Music Labels to launch CMX, a new digital album format. | Hacker News Reader

Music Labels to launch CMX, a new digital album format.

guardian.co.uk

22 pointsajg197716 comments

When I downloaded "The Slip" off Nine Inch Nails' website (for free), I chose the 320kbps MP3 package... each MP3 had embedded artwork and lyrics, and the album came with a PDF that had artwork, lyrics, credits, and all that. Their previous release (Ghosts) came with desktop & mobile wallpapers, as well. Both were released under the Creative Commons license, with "Ghosts" being listed by the band on sites like The Pirate Bay, Waffles and What.cd on the hour of their release.

I later bought The Slip's physical release - the CD came with a DVD with rehearsal videos of nearly every song on the album. (it also came with... stickers!)

I'm betting the revenue from both of those legally-free-to-download releases will be more than all the profit made from sales of CMX-format albums combined.

Because talented musicians, providing value to the consumer and intelligent music marketing has very little to do with container formats.

edit: (totally off topic, but i can't wait to see them in NY the 25th. NIN is my favorite band. Saw LiTS tour four times last year.)

"Ours will be a file that you click on, it opens and it would have a brand new look, with a launch page and all the different options. When you click on it you're not just going to get the 10 tracks, you're going to get the artwork, the video and mobile products."

We call it... CD-ROM.

The idea of some kind of standardized method to bundle audio tracks, liner artwork, etc. is a good idea. If they are planning to use something other than MP3 and/or FLAC for the audio tracks I can't see how this will succeed. Even FLAC would be questionable because of iTunes/iPod support.

If one were to create such a standardized bundling format I can't imagine spending more than a day developing it. The bundle itself should be something simple like a ZIP file with a different extension. The audio files could be MP3. The artwork could be PDF.

If one were to create such a standardized bundling format I can't imagine spending more than a day developing it.

But they didn't develop it: they almost certainly hired some IT consulting firm who billed them six or seven figures and spent months (or years) coming up with this ground-breaking innovation.

No thanks. All of this stuff already works with existing Mp3 and Ogg containers. We don't really need a new format.

I would love to know why they think this has any chance of success without the support of the iTunes eco system.

Someone will definitely write a tool to extract raw audio from this DRM'ed sausage of a format.

Knowing the labels they're going to price it more expensively than a normal album. I'm betting on $20.

Yeah, but that's just because of the expense of a new media type. As the media becomes cheaper to duplicate, I'm sure the price will drop...

Wait...

It's the convenience fee! Isn't that convenient.

They never learn from past mistakes.

In case you're wondering how this could get any sorrier: U2 will be involved in the "soft-launch".

might as well call it exe...

But surely that's assuming it'll only work on Windows...

... oh, wait. Carry on.

Apple working on their own format? Mmmm I love lock-in.

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