Comparing Online Music Offerings 603
hype7 writes "The Wall Street Journal has just posted a comparison of the three main legal music download services: Apple's iTunes Music Store, MusicMatch and Napster v2. The review covers the pros and cons of each of the services, and concludes with: "I'm sure all three services will evolve and get better, and others will enter the fray. But, for now, iTunes is the best choice on Windows.""
134 (Score:5, Interesting)
Now with books and personal playlists and gift certs, they have made it even better...
the best part is that the artists get their share...whether you agree its a fair share is a different matter since apple did not write the contracts between the record companies and the artists...
I will tell you this though... whatever they are getting from itunes is way more then they are getting from Kazaa downloads...
Re:What about Rhapsody, aka listen.com? (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe Offtopic -1 RTFA -1 (Score:2, Interesting)
Or is it just the encoding into an mp3 that does this? Any comparisons between the other `legal' music downloads and the end-quality of sound?
Just curious. I personally buy CDs still, except for the old blues/british invasion stuff that's out of print or never made it past vinyl.
Re:The biggest con of all of them... (Score:3, Interesting)
[legal disclaimers]
The poster of this comment does not endorse the trading/sharing of copyrighted material without the copyright holder's consent. Your milage may vary. Batteries not included. FDIC insured. EOE.]
What's so special about iTunes (Score:3, Interesting)
I downloaded the application the first day it came out, and so far liked it, but come on, there's nothing super-duper-extra-spectacular about it. Furthermore, there are some minor technical and technological problems that I've experienced.
1) Selection of radio genres is not that great. If all you wanted was to listen to some high-quality Internet radio, the genres and bitrates are okay, but MusicMatch and Live365 seem to be better.
2) Some radios are just silent. Listed in the app, some radios just don't have any music on the air.
3) All downloaded music is in AAC format. Great if you have iPod. Sucks for like 99% of the music players outthere that support MP3 and WMA. Yeah, there's always a way of burning a disk, then ripping that into MP3, but that's a hassle.
Other than that iTunes seems to be a nice app to have around for a music lover, but come on, it's just one of many. With Napster and Microsoft getting into the arena the competition will be heated.
has there been any converter program written? (Score:3, Interesting)
also i would be curious to know what security each of these 'stores' have in place, seeing how you are using their app to go over the network.. would be interesting to see if any concerns arose from shortcuts to meet promo deadlines..
Re:No open formats yet... (Score:4, Interesting)
No it's not. You only say that because it's cheaper than the massively inflated price of most retail CDs. And even that's changing - Universal's new pricing virtually destroys any cost benefit to downloading, outside of the price of gas to drive to Best Buy.
Re:No open formats yet... (Score:2, Interesting)
If you've ever licensed data (ie for work/research purposes), then you'll know that the transaction is significantly different than an outright purchase.
Re:Um... Ogg Vorbis? (Score:3, Interesting)
Although this will vary with tool, it is generally not true. Consider the similar (and more familiar) concept of image editting. If you are working with a compressed JPEG and simply open->save the image manly times (say 100) you will end up with the same result as the original image. The reason is that the threshold used to determine which information to discard does not change.
It really comes down to the basis functions used to express the data, which do not change. We can think of compression as a projection onto a smaller subspace. Repeated compression, or repeated project, will have the same result. This is very easy to verify gemoetrically for the 2-D case.
Example:
Consider the vector k=(2,1). If we wish to compress k by retaining only its x component, we would retain only the coeffient 2. Now our approximation to k is the vector a=(2,0). note that regardless of how many times we repeat this compression (projection) we end up with the same result of (2,0).
Re:No open formats yet... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Um... Ogg Vorbis? (Score:3, Interesting)
The loss in any kind of lossy compression occurs in the step function (I forget the exact term, step quantization I believe.) If you encode with one function, decode, and encode with a differenct step function, you will have two levels of loss. The compression is very complicated and has multiple steps. I know image compression uses transforms as well and I would assume audio compression woudl do something similar but I am not certain here.
You gave a compression example, consider mine:
compression scheme a: step quantifier of 7
compression scheme b: step quantifier of 15
encode 137 with method a: 137/7 = 19
decode 19 with method a: 19*7 = 133
encode 133 with method b: 133/15 = 8
decode 8 with method b = 8*15 = 120
120 != 137
That is an oversimplification on how the quality is lossed in jpeg compression. The larger the quantifier, the greater the compression/quality loss. The same idea goes for audio.
(Please forgive me if I used some incorrect terminology; it's been a while.)
Re:No open formats yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact is, once you buy music over iTunes, it *IS*, indeed YOURS. You are dismissing far too quickly the fact that you can burn it onto a CD and play it onto an unrestricted amount of devices. Many other "unlimited" services out there have DRM built-in stuff you download from them, but you can only play your music as long as you pay the monthly fee to listen to it. Apple lets you actually OWN it. And yes you can play your music on as many computers as you want, just not an infinite number of computers simultaneously. It does make perfect sense. Nobody controlls your iTMS-purchased music. It merely attempts to duplicate in a digital format hoops you would normally have to jump thru in the past to copy music you owned onto another medium, without the loss of quality. The only people this DRM model hurts are people who want to freely distribute their commercial (not freeware, not shareware) music to people who didn't pay for it.
Unrestricted digital music formats simply cannot live as "for sale music". Such formats will always either apply to free, shareware (a-la Magnatune), or pirated music. THAT is the issue. Now, don't blame Apple for being the first company to bring the world (well, the U.S. in practicallity) the first and only online store to offer a business model that mostly sastisfies all parties involved, in a very friendly, convenient interface. If music is to legally be sold in a digital format, that digital format NEEDS to have some sort of digital rights management. I challenge you to prove otherwise. If you want to blame somebody, then blame your favorite artists for going to big record labels in the first place, versus recording music on their own and making their music available for free on the internet as mp3's. Blaming Apple is non-sensical. Apple has managed to curb the record labels' hegemony and make it play nice with the consumers. Not only that, but Apple's online store ALSO allows independent, smaller record labels (such as CDBABY) to play with the big guys, and Apple has even dedicated an entire portion of their online music store to surface indie music and raise awareness to it.
Now if you stop and think about it, this is HUGE for indie music: It works this way: Big record labels promote their own music big time via the big AOL and PEPSI hooplah, and tell everyone to go buy music from the online music store. You suddenly get hoardes of average joe-blow consumers looking at the iTMS and wondering ... OoOOoo, what's that "indie music" thingamadoodle? Gee lemma check it out.
I like the principle behind Magnatune, i think it is valiant and worthy effort which definitely shows what the Internet is all about. But face it, artists that want to make it big-time (and i do mean BIG) NEED record labels. why? because it's a whole package: Record labels get your music PROMOTED. Until your music is promoted, it ain't worth shit. It's sad, it's infuriating, but it's true. Because right now people spend more time in front of the TV, listening to the radio, going to the movies, walking and driving the streets while passing hundreds of billboards, all of this courtesy of ClearChannel, than surfing the web for cool, original, worthy artists that are different from what the mass media shoves at our face.
There is a market for indie music, but the largest market still remains popular music owned by record labels. Apple will allow the first one to grow, and enable consumers to get what they want from the second one.
Re:What about Rhapsody, aka listen.com? (Score:2, Interesting)
If so, then I would consider switching from Rhapsody.
To me, it is worth $10 / month to be able to make playlists of (almost) the entire Rhapsody library and not have to pay $1 for every song. I probably listen to about 500 songs per month, 80% of which I probably won't ever listen to after 6 months.
Also the custom radio station is more appealing to me, so if I enter Wilco, Flaming Lips, Cursive, etc... I get to hear songs by them along with similar sounding bands (not just the bans I etnered). I also do not need to buy the songs by these artists or import their music files. It looks like in iTunes I can only listen to pre-defined radio station streams.
If iTunes has these capabilites, would somebody be kind enough to explain how? I would be quite grateful.
My opinion: None of these services are acceptable (Score:2, Interesting)
1. They all largely support RIAA music
2. Each has its own stupid DRM scheme, even if a weak one, that is a hastle for consumers
3. They are all platform limited and not Open Source (after all, you can't have DRM otherwise)
4. Most importantly: they still do not give all musicians a fair deal! ie.) at most 10-15% of sales for the typical signed artist, according to most reports.
The characteristics of a good online music service would be:
1.) Only non-RIAA affiliated labels or independent artists
2.) No DRM whatsoever, besides charging your account for the initial download
3.) Option to download in a lossless compressed format (such as FLAC)
4.) Contract with all artists that the music published via this service shall enter a non-restrictive Creative Commons license in at most 5-10 years (or after a sales target is reached) or else go public domain. This would re-introduce the concept of actually "supporting the arts and the public good"
5.) A free-downloads section for artists who realize it makes more sense to use recordings as a marketing tool for their live performances. Other artists services may be available in complement.
6.) All clients are open source and based on standard, open protocols.
7.) Artists directly receive at least 75% of the sales and are allowed to set their own per-track or per-album prices to remain competitive.
That would be a service I would love to use. Let us not accept anything less!
Artist's Share (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.downhillbattle.org/itunes/index.html
JGG
Re:134 (Score:3, Interesting)
IANA music industry contract L, but I would guess few if any extant artist/label contracts specify that income from on-line digital music sales channels is to be distributed to the artists.
Keep in mind, artists who get 5 cents per album when you buy their CD at Sam Goody get zero cents when you get the same album from Columbia House record club...