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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."
I would rent a song for a dime if you would lick my balls for a quarter.
If you can listen, you can save, and it won't be long before a hack for that is posted on slashdot.
Music Search: nerdcore
Sorry, no matches for you.
Sorry, no business for you.
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.
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.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
Click here
Unlimited free music with links to purchase it if you want. 100% legal. 100% major labels. Tons of obscure stuff too.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
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 .torrent
And your lawyer's just begun
I hope someday you'll
And the world will be as one.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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 wish I had mod points for you two. For $0.10 apiece you can pretend I modded you up.
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?
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
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.
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.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.
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.
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.
End the FUD
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.
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.