suraj.sun sends in this excerpt from CNet:
"One of the most recognizable brands in the history of illegal downloading is due to officially resurface, perhaps as early as next week, sources close to the company told CNET News. Only this time the name Kazaa will be part of a legal music service. Altnet and parent company Brilliant Digital Entertainment attached the Kazaa brand to a subscription service that will offer songs and ringtones from all four of the major recording companies. For the past few months, a beta version has been available. The company tried recently to ratchet up expectations with a series of vague, and what some considered misguided, press releases. The site will open with over 1 million tracks."
The NYTimes has a related story about how the music industry is
trying to convert casual pirates by offering more convenient new services.
Subject (Score:5, Informative)
Kazaa sucked even when it was a vehicle for illegal downloads. I can't see the music industry (motto: "fuck the pirates, fuck the artists, and fuck YOU") improving it at all.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Well, certainly the ad/spyware that it was a tunnel for sucked. It certainly worked well enough for a lot of sucker^H^H^H^H^H^H noob^H^H^H^H casual users out there well enough that they considered it essential software on campus. In fact, when looking for songs before the RIAA interference tracks, it did deliver on its core function... grabbing the song you want from other people.
Up until Napster, and then Audiogalaxy, and then Kazaa(lite), I had to depend on browsing the various PCs on campus to find son
Still fighting 1st gen (Score:4, Insightful)
All the first generation file sharing programs/protocols sucked.
Kazaa. Napster. I personally found Gnutella worst of all.
But this is hilarious. The music industry are so slow, that up until now they have been fighting decade old technology. Now they are digging up the corpses and attempting a reanimation.
When will they get around to fighting the completely decentralised and encrypted services bound together by nothing more than a loose collection of opensource tools?
*Reclines in chair with large box of popcorn*
Parent
Only the searches are onion-routed (Score:4, Interesting)
When will they get around to fighting the completely decentralised and encrypted services bound together by nothing more than a loose collection of opensource tools?
For performance reasons, only the searches are onion-routed in popular peer-to-peer file sharing networks; the downloads are direct from someone who has a piece of the file. So when you download a multi-gigabyte Blu-ray Disc rip, the machine on which it is shared still has to reveal its IP address. A copyright owner could log on to one of these services, download a piece of the work, and get an IP address, a time, and a block of the file: evidence that a piece of the copyrighted work has been distributed. Then the copyright owner can get a judge to compel the owner of a netblock to find the customer whose Internet access was used to distribute copies without authorization.
Or would you onion-route the downloads too? Let me know when Tor has become efficient enough to run BitTorrent or eMule Kad Network over it.
Parent
No DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
How about if they try to offer something better than the pirates?
No DRM, region locking/restrictions, convenience, etc.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
How about if they try to offer something better than the pirates?
They can never beat free, sorry.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A lower price isn't the only way to compete. "Better" is not the same as "cheaper".
Re:No DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
"Better" is not the same as "cheaper".
True, but seems to be equivalent for an astonishing number of people. I dare say, most people.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
They can never beat free, sorry.
That's not true. I often use MP3sparks.com even with all the hoops you have to jump through, simply because it works so well. They have almost everything I've looked for, the prices are very cheap, and you can encode to anything you like - including the Lame "extreme" preset to which I rip my own disks with. Even if the prices were double, I'd probably still use it.
Of course, if the RIAA weren't such pricks I'd just buy their garbage off of iTunes instead - but there's no way I'm giving them any money.
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What's the deal with MP3sparks.com? Is it another Russian site or something? Seems like either it's not legit or it's operating in a country with different ideas about copyright.
It is the same Russian site with a new domain name. And zookz is another interesting site.
Re:No DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:No DRM (Score:4, Informative)
That's, I think, exactly the reason iTunes is the juggernaut that it is... Quality: Good Enough to the ears of mere mortals. Cheap: People arguing over the price of iTunes music while sipping on a $7 Sapporo? Awesome. Worry free: Is there a remote vector to inject a virus/trojan? Possibly. It'd be damn hard though. I'm more worried about Apple releasing a version of iTunes that's buggy as hell and messes up my music library that I've spent years building. That's why I keep backups though! ;)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Well I definitely think that iTunes is convenient for most people, but not so much if you're trying to load music on your Palm Pre from your Linux desktop. It's pretty worry-free. It's fairly cheap, but I would definitely not call it "extremely cheap".
But overall, I don't doubt that Amazon and iTunes are cheap enough, convenient enough, and worry-free enough to have captured some of the market that would have otherwise gone to "free". If they dropped their prices and supported more platforms, more devic
Re:No DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
You can beat free with convenience and accessibility.
Take the Linux of, say, 2000 and compare it to Windows 2000. The former was free. The latter was more popular. Yes, because it was bundled and people were duped into thinking Windows is the be-all end-all, but there's more to it. I know a few people who tried Linux and found it complicated, they switched back to Windows. It might be different today (Ubuntu is in some areas way more convenient than Windows), but with the half-assed installers of early days, a lot of manual configuration (with command line!) and stuff that doesn't "just work", people dropped free for convenient.
The same can work for content. To beat free, you have to be easier to use and more convenient than free. Apple and iTunes went that way, and with some success. It's easy and hassle free to buy in that store, it's well organized and it offers what people want, with reliable quality. Compared to the free alternative, it's more convenient (no need to configure anything in your firewall, no need to find trackers or peers...), it's better organized (no need to ponder how it might have been named, no sifting through "insider" taggings) and more reliable in the quality of your product (you get that song. Not a (deliberately or accidently) mislabeled one, not in some shoddy, useless quality).
The only way to compete with 'free' is to offer more. People are willing to pay for convenience. The problem is that they get less with the current system of crippling DRM. The free stuff is, well, first of all free AND also more convenient to use because it does work on every player, any time you want, and without that sword of damocles hanging over your head, i.e. that the organisation offering it might close the shop and you're sitting there with data junk.
Nothing beats free AND more convenient/reliable, that's a given.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
You can beat free with convenience and accessibility.
Nothing beats free AND more convenient/reliable, that's a given.
If they were ever to let up on their legal war on p2p infringement, the p2p infringers would be able to deliver FREE and match them on convenience/reliability.
The only reason p2p is as inconvenient as it is (and its not THAT inconvenient) is because they are playing legal whack-a-mole with it. If that whack-a-mole were to cease, free p2p would rapidly reach itunes/amazon level of convenience
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Last time I checked Amazon is doing fine despite the recession. What's your argument?
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They can never beat free, sorry.
Sure they can. If free takes three days to download, and $5 takes an hour, that season of Desperate Housewives might be purchased instead of "stolen."
It is just that up to now they have had it backwards. They charge $40 a head for the soup kitchen, while the steakhouse next door is free. (There is still a long wait for a table)
Song of the South (Score:2)
If free takes three days to download, and $5 takes an hour, that season of Desperate Housewives might be purchased instead of "stolen."
Except $5 doesn't always take an hour. There are plenty of works which are available as infringing copies in three days or as legitimate copies in 95 years because their copyright owners decline to make more copies. Disney's Song of the South and Nintendo's Mother series are ones that comes to mind first.
Oh yes they can and it is VERY easy (Score:2, Insightful)
The answer? PUBLISH EVERYTHING
Not just everything out at the moment but every song for which a recording still exists and SELL it for a reasonable price. 99 cents ain't resonable to anyone but an Apple fanboy.
The business model is simple, you create a digital copy of your entire catalog and put it on a server. You then sell all your content this way. You pay a trivial amount of money for storage (songs ain't all that big) and save a FORTUNE on CD presses, cover printing, assembling, packaging, shipping, s
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I'd stop pirating for a cheap DRM-free subscription model.
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The pay step (Score:2, Interesting)
The complexity of "legal" services will always be bigger than the alternatives, since you can always subtract at least one step: the pay step.
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Not really... eg. itunes is extremely easy. OTOH Bittorrent requires knowlege of router configuration to configure ports forwarding etc. therefore itunes is easier (considerably, for the nontechnical).
If they can make a one click download that just works then the pay step (which can be automatic as in itunes) then they'll have something that works.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I don't pirate things, but back when I was knowledgeable about such things, pirating stuff was kind of a PITA. Not only did you have to keep up on where to go and what to look for (sometimes things were obscured in various ways), but often enough you'd download something only to find it wasn't what you really wanted. Like you might download a song only to find that it was malware or some other sound purposefully mislabeled as a prank. Or it might be a valid song, but the wrong song because some idi
Re:The pay step (Score:4, Funny)
P.S. Its amazing how fast it is too, I mean you have microsoft hosting 2 million songs and only 6 people are using it. Songs download LIKE THAT! *snaps fingers*
Imagine how slow bittorrent would be if only 6 people used it...
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Why do they even bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the biggest brand out there, Napster, failed to capture any of its former glory as a pay service despite the ad blitz and continued media coverage.
It's like shutting down a brothel and replacing it with a legitimate massage parlor. Would you fly out to Reno, Nevada to get a deep tissue massage at the retooled Bunny Ranch? These are kinds of questions these execs are not asking.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Why do they even bother?
Because they have plenty of money from the work of others to expend.
Re:Why do they even bother? (Score:4, Funny)
Given the choice, yeah sure, I'm definitely going to use a service whose name is synonymous with poor quality, malware ridden files.
It's like resurrecting the name J. T. Ripper & Sons as a personal protection service for lone wimmin.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Right, that's what I was thinking. If it didn't work for Napster, why would it work for Kazaa? At the time Napster went legit, it was still pretty much *the* name of music downloads. It was to online music almost what Xerox is to photocopying.
Now? Napster may be making money, but they don't seem to be any kind of a market force. Any music store has to contend with the 900 pound gorilla in the room, which is iTunes. Fine, I know there are people here who think Apple and the iPod are overblown, but the
Re:Why do they even bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not every business enterprise has to be glorious. Napster piggybacked off of an existing brand, and it was probably at least a decent move for them.
They seem to be doing okay. Just a few wikipedia quotes, take them or leave them...
So what if Kazaa-pay is not as nearly big as Kazaa-free was? If you're going to have a pay music service, it's still probably beneficial to call it Kazaa, just to have some name recognition.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Right, that's why no one trusts "Windows", "Office", "Internet Explorer", "Photoshop"... all of these shitty obsolete brands. Ignorant computer users are racing toward Ubuntu and OpenOffice because they're never heard of them, so they must be good!
cpt obv (Score:4, Insightful)
The NYTimes has a related story about how the music industry is trying to convert casual pirates by offering more convenient new services.
orly? Millions of people find our existing service so detestable that they turn to an illegal service to get what they want. Maybe, just maybe, there's a market for what they're looking for? Maybe we can make more money by selling them what they want instead of suing them?
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That sort of reasoning makes far too much sense for the music industry. More likely they just want to have a pay service to point to when grandstanding, never mind that almost nobody uses it because it only works with one specific version of Mi
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe we can make more money by selling them what they want instead of suing them?
Then again, maybe not. It may be that these companies have done some calculations and realized that their importance is dwindling in the new digital world, and the more they can drag their feet and stonewall, the longer they can keep their prices high and therefore keep their profits high.
Or maybe they really think they can get the government (lobbying the legislative branch and suing through the judicial) to keep their current business model going even though it doesn't make sense anymore. From what we'
I suppose naming their new enterprise (Score:2)
No business (Score:2)
The site will open with over 1 million tracks.
Much fewer than Kademlia/Ed2K or any music related torrent tracker.
Not to question the price.
It'll never work (Score:5, Informative)
It's failed already. You have to pay money every month to listen to music you don't own. This is why subscription-based services have never worked - iTunes and Amazon offer (and have offered for a while), for a much more reasonable price, music that you get to keep forever, and, since the abolition of DRM, can do anything you want (within the law, of course *nudge nudge wink wink*) with.
It didn't work for the Zune, it didn't work for Wippit, it's not working for Napster, it's not going to work for the relaunched Kazaa.
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It works for XM.
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But you don't have to pay for Spotify.
Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a reason why the Pirate Bay is successful and it is rarely mentioned. Apart from the content being free, and DRM free, the service offered is generally agnostic to brands, labels or formats. It is like Google for media - raw results for any media query. Until the worlds media companies can agree to build a centralised service that is effectively neutral, services like the Pirate Bay will continue to flourish. It will probably never happen though, because they're all too busy stepping over each other in the race for the prize, while at the same time believing that whatever service they dream up next will be better than everything that has gone before it.
Re: (Score:2)
Which is odd, considering the cartel that they formed. It should be trivial for them to come to an agreement.
Sounds good, until you take a closer look (Score:4, Insightful)
Although $20/month is a bit steep, I would consider this service were is not for a few limitations that make the service completely useless.
1) Only available in the US. Really guys, it's time to start thinking globally, the rest of the internet has for the last 10 years.
2) DRM, you don't really own the tracks, you can just play them for as long as you keep paying.
3) Can't play it on an iPod/iPhone, or any (portable) media player
If the music industry wants to get rid of piracy they have to start seeing them as competitors with a superior product. Since they cannot compete on price they have to compete on convenience and quality.
1) Make it global /month would seem reasonable).
2) Make sure EVERY song is there, not just the major labels
3) Allow artists to upload directly to the service, offer them the possibility to cut out the middle man. Effectively: phase out all music labels, let them fade out into oblivion. Smart music labels could re-invent themselves as companies that sell services (studio time, marketing, etc.) to artists.
4) No restrictions, no DRM, complete freedom.
5) Make it affordable so Average Joe will not even consider going through the 'effort' of pirating music. Flat-fee is preferred (e.g. $9,99
Nostalgia (Score:2)
I forget what I searched for but I got a listing of Word Documents that included "Penis Enlargement Instructions.DOC" or something like that. So naturally I clicked on that one and downloaded it. Figuring, it might be real, because a moron dumb enough to let Kazaa index his documents folder would be the sort of pe
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
As far as I can see (Score:2)
They're still missing the most important point of music sharing; one which most -- though not all -- of the *other* legal reboots of music sharing networks have also missed:
The long tail.
The thing that made Napster cool, and that makes Gnet and ED2K cool to this day, is this: not all the cool tracks belong to you. And to expand on what I mean there: I have 19 versions of the Star Spangled Banner in my collection. Not all of those were ever even released; some are rips from TV.
But in general, music sharing
Nitpick (Score:2)
"They're gonna have 'Existential Blues' by Tom 'T-Bone' Stenkus?"
Maybe.
The Dr. Demento compilations, which include "Existental Blues" are released on Rhino, which is associated with Warner:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_Records [wikipedia.org]
For those not into Dr. Demento, here's another example: Mothership, a Led Zep (they were on Atlantic which is now Warner) greatest-hits album, has the Rhino insignia on the case.
Amazon.com (Score:4, Interesting)
This whole idea of things being available in certain territories is outdated and makes no sense on the internet but as long as it's around then people will just steal what they can't buy.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"I've just been buying music from Amazon."
"This whole idea of things being available in certain territories is outdated...."
Amazon only sells music in a few, very limited areas.
In fact, in many places Amazon itself is just an online book store.