When something is "free" you just haven't identified how or where it is being subsidized.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JeffDM
Given how radio went, I don't have much faith that it can be unobtrusive. But then, for some reason, radio is still alive, it's kind of bizarre.
What's most bizarre about terrestrial radio is how they've gotten away with only paying songwriter royalties and not performer royalties for decades (under an obviously false premise that airplay generates album sales -- see above).
Personally between TV ads and radio ads (and car dealership ads are the worst!), I'm actually willing to pay for ad-free content, especially when its also DRM-free. Which is ironically the exact opposite of the QTrax business model.
I wonder how the "l33t haxor" community is going to feel about having a bunch of suits bottom feeding off their p2p networks by force feeding ad content to people...
If it doesn't play on the iPod, without expiry, without using Windows, then I'm not interested, no matter how "free" it is.
I'm thinking it will be a kind of Veoh for audio, but with expiring DRM. But we'll probably still figure out a way to hijack the audio output and reencode, albeit with a loss of quality.
I for one dont know how the ad is goin to be placed so I wonder how is this going to work out, if its after the song then its acceptable cause we can filter out the end part.
Second problem is I wonder when this project is goin to launch, so far I cant get into their download server. To make matter worse, news about they fail getting the music label agreement make me doubt if this project will ever launch.
When something is "free" you just haven't identified how or where it is being subsidized.
What's most bizarre about terrestrial radio is how they've gotten away with only paying songwriter royalties and not performer royalties for decades (under an obviously false premise that airplay generates album sales -- see above).
In the recent decades, the RIAA didn't seem to make much fuss about that until last year, somehow they suddenly think they have more to gain in royalties than they do with promoting album sales.
It's supposed to be an enticement to buy the whole album. Music labels used to pay for airplay. Look up "payola" some time. If they never did do payola, then I'd completely agree with you. But the recent fuss seems like an act of desperation.
The Qtrax software is based on Songbird. That is a slang term for a police informant or snitch. Currently, all that the Songbird software does is scan your system. It sounds like this software is nothing more than a Trojan horse to catalog exactly how mush illegal music people actually have on their systems and report back it back to the RIAA.
i feel like ghengis khan when he met those french missionaries:
How many sheep are in France?
No, but really, there's no way. If they make it easy to download 20 million songs, I'll go buy enough hard drives to fit all those songs and download the whole thing.
Have you compared tracks from both? I thought the word from those that tried both found that Amazon's quality is a lot better than the standard iTunes track, and about equal to that of iTunes+ tracks. The variable bit rate encoding on Amazon is supposed to make up for it being MP3. iTunes sells them as constant bit rate tracks.
I was comparing the Amazon MP3's with the iTunes Plus tracks. AAC is slightly better, although a lot of it depends on the original recording and the software being used.
When all is said and done, I think that having Amazon around for music downloads will help Apple, not hinder them. They are in the business to sell iPods, which play the downloads from Amazon just fine.
Comments
if this service actually offers legally available "free" music with unobtrusive ads
Given how radio went, I don't have much faith that it can be unobtrusive. But then, for some reason, radio is still alive, it's kind of bizarre.
Given how radio went, I don't have much faith that it can be unobtrusive. But then, for some reason, radio is still alive, it's kind of bizarre.
What's most bizarre about terrestrial radio is how they've gotten away with only paying songwriter royalties and not performer royalties for decades (under an obviously false premise that airplay generates album sales -- see above).
Personally between TV ads and radio ads (and car dealership ads are the worst!), I'm actually willing to pay for ad-free content, especially when its also DRM-free. Which is ironically the exact opposite of the QTrax business model.
I wonder how the "l33t haxor" community is going to feel about having a bunch of suits bottom feeding off their p2p networks by force feeding ad content to people...
If it doesn't play on the iPod, without expiry, without using Windows, then I'm not interested, no matter how "free" it is.
I'm thinking it will be a kind of Veoh for audio, but with expiring DRM. But we'll probably still figure out a way to hijack the audio output and reencode, albeit with a loss of quality.
Second problem is I wonder when this project is goin to launch, so far I cant get into their download server. To make matter worse, news about they fail getting the music label agreement make me doubt if this project will ever launch.
CHAOS
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/a...out/article.do
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...44446320080129
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...,6460500.story
When something is "free" you just haven't identified how or where it is being subsidized.
What's most bizarre about terrestrial radio is how they've gotten away with only paying songwriter royalties and not performer royalties for decades (under an obviously false premise that airplay generates album sales -- see above).
In the recent decades, the RIAA didn't seem to make much fuss about that until last year, somehow they suddenly think they have more to gain in royalties than they do with promoting album sales.
It's supposed to be an enticement to buy the whole album. Music labels used to pay for airplay. Look up "payola" some time. If they never did do payola, then I'd completely agree with you. But the recent fuss seems like an act of desperation.
(I'm not serious)
How many sheep are in France?
No, but really, there's no way. If they make it easy to download 20 million songs, I'll go buy enough hard drives to fit all those songs and download the whole thing.
Have you compared tracks from both? I thought the word from those that tried both found that Amazon's quality is a lot better than the standard iTunes track, and about equal to that of iTunes+ tracks. The variable bit rate encoding on Amazon is supposed to make up for it being MP3. iTunes sells them as constant bit rate tracks.
I was comparing the Amazon MP3's with the iTunes Plus tracks. AAC is slightly better, although a lot of it depends on the original recording and the software being used.
When all is said and done, I think that having Amazon around for music downloads will help Apple, not hinder them. They are in the business to sell iPods, which play the downloads from Amazon just fine.