RSSEMI Considers Selling Music in MP3
By Nate Mook | Published February 9, 2007, 11:50 AM
EMI, the world's third largest music label, is actively considering removing the digital rights management restrictions from its song catalog and selling tracks online in MP3 format, according to a report published in The Wall Street Journal Friday.
The news comes on the heels of an open letter published by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, in which he advocated abolishing DRM as the best way to encourage digital music sales and benefit consumers. Jobs said that DRM systems only create walls that prevent interoperability and licensing technology has proven unworkable due to concerns the copyright protection will be more easily broken.
EMI apparently began floating the idea of selling its music library in unrestricted MP3 format in December, contacting online music retailers including Apple, RealNetworks, eMusic, MTV Networks and MusicNet, which powers Yahoo! Music Unlimited and other stores.
However, in exchange for allowing MP3 sales, EMI wanted a multimillion dollar payment up front as insurance in case the plan backfired and consumers simply began sharing the legitimate MP3 files with others who had not purchased the music. Apple's Jobs doubted a move to DRM-free music sales would hurt the industry, saying CD sales still make up the vast majority of the market and they can be freely uploaded and shared.
Music retailers balked at the payment request, leading EMI to circulate a survey in late January asking how much they would be willing to pay for the right to sell the label's songs in MP3. Those proposals were submitted yesterday, the WSJ reported, and a decision from EMI whether it would continue to pursue the option could come as soon as today.
Another source reported that EMI is in talks with Snocap about licensing its music in MP3 for sale on the popular MySpace social networking site owned by Fox. Snocap was founded by Napster creator Shawn Fanning as a way to facilitate music sales between labels and Web sites or services.
EMI has refused to comment on the speculation, but did note that it has experimented with the MP3 format. Singles from the likes of Norah Jones and Lilly Allen have been made available by EMI in MP3, and the label says the results have been positive.
Apple, which controls 70 percent of the digital music market, believes DRM-free sales are the way to go. "This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat," Jobs wrote this week. "If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store."
The people from EMI consider visiting planet Earth.
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|MP3 is royalty based technology. Why don't they go a little bit further to adopt a truely free format like OGG? Can someone please explain the technical (or political) reason? Thanks in advance.
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|Doubt that they would for the simple fact that not all players support the OGG format. But it is a great format.
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|They should offer full albums at prices ranging from $3 (old titles) up to $10 (new titles) and it should be full license based in the sense that your receipt will allow you to download whatever version you prefer DRM-free from their sites and both lossy and lossless compressed, and it should remain valid for a long period of time like 2-years at least,just like a guarantee that what you paid for doesn't disappear if you delete your downloaded copies. So for example they could provide APE format or just ZIPped/RARed .iso of Full Uncompressed CDs along with the lossy MP3 and maybe WMA and AAC formats as well.
Then their service would make sense and I would buy titles from them. Of course, they should include in the license the ability to download full high-resolution scans of all the covers to allow the customer to print them at will.
But I seriously doubt they will be going down this route. The DRM maniacs are still active in the industry.
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|That would be nice, but for me to buy it instead of the CD it would have to be cheaper than buying the actual CD. It would be kick a$$ if it was under $7 per album (since I can get a CD's for about that price new or used... if you know where to look).
The quality would have to be good too. Like they could offer any format or any bitrate of up to Flac or WMA Lossless (DRMless of course). They should make it so you can just download it from a website, not tied to a specific program like iTunes. And for people that don’t care too much about quality could download it into MP3 or Ogg or AAC or whatever there preferred format is. Plus your allowed to download it multiple times. Then maybe I might do that instead of CD’s, but not until then.
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|as much as AAC is kinda gay because its tied to itunes only its one of the best formats out there. mp3 or anything is good enough for me but u can tell the difference when its AAC compared to mp3
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|I wouldn't mind a client interface.
Personalized tagging, bandwidth control, etc.
So long as they don't let it try to take over the system and be my new media player, it's all good.
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|AAC tied to iTunes since when ? The Apple's own DRM-infected AAC format doesn't mean that AAC was born with iTunes. In fact AAC is part of the MPEG standards.
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|Yeah, I just like using my own programs. Like I use Free Download Manager to download things (which it does have a bandwidth control) and I like to use MP3tag (the one found here www.mp3tag.de/en/) to correcly tag my music.
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|Although AAC does sound better than MP3, I did my own tests with Ogg at bitrates about 64kbit/s (since I can't really tell the difference at 128kbit/s or higher) with both AAC and Ogg and I thought Ogg did sound better than AAC. It could be though that Ogg is VBR and AAC isn't. Just my 2 cents worth.
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|DRM-free won't happen, Steve Jobs is just saying what he will never do, at least Microsoft is honest about the attentions when it comes to this subject.
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|Look out! Zee Germans are coming too! :P
Jobs is far more often one to put the money where his mouth is than Gates. Not sure how you got it the wrong way around... fanboy, perhaps?
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|He might just be blowing hot air, but at least it will get more people thinking about these things.
It's no revolution yet, but, I'd rather he come out and say it then just keep quiet.
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|If you can't beat'em join'em. Maybe just maybe the end of one era and the beginning of another.
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|If music was sold DRM-free, many users will rather buy it than go download it elsewhere simply because nobody wants to spend time looking for something that might work or not. Just my two cents.
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|well the drm has never been a problem for me since im happy with an ipod and i dont have a bunch of mp3s. but this is a great idea. i really do hope that piracy doesnt go through the roof though. all these stupid a$$holes. thinking they are entitled to anything they can get for free. nothing different than a common thief.
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|Steve Jobs, go pay the money, put your money where your mouth is. If your not willing to pay the insurance, the shut your mouth about DRM-free sales.
If he really does believe it, and its not the normal talk from Mr. Jobs where he slanders Bill Gates and others, then we will see Apple giving a chunk of change to EMI.
I hope it happens, of course it won't happen, and the music won't be .99c anymore.
Which I said recently is fine, charge $1.99 for a song, as long as its DRM-free and you can use it on multiple devices that you own, thats a great price.
But Steve Jobs is all talk and no game.
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|For a buck 99 i better be getting flac and artwork and not some crap mp3. If you do the math I may as well drive my happy a** to the store and buy a CD instead of waiting an hour to DL.
Price can't change for this to succeed.
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|One, wrong topic.
Two, there's no indication that the music labels will ever sell non-DRM mp3s.
Get over your hatred of Jobs.
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|"But Steve Jobs is all talk and no game."
Seems to me like you're all talk and no brains. :P
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|This would be welcome, but I think they will be unwilling to sell at the old iTunes 99c price, proferring a 'piracy levy' to cover increased copying.
Still, it's a start.
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|Any piracy "levy" implies that it's legal. Charge an extra 35%, and pirating 35% of your collection is legal.
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|LOL tell it to the judge, but I wish such reasoning were followed.
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|Its what consumers want ... But there will be more people copying rather than paying. There are people who simply cant be bothered to copy CD's or are sick of disks copied at high speed and suffer skipping or incompatibility between readers and disks and the then ripping to your favorite player.
The ease at which mp3's will be transfered will mean a huge uptake of casual sharing. If they want to put the disk copy merchants out of a income then this will certainly do it. But i suspect they will simply move to compiled MP3 cd's due to the abundance of mp3 DRM free tracks.
Yummy
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|well, personally i'm more likely to buy music if i can do whatever i want with it. i think a lot of people just hate the drm and i really don't think that there will be much (if any) more sharing then there already is.
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|They'd be smart to do this.
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|If the bit-rate is decent (128+ - pref 192) and they don't get stupid & greedy on the charging rates then this could be a welcome dose of sanity to an industry that's gone way way too long without any.
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|I hope they don't. MP3 is now a very old, and inferior format. I do however wish they start using unencrypted WMA, AAC or ATRAC..
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|WMA and ATRAC are worse.
AAC all the way.
With some FLAC for hardcore people.
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|Why not offer all the formats? Couldn't be that hard.
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|Actually, WMA is a better format than MP3. ATRAC is a piece of garbage. But the appeal of mp3 is the pure compatibility of it. A good V0 vbr mp3 is still a thing of beauty. Even your average 192 cbr is 100% compatible with every bit of hardware out there, and sounds better than FM radio. For many applications, this is what fits the bill.
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|You'd think... If you had to rip 10,000,000 tracks into mp3, would you want to repeat the process for multiple formats?
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|Well, not so much. There are encoders, even open source, that convert fast and with good quality.
Anyway, I think that the best solution would be Ogg Vorbis - good quality at relatively low bitrates, Lancer based on AoTuV is blazingly fast (try oggdropXP from http://homepage3.nifty.com/blacksword/index_e.htm ) and the format is open.
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|You should try listening to a ATRAC before totally writing it off because it's Sony.
The sound quality vs compression of ATRAC3 is better than WMA and AAC, and DRM is optional. The other benefit is low CPU use to decompress, which is why the Walkmans have 35hr battery life..
Still I suppose the only people missing out, are the idiots who fail to understand it..
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|I agree to an extent. MP3 is pretty good for what it is, especially with modern encoders. Good encoding is the true secret behind the format's longevity.
I'd like to see songs made available in both 192kbps MP3 and in FLAC, and we shouldn't be forced to choose between either. One payment should allow us to download both formats. The FLAC version stays on a hard drive, the MP3 version goes onto a media player.
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|Why not have them store the downloads in flac and then have the client program offer to convert it into whatever format you would like? This would be able to satisfy everyone.
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|Encode tracks on the fly, you want MP3, you get it straight away, you want something else, it gets encoded on the server and send when ready.
Either that, or they use a lossless codec like FLAC, so people can do what they want with it.
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|Uhmm, allofmp3.com seems to manage things without such issues.
Perhaps EMI should buy them [grin]
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|I get 35+ hours playing OGGs - I'd probably prefer that over WMA & AAC, and definitely over the proprietary and rarely-used ATRAC. :P
But if I was buying online, I'd want FLAC. Particularly given the inflated price of online music locally.
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|I'll buy. Mostly on principle.
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|Cracking idea - let's see what happens.
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|I really hope they do.
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|DRM is killing them, this would be a wise move for the media industry. DRM has gained a negative stigma for them, and in my view DRM-free music is what we all want, for convenience sake. So perhaps make mp3 formats cheaper, (or even free), and pay a little for flac. Whatever.. But my main point is that CD and online music sales is wholly separate from the concert & live performance promotions.
True fans will always go to the concerts. The fact is, that many artists don't get much of a cut in record sales as it is. They get a better cut the more they tour. Touring is hard work, and if you are real rock star, and not some corporate, manufactured cookie-cutter band or artist, and you truly rock, then they will come. This comes down the unnecessary greed of the music labels. Props to Snocap and EMI for this commendable effort!
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