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New Online Music Push by EMI
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Apr 23, 2003 01:34 PM
from the joining-em-after-failure-to-beat dept.
from the joining-em-after-failure-to-beat dept.
akadruid writes "EMI has signed deals with 20 top European websites to sell its music online.
According to Reuters, 'Consumers will be able to make permanent copies of songs and transfer them to recordable CDs, portable music players and their computer hard drives'.
This represents a major shift in policy by EMI, who previously went to great lengths to protect their music from copying.
Does this mark the beginning of a major change in the music industry?"
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Adapt... (Score:5, Insightful)
Missed boats by RIAA and Video makers (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Adopting new technology instead of fighting it (e.g., DAT audio decks, DVD+R vs DVD-R bs, mp3, etc)
3. Selling old content at low low costs to drive sales of new hardware/playback mechanisms
4. Enhancing the content/quality (e.g., an audio CD is unchanged since 1983 when it was introduced). At least DVD is much better than VHS
5. Selling different quality level versions of the same product at different prices (192k mp3 should cost more than a 64k mp3, A recent movie DVD should cost $12, SVCD $9 and a VCD $6).
6. Allowing flat rate pricing for content (e.g., $20 a month for all of the mp3 and all the VCD's you can download)
7. Actually apreciating the customers by including extras in the product (e.g., including 1 or 2 extra tracks on an audio CD or including a mini-cd with a few mp3's of other bands).
8. Packaging older material into collections at a reasonable price (e.g., a box set of all of the albums by a 1960's band should cost about $20 to $25). Same goes for TV shows (e.g., A complete collection of six million dollar man episodes should cost $50 max or no more than $1 an episode). Consider shows like Gunsmoke with 500+ episodes - would you pay $1000.00 for a complete collection?
9. Selling new audio CD's and DVD's by online auction to actually see what people are willing to pay for the content and then pricing content accordingly.
Parent
Re:Missed boats by RIAA and Video makers (Score:3, Insightful)
10. Burn audio CD's, print books, burn DVD;s on demand at the retail store (much lower distribution costs == lower retail prices).
Re:Missed boats by RIAA and Video makers (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't that determine the MOST that people would be willing to pay?
Rhapsody (Score:3, Informative)
First step... next... (Score:5, Interesting)
It would sure be nice to pick and choose what I want to download in flac.
Re:First step... next... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, sometimes it fails. I did a 196 encoding of a Dvorak piece and when the singer hit the really high notes the vibrato sounded like a fire alarm. But that was only once.
Re:First step... next... (Score:5, Informative)
No, what I wanted to really respond to was this:
Excuse me? The whole point of MP3 (and other lossy-compressed audio formats) is to reduce storage requirements for the data, and to reduce bandwidth requirements for its transmission over a network or broadcast medium. Your statement runs completely contrary to the spirit of that engineering design goal for MP3 audio. MP3 is obviously inferior to uncompressed (or losslessly compressed) source material for critical listening; where MP3 shines is in streaming applications and applications where storage space is at a premium. Of course you can jack the bitrate up to 256 kbps, but if you're going to do that with MP3, why not use a better codec that's engineered for musical reproduction, instead of using MP3, which was engineered for digital television broadcast and network streaming? ATRAC seems to get some things right that MP3 doesn't, especially at more modest bitrates. I've been hearing good things about AAC as well, although the patent restrictions may hinder its adoption.
I mean, seriously, would you rather listen to an uncompressed CD or DVD-A or SACD on your high end home stereo, or an MP3 compressed copy of the original source material? I don't even think there's a contest here! No, the MP3 copies are good for putting ten hours worth of music on a CD-R that you can play on a portable player or in a car's deck. When you're in a car, or flying cross-country on a plane, or stuck in a hotel room somewhere, or visiting family, or when you're camping somewhere -- these are non-critical listening environments, and highly compressed audio is not a problem.
Parent
Re:First step... next... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, the CD frequencies don't wobble all over the place as the deck changes speed, and the CD audio isn't ruined by pops and squeaks caused by dust on the platter, and after playing one CD a few times you can still hear the high frequencies unlike vinyl where it gets muted over time.
Yes, there's certainly a difference. No wonder my entire collection is CD.
of course (Score:5, Interesting)
They provide the music, other people handle the packaging, shipping and shelfspace, if you will and they collect the money.
They don't even have to pay to have the CDs pressed or the cover art printed.
OGG or NOTHING! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:OGG or NOTHING! (Score:3, Interesting)
Although this comment is kind of fundamentalist (essentially, Ogg or Bust), it does raise an interesting question: How will EMI distribute the music online? The article doesn't get into this at all. There's been talk about lossless vs. lossy compression so far in here, but even amongst these there are choices. If EMI chooses lossless, will they go for WAV, FLAC or some other encoding. For lossy compression, there's a plethora of options: Ogg, MP3, Real Player, Windows Media, etc.
Although I am a fan of O
Apple? (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean, this sort of thing should have been embraced five years ago by all of the labels.
hah (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Objectivity is journalism makes me happy (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder where they're getting their statistics about "global music sales sharply lower". Most of the statistics that I've seen say that the music industry is still an unbeatable juggernaut.
I suppose that the RIAA pushing new "Super-DMCA" laws through state legislatures is just a symptom of them being on their knees.
Re:Objectivity is journalism makes me happy (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
This makes little difference (Score:5, Interesting)
Confused Philospher says:
NO.
This is because we will have to wait years for other companies to follow suit, since few people will use the EMI service initially because of the ease of using Kazza for FREE [minus jail time and billion dollar law suits].
The music industry missed the first boat when Napster sailed.
Re:This makes little difference (Score:5, Interesting)
of course, then what's to stop somoene from uploading it to kazaa.
But the fact remains, as long as I can share amongst all of MY computers and MP3 Players I have no real desire to share with the universe if the price is fair.
Back when we had to buy a cd, rip, encode, and upload for 3 days on a crappy modem there was a cost that made it worth trading with others. I'll waste days of my life on artistA if you waste equal time on artisB and we'll swap. With quick high quality legal downloads for a fair price I'd rather say "go buy it yourself, here's the link".
If they can tap into that me-first (leachers abound) mentality and call it honest consumerism, they'll be loving life again. They can do so without limiting our civil liberties and suing the fuck out of everyone too.
Unfortunately, until a record company actually does something to repeal the evil fuckin dmca, I ain't buying shit from them, ever again. And I haven't since that piece of shit communist legislation was passed. FUCK YOU RIAA!!!
Parent
Re:This makes little difference (Score:5, Insightful)
of course, then what's to stop somoene from uploading it to kazaa.
This is going to sound dumb and naive, but listen for a second, my fellow Slashdotters:
Honesty.
Dishonest people will download the MP3s with/from their favourite p2p service and never buy the album. Honest people will either download the MP3s and buy the CD, or just buy the CD outright.
The world is how it's always been, and the record companies don't understand that. An honest person will be honest; a dishonest person will be dishonest.
No DRM or tricky license agreements--not even the DMCA--will ever change that. It takes only one person to rip a CD before it's available to every dishonest person out there.
Perhaps one day, this will be realized by the content providers, and they'll stop screwing the people who were going to be honest in the first fucking place. If you're gonna steal it, you're gonna steal it. Simple. You will find a way around the restrictions.
-/-
Mikey-San
Parent
What I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
But what about if you're accused of piracy when you have a vast library of legal songs? Are they going to properly cross-reference their user-list, or just continue to send nastygrams to anyone whom they suspect of having Mp3's?
IMHO, it seems terrible ironic and two-faced to be blatantly accusing mp3's etc of being piracy and profit-stealers, asking for (in Canada) huge taxation on mp3-capable storage devices, and then selling off music to run on those same devices
Re:What I don't understand (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe they will watermark the downloads individually. If they were really nasty (clever?), they would embed your credit card number into the watermark as as additional deterent from file sharing. (Nah, they aren't that evil...)
At least this might cut down on the number of retards that keep claiming that "downloading copyrighted files is illegal" (So downloading a Redhat ISO is illegal then?)
Parent
Re:What I don't understand (Score:4, Informative)
[...] Is how they're going to sort out whom has a legal copy of a song, and whom has an illegal copy of a song.
They could do what EMusic does, which is keep a catalog of all the music you've ever downloaded with your account. This is supposedly for convenience so you can look back and grab songs you downloaded before, or something like that. But I bet it'd be a good way of proving that you have a legit copy of a song you got from the service.
Don't believe that I have a legal right to that copy of "Hey Pachuco"? Check my EMusic history, bub. I got it fair and square.
Parent
They have no choice... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They have no choice... (Score:3, Insightful)
What is a lot more important than EM
not MP3's.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought "wow someone finally gets it! They know they have no choice". I clicked on the article hoping to find a link to one of these sites selling the music, and actually thought I'd buy an album to check it out.
After careful scrutiny, I noticed this line from the article:
We are using new technology to benefit both artists and consumers by massively expanding the amount of music available securely online,"
This is not MP3's nor is it Ogg, and I am not going to buy anything that limits me in any way.
Re:not MP3's.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you ever bought a MS O/S? Talk about limiting! At least CDs you can play on a bunch of CD players... If MS ruled the music biz, you'd have to buy one CD for each CD player you had. And if you CD player broke, you'd need to buy a new one since your CD's license is attached to your now defunct CD player.
Parent
Re:not MP3's.. (Score:5, Funny)
Wait...you mean like....purchase something digital?
Fuck that. Gimme Kazaa Lite and IRC any day.
Parent
Re:not MP3's.. (Score:5, Interesting)
What the word "securely" means in this context is difficult to determine. It might mean the music itself is somehow secure (Digital Restrictions Management, etc.) or it might simply mean the purchasing itself is secure (SSL). I'm going to wait to hear the nuts & bolts of this thing before jumping to conclusions.
Though I'm not buying anything packaged in a closed format.
Parent
Huh? Limited? (Score:3, Insightful)
You can burn it, you can put it on a portable (assumes this means you can get it as mp3 or a player-compatible format), and you can put it on your drive.
I'm fairly sure the secure part means the billing/transaction system.
Re:not MP3's.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope your DVD collection is standing at zero, then?
Robbie Williams anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well after the english singer Robbie Williams [bbc.co.uk] claimed that piracy was 'great', and his record company (EMI) went ballistic.... it is quite an interesting change of tact from them.
Either that or they realised that expanding their online availability might be due to the new report [www.enn.ie] that online downloads of songs will impact on the national pop charts?
Just my 0.02 downloaded songs (or cents/pence).
Grateful Dead (Score:5, Insightful)
CDs are nothing more than advertisements for bands. Bands should make thier money working (i.e. touring, concerts, etc), and not sitting down at one recording session and cranking out 10 bajillion CDs.
People that want the cover art are going to be willing to pay for it anyways. But the rest of us who like to go to concerts and support the band by going to concerts should be able to do so, and even leave with a recording of the concert as a fond memory.
Re:Grateful Dead (Score:4, Informative)
Small (i.e. local bands)
1. May break-even on their CD after recording costs. Some even make some decent cash on the CDs if they sell more than 2K of them.
2. Unlikely to get any decent amount of ASCAP/BMI money.
3. Lose money playing out. Lucky to get a beer for a show.
Medium (i.e. developing artist - sales under 900K)
1. Lose major cash on the CD. Label invents big dough in videos and stuff hoping to push them to Large sized act.
2. Make a bit of dough from ASCAP/BMI if they get radio play.
3. Band breaks even playing out generally because the label generally underwrites their shows (called a guarantee) in hopes that it will drive CD sales. If the label has given up on CD sales, the band loses big touring.
Large Act (over 900k):
1. Either make huge cash or no cash on their CDs. The no cash ones are like MJ where the label spent massive dough promoting and producing the album but saw sales that would make money with most artists, but because they poured so much dough into the album, they lose.
2. Almost all large acts make good dough off of ASCAP/BMI.
3. Only the acts who have a number of huge selling albums or extensive, extensive touring history make huge cash here. but when they do get to that level (i.e. rolling stones) they make massive, massive cash.
Parent
Re:Grateful Dead (Score:3, Insightful)
For a good rock band, hell yeah they should be best when seen live. An orchestra might be good live, but is just as well enjoyed at home with a good stereo. Rhythmic ambient noise would awful live, but great at home late at night on an excellent stereo.
And the thing is... I like all those. I want to support all those. And in some cases that means going to see them live, but in others it necessarily means buying the CD because th
Death of the industry... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is the main reason why I think the Music Biz is scared of technology, especailly when downloading is the "normal" way to purchase music:
*Large labels get web site and have music for download.
*Indipendant artist also makes website, has music for download.
And there you go... indi-artist and Brittney spears on the same equal footing. Suddenly the labels loose control of what gets distribution (downloads), what gets airtime (net radio), and that is where the money generation is reborn. The big money is not the few million off of an artist, but in the multiplication of said millions over MANY artists they can make "big" and push onto TRL and control. Oh, and if anyone actually thinks TRL (Total Request Live, a v-e-r-y popular MTV show here in the States) plays what you actualy vote for, you're an idiot. TRL is a marketing tool that plays mostly what you want, but is used to push no-names like P. Diddy's little boy-band on top very quickly. "Look everyone, B2K is #1 on TRL! You all love them!" And then little boys and girls run to the store because "everyone" who is "kewl" must be listenting to those dancing crackheads.
Yes, you do detect some envy. Brilliant minds created TRL and I'm sure every artist that wants to push a CD pays payola to TRL in huge ways. Brilliant business. Wish I thought of it.
a shot at a conspiracy theorist guess (Score:5, Interesting)
Is how they're going to sort out whom has a legal copy of a song, and whom has an illegal copy of a song. I suppose that even if you "buy" a song online you still can't put it on kazaa, as that would be considered distribution?
What if they were just trying to track down the distributors? It would be SOO easy to put a signature on each track they allow someone to download. Then, they just connect to all the various file-sharing places, download songs, and analyze them. They find out who put their tracks out there. Then they prosecute those people.
This would be SOO easy to do, too. I mean...geeze...ESPECIALLY if they ake the people play the downloaded tracks with a special codec they have to download, that has a private key in it...but even without that, you can still sign a file without encrypting it, and just wait and see who's files get shared. Then when you arrest those people and charge them $10,000 per shared song, you take care of the problem from the other end. When people have 100Gigs of MP3's, there's almost no chance they have even 10% of the cd's to back them up. Someone, somewhere, ripped those cd's and originally shared them. So don't just go after the people who continue to share things they've never had - those go on and on. Go after the ones who do the original ripping.
Decent conspiracy theory?
Re:a shot at a conspiracy theorist guess (Score:3, Interesting)
No! (Score:4, Funny)
possible reason (Score:5, Insightful)
same old BS... (Score:5, Insightful)
Illegal online services, kick-started by the original maverick Napster, have brought the music industry to its knees in the past few years, forcing global music sales sharply lower...
How many more time is the RIAA gonna try to stuff this crap down our throats and have us burp up sympathy?? Here are just a few of the reasons why a drop of sales in not at all necessarily due to downloaded music...
1. The most obvious of these is the drop in economy, with similar sales slumps in the last econo-drop of the early '90s.
2. Secondly, the increase in games and DVD sales is a contributing factor. With DVD's being, in many cases, cheaper than a music CD, their is much more value in a DVD than a typical CD.
3. Last, but not least, radio is highlighted as a problem due to its short play lists and the difficulty in getting playtime for new artists. Has anyone else noticed not that ClearChannel owns about everything, only about 20-30 bands ever get airplay??
I suppose EMI is stepping in the right direction, but IMHO its too little, too late. The future of music will probably have something to do with corporate sponserships, where hit songs are considered a form of advertising and bands are reduced to touring ad billboards where huge multinationals will "own" popular acts.
Re:same old BS... (Score:4, Informative)
Anyway, I agree with your three points--- especially #2. At the store I work at, DVDs and games are going through the roof. Some in the music biz argues that that's because they can't be pirated, but I think it's simpler than that: customers like video games better than a CD and would rather spend 50 bucks on a game than buy 3 CDs.
Parent
The already can! (Score:4, Insightful)
We already can-- it's called an analouge loop-back. Unless analouge sound cards are suddenly outlawed I don't see you ever won't be able to make copies of music on your computer.
Only for show, perhaps? (Score:3, Insightful)
Time to get my rant on! (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article: "...giving them access to most songs on today's top-selling charts.". "them" being the consumers.
I could not care less about the top-selling quote artists unquote. I want EMI's back catalog. Unlike the material world the Internet does not entail the costs of reprinting, repackaging and redistributing out of print material.
I will not get exited and more importantly I will not open my wallet until I see that the record labels are making an effort. There are ways to make music better through Internet distribution. As long as I sense that the music labels take care of numero uno first, so will I!
How can music be better? I'm glad you asked.
Small artists can get published for free through major labels and the second they catch on they can start selling. It sure beats touring like Black Flag did. The overhead of publishing a number of small new bands with a couple of songs each on an EMI server farm will be negligible.
If the user has bandwidth to spare uber-high fidelity downloads should be an option. We are not limited to CD quality on the net. High paying consumers can have custom stereo/mono/bitrate/hz files generated from the masters real time. These custom packages can be downloaded or burnt onto DVD and mailed. Will this allow you to get a perfect master and facilitate piracy? No more than high fidelity vinyl. 99.9% of the people that spend big bucks buying a custom remastered 60GB version of Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" will not be disposed to spread it around until the technology allows them to.
To reiterate, I want back catalogs and so do most serious music lovers. I cannot imagine people buying rare Hendrix, King Crimson and Brittney Spears in one group.
Maybe "chart toppers" should be printed on disposable CDs? The music will be irrelevant in weeks anyway so why print them on the same material that you print real music?
Visited EmiGroup's site (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.ondemanddistribution.com/eng/
It lists details of their DRM scheme and from elsewhere in the site i can see its MS DRM.
I hope EMI have a special deal with them to use an open format (Gee i wonder what the chances are
i thaught EMI had finally got the message...
Another format (Score:4, Insightful)
Relevant Plug (Score:4, Informative)
If you haven't checked out emusic, give it a look:
www.emusic.com [emusic.com]
If nothing else, you can get 50 free MP3s*... but I've found a subscription to be very good value (I must have at least 4Gb of MP3s from the site)...
[* they will ask for your credit card number; as far as I can tell they're secure and respectful of privacy]
Another Microsoft? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is just a PR move, and old news already (Score:3, Informative)
The company that has been implementing the actual sites is (as someone already pointed out) OD2, or On Demand Distribution, founded by Peter Gabriel. OD2 has released music download services on about 20 European websites, including Tiscali's and MSN's. All of these services feature music from all of the major labels, and all of these services allow burning of songs & transfers to portable devices. (For a price of course.)
OD2 also organized a promotion effort for these services called Digital Download Day; check it out [digitaldownloadday.com] if you want to see the complete list of sites the service is available on.
Incidentally, OD2 uses WMA audio. If you check out the press release [emimusic.com], you'll also see that it doesn't mention MP3. I sincerely doubt that EMI would go for an unprotected format, although some news organizations have interpreted it as such.
So you see, it's not just EMI that's doing all this. The only real news in the article is the amount of tracks available (200.000). The whole of the OD2 service includes ca. 150.000 tracks so far, so it could be that EMI has cleared a bunch of new songs for release.
Re:What I want... (Score:3, Informative)