Category: Music

Audiolunchbox – DRM-free music

Audiolunchbox.com specialises in indie music and amongst many bands we’ve never heard of (All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors, anyone?), the site provides non-DRM restricted legal downloads of tracks and albums from Moby, Sasha and even The Pretenders.

Some 160 labels have licensed content to Audiolunchbox, and they use a familiar distribution model — US99c allows you to download a track to your PC, and then you are free to store it, or use it on any capable device. Albums are available from US$8.99. Users buy a “Lunch card” in a variety of values, which helps to bring access to kids without credit cards.

There’s an interesting twist – the site also offers Ogg Vorbis encoded downloads, so at last it will be easier for Linux users to play legally purchased music on their distributions. As MP3 is a proprietary format, there are no open source codecs for the OS.

“When you purchase audio from us, do with it as you please, as long as it’s for personal use.” — from the website.

Audiolunchbox

Give Ogg Vorbis a try

Eminem Sues Apple Over Unauthorised Use of Song

Because of what seems to be a rather surprising error by Apple, rap star Eminem is suing the computer company for featuring lyrics from the song “Lose Yourself”, sung in the advert by a ten year old boy, in their 2003 campaign for the iTunes music service.

Eminem’s company Eight Mile Style said “Eminem has never nationally endorsed any commercial products and … even if he were interested in endorsing a product, any endorsement deal would require a significant amount of money, possibly in excess of $10 million”.

The ad was shown multiple times on MTV, and it seems odd that Apple would feature the song without first seeking permission. Apple Computer has yet to comment.

Slashdot on Grey Tuesday, Slim and Apple

Nokia Boss Admits N-Gage Below Expectations

Jorma Ollila Nokia chairman and chief executive, admitted to the Financial Times yesterday that the N-Gage, their gaming platform, has not been the success they had hoped for, in his words “The sales are in the lower quartile of the bracket we had as our goal.”

The original aim was to sell 9 million units within its first two years, but many feel that the €300 (£200, US$380) is too expensive when compared with other gaming-only platforms such as the Nintendo GameBoy. It has also been criticised for its lack of game support and difficulty in operating it, in particular requiring the removal of the battery to change the game. The cracking of their game copy protection method last year has also not helped them with game publishers.

Ollila said he plans to wait until November 2005 to decide if it has been a success or failure.

Europe’s first mega-pixel camera phone launched by Vodafone

Vodafone has beaten the rest of the market to be the first to bring a mega-pixel camera to Europe. In a further development of their relationship with Sharp, it will be Sharp GX30.

Not content with being just a mega-pixel camera, this quad-band (GSM) phone of many features incorporates an MP3 player, offers Bluetooth support, has a removable SD memory cards and provides video message functionality. The screen on the handset has been significantly uprated to be capable of displaying 262,144 colours, four times its previous model, the GX20. It will be available in retail stores from March 2004.

Breaking the mega-pixel barrier is significant. At this resolution the photographs start to become useful beyond simply sending them other phones. The quality is sufficient to print them out and services such as Pixology (We QuickLinked earlier), are planning to take advantage of the always increasing resolutions.

The other direct benefit for Vodafone in higher resolution cameras’ becoming the norm is in increasing their call income – the higher the resolution, the more data there is to transmit, the higher Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). Raising ARPU is the mantra for mobile operators.

Vodafone’s global presence means it has tremendous clout and purchasing power enabling it to secure exclusive deals with phone manufacturers. It is known in the industry that Vodafone is keen to develop its own, branded phones in an attempt to break the power of Nokia on the phone market. They want to move their users from identifying with the make of handset, “I’ve got a Nokia” to “I’ve got a Vodafone”. Extending the relationship with Sharp is a further step towards that.

Vodafone

Sharp phones

Legal Music Downloads Reach New Highs

There were more than 150,000 legal music downloads in the UK in January 2004, putting downloading in second place behind buying singles for the first time. Although there were still about 341,500 singles sold in in that month, these figures show that legal music downloads are increasing in popularity all the time.

We feel that if there were more options for people to easily download music, then the CD single would die even quicker – it will be interesting to see what happens when iTunes eventually opens up shop in the UK later this year.

Of course, now that record labels are producing “copy protected” CDs with deliberate errors that do not play in many CD players (owners of car CD players be especially wary), and are difficult to rip, this may have the effect of driving more users to download sites.

MyCokeMusic has been an enormous success prompting many more people to download music, the January 19th launch was followed by 50,000 downloads in one week – we’ll be watching to see what the figures will be for February.

The Official Chart Company is now compiling figures on music downloads, and intends to issue a download chart in the future. Hopefully when this appears users will be able to buy music directly from the chart listing itself and will increase sales even further.

The Offical Chart Company

The Register on this week’s launch of “copy crippled” CDs

Midem Report: Focus on the Mobile Music Forum

By Paul Hosford, partner, New Media Law

In another crammed auditorium full of music industry and mobile phone industry delegates, keynote speaker, Takeshi Natsuno, MD of i-mode strategy at Japan’s NTT DoCoMo in revealed that its straightforward, entertainment-based service had attracted 40 million users to its subscription based model, because it is an utterly consumer focused offering. He urged his European and North American counterparts to leave behind current industry specific perspectives and to develop viable marketplaces for mobile content, where the key to overall success would be equal roles for all types of hardware manufacturers, content providers, and service providers.

His advice to the music content owners was to translate pricing models into the world of the packaged IT product – lower price higher volume, but to consider that the mobile operators need business models that address their industry’s concerns as well. Service providers should stay user-centric ensuring that even the most unsophisticated user is comfortable with, and enjoys using the product, for it to be properly commercially viable. DoCoMo’s model is to only take 9% commission on sales for themselves – preferring that “the revenue must go to the content providers”. In fact Natsuno said when other people within his organisation had suggested that they took a higher percentage, “I fired them”. This is a refreshingly different approach to current income sharing with many mobile service providers, particularly in the UK, where the operator takes as much as 40% of some services. His expectation is that their 40 million paying subscribers in Japan and 1.5 million active subscribers outside Japan will grow to a target of 100 million by 2010.

“Making Money from Mobile Music, Today” panel
In the panel session “Making Money from Mobile Music Today”, these different industry perspectives were apparent in the lively discussion of how ringtones and their increasingly musical offspring, “Hi-Fi tones”, had proved to be massive money spinners for the mobile operators. HiFi tones are near perfect reproductions of music. Representatives from T-Mobile International (Germany), Comverse (Israel), Musiwave (France), EMI Music Publishing (UK), Sony Music (UK), and Faith West (US) debated the future growth of “real” mobile music content with the development in mobile technology and the increase in personalisable ring-tones of various kinds beyond the mono and polyphonic tones that most of us are used to hearing. From the music industry’s side, as the quality of ringtones reproduction increases, record companies and publishers will overcome their initial reluctance to put their music on what they say has, up to now, been a platform with inadequate reproduction quality (they say they have been protecting their artists from low quality renditions of the music). The operators and service providers view is that it is clear that business models that take into account airtime and subscription considerations may or may not work for the rights owners. The record labels and publishers whilst obviously keen to collect revenues for themselves and artists from this potentially massive distribution opportunity will have to continue to develop open licensing policies across many territories. And if the operators follow Takeshi Natsuno’s advice, they will lower resale rates from the 10 to 40 % currently talked about.

Conclusion
As in the online environment, the on-demand mobile music world that will come to consumers in the near future will require the multiple rights relationships that exist within the music industry to be simplified and standardised – this in itself is a large task. As ever, what is all too apparent is that there are many expecting their slice of the pie – at an extreme the list could be as long as record company/label, music publisher, possibility the artist (depending on their contract), content aggregator, mobile service provider and payment system provider. One of the challenges facing the mobile music industry is whether the pie will be as big enough for everyone to get their slice.


         

MidemNet 2004 report

By Paul Hosford, partner, New Media Law

The fifth MidemNet 2004 opened the week long international music industry’s conference in Cannes. In heavily attended sessions this year, it appears, at least on the surface, that the industry is at last grasping on-demand digital distribution of music – the legal variety that is.

MidemNet is the music industry’s international forum that attracts players from every corner of the business to get together and discuss the issues confronting an industry severely impacted by the illegal distribution of millions of copies of its product.

Ted Cohen, EMI Music’ s senior VP of digital development and distribution, opened with the positive pro-industry message – commercial downloads represent the ultimate way forward for music consumers. He feels that it will come of age in 2004, and when legal battles are overcome and the consumer is empowered by commercialised P2P delivery, the industry’s bad reputation will begin to improve.

Keynote interviewee Eddy Cue of Apple’s Internet services announced what everyone suspected, the iTunes Music Store would launch in Europe at some point. iTunes throws into relief these challenges for the music business. Launched in April 2003 as a proprietary platform download service, the Music Store leverages Apple’s existing back-end infrastructure to offer a flat fee of 99 cents per track, and now offering 0.5 million tracks, made available by the Major record labels under recent licensing, but only available to US consumers. The delay in the European launch has been put down to resolving licensing across countries.

Setting out to develop “a better Kazaa” by 5 January 2004, iTunes has sold more than 30 million tracks in all kinds of genres, predominantly to an over-21 demographic. This has moved the Majors on from a proposition that only 2 and a half years ago was not on their list of potential licensing opportunities.

Whilst we all know and covet that beautifully packaged piece of must-have hardware that is the iPod, the reality is that Apples share of the 99 cents may not, in isolation, be sufficient to rev-up their share price. What is clear is that sales of iPod are going through the roof.

There has been a lot of discussion here about iTunes downloads not being platform-independent and that ultimately this may become a sticking point for the device-rich consumer who wants the flexibility to listen to their paid-for music on any device they own. In the meantime, iTunes sales still represent small numbers when compared to the world of illegal P2P sharing.

The European iTunes delay has highlighted a major problem. What will remain firmly as the principal challenge for any pan-European initiative is an industry with differing product release dates, differing licensing and rights collection mechanisms across the European territories – and differing price models. The message is clear – the industry must push through change in these licensing and publishing practices across the major markets.

In the panel sessions representatives of OD2, EMI Music, RealNetworks, French ISP Wanadoo and mmO2, debated the very real technical problems of delivering to consumers a single product where the industry’s marketplace and accounting mechanisms are territorially divergent and a very long way from uniformity. Whilst EMI’s goal is obviously, to sell more music by making it available in multiple formats on any platform, corralling all the various rights holders that share in recorded music remains the Major Labels most immediate challenge.

For the content aggregators, the ISP’s mobile networks and digital music intermediaries, the problems are different, but equally complex. They must deal with multiple payment mechanisms, differing pricing regimes and a complex value chain that makes it very challenging to deliver cost effective alternatives to paying consumers demanding of quality content. What will be critical to delivering a successful consumer experience is cross-platform transferability of the downloaded track that is paid for once.

In the meantime, the disc media formats are very much alive and kicking representing over 90 percent of music bought today. Your correspondent for one is looking forward to experiencing SACD recordings – real surround sound.

First WiFi Portable Music Player

Ever since the rise of the portable digital music player people have been discussing the possibilities of connecting them wirelessly rather than via a cable, either for loading content, or playing it back. After two years development SoniqCast has now released the Element Aireo, the first product to come to market that includes 802.11b (WiFi) support.

The WiFi connection enables the synchronisation of music-file contents with those on the PC’s hard drive, using their SoniqSync software. Synchronisation is either on demand or based on a user-defined schedule. Looking to the future SoniqCast are expecting to enable content download directly from the Internet via Hotspots and peer-to-peer content download from one Aireo™ player to another.

The built in FM transmitter (FM TX) can be used for wireless playback of music in cars or at home. While not a unique idea, this is achievable with an iPod by adding a third party extra to it, it is the first time it has been included.

This initial release has a 1.5Gb hard drive capacity built in, which while it hold a considerable amount of music, may appear to consumers to be dwarfed by the 40Gb storage offered on some other devices. The physical size of drive, could in a later product, be replaced by a 4Gb drive. Additional storage can be enhanced by up to another 1Gb by inserting an SD memory card.

The device won the “Best of CES Portable Audio” at the 2004 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

While we welcome this type of device, we feel the wireless features will not remain unique for very long and our concern would be the devices battery life – using WiFi consumes a far amount of power, potentially leading to short periods between charging, eliminating the benefits of it being wireless.

It is expect to go on sale for $300 within the next month.

SoniqCast

Review of Bleep – DRM-Free digital music sales

Warp Records have made their music back-catalogue available for purchase online via their Bleep service, but with the twist that the tracks are not electronically protected.  The bought tracks are downloaded as high quality, open MP3 files not using any form of Digital Rights Management (DRM).

We see this as an important development, as it takes a different approach to the purchaser of the music – it assumes that the majority of their customers are honest and will not pepper the file sharing networks with their paid for tracks. We will continue to monitor whether this approach has been good or bad for their sales, certainly short term they have benefited from positive press from the technically aware.

We have used the service extensively and below give an overview of the process.

_The standard – iTunes Music Store
As anyone who is attempting to sell music online is very well aware, Apple’s iTunes Music Store (iTMS) has set a high bar for other to reach, never mind exceed. iTMS addresses one of the major reasons for music copying, it brings music that people want to listen to and purchase easily within their grasp. It’s a friendly, well thought out and fast to use system, that charges an arguably reasonable amount of money, 99c, per track. The purchased tracks are downloaded in secure AAC format, can be held on up to three computers, burnt to audio CD and held on as many iPods as the track purchaser owns. iTMS licensing terms were a liberal world apart from compared to the highly restricted, effectively rental-based previous system.

_The Bleep interface
Bleep does a good job of keeping the screen uncluttered and uses three easy to follow columns that naturally progress form left to right to complete purchases. The left is for locating tracks at an album level, or for searching; the middle columns list the details tracks selected as well as enabling previewing and picking for purchase; the right hand column show the tracks ready for purchase, and following purchase, a list of tracks that can be or have been downloaded.

Selection of albums and tracks is as smooth a process as you would expect, either by clicking on the album cover icon or individual track name, if a text search has been carried out.

_Browsing & previewing tracks
Once the tracks have reached the middle column, simply clicking on Play can preview them. The previewing is quick to start, essential for a good user experience. Although it is not quite as fast as iTunes, which is like pressing track skip on a CD player, it is impressive considering it does not use a content delivery network like Akamai.

The loading of the preview track in displayed in a small, integrated Flash player, just below the album cover art, giving good feedback to the user making them aware that something is going on. Once sufficient has buffered, the first 30 seconds of the track starts playing, with a green highlight bar showing progress along the track. The preview track has been encoded at 90kbs and we found the quality more than sufficient.

There are a number of areas that Bleep wins over iTMS.

  • Preview is no limited to just 30 seconds of the track – the whole track can be previewed simply by clicking the play button again, every 30 second chunk.
  • Once buffered, the listener can click anywhere to the tracks timeline to listen from that point.

__Purchasing tracks
When tracks are selected for purchase, they are placed in the right hand column. A running total of the cost is displayed at the bottom of the column, as is useful additional information such as the size of download and an approximation of the time they will take to download.

Clicking on the tracks in the checkout basket the chance to still preview the tracks, you can still listen to it.

When ready to pay, the user simply clicks on the Checkout link, and they will be asked to login to their account or create an account if they have not used it before.

Warp has done a good and wise thing in making creating an account as straightforward as possible, you simply supplying your email address and a password.

The user has three way to pay; credit card, PayPal, and in the UK, mobile phone SMS text message for single tracks. After entering these relevant details, future purchases are as simple as clicking on a link.

The purchase via SMS is of particular interest as this has never been used for buying music downloads. After entering your mobile phone number in the setup screens and sending a confirmation message from you mobile to Warp, purchasing single tracks is a simple as confirming your desire to pay via SMS. An SMS is then received to the handset confirming the price charged and giving a reference number. The SMS payment option is a great idea for opening music sales to people too young to have a credit card, as they are bound to have a mobile phone.

_Receiving the booty
Once payment has been cleared, the right hand column lists the tracks now available for download. To save the trouble of downloading each track individually, there is an option to bundle them all into one Zipped file.

The user is also free to add tracks to a new shopping basket while tracking are sitting in their download list.

_Summary
Warp has done a good job with this service, generally improving on Apple’s iTMS. When comparing them it should be remember that this service is browser based, not the simpler dedicated application approach that iTMS takes.

We spoken to Warp at some length and are impressed with their understanding of the users needs. They also have some very interesting plans for the service, which we will report on when they are becoming available.

Bleep online music service