The Song Fight Bulletin Board

So I finally bought "OK Computer". 256kbps MP3s with no DRM
Finally, some competition for iTunes, and the price of digital music might just start to go down. Like it was supposed to in 1985...

I heard about this thing Amazon was doing on Morning Edition. They did a fairly long piece on it. I'm pretty excited about it.

OK Computer, eh? That album's just so...OK.

Lord of Oats wrote:OK Computer, eh? That album's just so...OK.

i can't help but feel like you said that to get someone riled up.

I figure it's either a pun or a lie.


Now I can buy this album. I've wanted it forever, but I could never stomach waiting for a physical CD to ship to me internationally, or the idea of buying DRM ridden sub-192-kbps mp3s. And I could never bring myself to pirate it, so it's full of songs I've never heard / JB's cello solos / etc. This is going to be like Christmas.

HEY FRONTALOT, get your new CD on there, too. Your skits and hidden tracks better by worth my hard earned and increasingly valuable Canadian dollars.

Here's an interesting article for those seeing the amazon thing as "better" (which it might be - I need to check it out more)

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/musi ... m_part_one

by the way - I like Kid A better than ok computer. I actually think the latter is only ok - without the pun.

Oh, and furthermore - it seems that buying hte physical CD still supprts the artist best. Here's a message I got from teh rock band Cracker through their myspace:

"well the dirty little secret of downloads is that artists actually make less than buying the cds. but e music is marginally better.

amazon is just as good as anything for cds.

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Ross Durand
Date: Aug 20, 2007 8:46 PM


Hi guys, just a fan excited to find you had a new album. Extra excited to find it on eMusic.com. But then I wondered, if I want to support the musicians making the music I like, would it be more profitable for you if I bought retail? iTunes? or are eMusic royalties equivalent?

Just wanting to do the right thing and put my money where my ears are."

Yeah, it wasn't about the album I downloaded as much as the service I downloaded from. Watermarking will be a reality for any company that wants to study the dynamics of downloaded/shared media (a smart thing to do). Neither company is embedding personal data in the files, so I'm fine with them tracking where it came from. But this needs to be monitored.

CDs, while touting their audio quality capabilities (not realized until years later) initially were supposed to decrease in price, as the manufacturing and distribution costs plummeted compared to vinyl. But it never happened. Prices went up, people bitched and moaned but nothing could be done. MP3 sharing made labels mad rather than wake up, prices continued to rise, along with margin. They lost market to DVDs and games of all types, and the internet, but they still blamed sharing and started playing with DRM to "protect" themselves, while sharing likely makes up a small percentage of actual market loss (you never intended to actually buy all those songs, after all).

An album of 256kbps MP3s for $7? This starts sounding better (about what a vinyl album cost when they all but went extinct). But hey, there's infrastructure to support the sale and the download, but NO physical inventory nor manufacturing, so hopefully some price wars can now erupt and a more reasonable $4 price will emerge. Yes, with a much larger % going to the artist. But I have the feeling a new record label model will tilt the artist compensation issue, not the existing ones.

It looks fairly compelling to me. I experimented with the iTunes store using a $20 gift card someone got me. I got one album without DRM (iTunes "plus") which was cool. The price was the same since I was buying the whole album, and the encoding was high enough quality for me. Sadly only a limited amount of albums/track on iTunes are offered that way.

Then I bought another album, which was -not- iTunes "plus". At first I didn't think the DRM would be a big deal, since I'm already an iTunes/iPod user. Who cares if one album is locked in to that world, since I'm not likely to be leave it until my iPod breaks? (Probably I will get a different brand of MP3 player next time.) Then I discovered that the damn songs don't play on my iPod because it's too old! (2nd gen.) I am probably going to reencode them and just live with a little quality loss so I can play them.

That was my first/last/only time buying DRM'd music. Lesson learned.