But I would not pay such a price for 16-bit mp3s. That is a sample to listen to, a freebie to check it out.

And yes, I you can hear the difference. When a song gets loud and suddenly the recording attenuates the amplitude to squeeze it into 16-bit, the experience is that of an aural cringe. Like ducking when a jet flys over, or what you hear when an ambulance turns to face you. It’s an unpleasant effect that is similar to driving speakers without a strong enough amp. Like the distance to the music is changing.

So yes, I would definitely like to see quality for sale.

In the bagels story, the incentive to be honest is in the repetetiveness of the exchange (all days, any day) and in the fact that cheating will dry up the bagels flow.
The notices placed when the bagel are not paied enought are a simple warning that the flow is at risk to be ended.

When people start/learn to pay the bagels honestly, they MUST decide to cheat, and this bring a cost (thinking about it, remorse, risk no more bagels, etc.).

This can be explained with a “prisonier dilemma” simulation, where the incentive to cheat idecrease as the number of times the game is repeated grow.

For the bagel, I would feel that I own $1 for a bagel. For music, I think $0.50 is too much to pay per song. Part of the problem of this is having a broker (the RIAA) between the artist and the customer.

So I would not be inclined to pay an exorbitant amount. It would be like asking me to buy a bagel for $20.00

I would be inclined to pay something on the order of a dollar a day or something. I don’t want to ‘own’ the music, I just need access to it, all of it.

Merck Records did this awhile back. the story even made headlines in Japan.

www.m3rck.net

paypal button towards the bottom.
no idea how much Gabe gets from it (if anything).

peace,
a

It seems to be workign well for him (although I can’t speak for him, just being a fan)

A good band could now sell their music directly on the internet for little cost. Concert tickets go for huge amounts of money by scalpers buying them and selling them for 10 or 20 times the cost. The bands could give credits or rankings to their fans that buy music from their website to be applied to special consideration for concert tickets or online chats and such. Bands will need to tour more and accept losses using the honor system by cutting the overhead. Steven King did well at 25%. The number would have increased over time.

First, the bagel guy didn’t already piss off most of his customers.

Second, when you steal a bagel, you actually do something. You have to physically take it. Someone might see you. You feel yourself taking it. With a song, you click a button and you’re done. No risk of someone else seeing you, no actual removal of bagels.

People are honest, sure, but people don’t add things up properly either. Another problem you see in economics is scale. Will people really pay 50c per song? With charity at least, and this p2p model is kind of like charity in the sense of voluntary donations, I’ve read that things just don’t scale up. There’s a $25 account for saving the rainforest, whether it’s going to an effort to save 10 Acres or 1000 acres. There’s a $5 for frogs, whether the tadpole density is 5/square meter or 1000/square meter. I highly doubt those who download 40 gigs ~5000 songs would pay $2500 for them, even spread out over time. I don’t think these stats are unreal either. Admittedly Oink is a music enthusiast’s site, but who do you think will use these official RIAA donation based p2p programs? I’m pulling stats off of them right now, and the top 250th person downloaded 183.14 GB in data in 35 weeks. Scaling problems.

I think donating to artists is the best thing to do, and indie artists are already into this type of thing. If people really were honest they would donate regardless of the incentives. They would get their songs off an unofficial p2p source and pay the RIAA back. Maybe the RIAA should just clean themselves up and set up a paypal pot on their homepage and make some statement based on morals. However, there are plenty of other things to consider too, like the ever present Slashdot favorite, the stealing vs. copying debate. There’s a difference between well-off office types buying bagels and people downloading intagible bits and bytes protected by property rights. And the image of the RIAA as evil corporate bastards doesn’t help the concept of corporate charity. Honestly, I think the cost and legal effort of creating a new model is greater than the revenues they’ll receive. And am I the only cheapskate who thinks a 10% cut for Paypal is a lot? Hopefully, if there is a donation model, I really hope that Google can step in and maybe round it down to 0% or 5%.

I think the simplest answer in all this is the one suggested by myself and subsequently suggested with much more publicity by some else (Canadian?). viz, Adopt the AllofMp3 model, pack it with every audio track ever recorded and then sell the tracks at the equivalent of 10c each for 192K VBR. In other words, get rid of the bits that annoy about iTMS et al (DRM, limited catalogue, low quality) and then see what price the market will bear and how much price elasticity there is. Somewhere between $1 per track and 1c per track there’s a price that maximises profit. But you can be damn sure it’s not at the limits of that range and not for the current offering.

Experience shows that the payment rate also depends very critically on how much of a barrier you put in the way of payment. Even a very small speed bump like taking a few extra minutes or a little bit of extra thought can cut the payment rate in half when it’s voluntary. But adopting a working commercial model like Paypal is probably the best place to start.

But what about the music subscription services as a model? Yes, their catalog is limited at the moment, but suppose it was much more complete? If you could pay $20/month to hear whatever music you want, and at the end of the month you could see a quick checklist of your personal favorites with an option to buy permanent copies at $0.50 per track (without DRM of course), wouldn’t that be attractive? I’d go for that. The limited catalog and the annoying DRM is all that makes this unworkable at the moment.