Unlimited Legal Music Downloads for $3.95 a Month? 244
fishmasta writes "I'm at a major university studying the music industry, so we get to regularly talk to executives in the major labels. In a recent talk with someone working at Warner Bros, she brought up an idea they want to try where all file sharing is legalized by paying $4-5 a month through an ISP, all downloads are permanent, and you can get them from any source, and do what you want with them. It seems like some in the industry are starting to 'get it.' I was just wondering what Slashdot thinks of this idea. Would you be willing to pay a small fee each month if you could get all the music you want and have no legal liability?"
El-Man has another take on that subject replacing "unlimited" with a set number of licenses: "I believe that people are basically honest (maybe a failing, but it's how I feel), and are quite happy to pay for something of value. With music downloads, the only solution the recording industry has come up with is wrapping digital files with onerous, incompatible DRM systems, suing those whom they say have illegally distributed music (what is it, 13000 people and counting? Surely the courts have better things to do!), and generally not doing themselves or music lovers any good. How about a system, whereby a user can purchase a license for [n] amount of digital music files? Numbers can be, 10, 50, 100, 200, etc. Doesn't matter what the files are, as long as the number is not exceeded. There'd be a lot of details to thrash out, but is this something that is ultimately workable?"
If you were an executive of a medium-to-large sized record company, how would you handle the potential of the Internet?
Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't this basically just stealing from people who don't illegally download music off the Internet? Because basically you have to pay whether you download songs or not. I don't download copyrighted music anymore, but if Warner keeps advocating stealing from me I just might start stealing from them again in retaliation.
No (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no way for the money to get back to the artist. This plan only benefits the labels. Perhaps they can survey the P2P networks and get a sample of what's being searched for, then pay the artists accordingly. This will ensure the popular artists get the money while those with fewer fans get the shaft. At least by getting DRMed music, in theory the provider can accurately track whose music is being downloaded and thus compensate the artists.
Re:I doubt it... (Score:3, Interesting)
From a future executive? (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe that music has some interesting profit incentives when it is played live. We've looked into all sorts of value-added options for those live venues, including the following:
* Buy the official CD, get a free ticket to a private show.
* Buy the official CD, get a login to view the band in the studio for a set period of time
* After the live show, purchase a real-time edited sound-board fed DVD of the show
* Buy practice time with the band
* Let anyone else play the song live if you like, but we'll make sure we find out who performed what and when, and advertise that we're the co-op that created the music.
I don't believe in any intellectual property. In the last 6 months, I have attended almost 50 live shows in the Chicago Indie, Punk and alternative scene. I've met over 75 bands who have admitted that copyright has done jack for their income, and they were always better off giving away the recorded music in exchange for getting people into the shows. If you're a musician and you want to earn an income, is it better for the top 10 in the country to make $10,000,000 because they're the main earners for those who control the distribution networks? Or would you rather see 1,000 bands locally who can generate $100,000 each?
There is a lot of money out there to be made when you take out the copyright cartel companies from the market. I firmly believe that bands can make money if they realize the supply and demand forces at work can not be manipulated. Taking advantage of supply and demand is the best way to go about it. MP3 = near infinite supply = $0. Live music = limited supply = income. QED.
Re:Kinda... (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes. And I already am. I am paying for my internet access and the CDs and DVDs I buy are levied because I am expected to be pirating music/movies with them.
Because I am considered guilty anyway and because I have paid my debt through various levies, I do not expect to have any legal liability. Thank you.
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess it depends on what was meant by 'download'. If they're talking about downloading from the current (or something similar) P2P programs, i.e. off some dudes hard drive, then no way I'd pay money for that. You'd still be left with the all too common partial files, mislabeled files, slooooow downloads, etc.
Now, if it was something like emusic.com used to be. All you can eat legal mp3's, for a flat fee, then hell yes.
But paying money, just to use the current P2P offerings? That's just paying protection money to the RIAA, and they don't have to do anything at all.
Re:Oh Canada... (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I find the idea of paying a levy on every piece of media I *could* use to pirate music repugnant. I do sound for a Dharma center where we have a lot of teachings; we record them and give them away for free. Having to pay a levy for an iPod or for CDs or whatever is completely unfair in this case - we aren't getting any of that money back when people copy our audio (nor do we want it - the audio is *supposed* to be free).
Meanwhile, because of all the paranoia from the music industry, it's very difficult to record anything - there are so many attempts to close the analog hole and to avoid perfect copies that, to this day, it is a struggle to get any kind of usable equipment that works for us - e.g., something where you push "record" and you get a clean digital recording. If you have the bucks for really expensive pro gear this isn't out of the question, but all of the sub-$1k equipment is deliberately crippled.
Re:sounds good in theory... (Score:5, Interesting)
However what happens to the tracking if the artists themselves decide to boost their income by having bots download their songs as often as possible?
Tracking P2P downloads is probably simple and accurate as long as noone is profiting directly from the results. As soon as an individuals salary is completely dependant on these figures then I think it will get much more difficult to ensure the correctness of the results - it is too easy for people to influence.
Re:Kinda... (Score:3, Interesting)
Is backing up your (homework/thesis/research/work of any kind) really that rare? What about driver discs? I won't try and pretend that Linux makes up a big portion of the sales, but I think there's a lot of family photo albums out there. Tax season has begun, my family keeps their results on a CD, is that uncommon?
Personally I think there's a big market out there for completely legitimate uses for CDs, before you even approach the car audio compilation, which is also very popular and legal if you have a clean source.
~Rebecca
Re:sounds good in theory... (Score:4, Interesting)
That should be no problem. Lets say everybody pays x dollars a month, and lets say three dollars of everyone's payments is to be distributed to the artist. If all you download in one month is one Britney Spears song, she gets your three dollars. If you download her song tenthousand times, she gets three dollars. If you download ten different songs, everyone gets 30 cents, if you download 1000 different songs, everyone gets 0.3 cents.
The bot can only produce three dollars of income to an artist, but it needs an ISP address where more than three dollars are paid, so it is a net loss.
What would be dangerous is a virus that gets copied on many machines of paying consumers and downloads stuff they don't want.
Re:Absolutely not (Score:2, Interesting)
What I'd do would be to try to get away from the amount of money an artist earns being directly related to their record sales. I think a model more closely modeled on professional atheletes would be better, a studio would pay a yearly wage to an artist and for that they'd get exclusive access to their work (and possibly their back catalogue). As an artist's popularity went down they'd be paid less which would then free up money for new bands. Some artists would probably choose to become "self employed" and cut out the middle man.
Re:The average person now spends about $4.50 / mon (Score:3, Interesting)
Currently the RIAA has two tasks:
- Find and/or fabricate artist(s) and promote them.
- Distribute physical media for a profit.
They don't produce content: Artists do, and always will.The problem for the RIAA is that internet+economics dictates that they are no longer the cheapest/most-efficient method for accomplishing Task#2.
So then comes the argument that We've never seen a mega-band come from non-RIAA promotion (i.e. internet alone). Well, that's simply not quite true (as in the whole truth). The reality is that the RIAA controls the single best music advertising medium: Commercial Radio. Wanna get radio play? sign right up... Don't wanna sign? sorry, no play for you. Radio play equates to CD and ticket sales in a very real way, and the RIAA knows it (now!) which was why payola was made illegal (which hasn't stopped the practice, just changed it to 'promoters').
So let's eliminate the RIAA completely and see where this goes:
Commercial radio isn't going to die if the RIAA doesn't payola them, so there's no loss there.
People will hear new music from a variety of sources: radio, internet, friends, etc so people will still get new music, so no loss there.
Will it be the same bands? Probably not, since we already know that the RIAA is pretty bad at picking good bands (by their own 1-in-20 numbers). Is that a loss? Not in the least: it's a major bonus for music enthusiasts. No more sifting through the crap they feel is most profitable (i.e. those that would sign away their artistic integrity).
This decentralises the power of who gets to control what you hear. Friends and the 'net (blogs, last.fm whatever) become more important in determining what you listen to, and the local radio station might (again!) have a say in what they play. The title 'music director' might again be someone who actually picks up random recordings and plays them, or better, DJs might again get to do the same... 'music director' is an invention of the RIAA controlled marketplace.
So, do I want a system that continues to prop up a business that has outlived it's usefulness, and is harmful to artists and consumers? Nope, I won't pay for the buffet.
Re:Oh Canada... (Score:3, Interesting)
In general, ALSA drivers are good, but only for non-obscure equipment. The M-Audio gear is sufficiently obscure that I'd have to have a lot of miles on it in testing before I'd trust it live. Pretty much the difference between a pro setup and a cheap setup is that the pro setup works reliably. You pay the extra money not so much for better quality hardware as that the manufacture is going to be in deep doo-doo if somebody loses a recording session on the pro gear they bought for a couple of thousand bucks, but if you lose data on the cheap stuff, the manufacturer pretty much doesn't care.
Ironically, what I'm using right now is a Shuttle box, and it pretty much does the job with the baseboard audio - I don't need an M-audio card, because the motherboard comes with a line in. The software is all command-line, which means that only I can operate it, but that's fixable - as I said earlier, I'll probably wrap some Qt4 widgets around DarkIce and do some trivial mods to support storing uncompressed audio rather than MP3. It's a work in progress.
$1k for a reliable recorder is a little spendy, but that's about what you have to pay. I'd really like something the size of a Nokia 770 with a line in and a real spinning disk drive - that would address my need precisely, because it runs Linux, so I can slap a custom recording program on it and go. Unfortunately the real Nokia 770 doesn't have a line in, and doesn't really support spinning media, so I'd have to get an iMic or something, and it'd take me a long time to be able to trust the driver on that.
Also, you're right that I'm asking for the world. What's wrong with that? Seems like the world is eminently buildable - there are devices that are very, very close to what I want on the market already. Sadly, there are none that do exactly what I want.
We tried the iRiver for a while, but that was a huge disappointment - despite being a great hardware platform for recording, the UI is geared primarily for playback (one wonders how many people buy an iRiver when they could have an iPod for less money if all the want is playback), and, unbelievably, the iRiver maxes out at an hour and nine minutes of recording if you record into a WAV file at 44KHz+mono (less if you go stereo), and so what we found was that we kept getting half a class, because the person operating the iRiver had no real way of noticing that it had stopped recording. You could set up a discipline (e.g., set a timer for an hour, start a new session then) but it's not practical unless you have professionals doing the recording, and we don't.
The lesson here for me is that it pretty much has to run Linux or I don't want to be bothered with it. So no more iRivers. No windows boxes. No Macs (mac sound drivers tend to fluctuate in quality from release to release, unfortunately, and coding for Cocoa and Apple's sound system is deeply painful). I'm confident that within a year or so there will be something on the market that fits the bill, but I can still whine about it in the meantime!
Re:sounds good in theory... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure they can: If an artist puts 10 songs on a CD that sells for $15, it comes to $1.50 a song. The label takes its profit, and the artist takes the rest. That's the way it works now, no?
Artists have to churn out songs one after another to keep a steady income. Most just can't keep up. Result? CDs filled with crappy songs that cost way too much.
Fast-forward a bit. Now, the record labels have figured out that the internet is a useful mechanism for selling music. The difference is that now, they charge $5 per month for unlimited downloads. Since the record label is pulling in money at a regular clip just from people being subscribed, artists are under less pressure to crank out songs. They can concentrate on making good music. The ones who don't get downloaded (i.e., miss a download target some number of consecutive months in a row) get dropped from the label. Also, lets don't forget that this gives opportunities to more musicians to "make it" as the cost for producing 1 or two songs to be downloaded would be phenomenally less than the cost of making an album, not to mention an instantly broader audience.
Result? A system where good musicians get weeded out from the bad without requiring the good ones to sacrifice their reputations by writing 3 crappy songs for every 1 good one. Better music. Better prices. More profit.