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Music Labels Working On Digital Album Format
Nerdfest writes to mention that just weeks after Apple announced their new "Cocktail" digital album project, the four big record companies are moving forward with their own project dubbed "CMX." The new digital album will feature songs, lyrics, videos, liner notes, and artwork. "However, this may be of little interest if CMX isn't compatible with iTunes, the default music software for iPods, iPhones and Apple computers. Whereas labels are eager to resuscitate the album format in an age of singles, Apple is concerned with selling hardware, including a tablet computer rumored to be launching this fall. The major labels plan to launch CMX, which is just a working title for the format, in November. It will reportedly be 'soft-launched' with a few select releases."
Their business model is dying, and again they're trying to come up with ways to corner a market they've already lost, with a format that will fail.
You must eat it.
(If, by any chance, this format is not DRM'ed and patented to Hell and back, count me impressed).
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I spend some time removing art and crap like that from mp3s so they don't waste space on my iPod - why re-invent the wheel?
1) CMX will be used to facilitate DRM
2) CMX will be used to facilitate unwanted bundling (i.e. without offering singles)
3) CMX will be patent riddled
4) CMX will be designed to exclude FOSS
Excuse for why is your room always messy?
While doubtful, I want to know if the people in charge of this product are going to give us the "what the consumer wants" that WE want, what they THINK we want or SOS with a higher price tag. At some point these executives need to catch on that they're middle men and have a shrinking role in the game unless they work on increasing their assets rather than controls.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
"songs, lyrics, videos, liner notes, and artwork". Brilliant! Although I think I found a better technology for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(file_format)
it won't really matter. if there's one thing the labels can be relied upon to do, it's to provide something that people don't want.
Sounds like both Apple and the Major Labels are infringing on my patented Digital Album Format. The working project title is 'Directory', but it looks like I'll now need a TLA to compete with Big Media - 'DIR'? DIR can hold any reasonable number of 'tracks', or even multiple albums and movies, each of which is 'tagged' with all the relevant data and album artwork, and all of which are already compatible with iTunes! Recently I've also implemented 'a brand new look, with a launch page and all the different options.' Like CMX, 'When you click on it you're not just going to get the 10 tracks, you're going to get the artwork, the video and mobile products'. Obviously I can't give away too many details at this point, but I can tell you that I'm thinking of calling the DIR launch page 'index.html'.
Several colleagues of mine pointed me to this story and I just have to say: the labels - again - still don't get it, and they apparently never will.
I can understand why some artists create full length works. Few can argue that an album like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" or The Beatles' "Abbey Road" work very well as complete pieces. The reality is: how many current artists are making albums that consistent? I can think of only three that actually make the cut for me: Queens of the Stone Age, The Mars Volta and until lately Nine Inch Nails. With only that last example, their audiences are not earning them in the tens of millions in sales. The only artists which are are the artists which are responsible for this massive audience shift away from album purchases!
Britney Spears is the veritable poster-child for why albums are failing: even if you are a die-hard fan, you really only want two songs, at most perhaps five, from any of her full length albums. That says: you don't want to spend $15 - $20 for a complete CD / $9.99 per digital album download. You prefer to purchase individual tracks. (That and: you'd probably still prefer they cost around $0.49)
On the other hand, if their audience are "classic rock fans", I still don't see the point. If you're a Led Zeppelin fan, you likely already have all the remastered reissues and re-re-re-issues you care to spend any money on in the first place. (And the Beatles re-re-re-re-masters are coming out imminently as well, marking something like the eighth time those have been re-issued of re-packaged in one way or another.)
That well has run dry. Why they don't face this fact is confusing.
I know that individual tracks aren't going away, and I know that digital sales on their own aren't necessarily resulting in booming profits for any of these labels, but my point is: as someone who has been a voracious consumer of music since 1979, I see utterly no legitimate business case for this "new" format, and it baffles me completely that any major label would seriously consider this as the saviour of their industry.
I would have been far more excited to hear that they decided on a $0.40 per single purchase price for new artists - big marketing campaign or not - rather than this ridiculous additional format. That or that they finally decided to give the artists more of a cut of the digital download price, since printing, shipping and manufacturing costs are of course greatly reduced for any digital download format. (Not saying it doesn't still take a creative team to create artwork, but there is no shipping, and no printing involved.)
I've already made a few wagers: I give this two and a half years at best before we see an unsurprising news story claiming that this did not significantly improve any digital music sales for anyone.
What a waste of money already. They still have a full year before they even release the first one.
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Because I can! [Brainrub.com]
... but was the Apple tablet dragged into this article just because Slashdot is the only site not spreading that rumor?
The music track will use the Ogg Vorbis format, included videos using Ogg Theora, liner notes and lyrics being XML formatted with various included XSLT stylesheets for 10 different attractive layouts as chosen by the artists, as opposed to the music label! The CMX sales will be supported by donations and revenue reaped from immense sales of concert tickets, thanks to naked girls performing in the pauses as they serve Ubuntu Cola!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I've got a feeling it will all be Compressed Win32 Binaries.
Because _nothing_ can go wrong with that... right?
Isn't the venerable Compact Disc a "digital album format" already? That's why it doesn't degrade with repeated playback, after all.
This format won't add anything new to the software world, it's just a new complication. There's absolutely nothing new or exciting about this format, we can get the same effect with folders and multiple files -- or just cramming a few files together and splitting them apart when needed.
While I agree in principle with what you say, it's actually much easier than that. My crappy Winamp will auto-tag songs based on a lossy hash, grab the album cover art from some mysterious server, and display some sort of music website with the latest news about the artist, etc. You can install a free plugin that downloads the lyrics to the song, if you want, or you could get off your lazy ass and just Google it.
What these people don't seem to understand about albums is that they were a very physical thing (yes, past tense). You touched it on the shelf at the record store, turned it over to see if you knew any of the songs, then had a little (or big for vinyl) booklet to browse too.
When you put the album in your music playing device, you made a conscious decision to listen to at least a few songs from it. Nobody switched out albums like crazy playing one song after the other. Any sort of "digital album" will necessarily have that functionality, negating the whole album concept. Those who would listen to all the songs would just buy them individually, and those who would not won't.
Unless, they intend on killing the single by forcing albums down our throat. Helllooo, bittorrent...
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Just a thought...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Coming from the group that just recently announced their paying customers should not expected DRM encumbered music already paid for to work indefinitely, their follow up announcement of yet another new format surely isn't inspiring any confidence.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
The problem with supporting an effort like this is that 90% of your payment goes to middlemen. Artists need to stop making the deal with the devil for promotion, and increasingly they don't have to. Set up your own online store (not hard) or find an artist friendly aggregated store that gives the vast majority of the income to the artist, charging a small percentage for the service (not more than 20%!)
I believe there is an excellent business model to be had by setting up an artist friendly website. The trick would be to get a few major artists onboard for this effort in the beginning to attract attention. If I had time and VC capital, I'd run of and do this today.
What is needed is a mass abandonment of the ASCAP/BMI regime, so that it will collapse. How much of your 99 cent purchase at the itunes store goes to the artist, when the music is being licensed to the itunes store through traditional record companies? Very little, from what I have read. pennies on the buck. Itunes is part of the problem.
This whole thing has gone on far too long. Artists who are -good- should be able to stand on their own without the help of the major record companies, with all the tools that are available to the artist directly these days.
The record companies are similar to film companies in that they will obfuscate the profit sheets as much as possible to show a loss. That is why most major film talent now negotiates income percentage on the front end gross as opposed to the back end net, in addition to their fixed salary. The net income from any given film is proving increasingly elusive, if you ask the accounting department at the studio.
the one thing that can prove me wrong is if someone can show me that selling your music the traditional way is still more profitable than going it on your own, due to the sheer quantity of sales.
That's LAME! Or, actually, in this case it's not.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
We don't need a new Beatles or Beach Boys, we need a new Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd!
I can think of only three that actually make the cut for me
And at this point your entire argument falls to pieces. Just because you personally can think of only three that, in your opinion, make the cut for you, means nothing. Maybe your musical tastes are rather limited? The music industry caters for a far wider market than you personally. If they cannot sell an idea to you, that does not mean the idea has absolutely no value.
And your Britney analysis is like 5 years out of date. Are you sure you're well placed to be advising the music industry on marketing?
it baffles me completely that any major label would seriously consider this as the saviour of their industry.
I must have missed this in news article. Where is anyone claiming this? Oh, they aren't.
As far as I can see, this is the music industry providing "Value Added" content that everyone is always saying they need to do in order to convince people to actually pay for things. This is them providing an electronic equivalent of the record sleeve that many actually miss. What exactly is the problem with this??