p2pnet - rss feed: iTunes core value
p2pnet.net News View:- I was quite interested in buying U2’s new album. But because I use my computer for listening to music more than I use my stereo, I decided to look into buying it ‘online’.
The new U2 CD “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” is available through various generic pay-per-download sites. The cost is the usual 99¢ per song, or $9.99 for the full album. Or, if you’re not too sure, you can download all 11 songs, one at a time, for a total cost of $10.89.
This is pretty well the mainstream way sites such as PureTracks , iTunes, and Napster2 work. It’s a formula that’s become standard in the ‘legal’ world of downloading.
I paid a visit to the local retailer, and the cost of the full album was $13.99.
Being a consumer with limited amounts of free cash, I decided to do a little math to see what the best deal was for me.
And here’s what I found ….
So called ‘legal’ sites that spew songs at a 128 bitrate are offering downloads at 12.8% the quality of the original - put another way, they’re 87.2% inferior to the actual recording on the disk.
192 ‘quality’ is still missing 81% of what the artist intended to be heard. If you play a ‘downloaded’ version versus store bought, the difference is apparent. It’s FM (at most) compared to CD quality.
Now, if I were to buy the CD at my retailer, I’d be paying $1.27 per song, each song obviously being high quality and high fidelity.
Let’s look at the 99¢ version….
99 ¢ for 128 bitrate is equivalent to $7.73 for the ‘full’ song.
So if we work it backwards, the cost should be 16¢ per song,.
And that’s about what it’s really worth.
Dave O’Hare (aka Dave’s Lounge) - Toronto, Canada
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See:-
12 Days of Christmas - PNC Bank, December, 2004
December 6th, 2004 at 4:50 am
Only the steve jobs’s fankiddies would buy from iTunes. They think they get a good deal on anything anyways. Its all no different from any plastic music store, its all ripoff and inferior product. I find lots of good 192kbps to 320kbps for free and I’m happy.
December 6th, 2004 at 8:26 am
The people who use itunes, napster2 and the others, are in my opiniom, the majority of ppl who use them, use them because either are not very profecient with pcs, or because they want to look cool, and download from these sites, because after all, most of today stuff, like the ipod, somepp just buy it to look cool.
December 6th, 2004 at 4:18 pm
16¢ per song, that’s more than Allofmp3 charges for a Lame alt preset extreme encoded song.
Forget iTunes go Russia. All that you can leave behind…..
December 6th, 2004 at 4:40 pm
“192 ‘quality’ is still missing 81% of what the artist intended to be heard. If you play a ‘downloaded’ version versus store bought, the difference is apparent. It’s FM (at most) compared to CD quality.”
Of course as most people should know this arguement is complete crap since you can lossless copies of the songs that are only 50% of their original size.
A lame vbr mp3 at 192 is perfectly fine. If you really think your hearing is better than 99% of the population then perhaps you could go a little higher but for most music this is pointless. Calling this FM quality are just plain ignorant.
December 6th, 2004 at 7:46 pm
If you are listening through crappy computer speakers or a crappy boombox or other ‘inferior’ sound systems, then you probably will not be able to tell the difference.
If you do a frequency analysis on a recording encoded at 128kb/sec, you will find that all frequencies above 16kHz are removed. Stepping up the bitrate improves this cutoff. For example, at 192kb/sec you may have a cutoff at 18kHz. Even at the highest bitrate of 320kb/sec, a frequency analysis will show that there is information missing compared to the CD. (Note that large amounts of information at the lower frequencies are also altered when converting to mp3 as well, but these altered frequencies will not be as noticeable to most listeners on inferior systems.)
There are people out there who are purists when it comes to music, they want the best quality sound reproduced in their own homes.
Most of the masses have never experience well recorded music in a properly set up stereo system (and they may not be interested in doing so). The reason I say well recorded music is because much of the mainstream Pop/Rock music released these days does not compare to rock recordings made over 30-40 years ago. And I’m not talking about musical quality but just in terms of sound quality. Even an untrained ear will be able to hear some difference/improvement in a recording played on a good quality stereo system.
When you do experience true stereo, it will seem like the performers are right there in your room. You will see 2 speakers standing there in front of you but it will seem like the sound is not emanating from them. You will hear sounds coming from all around the speakers as well as between them.
The description may sound magical, but when you experience it you will feel the magic.
So even though the argument is that most people will not be able to hear the difference, there are people out there that may very well be able to. And this inferior quality music is being sold to us online for just a little less than the original CD at a record store.
In reality, people are getting ripped off, and it appears they are happy to be. Maybe that would change if they were aware of what is missing.
TV
December 6th, 2004 at 8:02 pm
Dead right. And if you can’t tell the difference, you’re a lost cause anyway.
December 6th, 2004 at 11:54 pm
Yeah.. except they buy new earplugs so they don’t get mugged and keep the iPod in their pocket so it doesn’t get stolen..
They’re obviously desperate to impress total strangers.. putz
December 6th, 2004 at 11:55 pm
Oh.. you’re referring to the 99% of ppl that can’t tell the difference as a lost cause.. cool..
December 8th, 2004 at 4:33 am
The majority of people will see little or no discernable difference - mainly as their speakers or headphones are likely cheap.
However the consumer is being ripped off in other ways. The $13.99 cost for a physical copy includes the material and packaging costs of the CD itself, the cost to ship the CD from point A to B, and the overhead of the studio, distribution system and store selling the CD.
None of these costs exist for a digital copy. While Apple claims the margins are razor thin, I’m certain that’s because the music industry is gouging them.
The fixed cost for storing the entire Apple itunes archive of 700,000 songs is roughly $30,000 in hard drives. Bandwidth for the 250+ million songs they served this year, over-estimating here, But is about $3 million. Even assuming another $5 million in infrastructure and administration …. That’s a total overhead under $10 mil - which works out to a nickle per song in 2004.
If the hard cost is five cents a song - what justifies a dollar a song? Where is all this money going to. We know it’s likely not the artist.
-Tragic
December 8th, 2004 at 6:24 pm
Absolutely right. I had read somewhere else that out of the 99 cents per song, the record company gets 75-85 cents, Apple/Napster/etc… get about 15 cents, and the artist depending on their clout would get about 5-15 cents per song.
In other words, the record companies are getting 75-85 cents per song and they do no work whatsoever. The entire cost falls on Apple/Napster/etc…
December 9th, 2004 at 11:44 am
…well, the record companies are paying for all the wonderful marketing of the artists, aren’t they? filling our tv screens, public spaces and newspapers with that wonderful colourful stuff that makes us proud of our human intellect