work. They have the audacity to "rent" songs for a whole quarter a song (or 5 for $1), for just one listen! If I'm paying for it, I want the right to my song, dammit!
Look, I'm all for actually owning the digital music you buy, but I think we're jumping on this for the wrong reason. It's not so much that they are ripping us off of our rights (which they aren't), as it is a stupid business model. There are so many other, better legal alternatives out there, I don't see this one flying.
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I believe this "submission" a way to get people on the site so that lala can tell their investors "We had 1 million hits within one day of launch."
Slashdot fell for it and is now giving a never heard of site massive traffic which will appear positive to investors.
Honestly, any music one buys online is going to have a limited lifetime. The best one can hope for is that you can make a copy to CD and not lose much in the transcoding. But how many people burn to CD? For most people the just put on their computer or another device.
While I think this service is maybe inferior to something like Amazon, it is superior in many ways to ITMS. If I can pay a dime to put something in a jukebox, then play it from anywhere I can log on, what is the problem? I might make even more sense to use this service that labouriously moving all my music from on device to another.
That is if I hadn't already bought half of the music I will likely buy in my lifetime. I have many gigabytes of music that I have bought over my life. If I was a kid with a computer, a smart phone, and internet access at school, this would be a wonderful deal. An album for a dollar. I can play on anything I normally play on? Sign me up! You may think of the expense, but how much are kids paying for ringtones, SMS, and the like.
I know we have a kneejerk reaction around here to paying for things, and we believe that music wants to be free, but perhaps the objection here is more based on what we consider the norm, not rational thought. Perhaps music is not about listening to the same album a hundred times because we can only afford that one album, or listening to whatever is free on yahoo. Perhaps there is some value in having a collection of songs, that one chooses our of personal taste, and then having access to those songs over many devices located in disparate geographical area. As I said, i would not do this. I would just buy the CD or download the album. But I can imagine such a thing maybe finding a small market. It would suck to have all the music go away, though.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
So if we pay per song, aside form the obvious distraction of having to make all of our own song playlists (radio pays people for that same job) we also get to pay about $2.00 per hour for the rental of songs. Between commuting and the work day, let's call that ten hours of rental radio, $20 per day. So by the end of the second week you could have purchased a href=http://shop.sirius.com/edealinv/servlet/ExecMacro?nurl=control/StoreDirectory.vm&ctl_nbr=2640&catLevel=1&catParentID=7874&scId=7874&oldParentID=7870>satellite radio and had the same thing minus the hour a day of lost productivity while you fiddle with your playlist.
We are all just people.
Next time, do them a favor and laugh in their face.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
1998 called, it wants its rant back.
Want high quality DRM free music? Here you go. Non-DRMed MP3 files, VBR-encoded with LAME (average bit rate 256kpbs), for $0.89 each. They even fill out the ID3 tags for you (including album art, for pete's sake) so you can just drop it into your music player of choice and go.
I agree Lala sucks, but the days when you could claim some moral legitimacy for leeching music torrents are over. There's really no justification for "getting it for free" anymore when there are completely legal, easy, and geek-friendly ways to get the music that also puts some money in the artist's pocket.
Read my blog.
Exactly. What a the record companies are failing to realize is that they aren't going to stop people for downloading music, so the best they can do is give someone a good reason to pay for it. In this case, it's convenience.
I never used iTunes, because I found the interface clunky and the DRM crap wasn't worth it. I have started, however, to buy mp3s off Amazon. They've got a pretty deep colection, with a lot of neat obscure stuff that can be had for less than a dollar.
The best part? It's DRM free. So when I buy the mp3, it's mine. I can do with it what I want (burn to a CD for my car, put it on my mp3 player . . . whatever. And I can get this a lot faster than searching through countless p2p and torrent sites to see if they have the particular recording I want (which, many times, they don't).
The Internet is generally stupid
That can't be. It's reasonable, but involves one of the Big Four record labels.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
People try this trick all the time, trying to get something for free. Put a stop to it.
Tell them up front that you work with code for a living and you don't work for free. Then give them a hefty hourly rate. And tell them you don't work partial hours. A five minute call gets billed for the full hour.
One of two things will happen.
1) They'll pull their heads out of their asses, learn to solve their own problems and stop bugging you.
2) You'll have extra beer money.
Win-win.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Sounds like a very reasonable way of promoting and selling music. You get to hear a song as much as you like for 10 cents, if you like it enough you get to take it away, DRM free, for another 79 cents.
Of course, this is just the kind of marketing that kdawson doesn't want to hear about. Much easier to continue whining about the nasty record companies not giving customers what they want, and forcing people to file share.