Downloads for 5 cents a tune?
p2pnet.net News:- The Billboard Producer Directory called ex-The Clash producer Sandy Pearlman the ‘Hunter Thompson of rock’.
Now Pearlman has come out with an idea that fully justifies the over-used superlative ‘revolutionary’.
A visiting scholar at Canada’s McGill University, at the Canadian Music Week conference in Toronto, last week, he suggested, "putting all recorded music on a robust search engine – Google would be an ideal choice, but even iTunes might work – and charging an insignificant fee of, say, five cents a song," says the Globe & Mail.
"In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers – two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven’t had to compensate artists."
It looks wild, but it could happen. And soon, you might not even need a computer.
US storage pioneer Michael Thomas says it’ll eventually be possible to store not only music, but full length movies you can then download to one of the mobile movie players that are starting to arrive.
With Atomic Holographic Optical NanoStorage it will be possible for the user to have access to an enormous library where they’ll be able to store their favourite music, videos and movies for a tiny fee.
This’ll allow travelers on planes, trains, camping, cruise lines, to access to their favorite entertainment – whenever and where ever they are.
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
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See:-
Globe & Mail – Would you pay 5 cents for a song?, March 10, 2005
Holographic Optical NanoStorage – Every file you ever owned on 1 disc, p2pnet, February 25, 2004
March 11th, 2005 at 5:49 am
Really now. If you can bring the price of a song from 99 cents to 5 cents then what in the bloody sam hell is the problem with p2p and free downloading?
By accepting 5 cents a song they (music industry) completely understand and agree that the downloads are NOT relative to their sales of cd format music.
Let’s examine that a little closer. At 5 cents the average cd-length amount of music is less than a dollar. It would be a 95% drop in price.
Would I pay 5 cents a song? Um, yeah, I would be willing to pay that and I’m one of the people who put all music on boycott from the days that Metallica started the ball rolling against p2p.
My point though, there’s no profitable difference in 5 cents vs 0 cents when you understand that even the bandwidth would cost more than the 5 cents a song. The action of making music 5 cents would be a complete admission that p2p is advertising and marketing research… It’s already been admitted that the RIAA adjusts which music it pushes to stores hardest based on what p2p download monitoring companies tell them people are downloading…. I suggest even further that if not for p2p and the data gained through it’s monitoring the RIAA would be losing money by not really knowing what the masses were wanting from them.
It’s time to move the price to $0 and welcome the p2p world. Would be add in scripts to track what’s downloaded to hubs in Direct Connect so you could use it for marketing information, sure we would (I can’t speak for every network but I can guarantee that many / most / all would follow) you could even mod clients like dc++ to send search requests history to a friendly site to track the searches as well… Anything is possible but the media companies need to get their heads out of our asses first. Sure other p2p programs could adapt to that as well as the ‘price’ of being able to download..
Movie companies, program developers, novelists, everyone could benefit from p2p if they were open to it but it does take a shift in what they consider marketing and product feedback and where they draw the lines on IP usage.
We’ve past a point where we can turn back technology. It’s not going to disappear no matter how much money you pump into the latest chump-DRM that an 8 year old will crack in a day – or circumvent with a black marker on the cd. It’s all a waste of effort and doesn’t gain the IP holder anything more stress and legal bills trying to sue John Doe’s on a list of IP-addresses. p2p itself isn’t going anywhere. There are private transfer programs that are nothing more than white-noise to anyone monitoring the traffic, it’s not going to be as easy as it was days/months/years ago once the average p2p user educates themselves to the new programs out there and the anti-p2p ip-address blockers to eliminate some of the hits the agencies get on easier to monitor networks… it’s over.
Get a clue media industry…. you can benefit from p2p without lawsuits if your big enough to stop suing your customers… if your able to set your prideful self-interests aside and not only listen to us, your customers, but to your artists – yes, even many of your own artists are tired of you suing us for your own goals and motives….
Just my 10 cents.
_-Jile-_
March 11th, 2005 at 5:59 am
I fixed my post – I’d edit my post above if I could to:
Really now. If you can bring the price of a song from 99 cents to 5 cents then what in the bloody sam hell is the problem with p2p and free downloading?
By accepting 5 cents a song they (music industry) completely understand and agree that the downloads are NOT relative to their sales of cd format music.
Let’s examine that a little closer. At 5 cents the average cd-length amount of music is less than a dollar. It would be a 95% drop in price.
Would I pay 5 cents a song? Um, yeah, I would be willing to pay that and I’m one of the people who put all music on boycott from the days that Metallica started the ball rolling against p2p.
My point though, there’s no profitable difference in 5 cents vs 0 cents when you understand that even the bandwidth would cost more than the 5 cents a song. The action of making music 5 cents would be a complete admission that p2p is advertising and marketing research… It’s already been admitted that the RIAA adjusts which music it pushes to stores hardest based on what p2p download monitoring companies tell them people are downloading…. I suggest even further that if not for p2p and the data gained through it’s monitoring the RIAA would be losing money by not really knowing what the masses were wanting from them.
It’s time to move the price to $0 and welcome the p2p world. Would we add in scripts to track what’s downloaded to hubs in Direct Connect so you could use it for marketing information? Sure we would, (I can’t speak for every network but I can guarantee that many / most / all would follow) you could even mod clients like dc++ to send search requests history to a friendly site to track the searches as well… Anything is possible but the media companies need to get their heads out of our asses first. Sure other p2p programs could adapt to that as well as the ‘price’ of being able to download..
Movie companies, program developers, novelists, everyone could benefit from p2p if they were open to it but it does take a shift in what they consider marketing and product feedback and where they draw the lines on IP usage.
We’ve past a point where we can turn back technology. It’s not going to disappear no matter how much money you pump into the latest chump-DRM that an 8 year old will crack in a day – or circumvent with a black marker on the cd. It’s all a waste of effort and doesn’t gain the IP holder anything more than stress and legal bills trying to sue John Doe’s on a list of IP-addresses… p2p itself isn’t going anywhere. There are private transfer programs that are nothing more than white-noise to anyone monitoring the traffic, it’s not going to be as easy as it was days/months/years ago once the average p2p user educates themselves to the new programs out there and the anti-p2p ip-address blockers to eliminate some of the hits the agencies get on easier to monitor networks… it’s over.
Get a clue media industry…. you can benefit from p2p without lawsuits if your big enough to stop suing your customers… if your able to set your prideful self-interests aside and not only listen to us, your customers, but to your artists – yes, even many of your own artists are tired of you suing us for your own goals and motives….
Just my 10 cents.
_-Jile-_
March 11th, 2005 at 10:40 am
Quoting Paul Resnikoff from http://www.digitalmusic.com:
Resnikoff’s Parting Shot: In Search of a Sweet-Spot Price
Have you heard about the 5-cent music download plan from Canada? No, this is not a geeky digital music joke, it is a real plan coming out of McGill University. Sandy Pearlman, legendary producer of The Clash, is one of its backers, arguing that consumers will play legit if the price is right. According to the proposal, volume would soon compensate for the massive price drop, with stores like iTunes suddenly experiencing billions, not millions, of downloads. And consumers would opt for the safer, higher quality tracks, minimizing the role of open P2P networks.
Sound like a hair-brained scheme? Most have already brushed the proposal aside, likening the idea to Mercedes-Benz selling its CLKs for $5,000 each. Mercedes would never sell a car for this little, so why should a major label initiate such a fire sale? The only problem with this argument is that Mercedes-Benz has its pricing structure sorted out, and the music industry does not.
Think that 99-cents is the sweet spot price for an a-la-carte download? Perhaps it will be at some point in the future, but currently consumers are mostly unwilling to pay. A sweet spot price is something that moves product, and a lot of it. While 300 million downloads is nothing to sneeze at, the iTunes contribution is simply a tiny fraction of total downloads online, with P2P applications accounting for billions of swaps annually. 99-cent download revenues are also largely irrelevant in the larger music industry revenue picture, despite explosive growth in 2004.
Maybe we need to give 99-cent downloads a chance, and exercise some patience. After all, music downloads account for a substantial portion of total online content purchases, and the sector is still in its infancy. Perhaps in three years, Apple will be selling billions upon billions of 99-cent tracks, validating its pricing model and reviving a sagging industry. This is the stuff of vision, with pioneers like Steve Jobs ready to receive more glory.
But what if the plan fails to work out? Gambling on one price point seems like a dangerous idea, especially with album sales slipping and labels losing money. But is the industry ready to experiment with lower-priced downloads? The answer is decidedly no, because most of the pricing pressure coming from major labels is upward, not downward. The logistics of actually executing the McGill plan are simply too impractical.
But wait. Somewhere in the bowels of Russia, a rogue download site named allofmp3.com may offer the experiment we need. That site, which sells tracks for as low as 5-cents, recently skirted IFPI enforcement. The Moscow Police were simply uninterested in the case, noting that the site was not violating any Russian laws. That creates a safe haven, with Moscow unlikely to take any action in the future. While selling stolen music is not the most admirable craft, perhaps allofmp3.com has a silver lining after all. With enough publicity and word-of-mouth, the dirty little site might just give the industry the market research it needs. And without a sure-fire sweet spot price in place, ideas like the McGill plan just might provide some learning.
Paul Resnikoff, Editor
March 11th, 2005 at 11:11 am
I obviously don’t have the rep of Perlman, but look at
http://p2pnet.net/story/2672 where I suggested the same thing.
I’m convinced there’s a sweet spot price where getting quality, well tagged files at your chosen encoding trumps free P2P and hassle. Somewhere betwen 5c per file and around 25c a file, volume and hence profit is maximised for everyone.
I too want to see the Allofmp3 model supported by every piece of audio ever recorded and mainstream.
But even if the music biz could bring themsleves to find the price sweet spot, I really don’t think they could bring themselves to give up DRM. And as long as they persist with that, I’ll try and route round them.
Just Say No To DRM.
March 11th, 2005 at 12:35 pm
If I could download the full .WAV file for $.99, that’d be a good deal.
If I could download a crippled AAC version for $.10, that’d be a good deal.
I’d pay a 10% tax on my connection to be able to download anything I wanted. The only thing hazy about this plan in warez. Maybe a 12% tax and you can download anything, anywhere, anytime!
March 11th, 2005 at 3:39 pm
yes there is a difference. You say the bands wouldn’t make any money, but at 5 cents many many many more people will buy the songs and listen to them, then they will at $1. or more to the point at $15-20/cd.