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Kazaa To Return As a Legal Subscription Service
suraj.sun sends in this excerpt from CNet:
"One of the most recognizable brands in the history of illegal downloading is due to officially resurface, perhaps as early as next week, sources close to the company told CNET News. Only this time the name Kazaa will be part of a legal music service. Altnet and parent company Brilliant Digital Entertainment attached the Kazaa brand to a subscription service that will offer songs and ringtones from all four of the major recording companies. For the past few months, a beta version has been available. The company tried recently to ratchet up expectations with a series of vague, and what some considered misguided, press releases. The site will open with over 1 million tracks."
The NYTimes has a related story about how the music industry is trying to convert casual pirates by offering more convenient new services.
Kazaa sucked even when it was a vehicle for illegal downloads. I can't see the music industry (motto: "fuck the pirates, fuck the artists, and fuck YOU") improving it at all.
How about if they try to offer something better than the pirates?
No DRM, region locking/restrictions, convenience, etc.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
As long as the complexity of downloading files trough a "legal" service is bigger than the complexity of the alternatives, people will always prefer the easiest choice.
The complexity of "legal" services will always be bigger than the alternatives, since you can always subtract at least one step: the pay step.
Even the biggest brand out there, Napster, failed to capture any of its former glory as a pay service despite the ad blitz and continued media coverage.
It's like shutting down a brothel and replacing it with a legitimate massage parlor. Would you fly out to Reno, Nevada to get a deep tissue massage at the retooled Bunny Ranch? These are kinds of questions these execs are not asking.
Hey, just like Napster! And I guess TPB will be the same in about 5-10 years!
The NYTimes has a related story about how the music industry is trying to convert casual pirates by offering more convenient new services.
orly? Millions of people find our existing service so detestable that they turn to an illegal service to get what they want. Maybe, just maybe, there's a market for what they're looking for? Maybe we can make more money by selling them what they want instead of suing them?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
...is at least some small acknowledgment that it was Napster, Kazaa and a few others who did all the heavy lifting do the proof of concept work for the big media companies and their artists about how to survive in the digital age.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
The most important question will be, of course, this: Will it have a new, more rounded interface?
The site will open with over 1 million tracks.
Much fewer than Kademlia/Ed2K or any music related torrent tracker.
Not to question the price.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
It's failed already. You have to pay money every month to listen to music you don't own. This is why subscription-based services have never worked - iTunes and Amazon offer (and have offered for a while), for a much more reasonable price, music that you get to keep forever, and, since the abolition of DRM, can do anything you want (within the law, of course *nudge nudge wink wink*) with.
It didn't work for the Zune, it didn't work for Wippit, it's not working for Napster, it's not going to work for the relaunched Kazaa.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
There's a reason why the Pirate Bay is successful and it is rarely mentioned. Apart from the content being free, and DRM free, the service offered is generally agnostic to brands, labels or formats. It is like Google for media - raw results for any media query. Until the worlds media companies can agree to build a centralised service that is effectively neutral, services like the Pirate Bay will continue to flourish. It will probably never happen though, because they're all too busy stepping over each other in the race for the prize, while at the same time believing that whatever service they dream up next will be better than everything that has gone before it.
Although $20/month is a bit steep, I would consider this service were is not for a few limitations that make the service completely useless.
1) Only available in the US. Really guys, it's time to start thinking globally, the rest of the internet has for the last 10 years.
2) DRM, you don't really own the tracks, you can just play them for as long as you keep paying.
3) Can't play it on an iPod/iPhone, or any (portable) media player
If the music industry wants to get rid of piracy they have to start seeing them as competitors with a superior product. Since they cannot compete on price they have to compete on convenience and quality.
1) Make it global /month would seem reasonable).
2) Make sure EVERY song is there, not just the major labels
3) Allow artists to upload directly to the service, offer them the possibility to cut out the middle man. Effectively: phase out all music labels, let them fade out into oblivion. Smart music labels could re-invent themselves as companies that sell services (studio time, marketing, etc.) to artists.
4) No restrictions, no DRM, complete freedom.
5) Make it affordable so Average Joe will not even consider going through the 'effort' of pirating music. Flat-fee is preferred (e.g. $9,99
Kazza was the biggest distributor of spyware and malware of its time. It should die a miserable death.
Kazaa was great. So many idiots set its upload directory to C:\ that you could find anything. Everyone was searching for MP3s, but you could search for the DOC files in "Documents and Settings".
I forget what I searched for but I got a listing of Word Documents that included "Penis Enlargement Instructions.DOC" or something like that. So naturally I clicked on that one and downloaded it. Figuring, it might be real, because a moron dumb enough to let Kazaa index his documents folder would be the sort of person who responds to spam and shells out money for penis enlargement instructions. And once he's paid for and gotten actual instructions that are obviously bullshit, even if he felt he'd been suckered, he'd at least hold onto the file. Maybe for psychological reasons, or to prove he'd been scammed, I don't know. So they might have to be just barely plausible. And hey, if they are, free penis enlargement instructions, right?
IIRC the dude gives his testimonial, it's so incredible, it will work for you too etc. and then he goes into this procedure where you basically yank on it repeatedly.
Only this time the name Kazaa will be part of a legal music service. Altnet and parent company Brilliant Digital Entertainment attached the Kazaa brand to a subscription service that will offer songs and ringtones from all four of the major recording companies.
In other words, RIAA music. Avoid this new service. Don't even grace them by visiting their web site.
how is babby formed?
They're still missing the most important point of music sharing; one which most -- though not all -- of the *other* legal reboots of music sharing networks have also missed:
The long tail.
The thing that made Napster cool, and that makes Gnet and ED2K cool to this day, is this: not all the cool tracks belong to you. And to expand on what I mean there: I have 19 versions of the Star Spangled Banner in my collection. Not all of those were ever even released; some are rips from TV.
But in general, music sharing services were popular, in large part -- I strongly suspect -- with people who like music that's *way* off the beaten path; it's just not practical for commercial services to have a library that deep.
Kazaa is going to sign the entire Blue Note catalog? C'mon...
They're gonna have 'Existential Blues' by Tom 'T-Bone' Stenkus?
I don't think so.
But *someone* does...
All the first generation file sharing programs/protocols sucked.
Kazaa. Napster. I personally found Gnutella worst of all.
But this is hilarious. The music industry are so slow, that up until now they have been fighting decade old technology. Now they are digging up the corpses and attempting a reanimation.
When will they get around to fighting the completely decentralised and encrypted services bound together by nothing more than a loose collection of opensource tools?
*Reclines in chair with large box of popcorn*
I've just been buying music from Amazon. It's DRM-free, good quality and the pricing is generally just right. If they want to stop piracy just make everything available to everyone in this sort of format.
This whole idea of things being available in certain territories is outdated and makes no sense on the internet but as long as it's around then people will just steal what they can't buy.
The answer? PUBLISH EVERYTHING
Not just everything out at the moment but every song for which a recording still exists and SELL it for a reasonable price. 99 cents ain't resonable to anyone but an Apple fanboy.
The business model is simple, you create a digital copy of your entire catalog and put it on a server. You then sell all your content this way. You pay a trivial amount of money for storage (songs ain't all that big) and save a FORTUNE on CD presses, cover printing, assembling, packaging, shipping, storage, breakage etc etc. Really, the costs should easily be able to come down to a dime per track and still give more profit to tbe artists (oops, I mean record industry).
The "free" sites out there are great if someone with the same taste decided to share the stuff he paid for but for those of us with odd tastes that ain't always easy.
Sony recently ran out of MJ CD's. If they had gone digital they could have sold all the MJ music they wanted at no extra costs to them. No more shipping to many or to few of a CD. iTunes is almost the way but has only what the industry currently wants to push and it is anybodies guess where the cost savings end up (well I got a pretty good guess).
It wouldn't be all that hard to setup a good digital system. The above idea is not from me, it is what Free Record Shop proposed years ago (dutch music retailer). The music industry didn't want it.
They don't just want to continue their old business model of being the only supplier of entertainment, they are even unwilling to change the technology involved.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"They're gonna have 'Existential Blues' by Tom 'T-Bone' Stenkus?"
Maybe.
The Dr. Demento compilations, which include "Existental Blues" are released on Rhino, which is associated with Warner:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_Records
For those not into Dr. Demento, here's another example: Mothership, a Led Zep (they were on Atlantic which is now Warner) greatest-hits album, has the Rhino insignia on the case.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
When will they get around to fighting the completely decentralised and encrypted services bound together by nothing more than a loose collection of opensource tools?
For performance reasons, only the searches are onion-routed in popular peer-to-peer file sharing networks; the downloads are direct from someone who has a piece of the file. So when you download a multi-gigabyte Blu-ray Disc rip, the machine on which it is shared still has to reveal its IP address. A copyright owner could log on to one of these services, download a piece of the work, and get an IP address, a time, and a block of the file: evidence that a piece of the copyrighted work has been distributed. Then the copyright owner can get a judge to compel the owner of a netblock to find the customer whose Internet access was used to distribute copies without authorization.
Or would you onion-route the downloads too? Let me know when Tor has become efficient enough to run BitTorrent or eMule Kad Network over it.
If free takes three days to download, and $5 takes an hour, that season of Desperate Housewives might be purchased instead of "stolen."
Except $5 doesn't always take an hour. There are plenty of works which are available as infringing copies in three days or as legitimate copies in 95 years because their copyright owners decline to make more copies. Disney's Song of the South and Nintendo's Mother series are ones that comes to mind first.
See: Spotify. It's a great service that is just as convinient as piracy for most people.
Will it come to the United States within the next five years, or should I work on a master's degree and learn a couple more languages so that an employer in a supported country will sponsor my immigration?
Is it really much easier today?
As long as you use an offline virus scanner such as ClamWin, it's a lot easier to find obscure, out-of-print films such as Disney's Song of the South on eMule than through legit channels.
But you don't have to pay for Spotify.
Some countries, such as the one where Slashdot is based, are conspicuous by their absence from Spotify's contracts with labels. So in order to use Spotify, I would have to find an employer in a supported country who would sponsor my immigration to that country. Then I would have to pay to meet the employer's qualifications, such as fluency in the local language and a master's degree, and pay whatever relocation costs the employer doesn't advance me.
Only available in the US. Really guys, it's time to start thinking globally
Bitch to the record labels first. Copyright owners are still in the pay-per-country mindset.
DRM, you don't really own the tracks, you can just play them for as long as you keep paying.
It's rental. How does it differ from Netflix?
Can't play it on an iPod/iPhone, or any (portable) media player
Nor can you play a vinyl record on such a player.
Smart music labels could re-invent themselves as companies that sell services (studio time, marketing, etc.) to artists.
Promotion of music and distribution of music to people without high-speed Internet access have vast economies of scale. Either your label is large enough that the payment for such services would include copyright ownership or equivalent forms of exclusivity, or it is small enough that its promotion service would likely be ineffective.
I heard a rumor that people are buying large external drive arrays for the purpose of consolidating their collections of music amongst themselves in person. These things come in sizes up to 8TB which is enough for about 4 million compressed tracks. I don't know how much popular audio is out there, but that should be essentially all of it.
Now, legal issues aside, this seems like a much more effective and less risky endeavor than passing the songs over the Internet.
Amen! Amazon is the best out there. DRM-free MP3's, 99 cents a piece, and a HUGE library. Amazon actually convinced me to lower the Jolly Roger and start buying legit music. I won't use iTunes (Apple software is too aggressive and they use proprietary formats). So Amazon is just perfect for me. Just wish they would do the same thing for videos.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Even an attempt resurrection of Kazaa under these circumstances, once again shows a total disconnect between customer base and the RIAA types. Zombie, bot, or borg - needs a brain shot or total disintegration.
Limited catalog, DRM, $20/mo, database issues. Insultingly ridiculous "outreach". No doubt the failure of "new Kazaa" will be cited as "we tried" or future "market damage". Sic semper tyrannis.
With P2P, you don't have to think about the bill coming from Akamai.
So, for example, if pirates offer 720P heavily compressed and transcoded junk, offer 1080p with 7.1 sound directly from masters themselves.
Or they offer FLAC? Offer 24bit 5.1 version with a special key to attend band's concerts 25% cheaper.
I would take a mpeg 2 DVD over pirated avi just because of picture and sound quality, extras, convinience. Most of DVD buyers aren't that technically illirate, they know they can download it freely but they choose DVD for similar reasons.
They will have the name of a notorious spyware and won't use any kind of features coming with P2P. They will put the exact same junk as pirates with the added DRM which will probably be wmedia based (so, there goes macs) and horrible compression and even taking Apple as example, stereo, relying on Pro Logic II.
I don't use Windows for a long time but when I read "Kazaa", "spyware" term comes to my mind instantly.
I don't know if Kazaa was spyware itself or people were downloading some .exe junk with it to get infected but really, Kazaa simply doesn't exist in anyone's "brand memory" anymore.
I would be really hesitant to let some service coming with that brand name store my credit card, e-mail and home address.
Again, not really using Win since 2003 but I was quite phobic about Kazaa name. I can still remember that name after all these years.
Napster didn't have any kind of "spyware" story while it was really Napster so it had some kind of brand recognition. In case of Kazaa, it just reminds some "Ilgaz" guy spyware. That is why I remember the name anyway.