Labels to ask Apple for music subscription model on iTunes - report - AppleIns

Offering subscriptions alongside the current iTunes buying model would be a very smart move for Apple. :)

It would essentially knock Microsoft out of the music market, as MS's last best hope for the Zune revolves around a 'cellular carrier' type of model where someone would sign up for a 1- or 2-year subscription for Zune Marketplace, and in return would receive a 'FREE' or steeply-discounted Zune. The hardware is in effect subsidized by the service fees over the length of the contract.

Has worked great for the wireless carriers for a long time now- that 'FREE' cellphone you got likely costs $200+ retail...

Apple would improve its relations with the record companies, offer increased consumer choice AND kick the last leg out from under Microsoft's music efforts all with one fell swoop by offering subscriptions (along with free or cheap iPods for long-term contracted subscribers). Seems like a win-win-win situation all the way around, so long as they don't stop offering 99 cent downloads... and it's highly doubtful they'd do that.

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Screw subscriptions. I want to own the music I spend my money on. Period.

Did the Music studios get a percentage of record player sales? No.
It seems to me that they are complaining that Apple gets too much money from ipod sales.
ipods have nothing to do with piracy. If there were no ipods, there would still be piracy (see cassettes).
What if they sold music for what it's worth? What if they started to promote live music (not just the BIG names on tour, but anyone who wants to perform and can draw a reasonable crowd at a reasonable price)?
What if they started respecting musicians as something more than money?
What if they released CDs that had more than one or two good tracks on them, so you wouldn't be tempted to cherry pick songs on iTunes instead of buying the entire album? What if they signed artists who were capable of making an entire GOOD album, rather than one overproduced overhyped track and bunch of sheeite filler?
What if they reduced CD prices to something reasonable to spur sales?
What if they actually developed and nurtured artists over the long-term?
What if the music industry suits actually had a clue? :no:

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Screw subscriptions. I want to own the music I spend my money on. Period.

You never will. The iTunes Music Store lets you license the music for a flat rate, but you certainly don't own anything when you buy from it. You still have to comply with the iTunes user agreement or you're breaking the law, and whether your license is transferable is still up to the licensor. That people buying from the iTMS music store feel they own something is a nice myth.

When you buy a CD, you only own the physical plastic and metal substrate, by the way. The pattern of 1's and 0's is still owned by the record labels and licensed to you for home use.

I'm all for it as long as Apple can
1) Shut Up the Niche that cares about Subscription Models
2) Negotiate all of them into allowing Apple to sell DRM Free Music, and not just a select few Albums, but their entire catalogs that are on iTunes and beyond including Music Video.

There's no need to hope it makes the Zune look even more like a failure. If Microsoft were to drop off the face of the Earth tomorrow, it couldn't possibly make the Zune look even worst.

Sebastian

most of the songs on iPods … result from illegal download."

This is incorrect.

Article 1 (http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/Study-finds-legal-music-far-outweighs-P2P-on-portable-players.html).

Article 2 (http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/ipod_owners_significantly_less_likely_to_steal_mus ic/).

music execs are "desperate for an iPod killer so that they won't be beholden to Steve Jobs."

Translation: They've been sticking it to their customers for decades - dictating the price of CD's, interfering with digital copy technology (cd burners), and now they have spent the last 5 years being forced to work with iTunes because it's popular and works and they don't like it.

These music execs do realize how transparent they are... right?

"The record industry, in particular, has long been frustrated that Apple has reaped most of the profits of the burgeoning online music market through sales of its iPod player," the Financial Times wrote in its report. "By contrast, they have earned only modest royalties from digital music sales because most of the songs on iPods and other devices result from illegal download."

I am so sick of hearing how these "poor record label execs" are losing money that it makes me wish they could all be disemboweled somehow. (only the greedy ones)

I am sick of ipods being equated with piracy. I occasionally run into folks that brag about their hard disks full of pirated music. None of them have iPods. Most of them hate ipods.

Isn't how they went in to negotiations last time? All full of bluster and what their demands would be? Let's face it, they are screwed yet again. Not that it bothers me at all.

If the ITMS goes this way, I will be the first to cancel my account and never return.

Let me buy and pay for my music once, and then leave me alone.

I'm all for it as long as Apple can...

...2) Negotiate all of them into allowing Apple to sell DRM Free Music, and not just a select few Albums, but their entire catalogs that are on iTunes and beyond including Music Video.
That's an awfully good point. Apple should say to the big labels (other than EMI), "So you want subscription, eh? Ok then, we'll give it to you, but you have to give us DRM-free for our non-subscription downloads."

Give and take. And if the major labels don't like it, well, screw 'em. Compromise is a virtue. ;)

There's no need to hope it makes the Zune look even more like a failure. If Microsoft were to drop off the face of the Earth tomorrow, it couldn't possibly make the Zune look even worst.
I disagree. While MS's efforts so far have been derivative and fairly pathetic, the key in dealing with them is to never let them get any traction. Even an obvious copy of a good product can eventually grab a good-sized chunk of the market, if the company backing it has several years and several billions of dollars to throw away on it. Look at the Xbox 360.

When you knock MS down, you don't let them get up again. :no:

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You never will. The iTunes Music Store lets you license the music for a flat rate, but you certainly don't own anything when you buy from it. You still have to comply with the iTunes user agreement or you're breaking the law, and whether your license is transferable is still up to the licensor. That people buying from the iTMS music store feel they own something is a nice myth.

When you buy a CD, you only own the physical plastic and metal substrate, by the way. The pattern of 1's and 0's is still owned by the record labels and licensed to you for home use.

Thank you. That said, a person can legally re-sell a CD if they don't like it. iTunes purchases have much less resale value. One advantage that could be had downloaded media could have isn't offered by iTunes, that is replacing a file that was lost or damaged.

Appleinsider, would you please stop using "subscription" when you actually mean "rental". Or do you actually mean subscription not rental? Anyway, some clarification would be nice.

I still think you are focused on a very narrow use of the word. The dictionary definition looks to be broader than yours.

Waaah.

If Apple offered subscription, they very likely would NOT take away the option for people to buy songs outright. People need to chill. :\

I don't get that either. The services that offer subscription also sell tracks too. It's not a dilemma. Offering a new service doesn't mean that the old service will be taken away.

They can't do that until the contracts that the "major artists" have with their labels run out. That can be a long time.

Many of the large groups self-publish anyway. They use the labels for distribution. The larger, more powerful groups could defect to iTunes distribution tomorrow if the economics were there. I'm pretty sure that they still make a nice bit of coin selling CDs and other related merchandise.

This is incorrect.

Article 1 (http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/Study-finds-legal-music-far-outweighs-P2P-on-portable-players.html).

Article 2 (http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/ipod_owners_significantly_less_likely_to_steal_mus ic/).

Right you are. I think this is a case of trying to repeat a falsehood
enough times that people start repeating it, a feedback loop develops,
and some people start believing it. The technique worked well (for a
while) for some US politicians, who shall remain nameless.

That's an awfully good point. Apple should say to the big labels (other than EMI), "So you want subscription, eh? Ok then, we'll give it to you, but you have to give us DRM-free for our non-subscription downloads."

Give and take. And if the major labels don't like it, well, screw 'em. Compromise is a virtue. ;)
Exactly

I disagree. While MS's efforts so far have been derivative and fairly pathetic, the key in dealing with them is to never let them get any traction. Even an obvious copy of a good product can eventually grab a good-sized chunk of the market, if the company backing it has several years and several billions of dollars to throw away on it. Look at the Xbox 360.

When you knock MS down, you don't let them get up again. :no:

The only competitor that could actually be considered a serious competitor to Apple right now is SanDisk. Microsoft's efforts are a lot more then pathetic; they are just too damn stupid!

Let's take their Xbox 360, they have shipped about 10 Million units by the end of December by stuffing the channel with their 4.4 Million consoles, they then reported that as sold and moved on. They vowed to sell 1 Million Zunes by June, at the current pace that the Zune is selling, that would take a mircale, or a curse depending on how you look at it.

Original Article (http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/5C795400-70F1-436B-BF5B-018200A788D2.html)

Units vs Dollars
When taking a crack at deducing a ballpark estimate of how many Zunes Microsoft had sold in January, I was careful to word it: "based on NPDs numbers and my math, it would appear Microsoft sold $7.2 million in Zunes in January via retail outlets, which at $250 each would be just short of 29,000 units."

David Dennis wrote, It's unfortunate these [NPD] figures are not given in units. For your math to be correct, the average selling price per MP3 player has to be about $250. This segment is purely MP3 players, not hard drive MP3 players, so in reality the selling price is probably about $150-175. If the average selling price is $175, then 1,287,361 units were sold. If we assume 3.2% of those were Zunes, that would mean they sold 41,195 Zunes.

Of course this makes very little difference, really. Let's say Microsoft started selling the Zune during the holidays in late November-December, and that they sold 80,000 during that popular period. Then they sell 41,195 Zunes a month from January-May. That means the most likely Zune sale count is 285,975 [by June 2007].

Ouch. There are flops and there are flops. Until I wrote that number I had no real idea of how catastrophic the Zune was. It really merits your Hindenburg picture.

How can Ballmer lie so pointlessly? I can understand how he can lie but now how he can lie when he's so easily found out? He must be afraid of how his shareholders are reacting, and figures the Zune will be forgotten by July. I mean we'll remember it as a spectacular bad example, but we're just a bunch of Apple fanatics, right?

That's a fairly old article, but even now, if the Zune was actually selling, it would be all over the internet, so I doubt it's doing any better. I expect it will turn out something like this, as June 07 approaches, Microsoft will have about a Million Zunes manufactured, they will then proceed to stuff the channel and then report it as sold. The press will take it to heart, warn Apple to beware of Microsoft, completely ignore the only real competition Apple may have: SanDisk, and later, a random blogger will debunk Microsoft's numbers by pointing out that Microsoft merely stuffed the channel with "Shipped" Zunes and reported them as "Sold."

Sebastian
Fun Fact: I have only seen 3 Zunes anywhere outside of the Internet, and one of those was replaced by an iPod Nano

Is $12-20 more than than an album is worth? You seem to imply this, which makes me think you don't really put much value in music.

It's expensive compared to what it gets. For $20, one can get a fourty minute audio track, maybe a music video or two, or one can often get a newly released movie with two discs, one with a two hour feature and another with two hours of bonus footage. After a while, the price might go down $10 or less. Price almost never goes down with music.

The record industry has been pulling a pretty big ruse, like the one where they claim that most iPods are just loaded with mostly pirated music. It also turned out that people that downloaded the most often bought the most music too. Their average sales volume per title has been going up as well, but that effect is tamped by releasing fewer titles and signing fewer bands.

Amen over here.
... iTunes still beats buying the CD on price, if not quality. ...

How do you figure that a lossy encoded mp3 version of a song is better quality than a CD (which is recorded at 16 bits /44.1 KHz)? Even at higher sampling rates (see the new 'higher quality' mp3 versions of EMI's records) the amount of data loss and the subsequent quality drop is still significant. (do a side by side comparison of a CD track and an MP3 track on a good quality player and you'll hear the difference)

I am amazed that the recording industry has managed to get the buying public thinking that they are not making very much money on sales of MP3 files when there is absolutely no overhead for the file past the cost of actually making the original file. The same file can be sold over and over again with absolutely no material cost to the label (i.e.: CD medium, cases, artwork, inserts, distribution channels etc.). Apple apparently gives 64 cents of each 99 cent sale to the recording label. (That 64 cents is just about all profit for the label minus the small percentage that goes to the artist for royalties)

And now the recording industry would like to make money from you on a monthly subscribtion fee for RENTING a song? I put out good money for CD's of music, and this means that I can play them anywhere, anytime I like, without worrying about a DRM demon telling me that my purchase has expired, "please put in another quarter to hear the song again...".

And the last point, would someone please show me the actual data that says that going to a subscription model would reduce piracy. A person who is pirating music is not going to care one little bit that a subscription service is available, they are still going to pirate copies of music. (the pirated mp3's are quite often of even a lower quality than the original mp3, so that they are smaller in size enabling more songs to be stored in a smaller space)

Just to put my comments in perspective I run a small recording studio and I have been doing audio production work for a few years.

I am amazed that the recording industry has managed to get the buying public thinking that they are not making very much money on sales of MP3 files when there is absolutely no overhead for the file past the cost of actually making the original file. The same file can be sold over and over again with absolutely no material cost to the label (i.e.: CD medium, cases, artwork, inserts, distribution channels etc.). Apple apparently gives 64 cents of each 99 cent sale to the recording label. (That 64 cents is just about all profit for the label minus the small percentage that goes to the artist for royalties)

The material costs are actually very low. I can get runs of 500 CDs printed at about 2 bucks each, and labels can get it done, in bigger quantities for much cheaper. Distribution is now handled much like Coca-Cola is bottled, with production centres spread out regionally so transport isn't too expensive. Also, with CD sales, they sell the whole album, but via iTunes, a lot of the time people are only buying a couple tracks.

Imagine if people could choose to save money on a Mac by not having Safari, Garageband, iDVD, address book, Mail, .Mac, iChat or any of the other programs I never use included, how much money apple would lose...

Think of it as an investment by the music industry in the (near) future. The subscription service puts DRM into the tracks and players so that when the subscription runs out, the tracks don't work. This doesn't affect current thieves or casual loaners of CDs to friends for copying.

However, in 5 years, when CDs are no longer produced, new material will not have a source for "ripping", unless they can get their hands on the master recordings or crack the DRM... "Buying" a track would probably involving getting a mulitple year license or something, while "renting" or "subscribing" would be monthly.

The apple model of iTunes/OSX/iPhone/ATv fits the idea of DRM perfectly, as a user's identity and music rights can be easily maintained through the whole system. In that way, people faithful to the Apple brand are the least affected by DRM (compared to somebody who has 3 or 4 companies' gear and software to move music around on).

Interesting, what you are hinting at here is a long term plan to force the consumer into renting the music. If correct this is extremely worrying as it means the music that I like to listen to, (and have currently compiled a large CD collection of) would continually have to be 'renewed'. I would see this as more incentive to invest in DRM removal technology and pirating than as a way for record companies to gain more sales. On top of that, as I mentioned earlier, mp3s are much lower in audio resolution than a CD is which therefore makes for a much poorer listening experience.

It is evident that technology constantly changes and improves, so it is easily conceivable that a different file format (non-mp3) could come along that would be both small and have high audio resolution. However I don't believe that even high quality downloads within a rental or subscription based model will work well as it effectively prohibits people from 'collecting' music because their 'rental' licence would either expire due to time out or on the number of playbacks. For instance I have CD's in my collection which were purchased back when CD's first started to appear, I can still play these (and frequently do) whenever the mood strikes me, if these were 'rentals' I would never have purchased them in the first place.

It is very hard to not despise the record company exec's when you read reports like Mr H linked previously. That whole 'infinite loop' premise... does anyone wonder if when these exec's were kids they dreamed of ripping people off on a grand scale and killing the spirit of the music they claim to represent - or did economics and the 'industry' drive them to it gradually? Quite depressing really.
I would certainly consider all the other Appleinsider readers to be a lot more than 'consumers' , we are more than happy to support the music/media that we love - as long as we are not being put over a barrel in the process. The latest EMI deal gives me hope for the future of the industry and I hope it is quickly taken up by the other labels.

How do you figure that a lossy encoded mp3 version of a song is better quality than a CD (which is recorded at 16 bits /44.1 KHz)? Even at higher sampling rates (see the new 'higher quality' mp3 versions of EMI's records) the amount of data loss and the subsequent quality drop is still significant. (do a side by side comparison of a CD track and an MP3 track on a good quality player and you'll hear the difference) Why would I tell you that? What am I a prop comic? Anyway, as I noted... "price, if not quality" is more important to consumers (which does not equate to the sentence you're pinning on me).

Why's that distinction more important than you're seeming to imply? By and large, the extra sound quality doesn't mean much to everyone. Notice, I'm not saying "most people", although that might be true... I'm saying "not everyone". Moreover, while we're talking about iTunes, don't confuse mp3 files with AAC files. AAC files, such as they are, are actually higher quality compression than mp3 files, so that your averaqge 128kbps AAC has less artifacting than its 196kbps mp3 file cousin. iTunes started years ago, when even LESS people cared about compression... they just wanted their music. AAC's are fine for the majority of iTunes listeners. Most people (here's a "most people" for you) cannot tell the difference between AAC and Mp3. That's right, I said it.

Take the test yourself:
http://duxlist.com:81/
Now, look at the results:
http://duxlist.com:81/song/show_results

It's almost a 50/50 split as to whether people were right or wrong. Moreover, the audiophiles commenting on the digg article noted that it took their studio equipment to make the differences very pronounced (ie: noticeable). Normal speakers generally don't cut it.

So, I'm going to go ahead and "keep it real". The comparison of cost between buying a CD and buying an album on iTunes is perfectly valid for most. What's worse... yes, mostly of the revenue through iTunes has people paying for the "content", not the "manufacturing cost" like with CDs. This is a point Steve Jobs never fails to make, and I'm under the impression he tries to brain the record industry repeatedly about it... but they don't care.

They're focused on perceived value, whether it is really warranted or not. I don't necessarily think they're wrong for it either. I think the real morons are the people that STEAL music from P2P sharing sites en masse, giving the record industry the perception that THIS is where their money is going, and that its NOT about consumer choice and high prices. The free market dynamics are being undermined with mixed messages. The industry simply needs to realize the were charging too much, and they're a dinosaur. Then we'll all be happy. Hard to see it happening given the people stealing music though. Such a distraction.

Appleinsider, would you please stop using "subscription" when you actually mean "rental". Or do you actually mean subscription not rental? Anyway, some clarification would be nice.

My understanding is that Appleinsider is right on with its terminology.

Under a "subscription" model, you pay a single recurring fee, and as long as you continue to pay that fee, you have the right to download every song in the catalogue with no incremental cost. As soon as you stop paying the fee (and the subscription "runs out") any tracks that you may have downloaded in the past cease to function. That's because the DRM inside the track will try to "call home" every time it is played (or every time a portable device is synched), and after the subscription runs out it will fail to obtain a valid license.

Under a "rental" model, you continue to pay a fee on a per-title basis. However, the DRM contained within the track contains a "time bomb" which would render the track unplayable after a certain period of time or a certain number of plays.

Clearly, EMI's new DRM-free offerings are fundamentally incompatible with either distribution scheme. But, a "modified subscription" model, in which the tracks don't expire after the subscription runs out, would be workable. Currently, the only subscription service out there which actually works this way is eMusic. All the other subscription services do include the "phone home" DRM layer as well.

That's bogus. Actually knowing people that have put together their own albums on independant labels, you're pissing all over a lot of effort to get product to you. I'm going to "remake" your point for you in a bit, but as is, it doesn't sit well with me.

#1. If you bought an album on vinyl, "back in the day", you should be perfectly entitled to TRANSFER your vinyl recording to another format. Period.
#2. If someone takes the time to RE-MASTER an album in digital format, that is extra labor and new media production in effect. For you to say, "hey, I bought that album once on vinyl, I'm owed the remastered version!" is ludicrous.

If you by the digital version at a lower resolution, I DO agree that it is bogus to sell someone a "higher res" version of the file later. They should have gotten the rights to the music... period. I wouldn't have a problem lifting a high-res sample from a friend.

Knowing that movies like Vertigo or Star Wars were remastered to "look better" and to clean off crap, is an important distinction. I don't think people should pretend like they don't know extra works was done.

I'm not pissing over the effort at all. My point is what the effort really is intended for?

Look, remastering is work, and someone does it, and let's say maybe you and me can hear and appreciate the difference. I'd argue though that since a damned good percentage (maybe even the majority) of digital files floating around are 128kbps MP3, which make cymbals sound like they've been sliced and diced and reassembled into some kind of digital soup, this shows that a fairly large percentage of people don't even know or care what "remastering" means.

So when the industry went from vinyl to CD, they had to "do" something to justify us re-buying Hotel California, right? So they pay some guy to "remaster" the album. Are they doing this to give us a better product? No, it's basically a line-item marketing expense, like paying a designer to redesign a box, or paying some scientists to re-jigger the soap powder formula so they can write "new and improved" on the laundry detergent box and jack the price up on you and get you to swallow it.

So, your perspective (maybe...I don't want to put words in your mouth) is that you bought the CD version to get the higher sound fidelity and whatnot. My perspective is: The industry recognized that moving to a different, cheaper to produce format that allowed for cleaner sound fidelity would allow them to convince everyone to re-buy a whole bunch of plastic from them at a higher price. So, they paid some people to go clean up the existing content so they could slap "remastered" on the label just like "new and improved".

(In fact, the truth of this is even more disgusting...most recordings were simply transferred from the masters to CD in the '80s. Then, they waited 10 years and released "gold" versions of the same shit, this time "remastered", to take more money from the audiophile crowd. And, of course, the fact that the industry claimed CD prices were high because of manufacturing costs but made the prices even higher even once costs had dropped to below that of the relative levels of LPs.)

The point being...some people have probably bought Hotel California on LP, on cassette or 8-track for their car, on CD...and some even twice on CD to get the "remastered" version.

Anyway, the remastering, repackaging and redistribution of an existing title costs them almost nothing, and it's all pure profit. All that hard work of going from LP to CD MAYBE would cost a hundred thousand or so per title (to hire remastering people, PR, design, etc). But at that point it's like adding one feature to an already shipping piece of software, and then having the audacity to charge the user more for version 2.0 than you did for version 1.0.

Run some fake numbers with a proven seller like...let's say...Pink Floyd's The Wall. Originally released on LP; now they move it to CD. They already know it has a cult following; it was guaranteed to sell over a million copies (I'm sure more like 5-10 million). So, even given a $500,000 budget for remastering and repackaging of The Wall, and then selling 5 million CDs at $15 a pop, you're talking about $74,500,000 in pure revenue...the second time around.

Excuse me if I'm not crying for the loss of that kind of extortionist business policy.

Look, the point is, all the stuff that labels supposedly provide the artist is really all just bullshit marketing they are providing themselves so that they can use the artist's work to make them rich. Tour support? advertising expense (send them around to feel like rock stars so they can advertise the plastic). Production? Advertising expense (make it slicker and people buy more plastic). Remastering/Mixing? (have covered it). None of this shit is designed to help the musician...in fact, they *charge the musician for it*, and use it as a way to sell the plastic.

My point is...take away the plastic, and you take away the whole shebang for them, and I'm glad.

As to your last point...ironically enough, Apple seems to be slyly reselling the higher bitrate music. It's curious that they coupled the EMI no-DRM thing with a bitrate increase, and then used that as a way to get another 30 cents per song out of you if you opt for the higher quality. So, not "resell" exactly, but...say...a 33% tax. Doesn't sit too well with me, and it'll be interesting to see how they behave in the future with the content you purchase now (video, for example is not DVD quality...what happens when they change the format? What happens when they move to MP5 instead of AAC/MP4?)

I disagree. While MS's efforts so far have been derivative and fairly pathetic, the key in dealing with them is to never let them get any traction. Even an obvious copy of a good product can eventually grab a good-sized chunk of the market, if the company backing it has several years and several billions of dollars to throw away on it. Look at the Xbox 360.

When you knock MS down, you don't let them get up again. :no:

.

I have looked at the XBox 360. It's not selling well at all. MSoft wants you to believe it's selling well, but it's not.

Microsoft is still a long way from selling any XBox for a profit.

The number 1 selling console is still the PS2, despite the PS3 and XBox 360's better features.

So when the industry went from vinyl to CD, they had to "do" something to justify us re-buying Hotel California, right? So they pay some guy to "remaster" the album. Are they doing this to give us a better product? No, it's basically a line-item marketing expense, like paying a designer to redesign a box, or paying some scientists to re-jigger the soap powder formula so they can write "new and improved" on the laundry detergent box and jack the price up on you and get you to swallow it.

Actually, the transfer from anything to CD requires mastering. They didn't hire a guy to do it to make us feel the quality was better. They did it out of necessity.

And the CD wasn't created from the vinyl. It was created from the source tapes.

The "ten years later" remasters, of course, are done for the reasons you specified. Mostly, the remaster is necessary because labels were so desperate to get music onto CDs that they cut corners on the original mastering job. (That's why older CDs actually have a warning on the label that the CD is not as good as the original.) They had thousands upon thousands of albums to master, and only so many people in the industry that knew how to do it. Thus, many CDs were done sloppily. On that point, I totally agree with you.

Sometimes, though, remasters are done because we simply have better equipment now than we had twenty years ago. If we can make those old Led Zeppelin albums sound like they were recorded in 1990 instead of 1970, why not? As a listener, if you care about the better quality, you'll buy the new version. If not, you'll stick with the old version. No one forces you to buy a remaster.

And believe me, remastering takes a lot more work than you think. To do it right, you need to go back to the original source tapes and start all over. It's a process that can take weeks, if not months. So yes, I believe that the people who do that should be paid for it. But if you don't, just don't buy the remaster.

That's an awfully good point. Apple should say to the big labels (other than EMI), "So you want subscription, eh? Ok then, we'll give it to you, but you have to give us DRM-free for our non-subscription downloads."

Give and take. And if the major labels don't like it, well, screw 'em. Compromise is a virtue. ;)

While MS's efforts so far have been derivative and fairly pathetic, the key in dealing with them is to never let them get any traction. Even an obvious copy of a good product can eventually grab a good-sized chunk of the market, if the company backing it has several years and several billions of dollars to throw away on it. Look at the Xbox 360.

When you knock MS down, you don't let them get up again. :no:

.

Agreed on all points. As far as MS goes, their motto might be summed up as "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again." Ignore their persistence and resources at your peril, they'll drop something only when the rewards are no longer significant.

Most are $9.99 (the average album you find will be $9.99). Much like their movies. If you notice the ones that cost more actually have more songs than the normal album. You might consider looking closer at pricing. iTunes still beats buying the CD on price, if not quality. I don't see anything in particular to highlight there. I think iTunes movies are more inconsisant on pricing, but I haven't looked for consistancy enough to definitively say. I know there were rules.

There doesn't really seem to be much link between number of tracks and price on iTunes. I easily comprehend that 2-CD albums will cost more, but that doesn't seem to be the link. For example, The Killers "Sam's Town" album has 12 tracks and is priced at $11.99 on iTunes, which means it cost more to buy the whole album than the individual tracks. Buying the album did include the PDF booklet or whatever. I purchased the CD from an online store for $7.41 (including tax and shipping).

And iTunes being cheaper is pretty much another myth . Perhaps for hard to find music it might be, but for mainstream music, most of the big retailers are the same or close to iTunes price. Some are more, some are less.

....there are in fact, others, namely Forrester Research Group, that have done extensive research on the subject...

Forrester Research were thought to be a little in accurate with their last set of figures.

Whatever the amount of illegal music per iPod is, the fact is that there are now 25 iTunes tracks per average iPod (sold), and slowly rising. At $0.64 a track to the record companies I make that $16 for each and every iPod that ends up in the music biz coffers.

How much does Apple make per iPod? 40 Bucks? 50?. (average price $175. 25% margin?) If the music companies are making in the region of 30% of the profit that Apple is making can they really cry about their "modest royalties"?

It's funny, cause though you understand this, and you have been working in the industry, I find it a bit shocking that you can't put together the reality of the music industry and what it is.

The fact is, the "music industry" has only been in existence for ~60 years.

However, music (and good music) has been around for literally millenia. Think about that for a second, and please think about it when you talk about all the touring support and studio time and other bullshit you claim is a service to the artist.



I think more in terms of around 100 years that the music industry's been in full force. RCA Victor purchased the rights to exclusively distribute all music from the Caribbean, central and south america (from the US Government!) back in the 30's and before that they operated monopolies on radio stations and record players... That was the end cycle of the first phase of the Music Industry as we now know it.

In terms of touring support, studio time and most importantly, advertising, if you think that's bullshit to musicians, then maybe your head is jammed too far up your ass to see what shit is...

I think every musician that's making a living realizes that, while you won't make much money from record sales on a giant label (at least initially when you have no bargaining power), you can get your album in every music store in the world with great production value, great advertising, radio and tv play, itunes features, newpaper features, your face on the cover of blender or downbeat, etc. etc.etc with a deal. Labels make people famous, whether it's Jack Johnson or Britney Spears or the Beatles or Woody Guthrie or Miles Davis or Duke Ellington, they all became household names because of their label support. And, while there's plenty of horror stories, nowadays most people with half a brain get paid decently too.

I've worked with a great jazz trumpeter, who was signed to a major label for about 10 records. He still gets "bills" from them, showing how much money he owes them from his standard 40% of 40% cut before he starts seeing album profits (its in the hundred thousand dollar range, which is a lot for jazz music). This might sound awful, but he was/is totally happy with it, because he kept the rights to the songs (and gets nice royalty payments and can rerecord the songs later if he wants), and every release he made was accompanied by massive radio play (on jazz stations), and cover or feature articles in all the major magazines, and label-organized spots at jazz festivals around the world. Because of the publicity he's now one of the most recognized jazz musicians in the world. A couple years ago, he started his own label and gets all the profits, which are good mainly because of hist history with a big...

DRM is simply a logical extension of the same strategy: create a distribution mechanism that can be owned and out of the consumer's control so that the extortion can continue -- on both ends. The thing is, the musuc industry was too comfortable...too stupid...to see this coming. In fact, they should have hired programmers circa 1985 and started to create something like the MP3 format themselves, and used their considerable lobbying power to wedge it in as a standard themselves, so that they could continue to control the distribution.

Now, they have DRM that is out of their control (either from Apple or Microsoft), and distribution mechanisms that are out of their control (iTunes, MS-compatible stores, free downloading). In all 3 of those scenarios, their business crumbles, because the only thing keeping them alive has been CONTROL.

So, they start doing things like suing customers and installing rootkits on people's machines because -- as I've pointed out before -- this industry thinks either like lawyers or thugs depending on who's in charge that day.

But get one thing straight...this is not the death of music by any means. In fact, if Apple succeeds in getting DRM-free downloads, and since it has apparently won the battle with Apple Corps, the industry is, in a word, fucked, because they need Apple more than Superbass points out.

You seem to have a problem with a business wanting to control how people obtain their product. I hope you never plan on running a business. If so, let me know, and i'll make sure my mutual fund does not include your company.

So far, they've sued customers who have massive quantities of P2P obtained music on their hard drives. Their conviction/settlement rate seems to be high, as it's pretty obvious when a person has 200 Gigs of music, no credit card and 10 CDs that's he's nothing but a thief. I don't call those people "customers". The attempt at copy protection on CDs failed, and that's why the industry began pushing forward with downloadable music.

Once CDs disappear, the labels will call the shots (they already are, actually). How many people would buy an iPod if you can't play any new releases on it? The labels will control that, and Apple will not have choices, except to only offer independents. Apple was given DRM free downloads to hurry the demise of the CD. See my other post in this thread...

$12-$20 is in fact too much to pay for an album. The proof is that people aren't willing to pay for as many as before.

This is because of file sharing. You can copy a CD much more elegantly, cleanly and simply now than you could 5 years ago, and that is causing the drop-off in sales. Indeed, it feels nothing like stealing to stick a friend's CD and rip it with your favorite app. iTunes does it automatically without necessarily telling you!

I find it sad that people think the cost of a cheap restaurant meal or a single viewing of a movie or 2 pints of beer at a bar is too much to pay for an hour of music that you can listen to (hopefully) unlimited times. But then, I am a professional musician, and you have read a book about the evils of the music industry.

So, I see this future as very bright indeed. More of my money can go where it deserves: to the artists instead of a bunch of PR drone lawyering thugs. Will there be fewer musician millionaires? Probably, yes. But you can walk into any random club anywhere and hear a band just as good as the shit the big labels are peddling anyway, and musicians who really want to make music are never gonna stop, no matter how poor they get.

But I don't think this means musicians will be poor anyway. In fact, they can now do more to create a promote for themselves, cheaply and efficiently, and who says being a musician couldn't be the kind of job that makes you $40-50,000 a year, just like any other job?

I'm doing that myself right now as a freelance musician, and it's a lot of work, but gratifying. There are 10s of thousands of musicians in the world that have solid middle class incomes. And we'd pretty much all like to have someone else taking care of the business and promotion so we can just make music. A label can do that, and it's worth paying for. I'd rather sell a million records and see .001% of the sales (as long as i keep the copyrights) than sell a thousand and get all of it. Not because I want to be famous, but because I want my music to have the chance to get to people, and I want to be able to book an out-of-town or out-of-country club on a friday night and have people show up and listen.

Forrester Research were thought to be a little in accurate with their last set of figures.

where was that said? link?

This is incorrect.

Article 1 (http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/Study-finds-legal-music-far-outweighs-P2P-on-portable-players.html).

Article 2 (http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/ipod_owners_significantly_less_likely_to_steal_mus ic/).

Yes, it is, and I find it very offensive that the music industry executives keep asserting that I'm a criminal. I have an actual CD for probably 85% of the music on my iPod and at least 14 of the remaining 15% was purchased through iTS. Have I stripped DRM? Absolutely! So I could pirate it? Not once.

Everything that the music industry execs say makes it ridiculously obvious that they are driven by only one thing... greed. I have to say that EMI has done a really impressive thing. There is no other music company that has even mentioned anything that indicates they are actually interested in providing a mutually beneficial service to consumers. While I will be extremely annoyed by it, I hope that Apple does offer the subscription model, and that it is completely ignored.

I'm all for it as long as Apple can
1) Shut Up the Niche that cares about Subscription Models
2) Negotiate all of them into allowing Apple to sell DRM Free Music, and not just a select few Albums, but their entire catalogs that are on iTunes and beyond including Music Video.

There's no need to hope it makes the Zune look even more like a failure. If Microsoft were to drop off the face of the Earth tomorrow, it couldn't possibly make the Zune look even worst.

Sebastian
They can't do away with DRM on a subscription rental service. If there's no DRM then what is going to bring your usage rights to an end and keep you from burning the tracks to re-rip and remove that DRM when you stop subscribing to the rental service? See that's not going to happen.

I'm just saying that you can claim that the medium's materials belong to the consumer, but that the content still belongs to the record company all you want. In practical use and thought, it belongs to the consumer once he/she pays for it. Assuming that the consumer is not abusing copyright law, I'd bet you'll find no precedent for any music company to ever demand that all purchased copies of anything be returned because technically they still own the content and they've decided they don't want it out there anymore. It's just not going to happen. So, again, I struggle to understand what relevance there is to the claim that the consumer doesn't really own it whether your talking about digital downloads or CDs .

I don't understand why you are assuming that calling it a license means that someone is going to take away your music. What you describe is basically the right of first sale. What it means is that a transaction of this type can't be revoked, but that doesn't mean that you own all the rights to the content, you only have rights to private uses of that content. For example, distributing infringing copies, whether or not they are paid, but you can format shift or make as many personal copies as you like so long as you aren't giving copies away.

It's a very subtle difference, but it is there according to copyright law. In short, for many intents, you can pretend that you own it and not really know any different, but that doesn't make it so, though your uses are well within your rights. But that doesn't mean that someone is going to take it away either.

That's like saying I don't own my car cause I can't drive it at maximum speed, or in the wrong direction, that's just crazy talk.

That's not comparable, but then, if you get caught doing that enough, you probably won't be owning that car for long.

Subscription music is a loser and does nothing to enhance the value of the iPod. Can't fathom why this keeps popping up.

Subscription music is a loser and does nothing to enhance the value of the iPod. Can't fathom why this keeps popping up.
It keeps popping up because of the people at CNN who continue to bring it up, and mostly wishful thinking on the part of both Labels who could sit back and watch the money roll in with no real competition and a niche market that actually likes the idea. As long as we see DRM Free music for every song on iTunes, I don't care though. :lol:

Sebastian

The other attractive feature of a largely subscription based audience for the labels is that the labels' economic performance becomes less tied to actual performance. If the majority of music listeners are subscribing month to month anyway, having a 6 month period without solid new music doesn't hurt their bottom line as much.

It's also a great monopoly market lock in for them, if any music outside the mainstream is associated with extra cost and effort.

That's ridiculous. Cable tv's been a subscription service since it's inception, and it's the exact same week-old toilet of bloody shit it's always been, no better, no worse.