emig5m
join:2004-02-16
Columbia, NJ | AllOfMP3 is the way foward, not taxing everyone connection People seem to be willing to jump through all sorts of hoops to be able to fund their Alltunes aka AllOfMP3 aka MP3Sparks accounts when they can use other legal music services or just pirate for free. If there's such a great service worth paying for even when you have to jump through hoops to fund your account over getting it for free, why not copy it here in the US? If I was the RIAA I would just try to buy out MP3Sparks and the developers of their software. Just straight up buy them out and bring it over here and make it a fully legit service to maybe license out to online music stores (so that retail chains could still sell music, but online instead of retail.)
Hell, I'd be willing to pay double the price for a totally legal and legit Alltunes/AllOfMP3/MP3Sparks type service, its setup is near perfect. You can pick the exact audio/file format and the encoding quality of your choosing/preference with no restrictive DRM - from mp3, wma, etc, choose the encoding bitrate to lossless codecs to straight up uncompressed wav files and pay accordingly for each different file size/quality (a 128KBs MP3 would be cheaper then a 320KBs MP3 and the lossless track would be more, etc..) Hell, I would buy the 320KBs MP3 along side the lossless FLAC files for each and every song I buy (MP3 for the car and lossless FLAC for my higher quality home stereo). Of course, if you pay the higher price for the lossless file, you should be allowed to re-encode to a lesser format for use in your car/portable without breaking any rules. They could also set up the pricing so that if you bought the best quality/lossless format, you could also purchase a lower quality encoding of the song you purchased the lossless for at a discounted mere pennies price for your portable/car instead of having to download and learn some freeware app to transcode/re-encode. People want convenience and people are willing to pay for convenience if the price is worth it.
Now as good as AllOfMP3 is/was, now just imagine taking it even a step further by making all the retail album art, content, inserts, etc. buyable in digital format if you want all the retail content for your favorite albums - even a CD label for people with lightscribe burners and offering all the music videos that's ever been made from compressed lossy formats (cheaper) right to the DVD quality VOBs (and in the future, up to 1080P HD) - price more according to the quality you buy (the key thing that makes AllOfMP3 so attractive is choice of format/quality and priced accordingly for each teir- this is the most important along side of having everything available.)
*Keep it priced low enough that people would rather just pay for a guaranteed good copy then deal with p2p crap with pops and crackles/fake files.
*Have all the file formats and encoding bitrate choices with each tier priced accordingly. (will make it super attractive over other legal music sites I wont bother with even if it was given to me for free - a lossy crap format shouldn't cost a $1 a song nor should I have to restrict all my music listening to lossy formats)
*Keep flooding p2p with fake files, yes, I believe you have to keep prices low and keep flooding p2p with fakes to slowly ween people off p2p making p2p too much hassle when you can pay for a gaurenteed good copy of the file format/quality of your choice the first time around.
Energy takes the path of least resistance- If I just watched a movie and there's a song I really liked in it, what's the easiest and fastest way to get that song in the quality I want - drive to the store at 10pm at night and hope they have it? Maybe the retail store isn't open when I want my instant gratification. Have to buy a overpriced entire CD just for one song? Go on p2p and maybe not get the quality I want or deal with fake/distorted files and slower home net connection upstreams and have to possibly share/use my own bandwidth while downloading? Or a service such as AllOfMP3 that has most everything at any quality/file format I want at any time of the day I want priced accordingly for each tier of quality
with dedicated upstream bandwidth to download as fast as my connection will allow for every single song I want. Yea, I'll go with AllOfMP3 type service...
Adding charges to peoples monthly internet bill is definitely NOT fair to people who don't listen to or bother with much music or already buy their music legally not to mention people like me not really interested in being limited to only lossy formats (even though I don't mind for the car or portable players but I prefer the lossless for the home stereo/serious listening). |
