Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Gang of Mixel Pixel 4 DRM FREE Download etc

Looks like online indie music retailer Insound.com is jumping on the download bandwagon finally.

I mean , not that they are not new to the web, or even downloads, such as this sample mp3

Gang of Four - Damaged Goods

It's just they've never sold any... yet.

So their concept is to offer only "full albums" instead of individual tracks... prices of the full album will range from $8.99 to $9.99

they've enlisted some top indie names like Colin Meloy to talk about their fave ALBUMS... the "Save the Album" website ad campaign features indie artists like Devendra Banhart and Bloc Party talking about their fave albums.

Meanwhile Redwood City CA based Emusic.com's CEO David Packman dismisses Insound & their concept as barely a baby blip on the internet music radar screen...

he told Mp3.com of Insound
" Their market share online seems to be so low such that they don't even appear in the market share statistics for online music sales (physical or digital), so I doubt their digital music efforts will have very much effect on the market"

Emusic's battle is not to save the album but to expand the market overall, and also defeat the various DRM platforms, and Apple's dominance of the music downloading biz. Packman, like the little yellow animated video game creature of yore, is much more concerned with his battles, and how to not to get destroyed while running the music industry maze.

It just got uglier with Microsoft announcing it's ZUNE rollout, that will also offer DRM protected content, that's incompatible with I-Pods.

Emusic, the 2nd most popular music site, has been in the music download game longer than both Microsoft & Apple companies, but they've done so with DRM-free mp3 files that offer consumers a choice of players. Emusic, despite their experience, has made due by working with indie labels, as the four majors refute them and the MP3 format, which is unprotected & can be played on any basically portable device.

Apple remains the elephant in the room, the industry behemoth with 1.5 billion songs in their library, and they account for roughly two-thirds of all the legit paid digital downloads. They are looking to trademark the terms Pod & I-phone, and seem to have a perfect proprietary system for pushing digital content through their exclusive portal.


Packman and others in the biz think Apple & Microsoft are merely trying to sell consumers hardware & software, and leaving artists & labels (i.e content providers) out of the revenue stream. Basically he contends the industry is forcing consumers to seek out illegal content, and the artists are losing out on a lot of potential legitimate downloads.

This year, despite tons of players on the market, many millions of I-Pods abounding, the average growth of monthly paid downloads is flat, and even declining, to around 10 million a week .

Packman of Emusic, and other players like Yahoo Music's David Goldberg insist that growth will only come when the largest companies stop trying to enforce a losing proposistion of offering player dependent & incompatible DRM music files. Yahoo has recently begun offering DRM free content, in addition to the protected downloads they previously had.

In a recent statement quoted in Billboard Yahoo Music's Goldberg stated
"It's all nonsense. Music is never going to be protected, and anybody who tells you that is not being honest. Yes, you can put up speed bumps, but the people who really want to steal music are going to steal it. So you're just making it hard for people who want to do the right thing to get the music they legitimately purchased on the devices and services that they want."


Anyhow

that battle is long from solved...

here's a couple new tracks I wanted to annoint ya with ...

Howz about this track from the new Tommy Guerrero release ...it came out last week...

The good folks at Quanuum gave me permission to share this track with y'all...

You can only download the rest of it at I-Tunes, or buy a hard copy at yer fave indie retailer..online or off.



Tommy Guerrero & Curumin - Salve

From the Soil To the Soul

From the Soil To the Soul

Tommy Guerrero

Quannum Projects




haphazardly left here by circa

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