Would You Rent a Song For a Dime?

An anonymous reader writes "What's worse than a padlocking every song so that they will only play on certain devices? How about selling (renting) you songs that work on no devices? Astonishingly, this is what the music industry thinks we need. Warner Music is spending $20 million to back Lala, a startup devising a service to convince people to 'buy' 'web songs' for 10 cents each; these are then kept for safekeeping only by Lala with no download privileges. Industry insider Michael Robertson leaks the facts on this scheme, along with a seekrit URL so you can try it out."

If you can listen, you can save

[Palmyst]

If you can listen, you can save, and it won't be long before a hack for that is posted on slashdot.

A-Hole vulnerability

[corsec67]

They are only "locked" if people don't record the analog output from the computer.

How many people really want music that can only be played from the internet? For some people this would work, sure.

Apparently they don't think many people like iPods and other portable music players.

Re:Imaginary Property

[mrbluze]

So now we're meant to pay ten cents for the right to imagine we have imaginary property?

I think they are anticipating the death of radio, which is essentially the same thing except they determine what kind of rubbish you listen to in between the ads. Here you get to pay 10c per song to choose what kind of rubbish you want to listen to whilst (probably) having to read ads anyway.

Re:If you can listen, you can save

[mrbluze]

mwahahahahahaaaaaaa!! When will they learn?

And considering for less than 10c you can copy it from a mate, that's even better value, without breaking the license agreement any more or less than you were implying.. heh heh heh!

Renting isn't so bad

[steveha]

My major objection to DRM on music I buy is simple: if there is DRM on it, I don't really own it.

If I am renting the music in the first place, DRM doesn't bother me so much. Exhibit A is the Rhapsody online music service, which is essentially a flat-rate music rental service. I have discovered that I like Rhapsody very much. I am finding new bands that I like, bands I had never heard of before, much faster than before I had Rhapsody.

Depending on what you get, Rhapsody is $12 to $15 per month. If this plan really is a dime per track, that's a cheaper rental than Rhapsody. The big question is coverage. If the new plan only lets me rent the latest pop acts, I'm just not interested. (Rhapsody has over 4 million tracks, including all sorts of cool things: Herbie Mann flute albums, Bill Cosby comedy albums, progressive rock, etc.)

When Rhapsody helps me music I really like, I then go and buy the music on CD, so that I will really own it. I'd be happy to do the same thing with this new service.

Will the service succeed? I'd say that depends very much on the specifics. How do you pay them that dime per track? If they have a convenient way to add dimes to your account, such as selling gift cards in Best Buy, it might become wildly popular; if you have to jump through a bunch of hoops (agree to a 20-page EULA, pre-register, enter a valid credit card number, pre-pay in $30 chunks, etc.) most people will just say no.

Assuming it's convenient, would I "rent" a song for ten cents? Sure. Why not?

steveha

Disclaimer: I work for the company that owns Rhapsody, but it's not my job to sell it to you or anyone else.

It's called a jukebox

[ReverendLoki]

We so need to organize a protest at this one diner near where I work. They have the audacity to "rent" songs for a whole quarter a song (or 5 for $1), for just one listen! If I'm paying for it, I want the right to my song, dammit!

Look, I'm all for actually owning the digital music you buy, but I think we're jumping on this for the wrong reason. It's not so much that they are ripping us off of our rights (which they aren't), as it is a stupid business model. There are so many other, better legal alternatives out there, I don't see this one flying.

Re:What?

[IP_Troll]

I believe this "submission" a way to get people on the site so that lala can tell their investors "We had 1 million hits within one day of launch."

Slashdot fell for it and is now giving a never heard of site massive traffic which will appear positive to investors.

Potential for Problems

[DaMattster]

I think other reviewers pretty much hit the nail on the head when they say that price is not really the issue. That said, I don't really like the idea of having to use a client to access the music off of a site. For one, you're dependant on the reliability of the media server. For another, you are banking on the fact that the client won't create a root kit for an intruder to gain access to your machine. Obviously, making a tcp or udp connection to the media server pokes all kinds of holes in a firewall. So, I Warner can keep its 10 cent music. It would cost me way more than 10 cents to fix a computer that has been rooted and assimilated into a bot net.

Re:Imaginary Property

[TheSHAD0W]

I suppose you've never heard the term "fiat currency"?

Only a dime?

[AnotherBlackHat]

Hard to find a jukebox these days that charges less than 25 cents a play.

Yeah, I know it's not the same, I'm just saying that the idea of charging per play is hardly a new, untested, unworkable one.

Re:Mod point fairy

[mrbluze]

Is rule number two that the mod point fairy only gives you mod points when you completely disagree with what someone has said but can't express your thoughts into a coherent or humorous paragraph?

Yep. That would be it. And rule #3 is that I will get modded redundant/offtopic or something because I'm agreeing with you and we're not talking about music anymore.

Re:(cue piano music)

[exley]

Hey, give the kid the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she's unaware of the premise of American Idol, and furthermore she clearly doesn't know the song was written by someone else. This wouls show that she's ignorant of both TV and pop music, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Like, totally!

Re:What?

[tripmine]

So what? This site is a stupid idea. If they go ahead with it just because of the slashdot effect, boy will they be in for a surprise.

this might works for many people

[fermion]

If this is a web interface, and a user can log in from any computer, then there is no problem.

Honestly, any music one buys online is going to have a limited lifetime. The best one can hope for is that you can make a copy to CD and not lose much in the transcoding. But how many people burn to CD? For most people the just put on their computer or another device.

While I think this service is maybe inferior to something like Amazon, it is superior in many ways to ITMS. If I can pay a dime to put something in a jukebox, then play it from anywhere I can log on, what is the problem? I might make even more sense to use this service that labouriously moving all my music from on device to another.

That is if I hadn't already bought half of the music I will likely buy in my lifetime. I have many gigabytes of music that I have bought over my life. If I was a kid with a computer, a smart phone, and internet access at school, this would be a wonderful deal. An album for a dollar. I can play on anything I normally play on? Sign me up! You may think of the expense, but how much are kids paying for ringtones, SMS, and the like.

I know we have a kneejerk reaction around here to paying for things, and we believe that music wants to be free, but perhaps the objection here is more based on what we consider the norm, not rational thought. Perhaps music is not about listening to the same album a hundred times because we can only afford that one album, or listening to whatever is free on yahoo. Perhaps there is some value in having a collection of songs, that one chooses our of personal taste, and then having access to those songs over many devices located in disparate geographical area. As I said, i would not do this. I would just buy the CD or download the album. But I can imagine such a thing maybe finding a small market. It would suck to have all the music go away, though.

Re:Imaginary Property

[Original Replica]

So if we pay per song, aside form the obvious distraction of having to make all of our own song playlists (radio pays people for that same job) we also get to pay about $2.00 per hour for the rental of songs. Between commuting and the work day, let's call that ten hours of rental radio, $20 per day. So by the end of the second week you could have purchased a href=http://shop.sirius.com/edealinv/servlet/ExecMacro?nurl=control/StoreDirectory.vm&ctl_nbr=2640&catLevel=1&catParentID=7874&scId=7874&oldParentID=7870>satellite radio and had the same thing minus the hour a day of lost productivity while you fiddle with your playlist.

Re:*laughs*

[NoobixCube]

It seems whenever I get mod points, Slashdot gets a whole week of nothing but interesting stories that I want to comment on (as opposed to the interesting stories I don't want to comment on...). I have nine points right now, and there are so many comments I want to mod up, but I commented early in the thread.

mod parent up

[globaljustin]

i don't have any mod points this week otherwise I would...well in...seems like /. has had so many posts about the music industry bending over backwards to do anything but the right thing, it's almost like there's nothing more to say.

apropo of nothing...Sometimes I hate iTunes, other times I love it. The reasons to hate it are obvious, but I always remember what digital music was like before iTunes. Haphazard at best. Labels wouldn't even consider selling songs online, and the quality of what was available through p2p's was suspect at best. Since we have MyTunes, i think the net effect of iTunes has been positive. I still use my dbpoweramp to rip cd's though ;)

Re:Sshhh don't tell anybody about this

[blhack]

Hardly a Last.fm ripoff. Imeem has quite a bit MORE music, as well as a much more intuitive interface.

btw this is my last.fm page: Blhack [last.fm]
and this is my imeem.com page: Blhack [imeem.com]

Point being that I've been around last for quite some time....its not just a pointless slashvertisement for imeem.

Re:Imaginary Property

[Chandon Seldon]

If you want to get the MP3, you pay 89 cents to download a high quality version.

Or you pay current market value, 0 cents, and download the whole album in a lossless format.

Re:(cue piano music)

[idonthack]

Next time, do them a favor and laugh in their face.

Re:If you can listen, you can save

[maglor_83]

how can they expect us to pay [anything] for such inferior quality?

Because the vast majority of people find such inferior quality completely acceptable.

Re:It's not that people won't pay for music

[jalefkowit]

It's not that people won't pay for music, most people would happily pay for high quality DRM free music, but they don't want to offer that. They'd rather come up with stupid schemes like this.

1998 called, it wants its rant back.

Want high quality DRM free music? Here you go [amazon.com]. Non-DRMed MP3 files, VBR-encoded with LAME (average bit rate 256kpbs), for $0.89 each. They even fill out the ID3 tags for you (including album art, for pete's sake) so you can just drop it into your music player of choice and go.

I agree Lala sucks, but the days when you could claim some moral legitimacy for leeching music torrents are over. There's really no justification for "getting it for free" anymore when there are completely legal, easy, and geek-friendly ways to get the music that also puts some money in the artist's pocket.

Re:Imaginary Property

[interstellar_donkey]

Exactly. What a the record companies are failing to realize is that they aren't going to stop people for downloading music, so the best they can do is give someone a good reason to pay for it. In this case, it's convenience.

I never used iTunes, because I found the interface clunky and the DRM crap wasn't worth it. I have started, however, to buy mp3s off Amazon. They've got a pretty deep colection, with a lot of neat obscure stuff that can be had for less than a dollar.

The best part? It's DRM free. So when I buy the mp3, it's mine. I can do with it what I want (burn to a CD for my car, put it on my mp3 player . . . whatever. And I can get this a lot faster than searching through countless p2p and torrent sites to see if they have the particular recording I want (which, many times, they don't).

Re:Zis is verry funny!

[nitehawk214]

Def.: the Slashdot Effect: Look here, a secret URL [lala.com] I just found, but shhh, don't go there and don't tell anyone!

One Question for Miss Morissette: Slashdotting a music service that is essentially nothing but a denial of service (a.k.a. sham), which effectively puts it out of service for a while, is that
 

a.) ironic, or

b.) a self-fulfilling prophesy?

c.) Free marketing.

Re:Look at the site, ignore Robertson.

[WK2]

That can't be. It's reasonable, but involves one of the Big Four record labels.

OT, but...

[Weaselmancer]

Especially when I still get phone calls from former employers about code written 10 years ago (irregardless or if I wrote it), and they expect answers for free

People try this trick all the time, trying to get something for free. Put a stop to it.

Tell them up front that you work with code for a living and you don't work for free. Then give them a hefty hourly rate. And tell them you don't work partial hours. A five minute call gets billed for the full hour.

One of two things will happen.

1) They'll pull their heads out of their asses, learn to solve their own problems and stop bugging you.

2) You'll have extra beer money.

Win-win.

Re:Do it the old school way

[Lehk228]

who gives a shit about illegal, torrents will get you busted, nobody can bust you for doing a loopback recording

but...

[JustNiz]

This is all great until LaLa goes under, or simply does a Microsoft and just leaves millions of PlaysForSure customers with a lot of paid-for but now unplayable music, just because of a change in DRM and marketing strategy. This model does nothing to guarantee you will always be able to access the music you already paid for.

Furthermore, what about all the times you want to play your music when you're not able to use an internet connection?

Call me old-fashioned but when I buy something I still expect to get something tangible I can be in control of, and use when I want. If that isn't the case then I just don't buy it. I suspect there are still enough people like me that will tip the balance on this.

Re:Look at the site, ignore Robertson.

[Phroggy]

They're willing to try anything if there's a chance it'll break Apple's monopoly.

Re:Look at the site, ignore Robertson.

[gsslay]

Sounds like a very reasonable way of promoting and selling music. You get to hear a song as much as you like for 10 cents, if you like it enough you get to take it away, DRM free, for another 79 cents.

Of course, this is just the kind of marketing that kdawson doesn't want to hear about. Much easier to continue whining about the nasty record companies not giving customers what they want, and forcing people to file share.

Re:Look at the site, ignore Robertson.

[porcupine8]

10 cents would be a perfectly acceptable price - if imeem [imeem.com] weren't already offering the same service for FREE.

Re:You need to keep reading

[porcupine8]

Is it any better than imeem [imeem.com], which offers essentially the same service for free? The one issue with imeem is that it can be hard to navigate and find what you want - it's no iTMS.