Here’s another thing I want. It may exist and if it doesn’t it should.
It’s a given that your DRM-encumbered music downloading sites are kinda crappy. Some are crappier than others, but they sorta suck. There do, however, exist numerous legal download sites, like emusic for example, that will sell you unencumbered mp3s that you can do whatever you like with, just like those CDs you can buy from Amazon that often end up cheaper than iTunes. The problem is they tend to only sell songs from a limited number of indie labels. This is fine if you’re into the sort of music that enlightened record companies provide, but there’s a problem.
You go to the site and search for your musician of choice. But they’re not on a label that’s working with that site. Or they are, but that label only has download rights for the US. Or the site has some silly subscription thing where you buy 40 tracks a month which don’t carry over if you don’t use them. (That’s the downside with emusic – I’ve pretty much run out of stuff I want so I’ll probably cancel my sub soon. Whether I’ll go through the rigmarole of re-subscribing should I discover something in the future I’m not so sure.)
That’s the nature of the market, you could say. Lots of competing business competing against each other and eventually the best one will prevail. But this sort of thing is slightly more important. It needs to be shown that there’s a market for DRM-free mp3s and that money can be made from them. It needs to be easy to find the music you want to buy without going to each and every site and going through the same often fruitless search. Simply put, we need an aggregator. A nice little box where you type in “The Breeders” and it brings up all the sites that stock them for your territory and how much they charge. This sort of comparison shopping stuff has been around for ages and can’t be too hard to implement, and I’d imagine it’d be the sort of thing those who are campaigning against DRM would want to encourage.
So, internet? Are you listening?
I don’t know if you saw this about Shawn Fanning’s latest operation. It’s *kind of* what you are on about:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4317381.stm
Not got time to find the right blog entry so I’m going to use this one to tell you Blue in the Face is on 4 at 3:30 Sunday morning.
No problem, Mikal. A derail can be excused for something important like that. The orignal post is here though. But 3.30am? If that isn’t an indictment against scheduled broadcast TV I don’t know what it. I’ve got to get Sam to show me how to work the video recorder and everything…
Smithylad: Thanks for that. I’m still digesting the implications. It could be way cool and the golden answer to everything. or it could be shit. Depends on whether they use the vast pool of “illegal” music out there already or try and build a new pool of “legal” tracks. If it’s the latter, how do I determine which of my tracks are one or the other? Do CD rips count? Too many questions…
At least someone’s trying to do the right thing and is attempting to understand the way people want to listen to music these days.
But we know enough about record companies to know they’ll get it right 90% of the way, and then destroy it completely over the last 10%.