Burn A Song For 99 Cents 433
tusixoh writes "CNN is running an article about an online music company, Listen.com, who has signed deals with Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group allowing users to burn songs from both companies' catalogs (more than 75,000 available tracks) on Listen's Rhapsody music subscription service for 99 cents per track. Until now, Rhapsody had primarily offered only streamed music to subscribers from all of the world's largest record labels as well as several independent labels." The upside of this, of course, is that it won't be necessary to pay for songs that are just "album filler".
Not viable yet. (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing will succeed when there is a free alternative. Sure, it may not require as much work, but the artist selection is more limited, and the CD's are about the same price as normal ones (you just like more tracks on the CD).
Without getting into the legality of P2P-music-downloading, it is simply too widespread and commonplace for something like this to work right now.
Most non-techie people I know really never even question the legality of downloading music, they just know how to do it and burn it to CD's. They never consider the moral or ethical reasons not to. With a market like that, it will be an uphill battle to make users want to pay for something they get for free right now.
suspicion (Score:5, Interesting)
Wait and see..
Re:Neat. (Score:1, Interesting)
hold on (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:suspicion (Score:5, Interesting)
I would find out if I subscribed... but I won't before learning all the details what I have signed away for.
Re:Oh my god..tears in my eyes. (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, a couple of years ago when this started to heat up, I would have been the first customer in line to use this service in order to prove that I'm willing to be legit about music. When they started doing things like proposing the SSSCA and accusing Apple of promoting piracy, they made me mad. So now my attitude is 'screw them'.
Am I being rational? Not really. Consider this my way of saying "I want the RIAA to apologize to Apple for their accusations, and to all of us legit consumers who were never given a chance to show their good will." I doubt that'll happen. Hopefully I'll grow up one day. heh.
Two questions... (Score:5, Interesting)
Secondly, how much of this money goes to the artist? On the assumption that $1.00 of each regular CD goes to the artist, I would expect to see about $0.10 from each track be paid directly to the artist. Yes, that's while I'm paying approximately $0.20 per track. I don't want to pay per track if the artist simply will not see any revenue whatsoever from this. At least if I buy a CD, there's a chance the artist will see some profit from me.
Not much of a bargain (Score:1, Interesting)
CD value is nothing compared to DVD (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, on Amazon.com you can buy Mariah Carey's Glitter cd [amazon.com] for 13.28
Even if you're a die hard Mariah fan, there are really only one or two tracks that made it onto the charts. Not to mention that two of the songs on the CD are the same, where one is just a remix.
Compare this to the The Lord of the Rings [amazon.com] for 17.97.
Hrm.. a cd that probably was thrown together in a month [free nervous break down included] compared to a movie, like LOTR, which I won't even begin to comment on how magnificiently it was created.
Add in the fact that it would take about 10 minutes to download and create your own glitter cd for free. Unless you're buying this as a gift, most people would just download the one or two popular songs and be done with it. Currently, it's a huge pain in the ass to download avi files. It's easier just to buy the dvd.
Anyways, the worst part about this post is now Amazon is reminding me on the left hand side that I looked at the Glitter cd. If it starts recommending
no love for Opera users :( (Score:4, Interesting)
FAQ says only 10 tracks per month for burning (Score:1, Interesting)
More for less (Score:2, Interesting)
What do I mean?
It's simple. $0.99 for each song. That's in American dollars so for me that comes to around $2.00 each. Add it up and I'm paying the same as I would if I purchased a new release at the local retailer. This is based on the fact that if I look through my CD collection, they average around $25 - $30 each (new release), with an average of 10-15 songs.
If it's an old release, I'm paying more.
At the same time, the pressing and distribution costs for the distributor have substantially decreased. So it adds up to more profits for their bottom line.
Will that in turn mean more money for the artist? Somehow, I doubt it.
Not having to pay for the album fillers is about the ONLY benefit here I can see. Thing is, for most of the music that I buy, I really don't find to many of them.
Am I being pessimistic?
this is bad. (Score:4, Interesting)
not to mention the only reason i use p2p is to find non-mainstream non-commercial stuff. if i wanted to listen to some friggin skinny blonde chick sing about her teenage crush i would go buy her CD ! i want indie artists and sampling.
if you dont own the CD how are you supposed to know what you want to download ? pay $.99 per track off the album plus for your bandwidth and the blank CD ? so
15 songs 15 x
1 blank cd 1 x 1.00 (guessing)
bandwidth
= $ 16.15 per CD.
wow that sounds like its STILL A FRIGGIN RIPOFF !
ill give them credit when they come up with a better soulution for ME ! the CUSTOMER. NOT THEM the EVIL MEGA-CORP.
although i will give them credit for trying. albiet a shitty attempt.
Re:Oh my god..tears in my eyes. (Score:5, Interesting)
A step in the right direction (Score:1, Interesting)
Also, tracks for burning should be available a la carte. I should not have to pay $10 a month for the RIGHT to buy tracks at 99 cents each.
The CD burning implementation needs to be flexible and work well. Ideally, they should write a plugin for Nero, Easy CD Creator and whatever you Linux guys use to burn CDs. You would download the track in some protected format and then burn it from your local machine. You cannot stream a track over the Internet while burning it. It just won't work.
Re:What for (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Existing p2p networks are slow and unreliable. I hate getting half way through a download only for the guy at the other end to disconnect from the network
2. The quality of rips varies *wildly*
Re:Oh my god..tears in my eyes. (Score:5, Interesting)
To me, it looks like these two giants are making a small investment now so that if and when Palladium and trusted security prevents the average non-techie home Windows user from burning his or her own CDs, Warner and Universal will have ready a business model and the associated infrastructure capable of filling the ensuing vacuum. Then it's just sit back and reap the rewards.
Re:Not viable yet. (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with you that the listen.com offering isn't going to compete with the free stuff. But it's a step in the right direction.
The free alternatives come with their own problems, and a suitably designed pay-per-song download would succeed and would make the record companies a lot of money if most music fans think like I do.
The problems I have with the free protocols: they don't have everything all the time. Some nights I can find what I'm looking for, many nights I can't. The quality is spotty. Some songs are of good quality, both in terms of the rip and the encoding (bitrate and the like), but most are not. Many songs have glitches in the ripping or are encoded at lower bitrates than I like (I prefer 192, 160 minimum). And downloading is slow; it might take hours to download just one song because I'm competing with all the other "customers" downloading from the provider's PC.
Those complaints reflect my use of Limewire (GNUtella), but as I remember, Napster was pretty much the same.
Give me a download site that has all the record catalogs: everything ever recorded, or at least a large fraction of the popular stuff, with the promise of the "minor" stuff to be added on an ongoing basis. Give me good-quality songs at my choice of bitrates (and encoding: mp3, ogg, or whatever). Give me servers that can keep my poor little ol' 128K ISDN connection running at full speed. Give me the freedom to do anything I want to, for personal use, of my downloads: burn them to CD for my home jukebox, or copy them to my iPod for the office.
Give me all that at a reasonable price and I'll gladly give up p2p downloading. I want to get my songs legally. I want lots of choices, speedy downloads, quality encoding, and most of all the freedom to use my downloads fairly. I want to be able to find that old Sanford Townsend Band" album, pay five to ten bucks for it, and download the whole thing as fast as my connection can bear.
Maybe my hopes are naive, especially for a complete catalog. But how many of you, like me, would give up your "pirate" p2p downloads if you could get all I've listed above?
--Jim, Not A Pirate
Curious (Score:3, Interesting)
math (Score:2, Interesting)
I did some figuring out of curiosity ....
From a price point of view that's about $120/yr so you can burn songs for 99 cents a piece.
The average list price for a CD is US$18.98 including the tracks you want and don't want. Let's say about 10 songs per CD, then I'm paying $1.90 per song off the shelf. From the subscription service, if I purchase 10 songs per month then I will be paying $19.85 for that month (close to the same cost of a retail CD).
Consider that Amazon often discounts CDs. On average an Amazon CD will cost about $14.99 ($1.50 per song based on 10 songs). In this case you only have to burn 5 songs per month to make up the equivalent off-the-shelf Amazon price. Not bad.
Of course the more you burn per month (beyond these numbers) the more money you save compared to shelf prices.
And you can't beat the listenting pleasure of hand-picked music. That's worth a whole lot more.
Re:Four times cheaper for back catalog access (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh my god..tears in my eyes. (Score:4, Interesting)
The devil's in the details (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm happily pay for music (or movies or tv shows or books) I might download, but the details have to be acceptable.
These aren't difficult requirements to meet it seems to me, except by panicy and sluggish business entities that can't read the writing on the wall.
Songwriter gets a royalty (Score:3, Interesting)
One "set charge per track" will break in a lot of ways.
Yeah, but it's the law. In the USA, a songwriter gets a fixed 8 cent cut per song five minutes or less in duration. (The royalty increases with the duration of the composition.) The songwriter typically splits the royalties 50/50 with a publisher, meaning that on a typical album with twelve songs, the songwriter gets just under half a buck a disc.
Re:Neat. (Score:3, Interesting)
Or... (Score:1, Interesting)
Until then, I'll just continue to D/L and burn that one catchy song that from an album that cost RIAA members a fortune to engineer and produce, and they'll make no money from me.
I think it's going to be the latter for a good long time, though I look forward to the day it's the former.
Re:So close... yet so far... (Score:3, Interesting)
Additionally, let me browse the catalog before I sign up, so I know whether there's even anything in it that I want, and offer low-bitrate (64k mono is fine) free samples, so I can check out stuff I've never heard of.
Forget burning... iPod/mp3 player support! (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't they realize that the people who will sign up for this service are the cutting edge music-listeners, the ones that will probably own an mp3 player and not a discman for their portable music needs?
Here, at last... (Score:2, Interesting)
Some people have commented that $0.99 per song is too much to pay, but I think that's preopsterous! Compare $0.99 per enjoyable song to $10.00 per enjoyable song (assuming that you like two songs on the disc you purchase).
Although I'm sorry to say it, however, I don't think I would pay even for this, good idea though it is. The reason for that is simply that I have very fickle taste in music... my $10 or $20 investment might, in as little time as a month, seem completely foolish to me.
What strikes me as most interesting is that the record labels were willing to work with this site on this issue. They must be getting rather desperate for any money they can get. Food for thought, eh?
it happens (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay, that song you've been toying with a bit gets recorded. Its ok, not ideal. But if you spend another week in the studio, you're paying even MORE for the time and your contract says this will be ready to be mastered by next week.
You're not proud of it, but it's good enough to slide in between tracks 6 and 8.
It happens. Really.
Bad is when you have 4 - 6 songs like that.
The grateful dead cut side two of an album up into several tracks to meet warner brothers contracts requiring "n tracks" per album.
Music and law meld as well as music and big business.
It's a step - inadequate, but a start (Score:2, Interesting)
Why?
Cause there was something like 1 CD burning plant in the hemisphere. Costs were high. Understood.
Since then (1984?) costs have plunged. The entire cost of the CD, case, liner notes, etc. is around $0.80. Art work might be a little more, but CD's are too small to really have good art.
So record companies rake it in. Artists don't get any more money with the overhead being down, they just bend over and hope the record companies have KY.
Now the companies want to remove the case, the artwork, and everything but the raw bits from the equation. Yeah, someone pays for bandwidth. 1 cost after the master is burned.
And the prices are higher per song that most CDs.
F*ck that. Give me a decent indie band and I'll Paypal them a quarter per song and the artists will make far more money per song than they would in the "big leagues".
I'd also do the micropayment model that's been around:
Everytime I listen to a song, the artist gets 1/4 cent from me.
When my account is dry, I can't listen to the song anymore.
Hows that?
Re:Beat-matching in kiosks; DVD format-shifting (Score:2, Interesting)
My "Blue Man Group" DVD would say so.
>And, for movie soundtracks, can you remove the dialogue when the actors speak over the soundtrack?
Yeah! Alternate audio is a huge feature of the DVD format. There's no reason you can't have a soundtrack track, and a soundtrack+speaking track, etc, etc. Unfortunately I don't DVD supports mixing the tracks, though.
Multiple angles would be the best way of dealing with the no-music-video problem... Daft Punk did an OK job of using multiple angles, but unfortunately not as I'd like.
I've yet to see a DVD fully take advantage of the features available with DVD, though.
>If catering to the "three second gap between songs" crowd is enough to turn a decent profit, why add more features?
Good point, but as someone who DJs for fun on College radio, I'm really starting to hate all these continuous mix CDs that are coming out. One or two are good for when you need a break, but not everything.
That is not correct (Score:2, Interesting)
No it will cost you $20, becauase you can only burn 10 tracks per month. $1 per track plus $10 per month. They also have a $5 per month service, but the previews are only 30 second clips.