Making Money Selling Music Without DRM 383
phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica's Nate Anderson has an excellent writeup on the rise of eMusic and how they're suceeding despite their unwillingness to hop on the DRM bandwagon. From the article: 'The Holy Grail of online music sales is the ability to offer iPod-compatible tracks. Like the quest for the mythical cup itself, the search for iPod compatibility has been largely fruitless for Apple's competitors, whose DRM schemes are incompatible with the iconic music player. For a music store that wants to succeed, reaching the iPod audience is all but a necessity in the the US market, where Apple products account for 78 percent of the total players sold. Perhaps that's why eMusic CEO David Pakman sounds downright gleeful when he points out that there's only two companies in the world that can sell to them--Apple and eMusic.'"
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:5, Insightful)
For more examples.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unexpected Success? (Score:5, Insightful)
*SHOCK* *AWE* You can make money selling music that people can freely copy? ZOMG!!1!
Businesses who think that selling unrestricted music that people can freely copy need only look to the bottled water industry to see that it's possible. In the west we have (effectively) free, clean drinking water, yet people spend billions each year buying it from stores. Sure, anyone can "turn on the tap" of the internet and get their fill of mp3s, but that doesn't mean stores can't make a huge profit selling those exact same mp3s.
Bottled water sells because of psychological tricks and convenience. MP3s can sell the same way.
Re:Emusic is cool but there are many great others (Score:2, Insightful)
It's rather a startling point . .
. . . given how many people are doing it; and have been doing it for so long. Even more startling that Ars Technica seems to be uncritically accepting the marketing claim in the article and run with the ball. It's, well . .
It's even more doofey that Slashdot, which has run any number of stories about outfits selling/distributing unencumbered mp3s, should perpetuate the claim, but, well, it's Slashdot.
KFG
Re:Selling music online the correct way (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unexpected Success? (Score:3, Insightful)
Does nobody remember the Cassette era, when purchased music was freely recordable and many players had two decks in order to facilitate copying? I don't recall any sort of music industry collapse back then. Sure we didn't have the internet back then, but people still traded music. A lot.
Few things
- I assume you had to make 10 copies of the cassette for 10 of your
friends - you would have spend a few hours doing it - with digital files you
could email it to 10 of your friends in 10 seconds.
- There was no cost associated with emailing it to 10 of your friends. Back then,
you would have to buy 10 blank cassetes to tape on.
- Assume you had a copy, anyone could look at it & tell that it was a copy,
not a paid for one. You can't with a digital file.
- The only people you could copy was for your friends, here you could post it
for the whole population of the world to download.
all but (Score:1, Insightful)
Funny, I thought it WAS actually a necessity. Silly me.
The tone of the article is a bit biased (Score:5, Insightful)
This article makes it seems that Apple compatibility is holding back companies from selling music online. An iPod will play MP3s. The problem is that the studios will not allow anyone to sell music online without DRM. FairPlay was Apple's solution to this problem. Apple doesn't want to license it, and that's their choice and right. So these companies don't have many choices, but Apple wasn't the one that created the problem. They found a solution that works for them.
Re:Emusic is cool but there are many great others (Score:3, Insightful)
Because they are the most brilliant thieves.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal." - Picasso
Re:Unexpected Success? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not siding with the industry here, just playing a bit of devil's advocate.
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:3, Insightful)
You may be able to justify it to yourself that allofmp3 is legal but I'd like to see how you could justify it as being morally or ethically correct. You are basically paying a fence for stolen goods or paying a counterfeiter for counterfeit merchandise.
Re:Unexpected Success? (Score:4, Insightful)
The largest content torrent that I've seen had about 750 leechers on it.
The *typical* large torrent has bout 120 seeders to 120 leechers. This is usually anime or a 1st run television show that was just shown.
However 99% of content torrents that I've seen has 1 to 2 seeders and 8 to 20 leechers.
It costs money and time to store downloaded material- and there is *always* a chance you will lose it.
There is a *solid* market for a copy (Vongo perhaps?) that sells me a lifetime license to a song/show/movie/book/etc. and stores a copy on their end.
They then charge a *reasonable* re-download fee (say 10% of the minimum wage), a reasonable annual storage fee (say 2 cents per gigabyte- a typical 400 movie library is about 1600 gigabytes- but they only have to keep 1 copy of each for "N" users) and allow me to re-download the song/show/movie/book/etc. a reasonable number of times per year (say once per year) with a small number of floating downloads which allow me to download twice for when things go wrong (an exceptions for cases where I can show them a police report).
But seriously--- most torrents are very small and it takes days (weeks...) to download things. There were a few things on emule (not a torrent) that took literally almost 3 month to download. I think almost anyone would pay some money to get it *now* vs getting it 3 months from now (or 12 days from now).
If the media cartel had not driven prices up so high (-- $20 mil for an actor? Should be more like $500,000-- with similar reductions all along the food chain with movies costing $5 to see as a result). However, they have raised their prices so high that people are finding many other less expensive forms of entertainment.
Re:well, it is legal (Score:5, Insightful)
"Many people", including the Moscow Southwest regional prosecutor.
Allofmp3.com let off the hook [arstechnica.com]
allofmp3.com violates the spirit of the law, if not the exact wording. It is like saying that identity theft was legal because when it first started happening, there was no specific law against it3/7/2005
Why don't you just say it's "like pedophilia" or "supports terrorism" if you're going to use absurd analogies. As for the "letter" and "spirit" of the law; the mechanism AllofMP3 is using is basically the same as applies to radio stations; they don't have to negotiate with every label for every song, they just pay a lump sum to a collection agency. If AllofMP3 isn't making these payments, they would presumably have been prosecuted.
Adding to the gushing (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone else in the thread has already said it, but I just wanted to add to the chorus of people urging emusic virgins to check the service out.
In addition to picking up new music from old favorites like Sufjan Stevens, The Decemberists, and The New Pornographers, their insightful reviews and helpful, music-lover-friendly emails have led me to find a bunch of new music I love. Calexico, Tarkio, Gomez.. A bunch of random electronic tracks... Oh, and a bunch of B-3 jazz / blues, like Tony Monaco, Jimmy Smith, Joey DeFrancesco, et al.
Seriously, it's great. It's like Christmas every month when the downloads renew and I can go grab a couple more albums. I dig it
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:5, Insightful)
RIAA and MPAA want crackdowns on the real pirates that are selling bootlegs produced in quantity. Legal manuvering can take care of allofmp3.com by making them cough up more and through a bit of treaty work that makes the copyright cartel in Russia pay up.
allofmp3.com is like a fly compared to what is going on in Russia to the RIAA. a non entity when there are bigger problems to deal with. They probably have another 3-5 years before any real changes occur that will matter.
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would you pay for quasi-legal music?? Just fucking download it for free already. Don't try to justify it being "right" because you're paying "less".
Re:Emusic is cool but there are many great others (Score:5, Insightful)
Help me out here. (Score:2, Insightful)
I was under the impression that CD's were still lossless, and were still somewhat portable, and perfectly legal. You can even rip them and load them into your Ipod or fav player without worry...
Have they started DRM'ing Cd's so you can't rip them yet? that's what I figured was the next step but haven't run across one yet.
-Duff
The Holy Grail of online music sales? (Score:4, Insightful)
My big regret is that Fraunhofer gave up the fight and MP3 became the de facto standard, rather than the technically superior MP4.
Re:well, it is legal (Score:4, Insightful)
>they just pay a lump sum to a collection agency
I think you misspelled "regional prosecutor".
Re:Emusic is cool but there are many great others (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:well, it is legal (Score:3, Insightful)
If identity theft were legal when it was done, it was legal. The US Constitution explicitly states that anything that isn't already illegal due to a law is legal. Trying to punish someone for an act that wasn't illegal at the time of the event is called ex post facto, and that also is explicitly banned by the US Constitution.
Finally, copyright infringement is not, I repeat, not theft. Copyright law is fully described in US Code Title 17 [house.gov], and copyright infringement is defined there as well. The concept of theft, burglary, robbery, larceny, and the rest of the theft family of criminal laws deal with physical items, not abstract concepts like ideas. Criminal law can be found in the next title (oddly enough), USC Title 18 [house.gov].
Now for my disclaimer: I am not a licensed attorney, but I study political science and law in fairly well detail.
Also, you refer to the Russian government as a "terrorist organisation"; with that logic, one can easily apply the same accusations towards the RIAA for their own regime.