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New Legit Napster Service Coming
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Mar 10, 2003 03:28 PM
from the rising-from-the-ashes dept.
from the rising-from-the-ashes dept.
Serith submitted a CNN story talking about the new
Napster Service. This is of course an attempt to legitimize music sharing. Provided the price point is fair and paying is convenient, I'll be first in line. Of course the odds of that happening seems awfully weak.
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To the Roxio Executives (Score:5, Funny)
the_sound_of_a_boot_meeting_a_dead_horse.mp3
Cordially,
The RIAA
Re:To the Roxio Executives (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
duking it out in the courts (Score:5, Insightful)
That did not stop music publishers from suing Bertelsmann for $17 billion last week, arguing that by throwing Napster a lifeline in 2002 it was responsible for the service continuing its illegal infringement.
this reminds me of when the photocopiers in the libraries had to have huge disclaimers about copying any material that was copyrighted.
i can only hope that personal use will extend to purchased music as much as it did to purchased books. as much as i hate these lawsuits, it is in the courts that the personal use issue actually finds some teeth.
Re:duking it out in the courts (Score:2, Funny)
Yes, because i know when i D/L an mp3, i only use it for educational purposes
Re:duking it out in the courts (Score:5, Interesting)
this reminds me of when the photocopiers in the libraries had to have huge disclaimers about copying any material that was copyrighted.
When office copiers were first coming out, publishers of recipe books fought to prevent them from being available too easily. Their fear? Secretaries, who at the time were mainly female, would copy recipes out of books for swapping amongst themselves.
Parent
Re:duking it out in the courts (Score:3, Interesting)
It would seem like the Internet will make criminals out of us all.
I loved this:""Where will it end?" wailed Marilyn Leavitt-Imblum, 54, who designs needlepoint patterns. "I just don't understand how these [people] can stitch a stolen angel and still live with themselves."
Copyright for non-commercial use is largely invalidated by the internet.
Re:duking it out in the courts (Score:3, Insightful)
Hearing insightful statements like this being made anywhere in the world makes me wish I could go back to the first invention of the word copyright, and whisper inside the head of the person who thought it up, "No, saleright would be a much better name." The natural feeling way of things is that, if you want to grant exclusivity for anything, grant it so that only one company has the right to sell something for profit. This would even mean only the saleright holder would be allowed to sell for radio play, since radio stations make money on commercials.
But due to the unfortunate coincidence that the government granted exclusivity was labelled "copyright", it became clustered with the idea that duplicating something is evil, and thus friends sharing with each other are being evil. Behold the power of a word.
If you swapped every existence of the word copyright in modern times with the word saleright, the world would be a much more sensible place.
Always Backdoors (Score:3, Insightful)
People are greedy, they want it for free, and they'll get it.
Re:Always Backdoors (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO
Parent
insite? insits? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:insite? insits? (Score:2)
oh, wait, no one's going to read it anyway. Never mind.
Re:insite? insits? (Score:2)
Of course they would probably have a co-conspirator shoot me with a high-caliber rifle for pointing that out. Whenever I see this fluff passed for english I just keep thinking of 1984...
(As an aside a co-consipirator is not a real world. A rifle, by definition, is a high-caliber weapon.)
Re:insite? insits? (Score:2)
Editorializing (Score:5, Insightful)
When the headline's only a few sentences long, do we need this sort of pessimism occupying so much space?
I for one think there's plenty of promise in a pay-per-download music service. If it's easy to use, and, here's the most important part: accessible to teens and pre-teens. Allow for a charge account to be set up by the parents, with the kids spending "credits" to download music, games, cell ringers, etc. Are you listening, BMG?
Re:Editorializing (Score:5, Insightful)
There is plenty of promise in pay-per-download music service. There is. It's only that NO ONE HAS TAPPED THAT POTENTIAL YET. The existing services are *ridiculous*. I am waiting for a service that will
1. Have a lot of selection. Not just the mainstream, not just the independants, not most of the bands. But rather just about everything. I really can't be bothered to figure out which services I have to subscribe to, to get a full view of music selection.
2. Will offer mp3 in high quality. Propriatory players do not cut it, I really don't want to lose all music that I have paid for if I stop subscribing. I don't like propriatory players (or even worse burners), but I do like my portable mp3 player.
3. Will not even attempt to sell streaming. Even if there is a lot of it for cheap. I have cable and still streaming can be laggy and it overloads the network. Local caches and file downloads exist for a good reason. (a radio-like subscription is exempt, I am talking about pay-per-stream model)
4. Will NOT charge me $10 or more a month. I don't want to pay for the priviledge of buying music. I don't want any pressure regarding how much music I should buy to compensate the monthly fee.
5. Charging $2 or even $1 per song is NOT CHEAP. Cheap is 25c to maybe 50c depending on the song. $1/song can easily bring to same $13-$15 per albom, but now I get no CD.
I know that several services cover *some* of the complaints that I have. I am not aware of one that covers all.
And before I stop bitching :), I'd like to point out the most amazing fact about all the existing services. If they have control over what you burn (i.e. not mp3 providers) they fix the number of tracks-to-burn WITHOUT an option to purchase more. That strongly remainds me of Soviet Union where I was born... In US, though, I thought that the seller WANTS you to buy more stuff and would never prevent you from doing so.
Parent
Consultant (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Consultant (Score:4, Funny)
As opposed to last time where he set the world afire for providing a way to illegally share music?
Parent
p2p (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:p2p (Score:3, Insightful)
Price? (Score:3, Interesting)
If I can get better quality fairly simply, I'm willing to pay. I still buy CDs, for crying out loud.
Re:Price? (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, so you're the idiot keeping them in business?
From the article (Score:2)
Irregardless of lawsuits, I'm afraid that this is the fate of all file-sharing programs. I salute Kazaa and Co. for fighting the good fight and all, but I just can't figure out how they'll ever convince enough people to pay for downloadable music to turn a profit.
Missed one condition (Score:3, Insightful)
And we all know the consequences of that - Record exec's saying "blah people won't buy music online blah piracy blah new DMCA blah THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!
Fair Price? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just out of curiosity, how many people consider a 'fair' price point to be greater than $0.00? Very few hardcore filesharers will actually buy music online, because the price is 'unfair'.
And how convenient does this have to be? Credit Card? (Oh, wait, we don't trust 'those people' with our credit cards.)
('Those people' being anyone who gets in bed with music producers.)
Re:Fair Price? (Score:2)
Depends on if there is any added value. I'ld be hard pressed to pay $0.99 a song if I didn't get to listen to it before hand. However, if I could listen to a streamed version of the song before purchase, and if after paying I can do what I like with it (put it on a CD, or a portable solid state player, leave it on my harddrive...) I'ld be pretty happy to pay $2.00 a song. Of course I'm not in the 18-24 demographic anymore so I don't find much "popular" music on the radio that I really enjoy so perhaps my voice doesn't count.
Re:Fair Price? (Score:3, Interesting)
However, in cases of a couple the $2.00 a song rate would dramatically drive up the cost of the music (the beatle's White Album, Pink Floyd's The Wall etc.).
3 points (Score:5, Insightful)
- The word is "insight". It isn't used at all in the linked article, and is misspelled twice in the original posting.
- Roxio, the company that took Easy CD Creator and turned it into an unstable piece of garbage is going to do something with Napster? Good luck.
- While occasionally, you'll find someone who says "The artists deserve to get paid for their work," most people say "CDs cost too much, and Kazaa, Gnutella, EDonkey, WinMX, etc. are free." If you really want to support an artist, download what you want from the P2P networks (or FTP or IRC), and send the artists a check in the mail. Cut out the middleman and show the RIAA that they aren't adding any value and don't deserve to get paid
</rant>Pay for mp3s? (Score:4, Interesting)
Record Execs don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Are these people stupid...never mind (Score:2, Interesting)
I wrote a casebook on mp3s as part of a freshmen english class about 5 years back. At this time several companies were trying to develop watermarked, time or number of plays limited propriatary audio formats. The companies failed to realize that this was a stupid idea, the mp3 files could be found anywhere, were compaitable with a number of good software programs, and didnt suffer from any of the limitations that the RIAA wanted to introduce in order to prevent piracy, and that because of this they would not catch on.
Appearently the big 5 still fail to realize that all the legislation in the world is incapible of putting the genie back in the bottle. Even while resorting to tactics like introducing bad versions of songs and spreading rumors of an upcoming, plaform independent mp3 virus and persecuting those running servers with nasty letters to their isp's, the popularity of mp3's and file sharing continues to rise. The infeasability of a pay-per -play scheme given the current abundance of peer-to-peer software should be obvious to anyone with half a brain...
More crazy RIAA math and dates! (Score:3, Interesting)
Uhhh..afaik, napster went offline in 2001. And I don't think Napster ever came back up.
And what's this about $17 billion dollars? I know punative damages are usually in excess of what's really expected, but $17 Billion? In 2001, only $13 billion worth of music was sold. So what is this, $4 billion in lawyer's fees?
Yeesh. Let's all pitch in and buy a timeshare nerd resort on Vanuatu so we all have a place to relax and trade files in peace...
What's new here? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if the value of being able to buy one song at a time and burn your own customized CDs is a significant enough improvement to alter consumers' behaviour (which I think is debatable), the perceived value of such a service has been diluted by the ability to do that exact same thing for free for years!
These companies are in a rush to grab a potentially huge market, but their business plans SUCK because there is no added value. I propose that declining CD sales may have more to do with the ease of burning CDs than actual Internet filesharing. With the current music marketing model of revenues coming from a few multi-platinum albums, it becomes very easy for kids to burn each other CDs since they all want the same mass-consumed product.
One way to give themselves a bit more protection might be to try to diversify musical interests so it wouldn't be easy to share 'the hot album'. I'm not sure if it's feasible, but they could save a lot of money on production and advertising, and still garner some major hits through word of mouth sales (kids will do an awful lot of free promotion if you're clever).
Now I know I may be talking out my ass, but the point is that recycling old concepts and increasing the price is NOT going to be a succesful business model.
What is needed... (Score:5, Interesting)
What, explicitly is needed:
Compressed AND un-compressed audio file for download
Artwork / track listings etc. to print
Nothing to stop you burning a CD
No watermarking
Affordable pricing that reflects the facts that:
You've bought your computer and internet connection and CD burner etc.
You've bought your blank media and printer and paper
Musicians give their music away on the radio all the time, and the consumer doesn't pay for this. This has devalued and / or shown the true value of music and it is a very low value.
The price of second hand CD's more accurately reflects a true market value of music
Do the sums yourself and even taking into account the costs of setting up the service, the price per song / per minute is going to be pretty low, but if the service / artist do a 50:50 split on that (before costs) I'd reckon that would be amicable.
Ofcourse, this would put record shops out of business, but that's their problem. They don't offer much useful anyway (unless they sell vinyl)
It's a one-way road (Score:5, Insightful)
Napster was never about "free music." Napster was always about community, about "sharing my collection--my very own, personal, idiosyncratic collection."
There is no way the record companies are going to provide the same variety or the same breadth of coverage as a bunch of dedicated enthusiasts.
Sure, I'll be able to get Britney Spears from this site--but am I really going to be able to get Arthur Askey? Or cylinder recordings by Billy Murray? Or sound effects? The Weavers' recording of "Tzena, tzena, tzena?" Bernard Cribbins singing "'Ole in the Ground?"
What, you say--you've never heard about them and don't care about them? Of course not. But on the old Napster there were people who did, and shared them with me. And you have a bunch of stuff of your own that you care about, that _I"ve_ never heard of. Maybe even stuff that isn't available on CD.
This new "Napster" is a one way road. It's going to be all about what the record companies push, and nothing about what the music buying public wants.
Old news -- it's just another reseller (Score:3, Insightful)
Napster Fanning himself? He's just a figurehead. George Foreman does more appliance design than Fanning will do with the actual running of this service.
Of course it'll flop, but that's what the record industry wants.
My Favorite Quote (Score:5, Funny)
Roxio managed to buy most of Roxio's assets, but it did not assume any of the company's pending liabilities.
That's pretty nice I wish I could buy up all of my own assets and hot have to pay for any of my liabilities.
Napster Insite is the product's name? (Score:2)
I believe that CmdrTaco got the scoop before anyone else in the whole world. [google.com], and this is one of those "from the future" stories that he was bragging about a few days ago. Maybe I should rethink that subscription after all?
Too bad it will never work... (Score:5, Insightful)
We can all scream bloody murder about how there are no pay systems, CD prices are too high, artists today blow, intellectual property rights are wrong, filesharing actually increases CD sales, capitalism is evil, whatever your favorite argument is...the fact is you can't beat free and as long as the people can get it for free, the majority of people will not use a pay service.
That's reality. Maybe not the reality in your head or on Slashdot, but the reality of the world.
I'm from Canada. (Score:5, Insightful)
If they're gonna tax me for piracy, then it's my goddamned right to pirate.
I'm going to use p2p services and download all that I want, and it'll be perfectly legal, seeing as how I've already paid the RIAA, so why shouldn't I have a right to it?
Re:I'm from Canada. (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course it doesn't actually mean that you're allowed to do it, but it does mean that you are certainly justified in doing it. It's the difference between legal and right I suppose. How can you make people pay for something they aren't allowed to do and consider yourself to be in the right?
poor business model yet again... (Score:4, Insightful)
What I originally liked about Napster was the fact I wasn't constrained to downloading from the traditional schlock the radio and MTV push on us. I'd say 80% of the music I've been introduced to in the last few years is thanks to Napster and Kazaa lite. I'd of never heard bands like Thursday, Death Cab for Cutie, or Rival Schools without digital music, now they're some of my favorite artists, all of whom I've attended their concerts. Now digital music is all I listen to, and I've been freed from listening to corperate schlock. I couldn't tell you who's on the Top 20 right now, nor have I watched MTV or listened to the radio for about 3 years (seriously).
It's the same problem in a different medium: push pre-processed garbage music down peoples throats. HELLO! That's why people aren't buying music in the first place! Why pay 17$ for a CD which you might listen to two songs on? Most of the time I get bored of that song after a month or two anyway.
The biggest thrill of Napster, though, was being able to get all those old songs you used to have, but your CDs were stolen/scratched/lost or you don't own a tape/record player. About half my
I wonder if their new ploy will work with my portible
Im not sure why this is so complicated ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine being able to walk into Best Buy (using a kiosk for the broadband impaired) or a simple web page and accomplish the following.
1) Design/burn your own music CD selected from the complete vast archives of the music biz.
2) Each song being 128k quality or better or varying based on cost
3) Each song costing anywhere between 49-99 cents each
4) Each song delivered in choice of format (.mp3 or wav etc...)
5) Provide some kind of e-receipt which you could use to re-download/burn music that you lost or damaged (eliminate need for "backup")
Then all they would need to do is promote the crap out of the service using all the money they saved from not suing the crap out of everyone.
I won't pay (Score:3, Insightful)
The RIAA with never allow this to succeed (Score:3, Insightful)
But, such an arrangement will never be agreed to by the record industry for one simple reason. Greed. The mindset of the record companies is "why should we sell songs for a nickel when we can sell CDs for $18"
Movies and TV episodes too, and some other ideas (Score:3, Interesting)
Here are some ideas:
Movies and TV episodes
As well as all the stuff mentioned above (easy to use, good quality, wide diverse collection, album art, etc.) I think a good service should also offer movies and TV episodes for download, and maybe even software. I know this would make licensing even more complicated, but a complete service like this would certainly be added value!
Must be P2P
And it would have to be a true P2P service, with users downloading from each other, but with some check that the material is licenced for distribution on the service. This check would also help to maintain integrity and quality. The check wouldn't need to be on a central server either, lists of allowed files could be distributed.
A Community
Recommendations based on what other people with similar tastes to you have downloaded would also add value. People like the whole community thing!
Bandwidth-based Pricing?
An interesting idea would be a bandwidth-based pricing model, maybe with discounts for people who share more (like Kazaa's user ratings). But it would have to be simple enough for people to understand - maybe with just 3 or 4 levels of MBs/month - and people always knowing how much they have left that month.
Quality
I think the biggest problems with current free P2P networks is finding exactly what you want, and always getting guaranteed quality. Reliability would hopefully be solved by a paid for system.
There are so many ways value could be added to such a service. I think if a paid-for service addressed many of the points raised in this discussion, and provided a complete P2P file-sharing experience, then people would use it. I know I would!
Re:"Insite? Insit?" (Score:2, Funny)
International Symposium on IT Standardization (from VERA, Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms.
I somehow doubt that's what they really meant, but at least you know it's not total gibberish.
Re:To(o) much work (Score:2, Funny)
Go Roxio, Go Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
The one thing I worry about is the idea that, according to rumor, they'll be charging ~ $0.99 per track. I think that's a bit steep unless they have some slick way of giving you album art and liner notes or other bonus materials.
I wish Apple and Roxio the best of luck. I really want to believe in pay-for-download music. I really want to believe that if you do this right, someone will pay for it.
Parent
No more tying! (Score:3, Informative)
$0.99 per track. I think that's a bit steep unless they have some slick way of giving you album art and liner notes or other bonus materials.
To me, the fact that the good songs on an album are no longer "tied" (by antitrust definition) to the filler more than makes up for that. This service [napster.com] is for people who want singles; this one [cdnow.com] is for people who want albums.
Re:Sounds like... (Score:3, Interesting)
Tim