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Evaluating a System for Selling and Delivering MP3s?
Posted by
Cliff
on Wed Jul 16, 2003 04:39 AM
from the many-eyes-first-impressions dept.
from the many-eyes-first-impressions dept.
Dredd2Kad asks: "I'd really like Slashdot's opinion on this. I recently secured an MP3 distribution deal with an indie record label, and negotiations with other indie labels and artists are in the works. The music will be distributed through my internet radio station's website. As you know, if you can sell music in a format such as MP3 you eliminate the costs of packaging, shipping, handling. You do have to contend with bandwidth charges though. Most indie labels and artists seem happy to pass along the savings to customers and stimulate sales. What I have built is simple and functional. We are trying to add value to the MP3 albums we sell by including quality artwork that can be printed onto CD labels and jewel case inserts (so you aren't just getting a 'bunch of files'). What would make you want to buy music in this way? What types things would turn you away? What are the positives and negatives of selling music in this manner? Do you think this is a viable alternative to someone who doesn't want to pay $10 or $15 for a physical CD? Does the format the music is in or on have an impact on how serious you take it?"
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Price Point (Score:5, Interesting)
People also want quality features. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is people think selling mp3s is a good idea, you have to sell services and INCLUDE mp3s.
Selling mp3s is like selling webpages, people will not pay on a per site basis, EVER.
However, people will pay for quality and service, people do subscribe to gaming sites, if you offer it at a cheap $1 a month, or $12 a year, people will subscribe. You also must offer alot of things in the members sections, not just mp3s, but video clips, tourdates, blogs, forums, pictures,interviews, etc. You have to make it into almost an online magazine, you need to build a community, then you charge people to access that community
You charge the fans to access a SCENE, because to the fan, its all about the scene, just like to the musician its all about the art. Treat it like what it is, art! Do not treat it like product, when you treat it like product and worry about how many sales of mp3s you'll get, you wont sell any.
I suggest you let a person subscribe to your site, your fans will subscribe, you may only have a few thousand fans, but thats enough. 5000 people paying $12 a year, is decent money, more money than you'd make trying to sell mp3s.
Parent
Re:People also want quality features. (Score:5, Funny)
>5000 people paying $12 a year, is decent money
That's enough to pay for hosting and bandwidth plus two salaries, if they like eating Ramin noodles 3 meals a day. That's Web Guy, who'll we'll charitably assume does the recording and editing, plus a drummer. You'd better hope that you can find 5000 people that like drum solos.
Parent
Re:People also want quality features. (Score:5, Insightful)
>It was just an example
It was indeed a perfect example of how vague handwaving and "oh, but of course" economics fall flat on their face when you're not living in your parents' basement.
>If you are hiring a webguy and doing all this stuff, you better be a damn good band.
But if you can't afford a webguy, how do you let people know how good you are. Hmm, that reminds me of something:
Bill: Ted, while I agree that in time our band will be most triumphant, the truth is Wyld Stallyns will never be a super band until we have Eddie Van Halen on guitar. [angelfire.com]
Ted: Yes Bill, but I do not believe we will get Eddie Van Halen until we have a triumphant video.
Bill: Ted, it's pointless to have a triumphant video before we even have decent instruments.
Ted: Well how can we have decent instruments when we really don't even know how to play.
Bill: That is why we need Eddie Van Halen.
Ted: And that is why we need a triumphant video.
(Pause)
Both: Excellent. (Air Guitar.)
You see the problem? Sure, tell yourself that you can set up a fan site for peanuts, but the first time it falls over with an "Out of Cheese" error, you have lost your revenue stream. Better hope your cupboard is full of those noodles.
>I was being very conservative when I came up with the 5000 number, any good musician should be able to do 15-20,000 easy
Which end of you did that number get pulled from? I'd like to know before I touch it. Can you provide examples of several non-RIAA bands that have managed to set up fan sites that have 20,000 subscribers at $12 a year? Note "several", because "any good musician". If it's that easy, let's see the examples.
If, as I suspect, you're pulling all this out of your quivering pick ass, and you're living in the aforementioned basement (or otherwise living off of handouts) and have no idea what the phrase "working musician" actually implies, at least have the good grace to acknowledge it.
Parent
Re:People also want quality features. (Score:4, Funny)
>Instead of worrying about the number, focus on the model. People who want to use numbers to discredit models, are wasting time. The model works.
My god, you've been frozen in a block of ice since 1998! Wake up man, it's 2003! The .com boom is over! You actually have to have revenue to make profit these days.
Once again, show us five examples of this model working. That's five non-RIAA bands that make living money off of electronic fan clubs. Show us five.
Parent
Re:People also want quality features. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:People also want quality features. (Score:5, Interesting)
* people will buy mp3's, but not very many people will. Use this knowledge when planning, consider not spending much or any money on putting it together, at least at first, to gauge interest.
* The band's hardest core fans will end up being the ones most likely to buy something from you. However they already own the albums. They may very well be convinced to buy the albums again if you include enough extras. Great extras being unreleased material, live tracks, stuff that didn't make the album, rough tracks from the upcomming album, remixes, instrumental tracks etc.
* This is important: People are (rightly) afraid of losing the mp3's they buy and being SOL. Make sure people who bought the album are allowed to download it again whenever they need it. Some folks may end up overusing this feature in your mind but the good will will go a long way into making people comfortable buying the medium.
* When you buy a cd you get the chance to rip at various bitrates. Make sure you provide a high enough bitrate for high fidelity listening (160k or 192k) but also consider providing a 96kbit or 128kbit set for portable players or other uses. Let them download either or both for one price. (and come back later to get the other one when they need it for free like the last point)
* Provide at least one sample mp3 encoded at the high fidelity bitrate so that people considering a purchase will know exactly what the quality of the encoding is (many bands only provide lower bitrate samples and people may assume the purchased music will sound the same)
* Consider watermarking if you want to be able to tell if the purchased mp3's are being made available on newsgroups/p2p etc or if it is people ripping the album themselves. This can be helpful if a band discovers their music on kazaa and is upset and makes a logical leap to blame the online mp3 sales... Likely they will have ripped it themselves and you'd be able to prove that rather than just speculating.
* (point #1 again) Remember, not many people buy mp3's online. Don't plan to order new computers, bandwidth, software services, spend a ton of time programming, doing art, adding extrasm or marketing until you get a chance to get your feet wet and gauge people's interest.
Parent
Re:People also want quality features. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I do, but the exact opposite. I was the one making money, and also the musician. You're forgetting the distinction between WORKING musician and LAZY BASTARD musician.
See above. I'd do a fan site for nothing. Once it's asking for money, I want a cut.
Agreed. For example, I'm a guitar tech by day. All my friends and bandmates get their shit worked on for free, under the stipulation that if they ever need a touring tech that I'm the guy.
What's a band that's gigging regularly going to put on their fan site that'll attract people who weren't at their gigs? If you're gigging, you're not working on new material. If you're not putting new material on your site, who's going to subscribe?
Ah, the $50,000 question. Frankly, I have no clue what you could offer. But you're thinking we gig 24/7 and don't have time to write. It doesn't work like that. No, you're not working on new material during the gig. Directly before and after going on and coming off stage you do have time to work on new material. Hell, if you're in a jazz band or something like that your whole gig may be made up on the spot.
I take the point that for small bands, this might - might - provide some extra income, but I suspect that it will be beer and guitar strings money, not apartment rent or healthcare money. Heck, go ahead and prove me wrong.
And with this statement, you hit the nail on the head. Any income from a website would be supplemental, an addition to whatever I make at my day job. It would in fact be string money but you have to remember that strings, heads, sticks, cables, and other things that wear out aren't exactly cheap. Every little bit helps when you're trying to hold down a job and have you band fund itself.
Parent
The only thing I would like (Score:5, Interesting)
Especially if it's something like ambient music, where hearing everything is important.
Re:Options (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:The only thing I would like (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the key is to give people choice. I know if I was presented with downloading ONLY 128k MP3's I would probably flag it, no matter how inexpensive. I want to be able to choice my own format (OGG, MP3, whatever) and ALSO at the bitrate I want.
For me vari-bitrate is where its at. Its a decent compromise on most factors. I cant understand why more people dont use this.
Re:The only thing I would like (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed. Ideally, I'd like (soon to be Ogg) FLAC and Ogg Vorbis as options, rather than, or perhaps as well as, MP3. I generally prefer to encode my own Oggs, so FLAC would be the ideal starting point. I like the idea of jewel case inlays. Ideally these would be in a neutral vector format like SVG rather than a bitmap, but even just PostScript or PDF would be fine. Oh, and obviously, I'd like my kind of music to be available. The problem with pretty much all onli
It should be better than what we have. (Score:5, Insightful)
Theres two options. One option is to sell the product, I dont really think this would work very well but it would make some money.
Micropayments are an option.
The other option is subscription option, and this is the option I think will ultimately work. If we treat music like we treat TV, and we create channels for certain labels, you can charge someone to subscribe to a channel.
So on your site if you are a channel, you list the price of all your musicians, and combine it up, then offer a subscribe button which a user clicks and makes payment to subscribe.
Once they subscribe for maybe $1-5 a month, the user now can access all the music from that label as long as they pay their fee, or you can charge them for the whole year, charge them around the price of a CD, maybe $15-20, and they can access the music all year.
There should be more than music, this means the whole community, the blogs, the forums, the pictures, video clips, everything you offer and you should offer as much as possible.
Look at AOL, they are king not because they offer the net, we all can get the net, they are king because they offer the features people are willing to pay for, they improve the net experience.
Its your job as a music company to improve the listeners music experience. INNOVATE, dont treat the listener as a sale, treat them as a member.
Parent
Re:The only thing I would like (Score:5, Funny)
The label could take the highest quality digital version of the music and create analog presses that have near the same quality as the file. In each press, hot vinyl would be pressed to form a high quality analog reproduction of the music (patent-pending). Now, these vinyl *discs* could be packaged in a carboard envelope with printing, lyrics, and etc. Then they are sold. Certain *disc* players would read the music off of these *discs* by dragging a needle across the surface (patent pending) and reading the resulting vibrations.
High fidelity buffs would be impressed with the quality, yet it's still analog which would prevent some piracy since people would prefer the *best* analog reproduction to some digital copy of that analog reproduction. Packaging would turn on people who want something a little extra with their music. Finally, and this is the ingenious part, since this *disc* is read by dragging a needle across the surface, the quality would degrade over time, preventing resale value from gnawing at new *disc* profits (patent-pending).
The ultimate effect of my new music distribution model, is that piracy would come to an end, since the best copy is analog. At most, piracy would be used to sample the music of a particular *disc* prior to purchase. I could revolutionize a piracy filled industry. Recording Labels would grow since they longer have to worry about piracy and digital CDs being reproduced. They could tightly control the distribution of these vinyl *discs* thus controlling their profit.
Music might become thought of as a tangible piece of property with a physical existance rather than some digital idea that is freely copied and shared. (patent-pending)
Parent
Re:The only thing I would like (Score:4, Insightful)
In the days of vinyl, a record came with all sorts of stuff-- large, often beautiful cover art; liner notes; lyrics; etc.
Nowadays you get a few pictures in a booklet that are barely large enough to see, and only occasionally do you even get lyrics.
The value-added content helped sell LPs; there is no question the lack of it is at least partially responsible for poor CD sales.
Parent
Fast Downloads (Score:3, Insightful)
Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
I pay attention to the music (Score:4, Insightful)
Adding value (Score:5, Insightful)
Specifically, I'd definately pay for a package that contained:
High quality vbr mp3s.
Multiple peices of album artwork, not just a scan of cd-album front cover.
Lyric files to all the MP3s.
Where available guitar chords as well.
I think that copy protection would be a big turn off. For indie bands, I reckon that the majority of people would be happy to buy, even if they could get it for free, just as a matter of support.
Perhaps an introduction to the album by the artists concerned.
And of course, some decent music
Re:Adding value (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me emphasize this: HIGH QUALITY!! This is BY FAR the most important issue for me. I swear if I hear another 128k MP3 labelled "CD-Quality" I'm going to scream and kick and kill my all of my fish.
When talking MP3, 128kbps is NOT CD quality, no matter what encoder you use. Downloads in Ogg format would also be very nice. A lossless codec would be even better. Anything not lossless that calls itself "CD-Quality" is flat-out bogus.
So, put HIGH QUALITY files up, open formats like Ogg, and FLAC, as well as mp3, lossless files if you have the bandwidth/disk capacity, and as others have mentioned, LOTS of pictures, videos, and things like that. Extra stuff. People that like a band enough to buy a CD are usually VERY interested in just about everything and everyone surrounding the band. I am, anyway. Foo Fighters had it right when they included the bonus DVD with their "All For One" release. Take that idea and triple it.
Also, let people re-download their music freely if they've paid. Put that info in their account details so if their computer crashes they don't have to email you and cause everyone a big headache to get their music back. oversights like this can ruin the legitimate online music download market, so DON'T skip it.
Parent
Turn offs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Juit quickly:
1. Low quality and / or fixed format files. MP3 has a large market penetration and LAME is a great codec for 99% of the material, but I'd like to be able to download FLAC, WAV, OGG, or something else. Preferably a clean open lossless standard i.e. FLAC. If the track costs more for the high-quality version then the regular MP3 version I'm okay with that.
2. Forced to purchase a full album over single tracks. This is a big turn off for me, as I find only a few tracks are really worth it.
3. No preview of tracks. I'm not entirly sure if this is bad or not, but some way of previewing, either by a short clip, or a really low quality version of the song, is definately nice.
4. No support for countries outside of the US.
Obviously the US would be the biggest market to start out with, but support for Canada is a cruicial second IMO. Apple's iTunes Music Store doesn't (to my knowledge) support Canada yet, so I can't yet take advantage of it. Ideally, the system would be able to easily support all countries, perhaps with credit cards this is possible, but I see some possible legal implications here.
ugh (Score:4, Interesting)
So now instead of buying an album which includes artwork, booklet, blah blah blah... You have to download the damn things, print them yourself, etc. I'm sorry, but that's too much damn work for me. Plus, the result would look so unprofessional which makes it feel cheap, and I hate cheap.
This is so not the way to go. CD is a fine format. I like having the physical CD, I like having the physical artwork, I like CDs. I don't like the idea of paying money for bits and bytes that represent music.
They should find a way of distributing physical media at lower prices. This is just like books vs "electronic books". You can't beat holding the thing in your hands, placing it in your shelf, looking at your massive collection... But whatever, I guess.
Re:ugh (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus, there is the case of the 'limited edition'-CD of course, which will become extinct once distribution is fully digitized.
Buying MP3's off the Net is an option for me if I want an individual track, but not the entire CD. But if I want the full album, I'd prefer a physical disk, with a nice booklet etc...
Parent
Re:ugh (Score:5, Informative)
Don't listen to this guy!! Or rather, do listen to him, and others as well
What I mean to say is that the market for music is rather diverse, and you will probably end up catering to a subset. Yes, some people like physical CDs. If you can manage to let such people select tracks, burn the CD for them, stick in a nicely printed sleeve and ship the physical thing to him for $15, you could capture this part of the market.
But... there are plenty of people (like me) who do not care one bit for the physical product. I have lots of CD's, which I only play in my car stereo that I plan to replace with an MP3 or MiniDisc player anyway. I buy the CD, then rip the songs off it. I play my music from the computer at home. In the car or on the walkman I like to compose my own albums rather than play the prepackaged ones, so I use custom-burned CDs or MiniDiscs.
My point: do a proper market study to find out who your customers actually are, and what they want. I seriously doubt that you will find one "way to go" or that "this is so not the way to go.".
Parent
What I'd care about (Score:3, Interesting)
2. Allow for some freebies so you can check out the band before you buy.
3. High quality files (more than 128kbit mp3), and allow the option of selecting either ogg or mp3. Although you might be eligble for paying royalities if you go with mp3.
4. Fast downloads.
Albums (Score:5, Insightful)
Firstly, I would like to say that this isn't intended as a slur on your musicians.
You must understand where the album came from, why it exists. It is an example of technology leading art. When the technology existed to fit n minutes of music onto a record, musicians started to produce works that were n minutes long. This is why first there were singles, then albums. This has meant that much of what is on an album is filler. I'm looking at my rack of CDs now, and most of them I bought for a few (3-5) great tracks out of a total of roughly 10. The MP3s I have online to listen to aren't complete albums, just the good somgs from each album. There are plenty of albums I can put on as background music, but few that I'd actually want to listen to. Some vendors (like Apple) are starting to understand that the album is an artificial construct... what people really want are individual songs, delivered efficiently. You can't do that so easily on CD, because there isn't so much of a price differential for a retailer to stock a CD album as a CD single (i.e. transportation costs, staff costs, etc are all the same). But now you can, with the network and the MP3 format.
So, the thing that would make me buy online is being able to construct my own "greatest hits" album from a musicians entire catalogue, and get it sent to me on SACD or DVD/A. I'm not even worried about buying compilations of different artists - I can do those myself on my HD after all.
This model is bad for some "artists" because it means they can't make money from filler, but it's good for real artists and their fans, because the percentage of an album that's worth listening to (and hence buying) is so much higher. And it's bad for record labels either way...
Re:Albums (Score:5, Insightful)
Then I can only say that your listening habits are significantly different to mine and most of the people I associate with. It's rare for me to buy an album with more than a couple of poor tracks. The artists I like fairly consistently produce a solid collection of tracks with very little filler. There are a few exceptions, the odd one hit wonder that really doesn't have the songwriting ability to make a full album of music. But that's the exception, not the rule. Perhaps that's a consequence of listening to a genre of music (heavy metal) that's so under represented in the mainstream media that the concept of a single is almost unheard of. Most of my favourite bands only make albums -- there's no point in making a single, because it's never going to get played anywhere anyway. Or perhaps it's some other reason entirely...
P.S. Today's music recomendation: Masterplan [master-plan.net]'s eponymous debut album. Feel the soulburn...
Parent
Re:Albums (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not quite accurate. The band cares less about whether I hear them and more about whether I buy them. Seriously - if all they cared about was people listening to their music, they'd just give it away. Some artists do that, but they are a minority. N
Use your MP3s for marketing. (Score:3, Interesting)
You wont make alot of money trying to sell mp3s, however if your mp3s are 40-50 cents each, it will work. I'll buy a few mp3s if you dsell them for 50 cents each, price is the issue.
I suggest you make your mp3s cheap, and make them high quality 360. Let us pay via paypal.
Another way to handle it, if you dont want to go this route, is to let fans subscribe through paypal for say $1 a month. For $1 a month they recieve access to a site you setup which has mp3s on it, comments from the band like a band blog,pictures of concerts, and a list of when the concerts will be in the area etc.
Sell your services, dont sell your mp3s, people want to pay for services not for music. Do what AOL does, dont sell the websites, sell the service, set it up so we have to pay to access the blog, the mp3s, the pictures, and anything else a fan may like, make them pay to access the forum, and use MP3s are just part of the whole package.
give away a few mp3s so new people can listen and see if your band is actually good, but keep everything else for subscribers.
Video clips, Mp3s, Forum, Blog, Pictures, if your band is good, fans will pay for this.
Re:Use your MP3s for marketing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell no. Stick to your core business: music. Yes, do the rest as well, the blogs, pictures, and so on (I like the ability to obtain CD cover art), perhaps as a premium service for subscribers. But your core business is music: sell that! When I visit the site, I will do so to download music, and I'd be willing to pay for that. If I'd find enough music to interest me, I would take a subscription if it was offered. I might be interested in cover art, artist blogs and video clips, but if I had to pay to access these, I would simply do without them. My advice: offer these additional services for free to hook your customers to your site, and hope that it'll make them buy more music from you.
That said, it's a good idea to set up subscription-type plans, where a user pays a monthly fee for limited or unlimited downloads, ie. charge $0.99 a song, and $15/month for 50 songs each month. Perhaps offer subscribers a few extra services.
Also think about selling download bundles / gift certificates! Ie. an (electronic) gift certificate for 50 songs that you can order and mail to someone else for their birthday. If your current customers like your service, they'll want gift certificates and with those they will do your marketing for you, in a way.
Parent
Amazon It! (Score:5, Insightful)
Most importantly, the user experience needs to be attractive since this is a very competitive space (and a lot of your competition has a compelling price point: free). Take a long, hard look at Amazon.com, which is the best e-commerce website I know. Notice how they have striven to make the purchasing process fun and informative. Notice also how the information-rich experience they provide helps to cross- and upsell customers ("People who bought X also bought Y"). If you can include ratings, recommendations, user comments, etc. in your site in a way that is slick and easy to use, that will definitely help to attract and retain customers.
Personal opinion (Score:4, Insightful)
However - one thing about MP3. When you're converting concerts [or anything else where the tracks are seamless] MP3 does not cut it*. Why? Because the MP3 specification does not allow gapless playback.
Stick to Ogg Vorbis or MPC instead, which are natively gapless [not to mention of higher quality.] The former is patent-free, royalty-free and more flexible than MP3. Plus Winamp has native support.
* There is a proposal that aims to calculate gaps from MP3/AAC/MP4 and remove them, but this isn't implemented in any player/decoder yet.
Some comments (Score:3, Insightful)
If I were to be downloading these albums, something I would worry about is bitrate -- whether you encode at 128 or 192 or anything in between. I don't listen to rock, but when I'm listening to a techno track at 128, I cringe at every flaw and makes it quite unlistenable. Also, I'd be worried that if I downloaded this and then my hard drive went kaput that I wouldn't have access to it anymore. Of course it may be best to burn to CD as soon as it's all downloaded.
Things I Like: I like having stuff in .mp3. I have 3 mp3 players so it's much easier to not have to convert and as is especially the case with indie stuff, enter in the id3 info meticulously. I like the lower price. 2 bucks for a whole album? Sure I'll give 'em a whirl, especially if I heard them on your internet radio. I think internet radio sites need to become publishers more often so that people who hear the music can find it. I like your model: listen to IR, hear a song you love, go to your website, find the album the track is on and download it for 2 bucks, knowing you'll love at least one track but possibly more.
Again, kudos, if I listened to punk or metal or whatever, I'd give you a spin for sure.
Couldn't care less about the jewel case (Score:4, Informative)
The point is, I want the music for the music...I'm not really interested in whatever packaging it comes in. Thats just something else I have to carry around while I'm travelling.
What I do care about is:
* Fast Downloads
* Price
You don't have to pay for bandwidth (Score:3, Insightful)
You do have to contend with bandwidth charges though
Is this really necessary? As I've posted before I think a different approach is possible. Set up a site where people can select songs and pay for these using whatever method you prefer: credit card, paypal...
Once they have paid they are free to acquire the song any way they can. This could include you providing a torrent or a slow download, but users are equally free to get the song from any P2P network or by copying from a friend, relieving you of much of the bandwidth costs
This has the effect of legitimizing P2P networks which is why big brands are not going to go for it for a very long time. It does however give small brands an easy entry to online sales. Users take care of the distribution and you only have to provide them with a way of paying.
Factors (Score:3, Interesting)
Ogg Vorbis (Score:3, Insightful)
Ogg Vorbis would also save you some bandwidth cost as files with the same quality are smaller than MP3 files.
Ideally, you would want to encode at quality setting 5, which results in pretty-close-to-CD-quality. This is about 160kbps at the moment and the quality is, IMHO, a tick better than a 192kbps MP3.
One thing... (Score:5, Funny)
A good trick is to cleverly craft and advert for your site and then cunningly present it as an "ask slashdot" question, thereby getting free advertising to huge numbers of people.
I would do something like that if I were you.
Partying Like It's 1999, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Artwork?" See above. Lyrics, sure. Give us a link from your Website. Band photo? Okay, fine, whatever. But artwork? Cute, but not a whole lot of value added, IMO. The odds of your band's tracks living on their own CD in my collection are tres slim.
Price? Competitive with iTunes. Less than a buck per song. Per Song Want the ability to preview each track I buy.
Format? I'm a 256kb/s Ogg man myself, but it's tough to argue for that against the vastly more popular MP3. You are aware that the second your avaerage customer downlaods a track from your site it will begin to swirl about the planet freely on P2P networks across which you will receive no compensation? I trust the bands have another surce of revenue (touring, day jobs) and aren't planning on getting rich from MP3 sales...? If your sales just about cover your prep and distribution costs, and you categorize the whole venture under "PR" or "Promotion," I'd say you would have a winner.
Reputation problems (Score:3, Insightful)
(Incidentally, have you thought about the rate of chargebacks you will get from people who download the music and then claim it wasn't them?)
This introduces a risk for the customer: what if I don't like it. You can reduce this risk in two ways:
Good luck.
Paul.
Re:Reputation problems (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, remember that the costs of shipping, handling, packaging etc. will be quickly made up in the costs for bandwidth.
everthing matters (Score:3, Insightful)
Here are a few ideas that might help you out.
I have yet to see a site that knows whats its doing. Most are crap.. and the few that do something right.. do alot more wrong. The best thing is to remember what the goals are
Dont be like Darth Vader.. dont squeeze your grip..they will only slip between your fingers.. keep your hands open.. and scoop them all up.
Recommended Songs (Score:4, Interesting)
(1) A radio like service where I can listen at any time and choose preferences about music type. Then, when I heard something I like, I can save it at high bitrate (higher than the streaming radio, or perhaps even CD quality) for a fixed price with a "one-click" kind of interface. Maybe it could cost a fixed price per month ($5-$10) and then maybe $0.50 - $1.00 per song that I keep. This is obviously the more complicated system, but I think it's just about ideal.
(2) A website where I can sample songs (maybe a part at low bitrate) and get intelligent recommendations. Then I just buy what I want. I would prefer to not have a monthly cost, since sometimes I tire of a service and I don't like to have to go through a cancellation. But, I would be willing to pay up-front (like 5 or 10 songs) and then choose the ones I want later (I know that saves on transaction costs for the merchant).
Problem (Score:3, Interesting)
99Cent, no DRM, CD-like Quality (192kbit) (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seriously considered buying (Score:4, Interesting)
Give me an alternative to purchase via a merchant with a properly implemented online payment scheme which doesn't require me to:
a) Live in the US/Canada/EU countries (or some other form of geographical bias).
b) Pass to them my current/savings account info.
c) Fax paperwork to them.
And there are lots of them out there on the net... Try to resist the "easiest way out" method by using (only) PayPal.
My take (Score:4, Informative)
OK, that said...
I need to be able to preview tracks. Especially if (as seems likely) they're from bands I've never heard of.
I need the site to work with any browser.
I need the files to be burnable on a normal audio CD. I would like them to be regular audio files unencumbered by DRM.
Ideally I'd like LAME encoded MP3s, using --alt-preset standard or --r3mix depending on how much bandwidth you think you can spare.
I'd like downloadable artwork, yes. I'd print that out or add it to the MP3s for iTunes.
If you're gonna sell whole albums only, I need the price to be lower than the iTunes music store. I wouldn't buy an album from the iTMS because it's no cheaper than CD if you shop around; all my purchases have been single tracks from albums I would never buy the rest of. I reckon about 50 cents per track or $5 per album would work.
I absolutely will not pay for RealAudio or Windows Media content at any price, because they're proprietary write-only formats.
MP3 is obsolete (Score:4, Interesting)
And there's the issue of quality. Buying lossy-encoded music makes me feel uneasy. Even though all my music is played back from Vorbis files, in the back of my mind I know that I still have the source CDs, so if someday I were ever to upgrade my hardware to a level of quality where artifacts were perceptable (however unlikely), I can always re-encode with a higher bitrate.
I don't think I want to buy 128kbps files, even though stuff encoded at that bitrate sounds fine on the equipment that I use today. Make 'em very high bitrate Vorbis files or Flac or something. But not MP3.
Beyond that.. frankly, I can't think of any value I want added to the music. Just give me the files and assurance that the musicians got paid, and I'll be a happy customer.
I don't want physical extras (Score:4, Interesting)
I have quite the opposite viewpoint, and I dare say I'm a more your target audience since I've bought quite a bit from the Apple Music store.
I don't want to be encumbered by cd booklet, jacket art, or a physical CD. I spent quite a bit of time converting everything in my CD collection to MP3s for portability in file form. I also don't want to be tied to the album format; part of the point of Mp3s is to mix and match songs by artist. Therefore, the liner notes of a CD is uneeded for the song order. The song titles are in the file. The lyrics? If I cared that much, I'd look 'em up online. Art? I'm certainly not looking at the art when I'm listening to this stuff on an iPod...
I'd say in terms of extras you could focus on higher quality audio for people who like the tunes. And, put the lyrics online for those who want them. Lastly, I'd suggest music videos streaming on your website. Other than that, I don't think many people who are into buying Mp3s are going to be overly concerned with all these "extras". The people who are into extras are probably going to be wanting a CD anyway.
Link here... (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft tries to stop Schnazzle [nwsource.com]
Now, to investigate further at Google!
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