The Great "Cheapest Legal Music Downloads" Hunt.

safari_2

koru wrote:

Playlouder is quite a smart move. Although they claim it costs the same as BT Broadband, we on this site know that you can pay quite a lot less than BT - up to £10 less. So, rather than selling at £10 less, they are bundling in "free" music downloads, which may attract a lot of customers.

But the same customers might be better to buy broadband using Martin's recommendations, at £18 pm, then buy Napster at £10 per month, which will give them "free downloads" from a wider range of music.

I don't mean to criticise, though. It is better than paying £27 to BT, then an extra £10 to Napster, and I guess that is the audience they are aiming at. I could see the likes of AOL and Tiscali offering similar deals in future.

there's a crucial difference between Playlouder (as I understand it) and Napster in that if you stop paying your Napster subscription you lose your music. I think with Playlouder you actually own the music and can burn CDs, back up etc.

koru

safari wrote:

there's a crucial difference between Playlouder (as I understand it) and Napster in that if you stop paying your Napster subscription you lose your music. I think with Playlouder you actually own the music and can burn CDs, back up etc.

But I'll bet that their new deal, giving unlimited downloads if you buy their arguably overpriced broadband, is more on the Napster model. If not, then you would just join for the shortest period possible, download every album you could possibly want to listen to, then cancel your subscription and spend the next year trying to find the time to listen to everything you downloaded!

primalsole

EMusic www.emusic.com is cheap only 25 cents per song and at the moment they are offering 50 free songs.

safari_2

koru wrote:

But I'll bet that their new deal, giving unlimited downloads if you buy their arguably overpriced broadband, is more on the Napster model. If not, then you would just join for the shortest period possible, download every album you could possibly want to listen to, then cancel your subscription and spend the next year trying to find the time to listen to everything you downloaded!

No, I think this is an entirely new model. Your extra £10 per month (or whatever they've agreed with the labels) goes into a big pot of royalties. These royalties are then shared based on the number of people in the Playlouder network that copy each song. The Guardian article seemed to think that the Sony stuff would be tethered, but I've read an interview with one of the founders that says that this isn't likely to be the case.

Cleverly, if you rip a CD from your collection to your PC and then share it with another Playlouder subscriber then the songs from that CD go into the royalty pot. The crucial things to making it work are the song recognition software and a security system to stop you from sharing those files outside the Playlouder network.

It's not launched for another month or so, but if they manage to get more big labels on board this could be a seriously cheap way of listening to a lot of music.

gnasher

forgive me if what i say is naughty in some way, but a lot has been made of the fact that some of the sites discussed give you downloads as wma files that you can't stick on your mp3 player - well at least one of the sites previously recommended here has links to download applications that convert these files to mp3's, which you can then stick on your player to your hearts content i presume?
or are these applications illegal?

bridiej

Aparently HMV are bringing out a new service which will be 39p per download

Not sure if this is it http://www.hmv.co.uk/hmvweb/navigate.do?pPageID=1530

koru

Virgin are also launching a new download service, but both Virgin and HMV will be WMA format files, so not iPod compatible (unless, as speculated above, there is some software that will break the copy protection in WMA and convert to MP3).

Given that about 75% of MP3 players are iPods, there seem to be an awful lot of download services targeting the 25% of the market who have WMA compatible players! Do you get the feeling the industry is trying to push us in a certain direction?

bridiej

Doesnt bother me, mine will play WMA or mp3!

Must admit it does seem a bit strange that they're targeting the 25% rather than the majority though.....

raeble

No they're targeting the majority that have PC's and have windows media player. I would have thought that was a much larger market than ipod owners all their stuff from itunes. Besides isn't the aac format exclusive to apple? Aren't they not allowing anyone else other than itunes access to it?

koru

raeble wrote:

No they're targeting the majority that have PC's and have windows media player. I would have thought that was a much larger market than ipod owners all their stuff from itunes. Besides isn't the aac format exclusive to apple? Aren't they not allowing anyone else other than itunes access to it?

If those people are happy to listen to their music only on their PC, then fine, but I think many of the PC owners who buy downloads want to listen to their music on the move. To do this, the majority of them have bought iPods and so must have installed iTunes (but are not necessarily downloading from the iTunes Music Store).

The AAC format may be exclusive to Apple, but it isn't the only format you can use on your iPod. All of the music on my iPod is MP3 encoded, using iTunes (for my own CDs) or music downloaded from eMusic. These websites could be tapping the huge market of iPod owners if they would sell in MP3 format. Using WMA limits their sales currently, but it may force people to start buying WMA compatible portables.