04-15-2004, 09:00 AM
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Swami
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 4,303
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Online Music � Less for More?
Ars Technica have an article up titled "Music executives want to see more expensive online music sales". In it, they point to Wired, who have reprinted a Wall Street Journal article. With me so far? :wink: "For months, digital-music services have been touting albums for $9.99 to entice more people to buy online. But Apple's iTunes Music Store has been charging $16.99 for Fly or Die, while Napster sells the 12-song collection for $13.99. Both prices are higher than the $13.49 that Amazon.com charges for the CD itself. The same pricing shifts are showing up on albums by a growing slate of artists, from Shakira to Bob Dylan." So why would I want to pay more for a series of intangible music files, rather than a CD that I can use to encode the music any way I choose? Who's great idea is this?
"The music companies are reluctant to talk openly about their wholesale-pricing strategies, but they are quick to blame the retailers for higher prices. A spokeswoman for EMI, for instance, stresses that the retailers, not record companies, ultimately set the prices consumers pay. However, the digital-music services say they base their retail prices directly on the wholesale prices the music companies charge. "Our pricing comes when the fees come in from the labels," said Cathy." So apparently it's no one's and everyone's fault that this is happening. :?
As Ars Technica say, "The music industry needs to wake up. A $4 price difference between a lossy, DRM-laden album and its (for now) relatively free, tangible counterpart is going to hurt their online efforts. If anything they should be bending over backwards to legitimize online music services and wean casual pirates off their habits, all the while building on the general enthusiasm experienced by users of services". Quite.
So do you guys tend to buy the whole album or would you pick out the singles online? I really don't think I need to ask you what you think of higher online music prices. :wink:
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04-15-2004, 09:19 AM
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Theorist
Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 275
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I would rather get my tongue stuck in a door than pay higher prices for anything to do with recording artists. I haven't bought music in years, and I don't download it either. It's all becoming so silly, that I'd rather just record jam sessions with friends and make some fun little tunes on my computer. All in all, I spend less on software and equipment than people do on cd's and music. I am fine without buying something I honestly just get tired of anyways. I do listen to the radio while I eat dinner and do dishes and stuff, though. Otherwise I don't have anything to do with recent music.
edited
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04-15-2004, 11:08 AM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Dec 2003
Posts: 95
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I use Itunes and I love it. The price of 99 cents per track is aok.
I refuse to buy any CD from a store, I just wont pay 14$ for an album with 1 or 2 songs I like.
Now if the price went up on Itunes I would definitely purchase less songs.
I have very little concern for the recording industry which has in my opinion overcharged from day one. I remember buying an album 4 years ago and paying 16$, I thought back then, wow I just got ripped off.
I was right... :roll:
With Itunes I never feel ripped off.
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04-15-2004, 11:56 AM
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Pontificator
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,079
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As I'm posting this, I'm listening to free MOD music with freeware ModPlug Player. I spent some time looking for free MOD files, sorted them to keep what I like, and this is my main source of music listening.
Unfortunately MOD is a lot less known than MP3, but it's quite different as well.
While MP3 is a compression (and decompression) algorythm of any WAV file, MOD is a crossing between MIDI and wav in which samples of the instruments used are stored in the file along with the partition to play them; the MIDI file is the partition that uses those samples found in your sound card and are limited to them, while any sample can be recorded and stored in a MOD file. MOD files are generally music only with no or little voice samples.
This way the file can be very small regardless of the song length.
Let's say you have 10 instruments sampled in your MOD file and that those instruments are simple, your MOD file can be quite small even if the song lasts 5, 6 or 10 minutes. Most MOD files are in the 10s or 100s of KB, rarely in the few Megs if there are lots of complicated samples.
:nonono:
Anyway back to price of commercial music files.
As usual companies are greedy (it's OK to want to survive and make money, it's NOT OK to want it all) and they want "the butter and the butter money" as we say in French, and they want the dairy shop too. :really mad:
In most of Europe since many years and more recently in Canada as well, the recording industry succeeded to obtain collecting a royalty tax on all recordable blank media: from the old audio tapes to video tapes to the latest flash cards, HDD, CD and DVD. Even if you use removable media to take pix or backup your HDD (on which you already paid this royalty tax in the first place) you have to pay this royalty tax on these recordable media too.
And they dare complain when people download "free" songs off Kaza, etc. while they encourage it with those taxes.
So everybody end up paying those songs multiple times over and over and over.
:2gunfire: :snipersmile: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH D@M!T !!! 0X :evil:  nfire: :splat: :soapbox: :bangin: :devilboy: :armed:
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04-15-2004, 12:07 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 383
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by jlp
As I'm posting this, I'm listening to free MOD music with freeware ModPlug Player. I spent some time looking for free MOD files, sorted them to keep what I like, and this is my main source of music listening.
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:worried:
/jizmo
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04-15-2004, 12:09 PM
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Pontificator
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,079
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by jizmo
Quote:
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Originally Posted by jlp
As I'm posting this, I'm listening to free MOD music with freeware ModPlug Player. I spent some time looking for free MOD files, sorted them to keep what I like, and this is my main source of music listening.
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8O
/jizmo |
What's so shocking jizmo?!
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04-15-2004, 12:14 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 383
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by jlp
What's so shocking jizmo?!
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I find mod listening pretty much as enjoyable as listening to general midi song on my desktop computer.
I can do it occasionally, but not for a longer period. :boohoo:
/jizmo
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04-15-2004, 12:26 PM
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Pontificator
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,079
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by jizmo
Quote:
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Originally Posted by jlp
What's so shocking jizmo?!
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I find mod listening pretty much as enjoyable as listening to general midi song on my desktop computer.
I can do it occasionally, but not for a longer period. :boohoo:
/jizmo |
It all depends on which MOD you listen to. Some, especially very old ones may sound like MIDI files, but 99% of those I have (a hundred or two) sound a WHOLE LOT better, much like MP3'ed synthesizer songs.
Anyway to each his own, as we say. You can't argue about taste or color... or music 
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04-15-2004, 01:53 PM
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Mystic
Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,887
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I buy CDs.
Not that I'm adverse to buying singles online; I think it is a good idea and a necessary component of the market.
But the thing is, I'm not into TOP-40 music as a rule so I don't have much exposure to "One-hit-wonder syndrome" as your average teenager buyer. Some of my favorites do show up on Top-40 lists from time to time but that's not why I buy them.
That said, my tastes are eclectic enough that most of the stuff I buy isn't carried by the online retailers, who are really focused on the 13-21 crowd anyway.
The thing to consider is that online music sales are now in FAD mode.
Which is why Apple is currently, and temporarily, in the lead.
Everybody wants to get into it because everybody is getting into it.
And for all the players it is a money-losing proposition.
They're just doing the old dot-com speculative market-share buy-in in the hopes of buying their way into the market that emerges *after* the FAD ends.
Look at the existing and announced players and they fall into two categories: the pure online players, like Napster, Rhapsody, and Musicmatch, and the loss-leader retailers, like Apple, Wal-Mart, AOL, and (soon) MSN.
The former are basically dot-coms, looking to build self-sustaining businesses out of selling music online. They're the ones that *need* to see higher online music prices.
Good luck, children!
Cause even selling CDs is not a profitable business in a world of Wal-Marts, Amazons, and Best Buys, for whom selling music is just a way to drive traffic (mostly *young* traffic) to their real businesses.
In the brick-n-mortar world, the loss-leader CD-retailers are just killing the pure music retailers and it is pretty much a given that the same will happen online.
Wal-mart sells online music to drive customers to their online sales portal because they realize their biggest competitor, across the board, these days is AMAZON, not K-Mart or Target.
Apple sells music online to create a completely controlled ecosystem for their hardware, much as they tried to do with the LISA and, to a lesser extent, the Mac.
AOL and MSN sell music as a way to add value to their online portal business, much the same way they provide e-mail and instant messaging; it is an added-value feature to get and retain customers.
And we will see others; COKE, PEPSI, McDonalds, candy vendors, all using downloads to promote brand-awareness among the trendy...
*Anybody* who sells products to the 13-21 crowd will see this as a way to build brand awareness by giving away singles at cost, just like people used to give away all sorts of useful products and services during the dot-com bubble. Nobody will make money off this except the guys in the backrooms setting up the online shops.
And just as we are only now starting to see the real online market emerge, *after* the collapse of the bubble, it will be a while before the real online music market emerges.
My best guess is it will emerge in three forms:
1- loss-leader top-40 singles downloads meant for casual listeners and teens. Low-quality/low-price and limited selection for anything not "hot". Disposable, transient music you'll be ashamed to admit to have listened to twenty years later. Likely price? 69 cents a song. Quality? The same as today, which is to say mediocre. It will *never* get better. And in most cases you won't even be able to get the full album at those prices. Nor will the catalogs get particularly deep. Think of it as the AM radio of online music. Not much money but one or two players (MTV?) might become destinations-of-choice for the kiddies and make a profit out of the penny-sized margins.
2- all-you-can eat-type subscriptions for the dedicated aficionados, with serious listening-habit-tracking providing meaningful reccomendations of likely new performers/songs; essentially personalized online radio, with DRM'ed downloads that you can take offline. There are already efforts in that direction but the model hasn't been fully fleshed out yet; expect to see more of it late this year and next. Think of it as XM radio done right; good quality, no ads, and nice explorability to help you find new acts/songs, at a reasonable price, say $5-10 a month.
3- broadband only-delivery of true CD-quality music at sustainable prices for serious music buyers interested in hard-to-find albums or just plain instant gratification. Price will NOT be the driver here but rather availability and quality. This will be the domain of lossless-quality codecs and vast international corporate catalogs. This is where you'll go looking for a digital copy of THREE JACKS AND A JILL. ;-) And this is where the real money will reside, cause this is what will replace the music stores and mail order CD-clubs...
Notice that Musicmatch is moving in this direction; a lot of their songs (most?) are in higher than 128kbit WMA format. I fully expect the MSN Music store to support the WMA Lossless format when it arrives. Apple may or may not follow suit (probably not) since their corporate needs are met by their existing music-as-loss-leader model. As long as they can make money off the hardware, they'll likely be happy selling lossy music at cost.
When will the dust settle?
Not soon.
The chaos hasn't really gotten started yet.
It'll be a year before all the likely players join in and three years, at a minimum, before we start to see significan differentiation and culling of the players.
In, say 5 years, we'll see the real online music market that will endure.
And it will look nothing like iTunes.
I'm thinking it will look a hell of a lot more like Columbia House with online delivery than iTunes.
Two cents worth; the check's in the mail...
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04-15-2004, 02:38 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 36
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Holy Cow! Felix summed up the whole recording industry and online music purchasing issue in one, fell swoop better than any other author seems to have covered it in mainstream media.
Jeeze - get that guy a job!
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Linear Mode
