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Apple to Launch Music Service?
Posted by
michael
on Tue Mar 04, 2003 01:06 PM
from the pay-to-play dept.
from the pay-to-play dept.
discstickers writes "The San Jose Mercury News is running an article about an Apple music service that might be ready to launch next month. $.99 a song with the ability to burn to CD doesn't sound too bad."
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At first glance... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:At first glance... (Score:5, Interesting)
I sure hope so. I buy pretty much 1-2 CDs a year now -- not because I pirate the songs, it's because I don't want to spend $15 on 2 songs. Being able to only buy the stuff I like could also allow independent labels to get some of the action. It would be great if an artist without a label could also hook into this service, so 5 million OS X users could have a shot at your song instead of the 30 people that go to the local bar.
New slogan: Listen different. :)
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Re:At first glance... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, seriously. If you're buying an entire CD for just two songs, it's a travesty. Furthermore, if (all other things being equal) we measure how good an artist is by the average strength of their songs, than an artist producing only two good songs per CD sucks, quantitatively speaking.
Now, of course, those of us who buy mix CDs have an alternate problem - usually either the entire CD sucks, or the entire CD rocks. Thankfully, Amazon.com is there to save the day
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Re:At first glance... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:At first glance... (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure where you're shopping, but popular CDs are running $14.99 around here (DC area) - you have to go to the used CD stores or the bargain bins to get down into the $10 range - and the used stores are only $2 or so cheaper than the new ones around here.
Besides, when was the last time you bought an album for the album and not just a couple of songs? Meatloaf? Pink Floyd? There aren't that manny artists producing thematic albums, instead of "compilations of 3-5 minute songs we just wrote."
I'd pay $0.99 a track to create my own version of someone's Greatest Hits.
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Re:At first glance... (Score:5, Interesting)
If I want a full album, it should be less expensive to go to the store and buy it. But I don't mind paying a slight premium for just the one song I want to hear.
Slashdot is full of cocksucking wankers who try to insist they want free speech when they really want free napster.
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$1/song? I'll bite. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:$1/song? I'll bite. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:$1/song? I'll bite. (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree that being able to pick song by song would be nice in the short term, I do think it would have some long term consequences that may not be so good.
Imagine some future world where everyone gets their music via these services... you could easily wind up with a situation where every new song is overproduced (and possibly run by one of those 'AI' music-hit detectors mentioned here previously) to try to ensure it is a hit, since any time spent writing/recording it will be 'wasted' if not enough people pay for the song by itself. Right now you have an environment where artists can put some experimental tunes in between the sure-fire hits. Maybe these tracks hit the mark and become huge, maybe they tank, but at least they are trying something different. If everything is per-song I think we'll eventually see even less artist experimentation and artist growth than we do now, and that is scary.
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Re:$1/song? I'll bite. (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe, that there are different kinds of music consumers. On the one side we have the Top-40 audience. They only want the hits. They buy CD-singles and compilations, download single songs from file-sharing services and listen to heavy-rotation radio stations. On the other side we have the album buyers. They buy the full album, adore soulseek, and hate most of the radio stations. I am sure that there are different in-between types of music listeners, but for the sake of simplicity let's just look at these two.
If you only like hits then that is what you will keep buying. I would hope, that full albums will not be priced number of songs*$0.99. So album buyers will still listen to all songs an artist has to offer. A lot of artists will continue to make the music they want to and not only machine-selected hits.
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The article says nothing about price or burning (Score:4, Informative)
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That's not the reason! (Score:4, Interesting)
Last time I looked, CD singles cost a substantial fraction of what albums cost, and I think that's why albums are popular. If we can reduce the transaction cost, as Apple has, then we can sell individual songs.
I like buying albums, though, because there are at least a few songs in a typical album that I will enjoy that I didn't hear before buying it. For instance, I bought Vanessa Daou's 'Make you Love' CD based on a couple of tracks, and my favourite song happens to be one I didn't hear before I bought the CD. I wonder how you could work around that problem. If people only hear one song on the radio, that's the song they'll buy.
I wonder if this might be a way to eliminate the truly stultifying "we only play three songs" commercial radio experience? It maybe become necessary, for marketing purposes, to play a wider variety!
D
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Still a little pricey. (Score:5, Insightful)
99 cents a track.
~12 tracks on a disc.
~12 bucks for the music, and you have to provide the bandwith, physical media, and case. oh, and no liner notes.
Thanks, but I'll go to my local indie store, where they have the media, case, and liner notes all for 12 bucks.
Re:Still a little pricey. (Score:4, Interesting)
so for my 12 bucks (and providing my own media at $0.35, liner if i want it), i get the equivalent of your buying 5-6 discs.
hmmm. $12 vs. $60 doesn't sound so bad, does it?
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Re:Still a little pricey. (Score:4, Insightful)
And some songs you don't want...
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Re:Still a little pricey. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, I'm not going to tell you *not* to got to your local indie store, of course, but there's some stuff you left out here.
Now, they *could* mess up and not provide any of this stuff, which would be lame, but Apple is the only outfit I can imagine that might possibly get this part basically right on the first try. We'll have to see.
On a related note, the expected debut of this new service could well be what is holding up the introduction of the long-overdue updated iPod line.
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Verified details? (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple DRM... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which indicates there is something in it that stops the rest of us using it. This would further indicate either a closed format with codecs only for these two. Or DRM on top of something that exists.
Now is that bad ? Maybe not, but I was pretty sure that the Slashdot perfect model was
Download for
Re:Apple DRM... (Score:5, Informative)
From the LA Times:
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Advanced Audio Codec info (Score:5, Informative)
The LA Times article [latimes.com] says that the AAC files can be DRM locked, but that Apple has required that they can be burned onto a CD, which would unlock them.
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Re:Apple DRM... (Score:4, Funny)
Bitch that you had to pay 99 cents for the song.
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Re:Apple DRM... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've heard that you can buy books from audible.com using iTunes. Supposedly, the download is encrypted, but you can move it to your iPod at will, and you can make MP3 CD's through iTunes that will play in any MP3 CD player (and, by extension, copied to any other medium). I imagine any Apple Music initiative would work in a similar manner.
If any company is going to make a DRM scheme that protects my rights as well as the copyright holders', I'd bet money it will be Apple.
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Re:Apple DRM... (Score:4, Informative)
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Confllict with Apple Records? (Score:5, Interesting)
The best source for these rumors was /. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just waiting for some electronic music distributor to realize that they'll make more money if they distribute MP3s and use social pressures to discourage piracy. If an album cost $4 online, and they'll let you do whatever you like with the music, why would you steal?
Two things would get me to use this. (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Catalog choices. If the selection is limited to Top 40 hits of the past ten years, no way. But if the choices are wide and deep (and maybe even out of print songs as was suggested earlier [janisian.com], and
3. Previews, allowing me to edit out the album filler. $.99 is cheap, and most albums only have a max of 4 good tracks.
~3% Not Bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Try before you buy (Score:5, Insightful)
Too little, too late. (Score:4, Interesting)
I recently asked a non-geek who gave up buying CDs a few years back if he would be willing to pay about $0.15 for this kind of service. He said no. This is the same person who spend $60+ on a concert ticket.
The paying for recorded music meme is dying, and there's very little that can be done to prevent it. No law is enforcable when more than about 10% of the population are breaking it, and so they will have to either loosen copyright law, or not enforce it at all. Artists are worth money, and people will pay good money to see them. Recordings are just advertising, and most people object to paying for advertising.
Make a record executive happy. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you really like music, you would never accept a lack of subsonic. You buy full albums of artists you like, and you Kazaa / live 365 to find new artists. If you don't really like music, you probably have never even heard of Kazaa. Maybe you will like this service, then.
In a world where costs have been cut dramatically, you can't go on charging the same. Tapes were a step above records acoustically, and CD's were a premium above tapes (despite being cheaper to manufacture). What do MP3's offer? They're cheap. Charge a premium for a lower quality? Nuts.
All you can eat 128k MP3's for 19.95 per month, with 180k MP3's available for 29.95, and lossless CD for 59.95. Why is supply, demand, and competition such a hard concept for record executives?
Possible negative effects (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, then again maybe we'll not see a whole lot of change after all
On a completely different note, if you download an entire CD, they should make available a printable version of the cover and liner notes.
Re:Possible negative effects (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait.. wait wait wait. If someone likes it, it must be good for something. Granted, we all grow older and wiser, to learn what "good music" really is. So if every song is good, whether it is because I liked it for the arist or because I'm naive is good!
I liked greenday about 10 years ago. I still love 'em. Good stuff. And about 80% of their tracks, I'd say is definitely worth downloading.
What if every artist was a greenday and not a one/two hit wonder.
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Re:Possible negative effects (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's another perspective. Some kids in a band start getting pretty good, a little local press and some regional gigs. They even get a label scout to come check them out, but she says "I like your sound, it's just not what we're pushing in the industry right now. Sorry."
Band flips a bird to the industry, spends a few thousands bucks on a used Mac and some really nice mics. They record an album and get the drummer's graphic designer girlfriend to design a fancy new logo and website. Then, they start distributing their tracks online at $.50 a pop. It gets picked up by a few indie music bloggers and then all of the sudden they're making enough money to upgrade their equipment and tour the east coast.
Towards the end of the tour, the record scout is back, ready to talk about a deal. "Nah," the drummer says. "We're making plenty of money doing what we love, we don't have to sell out to you bastards and we're going back into the studio here in a few weeks to record our second album. Feel free to download it in a few weeks!"
Every day, it's becoming cheaper and cheaper to record music. For $10,000, you can set yourself up with a near-professional quality setup. That $10,000 wouldn't even come close to the studio time required for an album. Online distribution is the last step towards breaking industry stranglehold on music.
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Apple Records, Inc. (Score:5, Insightful)
$1/track strikes me as a pretty good deal. I imagine the price is not imformed so much by Apple (while you may think their stuff is expensive, this scheme does nothing to directly contribute to their bottom line, i.e. hardware sales), as it is likely informed by whatever potential deals they want to strike with the existing content providers.
The pieces are all there - Akamai's hooked up, hell, the whole QuickTime network must be in bed with several studios already with the movie trailer video streaming service (easily the best on the net). One wonders if they have already laid the groundwork for those music-based partnerships.
And, lets not forget QuickTime. It's fantastically powerful and flexible, and they could package their media any way they wish. Some have mentioned the lack of liner notes, artwork etc. I would consider that moot if they provided, some real digital packaging. In Mac OS X, you can assign graphic files to the background of windows, you've got those 32bit 256x256 icons... if I could browse through my MP3 folder and have those icons sized nice and big with the appropriate artwork, fully tagged ID3-wise, and it's a high-quality file... yeah, I'd bite. Absolutely.
On another note, there is DRM of a sort in the iPod, specifically for the Audible content, but I think that is unique to their format and not system wide.
Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
That depends: does the customized CD have the original CD audio files, or CD audio recordings of a lossy-compressed format? If I'm going to be paying for it, I want CD-A, not MP3s.
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Don't like this system. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would I pay $1 a track, $15 a cd when I can go to a used Record/CD store, pick-up used copies of the artists I want to hear for about $6-$9 a pop. And lets say that Artist releases 5-6 Songs off said album I got as a used CD, Those with this music service from apple will have to go out, get to the site, log in, find the track, pay for track, wait for confirmation of the payment being recieved, then once that confirm is recieved - download it, and then play it where as all I had to do was find case, open case, remove cd, insert cd, play, enjoy.
Oh and I don't have to worry about falling victim to someone else's idea of "High Quality". Commonly people and services will encode at 128 or 192 to save space on their drives, and if you even remotely concidered yourself an audiophile, such sampling would be really sub-standard to your ears. =)
Besides, I for one am still really leary of any site that wants me to pay for digital downloads, what's really there to stop the RIAA or some of their Brain Washed supportive Artists from coming after members on that service? And what's worse from such acts like in the case of Napster, this time they'll have your Real Name, Real Address, Real Credit Card information, etc where as on Napster you at least had Annoniminity from such worries.
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Well then (Score:4, Insightful)
So the big question is (and always has been), are people generally more like you or more like me?
If the service really does offer MP3's for download at $1 a song, then we might get a chance to find out.
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Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the existence of 'free' (modulo the long term social cost of killing the creation of future music) alternatives could prevent this potentially sustainable model from catching hold.
Normally, when a society wants to proscribe some activity which is destructive to its long term health (such as the widespread freeloading of music), it uses social norms and, in extreme cases, laws to prevent them. Hmm - maybe copying music without giving anything back to the artist ought to be socially unacceptable, or maybe even illegal?
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Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
But please, if you remove the RIAA from the picture, and thus their bilking of the arist, the artists would like to be paid *somehow*.
I give my music away on mp3.com, besonic.com for free. But if I entered into a recording contract, I would like to imagine that people dont want all their music for free, for ever, no ifs ands or buts.
Kazaa is preferable to handing over money to the RIAA's members, but paying 1$ a song should be preferable to most people than getting all their music for free.
Even building a cheap mini studio to make music can cost anywhere from a grand (if you dont mind poor sound quality and only listen to intrumental/vocal music), to ten grand (approaching radio-quality production quality, more electronic type music). While many artists would like to give music away for free, its just not economically possible. So please temper your opinions with the realization that money has to come from somewhere
People say musicians make money from touring, but alot of the new kind of music coming out doesn't make sense in a live context (electronic music, mostly.) So its a pipe dream to imagine that getting distributed copies of music should always be free because musicians can just tour
Thanks.
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Re:99c / track? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not if:
a.) The selection's good.
b.) The quality is guaranteed.
c.) The transfers happen quickly.
d.) There's an ability to preview the song.
Believe it or not, the price tag is not the major contributer to using Kazaa. It provides the best service. But it's got plenty of room for somebody with good bandwidth to come in and make a better model of it.
You have to remember, this is the same country where people drive gas-guzzling SUVS, pay $3.50 for a coffee and pay over $1.00 for bottled water. They want quality and service, the cost isn't really that big of issue.
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Re:99c / track? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:99c / track? (Score:5, Insightful)
An Apple-designed service can be expected to be well-designed, reliable, and cool. If 4 major record labels really do provide content this could take off in a major way. This could materially increase Apple's marketshare. Contrast this with Microsoft's DRM-laden plans and you'll see that there will be a clear choice
My employer pays a lot of ASCAP fees, and we have to support Limewire because we have legitimate needs for rapid access to a vast music library. The #1 question during the iTunes 'rollout' was "can I download MP3s with this ?" That answer is about to change.
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Re:99c / track? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:99c / track? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is that because you might actually pay for something that is otherwise available for free if the quality of that product is offered at a price you consider worth spending on it? Gasp
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Re:Hmmmmmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine it would be a much higher adoption rate, if it were all this, and the RIAA and record congloms saw $$ coming in.
But in a sense you are right. There will always be those that weren't going to pay for it to begin with.
Someone mentioned one of Apple's good philosophies above.
Kepp the honest people honest by offering incentive such as 5 liscense packs of OS X for only $70 more
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Re:$.99 for a song?! (Score:5, Funny)
In order for it to be an Apple product, it has to be an Insanely Great idea that is overpriced enough to make you think twice before buying it.
This qualifies.
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Re:$.99 for a song?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, yes and no.
For one, you hear a lot of complaints which run "Why should I pay [$12-20] for a CD when I only like two or three songs on it?" If that's true, that means you're only paying $2 or $3 with this pricing scheme, so it suddenly becomes less goofy.
For another, $12 is the exception, not the rule, for pricing--if you can find everything you want on CD at Target, more power to you. I can't. Best Buy charges $13-16 for CDs, generally, and they have about the best price to selection ratio of any place that I've found. The actual list price for CDs seems to be $18.99--and you may think people never pay that, but if they find the CD they've been looking for at the Virgin Megastore and nowhere else, you can bet they grit their teeth and pony up the cash.
Sure, there are going to be people for whom $0.99 a song is too much, and I think it'd be a good idea to have something like a "10% off when you buy the whole CD" promotion (and maybe to let you buy the physical CD for another $3-5 or some such). But I don't think it's going to be that big a deal.
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Not unreasonable! (Score:5, Interesting)
Secondly, it's common practice that when manufacturers break out single units that they charge more. Ever buy a Coke from a vending machine? How much did you pay for it, 65? And what is the cost per unit when you buy a 12 pack from Food Lion? 40/ea.? Nothing new here.
Third, there are real savings here. Yeah, if you want the entire album, you may be better off just buying it from the store. However, if you just want one or two songs, then you have saved yourself $10 or more. I can think of a LOT of songs from the past 30 years that I'd like to buy, but I don't care to get the whole album. There's a lot of one-hit wonders out there, but very few artists that can pack out an album with great material.
I think that the price is right. In fact, if I were doing it, I'd set the pricing as a range, from 75 for the "moldy oldies" to $1.25 for the latest stuff. Really, the only hitch I see so far is that they haven't answered the question of DRM. If there is DRM technology built into this, then yes, you're right that the cost is way too much. I wouldn't be willing to pay more than 25 for songs with DRM, if that.
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Re:I'd imagine (Score:5, Insightful)
Some rockstars care about the quality of their product.
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