Music Industry develops Clue, news at 11...

[xthread]

Well, part of the music industry, at least.
EMI has announced that they will begin offering their collection without DRM, through iTunes, recorded at 256kbit AAC, beginning in May.
This is cool in a handful of ways - first and foremost, it means that a major music label is finally getting the clue that selling your customers what they actually want to buy (music they can play anywhere, anytime, can share with their friends, etc) is a better bet than trying to retain the ability to control what your customers do with their IP once they leave the room with it. Or, at any rate, if you plan to fight your customers to the death about it, prepare to die horribly.
Secondly, it's cool because the rips that EMI is going to make available are higher quality than the average customer's MP3 rip of their own CD would be, and in fact higher quality than the DRM'd versions (which will also continue to be available). Which makes this a fairly pure test of the proposition that 'DRM-free music is worth more than encumbered music.'
So, I think this is really cool (personally) because it now makes sense for me to buy good, archival-quality copies of tracks from iTunes when I have a spur of the moment desire to fill out my music collection with singles, because I know that I can buy a copy that's of sufficiently high quality that it's worth owning. This makes me happy.

The only remaining question is how EMI will be generating the 256kbit AAC tracks - will they be re-encoding them from digital and analog masters, or from already compressed cd masters? I hope it's the former, but that's probably rank optimism...

Comments

[gomijacogeo.livejournal.com]

or from already compressed cd masters

WTF? CDs are 44.1kHz, 16-bit stereo - i.e. 1.4Mbit. There's no compression going on.

[toxgunn.livejournal.com]

I'll be curious to see what the mix of DRM@.99 vs. non-DRM@1.29 sales are.

If they in fact keep the whole album prices reasonable on the non-DRM flavor, I might start buying commercial music again. As is, I am highly resistant to paying for lock-in, and don't get to a record store often enough to expand the collection otherwise.

Good luck sir!

[cos]

However, one clue they didn't get: They're still charging too much. The Music industry is often complaining that online sales aren't a "success" because mostly people just by a few songs, not album-sized chunks. But they're charging $1/song, which makes album-sized chunks cost *more* to buy online than on CD in many cases (depending on how many tracks there are on the CD). When you buy the CD you get higher quality, no DRM, a pretty booklet with notes, and a durable backup, so of course people are not very motivated to spend as much or more to get an inferior product on line. Now they're increasing the quality and removing DRM, but increasing the price along with it. I think people would still rather pay less for a CD, with the booklet and the durable backup. So they'll continue to buy individual songs online in about the same numbers as they do now, while spending most of their music money on CDs.

This is because the music industry demands too much money per track for online sales (of which they give very little to the artists).

I think that 50 cents per track is about the right price to make online music sales a real success. 50 cents and no DRM, that is.