Slashdot Mirror
New RIM Streaming Music: $5 For 50 Songs?
jfruhlinger writes with news that Research In Motion will soon jump into the music service market. The service will be available through BlackBerry Messenger, and will offer users 50 songs for $5/month, which they can then share with other people who own BlackBerries.
"So why would anyone pay $5 a month to get 50 songs on their phone, when they can pay $10 a month and get an unlimited number of songs, that work on lots of different devices, from services like Rdio and Rhapsody? Reasonable question! But RIM seems to be assuming that its subscribers won’t ask. Instead it is playing up the notion that BBM Music will be about 'personalizing' your phone, in the same way that ringtones supposedly did a decade ago. Ringtones, as you’ll recall, let buyers play a few seconds of a song, and sold for a couple bucks, while full songs from Apple’s iTunes went for 99 cents. And for a few years, the music companies and the wireless carriers sold lots and lots of ringtones."
Or you can wait a few months and buy 50 shares of RIM for $5. How much does a deathknell ringtone cost?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Before going down the 3rd time, a drowning man thrashes harder than ever.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
"What about this."
"We're RIM. You want this."
"No. Seriously. What about this?
"We're RIM. You want this."
Newsflash RIM. You've been resting on the fact that you were a big dog in the early professional mobile market. That's not going to save you. It's the only reason you haven't bailed from the market already. It's not going to slow your plummet anymore.
So get back to work and FOR FUCK'S SAKE...INNOVATE. Otherwise, take your place along other relics such as Microsoft Bob. The Lisa. The Osborne 2. Get the picture?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
99 cents for a song isn't extortion. At worst, it's a price somewhat higher than you'd like it to be. The fact that you have the ability to take something without paying doesn't mean that someone is extorting you by asking that you give them a dollar as a reward for their hard work.
Let's do some math, based on my personal collection. I have 7,677 songs, only a small minority of which (~400) are Creative Commons or public domain. If I were to rent those from RIM, that would be... $770 per month. Even by RIAA standards, that's extortionate.
But, you say, I don't actually listen to all those songs. You're probably right. Let's trim out the ones I gave 1 or 2 star ratings (my entire collection is methodically tagged), the ones I only have because they came on an album with other songs, or even just to complete an artist's collection. That cuts things down to 6254 songs, or $630. Still way too high.
Again, you repeat, I probably don't listen to all of those in one month. In fact, so far this month I have listened to a mere 727 songs. Adjust for the length of the month, and that comes out to 1090 songs/month, or $110. Which is still too much for me to pay, but maybe someone will. Sucker born every minute and all that.
So let's say I only rent my very favorite songs, the one's I've given the full five-star rating. That's 70 songs (I'm very conservative with that rating), two of which are CC-licensed, and one more that is copyrighted but not available for sale. Still, that would be $10 a month, for my favorite songs and a few variations each month. Which isn't competitive with other streaming services, and isn't even really competitive with buying permanently from any popular store - those 70 songs would cost ~$70-100 to own forever, or a few month's worth of streaming.
It's all about the convenience. Torrenting is far too complex and too much hassle. I've seen some of the interviews, and they're hard pressed to operate their phones, much less uTorrent. This is $5, no hassle.
#!/bin/bash
echo RIM are confused by the market
echo RIM don't know what to produce
echo RIM think that everybody likes Blackberry's
echo RIM can't accept that you would prefer another mobile
#!C
#include "staff.h"
#include "key.h"
#include "tempo.h"
#define poem RIMisRIM
a poem() {
RIM is RIM not Rim nor rim
tis why we stick them in
but
so where to put-it do we
}
#!/bin/bash
echo Can you guess what's in the headers??
-- The Grand Teddy Bear has Spoken: "Windows 8 Source Code Available NOW! more disgusting than your pr..."
Except that Steve Jobs publicly said that Apple would use non-DRM'ed music in February 6, 2007 and Apple offered EMI tracks in non-DRM'ed format starting May 29, 2007. Amazon didn't launch the public beta of their store until September 25, 2007 and it went live January 2008. I can't see how at least several months before Amazon == after.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
And, as usual, everyone on this entire site is aware of that.
That isn't Apple's model. That is the normal way of buying music that Apple only adopted after facing pressure from the community and competition from Amazon and others.
Spin history any way you want. The truth is, Jobs penned his famous "Open Letter" a full year before Amazon opened Amazon MP3. It just took Jobs a little longer to work out the details and hammer out the details, since they had a lot more deals with a lot more labels, already in place.
RIM is laying off a fair amount of their workforce. Coming up with the worst ideas possible. The tablet is crap, the phones are old tech and horrible. This is their newest idea? The future for RIM looks bleak. Hell I can use subsonic and stream my whole music library to my phone or any web browser for nothing.
Someone wrote, performed, and recorded a song. If you would like to be able to listen to their work whenever you want, pay $0.99 for it (which is 1/2 of the cost of a fricking cup of coffee these days, and that will last you about an hour until you pee it out).
Did they force you to download it and now demand money or they will break your fingers? No? Then it's not extortion.
I don't get why people complain about this stuff so much. It's a completely elective entertainment expense, you decide if it's worth it and either buy it or don't...