MSN Music to Stream Radio Classics

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://news.com.com/MSN+Music+to+air+radio+classics/2110-1026_3-5598255.html?tag=nefd.hed' target='_blank'>http://news.com.com/MSN+Music+to+air+radio+classics/2110-1026_3-5598255.html?tag=nefd.hed</a><br /><br /></div><i>"MSN Music has teamed up with MediaBay to sell radio classics on its Web site. More than 1,400 radio programs in different genres--classic dramas, mysteries, detective stories, comedies, westerns, science fiction and adventure stories--from the 1930s to the 1960s will be available in the United States. The catalog includes classics such as "The War of the Worlds," "The Adventures of Superman," "Gunsmoke," "The Shadow" and "The Jack Benny Show.""</i><br /><br />I'm not surprised to see the re-release of these old radio shows, but I <i>am</i> surprised to see that they're charging 99 cents each for them. Is it me, or does that seem a bit much? Sure they're 30 minute shows, but looking at those dates quite a few will be in public domain - is charging 99 cents, the same as a current music single, the right price point? And does content like this appeal to you?

[Felix Torres]

I'll have to look into this...
If nothing else, to see if the War of the Worlds is Orson Wells' classic.
I'll be wanting to check out some of the Superman and Green Hornet stuff, too. As I hear it, major elements of the Superman mythos (kryptonite, Jimmy Olsen, etc) originated not in the comics, but in the radio show. And I've heard stories of the very first Superman-Batman encounter being a radio episode. If those are now available for download to my Riot, I'll be having some fun this summer...
Hmm, I've never heard any Jack Benny routines... 8)

Anyway, to have these old cultural benchmarks readily available at a reasonable price is a nice development.
The pricing is, its true, high if compared to a tv show DVD set (Hogan's Heroes season 1 is 32 episodes for US23 dollars), but this is a low volume market, and can't be directly compared to other forms of entertainment; Eminem could burp and sell a million copies to his fans, but this stuff requires familiarity with the context to be fully appreciated, and that market is *not* legion, so the pricing curve has to reflect the reality of the lower volume.

To me this is a window to another era, a form of digital time machine and a surprising (though, in retrospect obvious) application of the digital download technology. A good example of the frictionless-delivery power of digital media serving a niche that can't be served any other way.

Update: the yellow rag report is off. Proper pricing is $0.99 and *up*.
War of the worlds is $3.69 and the Superman episodes(55 of them) are $1.69 each. Still acceptable but not cheap.
Also, the mapping of the content to the store interface is sloppy.
Needs serious work.

[mcsouth]

Regarding the pricing, I don't know that I think it is too far out of line. After all, someone would have had to pay to digitize that material, and even if it is in the public domain, MSN is incurring the storage and bandwidth expenses, as well as promotion costs.

I'm sure you didn't mean it the way it came out in print, but I ended up feeling like..."what is this world coming to when everyone expects to get everything for free?" I am certainly not condoning the money grab that the MIAA &amp; RIAA seem to subscribe to, but I still think it is reasonable to expect to pay something in order to obtain material like this...

[webdaemon]

Something like this may be a good library to use for a subscription service, if the libraries are complete and you can get everything that's available. I wouldn't want to have multiple subscription services to get all the content I was interested in.

I am not personally interested in listening to those old shows even if they were free, however, I'm sure something like this would be of great interest to others.