Pay to Play
I’ve always liked the idea of file-sharing, but I could never get quite comfortable with it. You download an MP3, and the artist doesn’t get paid for his time, the record company doesn’t get paid for its equipment and marketing, and the RIAA doesn’t get paid for whatever exactly its jackboot activities amount to.
Two outta three was enough to keep me from file-sharing. Mostly.
Yeah, I Napstered a bit, before it got shut down. And I’ve downloaded some songs off of Gnutella and WinMX. But I always had an excuse. Or one of several. They went like this:
I already bought that album, but I lost it. (“Your Honor, I would never have stolen that TV from Best Buy, but I used to have the exact same one before it broke.”)
It’s out of print. And what is this eBay of which you speak?
It never was released on CD.
Just one little song. . .
Of all my petty excuses, only the third one really has any honesty to it whatsoever. Some stuff you just can’t get in a durable format. Out-of-print albums can actually be pretty hard to find for download, so I have gone to eBay for them. (Two I can remember offhand are Michael Penn’s debut album, “March,” and the Mondo New York Soundtrack. If you’ve never heard Dean and the Weenies perform the grunge-lounge ditty “Fuck You,” then you’re missing out.) And, yeah, I downloaded some ’80s one hit wonder-type stuff that I couldn’t find on any of the billions of ’80s compilation CDs at MediaPlay.
All in all, however, the vast majority of the 3,000 tunes on my computer are legit.
But, yeah, I stole a little. Less than I did taping friends’ LPs as a kid, but more than I felt right about. I’ve been willing to pay to download music ever since I first heard of MP3s. No one, however, ever managed to come up with a service worth my money. And the RIAA’s legal antics went far to soothe my troubled conscience. Besides, illegal downloads have some serious drawbacks, which I went into in this post.
However, things might just be looking up. Read:
Apple launched its online music service today, providing almost unlimited usage rights, CD quality audio and reliable downloads for just 99 cents a song.
But you’re out of luck if you live outside the US – the only territory in which the service is available. It’s Mac-only too. It will come to Windows by the end of the year, the company promised, but it could make no such pledge to international Mac users.
The service centres on a new version of iTunes, Apple’s free jukebox software, and provides over 200,000 tracks at launch. According to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, that number will continue to grow “every day”. At its launch last month, BT’s Dotmusic on Demand kicked off with 155,000 songs, so Apple probably has the lead on volume.
I don’t own an Apple (go on and gloat, Lileks), so I’ll have to wait for the service to become PC-friendly.
But a buck a tune, no subscription fee, and portability to the iPod I haven’t bought but keep promising myself I will? Sign me up.
My only concern here is the size of Apple’s library. 200,000 songs sounds (weak pun ever-so-slightly intended) like a lot, but it really isn’t. And old fart that I am when it comes to music, I don’t want to download the latest from that creepy white rapper guy or the newest nasal whining from REM. What I want is a way to find, legally buy, and play pretty much wherever, that half-remembered song from 1977 that Dad used to hate.
The beauty of Apple’s system
I file share quite a lot, and I am not the least concerned about the morality of doing so. My reasoning goes something like this: radio and MTV et al suck, they rarely play anything I enjoy listening to, since I started file sharing music I’ve been exposed to much more music which I’ve liked and, in fact, I’ve bought many more albums (especially from less popular groups) than I normally would have otherwise. More music I like for me, more money for the artists, I don’t see how it’s a problem. Especially since I would probably buy used CDs to get most of my music otherwise, and not a cent of that goes to the artists.
Yes, the Music store suffers form the exact problem that you point out. 200,000 songs and not one James Newton Howard piece!
My two favorite musical genres (Movie Scores and Trance) are relatively obscure. I’m not surprised that I couldn’t find more than 30 songs that fit either of those genres.
I’m sure things will get better as time passes. Apple knows it has a good thing and they won’t let it go sour.
Well, it gives me sometime to get a credit card hehe…
Jobs goal is to have it grow to millions of songs including tunes that are out of print. That’s what might really pull it towards success.
I like the terms, I like the price, and I’ll love it if he can get something like Audiogalaxy’s selection (pre-capitulation, that is). That, though, will rely on the record industry seeing that his model can work.
I believe the record labels are watching this really carefully, to see exactly what kind of response it gets from customers. They’ll probably make the decision to either jump in and go hog wild, or cut and run fairly soon.
Based on the traffic we’ve seen on the system today, I would assume it’ll be the former.
Also, it does take time to digitize and make available all the zillions of tracks we all want. It only makes sense to start popular, then delve into the more obscure.
That said, I did find quite a bit of stuff I like that isn’t exactly mainstream, like Angelique Kidjo and Heather Headley. Good stuff.
I wish Apple luck. THe portability of the music is very important, though. So, I’ll have to see how that works. 99 cents a song for unlimited usage is the perfect price point. Sadly, pretty much everyone but the RIAA have known this for a while.
While it’s interesting that it’s Jobs whose doing it, it’s also worrisome. The “of-course Apple is better” attitude that pervades from his ilk could doom it if they a) don’t stay on the ball and constantly improve the service and b) they try to limit portability to Apple products. I have lots of confidence in Apple’s abilty to make a splash and change the market. I have no confidence in their ability to put together a viable long term business model that is available to everyone. Unfortuntely, when it comes to business practices, Apple is Microsoft without the power and market share.
Let’s hope this takes off. The RIAA needs to realize their business model is at least 5 years out of date.
Does anyone have an IPod and know if it still supports MP3? That is, if I have a set of music already, can I still use it on the new IPod. Also, does the AAC codec lock me into using ITunes for playing on my system and ultimately lock me into Apple’s software for the forseeable future?
AAC is MP4, so other devices will support it. I can’t speak for the IPOD, but I think it supports MP3.
–Stephen
iPods support MP3 and a few other file formats. There are some interesting copy protection features built into the files downloaded from Apple’s site–features that theoretically only allow it to be played on three different computers, be burned to CD (but ripping back to MP3 will cause serious sound degredation), and protection from p2p file sharing. The p2p file sharing protection doesn’t stop the file from being shared, but instead stops it from being able to be played at the other side.
I’m not sure how they’re accomplishing all this, but I’m guessing that within a a few months people will have found a way around the protection schemes.
The real difficulty in offering up the millions of songs that Jobs envisions will probably be dealing with the royalties to long-defunct artists and their heirs. I’m just guessing, but I would think that there would be a lot of interesting negotiations involved between all the people who get a piece of the proverbial pie.
I hope this is really a home run for Apple, although I have to admit to having watched the music industry squirming a bit over the last few years.
Finally! Justification for holding onto that Apple stock.
We are long time Mac users and run our business on Macs. Probably the one area in my life I could legitimately call myself counter-culture……lol.
Apple managed to be there first with a graphice user interface but lost the edge to Gates and company, (though I seriously can’t imagine why anyone would choose windows from the horror stories I hear. Sorry….years of Mac mania surfacing.) The question is can they carry the ball on this one and for once hold on to market leader positon? I hope so.
Record industry will have to make sure that they put less filler songs out there. It will be interesting to see how much money a “one hit wonder” makes with lots of people paying $.99 a song intstead of a handful at $19.99 a cd.
Just to clarify on the iPod, it originally supported only MP3 (MPEG1 Layer 3). A recent firmware upgrade to the first generation units, and all of the new units also allows it to support MPEG4 AAC, which is the new format Apple’s Music Store uses.
A note on DRM: All of the Music Store files are m4p (MPEG 4 Protected) which are tagged with an encrypted signature that locks them to your AppleID. The signature can only be unlocked via your password and a query to the AppleID server. This allows one to “authorize” up to three computers at a time, which you can change at any time, to play files purchased with your AppleID account. As well, anything you download to an iPod from an authorized computer will play just fine.
You can also burn up to 10 normal CD’s from a given album that you buy, and unlimited CD’s of a mixed playlist breed.
Apple’s approach to DRM is what it always should have been: Something that doesn’t get in the consumer’s way, but does get in the mass-duplication pirate’s way.
Thanks for clarifying Mr. Lion. I was pretty fuzzy on some of those details–and I wholeheartedly agree with you. The record industry has been pretty hostile towards users having reasonable leeway in personal use of their purchases; this is a much better approach.
Mac music service??? Try Rhapsody, its already here, and works, and you can burn tracks to CD. I have a feeling the vaunted Mac Empire is just going to relabel Rhapsody anyway.
http://www.listen.com
In defense of Apple’s ‘mere’ 200,000 song library I would like to point out what a monumental task it was to assemble. Not only did they have to encode each track just for this purpose (I doubt there was much AAC content available before), but each song has a 30 second preview clip that had to be manually selected; i.e. it’s not just the first 30 seconds. And all of this was done more or less in secret.
I wonder what a full time music encoder makes these days?
I’m just pissed that the selection of Queens of the Stone Age was limited to a couple live songs, and that there was no Mark Lanegan or Mike Johnson.
And I thought Steve Jobs had good taste.