MP3 phone quality upsets Big 5 labels
p2pnet.net News:- You have to hand it to Big Music. It leaves absolutely no stone unturned in its never-ending quest to control every digital device capable of playing music.
Yesterday, Samsung Electronics, the world’s No 3 cell-phone maker, was ready to launch its MP3 Anycall clamshell with an mp3 playback function, a 1.3-million-pixel digital camera, and 96-megabyte internal memory – plus an external memory slot and, not at all coincidentally, its mp3 function supports DRM.
But it decided to hold back.
As the Korea Herald says here, “Roiled by technology that allows consumers free access to Internet music files, the entertainment industry wants to lower the sound on MP3 mobile phones.”
In short – Big Music doesn’t want phones to sound too good – only low ‘radio’ quality is acceptable.
When LG Electronics, the fifth-largest mobile phone maker in the world, and Samsung Electronics announced plans to release MP3 phones this year, “alarm bells went off at groups claiming music copyrights” says the story, going on that about 150 mobile phones are expected to debut in Korea this year and, “with discriminate consumers demanding more and more features, the MP3 option is viewed as a likely favorite”.
“Our industry has been in a nose-dive since the release of MP3 players in 2000, “The Herald quotes Yoon Seong-woo, a director of the Korea Association of Phonogram Producers, an RIAA clone, as saying.
“At that time, we felt hopeless because Korean people were insensitive to copyright issues and we did not have any unified organization that could cope with the situation. Because the MP3 phone market is big enough to destroy the music industry, we’re struggling to defend it.”
Against that, mp3 phone makers wondered why anyone would want to pay for something they can download for free.
However, it would appear the two parties have, “found some common ground by agreeing that MP3 phones can play illegal music files, but only at low sound quality,” the report states, adding:
“Illegally downloaded music files will only be available for three days at the original high quality speeds until the technology of transmitting illegal music files at a low speed is developed, which will possibly take two months.”
But, “the controversy is still raging with Samsung Electronics insisting that record producers should eventually let them have high sound quality. Without an agreed solution with KAPP, Samsung Electronics was inclined to still move ahead with its MP3 phone release. But the Korea Association of Phonogram Producers was said to withhold songs on Internet pages related to Samsung Electronics.
“It also said it would consider not releasing any recent songs to mobile carriers and gradually stop providing songs that have been already transmitted to the mobile carriers via a content provider.”
April 1st, 2004 at 4:24 am
3 years after its relaease, my samsung upraoar is still a market leader, why, with its pathetic 128mb of ram, b/c of bs like this….