Good tidings, digital music fans! Reuters reports that Insound has finally committed to selling its awesome catalog in downloadable format. Full albums only (no propagating of a “singles” culture here), but most importantly (and like eMusic), we’re talking unprotected, shareable MP3s (i.e. no “DRM,” or digital rights management). This means no major labels will want to play with Insound, but that doesn’t bother us much, and more importantly, it means we’ll be cranking to indie jams regardless of portable music device.
Insound is embracing a user-friendly attitude, but also one that many industry insiders say is essential for the growth of a flat digital download market. Yahoo Music general manager David Goldberg told Reuters:
The notion that a track I buy in DRM is protected and one without DRM isn’t is a fallacy. 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.
He went on to state that this situation “only serves to dissuade consumers from buying music legally and instead keeps unauthorized peer-to-peer services in business.”
Yahoo really “gets it,” huh? There’s something to their line of thought, but we have to question some of their suppositions. Sure, we avoid obtaining records from iTunes in favor of a source of unprotected MP3s (for prospective sharing purposes), but that “source of unprotected MP3s” is often a free one.
Would you be more prone to buy your digital music if it were unprotected? And would your purchases put illicit torrent-trading and peer-to-peer sites out of business? Questionable, that. It’s sure to help those stalled digital download figures, but who’s got a better deal than free?
But Yahoo is intent on proving their theory, so they’re offering Jesse McCartney’s new album in both protected and unprotected formats and at the same price. ‘Cause Jesse McCartney fans are all about posting the hot tracks on their typepads and blogspots.
Yup, Yahoo totally gets it.
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What I want to know is, what will the quality of the downloads be at Insound? I hope it’ll be better than 128 kpbs. And why doesn’t iTunes offer better quality downloads?
more importantly, if selling MP3s gets more popular, having a gazillion gigs of MP3s will be less incriminating.
As long as I can still buy my physical CDs if I choose to, I’ll be happy.
If I buy digital music, I’d much rather have an unprotected format than one with DRM, for use not only with various devices, but also for possible sampling and remixing. It’s easy, but tedious, to recapture or convert some types of audio files to something usable in standard sequencing programs. Hell, if I had the choice, I would prefer to download in WAV or AIFF format to then do with what I choose. I wonder when some company is going to offer mass CD quality downloads.
I’d be more prone to buy digital music if it was the same quality as a CD, and unprotected. It would then be tantamount to actually having the CD, minus the cool part of holding it and seeing it on your shelf, to which current digital music sources (with which I am familier) fail to compare.
Insound’s non-DRM MP3 downloads will be 192 kbps.
aren’t 192kbps mp3s equivalent to 128kbps AACs (which you get from iTunes…) ???
I still prefer to have the physical copy of the CD, but even so, the #1 reason I will never buy music from iTunes is the DRM. So if the physical copy of the album was otherwise unavailable to me I would definitely buy a digital download of it from Insound.
I know Rolling Stone is essentially “pfft whatever”, but I was reading about this new site that will be starting up soon and it seems pretty neat. It’s going to be completely legal, and completely free, because instead of users paying for the music, advertisers will cover all the fees. Damn, I can’t find the site name anywhere right now…but if anyone knows what it’s called, post it here so people can check it out.