Australia’s very own FastTrack
p2pnet special: Just as in the early days of French revolution where some of the plump minor royals portrayed themselves as revolutionary thinkers, or at least adopted a revolutionary vocabulary, it was only a matter of time until compact disc retailers would do the same and claim to be part of the digital revolution.
Even before having to admit that they operated so-called rival retail music chains HMV and Virgin, two weeks ago Sanity, one Australia’s largest music retailers, announced the launch of their very own “Fast Track” service.
“Fast Track”? No, they haven’t bought into that well-known p2p app – they’ve launched CD burning/digital download kiosks.
Called Fast Track kiosks. the “initiative” is basically a vending machine on which consumers can burn their own discs, or download music to their own portable digital music systems.
At the time of writing, the kiosks have yet to operate properly, and are known to visiting consumers by the technical term “boxes”.
Sanity executives declared the death of the CD at the recent launch held in their palace, the Sanity store at Fox Studios in Sydney. While this irony was lost on local journalists, they certainly understood there might have been a story there —– the story being that Sanity been operating rival music stores without mentioning it!
Christine Sams writing in the Sun Herald (February 19, 2006) said:
Mr Milne acknowledged that many music fans might not be aware Brazin operates so-called “rival” record stores including HMV, Virgin and Sanity. “We own them all,” said Mr Milne. “If we didn’t think it was a good idea, we wouldn’t have done it.”
Presumably, in discussing the “good idea”, Mr Milne meant buying the rival chains, and not keeping the ownership of the rival chains a secret from consumers.
Another irony lost on all is that not so long ago, the ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) deployed its anti piracy acronym MIPI and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on preventing vending machines called Little Ripper making it to market. The Little Ripper case was another example of suing a rival business model out of existence.
Of course, that only works when the victim doesn’t have the money to fight fire with fire. Butd then, how many businesses have their own a MIPI anyway?
Not all the royals can stomach pretending to be revolutionaries. Sanity’s sole remaining competitor of note, Leading Edge Music, issued a hastily written press release on February17, a day and a half after Russell Crowe led the chorus at the Sanity launch.
The press release, reproduced in full below, insists the divine right to distribute music still belongs to retailers, and the digital revolution is an internet thing that would pass.
Apparently the box (oops – I mean the music download kiosk) has a long way to go. First they’ll need one that works. This, like the whole internet revolution thing seems to be a mystery to your traditional music retailer.
Music retailers must be the only ones other than record company executives who think the internet revolution was designed as a new way for them to pull the same old routines on music fans. They just don’t seem to get that the revolution in music downloading is in part at least a response to a massive customer rejection of their behaviour.
At the moment, the kiosks seem to have been designed by a spoofing company: it looks like you can get music, they say there’s music, but nothing worthwhile comes out!
In what will become the digital revolution’s equivalent of “Let them eat cake”, Leading Edge’s Gavin Ward (who’s also a big wig at The Australian Music Retailers Association) said:
Update on Sanity Digital Kiosks
I have had a lot of calls from members this morning in response to Sanity’s release notice on their digital kiosks so I thought I would send out this note with a few facts and also my thoughts.
Sanity’s current status – Sanity launched with six machines at Fox studios but this was just for the press. Four of the machines are now destined to other locations including George Street in the city and to Canberra. These will be installed over the next few weeks.
The role out is expected to be very slow, at this point it is estimated that it will take around two years to role out to most stores.
A few more facts about the machines – These machines were developed specifically for Sanity and they have invested heavily in there own back end structure to take a position as there own digital content provider developing their own compliant digital rights software, suffice to say this would not be cheap.
A track costs $1.69 for as many tracks as you like. I am told that there is no album price it is just the number of tracks multiplied by $1.69
It takes about 4 minutes to burn a 74 minute CD It only takes a few seconds to download to a single track to a memory stick
The files are WMA format which may have compatibility issues with I-pod as they need to be converted to AAC format. This needs to be tested as they say it can be done but I know that I have experienced difficulties with this in the past. This would be a negative to anyone who is an I-pod user.
Do I think it will affect the market?
I think a digital kiosk has a definite place in the market although I am not convinced about its commercial viability at this point. For those people who really want a certain track in a hurry, for instance for a wedding, to be able to provide this service would be great but it is nothing that we can
not offer off our own Digital Downloads section of our own website. Of course this also depends on the content that is available.
I do not believe that this represents a significant threat or short term opportunity to us but I will certainly watch with interest and I have started discussions with Destra regarding our options within this Digital space and I will present these once available
Regards
Gavin Ward
The Wizard of Oz – p2pnet
