Index of Digital Music
March 4th, 2008
 When we were checking out Nine Inch Nails’ site for their new release, Ghosts I-IV, we noticed that they are doing some really interesting things with podcasting, remixing and Creative Commons.
- Many of their tracks are available with Remix-ready Garageband files.
- Ghosts I-IV is made available with a Creative Commons license and with multi-track stems for remixing.
- They’ve got a site devoted to fan remixes.
They also provide good information on using RSS feeds, and offer podcast feeds for their fan remixes:
To use RSS feeds as podcasts with iTunes, simply drag the icon  for the feed you want into iTunes. iTunes will then automatically download MP3s when new remixes are added - you can even sync them to your iPod.
REMIX SITE FEEDS (RSS/XML)
NIN is making smart use of new licensing and podcasting to promote their music. And, if you want to use Nine Inch Nails’ music to score your next project, they’ve got you covered.
Another musician working intelligently with the Internet is Moby.
February 19th, 2008
Good news for Apple: half of all music sold in the US will be digital in 2011.
Sales of digitally downloaded music will surpass physical CD sales in 2012, according to a new report by Forrester Research. Digital music sales will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23 percent over the next five years, reaching $4.8 billion in revenue by 2012, but will fail to make up for the continuing steady decline in CD sales. In 2012, CD sales will be reduced to just $3.8 billion.
Among the drivers of Forresters forecast for music sales:
- MP3 player adoption. The average MP3 player is only 57 percent full, suggesting that the devices are underutilized, while more of the devices are being bought by households with more than one MP3 player. Moving forward, a majority of MP3 players will be sold to households that already have one.
- DRM-free music. With the four big music labels now committed to eliminating digital rights management (DRM), DRM-free music will extend beyond pioneer Amazon.com to Apple iTunes and the other major online music sites.
- Social networks. DRM-free music enables every profile page on MySpace.com or Facebook to immediately become a music store where friends sell friends their favorite tracks.
“The industry has to redefine what its product is,” according to Forrester’s James McQuivey. “New forms of revenue will come from unexpected sources. For example, the industry has failed to capitalize on the growing popularity of video games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band.”
February 4th, 2008
 Music subscription services have, by and large, bombed. The idea of renting music hasn’t taken off and, even worse, customers have to worry about the services’ futures.
The latest example of this comes with Yahoo’s subscription music service. On Monday, the company announced that it will discontinue its Yahoo Music Unlimited subscription service and has instead struck a deal with RealNetworks’ Rhapsody service:
Beginning in the middle of 2008, Yahoo Music Unlimited subscribers will be guided through an in-browser process to convert their music libraries to Rhapsody’s service. For a limited time (length unknown), they’ll be able to keep paying Yahoo’s subscription fees, which cap out at $8.99 per month, before being required to start paying Rhapsody’s $12.99.
Anything could happen with the service, though, given Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid for Yahoo.
January 28th, 2008
Yesterday, when everybody was hyping the new ad-supported music service Qtrax, we said Qtrax was D.O.A.
We noted that “Qtrax wants you to download software to watch ads to get DRM’d music that probably won’t work on your media player.” Not something that we really want to do.
Others are starting to see through the free music fog, too, and realize that Qtrax isn’t all that it claims:
- The Times Online notes that “none of the four major labels had done deals with the site, putting a large dent in the promised catalogue of 25 million songs and prompting allegations that the site’s founders had misled fans.”
- The BBC reports that, despite the fact that Qtrax is saying it has deals with all the major music labels that deals have not been signed.
- Ars Technica says that Qtrax is vaporware, making big promises that it can’t deliver.
The ad-supported music model is going nowhere fast, because people already have a lot of digital music, don’t spend a lot on digital music, and really, really hate annoying advertising.
New music startups need to address a real problem - helping you find music you like among the millions of free tracks that are already legally available on the Internet.
January 28th, 2008
 The net is abuzz with talk today about Qtrax, another service that promises free ad-supported music.
The Qtrax service offers to let you use an ad-supported program to search for and download DRM’d music that you can play on a PC and on some media players.
Unfortunately, it looks like Qtrax will be as dead on arrival as the rest of the music industry music download sites and iTunes-killers have been over the last few years.
Here’s why Qtrax is D.O.A.:
- Qtrax solves a problem you probably don’t have - paying for music. The average iPod owner has spent about $20 bucks on music downloads. That’s not a problem worth fixing.
- Qtrax forces you to watch ads - people generally hate ads and haven’t shown much interest in ad-supported software like Qtrax, as a result.
- Qtrax requires a proprietary application that you have to install. You’ve probably got at least three or four media apps on your computer already, between Windows Media Player, Real Player and iTunes. Do you want to dink with downloading and patching and updating another app just to save a few bucks on music?
- Qtrax is making promises it can’t deliver. They promise to offer music from the big four music labels, but at least three of the big four labels - Warner, EMI & Universal - haven’t agreed to let Qtrax distribute their music.
- Qtrax’ music is DRM’d - DRM’d music is on the way out. Apple has been the only company to successfully establish an accepted DRM standard for digital music, and the music industry doesn’t want to have all their eggs in Apple’s basket. The industry’s strategy to control the music business now is to offer a limited number of partners, like Amazon, the ability to sell DRM-free MP3s.
- Qtrax doesn’t work with iPods - this is the WTF? bullet point. Why is anyone excited about a digital music service that doesn’t work with iPods?
- Qtrax is managed by the guys who ran Spiralfrog, the last free music service that bombed - remember Spiralfrog, the free music service that offered DRM’d tracks incompatible with most people’s media players? The company that went on to lose $3.4 million on revenue of about $20,000? The Qtrax press area hypes that former Spiralfrog executives joined Qtrax in April.
- Qtrax is not Mac compatible - it might be compatible in March! Or….it might not be.
In other words…..Qtrax wants you to download software to watch ads to get DRM’d music that probably won’t work on your media player.
While some seem to think this is a recipe for success - we think it means that Qtrax is D.O.A.
Update: Ars Technica offers another skeptical take on the service: “I can’t see many of today’s P2P users opting for a “legal” service that sends them DRMed files, not when DRM-free music can be so easily obtained from the very same P2P network. The Zune-style approach of taking a Gnutella P2P song, wrapping it in DRM, and then enforcing a certain set of usage rules is a turn-off.”
January 27th, 2008
 Amazon.com has announced plans for an international rollout of Amazon MP3 , a DRM-free MP3 digital music store, in 2008.
Amazon MP3 is currently the only retailer that the four major labels are allowing to offer customers DRM-free MP3s. As a result, it can offer over 3.3 million songs from more than 270,000 artists in DRM-free MP3 format.
Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device; organize their music using any music management application, such as iTunes or Windows Media Player; and burn songs to CDs for personal use.
The company is not disclosing a specific launch timeline for individual Amazon international websites.
January 14th, 2008
For a long time, people have thought that getting the music industry to switch to DRM-free MP3s for music downloads would open the doors to a consumer-friendly world of digital music competition.
Now it’s starting to look like the music industry wil use DRM-free MP3s to enforce their traditional monopoly on what you hear, what you buy and where you buy it.
The New York Times reports that the mainstream music industry will be using the Super Bowl to undermine Apple’s dominance in the world of digital music. The labels have cut exclusive deals with Amazon to let the retailer not only offer all their music downloads as DRM-free MP3s, but at a better price than Apple.
In other words, they’re trying to use exclusive deals and monopolistic tactics to weaken Apple’s role in digital music so they control what you hear, where you hear it first and and where you buy it:
Behind this strategy is a growing desperation: sales of digital albums and songs are rising far too slowly to offset the rapid decline of the CD, the industry’s mainstay product. CD sales slid 19 percent last year; after adding in the 50 million digital albums sold last year and counting every 10 digital songs sold as an album, overall music sales were still down 9.5 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
In trying to nurture Amazon’s service, the four major record companies have offered it one potential edge. One by one, they have agreed to offer their music catalogs for sale on the service in the MP3 format, without the digital locks that restrict users from making copies of the songs. (Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the second-biggest company and the last holdout, signed on last week. Sony BMG is a joint venture of Sony and Bertelsmann).
All of the companies except the EMI Group still require Apple to sell their music wrapped in digital rights management software, or D.R.M., which is intended to discourage rampant copying. Some consumers say D.R.M. creates confusing problems, like a lack of compatibility between most songs and the devices sold by Apple and Microsoft. In fact, it was Mr. Jobs who, in February, called on the industry to drop its longstanding insistence on the use of the software, saying it had failed to rein in piracy.
Increased competition in the digital music world is good, but we’d like to see everyone operating on a level playing field. As it stands now, the music industry is set to use DRM-free MP3s to remake the world of Internet music into a “2.0″ version of the old music industry - Big Four labels, RIAA, Wal-Mart and all.
Image: Salsa Puppets
January 7th, 2008
 Napster has joined the ranks of companies trying to compete with Apple’s iTunes by offering MP3 music downloads.
The file format change will apply only to single tracks and album purchases, according tothe company. Tracks downloaded as part of the company’s music subscription service will continue to be DRM’d.
“The ubiquity and cross-platform compatibility of MP3s should create a more level playing field for music services and hardware providers and result in greater ease of use and broader adoption of digital music,” Chris Gorog, Napster’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.
In other words, by offering MP3s, Napster has a chance of selling tracks to the largest group of portable media player owners, iPod users.
December 2nd, 2007
 Deutsche Grammophon, the world’s leading classical music record label, has launched the DG Web Shop, a digital music store that offers the majority of the label’s recordings as MP3 downloads. Almost 2,500 DG albums will be available for download at a transfer bit-rate of 320 kilobits per second (kbps).
The label will be available in 40 countries, including areas where other digital music stores aren’t available: Southeast Asia, including China, India, Latin America, South Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe, including Russia.
Exposing The Long Tail
Among the highlights of the DG Web Shop are nearly 600 album titles which are no longer available as CDs. More out-of-print titles are expected to follow. The goal is to digitize all the great Deutsche Grammophon recordings to be available for download.
Individual titles with a playing time of up to seven minutes will be priced as low as $/€1.09; while regular-length albums – with/without “e-booklets” (ie, cover-art, photographs, and liner notes) – will sell for between $/€10.99 and $/€11.99.
“The DG Web Shop will play a defining role in the digital marketplace,” said Universal Music’s Christopher Roberts, “superior audio, easy-to-use and compatible with all players.”
December 1st, 2007
 After years of attack from everyone from privacy advocates to consumer rights groups to so-called “freetards”, it looks like DRM’d music may finally get killed off by Wal-Mart & Pepsi.
And it’s not because they care about your rights as a consumer. It’s because they want onto your iPod.
According to an article in Billboard, Warner Music Group (WMG) and Sony BMG Music Entertainment are making plans to follow EMI and Universal Music Group’s lead in distributing music in the MP3 format, under pressure from Pepsi and Wal-Mart.
Pepsi’s MP3 Promotion
Pepsi plans to feature a download promotion on the inside of 5 billion of its soda bottlecaps. Sources say Pepsi customers will need to collect five caps in order to exchange them for a download; this yields the potential for 1 billion redeemable tracks.
In the new Pepsi promotion, sources say, Amazon will serve as the supplier for the downloads, and customers will need to visit a specific redemption store on the Amazon site to access music from participating labels.
If the major labels want to ride on Pepsi’s publicity, they’re going to have to offer MP3s through Amazon.
Wal-Mart Throws Its Weight Around
Meanwhile, the world’s largest retailer can’t get its online music store off the ground because of the limited selection of un-DRM’d MP3’s it can sell.
Because of this, Wal-Mart is reportedly plans to pull WMG and Sony BMG’s music files in the Windows Media Audio format from Walmart.com some time between mid-December and mid-January, if the labels haven’t yet provided the music in MP3 format.
While Wal-Mart has about 22% of the physical CD market, it’s a minor player online.
|
