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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Let's see what happens on that front. Obviously, the movie biz is somewhat different (if only for the size of the initial investments). But I don't see what prevents studios and entertainment conglomerates from exploiting their back catalogs that way too. I'd definitely buy and download a Douglas Sirk movie from Amazon for $6.99.
When an album is available on CD, I prefer to own it on CD so I can rip it to lossless format if I so choose. But some albums get prohibitively expensive to obtain when they go out of print, and I'd rather own MP3s than not have one at all. The back catalogue is pretty good; they have Entheogenic's first album, for instance, but not the soundtrack to Katamari Damacy (only available in Japan) or obscure William Orbit tunes that were never released on CD.
MP3 may be free of DRM, but it isn't really "free". MP3 is patented by the Fraunhofer Institute, and they charge licensing fees. Open source projects like Fedora and Audacity don't come bundled with MP3 capability for that very reason. Ogg Vorbis is to MP3 as PNG is to GIF.
That said, I'm glad Amazon is selling MP3s and not Ogg files, as there are five MP3-capable pieces of hardware in my collection that can't decode Vorbis.
Still, there's stuff I don't get. How are the very same labels that bitched and moaned about Apple's refusal to price anything above 99 cents with DRM restrictions going to be willing to let Amazon sell their stuff for ten cents cheaper and without restrictions? I guess it's already happened with the first two that signed on, but I'm suspicious that some agreement is in place whereby Amazon agrees to jack up the price after a certain amount of time. I guess we'll see.
That agreement does seem odd.
Record execs seem to hate Apple because Apple refuses to allow them to charge more.
So they make an agreement with Amazon that allows Amazon to sell the songs for....less?
And why do you think that is?
Change of heart?
The objective is to either kill iTunes or to make it at least a 50/50 split between iTunes and another competitor so that the music execs have some kind of leverage to get what they really want -- to jack up the price.
This is only about one thing: they want to charge 50 cents for a download of Lou Vega's "Mambo #5" and charge $1.99 for the latest new releases.
This model is obviously more profitable because for every 1 person buying an oldie there are a thousand buying the latest Amy Winehouse.
Reducing prices on old songs just to jack up prices on new releases (and calling it "market based pricing") is a bad deal for consumers in the long run.
...a pretty good selection of classical music, if anyone's interested.
"but in listening to the same song purchased from each store -- Amy Winehouse's "Rehab" -- I couldn't tell a difference."
Two possible problems with this test: First, what kind of headphones were you using? High-quality phones (anything you spend over $250 on) will project the flaws in digital music much better than those of lesser quality, so there may very well be a difference between the bit rates, but you just can't hear it on your ear-goggles. Second, most pop songs today are digitally processed, which usually compresses the spectrum for each individual audio track- especially when compressed. This phenomenon could also account for a 'washing out' of the differences in bit rates. I'm no expert of course, but that's what I thought when I read that passage.
Seriously. iTunes isn't going away overnight, but Apple really doesn't need to be in the music distribution business - they just got in to (a) sell iPods, and (b) fill a void. If Amazon's store is a hit, that takes off the pressure from European lawyers and iPod haters. The big loser, in my mind, is Microsoft/Zune. Sounds like Amazon already has them beat in catalog, and if the music goes DRM-free, then why even support a new format?
It will be interesting to see if (a) Apple is able to get other music companies than EMI to sell DRM-free with them (although Universal seems a lost cause), and (b) how this will affect music piracy. What's to stop me from buying a song from Amazon and giving it to anyone who asks? I know I could do that easily enough now, but if a "second wave" of Napster-style piracy explosion blows up, will record companies pull the plug on DRM-free?
Just checked out Amazon and bought some tunes.
--Ugly as sin interface
--Apparently no shopping cart, and once the purchase/download is over, you are returned to the HOME page! Not even to where you decided to buy the previous song.
--Only the "Top 100" songs are .89 cents. Most are .99 and up.
And what's all this about iTunes songs being locked into Apple players? Bull. As another reader commented, you can rip to a CD and re-encode. Your quibble about "re-compressing" is a distinction without a difference. Re-encode at a higher bit-rate if your ears are so sensitive to such tiny variations in sampling or compression. Or skip the CD step completely and use an audio capture program as you play back each tune and either compress on the fly or capture uncompressed and re-encode later.
Criminy, even an old geezer like me knows these things. Workarounds--without them IT would crash permanently.
Farhad says: "True. But of course that ruins your songs -- burning to MP3s and then ripping back to iTunes decompresses and then recompresses the music, introducing digital artifacts into music."
This is only true if you rip the CD back into MP3. With a standard audio CD (which you can burn from iTunes) and the right software, you could rip the tracks to lossless FLAC files and add no additional compression. Or you could rip to a much higher bitrate MP3 to lesson the compression and potential file degradation. I've done this and haven't noticed any loss of sound quality. It's not a perfect solution, but it works.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
