iTunes Music Fucking Store

You can't buy from other countries' stores because music licensing is territorial.

Quite a few independents are on there. Midheaven is making lots of cool stuff available http://www.midheaven.com/downloads.html

also, taking re-sale value into account when buying music is kind of lame.

uh, unless it's used.

okay you're excused. I was just imagining you buying CDs thinking "Hey, I could sell this back no problem!" (to be honest, that's a thought which indirectly crosses my mind as hindsight whenever I try to sell off records that haven't aged well and get, like, 10% of what I paid for them. oh well)

but re-sale value should totally be taken into account when selling music and putting a price on it. if you sell me a guitar and a year later i decide i want to replace it, i can sell it or trade it in because it still has value. that makes it worth more to me at purchasing time than something that won't have value a year later. likewise with cd's, i can trade 'em in next year at a used-cd store and get different cd's in return.

presumably i can't do that with mp3s, so they are absolutely worth less to me. i mean, sure, yeah, it's lame to put a "price" or "value" on music, but i'm not the one who came up with that concept in the first place. i'm just the poor schmuck who has to go out and buy it.

disclaimer:

HOPE TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC. AND PROBABLY MAKES YOU BLIND AND INFERTILE.

i buy stuff from the itunes store all the time.

But I also don't like all this mp4 business. That's another thing.

if you lose the files, you have to buy again:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93033

which is totally stupid if you ask me. it would be painless for them to keep track of what tracks you've bought and allow you to redownload them. emusic does this. napster does this. of course, rights and availabilities change all the time and this may be a music business motivated move. it's also possible that there are technical issues related to how the DRM scheme works.

as much as i like packaging and resell value, $10 for a $18 album definitely isn't bad.

isn't there a lossless format you can get? i'm fairly certain that you can download in aiff or something, which is like wav...it's pretty much recorded at the quality a cd would offer. i haven't tried this yet though. after 15 years of show going, i have proabably lost enough hearing to not really notice much. not to mention the craptastic headphones i wear. 128-bit aac is like ogg, it's better than 128-bit mp3.

m.

-- Drew Danie

I wonder if these are reported by the artists. I am sure Yngwie dreams of being considered classical.

http://www.audiolunchbox.com/album?a=11864

Why doesn't anyone buy stuff from/post about Audiolunchbox? They sell actual MP3s (and Oggs, for you open-source, non-royalty-liking types).

However, audiolunchbox has Boredoms and Sleep and Rovo... I'm still looking.

emusic does not reveal how much they give artists/labels but there's a cdbaby page that says it's usually 65 cents / track.

stuff is generally in 128 or vbr mp3 format.

stuff i got from them this month (i bought extra tracks):

robert wyatt "ruth is stranger than richard"
stereo total "do the bambi"
outrageous cherry "our love will change the world"
mouthus ... a live show
akron/family ... live show
anaal nathrakh "Domine Non Es Dignus"
carlos giffoni and chuck bettis ... live show
m.i.a. "galang" single
konono no 1 "congotronics"
sounds of the womb ... 60 minutes of womb sounds... totally weird.
gilbert and lewis "8 time"
schema "s/t" ep
suicide "happy alive"

sometimes emusic is really annoying... but generally, if you go in with a used/bargain bin attitude, it's pretty rad. i get really frustrated by the labels on there not being as up to date as possible. there are releases on several labels i want really badly, but i doubt they'll ever appear cause i've waited forever.

lately i've been trial running the new napster. it's ok. the DRM is pretty heinous. it makes itunes look sweet. but for $10 a month i can stream or download to my box most of their inventory which is pretty extensive in a major label way. indie-wise it's weaker, but still strong with subpop, trojan, krs, etc etc. matador and merge it doesn't have though. many sought after tracks are buy only... at prices comparable to itunes or lunchbox. napster is way more up on the new releases tho. especially with smaller stuff. still months behind, but... i can't decide if i should continue. napster by far has the most insanely confusing set of things you can do with it. you buy only which lets you actually burn the tracks, but only so many times. you can $10 sub for streaming and downloading on your PC and buy etc etc. or you can $15 sub for stream to pc and download pc or transfer to an non-ipod ipod thingy and buy,etc etc. it's like James Joyce wrote their damned terms and conditions.

but it's got brian wilson, ll cool j, junior varsity km, and dragaur.
m.

1. What if you could access whatever you want from anywhere (the "music locker" model)? Once wireless internet becomes more ubiquitous, this would be very useful.

2. What if every time a better music format was released (FLAC, then 24/96, then 5.1, etc.), you could just automatically upgrade to that format? No more re-buying everything you already bought! This is the idea that really got me on-board. Strip the DRM from these services, and I would sign up in a flash.

Right now, none of the music services have the selection of p2p, but those two features would make the subscription model much more appealing.

napsters sub is close to that in some ways, but limited. it's like a corporate version of it. where instead of you owning the bits on your computer or your webspace you have somewhere, you kind of don't. and i can access from other computers, but there's a limited number of computers that can access the tracks as my account at any one time.

that format idea is really rad. it's a big plus for the tech company that implements it. a big minus for the music industry execs who like everyone repurchasing old versions for new. i'm having thoughts of broadcast flag woe just thinking about it. (wasn't that the thing where hollywood has control over what tech companies can produce?)

m.

Is 128 mp3 still pretty typical for purchased mp3s across the board? (I've not been paying attention lately)

eMusic lets you download albums that you've previously downloaded as many times as you want, on as many computers as you want. Until about a year and a half ago you could download as many MP3's as you wanted for the monthly subscription, too. A lot of people bailed after that, but I've stuck with it. You can find quite a bit of really great stuff if you dig around (which is half the fun, like digging through bins at the store.)

(The Konono album is on there? Hot damn, that's excellent!)

I usually use iTunes when I'm dying to hear some random track (as mentioned upthread) but I've had my subscription to eMusic for something like 3 years now!

1) is a really good idea and could be very useful. you kinda buy stuff but leave it stored centrally and get at it whenever you want. This means trusting other ppl with your stuff though...

3) again v interesting, but it means record companies can no longer get ppl to re-buy old stuff in new formats (record->CD, vhs->DVD etc) which was previously important to them. Maybe they can't now anyway?

1. Boo-hoo to the record companies.

2. In the subscription model, they would be getting money from me EVERY MONTH. Isn't that incentive enough for them?

You can only play the tracks on computers you've authorised (or iPods), which must be done over the internet to Apple's servers. So if you want to have a machine in say 20 years to play your music you're relying on Apple still being in the music business, still having the same server set-up etc. They could even charge you if they wanted.

I suppose you could avoid computers and just shuffle your entire collection between different versions of iPods over the years, but you're still relying on Apple being there to take your cash.

i wonder how the rights differ from a hardcopy and a burned iTunes copy.

?
m.

m.

"We try hard to stay current with advances in encoders as they happen. In general, the newer the album release, the newer the software that was used to encode the music. The exception is material that was not encoded in-house and may have been encoded with a different version encoder than what we are currently using for in-house work. Currently, all of our MP3s and Oggs (whether they were encoded in-house or not) are encoded at 192 ABR and Q6 respectively using lame and oggenc respectively. I hope that information is useful. We are always looking for ways to improve our offerings."

http://audiolunchbox.com/community/discussion?d=25

OK, that's weird. I'm the nerd who asked the original question.

Yes "Relayer" $2.97

cuz it's only 3 tracks, duhhhhhh. get it before someone figures out that it's not an EP.

DRM = pwned

What's the scam here?

cost of album on uk itunes £7.99 ~ $15.50
cost of album on us itunes £5.10 ~ £9.90

The thing gift cards are really good for is buying music from foreign iTunes stores...they make it difficult, but if you have a certain country's iTunes gift card, you can install a separate version of iTiunes and buy from their store. A real pain in the ass, but for some it's worth it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7988345.stm

Apple has introduced a new three-tier pricing system for downloading tracks from its iTunes online store.

Downloads now cost either 59p, 79p or 99p per track - most songs used to sell at a standard price of 79p.

They will now be Digital Rights Management (DRM) free so can be used on all players and not just Apple's iPod.

Announcing the changes in January, chief executive Steve Jobs said prices would be based on what record labels charged Apple.

New releases will now often be priced 99p.

The move comes after major labels said the price of a song should reflect how much buyers were willing to pay for it. They hope it will make music sales more profitable.

Removing copy protection software from the downloads could spell the end of unpopular DRM-limited music.

The changes come a day after rival Amazon dropped the price of more than 100 bestselling songs on its MP3 site, including number one Poker Face by Lady GaGa, to 29p.

Amazon's site, launched in December, has more than five million tracks for sale compared with Apple's catalogue of more than 10 million.

So they put up the prices of new releases then they will complain when people say "sod that, I'll download from limewire/blog"?

sad bastards if they feel that strongly against paying an extra 20p for a track they want tbh

it doesn't say that in addition to removing all DRM they've also made everything 256 AAC (rendering itunes plus obsolete) - if they have then cool

all tracks were 99p when it launched anyway iirc

sad bastards if they feel that strongly against paying an extra 20p for a track they want tbh

It all mounts up.

Anyway I'd far rather buy the vinyl or a cd than a download. Wish more labels would offer d/l coupons with the vinyl so that you can get mp3s for the ipod. A few labels do this and it's a great idea.

Wonder how much iTunes will charge for Beatles albums and will they allow downloads of separate tracks?