i seem to be getting sick... or maybe it's hayfever.
Amazon.com seems to think I like Kiss. I don't.
When "piracy" can make a band money... was listening to the radio the other day (Triple J I believe) and they had a song they wanted to play but it wasn't in the ABC music archives anywhere (the band WASP doing a cover of something or other). They didn't have a copy of it, so they couldn't play it. So they asked fans, if they had it, to please send an MP3 in.
Technically this is illegal. One, you're not allowed to convert your CDs to digital format in Australia. If you do they tie your kangaroo down sport and kick you with the giant boot. Two, sending a copy of that MP3 to someone else is a nut-chopping offence.
Thing is, if they play that song, WASP gets $1 from APRA for the song being played on the radio. Well... actually, it was a cover so whoever it was a cover of gets the money. Point is... if they didn't get sent the pirate copy of the song it would never have been played and whoever would never have got their $1. The CD had been deleted too so there was no hope of anyone going out and buying this CD. The radio station can't go and buy this CD. The only way to get this music was for a fan to send it to them.
I sent an email to my ISP asking if they were going to do a similar service to the Telstra Bigpond Warner music download service... I expect an interesting answer...
Downloads are expected to be around $2 a song (much cheaper than the $3.90ish per song at Wired Records) and will not count on Telstra Bigpond customers download limits. The cost of songs will be added to Tesltra Bigpond customers bills (thus the service will be for Bigpond customers only). The files are in WMA / Windows Media Audio format and I assume covered in DRM. The cost of whole albums will be less than the sum of it's tracks.
Two of the biggest issues with online music sales are that the cost of bandwidth in Australia is high enough that you need to factor that cost into the cost of downloading a 30 Meg album. Also, the cost of credit card transactions in Australia is enough that it's not possible for a company to make a profit on a 99 cent transaction and very little profit on a $2 transaction.
Telstra's service will get around both these problems. Cost of music is added to their existing bill, thus there is no transaction cost. Bandwidth used by the customer to download their purchased music does not count to their limit, so they're not paying for that either.
But it's Telstra only, and needs to be for the billing system to work and for the tracks to remain cheap. I'm interested in knowing who built / owns the technology behind this and can it easily be translated to other ISPs.
I doubt Warner built it, which is a pity. The record company should really be building and selling the distribution technology, or at least licencing it non-exclusively. That IS their job.