EMI May Sell Entire Collection as DRM-less MP3s 188
BobbyJo writes "According to the Chicago Sun-Times, EMI has been pitching the possibility of selling its entire music collection to the public in MP3 form ... without Digital Rights Management protections. According to the article, several other major music companies have considered this same route, but none as far as EMI. The reasons, of course, have nothing to do with taking a moral stand; EMI wants to compete with Apple. 'The London-based EMI is believed to have held talks with a wide range of online retailers that compete with Apple's iTunes. Those competing retailers include RealNetworks Inc., eMusic.com, MusicNet Inc. and Viacom Inc.'s MTV Networks. People familiar with the matter cautioned that EMI could still abandon the proposed strategy before implementing it. A decision about whether to keep pursuing the idea could come as soon as today.'"
Someone has to be first (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they'll be pleasantly surprised (Score:2, Insightful)
and the price is fair, there are a lot of songs I've wanted to buy. I only liked one or two
songs from the album so I was never going to go buy the whole CD anyway.
Dear EMI, (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Compression (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Recent EMI News (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:To paraphrase Johhny Dangerously... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Recent EMI News (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Recent EMI News (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you figure? They've been making quite a profit selling CDs which are easily transferable to mp3, so why would also selling mp3s hurt that profit? If anything it'd help.
Re:Recent EMI News (Score:5, Insightful)
I would however pay £5 for a high- or very high- quality mp3 album.
Not really "competing" with Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple will greatly benefit from the destruction of the iTunes "one price, everything DRM'ed" model for music. As Jobs pointed out in his essay, only a tiny fraction of music on iPods is bought from iTunes. If iPod is to continue to grow as fast as it is now, ripping CDs will become a bottleneck. A multi-supplier, competitively priced, flexible, compatible, user-friendly download business is needed for the media-player business to reach the next level of expansion.
What will prevent piracy? The same thing that made phone phreaking obsolete: Music, like long distance phone service, will become too cheap to steal. $0.10 to get a high quality digital recording vs. swapping sketchy rips with sketchy people - the choice is easy. The other side of the coin is that $0.10 is too little money to support the customer service required when people migrate a DRM'ed music collection from one computer to another or one player to another.
Re:Recent EMI News (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Recent EMI News (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Recent EMI News (Score:5, Insightful)
Why?
DRM-less music has existed for longer than its DRM-encumbered counterpart. The web, Napster (v1), Kazaa, AllOfMP3 all made every album ever released fairly easy to get free or cheap, without any DRM.
And yet... The music industry still manages billions of dollars in sales per year.
How can that happen? It only takes one copy, right?
What the RIAA, MPAA, and apparently you need to understand, most people consider themselves basically honest. People want to "do the right thing", and they want to support their favorite artists.
People do not, however, like getting "burned" buying an album of crap with one overhyped single on it.
You basically have two kinds of music downloaders... The first group (which I consider the vast majority) downloads a few tracks to check them out, and if they enjoy the music, they'll buy the album. The music industry should court these people, not take them to court, because they count as customers (if they don't get too pissed off at the antipiracy measures put in their way). The second group will download anything and everything the can, and wouldn't dream of paying for music. You can fairly call them parasites, but their behavior (and how little they actually buy) wouldn't change in the least if the MP3 fairy came along and made it physically impossible to pirate music. So, as much as the industry may hate them, they have no effect on sales, whether given free reign to download, or whether DRM eventually proves effective in stopping them.
I would actually add to that one more pseudocategory, the "potential" customers... These people fall into the first group but currently can't afford to actually buy much music. Many college students fall into this category. Although they may superficially look like group #2 at their present station in life, in a decade they will start replacing their collection with legally obtained copies, to the great profit of the music industry.
So, does the industry need to address the "problem" of try-before-you-buy, or embrace it? Since we don't already all have a complete collection of every song ever made, despite the ready availability of them, I'd say "no". This problem exists only in the closets and under the beds of media company CEOs.
Re:Recent EMI News (Score:3, Insightful)
If, however, EMI decides to go with a constant 128k for their material, they're shooting themselves in the foot. 128k MP3 (almost never encoded using a good MP3 encoder like LAME) is what's available on Kazaa, LimeWire, and all the other popular P2P networks. If they can at least do as good (if not better) than the MP3 scene rules (EAC + LAME fast standard), and combine that with a good [online] interface with tons of music, they're golden.
For instance, if EMI decides to try and compete with quality and price, I will definitely buy the latest Iron Maiden album right off the bat even though I've already gotten it on the high seas.
Re:Recent EMI News (Score:4, Insightful)
-BA
Give Steve Jobs some credit (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope EMI follows through on this. Without DRM, now we'll have real competition. Stores will differentiate on quality of music, artists available, and price. I think in the end, FLAC will become the format of choice so player compatibility won't be an issue at all.
And I still think Apple has something up its sleeve. Now that they've settled their feud with Apple Corp., they are free to enter the music business. At some point, they will have an agreement with a major artist to sell the artists music on iTunes without one of the Big 4 labels being involved. This could signal a major shift in artists way of thinking. Who needs a label if you can distribute your music through iTunes?
This will also start a new industry of marketing agencies whose primary business will be marketing recording artists. They will become the promoters instead of the record labels. In 10 years, the labels will either be transformed into promoters or be out of business.
Re:Recent EMI News (Score:4, Insightful)
When DRM is abandoned, sales of digital music will go through the roof. It will promote greater competition across a more level playing field all throughout the music industry (i.e. Jobs is right).
Re:Recent EMI News (Score:5, Insightful)
"The translation of this concept from Russian to English, of course, is "Allofmp3""
Exactly. And since the EMI catalog would presumably include album art, it would make it that much easier for Allofmp3 to bolster their library.
The gotcha here is that customers want a "fair price," and many people have mentioned that since allofmp3 sells for less than $0.10 per track, that's a "fair price" and anything else must be henous profit-taking. The reality is that in the US, the minimum mechanical royalty payment by law is about $0.07 to the songwriter and lyricist (not to mention royalties for performers, bandwidth, credit card processing, and all the expenses that happen when people who draw salaries touch the product somewhere), so if your net cost per track is greater than $0.10, you can't break even no matter how many you sell. And as noted in the article, EMI netted eight points of profit last year, so they don't have a lot of room to play with.
People mentioned ease of use. The thing is, the people on the pro-piracy side have pretty good designers and coders, too. No matter how good Apple makes the iTunes interface, BitTorrent clients and sites like allofmp3 keep getting better, too.
What this means is that people will always find a moral reason to pirate. EMI releases their catalog in MP3 format in a variety of compression rates and with album art? Sorry, chaps, allofmp3 will give us the same thing, and they're $0.10 (lower than EMI will ever be able to sell at unless the law is changed), so EMI must be the greedy fucktards here. The iTMS is easy to use, you say? Sorry, bittorrent clients are just as easy and have just as much eye candy; thus iTMS et al. have clearly dropped the ball and we shouldn't give them our money.
I mentioned the law requiring minimum mechanical royalties. A few months back, the record companies actually were trying to change these royalties, and to say that it did not go over well with the Slashdot crowd is putting it mildly. If the law does get changed one day, then many people will certainly use the logic that if the record company isn't paying the artists, then they shouldn't have to. EMI is big and evil; allofmp3 is the our friend since they've been selling cheap, DRM-free music for a while now. Guess who will get the average Slashdotter's money?