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Paul McCartney Releases Album As DRM-Free Download
Medieval Cow writes "Sir Paul McCartney has a side project called The Fireman and he's just released their new album, Electric Arguments, as a digital download. Why this is of interest to this community is that he released it 100% DRM-free. You can purchase just the digital files, or if you purchase a physical CD or vinyl copy, you are also given access to the digital download. Not only that, but the download is available in 320-kbps MP3, Apple Lossless, or even FLAC format. If you're interested in trying before you buy, you can listen to the entire album in a Flash player on the main page of the site. It's so nice to see a big musician who gets it. Bravo, Sir Paul!"
...usually like to release DRM-free, or even free, period (Radiohead, NIN. etc.). With certain exceptions *cough*Metallica*cough*.
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
In fact it's been there since the 20th November.
One point to make though is that Paul McCartney is the sort of guy who can afford to go DRM free, if this album is ripped, lobbed on bit-torrent and limewire then Macca is unlikely to be out on the streets through lost revenue. Its great that he has done it but the _fear_ of being ripped off is going to be less for one of the biggest selling artists of all time than it would be for the average band.
Kudos indeed, but this isn't just a random artist choosing DRM this is the bloke from the Beatles who co-wrote the first hit for the Rolling Stones and the Frog Chorus.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Let's count the number of posts that occur before the first complaint about "no ogg vorbis".
#DeleteChrome
Come on man. Feel free to buy the FLAC and convert it to your preferred format. It's lossless compression, you can't ask for more.
How we know is more important than what we know.
And Radiohead did it a year ago. If anything, it's disappointed it hasn't caught on than anything else.
I'm impressed that he lets you try the album before you buy it, and that it's in flash. Of course, nobody would ever download the file and convert it to an mpeg because that wouldn't be honest.
Meh, some obviously will. But what's the quality on that MP3? And of course the obvious realization: you can bet a lot of people in the music industry watch these experiments very carefully.
If more people just find a way to get the album without paying for it (because that's obviously easier without the DRM... though still not completely trivial for the average fan) ...then they will be forced back into DRM-based approaches.
It's a money experiment. Dunno how they'll measure exactly... I suppose they can at least monitor in some way how widespread the album becomes on the various p2p networks & torrent trackers; if it explodes, you may not see this approach again.
Anyone know good sources of legal free downloadable music? There's a lot of it out there, but sometimes hard to find. Here's what I've stumbled upon recently.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
A McCartney album that's actually worth the money!
This is good news, even if it's another major artist, rather than the whole record industry!
The producer that is the other half of the project - Martin Glover a.k.a. Youth is well known in music production circles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Glover
His side projects Dragonfly Records and Liquid Sound Design lean towards the more psychedelic aspects of trance and dub. The liquid dub styles promoted through Liquid Sound Design in particular are releases that are well worth a listen and feature some really stunning production values.
http://www.liquidsounddesign.com/index2.htm
It's the kind of music you generally won't hear anywhere else ... try it! :)
Peace,
Andy.
Or instead of hunting for a 20+MB download...
ffmpeg -i in.flv -acodec copy out.mp3
mplayer in.flv -dumpaudio -dumpfile out.mp3
...or just listen to it in the flash player already and buy it if you like it.
I've sampled it and I find it good-ish, but not impressive. Still, I am tempted to buy it just to "make a statement"... I know. Silly me.
Probably he realized that he'd loose most of any profit made at the next divorce anyway.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Paul McCartney has an estimated worth of $1.6 Billion so it's not as if he's going to be affected by people pirating it so is far better placed than up and coming groups to be able to afford to take the hit.
$1.6 Billion in the bank allows you to be able to afford to have altruistic ideas.
However, the vast majority of musicians aren't in such a position so need the sales.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
The only reason I didn't download other drm free ones in the past was the lack of flac or ogg. Flac is best of course, as it's just like buying the album for real. Using one price for the globe is also cool. I never expected it to come from Paul McCartney though considering comments from him in the past. I've never downloaded an album illegally in my life, but then I've never bought an album via a download either till now when finally someone makes flac available. To be honest though, I'm mainly doing it out of principle to support good sense finally. I'd like to see Madonna's albums like this, I wouldn't have to all the way to the shops :-)
So he has a butt load of money. The fact is that he took the step and a lot of artists have been inspired by his music so perhaps they will be inspired by this move and follow his example. Does it really matter if he needs the money or not? Oh and it doesn't matter if you like his current work or The Beatles his name is very well known in the music industry. If more big name artists take steps like this then things just might start to change.
When you have been famous for years, to the extend just your name is known to almost everybody, abandoning the classical publishers not only ie easy: it gives you MORE advertisement (e. g. a paper hree on /.)
OTOH, when you are a completely unknown new band, then you must be courageous. I for one will be happy when there'll be a post here listing the last ten courageous little groups trying http://magnatune.com/ .
And in case you were among the happy few knowing Magnatune, let's mention a foreign, minuscule one for classics mainly: Zig-Zag
Herve S.
Monkey's Audio is already undergoing bit rot, and the legality of improving on existing decoders is dubious. Being in development does matter if you want to continue to enjoy the format on the devices of the future.
When they released Death Magnetic, they put a flash player on their website so you can listen to the whole album to see if it's worth buying. You can still listen to it now : http://www.metallica.com/index.asp?item=601231
I was very surprised at the time that nobody seemed to give a flying fuck, I thought it was a very interesting move, especially coming from Metallica... It was not even mentioned in online reviews ffs! I hardly saw any mention of that anywhere, and had to add it myself to the Wikipedia page (it was deleted instead of being expanded, natch).
Really, I've no idea why, but nobody cared. At all. (Not even fans, before you say noone cares about Metallica period)
This album sells extremely well, btw.
Just purchased the MP3 version. It is, as claimed, mpga 320K, DRM-free. In addition to the tracks, you get cover artwork and liner notes as jpgs.
The range of purchase options is very interesting. $8.99 for MP3 files and artwork, $12.99 for a CD, $29.99 for a direct metal mastered double vinyl record, and $79.99 for a DVD containing 24bit 96Khz tracks, and a second DVD containing multi-track session files for a selection of the album tracks.
The purchasing experience was flawless: create an account, give a credit card (with optional choice of saving the number or not; I chose not), get a zipfile of the downloads. Not a wasted keystroke or mouse click.
This really is the way I want to purchase my music. Two big thumbs up from the consumer angle. Lots of choices, low prices, immediate downloads, supports the artists.
The perfect shopping experience.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
The audio is a 128 kb/s mp3 audio stream packed inside of a flash video file.
Mplayer will demux the stream and dump the audio to a file with no loss in quality (I imagine that most semi-functional video software will do this).
So it isn't good enough for someone who is fussy, but it is plenty good enough for your typical music fan (who is going to be playing it back on $2 headphones, or their laptop or cellphone).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Am I missing something? I've bought dozens of DRM free albums over the years. Nothing on Amazon MP3 or 7Digital.com has DRM as far as I'm aware, so how is this news? At first I thought the album was also FREE (price wise), but it's not - you have to pay for it, so I don't get why this is a story??
After all, most slashdotters are not anti-copyright. The industry position on DRM is based on confusing DRM with copyright and (ironically) compensating musicians.
Acknowledging a sizable die hard "information wants to be free" contingent, I think the consensus position here is that artists should be able to make money with copyrighted but DRM free music, priced reasonably, and packaged for convenient purchase and use. True, that means the only the most efficient distributors make money, which is bad for some cherished institutions like the neighborhood record shop, but it should mean more music being heard.
I would venture that listening to music is a habit. Habits, once acquired, lead to purchases. In an ideal world for musicians, people would go through life in a habitual cocoon of music. The problem with most DRM schemes is that they work against the habit by making using a song in some context a conscious economic transaction. For similar reasons, I think that unlimited copyright terms work against the habit of music. There's only so many times you can listen to Louis Armstrong recordings from the 30s, but the education in jazz makes you more likely to buy recent recordings.
While the notions that DRM and extended copyright work against the habit of music are consistent with each other, they are neither necessary to each other. One can believe one without the other. This seems a reasonable test of the DRM notion, one that is entirely within the rights for McCartney to attempt.
Now, I happen to think that at this point, if the Beatles catalog was in the public domain, there'd be more people interested in McCartney's recent music. He'd make less money, but he'd get a lot more new fans. However, even if he were inclined to do such an experiment (which he is apparently not) he'd have to buy out others with a proprietary interest in the old copyrights to do it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We're the good guys, right? DRM is evil (true that), and we offer alternatives. But the fact is that before DRM came along, piracy of music on the internet was rampant. People (good and bad) didn't give it much thought since it was just so easy to copy. We now say "give it to us without DRM, and we'd gladly pay a reasonable price." But for most people, this is a lie. If it weren't for DRM, they would have no concept of the value of the thing they're copying. They would not have "paid a reasonable price" because they would just have downloaded it for free. Only when they were threatened by having that taken away did they think about opening their wallets.
The RIAA and DRM have been an important corrective event in our society. Because of them, we have become more aware that the producers of this content have a right to protect their investment. Whether you're an artist publishing a song or a coder licensing under GPL, respecting copyright is important for our economy, our access to artistic works, and our freedom.
We still have an uphill battle against the RIAA and their efforts to lock down every little bit of content and take away our right to listen to the content we paid for on any device we wish, let friends listen, etc. When the dust settles, a happy compromise will be reached where sharing with a friend (who will probably turn around and buy the whole album as a result) is reasonable fair use, while the same is not true for posting the copyrighted work on a P2P sharing network, completely taking away the livelihood of the artist who created the work.
My favorite band is They Might Be Giants. Not all of their stuff is fantastic, though, so I have sought ways to listen before buying. But in the end, I have legally bought and paid for every one of their albums. Maybe that's mostly because I'm a fanatic, but I also see it as a statement of respect to people whom I want to produce more of the same kind of brilliant stuff.
That's the whole point of the issue. Digital copying has the recording industry running around like a chicken with their heads cut off.
A digital copy never degrades. Assuming no corruption (which good protocols prevent), the 5 billionth copy sounds just the same as the first. So in essence, a copy is just as good as "the real thing". They panic and insist that DRM is a "must" because otherwise, people will copy those songs wholesale.
The thing that they forget though is the same thing that drove them into the frenzy in the first place: DIGITAL COPIES DON'T degrade. If I want to pirate a song, I generally don't go to my buddy who bought a non-DRM'd copy. I'd go to a sharing site. Since a digital copy doesn't degrade, then as you said it only takes ONE copy of the song without DRM to spawn as many non-DRM'd copies as are necessary to quench the thirst of the masses.
In the end it's STUPID. Anybody who wants a free (regardless of legality) non-DRM'd copy of any song or movie knows exactly where to get it. The only people who get affected by the hassles of DRM are the people who wish to obey the law. So, ironically, they get a worse product than the pirates. Rather than the copy being "just as good" as the real thing, it's now actually BETTER.
Try to sell an inferior product at a higher price with nothing more than a law that most people see as antiquated, and it's not going to fly. Particularly when the vast majority of offenders of this law are never prosecuted, and you have a recipe for the collapse of an industry. The solution is simple. Provide a SUPERIOR product, and a REASONABLE price, and people will buy it.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain