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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.
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
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.
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.
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
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*
But you don't have to pay for Spotify.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
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.
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.