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."

Comments

Would you lick my balls for a quarter?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would rent a song for a dime if you would lick my balls for a quarter.

Re:Would you lick my balls for a quarter?

[moderatorrater]

It's easier than what the RIAA makes us do for two and a half songs.

Re:Would you lick my balls for a quarter?

[phat_cartman]

Once I ate 5 pennies, and shit a nickel.

Imaginary Property

[NoobixCube]

So now we're meant to pay ten cents for the right to imagine we have imaginary property?

Re:Imaginary Property

[mrbluze]

So now we're meant to pay ten cents for the right to imagine we have imaginary property? I think they are anticipating the death of radio, which is essentially the same thing except they determine what kind of rubbish you listen to in between the ads. Here you get to pay 10c per song to choose what kind of rubbish you want to listen to whilst (probably) having to read ads anyway.

Re:Imaginary Property

[Unending]

it looks like they are offering the songs in MP3 format for 89Â... I'm not sure, but I think the summary isn't giving the full picture.

Re:Imaginary Property

[QRDeNameland]

As long as it's an imaginary ten cents...

Re:Imaginary Property

[Original Replica]

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.

Re:Imaginary Property

[Tony Hoyle]

Is that what you buy cheap french cars with?

Re:Imaginary Property

[zenslug]

I think it really depends on how you listen to your music. A lot of people like to listen to a rolling window of the same 100 songs. It grows and changes over time, but you get hooked on a new band or a new album, and you want to hear that for a while. You pay 10 cents (or upload your own) and then you're set. This isn't for everyone, that's for sure.

Re:Imaginary Property

[topherhenk]

from the article.

Next to every song is an "Add" button which for a single credit will add the tune to your personal collection. Credits cost 10 cents and each new customer gets 50 credits for free.

Once a song is added it is accessible from your "My Collection" area where it can be listened to an unlimited number of times.

So you can listen to it online as much as you want for $0.10, you just can't take it with you.

Re:Imaginary Property

[zenslug]

10 cents is to listen to it an unlimited number of times. If you already own the song, upload it and listen to it for free as well, it costs you nothing. The only time you pay for the song is when you don't already own it and when you want to listen to it more than once.

The first listen is free.

If you want to download a 256kbps VBR MP3, that's an option too. If you want to buy the CD, that's also available.

Re:Imaginary Property

[interstellar_donkey]

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).

Re:Imaginary Property

[jekewa]

Before we dig into the viability of such a service, consider a similar service that already exists. Surely you've heard of jukeboxes. They have them in diners and bars near you, I'm sure. I think most offer a small number of songs for a number of pennies each (three for a quarter, or whatever). You plunk in your change, pick from the limited list, wait for your turn in the queue, listen eventually to your song, and move on. Repeat as desired.

Moving on from whether or not the service may be viable, if YOU read the article, you'll see that you were wrong in your understanding of how it works.

The article at the first link says "For just 10 cents you'll be able to select a song to add to your Music Locker to play whenever you like." (I copied and pasted between the quotes...) Not per listen, as you suggest, but per song. In case you don't want to scour the whole article, it's the second sentence in the first paragraph...

If you follow the seekrit link and look at the "how it works," (link at the bottom) you'll see that in fact you can actually listen to any song for free, once (first question), not dropping the dime to see if you like the song. It also confirms that for your thin dime, you add the song to your list to listen to again any time you want (second question). Additionally, if you want to download the song to another device (iPod, for example), that dime counts towards the purchase of that song.

That all seems better than a diner jukebox to me.

This will work for some, if not many.

Re:Imaginary Property

[aurispector]

You make a good point and made me realize why I never bought any music downloads. Basically, I'm completely turned off by the DRM approach offered by the major outlets. Why waste my money? I'm not that organized with my files-some are here and some are there so if it's DRM'd I can guarantee it won't run when I want it.

If they would just break down and sell it all without DRM I might consider it. IF it was cheaper. My feeling is that they've always been too expensive - MP3 files at $0.99 cost almost as much as a CD. CD's are DRM-free, lossless and easily ripped anytime you want to any device at any bitrate. Sell downloads for a dime. At $0.10 it becomes an impulse buy.

I'd download all day and twice on sunday at $0.10/track. They need to adapt to the reality that mp3's are practically free and leverage really cheap downloads with advertising. They might even sell some CD's.

Re:Imaginary Property

[Phybersyk0]

Quote:
topherhenk said:
"So you can listen to it online as much as you want for $0.10, you just can't take it with you."
Heh, says you. Creative Labs SoundBlaster Audigy ZS2 "What-U-Hear" Recording controls say differently. i gotz mp3's now bitchez!!!!

If you can listen, you can save

[Palmyst]

If you can listen, you can save, and it won't be long before a hack for that is posted on slashdot.

Harrumph

[RollingThunder]

Music Search: nerdcore

Sorry, no matches for you.

Sorry, no business for you.

Doesn't seem so bad...

[pirodude]

So they're letting you listen to a digital copy one time? Time to start firing up the flash ripper and start scraping the site. Chances are they're not sticking stupid DRM or watermarking in their own 'secure' player.

Granted having your entire music collection in fla is annoying, you can probably can convert it to something a little more usable.

Sounds like a great source for large volumes of music.

Re:Doesn't seem so bad...

[pirodude]

http://next.lala.com/api/AutoComplete/songAutoComplete?prefix=bt

Pass URL encoded downloadToken to:

http://next.lala.com/api/Player/getTrackUrls?flash=true&webSrc=lala&widgetId=LalaHeadlessPlayer&T=

url gives you the mp3 url, it's not a full mp3, sounds backwards, but it's a start to downloading from them.

Re:Doesn't seem so bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

To expand on that previous finding, here's a script that lets you download any song you want:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;
use JSON;
$|=1;

die "$0 <search param>" unless $ARGV[0];
my $root_url = "http://next.lala.com/api/AutoComplete/songAutoComplete";
my $content = get "$root_url?prefix=$ARGV[0]";
my $ref = from_json($content);
my $num = 0;
foreach (@{$ref->{data}->{list}}) {
  print "$num : $_->{artist} - $_->{title}\n";
  $num++;
}
print "Download which? > ";
my $req = <STDIN>;
die "not valid" if ($req < 0 or $req > $num);
my $download_url = "http://next.lala.com/api/Player/getTrackUrls?flash=true&webSrc=lala&widgetId=LalaHeadlessPlayer&T=" . $ref->{data}->{list}->[$req]->{playToken};
my $play_url = get $download_url;
my $play_ref = from_json($play_url);
my $download_link = $play_ref->{data}->[0]->{url};
print "Getting: $download_link\n";
my $filename = $ref->{data}->{list}->[$req]->{artist} ."-" . $ref->{data}->{list}->[$req]->{title} . ".mp3";
print "Downloading to $filename\n";
system("wget -O '$filename' $download_link");

It's quick, it's dirty, but it works:

perl download.pl tiesto
0 : Tiesto - Ten Seconds Before Sunrise
1 : Ti&#195;&#171;sto - Forever Today
Download which? > 0
Getting: http://cfs-listen-52.lala.com/contentfs/content?t=NjU1MzVVNDM2OTE1OQ%3D%3D-vSOzDPPcV8VwbKW6Bwdv%2FQ%3D%3D
Downloading to Tiesto-Ten Seconds Before Sunrise.mp3
--2008-05-27 18:16:09--  http://cfs-listen-52.lala.com/contentfs/content?t=NjU1MzVVNDM2OTE1OQ%3D%3D-vSOzDPPcV8VwbKW6Bwdv%2FQ%3D%3D
Resolving cfs-listen-52.lala.com... 209.237.235.158
Connecting to cfs-listen-52.lala.com|209.237.235.158|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 3609494 (3.4M) [audio/x-mpeg]
Saving to: `Tiesto-Ten Seconds Before Sunrise.mp3'

Re:Doesn't seem so bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a better version that gets many more results from a different webservice.  Apparently the front page one is very limited:

This one will do paging, use n/p to go next/previous  when prompted.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;
use JSON;
$|=1;

die "$0 <search param>" unless $ARGV[0];
my $ref;
my $offset;
my $req;
while(1) {
  $req = "";
  my $root_url = "http://next.lala.com/api/SearchUtils/search/v19.110.0-24?Q=$ARGV[0]&sortKey=relevance&sortDir=desc&Nb=100&Sk=$offset&webSrc=lala";
  my $content = get $root_url;
  $content =~ s/new Date\((\d+)\)/$1/g;
  $ref = from_json($content);

  my $num = 0;
  foreach (@{$ref->{data}->{songs}->{list}}) {
    print "$num : $_->{artist} - $_->{title}\n";
    $num++;
  }

  print "Download which? > ";
  chomp($req = <STDIN>);
  if ($req =~ /n/) {
    $offset+=100;
    next;
  }
  if ($req =~ /p/) {
    $offset-=100;
    $offset=0 if $offset<0;
    next;
  }
  if ($req !~ /\d+/ or $req < 0 or $req > $num) {
    print "Invalid!\n";
    next;
  }
  last;
}
my $download_url = "http://next.lala.com/api/Player/getTrackUrls?flash=true&webSrc=lala&widgetId=LalaHeadlessPlayer&T=" . $ref->{data}->{songs}->{list}->[$req]->{playToken};
my $play_url = get $download_url;
my $play_ref = from_json($play_url);
my $download_link = $play_ref->{data}->[0]->{url};
print "Getting: $download_link\n";
my $filename = $ref->{data}->{list}->[$req]->{artist} ."-" . $ref->{data}->{list}->[$req]->{title} . ".mp3";
print "Downloading to $filename\n";
system("wget -O '$filename' $download_link");

Re:Doesn't seem so bad...

[aarku]

Here's a fixed one that uses utf-8:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;
use JSON;
$|=1;

die "$0 <search param>" unless $ARGV[0];
my $ref;
my $offset;
my $req;
while(1) {
  $req = "";
  my $root_url = "http://next.lala.com/api/SearchUtils/search/v19.110.0-24?Q=$ARGV[0]&sortKey=relevance&sortDir=desc&Nb=100&Sk=$offset&webSrc=lala";
  my $content = get $root_url;
  $content =~ s/new Date\((\d+)\)/$1/g;
  $ref = from_json($content, {utf8 => 1});

  my $num = 0;
  foreach (@{$ref->{data}->{songs}->{list}}) {
    next if $_->{playType} eq "Sample";
    print "$num : $_->{artist} - $_->{title}\n";
    $num++;
  }

  print "Download which? > ";
  chomp($req = <STDIN>);
  if ($req =~ /n/) {
    $offset+=100;
    next;
  }
  if ($req =~ /p/) {
    $offset-=100;
    $offset=0 if $offset<0;
    next;
  }
  if ($req !~ /\d+/ or $req < 0 or $req > $num) {
    print "Invalid!\n";
    next;
  }
  last;
}
my $download_url = "http://next.lala.com/api/Player/getTrackUrls?flash=true&webSrc=lala&widgetId=LalaHeadlessPlayer&T=" . $ref->{data}->{songs}->{list}->[$req]->{playToken};
my $play_url = get $download_url;
my $play_ref = from_json($play_url);
my $download_link = $play_ref->{data}->[0]->{url};
print "Getting: $download_link\n";
my $filename = $ref->{data}->{songs}->{list}->[$req]->{artist} ."-" . $ref->{data}->{songs}->{list}->[$req]->{title} . ".mp3";
print "Downloading to $filename\n";
system("curl -o '$filename' $download_link");

What?

[willyhill]

The website clearly says "Get MP3s for your iPod". Is the submission incorrect, or is there a catch to said MP3s? Because the submission clearly states that anything from Lala won't play on any devices. That was the whole point of posting this here for people to be outraged, I imagine.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

From http://next.lala.com/#howitworks :

Want MP3 downloads?
You can buy DRM-free MP3s for your iPod or other portable device for just 79 [cents] more. So, it's a lot like Amazon MP3 but with a "trial version" feature, except you have to pay for the trial.

Also, my CAPTCHA is "patents". How apropos.

Re:What?

[IP_Troll]

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.

Sshhh don't tell anybody about this

[blhack]

Click here

Unlimited free music with links to purchase it if you want. 100% legal. 100% major labels. Tons of obscure stuff too.

(cue piano music)

[jd]

Imagine there's no Lala,

And paying for is to buy.
No Warner below us,
Above us, metro wi-fi
Imagine all the artists
Getting paid the full amount.

Imagine there's no IP
Nor music tax for you
Nothng to lawsuit over
And no Sony too
Imagine all the people
Owning what they have

You may say I'm unAmerican
And your lawyer's just begun
I hope someday you'll .torrent
And the world will be as one.

Re:(cue piano music)

[willyhill]

Completely offtopic here, but the other day I overheard the 14-year old daughter of a friend of mine remarking on what a beautiful song David Archuleta had written to sing in American Idol, and how he should have, like, totally won the competition if only for that.

I excused myself, went to the bathroom upstairs and laughed uncontrollably into a towel (to muffle the sound) for about five minutes.

Re:(cue piano music)

[AtariKee]

These are the kids that will be running the country soon. I would have suffocated myself.

Re:(cue piano music)

[idonthack]

Next time, do them a favor and laugh in their face.

Renting isn't so bad

[steveha]

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.

It's called a jukebox

[ReverendLoki]

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.

*laughs*

[OMNIpotusCOM]

I wish I had mod points for you two. For $0.10 apiece you can pretend I modded you up.

Re:*laughs*

[mrbluze]

I wish I had mod points for you two. For $0.10 apiece you can pretend I modded you up. Mod Point Rule #1: The Mod Point Fairy only gives you mod points when you don't want them.

this might works for many people

[fermion]

If this is a web interface, and a user can log in from any computer, then there is no problem.

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.

Zis is verry funny!

[antek9]

Def.: the Slashdot Effect: Look here, a secret URL I just found, but shhh, don't go there and don't tell anyone!

One Question for Miss Morissette: Slashdotting a music service that is essentially nothing but a denial of service (a.k.a. sham), which effectively puts it out of service for a while, is that

a.) ironic, or

b.) a self-fulfilling prophesy?

Re:Zis is verry funny!

[Anonymous Coward]

Irony is nerds not being able to spell.

The only irony here would be if the one nerd who understood the meaning of irony went to correct your use of the word but wasn't allowed to because of an ip ban caused by a flamewar he started over the correct definition of the word "irony". I think the word you were looking for is "reality".

Unless the guy who had posted the misspelling was named "SpellingMasterNerd" in which case it could be ironic.

Re:Zis is verry funny!

[cjb658]

Slashdotting a music service that is essentially nothing but a denial of service (a.k.a. sham), which effectively puts it out of service for a while. Click Here!

Re:Cracking the "DRM"

[rts008]

The 'Download Helper' extension for Firefox works just fine. The playback in VLC (on Kubuntu 8.04) was just peachy.

Another kind of slashdot effect

[Attaturk]

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.

You're quite right. But on the upside Slashdot also hacked the proposed service within minutes, after tearing the idea to pieces. Hopefully this might also tell the investors something about the company's business model and its viability. Even if a wee hack like that one isn't immediately obvious, plenty of people have pointed out that there's a speaker jack in your computer. Plug it in to anything from an ancient cassette recorder up to a modern mulitmedia PC and you can just record it with one button press or click. Surely even 'analysts' can see that. Daft idea. Daft business model. Protecting content - especially 'small content' such as songs or low def video - is a mug's game in this day and age.

Re:It's not that people won't pay for music

[jalefkowit]

It's not that people won't pay for music, most people would happily pay for high quality DRM free music, but they don't want to offer that. They'd rather come up with stupid schemes like this.

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.

Look at the site, ignore Robertson.

[markalot]

I hope this makes it to the top.

Most of the information here is just plain wrong, I think Robertson is afraid of something. If you mostly listen online then instead of buying a song for 99 cents you can get it for 10 cents. If you really want to buy it you have to pay 79 cents more for a high quality DRM free MP3 copy.

So please, why is this so bad?

From the how it works page:

What does adding a web song to my collection mean?

When you add a web song to your collection, you're able to listen to it as many times as you'd like, from any computer. You can also create playlists with web songs.

How much does adding cost?

It costs 10 cents to add a web song to your collection. Plus, the first 50 web songs you add to your collection are free, so give it a try!

If you later decide that you also want to get the MP3, the 10 cents you paid for the web song will be applied towards that purchase.

What is the bitrate of a web song that I add to my collection?

We strive to maintain a streaming bitrate standard of 128 kbps for web songs added to your collection. As determined by the labels, some web songs you add to your collection may stream at a bitrate of 64 kbps. Songs that you upload will generally stream at the bitrate at which they were ripped.

How do I listen to the web songs I've added to my collection on a portable device?

To listen to web songs you've added to your collection on an iPod or other portable device, you can download the MP3 file for an additional charge. The 10 cents you've already invested toward this purchase will be deducted from the final MP3 price.

Re:Look at the site, ignore Robertson.

[WK2]

That can't be. It's reasonable, but involves one of the Big Four record labels.

Re:Look at the site, ignore Robertson.

[gsslay]

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.

OT, but...

[Weaselmancer]

Especially when I still get phone calls from former employers about code written 10 years ago (irregardless or if I wrote it), and they expect answers for free

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.

Re:You need to keep reading

[JeremyBanks]

This article is unclear to the extent of bias. I've been trying out the service (you get 50 online song credits when you register) and it actually seems really neat. A DRM-free store is always good and the additional features are nice. You can listen to a song as many times as you want. I can also listen to any song online that I've already got a copy of on my computer (if you true them enough to download and run their app). I don't see what all of the hate is about.

Re:You need to keep reading

[Seraphim1982]

If you don't pay anything, you can play a song once in full, and as many times as you want as a 30 second clip.
If you do pay that 10 cents, you can play the song as many times as you want in full.

I'm not sure why you found that so confusing. The article was pretty clear about it.