Digital Noise: Music and Tech

Free All Media, an Atlanta-based start-up, is the latest company to propose an ad-supported music downloading service. The company, which just announced its first seed round of funding Wednesday and expects to begin public beta testing by December, hopes to differentiate itself from flameouts like SpiralFrog with a unique advertising model that asks users to participate more directly in choosing the ads they'll see.

The company's CEO, Richard Nailling, explained how the company's Web site, Free All Music, will work. Users will select an MP3 they want to download and a sponsor they'd like to "buy" that MP3 for them. They will then watch a video advertisement, between 15 and 18 seconds in length, from that advertiser. Once the ad is completed, they'll be free to download the file, a 256kbps MP3 with no copy restrictions. No further advertisements will be served for that download.

But here's the unique part--Free All Music will then use the downloader's handle in other banner ads for that sponsor, which Free All Music will place around the Web using an (as yet undisclosed) third-party ad network, as well as through its own ad network, which will focus on music-oriented sites. In other words, you might be visiting CNET and see "MattR just downloaded 'Angry Chair' by Alice in Chains...sponsored by Converse." In this way, Free All Music will be able to sell multiple ads per download and perhaps earn enough money to cover the license fee for each song.

There's a catch, of course: users will only be able to download as many songs as Free All Music can sell sponsorships for. At launch, the company is aiming for what Nailling calls "typical iTunes behavior," which is 15 songs per month, spread over three sessions. If the site takes off and advertisers buy more space, the song allowance will increase.

The key to success will be whether the company can get all four major labels and enough indies on board to make for a competitive selection of music. So far, the company claims it's signed up one major label (unnamed), and is aiming for the "full digital catalog" from each label, giving it full parity with iTunes and sites like Amazon MP3.

Would you be willing to sit through an 18-second video ad in exchange for a perfectly legal and guaranteed legitimate MP3? Or will you stick with file-trading networks?

Correction at 7:13 a.m. PDT October 1: This post incorrectly stated the number of free songs that Free All Music aims to offer at launch. The site plans to offer 15 free downloads per month, spread over three sessions.

I'm not a huge Phish fan. I've only seen them once, at the Warfield, a 3,000-set venue in San Francisco, back in 1994. I skipped their subsequent arena shows because I figured they couldn't top the intimacy of that experience. But I know from that one show that they're a great live band, and now they're back together and touring for the summer after a six-year hiatus. They haven't announced a Pacific Northwest date yet, but if they do, I'd be tempted to go.

Get your phree phresh phish, right here.

(Credit: LivePhish.com)

Here's the thing, though: six years is a long time. What if they don't have it anymore? Even some hardcore fans I talked to said their last few tours weren't as great as their heyday at the end of the 1990s. (There's this story, probably apocryphal, that guitarist Trey Anastasio knew it was time to take a break from the band when a certain trio of fans he used to see at every show stopped coming.)

Doubt no more. Now you can find out for yourself whether they've still got it because Phish has made a full recording of every show on the 2009 tour (three, so far) available, in its entirety, for free. Start here, click on the "DOWNLOAD FREE MP3s" link at the bottom of each page, and you're in. If you're a big fan, you can pay for higher quality FLAC files or ar triple CD of the show. You have to register with an e-mail address (you could enter a fake if you're paranoid) and password, and you might want to install a small Java applet to download entire shows at once (downloading individual songs requires the old right-click save-file-as kludge).

The site itself has short samples of each song. Want to see whether that performance of "Rock and Roll" on March 7 was the Led Zeppelin song or the Velvet Underground song? Find out here. Can't imagine their first-ever performance of George Jones' "She Thinks I Still Care" from last night? Right here.

See, most bands are scared to give recordings away. Why would anybody come to the show if they can already hear it online? But Phish is so confident in its live abilities, it knows that posting live recordings for free will serve as an incentive to draw fans to its show. So when will other big-name live acts start doing the same thing?

Dell on Wednesday began offering bundles of songs on new computers ordered through its Web site.

Just like you can add a copy of Microsoft Office or an extra hard drive, you can pick a bundle of 50 MP3 files for an extra $25 or 100 MP3s for an extra $45--that's about half the price of most download stores. The deal's limited to songs owned by Universal Music Group, one of the big four record labels.

"And if you hear me talking on the wind, you've got to understand we must remain...perfect strangers."

(Credit: Dell)

When I first read about this, it seemed an afterthought for newbies too clueless to know how to rip CDs to their hard drive. But after taking a look through the playlists, it made a little more sense: these are genre-specific samplers or one-hit wonders. In other words, the kinds of songs that people might enjoy having on their MP3 player but aren't worth buying a full album to get.

For instance, as a classic-rock kid from the '80s, there are times I might enjoy hearing "Funk #49," "Maggie May," or "One Thing Leads To Another" (in fact, I've owned LPs with all of those songs at one time), but I wouldn't pay a buck to download them. But there they both are on the "Rock Titans" bundle, along with a few other ex-radio songs that get stuck in my head occasionally, as well as some trash I'd delete immediately.

So basically, Dell and Universal are charging $25 to save you the trouble of going to an online music store like Amazon.com or iTunes, and downloading a bunch of individual tunes. The idea would work better if it dug deeper into particular genres--the Blues Masters collection is great for casual blues fans, but what about Madchester flashback or old school?

It's sometimes lost in all the flavor-of-the-week mix-remix-download-social networking sites, but eMusic has been selling DRM-free MP3s--meaning they can be played on the iPod or any other player--from independent labels and artists for a decade now, and has a reasonable claim to be the No. 2 music store behind iTunes.

The venerable MP3 retailer is getting a redesign.

(Credit: eMusic)

A planned redesign is meant to help eMusic retain this position. According to reports in Fortune and Digital Music News, the site's slated for an overhaul beginning next week. Artist pages will be updated with Wikipedia biographies, original editorial content, and embedded YouTube videos. In a nod to Web 2.0, fans will be able to embed portions of these artist profiles, including streaming song samples, in their Facebook pages, as well as on other social-recommendation sites such as Digg. A navigational update is also in the works--for such a well-established site, eMusic is kind of hard to get around.

One thing they're not getting rid of: the subscription-based purchasing model. That's always been a deal-breaker for me, as I simply don't download 30 songs from independent artists and labels per month. Still, if you're a voracious consumer of new music, and prefer legal downloads to file-sharing or buying physical recordings, eMusic remains an excellent choice.

Yahoo Music's going to join Amazon.com in offering DRM-free MP3s, either for free as part of an advertising-supported service, or for sale on a per-download basis, according to anonymous record company executives cited in this AP story.

Yahoo Music is the only major commercial download site that offers lyrics.

(Credit: Screenshot)

Ian Rogers, the exec in charge of Yahoo's music service, has certainly thought long and hard about the future of the music industry, and Yahoo's got tons of traffic (which it hasn't done a very good job of monetizing, but that's another story). I like the site's search interface--it's a lot better than Amazon's, which mixes MP3 downloads and physical CDs with no rhyme or reason--and it's the only major commercial music download site that offers lyrics.

They've got a fighting chance, in other words, but will need something extra to differentiate themselves from the rapidly growing pack. Some ideas: offer a range of bitrates, all the way up to lossless. Do more with the lyrics, like integrating them into music streams, then scrolling them across the Yahoo Media Player when users play or link to a song that's hosted on the Yahoo streaming service. Make it as easy as possible for independent artists to post their files on the site, like CDBaby and (recently) Last.fm--depth of catalog is key.

What not to do: stay wedded to Windows Media Audio, require a subscription fee or online registration, or (worst of all) try and create yet another desktop application for playing music--we've got plenty of those already, and most iPod users will stick with iTunes.

I'll wait on the details before speculating further as to whether a revamped Yahoo Music will hit or miss.

There's a war going on among music critics of a certain age. A few months ago, San Francisco Chronicle critic Joel Selvin mourned the loss of concern for sound quality in the MP3 era. Since then, writers for the Wall Street Journal and New York Times have thrown down the gauntlet for the other side, arguing not only that MP3s and other forms of compressed digital music are sufficient, but that audiophiles are delusional--especially older audiophiles, whose hearing has probably decayed to the point where they couldn't even hear all the things that MP3s take out. Slate columnist Fred Kaplan responded this week with an impassioned defense for the audiophile team, arguing that you need to the gear in order to hear the subtle beauties that make music musical ("the silky sheen of massed violins; the steely whoosh of brushes on a snare...").

There's an element of truth to both sides. Nobody's arguing that MP3s sound as good as a CD or LP on a proper stereo system. But in listening to audiophiles rave about their gear, I've often found that they show a strong bias toward big, expensive speakers. Same with many studio engineers. To me, that sounds a lot like conspicuous consumption masquerading as knowledge.

$325,000 speakers from Acapella

(Credit: Acapella Audio Arts)

Personally, I agree with the kind folks at my local audiophile store, Hawthorne Stereo, who argue that speakers are chronically overmarketed, overadvertised, and overpriced. Yes, bad speakers can absolutely ruin sound, usually by trying to add color that shouldn't be there, or sometimes by having obvious gaps in their frequency response. (There's a story about the Beatles recording "Hey Jude" at a different studio than usual. It sounded great on that studio's speakers, but horrific at Abbey Road, where they usually recorded. Turned out that the other studio's speakers were set to artificially boost the treble.) But source is king--if your system can't convert your source material to electrical signals accurately, the best speakers in the world cannot help you. They cannot add to sound, only subtract from it!

So, if your budget's limited, you'll do far better to spend about 40% on an audiophile turntable or CD player, and split the rest between amplifier and speakers. This holds true in amplified live music as well--the most important component is the source (the player), followed by the construction of the instrument, followed by the electronics on the instrument, followed by the amplifier, with the speaker serving as a mere transducer to transfer electrical into acoustic energy. It's not unimportant, but it's the least important component in the chain.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that there's an element of chicanery in a lot of audiophile marketing and self-congratulatory backslapping. As I've said before, if you want convenience and portability--background music for working out at the gym or driving--MP3s on an iPod are adequate. The convenience more than outweighs the lack of sound quality. Compressed AAC or WMA files generally sound better for the same bitrate, and lossless files are the best but take up lots of space. But if you are the type of person who really sits and listens to music, invest in the best turntable or CD player you can afford, make sure your amplifier and speakers don't suck, place yourself in the center of the stereo field, and allow yourself to be carried away.

Two interesting pieces of news highlight the trouble online stores will face as the price of legal song downloads approaches the price of illegal downloads (which is zero).

On Monday, Amazon.com announced an extremely generous revenue-sharing program for affiliate sites to resell MP3s from the Amazon MP3 store. Amazon will give them 20 percent of the revenue from all sales until January 1, 2008, after which it will drop to 10 percent. Since Amazon sells some downloads for as low as 89 cents, this means it'll have only 71 cents left to pay to the copyright owners. I don't know exactly what the wholesale price of these per-song downloads is, but I expect that Amazon will barely break even, and perhaps lose money, on this deal.

The same day, Ars Technica reported a rumor that Apple was planning to drop prices on iTunes Plus songs to 99 cents, the same price as all other songs on the service. Like Amazon's MP3s, these files have no DRM, meaning they can be played on any computer or device that's capable of playing AAC files. (Amazon's MP3s are more broadly compatible--for instance, many Windows Media-based MP3 players can't play AAC files.) On Tuesday, Steve Jobs confirmed the rumor to The Wall Street Journal shortly thereafter. I don't think EMI's charging Apple more for the DRM-less files than the other labels are charging for their content, but the price drop suggests that Apple's feeling the competition from Amazon.

Prices will probably continue to drop until the retailers have no margin left. In other words, to make a business out of selling digital music, you have to have an attached product that's actually profitable. In Apple's case, it's hardware. In Amazon's case, they must be hoping it draws users to the site, where they eventually will buy other products. That's been Amazon's strategy from day one--I used to work in a bookstore, and retailers' margins on books are exceptionally low relative to the retail price of the book. I remember wondering how the heck Amazon was going to turn online bookselling into a viable business, but of course they have with massive scale and significant attach of other products.

The Russian government has agreed to shut down Web site AllofMP3, which offers downloadable MP3 songs for a significant discount--20 cents per song or less--compared with stores such as Apple's iTunes.

The site was controversial because it paid royalties to a Russian organization that was not recognized by the record industry. In 2005, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) filed suit in Russian court to shut the site down, but its request was denied by Russian prosecutors. Now, apparently under pressure from U.S. trade representatives, who are pressing for stricter copyright enforcement before agreeing to admit Russia to the World Trade Organization, the Russian government has stepped in.

According to the TorrentFreak blog, AllofMP3 had 6 million customers before the shutdown. A couple years ago, I considered downloading some music from the site--mainly Led Zeppelin songs that I was too lazy to digitize from my record collection, and which aren't available in most online music stores--but I balked at sending my credit card number to a Russian organization that I wasn't completely familiar with.

The shutdown appears to have taken effect--the site is timing out as of 10 a.m. (Pacific) on July 3. Or maybe that's just everybody rushing to get a last few downloads in. Regardless, fans will simply migrate to one of the other discount MP3 sites, or just continue using file-sharing networks or Google to download free files.

Once again, everybody: audio CDs aren't copy-protected. That root problem is not going away.

A few months ago, JimmyR-dot-com (aka Jimmy Ruska) posted a YouTube video that showed users how to conduct a Google search for free, unprotected music files. Essentially, by modifying search terms with a few extra key words, a user can limit results to underlying directory pages rather than user-facing Web pages. The video proved quite popular, garnering more than 300,000 views.

Recently, he went one step further and created a Web page that modifies the search for you--all you have to do is enter the song title, and you'll receive a Google search page with links to directories containing an MP3 file with that text in the file name. These are often full MP3 versions of the song in question. Artist or album names also work.

This just shows the complete inadequacy of the record industry's attempts to crack down on illegal file-sharing by suing file-sharing networks and their users. Even if the RIAA tried to shut down this site, others could easily spring up. And suing Google would be a much harder task.

The root problem: audio CDs aren't copy-protected. Anybody with the right software can rip an audio track and post it publicly. The methods of discovering these postings might change over time, but the root problem won't go away.

(Thanks to Coolfer for pointing out the site.)