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Amazon AutoRip — 14 Years Late
An anonymous reader writes "Amazon just debuted a new service called Autorip, which grants you MP3 copies of music when you purchase the CD version. This is a technology people have been trying to introduce since 1999, but only recently have the record labels — and the courts — seen fit to allow it. 'Robertson's first company, MP3.com was one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley when it launched what we would now call a cloud music service, My.MP3.com, in 1999. The service included a feature called "Beam-It" that allowed users to instantly stock their online lockers with music from their personal CD collections. ... Licensed services like iTunes were still years in the future, largely because labels were skittish about selling music online. But Robertson believed he didn't need a license because the service was permitted by copyright's fair use doctrine. If a user can rip his legally purchased CD to his computer, why can't he also store a copy of it online? ... the labels simply weren't interested in Robertson's vision of convenient and flexible music lockers. So MP3.com was driven into bankruptcy, and the "buy a CD, get an MP3" concept fell by the wayside.'"
Is that I now have mp3s for CDs I gave as gifts. Unfortunately, my friends and relatives seem to have different music taste than I do, so now I have the Chicago soundtrack and Hannah Montana mp3s.
Why can't we get copies of our ebooks when we buy the dead-tree version?
Auto-rip raises an interesting question about resales. It appears that Amazon is granting downloads for CD purchases (even retroactively, for CDs purchased years ago). If I've since sold the physical CD, Amazon would not know that. Furthermore, I could deliberately game the system by buying CDs and immediately reselling them.
I know, it's a stupid edge case, and I could already do this by ripping my own CDs today and subsequently selling them, but it's exactly the type of "problem" that keeps the recording industry up at night.
Really a shame that service got buried by the dinosaur music industry....
Now I'm going to start worrying about the raptors of the music industry ... thanks a lot.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
"CDs are big, bulky, and easily damaged. Why are we still using them?"
Because its the only way to get full quality DRM free music.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You didn't rip anything. MP3 actually had loads of CD's already ripped and on their servers. You put in a CD in your PC, it would get some data off of it(effectively a hash) and then used that info to figure out which CD it was and allow you to stream the rip from MP3.com. So for they'd have a rip of say Led Zeppelin IV on their servers. Everybody that put that CD in their PC could access MP3.com's rip of Led Zeppelin IV and stream it but nobody who used the service was actually ripping their own copy of Led Zeppelin IV and putting it up on the MP3.com's servers.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
It varies depending on the album. Recent purchases I've made have been encoded using LAME 3.97 with its V0 setting (~245 kbps VBR), this seems to be the default for MP3s encoded by Amazon. One self-published album I grabbed that was MP3 only was 320 kbps CBR. The MP3's I've downloaded via the site and via the downloader are bit-for-bit identical.
It's a pitty Amazon isn't more forthcoming on what the encoding is before you buy it, but I'd imagine whatever album you grabbed was simply provided to them as a 128 kbps file from the source.
-- It is too late for the pebbles to vote, the avalanche has already started.
"CDs are big, bulky, and easily damaged. Why are we still using them?"
Because its the only way to get full quality DRM free music.
And if you get tired of a CD, you are free to resell it, give it to a friend, trade it to someone for something else, donate it to a thrift store, etc.
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People still buy CDs? It seems that the MP3.com idea may have saved CDs... tied the license to the CD itself, so you got to buy that to get a legit MP3 license. Instead they kept their heads up their asses for 15 years and the world moved on. Artists: I can get your music for free, at any time of the day or night, from nearly anywhere in the world. I can have your entire album in under 5min. It's easier, the quality is often better, it wont get scratched, it's free, there's no taxes, it's environmentally friendly... Think of a new business model. The universe is against you on this one. Trust me.
2 clarifications for the summary, since I was the 10th engineer at MP3.com and worked there from 1999-2003:
- We lost to the record labels/publishers not because we gave people access to their music, but because we compiled the music library and streamed it without paying the labels/publishers any royalties. Our strategy was to buy a copy of the CD ourselves, rip it, then claim fair use doctrine when we streamed it to someone else who also owned it. This was a supposed grey area in the law that got cleared up REAL FAST in a media-friendly district court. Services that you see now are paying royalties on what they stream. MP3.com later sued its lawyers that gave the advice on the so-called "grey area" it tried to go through.
- We where not a Silicon Valley company, we where in San Diego. Perhaps if we where SV we would of gotten better legal advice :p