When will they start selling music in FLAC?
I view streaming as a convenience, and not as an approach that requires one to forgo having a DRM-free backup.
Well, they don't want you to be able to permanently download the files. If you cancel your subscription you'll lose whatever you have downloaded. Offering you a file you can easily convert into a different format would break that pretty comprehensively.
And why is that exactly?
> Well, they don't want you to be able to permanently download the files.
Not sure what they gain by it. I prefer to buy and keep what I bought. Not really interested in renting digital goods. That's why I'm not using Google Play and similar stores for music. Bandcamp offers DRM-free music in FLAC for example, and there once you buy it - you keep it.
> And why is that exactly?
As untog says: "Because it is a streaming service, not a download service."
People make a fair bit of money on software and services that attempt (with varying degrees of success) to automate music industry billing. Music industry billing is complicated because music industry licensing is (needlessly) complicated.
Streaming services typically have substantially different royalty rates than services that make it easy to save a copy of a given audio file. What's more, the license is very likely to have reporting requirements attached to it, along with different rates for partial plays and the like. These rates and reporting requirements may vary wildly from song to song and from album to album.
Have you ever wondered why there isn't one audio and one video streaming site that has everything that rightsholders are willing to have streamed on the Internet?
It's because
* The Big Music and Hollywood rightsholders aren't in this to make things easy for you. They're in this to make shitloads of cash.
* As Big Music learned from Apple, permitting a single entity to distribute pretty much all of your product substantially reduces Big Media's negotiating power. [0] This means that Big Media makes less money and... refer back to point #1.
[0] Being able to credibly threaten to remove something from the catalog, or be a gigantic ass and demand substantially more money for an entire album, rather than "most of the album, except for those couple of songs that are really good" helps to keep their rates high.
I indeed wondered about that :) All those release limitations always looked stupid to me.
> The Big Music and Hollywood rightsholders aren't in this to make things easy for you. They're in this to make shitloads of cash.
They are just blind with their thirst for control, which outweighs their thirst for money. They are losing money on making things harder for their users. For instance DRM means lost sales for them. Same goes for fractured releases and poor availability of what they offer. They might gain some power to tell who can get what, where and when, while in practice they reduce reach of what they make which means less profit.
Avoiding too much distributor's leverage can be an issue if there is only one distributor or some collusion between them. If there is healthy competition, they can always ditch one and chose a competitor which balances this issue. In a healthy market, creators should distribute all their content through all available distributors.
> If there is healthy competition, they can always ditch one and chose a competitor which balances this issue. In a healthy market, creators should distribute all their content through all available distributors.
Perhaps my brain is poisoned by looking at this through the eyes of Big Media. How would this work? Remember a few things:
* There really aren't that many companies in Big Media, but they've managed to amass quite a lot of power, and influence, and a fair bit of money.
* If all media that is made available is made available through all channels at the same wholesale price, then retail sellers can only distinguish themselves through ease of use, lower overhead (which enables lower retail price), or other "value-adding" things like social networking integration.
What's to prevent the five or ten real media distribution heavyweights that would inevitably emerge from doing the very same thing that Big Media currently does to everyone: using strong-arm tactics and back-room collusion to keep Big Media weak and in a position where the distributors set the price?
And I don't understand why they wouldn't to make more. Removing all those pesky restrictions would just give them even more sales than they already get. All I can guess is like I said above - they value control over reach and profit (calling them control freaks was very appropriate ;)).
> Perhaps my brain is poisoned by looking at this through the eyes of Big Media. How would this work?
I'm looking at it simply from perspective of potential creator. Most of the time I personally don't care about "big media" and its dull commercial mass market art. But going back to creators - for me it seems pretty simple. Let's say someone wrote music, a book or made a film or computer game or whatever other artistic work. They need to break even and profit to be able to create more art. So, the way the do it is by reaching as many people as possible, right? And distributors come in play and help them to increase that reach. The more distributors they use, the more potential people they'll reach. Any kind of exclusives would mean lower reach for them. Pretty straightforward, no?
> If all media that is made available is made available through all channels at the same wholesale price, then retail sellers can only distinguish themselves through ease of use, lower overhead (which enables lower retail price), or other "value-adding" things like social networking integration.
Distributors can compete on features like you said. Exclusives of course give them an advantage, but only they benefit. It hurts both creators and people who are forced to use certain distributor to get what they want. For instance, many computer games (which is probably one of the most successful art forms for independent creators today) are released through as many distributors as possible, obviously to increase reach.
> What's to prevent the five or ten real media distribution heavyweights that would inevitably emerge from doing the very same thing that Big Media currently does to everyone: using strong-arm tactics and back-room collusion to keep Big Media weak and in a position where the distributors set the price?
Good question. In theory competition + anti-trust laws should prevent that. Collusion and price fixing are really illegal. But if competition is strong, they won't be interested in doing it anyway. In practice I agree that anti-trust laws are rarely enforced, and bad players manipulate the market way too often.
In the long run, the industry as a whole might make more money, but it's certain that each individual company wouldn't.
As you say, investigations into collusion and price fixing are substantially more rare than they should be. If Big Media loses the ability to refuse to grant parts of their catalog to one distributor or another, enough distributors to matter can easily band together to force reductions in media licensing fees.
> I'm looking at it simply from perspective of potential creator.
Ah. Well, that (in all seriousness) is a useful and valid conversation to have, but you asked why a site that streamed media controlled by Big Media wouldn't do the obvious thing and let you download what you stream. The answer is that Big Media won't let them; sometimes under any circumstances, other times unless the site pays a lot more than they pay for just streaming rights.
I agree that the state of Big Media's licensing regime is really rather bad for society overall, but it's fantastically good for Big Media.
Because it is a streaming service, not a download service.
I prefer to buy and keep what I bought. Not really interested in renting digital goods.
Then don't use a streaming service.
Why can't they offer both? For instance Bandcamp does. You can stream music if you don't want to download it, but you can as well back up your DRM-free copy which I always do. I only pay for music when such option is available.
> Then don't use a streaming service.
I see no correlation between streaming (convenience) and forbidding one to download what is streamed (DRM). I'm OK with first, but I'm not OK with second.
But streaming isn't convenience, it's the business model. At no point do you buy any albums, you merely rent them while you listen to them. Otherwise you could subscribe for one month and download every single piece of music you can within 30 days, then cancel. That's pretty obviously not how the system is designed to be used.
For me it's convenience.
> At no point do you buy any albums, you merely rent them while you listen to them.
I don't really understand the concept of renting for digital goods. Since they can be duplicated practically at no cost, there is no practical reason to "take and return" approach (i.e. rent). Keeping your digital copy does not reduce any value for the service.
> Otherwise you could subscribe for one month and download every single piece of music you can within 30 days, then cancel
That can easily be prevented by saying that you can't exceed certain limit of downloads for such service if you only pay per month, and not for each copy. But again, I see no reason why they can't offer an option to pay per copy and let you keep one.
Of course it does. If you listen to an album a lot, it would either cost you a one-off payment $9.99 to download it once during your subscription, or, if you can't download it, you'll have to pay $9.99 every month in order to listen to it.
Allowing users to download music permanently would absolutely affect the profit Google would make - let alone how difficult it would make their negotiations with major labels.
Renting makes sense when resources are limited, like with physical goods. Returning it removes the need to produce another one, and it also naturally makes renting prices lower. With digital goods it's artificial - there is no scarcity that should require returning it after usage. Making one return it and pay over and over for unlimited resource is simply a rip off.
Not necessarily. I might listen to one album very frequently, but also other albums, including new ones as they come out. In that case, I'll be paying $9.99 for streaming no matter what, so there's no need to buy the album.
Making one return it and pay over and over for unlimited resource is simply a rip off.
Yeah, it's a business. It's the entire model of the business. If you don't like it you are welcome to not use it.
I prefer to always have backup of what I buy. I don't want my digital library to disappear because some DRMed service will go bust tomorrow (and that happened quite a number of times already with various services in the past). It's one of the reasons I don't use such digital renting services.
> Yeah, it's a business. It's the entire model of the business. If you don't like it you are welcome to not use it.
Indeed I don't :) In general digitial renting is aimed at reducing ownership. It started with crazy EULAs, DRM and other nonsense "business models" that some "smart" suits devised just because they dealt with digitial and not physical things. So I support those who distribute DRM-free (whether it's music, books, games, video and etc.). It's a form of voting with one's wallet as well.