Wired has a neat article about the Internet and the music industry, and the title pretty much says it all: "
Music: Too Expensive to Be Free, Too Free to Be Expensive."
Basically, free services like
imeem and
MySpace Music (which is different from the music you can hear on bands' MySpace pages) are having trouble turning a profit. The sites are entirely dependent on revenue from online ads, which has not been enough to cover the licensing fees they have to pay to record labels. MySpace is also set to acquire imeem, which could turn into quite the financial disaster.
The problem, Wired says, is that once these ad-supported music sites start to go under, listeners who were willing to enjoy music in this legal fashion will likely return to torrent programs and other methods of illegal file sharing.
YouTube is the sole exception, according Wired, perhaps because ads, like videos, are visual, so YouTubers are more likely to click on them.
The article doesn't mention the online radio station
Pandora—my go-to site for legal music listening, although I have to admit I don't
go to it that often... it just reminds me of the radio, which for the past five years or so has just been that thing I use to connect my iPod to my car.
Will the Internet and music ever get along? Where do you go for music online?
Comments (36)
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I go to Youtube or Myspace. I'm not going to pay flipping 18 dollars for a CD that I only want to listen to a couple songs off of. If CDs were cheaper, I'd be willing to buy them more often.
I go to Limewire. I love illegal shit. ha ha feds, ha ha.
@ShimmerBodyCream@xanga - yeah, I like piratebay.org the best :)
@ShimmerBodyCream@xanga - limewire is good if you like to get viruses
I use Pandora and my favorite private tracker website, what.cd. Youtube and Myspace usually butcher the quality of songs. If I enjoy an album(which 90% of the time I do) I will go out of my way to buy it. I don't support any big label bands, just the smaller labels(like Nuclear Blast).
Pandora has kept my activities legal for the last year or so.
Will the Internet and music ever get along?
Sure
Where do you go for music online?
Pandora
@lewk@xanga - i LOVE pandora! except i've started using it less what with the 40 hr/month cap :C
youtube is gud too.
@cornyonacob@xanga - I didn't even know Pandora had a monthly cap. I feel like a poser now. :(
@lewk@xanga - oh. that means you're probably not going to hit the cap, lol. pandora started it sometime in july. click on the account link at the top to see how many hours you have left. here's part of the email i got:
"...Specifically, we are going to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per
month on the web. Because we have to pay royalty fees per song and per
listener, it makes very heavy listeners hard to support on advertising
alone. Most listeners will never hit this cap, but it seems that you
might..."
@cornyonacob@xanga - Oh wow, I didn't know about that either, but it does make sense I guess.
Not sure if the Internet and music will ever truly get along.
And I go to Youtube, pirate stuff from weird sites or peer to peer and Pandora (haha, if my head didn't start hurting a little before the end of last month I think I would've needed a third account). >_<
most of the time i buy the whole albums from stores or online stores. I may get a few songs from itunes every now and then. It's a better feeling to have the REAL cd than some burned faked cd you got from limewire or some crappy torrent. Real fans would always get the real thing and support the musicians they listen too than to just download it for free of the wb.
I buy singles online and whole albums down the block at my local CD store, because I'm not a thief and I don't want to contribute to the collapse of an industry that provides something I very much want them to provide.
I love iTunes. I would so much rather get the real album, including artwork than a bunch of pirated songs. Not only that, but I believe in and support capitalism, and the idea that artists should make money when someone uses their work. Another thing I love about iTunes- if I only want one song, I only buy one song.
When I lived in America, I thrived on Pawn Shops, Goodwills, Thrift stores and Garage Sales. Patience has it's benefits.... I sometimes waited a year to find a CD, but at most I only paid $2 - $3 for it, often less. Rip them to MP3 and re-sell the CD to a Used CD shop and I've not only gotten the music I want, at a decent price, but I don't have the clutter and mess of thousands of CD's taking up space in my home. It's not ripping off the artist because the artist makes ZERO DOLLARS from the re-sale of their product, and I did actually in fact own all 4,500 CD's worth of music I now carry with me.
Trust me, when I moved to Taiwan in February, and brought my music collection with me... it cost me next to nothing to do because of my habits. 2 320 gig Hard drives (one source, one backup) in a suitcase and my life is set to music for years to come.
If I had had to ship the CD's over --- the cost would have ran $1500+ to do so because of the weight, and then I would have also had to deal with custom's agents and fees. I'm glad I switched over to MP3's back in 1999, it's made life so much simplier.
@ShimmerBodyCream@xanga - Try FrostWire! It's basically the same exact program (seriously, the main difference is it's blue theme instead of green, haha) but I don't get viruses and junk from it.
The thing is, many consumers just don't have the means to bona fide own all the music they want to listen to. Because CDs are just ridiculously expensive. I think it's around an average of $15 per CD, and that's 5 gallons of gas (give or take)! The cost of production is so much less than that. I once had to write a paper (in Chinese) on this... I argued that such a price is unethically high, and that there must be some lower price that consumers are willing to pay.
I think one of the reasons why obtaining music over the internet illegally is so prevalent is because the regular radio sucks. At least around Chicago. That and people just want complete control over what they listen to. It's just a vicious cycle that will end in the death of the radio for music. People can just pop in that cd they got their illegal tracks burned onto. In my case, I can just hook up my USB drive with dozens of albums and have my car play that.
i go on playlist or youtube. if i was able to update my ipod (i can't right now because my laptop has been broken for a year now) i wouldn't be online.
And oh... the Vuze (formerly Azureus) client is awesome. You can use it to search for torrents from bitjunkie, sumotorrent, vuze, mininova, etc.
I'm not proud of downloading music illegally but it's just more convenient. I usually like 1-2 songs in an album so it's really money wasted if I pay for a CD.
@fL0riiZee@xanga - you can always get itunes which allows you to pay for a song you like without paying for the entire cd.
@Unfettered_Mind@xanga - you have to pay for advertisement and production cost and i'm not sure if its like video games but advertisement costs twice as much as production.
oh and music and the internet can get along once everybody starts using cloud computing.
How about things like the Amazon MP3 store or iTunes? How's their profit? And how about the tendency for the internet to boost people's awareness of bands, thus boosting merchandise and concert sales?
The problem, in my opinion, comes down to the recording industry trying to survive through litigation rather than innovation. Then again, the internet has allowed artists to essentially become their own labels and cut the recording industry out completely.
I support artists, I don't support the recording industry.
check out grooveshark.com. anything you want (well, almost) for free. it's legal and there is no cap time.
The thing is, it isn't only the phonographic industry that hates the internet. Television hates the internet. Book publishers hate the internet. Radio hates the internet. And, most importantly, the old newspapers hate the internet.
Evolution involves extinction. The fact is, the internet has rendered them all redundant - and they know it. The fact is, though they like to talk about Artists, and Journalists, (all with capitals), they're middlemen.
And if there's nothing the internet does better than making middlemen redundant. The paper connects journalists and readers. The music label connects artists, advertisers and listeners. The film industry connects the film crews with the audience, and so on. But the fact is, We Don't Need Them. Any journalist can now self publish, and if he's good enough, have his work read by millions. Artists can put their work on the net, films can be streamed, all without a useless parasite leeching its cut from every transaction.
That is why they are fighting tooth and claw to kill the internet. They lose their exclusive control over cultural production. It's a level playing field now - the best journalist, the best writer, the best artist will win, not the one who's picked up by the best paper, publisher or label. They hate fair games.