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- I never downloaded a song, or anything else off any filetrading system. It was just a computer/net use I never got intrested in, mainly because the connection I have is slow enough already.
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- I never downloaded a song, or anything else off any filetrading system. It was just a computer/net use I never got intrested in, mainly because the connection I have is slow enough already.
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- I would only be interested in doing so legally/for a fee if:
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- Songs could be had individually,
- The giant lyrics database was allowed to return to the net,
- and finally, if you could listen to a way-low-quality version for free, like, 64Kb/sec or lower.
~ - My problem is that I have heard songs on the music service where I work, and of the few I would like to have a good copy of, all I know of them is a couple lines of the lyrics. As it is, I have no way of knowing who sings them or what they’re titled (thus, the lyrics database) and I will not pay to download anything unless I already know it’s what I want (thus the very-low-quality freebies).
… - As it stands, I rarely ever buy CD’s at all anymore: the only place I can hear announced new music is on the radio, and they’re all gone corporate and don’t play much but all the same mainstream stuff in heavy rotation, so I usually get tired of a song before I get around to buying the CD. - DougC
Amen, brother.
There’s a sig line in here somewhere. 
I agree with your analysis, btw, and the game will be over for them sooner than they think. Young people are the ones who keep Big Music in business, and in five or six years, the typical college student (let alone the junior-high kids) will barely remember a time when music couldn’t be downloaded for free.
So they have a very short time to change the culture, and that can only be done if they are willing to sell downloads of all their individual songs, cheaply and in a manner that doesn’t interfere with fair-use rights. Or coming up with the magic anti-piracy bullet.
Possibly. An article in the Chicago Sun-Times in the last couple days talked about Wilco’s latest album. Due to difficulties with their previous record label, they left and made their completed album available for free download on the Internet. Recently they hooked up with a new label, who released that album. It sold 55,000 copies its first week, which according to the article is an extremely good sell rate for that band, and obviously says a lot about whether people will pay for things that they had the chance to get for free.
Like other people mentioned, if it were extremely high quality and had no recopying restrictions for my personal use, I probably would think this was a fair price. The option for a 60-second sample of the song should be present, to get a good listen to it and figure out if you like it or not.
Depends. There have been plenty of CDs where I didn’t like every last song on them.
Like Jman’s comments on the matter - I sympathize with the need for people in the music business to make money. However, when you start involving things like not being able to recopy music onto MP3 for your own use, not being able to play the CD on computer CD drives, and so on, you make me annoyed. I have a Rio Volt MP3/CD player that lets me burn MP3s onto a CD-RW and play them in the player; the CD in there currently has 46 songs on it and isn’t even half full. I don’t want to tote a mess of CDs around with me when I’m on the go, so storing a lot of my music on a device is what I want.
My husband bought a new Sony MP3 MD (mini-disk) player yesterday. It uses some sort of encoding that (from what I understand) requires you to go back to the original source when the song file has been copied more than 3 times, to make a new copy. He’s pretty satisfied with that method, and assuming there isn’t an easy way to get around that restriction, something of that nature seems to be a good solution for the industry. It lets you recopy music that you own to your heart’s content, for your use (or the occasional copy for a friend), but makes it tough to redistribute the music widely.
If the site had the range and depth of Napster at its peak, and I had the option of paying, oh, I dunno, let’s say $10 for 25 downloads or 3 days whichever lasts longest, I’d consider that reasonable.
$1 per track sounds a bit high.
Well. Several months later and here’s what we found.
NO. People won’t really pay $1 or even .50 for mp3 files.
Very few have sold across the board. I tested it out and didn’t sell any.
BUT… CD sales on the website increased.
If you had a music download service that:
- offered music from both indie and mainstream artists
- imposed no limits on the number of songs I could download
- did not require me to supply any personal information
- did not require me to install their software onto my computer
- did not keep records of my downloads or search queries
- offered high-quality mp3 files, without pops, skips, or abrupt starts and stops
I would be willing to pay at least $20 a month/$200 a year for it. Probably more.
- Are people just too used to downloading stuff from the web for free that they will avoid pay systems all together?
People are very use to getting music for free, especially the people most likely to use this service as they have experence at using the net for downloading music (which has been for free). In order for such a plan to work I think the price should be lower and fileswapping has to become less attractive.
- Would YOU pay $1 USD for a song you liked? If not $1, how much do you feel a song is worth?
For really popular songs I think $1 - $3 is ok but for the rest of the music that makes up the CD I would think a much lower price is in order $0.10-0.25 (or a few free tracks w/ a paid popular DL). This is manly because the artist would want to get his work out there but no one is going to want to pay for non - popular DL’s.
- 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 think a CD is ‘better’ then an mp3 collection on a HD. Then again it depends on how much I want the other songs.
- What are your general thoughts on this?
It’s tought to compete with someone who is giving away their product (file swapping) and even tougher if your target market is exactly the same as that of the free service. Also Artists want their collection of songs out there not just their hits but that is what paid DL mp3’s will lead to. If you can get the entire CD for free then OK but if you have to pay (esp $1/song) then no one will listen to the ‘other’ songs. That’s why I think a different pricing structure is needed.
AudreyK, Emusic.com is pretty close to what you describe. You pay $9.99/month for unlimited downloads. All downloads are 128kb/s mp3 files, and you have full rights to transfer them to a portable device or burn them to a CD. They have a pretty good mix of major and small/indie label artists, although the major-label stuff tends towards jazz and classical. They have had stuff like the entire Elvis Costello back catalog, and They Might Be Giants, things like that. And they carry an enormous amount from some small labels that I like, such as spinART and Matador.
Universal Music Group recently made a deal to start providing about 1,000 of their back-catalog albums online, and they started putting it up this week. I’ve already downloaded about 12 albums since they started, ranging from Oingo Boingo to Lionel Hampton to Helmet. I’ve been using them for about two years now, and it’s been worth every penny to me.
I might be deaf, but I’m not so dumb as to pay for music downloads.
This is a very complicated situation. In my case, I would not be burning cd’s or making mp3’s; I’m a doofus when it comes to complicated things like that. I’ve heard that many home computers don’t have sophisticated enough speakers and sound cards to record the music as well as a cd would. What I would like is to go to a website, pick a genre I’m interested in, listen to tunes and put a checkmark next to the 10-15 songs I like. I would like to order a cd made in a professional recording studio and mailed to me. This cd would have liner notes and artwork in it for a price of about $5.00-$10.00 each, with a discount for more cd’s. That’s what I would like. Right now, I go to record stores and pick out likely cd’s from their used cd section.
I wouldn’t pay. My philosiphy is I download a couple songs from the CD. If its good, I go out and buy it. I got sick of buying a CD cause I liked one good song, and getting home and finding out the rest of the CD is crap. I’d rather have a official copy of a CD then a burnt copy. I like supporting bands. I just don’t want to pay for a whole CD if I like one song.
Possibly a monthly plan is a better idea. Pay $40, download all you want. The money is divided to the bands accordingly.
Or maybe for an extreme, a music tax on your pay cheque. $10 monthly. It’s how much you’d spend on a CD anyway. All the money is divided to the artists. Of course there are bound to be problems with this idea…
If it is $40/month then fine, I have no prob. w/ that - I will never ever pay that much but if that’s what they want to sell it for then more power to them.
BUT DON"T EVER EVER EVER even joke about such a tax. Do you have any idea how much we already pay in taxes? Do you have any idea what happens to quality when income is insured under threat of imprisonment?
The website in question from the OP is finding this out. People aren’t willing to pay for the download because is seems they don’t find value in it. CD’s are another story. From the time the Pay for Download went into effect the website saw an increase in CD sales across the artists.
So the Pay for Download’s method failed (or seems to have failed) but it sparked an increase in CD sales which IMO are much more valuable to the listener. So perhaps Pay for Download didn’t really fail at the end of the day
$40 isn’t that much considering you can download a unlimited amount of music. I know its free now. But at least that way its more ethical.
OK sorry, no tax then. But consider that you’ll spend $10 on a CD anyway? Or you may not have enough money left over to do so… Um. I’ll shut up now ok? Everyone fine with that?
**Wearia[/q] As I stated I have no problem with them charging whatever as long as it’s volentary.
I just did searches and browsed random categories, and Emusic doesn’t have much of the music I like. They have mainstream groups like Blink 182 or Green Day, but they have fewer than three songs per group available for download. The groups that have the most mp3s available for download are mostly groups I’ve never heard of.
Unfortunately, they had no mp3s by my favorite groups: BNL, Matchbox Twenty, No Doubt, and Third Eye Blind. They also didn’t have anything by my not-quite-favorite artists, like Don Henley, Weird Al, Madonna, Fastball, Marcy Playground, Janet Jackson, Bruce Hornsby, or Huey Lewis.
I did find some “hey, neat, they have that song, haven’t heard it in years” mp3s, but it wasn’t enough to balance for what they lacked.
I do like jazz and classical, but I don’t listen to them often enough to make it worth a subscription.
I’ll keep an eye on them, and with luck they’ll soon have songs I want.