By eoghan on Wednesday, September 26, 2007 Amazon's MP3 store went live yesterday (well, it opened its doors as a public beta) on the US Amazon site. At a quick glance it is an impressive offering for a Beta:
All MP3s they sell are without any form of copy-protection.
About 2 million songs are available for purchase which, for a freshly launched public beta service, compares favourably to eMusic and Apple (who claim 2.7 million and three million tracks respectively).
Half of the songs are priced at US $0.89, the rest at US $0.99. This is cheaper than iTunes DRM-free MP3s ($1.29 each), but eMusic still offers a better deal to US downloaders
Prices for complete album downloads are in the US $6-$10 range.
Unlike many other online music stores you don't need iTunes or Windows Media player to download, play or manage the tracks, even so…... Read More »
|
By eoghan on Tuesday, September 25, 2007In recent months there has been growing talk of services that would allow music fans to download legal MP3s for free, thanks to the support of ads. While a number of services are already seeing the light of day the bad news is that not all of them can be used by music fans outside of the USA or Canada.
 Take Spiral Frog. Launched last week (6 months after they originally planned) they describe themselves as a "Web-based, ad-supported music experience, combining music discovery with the free acquisition of audio and music video files". Right. Boiling it down to brass tacks, they currently have 800,000 tracks licensed from Universal Music and several independent labels that you can download for free, all supported by ads. Unfortunately... Read More » |
By eoghan on Tuesday, September 25, 2007Matt Cutts (a Google employee whose blog I dip into for nerdy hints on how Google's search engine works) last week posted, as a diversion from his usual geeky stuff, a blog entry about a fledgling business idea he had that touches directly on music and how it is consumed today.
His idea (which BTW he has no intention to follow up on) was for a company to provide a service of making someone's illegal MP3s legal. Something along the lines of allowing the company to scan your music collection for illegal file-shared MP3s and to convert them to legal MP3s (with high quality bitrates and maybe cover art, lyrics, etc). (Obviously there are privacy & trust concerns with letting a company scan your computer in such a way. But for the sake of exploration let's assume that a company offering such a hypothetical service is a) considered trustworthy by its targeted consumers and b) addresses privacy concerns.)
Now with... Read More » |
By eoghan on Friday, September 21, 2007 The New York Times annonced this week that they were going to stop charging for access to parts of their website (they had been charging $49.95 a year for online access to the work of its columnists and its archives). Despite persuading 227,000 readers to pony up the money (and netting about a tidy little 10 million dollars a year) they have done the sums and realised that, if they open up their website to everyone and run ads on each page, they can actually make even more money.
Indeed, subscription-based models for accessing web content are slowly - but surely - dying. All thanks in the main to the rise of the new targeted advertising models for the web, available to any website - big or small - through services such as Google's Adsense program (which CLUAS uses).
... Read More »
|
By eoghan on Saturday, August 25, 2007Blogging will be light from me until early September. In meantime here's a few links that caught my eye recently:
It turns out that YouTube's Terms & Conditions state that it can license any content uploaded to its servers as it sees fit. CNET have the details. Any independent bands uploading, for example, DIY videos of their music to Youtube should sit up and take note. A similar broo-ha hit the interweb last year for MySpace but a campaign - spearheaded by Billy Bragg - got them to dilute down their terms. Will YouTube, like MySpace before them, soon do the decent thing?
Major US ISP throttle Bit Torrent: if such policies become more widespread among ISPs could it reduce the usefullness... Read More » |
By eoghan on Tuesday, August 21, 2007 Yesterday the Consumer Association of Ireland published the letter they sent to MCD after receiving complaints from hundreds of ticket holders for the Barbara Streisand gig in Celbridge. The letter seeks a refund in addition to compensation for the complainants that contacted them.
Will MCD cough up? Many doubt it and that what awaits us, once they send in their reply to the CAI, is another round of phone-ins to Joe Duffy featuring some of the punters in question, the CEO of the CAI and a PR person from MCD going on the defensive with a list of banal talking points. And then it'll all quieten down, until the next concert controversy.
Surely there is an alternative here? An opportunity for MCD to turn this around? Instead of taking a position of 'no compromise'... Read More »
|
By eoghan on Tuesday, August 21, 2007 The Consumer Association of Ireland (CAI) today published a letter it sent to MCD, motivated by 95 complaints representing 343 ticket holders to the Barbara Streisand concert in Celbridge.
No matter what you think of Madame Streisand's music (or, for that matter, of people prepared to cough up a fortune to sit in a field and listen to it) the letter presents a long list of complaints from a large number of punters.
The letter seeks not only a refund but also compensatation for the complainants for "their lack of enjoyment of the concert" (although I do note that the lack of enjoyment they talk about is not of the musical kind).
Citing the The Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Act, 1980, the letter also claims a... Read More »
|
By eoghan on Friday, August 17, 2007
Twenty-five years ago, on August 17 1982, the first ever CDs rolled off an assembly line in Hannover Germany. And the music that was on those first CDs? Some future-focused music of the day? Maybe New Order's 'Temptation'? Or Simple Minds 'Glittering Prize'? Or even the Stranglers 'Golden Brown'? No, the first music on the first CD was Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony.
The first CD player hit the shelves a few months later on 1 October 1982. A Sony player, it was initially available only in - where else but - Japan. And the first CD to be supplied for mass consumption? Billy Joel's '52nd Street'. Obvious choice, really.
... Read More »
|
By eoghan on Friday, August 17, 2007
NME are reporting that the new Radiohead album (which was remastered last month) won't be out until 2008. I can only speculate, but there may well be some fascinating stuff going on behind this decision to postpone the release.
With Radiohead out of a contract, their non-aversion to corporate bashing (despite being signed for years to a multinational) and the music industry up in arms over what the future holds, I suspect that they are planning some innovative means of getting the album out there. I certainly don't expect them to do a Prince and stick a free copy of the album on the cover of the Daily Mail, nor just release it via iTunes or eMusic or Amazon's new MP3 store. They are in a unique position - a band with a huge global following without any record... Read More »
|
By eoghan on Tuesday, August 14, 2007 The days of record company lawyers sending intimidatingletters to music fans suspected of illegally downloading and/or uploading copyrighted music may be coming to an end. At least in the EU.
If it happens it will be as a consequence of some action in that plush auditorium there to the right. No it's not Whelan's after its ongoing refurbishment, it's the main chamber of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg. There is a strong likelihood that the ECJ's judges may soon rule that... Read More »
|
By eoghan on Tuesday, August 14, 2007 When recently blogging about what might possibly be the best ever pricing model for selling MP3s I mentioned how EMI were the only major record label to allow MP3s of their artists' music to be sold without copy protection. Now however they are being joined by Universal. Well, sort of. Let me explain.
Over the weekend Universal records said they would start selling MP3s free from the shackles of Digital Rights Management. A welcome move, but as always the devil is in the detail. For example:
Their move is an experiment and not a full commitment to go down the route of DRM-free MP3s. They will evaluate... Read More »
|
By eoghan on Thursday, August 09, 2007
When it comes to downloading legal music from the internet two of the biggest names in town - iTunes and eMusic - have built up their business on back of two different pricing regimes. iTunes charge consumers by the download - 99 cents for each DRM-protected track (or EUR 1.29 for a track that is DRM free, but of EMI artists only). On the other hand eMusic have a subscription model where every month you can pay from EUR 12.99 (for 20 downloads, no DRM protection) up to Euro 20.99 (for 75 downloads).
iTunes and eMusic however can expect some potentially considerable competition when Amazon launches their MP3 store later this year but the most disruptive aspect of their... Read More »
|
By eoghan on Friday, August 03, 2007 Note: After a huge interlude (during which whatever spare time I had was focused on sorting out stuff for the CLUAS site) I'm now getting back into blogging, I suspect it'll be in starts and studders for a while though, but hang in there...
The internet is, er, killing the music industry. Obviously.
Thankfully we have Elton John who, single-handedly, has come up with the best idea yet to save the music industry from inevitable death delievred by the hand of devious digital demons: we must (wait for it) shut the internet down!
Damn, if only I had thought of that earlier. Yes, in yesterday's Sun Elton John went on the (analog, non-digital, paper-archived) record stating:
"I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span… there’s too much technology available… I’m sure, as far as music goes, it would be much more interesting.”
... Read More »
|
By eoghan on Friday, June 01, 2007Warning:
This blog entry starts out with a flimsy but deceptive rock music angle to lure a reader in. This is a trick. Because - before you know it - it descends full-on into all sorts of political stuff.
Whether the widely derided Rock the Vote initiative had any impact in terms of getting greater numbers of younger voters to vote is something we will probably never know. I for one have my doubts that they did succeed on this front. But in an earlier posting on Rock The Vote I lamented how the initiative did not have any chance (or apparent willingness) to address what are two other key barriers to getting a greater proportion of 18-30 year olds voting, namely:
Not being registered to vote (or being registered to do so in another part of the country from where you live / work / study),
The (since time-eternal) imposition of the party in power of a week day election.
Now it's not very rawk'n'roll... Read More » |
By eoghan on Friday, May 25, 2007
UNKL, a bunch of American creative types who (to quote themselves) "develop products that tie directly to their ever growing line of urban vinyl characters" have a whole range of 2" minature dolls they flog for about US$8.
They have just announced that they will be launching a “six pack” set of Wilco dolls at some Comic shin-dig called Comic-Con, taking in San Diego in July. We're talking a limited edition of 1000 of the 6 packs, which can be ordered for 50 bucks on Wilco's Musictoday store. Earliest shipping date is June 15th (and watch for the importation duties slapped on by your friendly Custom and Excise service).
Hat tip: DaddyTypes,... Read More »
|