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Music Media

Jupiter Report tells music industry to use MP3s 30

Posted by Hemos from the can't-beat-'em-join-'em dept.
iceT writes "Jupiter Communications released a report that recommends that the Music Industry exploit MP3's rather than fight them. They also forcast that online digital sales will rise from 1.1% to 14% by 2003. Now, if the Music Industry will only listen." For those you not in the know, Jupiter is a bigwig research agency, and sponsers events like the annual Plug.In musical forum.
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Jupiter Report tells music industry to use MP3s More

Jupiter Report tells music industry to use MP3s

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  • Re:MP3 (Score:1)

    by jshare ( 6557 )
    Amen, brother.

    I've thought this for a long time, it's nice to see someone thinks the same way.

    Anytime I'm on IRC trying to get new MP3s, I always wish I could just go to a URL and pay to download them. I'd easily pay $8 or so for an MP3 version of an album.

    Basically, all that making MP3s available online (for pay) does is make it easier for pirates to get the original MP3 file (that they then share with others). But, it's not all that much easier than just ripping it yourself. So, I don't think it'd increase piracy at all.

    I know a college dorm where they ripped each others CDs and traded the MP3 files amongst themselves. This is not at all affected by having online versions available for download. Negatively, or positively.

    Usually, if the album is any good, I buy a CD anyway, so I can play it in my car. Until HD technology can handle the temperature extremes of the east coast, I won't be able to have an MP3 player in the car.
  • MP3s are a disruptive technology. The industry will adapt or die, and other companies will take over. Either way the industry as a whole will survive, just maybe not with the same companies.
    First post!

  • MP3 (Score:2)

    by drwiii ( 434 )
    Whichever stance the music industry takes on the whole MP3 issue, one thing will be for certain: Copying will be possible. Period. They will have to live with that. Honestly, I think that's what scares them the most. That it's possible to essentially rip an entire disc with little or no effort. It's also easy to rip anything that you can pull an audio stream from. Aside from the fact that all the songs they release these days suck, I'd say the music industry has some tough days ahead.

    Random Link o' Humor: BO2K Fun [altern.org]

  • This is very true. To be quite honest, I'm all against it. My current buying is mainly done because the speakers on my computer aren't good enough to play my MP3's at a quality I like, and I don't yet have an mp3 playa for my car :-( (donations are welcome, hee hee).

    Although what Jupiter is advocating - wiping out MP3's by aggressively marketing a digital standard that they _can_ control, I would rather suggest aggressively marketing _free_ MP3's (think of it!) which entice a user to buy the full album. Time and again my burned CDs scratch - they do not compare to an actual god-honest pressed one.

    Well, that's enough from here.

    Jezzball.
  • I dont think copying itself scares the biggie companies. That technology has been available for a long time, with casset tapes, and later on CD recordables. What really makes their makes them crap their pants is that I can rip the song, post it on a website, and thousands of people can download it with little effort on either party's part. Before, I had no way to reach so many people as well as no way make several thousand copies of the music easily.

    An ungood alternative you mention is streaming format. This is a disgusting pay-per-view technology that is being twisted to intentions its not designed for. It was created with the idea that you could broadcast radio stations (or cell phone conversations) over the internet without a download, not so that you can run a pay-per-view music site.

    The music industry is most definately not doomed. Mindless hordes will continue to buy whatever Disney etc. pushes in their movies on television shows. Older hordes will be unexplainedly drawn to "pop" music, and keep the money flowing. The only problem they face is that with the introduction of the internet into the horde, people no longer have to buy a 20 dollar CD to see if they even like the music. There will always be people with morals there to actually buy the stuff. The are afraid because they are losing control over their buyers. Now a band can sell directly to audiences. They are not afraid because people can copy the music. That has always been available.

    - Branden
    Yadda yadda webpage yadda yadda visit yadda yadda email yadda yadda.
  • Seeing as I have nearly 6 gig of MP3s on my work computer alone, why not just sell MP3's via the Internet? People are going to copy music, no matter what media it's on. Half of my CD collection is burned. 90% of my tapes (so I'm dated...so what.) are copied as well.
    The music industry is going to realize this one sooner or later, and learn to deal with it. The sales figures are just that. Sales. Honest people buying music. Some people are going to copy, some are going to buy. It's a fact of life. Why not make a handy audio format available for more honest people, with bands that they like and have heard of?
  • I would rather suggest aggressively marketing _free_ MP3's (think of it!) which entice a user to buy the full album

    Probably the best application for this technology, at least until such time as the quality improves to the point that it can be considered high fidelity.

    aj
  • I have to admit I am totally clueless about this kind of thing. I don't listen to music and usually stay away from Mpegs. So, I have to ask: is Mpeg and open format?

    And I think maybe Mpegs could bring down the prices of CDs. Just like software only the company spends almost no money on R&D. This is what there are afraid of.

    --

  • MP3 may not be good enough for "the audiophile who likes to turn off all the lights and just listen", but that doesn't describe the majority of music listeners *or* the majority of music listening.

    The last time I had enough free time to just sit there and do nothing but listen to music was probably at least six months ago. By contrast, I've listened to hundreds of hours of background music between then and now.

    The storage capacity of DVD and other mediums is irrelevant. MP3 did not take off because the files were small enough to fit on peoples' hard drives: it took off because the files were small enough to send over the 'net.

    I do not see "a T1 on every desktop" anytime soon, so I think that the market forces which made MP3 popular (i.e. saving a few megabytes during file transfers) are still stacked against the adoption of less-lossy formats.

    -Mars
  • What do you call CD's then? The industry has been selling digital music already for years, just
    not online.

    When you buy a CD, you are getting a bunch of files that you can copy, and the purveyors know that you can copy them.

    I suspect that the music industry has anticipated that hardware would eventually get to the point where it enables people to casually trade music files. They just didn't count on it happening so soon thanks to very effective lossy audio compression.

    There is no fundamental difference between shipping data on polycarbonate or doing it over a network. Either way, the possibility exists that someone will buy one copy and then duplicate it countless times.

    So it's not real news that the industry is getting in on the action, any more than it's newsworthy that some software company is delivering software to a client over a network.

    Everyone wants to get into online sales, and it makes particular sense for software of any kind, because of the reduced manufacturing and distribution costs. The losers in this will probably be the music retail outlets, who will become increasingly obsolete.
  • Posted by Lothario:

    I don't think the real issue is whether or not the music can be copied with ease or fidelity. That is currently possible, although more difficult than with MP3. There is a ton of money locked up with distribution of recorded music. There are only a few players in the main distribution channel (Sony, BMI, etc.) and they stand to go through massive upheaval if the barriers to entry in the industry are reduced to recording an album on your Macintosh studio in your garage and chucking it out on the Internet. I've found that powerful monopolistic companies tend to get edgy when their market barriers are erased.

  • Well, there are a few things everyone here is forgetting. Most importantly, who sifts through teh junk to find the good music. That is what labels have spent years doing, and they will likely contiue to do so. When I get an album, I wnat something produced well, with good songs, and professional recording. I don't care if everyone is going to post their album and sell it. Most of them will really, really suck.

    Second, obvious copying (big web sites with illegal mp3's) will be stopped, but even local copying, say, me and my 10 friends sharing MP3's will result in a huge decrease in album purchases. And those purchases are what fund little money losing bands. Big artists fund the little ones in the current system, and without that, lots of little bands and experimental stuff will fall by the wayside. The only things which will get marketed will be superstar acts. Nothing else will make it. The big will get bigger and the small will get screwed. So think a little about the overall economics of the situation. The labels do some bad stuff, but they are pretty useful, too.

    Maybe I'm, wrong, and big MP3 review sites will start doing a good job of reviewing all the independent labeled music out there, and selling it. If you think about it though, that is precisely what a big music label does. And they are really experienced.

    Anyway, there needs to be some set of intermediaries between teh consumer and the information: Some kind of review, some kind of rankings, something to separate the wheat from the chaff. I suspect the labels will figure out a way to make sure it is them, and thats not such a bad deal

  • Re:MP3 (Score:4)

    by BeBoxer ( 14448 ) on Monday July 19, 1999 @10:40AM (#1795412)
    I think this is pretty on the nose. It's my opinion that the industry is not going to lose a whole lot of money to copying/piracy. They can't stop people from putting stuff on the web, but they can make it hard to find. The fact is that most consumers don't want to go hang out in #mp3warez or somewhere to find the latest pop tune. They will just head over to www.sony.com or wherever to pick up their songs. All the labels need to do is hire a few network savvy lawers to send out cease and desist letters so that the pirate sites have to keep their heads down. As long as pirate sites are hard for the masses to find, the masses will just buy the music on the official site. Just like with software. Last time I checked, the software industry was doing just fine despite the fact that it's trivial to pirate software. Even with sites like www.warez.com, getting pirated software is a pain in the ass. It's pretty much nothing but broken links and overloaded servers. Why should I spend two hours trying to find a working server with whatever new game is out, when I can spend five minutes having it FedEx'd to me? It's just not worth my time. If the software company is savvy and sells downloads of the program, I can have a legit copy even faster.

    However, what is a threat to the music labels are the legitimate sites with MP3s. There is every reason to believe that www.mp3.com or some similar site will start taking market share and mind share away from Sony, BMI, and the others. While the big labels like to think that they are in the music creation business, it is more accurate to say that they are in the manufacturing and distribution business. There are lots and lots of companies and bands capable of making a studio quality recording of decent music. However, there are very few companies with the infrastructure to make millions of physical copies of that music and ship it to thousands of stores all over the world. Now that the Internet allows someone to dispose of the physical aspect of the music and just ship the bits around, the big labels are going to lose the edge that keeps them on top. I would hope that this is what keeps them awake at night, and that the piracy story is just a cover. However, you never know. Upper management may actually be so clueless as to think that they are in the "music" business and not the "manufacturing" business.
  • Story here [wired.com]
    Virgin Entertainment Group launched a new kiosk service Thursday that will allow in-store customers to burn Internet music onto CDs for purchase.

    They seem to have found a way of cashing in the MP3 craze. Provide high-bandwith Net access, let user download on his own, charge for the CD-R.
    - - -

  • ...but even local copying, say, me and my 10 friends sharing MP3's will result in a huge decrease in album purchases.

    I know tons of people who already do this with CDs. MP3 is irrelevant, other than that you don't have to have a CDR drive. But, they are pretty cheap already, and I don't think that it'll take that much longer before they are prevalent. (I couldn't believe that a (shitty) scanner starts at $49 now.)

    Jordan
  • While I am all for the expansion of digitally distributed music and the increased selection that it brings consumers, I'm not satisfied with the quality that 128kb encoded mp3's provide. There is a noticable difference in quality between the CD and the mp3. Unfortunately, it seems that 128kb compression has established itself as the defacto compression scheme. While it is an excellent compression method, it is not adequate for distributing music. I have found that 256kb compression is close enough in quality to the original, but the increased file size hampers distribution. If the music industry jumps onto the mp3 bandwagon (unlikely, but possible) it seems that the consumer will face the prospect of lower quality music. If I had to choose between purchasing a physical CD or purchasing a digital distribution (i.e. They Might Be Giants), I would choose the CD because the CD offers higher quality audio. The loss of quality is not worth the few dollars saved.
  • You may have seen the story [slashdot.org] posted several months ago about the band They Might Be Giants [tmbg.com] releasing an album in MP3 format only. This release, Long Tall Weekend [emusic.com], will finally be available tonight at EMusic [emusic.com] (formerly GoodNoise). Apparently, they've decided to make an event out of it, with a web chat and a live-broadcast concert. TMBG is one of my favorite bands, and I want to support them, but I also want to support the idea that people will pay a reasonable price for good digital music, even if it isn't copy protected.

  • Too sure of themselves. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The linked article seems to indicate Jupiter is way too sure of themselves. They didn't say 14%, they said 14.0%. That's awfully precise for a 4-year prediction in a nascent market, whose behavior will likely depend strongly on exactly what the RIAA and the courts etc. do about it.
  • Personally... I listen to 128kbit mp3s all the time.
    I have all of my CD's ripped and encoded. I DON'T
    have a stereo, only my computer. I don't like
    putting a cd in my cd-rom drive and running it endlessly
    for weeks on end.... besides.. it's not a 10-100 Disk
    cd-changer anyway.

    I even run my own Icecast server (don't ask.. it's private) since it's easier for me to store the stuff
    on the server and listen to it from there without bogging
    down my own harddrives with massive files.

    Here's my problem. I would love to listen to streaming AIFF files... that would be fantastic.

    Anyone know of any streaming servers or players?
    I have the bandwidth.
    Unfortunately.. that would mean either a huge multi-cd player/drive
    attached to my server or ripping them all and storing
    them on the harddrive space that I don't have.

    Fortunately.. 2 things are changing fast...
    1) Bandwidth is increasing and getting cheaper.
    2) Storage medium is getting more dense and cheaper.

    When the bandwidth and storage capabilities reach the
    point where I'll be happy... everyone will be throwing
    AIFF files back and forth... *shrug*


    Until then? I'll keep listening to my 24/7 streaming MP3s... thanx.

  • There's three ways to encode:

    1. 32 kbps (or maybe 64 kbps): Demo. Download and spread the music all you want. Free, try before you buy.
    2. 128 kbps: For pirates.
    3. 256 kbps: Commercial. When I start buying MP3s, I hope they are at max quality. Who cares if it takes twice as long to download? It's still faster than waiting for CDs to arrive via snail mail.

    Free demo copies need to be at an intentionally degraded quality (so that they are unacceptable substitutes for the Real Thing), and the ones you pay for need to be extremely high quality. Different people have different opinions about whether 128 kbps is "good enough." It's kinda close to the threshold, no matter which side you think it's on. That makes 128 kbps a bad choice for both demo and commercial purposes.

  • I have to admit I am totally clueless about this kind of thing. I don't listen to music and usually stay away from Mpegs. So, I have to ask: is Mpeg and open format?

    You don't listen to music!? Have you no soul!?!?!

    Thad

  • This report discusses something I have secretly hoped: MP3 (or any other format) won't make CDs go away. At least not anytime soon.

    Now, I'm as nerdy as the next guy (nerdier if the next guy happens to be my brother). But I like having CDs, for reasons related to why I will probably never buy an eBook as long as paperbacks still exist. The physical medium just suits me. I like liner notes. It is important to me to hear an entire work from an artist (ten or so songs carefully ordered) instead of just merely the one hit the radio picks up.

    I even like the fact that for the most part, you can't just get a single song at a time from an artist (I never buy singles). Often it is the other tracks on the CD I find myself listening to years later. Some examples from my own collection (which date me, I'm sure).

    Bought the album for: Outshined; keep it for: Slaves and Bulldozers
    Bought the album for: Under the Bridge; keep it for: Funky Monks and Mellowship Slinky in B major
    Bought the album for: Alive and Jeremy; keep it for: Porch and Garden
    Bought the album for: What I Am; keep it for: Air of December and Now
    Bought the album for: head like a hole; keep it for: that's what i get and something i can never have

    Now of course, there will be a market for online digital singles for one-hit wonders (Right Said Fred comes to mind; those guys should never have even been asked to come up with an album). And I'll use MP3 or the ubiquitious, lossy, high-quality audio compression format du-jour to make my purchased music more portable. But you can bet I won't be downloading all my music anytime soon.

    Although, if MP3 manages to make record companies charge $5 per CD instead of $15 (something more in line with what they should cost, given manufacturing and distribution costs and reasonable royalties), you won't hear me complain....

  • Agreed. I'm tired of violins playing underwater.
    It may be the encoders fault, but bumping up the rate seems to not be so bad.

    What about AC-2 Dolby 5.1 encoding? Can we find a way to keep that too?
  • You sound like you read "The Innovator's Dilemma" recently. Correct? If it's just a coincedence that you use the same terms as that book, you might enjoy reading it.
  • Find a friend or friend of a friend with a CD burner. Problem solved. Only costs $12 too, between the emusic price for an album(last I checked) and the price of a blank CD-R.

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