A music website I know of is starting a new option for their artists. A pay per download system.
The artist does not have to go this route. They can still provide free downloads as well as free streaming of the music. This is just an extra feature the website is putting in.
The starting rate for the music downloads is $1 USD. As they get the kinks worked out of the system they will impliment a new system where the artist can set the price.
This site also allows high bit-rate mp3 files. So the quality of the files will be pretty high (320kbps).
My questions are these.
Are people just too used to downloading stuff from the web for free that they will avoid pay systems all together?
Would YOU pay $1 USD for a song you liked? If not $1, how much do you feel a song is worth?
If the artist had several songs set at $1 a download but offered a CD of 10 songs for $9.00, would you be more inclined to just buy the CD?
I’d certainly never pay per download. The great strength of MP3 distribution is that it allows people to sample from a huge variety of music to which they might not otherwise have been exposed. A pay per download scheme would discourage such random sampling.
On the other hand, I would seriously consider a subscription service provided the fees were reasonable and the catalog were sufficiently large and varied. To-date, neither of these conditions have been fulfilled. This is primarily due to the anti-competitive practises of the music labels, but that’s another thread.
Also, IMHO, this thread would be more appropriate in IMHO
I personally would pay $1 for every MP3 that I downloaded. But most of the people out there are too used to getting things for free.
There are few artists where I would want the whole CD and don’t already have it, so it would depend on how much I liked them. At one time I had nearly 400 CDs.
It won’t work. It’s too late for the industry or anyone else to bring the two camps together. The whole Napster thing has polarized the Internet community into two violently diametrically opposed camps, with by far the largest camp openly contemptuous and hostile towards the music business. All the copy protection schemes that the music industry continues to try are a joke, and will never work. As I’ve said before - a multi-billion dollar worldwide consortium of companies fighting for their livlihoods is trying to take on a disorganized rabble of teenaged hackers and script kiddies who want music for free.
In general, I’d say most people will try to find the music for free, first.
I would probably pay the dollar if there were no restrictions on the song – I could make multiple copies, burn to CD and/or transfer to MP3 player.
Depends on whether I liked their stuff or not.
I would like to see a model where I can be sure the artist is compensated, but the users are not technologically restricted as to what they can do with the songs they have downloaded.
I’m a big fan of Fictionwise an e-books site. You pay for the book/story & it is put on your “Bookshelf”. You can download it in different formats and have access to it wherever you have Internet access. There are copyright restrictions, of course, and they are moving to an encrypted format that is tied to your PDA ID… but it looks like they will let you enter multiple ID’s.
I would never pay now I have found a way of getting them free?? Spent so much money on them when I was younger 2. But not very often you get something for free.
$1 per track is clearly too much. It’s just too close to CD prices. If I buy a CD, I can create perfect high bitrate MP3’s out of it. If I buy the MP3’s, I can create a cheap looking burned CD out of it. I’ll always go for the former personally, if the prices are comparable.
Now if they manage to make it impossible to rip the CD’s, then my opinion might change. But by then, the downloadable "mp3"s will probably not be burnable. Yuck.
I think downloads should remain free. Heck, since I started downloading, I have bought many more CDs than I do normally. I consider it an advertisment, much like radio or music videos. I wouldn’t buy a download for money, because:
I don’t like to listen to music on my computer
Wouldn’t get a really good quality sound (my stereo is better than my computer, and that’s the way I like it :))
When my computer crashes, I lose it.
Whenever I find a song I really really like, I just go out and buy the CD. I’d rather have a good version of the song than an mp3 (which in my opinion is far inferior, quality-wise, to a CD).
I’m not so sure. Almost every artist I know has free sound clips available (ie/ 30-60 seconds of a song). Half a song exposes one enough to be able to be able to “sample” and evaluate the musical style of a recording so that a consumer can determine whether or not they want to make a greater investment (such as a CD purchase or a pay-per-download).
I wouldn’t pay per download unless there was a quality guarantee. I’ve heard crappy “high bitrate” MP3s that turned out to be copies of lower bitrate MP3s that had been ripped and burned to CD and then re-encoded as MP3s later on down the road.
I’d pay for a good quality MP3 even at a $1 a song – sure it approaches the cost of a CD, but if I don’t like the rest of the CD and just want the one song, I’d have no qualms about paying for it.
I don’t search out unlicenced free MP3s because I work with indie artists who are totally self-financed and have suffered huge personal losses as a result of their albums being sold as pirated copies on-line.
I don’t think “too used” is the condition, I think that people don’t see the harm in downloading music. But there is, more on this below.
I think $1 is a good basis per download. I could imagine that if a song was particularly popular at the time, or was unusually long, that the price could be nominally more.
Nope. I will tend to buy the CD of my favorite artists (to get the liner notes, art, etc.) or of a particularly exceptional genre collection, where I am relying on a group like Rhino to do the research and develop a thorough cross-section of important songs. Otherwise I will pick and choose the samples to only get the songs I like.
[SOAPBOX]
Napster Good:
Napster showed us that digital distribution of music (and by extension, other media) is viable over the internet.
Napster allowed people to sample music without having to pay for it. Until then, the typical scenerio was to pay for a FULL collection of music, take it home, listen to it and find out if you even want 1, a few, or ANY of the songs.
Napster promoted the exploration of new music. With no risk of getting burned in the scenerio mentioned above, people could check out musicians they had never heard of before, thereby broadening their cultural horizons and giving newcoming or unsigned musicians “airplay.”
Napster demonstrated that anyone with a digital recording technology (a minor expense) can distribute their music to a worldwide audience without having to get a difficult-to-obtain recording contract.
Napster Bad:
Napster makes it easy to be a pirate. In a nutshell, copyright law stipulates that it is unlawful to reproduce copyright protected work for purposes other than news reporting, criticism, scholarship, parody, teaching or commentary without permission from that copyright holder. This is not my opinion, this is U.S. law and has been for many years.
To which most people say, “Come on…who is it hurting, really?” If you are a musician whose sole form of income is the music you create (they’re not ALL rockstars, folks) you are taking their only form of income. Take your own job, what if you spent a week’s worth of work working on a particular project and when payday comes along, the person who hired you said “I don’t have to pay you, I already have your project, which I like enough to take it from you and you can’t take it back. Go to hell.”
I have to confess that I’m as guilty as any of you. Oh, I’ll rationalize it by saying that until an artist lets me buy a single song rather than skewering me for a disc’s worth of crap I don’t want, I’ll continue to download music. But in all the postings about MP3 and sharing files, I’ve never heard an appreciation that copyright law was created for good reasons.
Before you say, “Yeah, but some unknowns like to put their stuff out for free, to get them noticed.” Fine, I would too if I were in their shoes. And that is their choice: they are simply not exercising that right for a particular batch of work.
Besides that, I feel that file sharing or pirating is ultimately bad for digital use of music, because if the copyright holders can’t limit file sharing, they will seek out some other means of stopping people from breaking the law. Has anyone heard of rip-protected discs? How about the since-modified Hollings Bill?
I use emusic and I love it. $9.99 a month w/ unlimited downloads. A vast collection, and they add stuff all the time. I’ve been able to check out stuff I would not otherwise have heard - if I don’t like it, I delete it. The artists get paid, so I am not a thief. Check it out!
Great comments and some food for thought. Without counting, it kind of seems people are split on the issue.
One thing I failed to mention is the music isn’t top40. It’s indie music. (sorry. sometimes I forget about popular big label music because I haven’t heard it for so long)
For the record, I’m one of the indie artists on this website. I’ve had my music there for a couple of years. When I first heard about this new feature I didn’t think I would bother using it because I don’t think many listeners would use it. But it seems a few of you might.
Myself, as a consumer, I don’t think I would use a service like that. I’m more of a CD kind of guy. I enjoy having a final product with the artwork, inserts, ect. Plus, I have CD’s I bought years ago. I don’t have hardly ANY of the music files I downloaded jest a few years back. They somehow get lost.
I’m still interested in hearing more on the subject so please continue. I would like to get a handful of comments from the average internet user to present to this company. Many of the artists already on this music website have expressed fear that introducing a pay per download feature might just scare people away. I do not think this is the case. I think that people will just skim over the pay songs and go right to the free ones (but it seems from a few comments this in fact might NOT be the case)
Let me address a few of you if I may:
DrMatrix: Sorry about the wrong forum. I wasn’t sure on this one.
Hodge: Considering I left out the fact this is indie music (and it isn’t available elsewhere, would this change your mind? The suspected layout of how the site will work (I haven’t seen it yet) is that people would be able to stream the entire song. Then if they liked it they could buy the high bit rate version.
white- tigeress: Don’t take this as an attack in anyway but, do you feel that all music should be free then? What if you really liked the artist? You would rather get the music free rather then support the bands?
SmackFu: I agree with you about the price. I kind of think $1 is too much for a file. So can I assume with your statement you are a product person. Meaning you would much rather spend a few more dollars and have the CD then just a stupid mp3 file (that’s how I am).
Charmian: A quality guarantee is a good point. I have also downloaded “high rate” 320kbps mp3 files and found them to be very close to the quality of an AM radio with low batteries.
Too used, I don’t know. But if it’s possible and reasonnably easy to get the music for free, most people won’t pay for it.
Yes, providing I could sample the music first.
In most cases, no. The main appeal of downloading music for me isn’t that it’s free, but that I can conveniently sample it at home, get it immediatly, and that I don’t have to buy the whole CD when I like only one or two songs (which is usually the case).
Depends on who “people” are. A lot of us middle-aged types are too inherently law-abiding to do Napster/Morpheus/etc., no matter how pissed we are at the music biz for being so consumer-hostile.
It varies. For the indie stuff, $1 is too much. For a current pop hit, $2 is perfectly reasonable. But even for the bands that get radio play, I wouldn’t go higher than 25-50¢ for the songs that don’t get radio play. If the only way I can hear is to buy, I’d better be able to buy cheap.
That clearly applies to the indie stuff, which is by definition stuff that gets played only on college radio and other independent stations, if there. If something’s gotten a lot of word-of-mouth buzz, I might pay 50¢, but usually not that much for a song I had heard little about by a band I knew little about.
No. With indie artists, I would figure going one song at a time is best. And even with established artists, I really don’t expect most of the tracks to be nearly as worthwhile as the ones that were on the radio.
That perhaps it’s time to check emusic out again. Last time Phil Dennison told me how great it was, I searched their database for several songs I wanted, and came up empty every time - and I wasn’t willing to sign up for a service that gave me what they wanted to give me, rather than what I wanted. If they’ve been adding artists, maybe things are better now.
I really want to be able to download music off the Web, legally.
That’s me too. But instead of being able to do that, what we have is a Total Business Case Disconnect - a vast, untapped market that cannot develop, let alone flourish, because of a xenophobic and paranoid monopoly which borders on showing outright contempt towards its customers (the Big Music Industry as a whole).
As a person entering middle age, $1 per download is so trivial for me that I don’t even register the loss. $3000 for for a whole hard drive of music I like? Just show me where to use my credit card - that’s only about the equivalent of 200 CDs (at the hyper-inflated CD prices of popular releases). Except that I would actually listen to every song.
I see no hope whatsoever. I was one of the “pioneers” in studying this issue - I knew of Napster and MP3 trading long before most people did, and I made several predictions that have all come true. The Music Industry is paralyzed by its fear of change, and is going to fail, and fail big.
No matter whether or not it is legal or ethical, there will be billions of downloads of pirated MP3s every year. This is not the way that things should be, but it’s the way that things are and will be, and the sooner they come to grips with this, the happier they will be. Oh sure, you can argue “But why should they change to accomodate the abusers and criminals?” Well, morally, they shouldn’t have to, in a perfect World. But in a perfect World there wouldn’t be pay sites for goat sex either.
So the industry has two choices:
Sit there with their fingers in their ears, spending $$$ on hordes of lawyers, bribing politicians, and copy-protection schemes doomed to failure, as their market share erodes year by year and their user base drifts away. You think Sony, Warner, and BMI are too big to just “fade away”? Right…shit changes, and just because they seem big and unstoppable now doesn’t mean that ten years ago someone won’t be browsing a bin at a music store and saying “Sony makes music CDs? Who knew?”
Start immediately opening up their artists catalogs to online sales, and develop a business case.
Like Sassy, I subscribe to EMusic. $9.99 a month for unlimited downloads is worth it just to support the idea. Their selection is somewhat limited, but oddly enough, that has worked in its favor sometimes–it has introduced me to bands that I never would have tried before.
I also use <insert popular file-sharing program here>, and I don’t feel any guilt about it. I will always download stuff from EMusic if I can, because the artist is compensated; if I can’t, I look elsewhere.
In addition to all this, I spend between $100-$150 a month buying CDs. I expect this to jump a bit in the next few months, when I actually have an income.
Most people are not going to pay near-CD prices for downloads. I know that the actual, physical CD is a small part of the cost one pays, but that makes no difference; one you can hold in your hand and one you can’t, so the perceived value is different. That’s why I think $1 a song is too much, especially sight unseen.
I much prefer the subscription idea, because it gives me a chance to download and listen to a lot of music without worrying about not liking it. For a site with fast access and a virtually unlimited selection, I would pay $50/month without hesitation, and probably much more.
I would pay for high quality MP3s, provided they are completely usable for burning to audio CD. I would maybe pay $1 a song for certain songs, but not $9 an album. If I’m providing the CD to burn, and no liner notes, and such, it had better be more like $5 an album. At that price, I would likely buy all my music on-line.
I also think the RIAA’s strategy with copy protection is going to fail and hurt the industry far more than piracy will. I know that I will NEVER buy a copy encoded CD. I’d rather tape songs on the radio than pay for a CD that I can’t make a mix with, and I can’t burn an MP3 CD with for my Rio Volt. While I’m on long drives, I want to listen to 80 minutes of music continually…and I can’t do that with 95% of CDs…so I make mix CDs filled with songs I like.
I understand their fear of piracy, but I will not pay for an album that denies me my fair use rights to create mixes and use MP3s on my personal player. Interestingly enough, the last CD I purchased was Glen Phillips “Abulum.” I like the music a lot, but I bought the CD because he showed an open mind when it came to MP3 distribution, and released demo cuts and even some early studio cuts of his songs (full length, high bitrate) every month for a while leading up to the release. That kind of open mind earns my respect, and I paid him back by purchasing his CD.