Liquid Audio To Evaporate

[Ed Hansberry]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://news.com.com/2100-1023-976359.html' target='_blank'>http://news.com.com/2100-1023-976359.html</a><br /><br /></div>I know this isn't Pocket PC related, but the ability to play music on our devices is a key reason for owning them for many people and where and how we get our music is of interest. Liquid Audio decided to close up shop and pay out their remaining cash, approximately $57 million, to existing shareholders and call it a day.<br /><br />"Liquid produces software that prevents digital song files from being distributed illegally. Although the company was lauded by the recording industry for its copy protection technology, it could not compete with free file-swapping software such as Kazaa, Morpheus and the now-defunct Napster. Liquid also was unable to offer enough songs for people to purchase due to the recording industry's slower pace of releasing digitally encoded versions of their copyrighted songs."<br /><br />Oh well. Another digital library with a small selection that required most of your music to be played on the device that downloaded it down the tubes. At some point these people are going to figure out that what draws a lot of people to the file swapping services is not the free music but the ease with which you can put the music on your PC, a CD or your portable music player. I know that a lot of the people are on the peer-to-peer networks for the free music, and that is a shame. They will find a way to keep getting the music free. Meanwhile, the rest of us will have handcuffs put on us by the music industry while we are chained to our PCs listening to their time limited tracks.<br /><br />Oh, if you liked Liquid Audio's DRM, don't fret. "In September, Liquid sold its digital encoding patents to Microsoft for $7 million." :?<br /><br />One more thing. Those of you that have Liquid Audio tracks on your PC. What do you do now? As long as you keep your existing PC and operating system, you are OK. Get a new PC or upgrade to a new OS that the Liquid Audio player is not compatible with, I guess you lose your music. This is another reason that I won't bother with <b><i>any</i></b> solution that requires a proprietary player. Certainly not that <a href="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5314">Sony garbage</a>. Not that I think Sony is going under anytime soon, but they will eventually drop support for Label Gate in favor of something else and your music will again be gone.

[urologyhealth]

What do you think of PressPlay? I haven't tried it yet.

Thank you

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

(giggle... giggle...)

So Ed... how do you really feel about digital music protection!?!?

I agree though... all these copy protection schemes and proprietary set-ups are lamer than lame...

[krisbrown]

Wandering here a bit, but what happened to MP3PRO it seems such a cool idea but haven't seen any players for it or any PRO encoded mp3 files.

If you don't know it, it's from the makers of mp3, better quality smaller files that still play on an old mp3 player.

[drosenth]

Wandering here a bit, but what happened to MP3PRO it seems such a cool idea but haven't seen any players for it or any PRO encoded mp3 files.


Actually, Musicmatch supports it. I don't use it, since my MP3 player in my car as well as a portable doesn't support it. I would really like to use it, but like you said, it just isn't out there....yet.

BTW, if you have never tried Musicmatch's Radio MX, it is awesome! I pipe it through my entire house - very cool and just over $3 per month.

[Bob Anderson]

Ed, your post really says it all with regard to DRM.

The supplier goes out of business (which the consumer really has no control over) and poof... there goes your music, your e-book, or whatever the case may be!

And then let's not even talk about what's going to happen in 5 years, when the OS takes a radical change or something, and vendors say... well you'll need to buy your DRM stuff all over again, because "the old format just doesn't meet the benefits of the newer technologies" etc.

I won't buy any music protected in this fashion for the points you bring up.. I've got 4 personal computers, and a Pocket PC, and I need to be able to freely move my resources around to meet my needs at any moment.

[ThomasC22]

So Ed... how do you really feel about digital music protection!?!?

I agree though... all these copy protection schemes and proprietary set-ups are lamer than lame...

I don't really think DRM is the problem as much as greedy companies trying to make THEIR PROPRIETARY solution the de facto standard. I think Ed hit it on the head when he said that it wasn't that Sony was going to go out of business but that they would eventually drop support.

What the entertainment industry really needs is to agree on an Open, industry wide standard and then support it. Because the longer they let non-protected formats remain the defacto industry wide standard the idea that "music should be free" will persist and it will be all that much harder to collect any money for digital music in the coming years!

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

What the entertainment industry really needs is to agree on an Open, industry wide standard and then support it. Because the longer they let non-protected formats remain the defacto industry wide standard the idea that "music should be free" will persist and it will be all that much harder to collect any money for digital music in the coming years!
While a universal standard would be better than a proprietary one, any standard that would prevent your CD from being played on a computer or prevents you from making your own digital copy for your own use is completely unacceptable in my opinion.

This is also the first I've heard of the idea that some people believe "music should be free" (unless that's a veiled reference to all the people who swap music online). The argument I normally hear (and the one I support) from those against these swapping music is that the price of a CD is too high to justify the demand for 1 or 2 good songs, not that "music should be free".

Instead of focusing on how to collect money from all of those believing "music should be free", the RIAA should IMO focus on finding better ways to make these songs available to us to purchase on an individual basis, especially the older music that is no longer available in stores. People paying $15 for a CD containing only one song that they like may have worked before (after all how can a store stock it's shelves with individual songs and albums... it's just not practical...), but in this age where digital formats make it possible to sell music in all types of packages, the legacy model of music sales is no longer accepted.

It's my hope that the music industry will at some point realize this and provide more options as opposed to trying to restrict the current options.

[Daniel]

I agree with that, a lot of people that wouldn't otherwise will look at file sharing networks are because of proprietary DRM solutions and overly restrictive licensing. Once companies get together and work out a more reasonable and equitable system then they might get people on board.

Daniel

[krisbrown]

MP3 PRO can get an average of 300 songs on a cd, even better quality than a 128kb normal mp3, soon that'll be 1500 on a DVD when everyone gets DVDR, then it'll be the new 20gb double side dvd, in less than 5 years it is conceivable for an affordable data storage device to be able to store every song ever made.

When people start swopping these and copying them, then music sales will be of little consequence.
We are seeing the beginning of the end for the people with the most to lose, the record companies.

[ThomasC22]

It's my hope that the music industry will at some point realize this and provide more options as opposed to trying to restrict the current options.

You made some good points. The problem I see is this, for the Recording Industry to put serious effort into selling digital music there needs to be some kind of DRM standard that is supported by devices that can play said music. This is a problem because they let MP3 players get out of the gate and now there is no way to sell companies on a more secured format.

I think that more than anything, the recording industry simply has to accept that some people will in fact copy music (just as they have with tapes in the past) and give it to their friends and there isn't much that can be done about it. I mean, no technology is going to be able to tell if the CD you just burned is playing in your CD player or someone elses and consumers have no tolerance for limitations on how many CDs they can make of a paticular song.

BTW, I don't think the theory that people should be able to buy individual songs is that compelling (nothing personal). It's the companies choice as to how to package their product and you may not like it, but that doesn't give you the right to steal it just the same.

My problem is simply it costs the record companies (even with production costs) somewhere around $2 per CD to produce which they then in turn sell for $15. I've never understood why no one attacks record companies for monopolistic behavior. I mean, music is not music and each record company has a monopoly on their artists so I don't see how this price gauging is really legal (but then again, apparently Microsoft is making 80+% margins on Windows and Office)

Oh and as for "Music should be free" you should pop over to Slashdot and try telling them that most people don't believe that (don't really, I tried, they won't listen). The theory being that Record Companies make all the money off of CDs and Artists only make money on concerts so why not give away the music and kill the record companies (which I think is kind of stupid).

[Jason Dunn]

Wandering here a bit, but what happened to MP3PRO it seems such a cool idea but haven't seen any players for it or any PRO encoded mp3 files.

MP3Pro is largely a dead-end format. It was created by Thomson, I believe with involvement from Fraunhofer. It's essentially MP3 with a better psycho-acoustic model just like WMA has - it throws away more data in a more effective fashion, and we get a smaller file size that sounds better than the same MP3 file at the same bitrate.

More info: http://www.thomson.net/gb/00/mp3.htm

The problem is that Thomson is very strict about licensing fees. They recently changed the licensing on MP3 to try to extract more money from developers who use MP3 decoding. MP3Pro is expensive for developers to use, and it's hard to find encoders and players for it.

better quality smaller files that still play on an old mp3 player.

Not quite - they'll play, yes, but without the proper MP3Pro codec, they won't sound nearly as good as they should. The high end frequencies are cut off...

Ultimately WMA sounds as good or better than MP3Pro, is free for developers to use, and is already supported in a huge variety of players.

MP3Pro is too little too late IMO.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

I think that more than anything, the recording industry simply has to accept that some people will in fact copy music (just as they have with tapes in the past) and give it to their friends and there isn't much that can be done about it. I mean, no technology is going to be able to tell if the CD you just burned is playing in your CD player or someone elses and consumers have no tolerance for limitations on how many CDs they can make of a paticular song.
Agreed 100%

BTW, I don't think the theory that people should be able to buy individual songs is that compelling (nothing personal). It's the companies choice as to how to package their product and you may not like it, but that doesn't give you the right to steal it just the same.
Agreed again. It's the companies prerogative package their music the way they like and the customer's prerogative to buy or not. My point was that I believe this is a strong demand for more flexible "packaging". This kind of demand wasn't practical in the past (before digital formats hit the streets); it just didn't make sense to manufacture thousands of singles from every conceivable album (high production costs with little return) and then expect stores to stock every single one of those singles (limited space). Now with the digital formats available combined with the internet, such things make so much more sense now. Think about it for a moment, currently customers are being told that in order to get what they want (1 or 2 songs), they need to pay the full price for a bundle of items they DON'T want (the remaining 8-12 songs) when the technology exists (digital formats and internet) for options that better meets the demand without any sacrifice to supply costs.

I'm quite sure that a lot of people would be willing to pay $1-$2 per single if they could pick and choose online what singles they want (without restrictions on where and when they can play that music). The problem is that the industry likes the current model and is unwilling to evolve with today's technology and the new type of demand it has helped to create.

Oh and as for "Music should be free" you should pop over to Slashdot and try telling them that most people don't believe that (don't really, I tried, they won't listen). The theory being that Record Companies make all the money off of CDs and Artists only make money on concerts so why not give away the music and kill the record companies (which I think is kind of stupid).
Agreed. Stupid. How money is distributed between label / artist / promoter / manager / etc is a whole other issue that also is pretty screwed up.

[Kati Compton]

I'm quite sure that a lot of people would be willing to pay $1-$2 per single if they could pick and choose online what singles they want (without restrictions on where and when they can play that music). The problem is that the industry likes the current model and is unwilling to evolve with today's technology and the new type of demand it has helped to create.


Sure - why would the industry want to stop making money on the bad songs? ;) Once people can pick and choose what songs they want to buy, you'll have heavy demand for some songs, and no demand for others. Whereas now if there's heavy enough demand for some songs, you're forced to at the very least buy the b-side, and usually the whole CD. So it's $15 for a one-hit wonder song, not $1-$2. To this the record company says "Yay".

I have to wonder if the number of people willing to pay a small per-track price (who would normally napster it) would make up for the songs that the companies would no longer be selling. Of course most object to their current profit margins anyway, but it's difficult to convince companies to make less money even if they are currently screwing the consumer.

With by-song purchasing, though, I think people would tend to buy only the exact songs that they've heard and liked, and may not give songs that require more listens to grow to like a chance... But I would think the per-track licensing would be a supplement to album sales, not a replacement anyway.

PS - I'm *pro* by-song purchasing, but I just see so many reasons why companies are not inclined to make it happen...

[pro_worm]

I just learned something very interesting in my microeconomics class - it's called public goods. Public goods are things everybody wants, but nobody wants to pay for. Like street lamps. Or the military.
Public goods are characterized by two things: they are non-rival, meaning lots of people can use the good without preventing others form doing so, and they are non-exlusionary - there is no way to prevent people from using the product without paying for it.

Sounds familiar?

The prime example of a public good is broadcast television - they of course solve their problems by having commercials... that will not work for digital music.

[Take1]

Good riddance. Hopefully this will discourage future investment in rip-off music 'hostage' ventures.

There will ALWAYS be a way to get around DRM. Perhaps the copies will not have 100% quality as the source material, but 95% is more than enought for 99% of the people who desire the benefits of a DRM free experience.

[Daniel]

Funny, it just dawned on me how people can justify stealing music using file sharing, my theory goes like this:
"I want 2 songs off album X but record label Y makes me pay $15 (or whatever) for it. There are 15 (easier math :D) songs on the album therefore record label Y is actually forcing me to pay $13 for something I don't want. I will steal $2 worth of songs rather than have record label Y steal $13 from me"
Does that sound about right? I actually buy all my albums, I got religion about it for some reason. :)

Something else occurred to me as well (it's late, I normally babble at this time in the morning, please note the sig.), Mozart is dead and has been for a fair while right (rhetorical question), so why would we ever pay the same for a mozart album when the artist doesn't get any cash? I guess that no-one gets the extra in this case except the record label? Does anyone know the story here?

Daniel

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

I have to wonder if the number of people willing to pay a small per-track price (who would normally napster it) would make up for the songs that the companies would no longer be selling. Of course most object to their current profit margins anyway, but it's difficult to convince companies to make less money even if they are currently screwing the consumer.
Kati, I honestly believe that there are two reasons why sales in the music industry has declined. One is obviously the slumping economy, but I think the second is this new type of demand that isn't being met. That may sound a little absurd, but technology has made it possible for us to pick and choose making it less acceptable for the typical consumer to buy an entire album of a "one-hit" wonders. Also realize that there are many folks (especially in this economy), who can't afford to just go out and buy all the albums of all the songs they like. They may purchase a few albums from which they know contain at least 3 or 4 good songs but shy away from all the others. An "on-demand" type of store would probably generate more revenue from these consumers. Would this make up for the $$ the industry used to make when the economy was good? Probably not, but I think those days are over and the current business model is no longer the best one for them (or the consumer). If they come to realize / accept this, then maybe they'll finally entertain a new business model.

In the end, this is how corporate greed works though... those who have long benefited from it will worry to no-end on how to *prevent* themselves from losing profits instead of innovating new approaches that benefit both them AND the consumer.

With by-song purchasing, though, I think people would tend to buy only the exact songs that they've heard and liked, and may not give songs that require more listens to grow to like a chance... But I would think the per-track licensing would be a supplement to album sales, not a replacement anyway.
Good point. This probably would be one consequence, particularly for one-hit wonders or for artists that a consumer doesn't normally listen to (e.g. - I may like a particular love ballad from a heavy metal band but may not think enough of the band or its music to buy the entire album).... but what if companies decided that for non-hit music, they were to lower the price or package a bundle deal? For example, buy the remaining music from this one-hit wonder for $6. Not all songs have to sell at the same price.

For proven artists, such as Madonna / Aerosmith / etc., I think this will be less of a concern. There still are artists out there whom will immediately generate album sales with the simple annoucement that their album has been released. For those artists, if given the choice of picking a song at $2 each or getting the whole lot for $12-15, I think many would opt for the latter.

Funny, it just dawned on me how people can justify stealing music using file sharing, my theory goes like this: "I want 2 songs off album X but record label Y makes me pay $15 (or whatever) for it. There are 15 (easier math ) songs on the album therefore record label Y is actually forcing me to pay $13 for something I don't want. I will steal $2 worth of songs rather than have record label Y steal $13 from me"
I never thought of it that way, but I do believe people's actions more or less reflect that. Like I said, I believe technology has helped create a new market and the line of thinking you just expressed wasn't even possible or practical 5 years ago.

Ekkie

P.S. - Just for the record, I'm not a user of any of the current music-swapping softwares available, though I did use Napster a little "back-in-the-day".

[Somewhereinsummer]

Hey, just a comment that I haven't heard before (but probably has been made manny times): I know everyone is talking about sales of CD's declining for the last couple of yeats. However, most people have also heard of the fact that record companies regularly buy-back HUGE numbers of their own CDs to get certain artists into the charts (normally as part of the marketing budget).

Now, could it be that at least some of the % of CD sale drop is due to record labels cutting back on CD re-purchases (partly due to wanting to rein-in costs in a recession and partly because this gives the RIAA the perfect message to broadcast in the campaign for DRM). I think if this was the case the actual drop in sales due to consumers not buying could easily be explained by the economic recession and cut backs in income.

Any thoughts?

[Janak Parekh]

You made some good points. The problem I see is this, for the Recording Industry to put serious effort into selling digital music there needs to be some kind of DRM standard that is supported by devices that can play said music. This is a problem because they let MP3 players get out of the gate and now there is no way to sell companies on a more secured format.
Maybe, maybe not. The other wild-card here is that consumers hate restrictions. Do you remember the utter copy protection failures of the late 80's, especially with Lotus 1-2-3? :)

BTW - if you're really interested in a better non-WMA codec, don't use MP3Pro, consider Ogg Vorbis (http://www.vorbis.com) instead. Completely open, royalty-free platform, extremely good quality at low bitrates, and unlike WMA, you can use non-Windows platforms. I have an Ogg player in my iPaq, and it feels great not to be subsidizing the crooks that Fraunhofer-Thomson are.

--bdj

[Jonathon Watkins]

Well, I use MusicMatch on the PC and was considering ripping all my future albums with MP3 Pro, as MM supports it out of the box. I don't want to rip albums using a MS controlled format that can have DRM applied to it later. I trust MS so far - but not this far. I would prefer to stay with an open format - even if it costs a bit more.

[Jason Dunn]

Well, I use MusicMatch on the PC and was considering ripping all my future albums with MP3 Pro, as MM supports it out of the box. I don't want to rip albums using a MS controlled format that can have DRM applied to it later. I trust MS so far - but not this far. I would prefer to stay with an open format - even if it costs a bit more.

Each format is controlled by one company - WMA by Microsoft, MP3Pro by Thomson. So the question is, which company is likely to screw you in the end? :lol:

You can rip into WMA format without the DRM active, and use a third party player like Winamp or many others.

But if you really want to avoid WMA, Ogg-Vorbis is what I'd recommend - totally royalty-free, open, and likely to be around for a while. Needs more traction though before I'll really trust it though...I still rip to fat ol' VBR MP3 files. :lol:

[Janak Parekh]

But if you really want to avoid WMA, Ogg-Vorbis is what I'd recommend - totally royalty-free, open, and likely to be around for a while. Needs more traction though before I'll really trust it though...I still rip to fat ol' VBR MP3 files. :lol:
Yes, that's true. Vorbis's quality is superb, but support is still weak, especially on handhelds. There's two players on PPC's, and one on Palm, but none on iPod-like devices. :(

I certainly wouldn't go with MP3Pro. I don't see its adoption rate increasing anytime soon, especially in handheld devices.

WMA is not bad at all - cross-platform, or the lack thereof, is my problem with it.

--bdj

[Rob Alexander]

I just learned something very interesting in my microeconomics class - it's called public goods. Public goods are things everybody wants, but nobody wants to pay for. Like street lamps. Or the military.
Public goods are characterized by two things: they are non-rival, meaning lots of people can use the good without preventing others form doing so, and they are non-exlusionary - there is no way to prevent people from using the product without paying for it.

Sounds familiar?

The prime example of a public good is broadcast television - they of course solve their problems by having commercials... that will not work for digital music.

Right, that won't work for music and the other traditional means of supplying public goods is through your government which taxes you and then buys them on your behalf. That's not much of a solution here either.

The thing with intellectual property is that it didn't used to meet either characteristic of a public good. Production of the distribution medium was expensive (i.e. the actual book or record or VHS tape), so while the intellectual property itself was non-rival, the medium you consumed was rival. You used it, it wore out, you bought another, only one person could use it at a time, etc. And because the medium was physical, it was also easily excludable. You went into the store and bought the thing... if you didn't, you couldn't consume it.

But digital technology has changed all that. More and more, the intellectual property is in a transferrable digital form, with no generational degredation, and with without DRM, there is no way to exclude a non-payer from using the property. This, of course, is what everyone in these industries is so scared of. They don't miss the point that you made at the very beginning of your post... that public goods are always undersupplied in a market.

We're all focused on the consumer not getting screwed (something that I'm concerned about too :!: ), but it's also true that any solution must allow intellectual property owners to benefit from their property. Otherwise, the industry will decline and there won't be anything new to steal in a few years.

[Rob Alexander]

Something else occurred to me as well (it's late, I normally babble at this time in the morning, please note the sig.), Mozart is dead and has been for a fair while right (rhetorical question), so why would we ever pay the same for a mozart album when the artist doesn't get any cash? I guess that no-one gets the extra in this case except the record label? Does anyone know the story here?

Mozart is the composer, not the performer. There is still an entire orchestra of musicians who must earn a living if we are to have new recordings of classical music. But having the piece in the public domain does have an effect. That (not paying the composer) is why you can pick up some very nice classical CDs for very little money if you are willing to listen to an East European orchestra instead of the London Symphony Orchestra. (Some of those are excellent performances, BTW, though I guess what you pay for with the big names like LSO is some certainty that the performance be good. With the obscure groups, sometimes they're excellent and sometimes they're pretty mediocre.)

[Kati Compton]

But if you really want to avoid WMA, Ogg-Vorbis is what I'd recommend - totally royalty-free, open, and likely to be around for a while. Needs more traction though before I'll really trust it though...I still rip to fat ol' VBR MP3 files. :lol:
Yes, that's true. Vorbis's quality is superb, but support is still weak, especially on handhelds. There's two players on PPC's, and one on Palm, but none on iPod-like devices. :(

What plays it on PPC's besides Pocket DivX?

[Janak Parekh]

What plays it on PPC's besides Pocket DivX?
iPlay (available at www.40th.com). Note, the guy who makes and sells the product is a bit of a Soup Nazi (clicking on the link gives you an example - you must type in the URL, as he has set up Apache rewrite rules based on referrer tags for certain sites).

On the other hand, it's the best player I've worked with on Pocket PC, and I'm very happy with it. Don't know about its compatibility with the Dell, but you can download a trial version and play around.

--bdj