Here are your two options: 1) Buy DRM enabled music, then have it confiscated by a DRM server shutdown, or 2) Pirate it, and keep it for free. This BoingBoing article talks about Walmart's music store, which is now shutting down, and unless consumers are tech savvy, they'll lose the ability to play the music they've bought legally. Even if they have the skillz, what they have to do to save their music that they've paid for is a huge pain anyway. With such massive amounts of shit going online nowadays, including porn, video games, e-books, and even music, there really needs to be a discussion on each company's long term support of DRM protected content. I would be fucking pissed if I were the fellow who spent hundreds of dollars to buy music legitimately, then see it get completely bricked for no reason. There needs to be legislation that says, if you're turning off your servers permanently, you must release the server code into the public domain. I mean, isn't it basically theft if you agree to merchant terms of ownership and then they yank away what they gave you? (Unless, of course in the EULA it says "when we turn it off, ur fucked LOLOLOLOLOL"....paraphrased of course). Welcome to "you're not really owning what you buy lol" digital era.
I got that point when one day, I tried to play an Audible file and their servers were down or something, anyway, it didn't work. Until then, I hadn't minded so much because their policy is reasonably generous to not be a burden. After that, I went thru the considerable trouble of making MP3s out of all my .aa files. If you think those suckers can simply be converted, think again... you gotta burn them to CD and rip the CD back to MP3s. Yay.
Of course, you CAN buy DRM free music from Amazon.com as well. I like to BitTorrent stuff as much as the next guy does, I just think it's dishonest to paint "piracy" as the only way to get ahold of DRM free music.
DRM sucks ass. This is why I still purchase CDs and DVDs. You can rip them yourself and not have to worry about that DRM bullshit. Yes, they are slightly more expensive (I just bought a CD for $11.99 that I could have got from iTunes for $9.99) but in the end it's worth it.
Most hypocritical system ever. Here's a timeline: -internet music piracy starts to get big -music industry ZOMGs, somehow believes their losses are equal to # of songs downloaded -downloaders say "this doesn't cost you anything, we do the file transfer and storage, its not wrong" -music industry says "NO, you have never been paying for the media, you are paying for the CONTENT! You are paying for the rights to hear the song, not the CD that it comes on!" -music industry sues people for 1000x the value of the stolen content -legal users of DRM-encrusted stuff get burned, they say "WTF I want those songs I bought back." -music industry says "NO! you were never paying for the content! You didn't buy the rights to the song! You just bought the media that we used to provide it to you, for as long as we choose to support it." A big part of the music/movie biz is reselling you the same stuff multiple times. Even though we SUPPOSEDLY bought the rights to a song on vinyl, we still pay for those same usage rights each time we upgraded to a new format. I won't buy music with DRM on it, period. I have an iTunes gift card and I keep waiting for something that I want to be on iTunes plus. I don't want to buy anything from there, but I figure that letting a 35 dollar gift card just go unused is even worse than spending it (they already have the money). Can't tell you how many times I've wished it was an amazon gift card (or better yet, cash).
Sokar already told me about the MP3s you can buy on Amazon. Unfortunately, no such deal is in place for people in Canada. Ashame too, as I wanted to use it for artists I legitimately want to support.
Songs from select music companies that do not have DRM on them. They are also encoded at a higher quality (although not lossless). Of course, they are still in apples fuckin .aac format. I'd have much prefered mp3s or even better, a lossless option. For a brief period, they were more expensive than the normal versions, but now they are the same price.
If you are doing that often, you might wanna look into an ISO/CD/DVD mounter like MagicISO, Power ISO, or Alcohol 120%. (I personally use MagicISO.) They make a "virtual" CD, and you can prolly rip it from there instead. That'll at least let you save your CDs for what they were made for, namely, listening to pirated music on your car stereo.
Yep, Amazon is great. Cheap, high-quality, DRM-free music. I started "converting" my music library over a couple months ago (though it'll take a long time to finish). If the music industry had figured this out 10 years ago they'd be in a way better position than they are now.
People should read up on Divx. No, not the video codec. The pay-per-play DVD format from 1998 launched by Circuit City. "Get a movie collection at a low price" they said. "Convert your disks to unlimited play," they said. But when the servers were shut down after the product failed, every Divx-"enhanced" ( still) DVD became an unusable coaster.
A lot of indy bands are putting their stuff on the internet to get more exposure and maybe land that big recording deal. Some of the places they put their stuff is on Limewire. For full album downloads, I always found bittorrent best. Yup, bittorrent for full albums, and Limewire for individual songs.
I find Indie music too stressful. How am I supposed to decide what's good if MTV or VH1 hasn't ranked it yet ?
I'm just waiting for the day when rock bands, en masse, realize they don't even need the record companies anymore and just start releasing their own music. Record companies do help with marketing and distribution on a national scene. But they also take 90% of the profit. They should be abandoned or forced to re-negotiate the contracts.
Why? Recording, pressing CDs, touring, payola, they're all significant capital investments small bands will have difficulty with.
Um, there's a band called Koopa, from Colchester, who've twice made it into the charts without any official help... RM is right, when the bands get savvy en masse, the labels are finished...
I have thought about that. But it won't work - music will never be a fair market. For example, when NIN decides to go the no label route, they'll still make a boatload on money because they are a household name. When Whiz Kids from Tacoma record an album, nobody will buy it because nobody knows them. So Whiz Kids pay someone to market it. As does everybody else. Then, one day, they'll decide that there's synergy to be had by marketing together. Or share the cost of producing. And there you have the roots of a new music industry.
Entrepreneurial souls will always find a way to work outside the system (and with the internet it's become easier than ever). But the proof is in the pudding. Acts like Radiohead and Prince that that spend all kinds of time bitching about record labels, that don't even need one, end up jumping right back in bed with them. They're obviously offering something otherwise artists wouldn't keep signing with them.
^Actually, Radiohead haven't jumped back in bed with the record labels. And we have this development. I suspect we're at the same stage as when actors finally shrugged off the studio system. It's going to get interesting...
They ended up with two different record labels for distribution. Musicians have needed to unionize for a long time and hopefully things will begin to change. But even your article says record labels won't be going away because artists will need someone to help build their career and market and distribute their music. Big bands have the resources to do this, small bands don't.
