Yahoo’s New Media Device

Michael I don’t think you understand youth culture.

Most of the songs on an iPod these days ARE DEFINITELY NOT LEGAL. To go one step further, most of my friends probably only know how to download and add illegal MP3’s as opposed to ripping their CD’s.

Sure I have ripped some of my CD’s but no way are the majority legal. Hold on let me open up iTunes - there we go, I have 3,000 songs and about 200 of them are legal. And I am the norm.

I agree 100% that we shouldn’t have to pay for music more than once but I discount your statement that the majority of music on an iPod is legal.

I love it how bloggers push DRM-free music yet when it comes to their own content and IP they are so heavy on protecting it. I challenge a blogger to think outside the norm and look at expanding DRM instead of getting away from it.

Nice going, Ian.

With an attitude like that, no doubt this device is going to find its market quickly … that market of course being the friends and families of record label executives.

Sheesh.

Hmmm… Well, I’m not against downloading music for free on the net at all, but I’m pretty sure Ian meant “not paid for by the owners of those iPods”, in which case he’s most likely right - the only one who paid for the songs is, as I think you’re trying to point out, that one person who purchased the CD, ripped the songs off the CD and upload them to the net so that everyone else could download them and upload them to their iPods. So you’re both right on that one.

Anyway, the device looks cool. The subscription plan I think it’s been tried before. It probably works for some people but overall most people just get the music they like from the net without paying a dime, like it or not.

While ian’s remark is perhaps a little off-putting, it is definitely true. I’m fairly confident that a significant portion (at least a plurality, if not a majority) of music on all mp3 players and computers is illegally acquired (regardless of what one thinks of the ethics of copyright laws).

This is quite an exciting device - what’s strange is that Yahoo is not making a bigger push advertising the fact that Unlimited to Go is essentially $6/month when you use a MasterCard (2nd year is free). There’s a lot of faults with YMJ, YMU, (improving, but still buggy program, occasional DRM breakage, etc.), but this device, if it works as described and has a decent battery life, has a lot of potential to really be exciting. At the very least, it’ll get the other players (notably MSFT) with how to use WiFi.

I pay for a subscription and then undrm or download music from elsewhere. I want to be able to use whatever player I want with the music- not be tied to the subscription’s limited player selection. So essentially I only subscribe so I can be somewhat ethical by having a “license” to my music, and I plan to continue to pay as long as I keep my music.

Obviously this wouldn’t work as an official subscription model as users can’t be trusted to delete non-drm subscription music if they cancel, but it works for me.

Chris, I don’t know if it’s true or not. It isn’t true for my iPod because I ripped maybe a thousand dollars worth of CDs I’ve collected over the years. Those songs were bought and paid for, and I have every right to listen to them on my iPod without paying anyone else any more money.

Zoostarr & Chris,

I have to disagree with you, too. I have about 6000 tracks in my iTunes - 99% of them legal (ripped from CDs). And I’m not even sure that’s all my CDs, I found another box full a few weeks ago that seems to have a bunch I didn’t rip!

Asking around, it appears everyone in my circles have mostly legal music.

Sure, at ~30 I’m past current “youth culture”, but like many others I have more money to spend on CDs and iPods than most “youth”.

On the other hand then I don’t have time to hunt the net to download music. $12-$18 to get the CD from Amazon in a couple of days (or with instant gratification from iTunes when they start offer DRM-free tracks next month) is a pretty decent deal.

- ask

Bjorn:

I was just going to ask how old you are buddy but you quickly fixed that for me. I am 19 and I grew up on MP3. I remember I last brought an album maybe eight years ago? This is the same with almost any kid my age.

My parents don’t have any illegal music and if they created an iPod playlist they too would have $000’s worth of CD’s legally owned by them.

Unfortunately, if you look at my demographic, we won’t have any.

Many people criticize iPods as portable jukeboxes with illegal music. I don’t bother with getting illegal music, it’s too much of a hassle to obtain, organize and the quality isn’t worth it. But, as much as they may bash the iPod, they forget it’s much more than a music player.

I have different iPods for different uses. I use my shuffle mainly for music on the go (jogging, etc.). I have multiple uses for my video iPod. This includes:
- music (from my CDs, iTunes purchased, SXSW samples)
- TV shows
- uploading and showing presentations (using Apple’s Keynote); and
- videos I edit and create from my Mac

iPods are more than legal music for me.

Yeah, 4000+ tracks on my Ipod are legal dudes. Ripped from my extensive CD collection which is now gathering dust in storage. Not a single illegal track in the bunch.

Just doing a simple query with my friends also and the majority of music on thier iPods are also ripped from CD’s and even some from vinyl.

So funny this thread. Guys, I’m 41 and the majority of my music is illegally downloaded and it all sounds great thanks to the free tools to even out volume and such (MP3 Gain). I do have a lot of my CD collection ripped already, but any new stuff I can download (at minimum 160 quality) just about anywhere I please.

The music industry has screwed so many for so long that now it is their turn to get their come uppance.

cheers!

Wow Michael, I agree with #1, you don’t understand the majority of the people which push this market forward. Maybe people like you have tons of cds from over the years (so do I), but I (and others) would rather download a cd anyday then buy it (let alone rip it).

Ian is 100% right.

my 2 cents

p.s there will always be anecdotal cases

Damn. Apparently I can turn any news item into an argument about file sharing! This was supposed to be about this rad new device!

Anyway, Michael is at least partially right to criticize my comment, which was made flippantly, as an afterthought to the blog post, and wasn’t buttoned up for a debate such as this one. Any conversation about where the music on an iPod comes from needs to take legally ripped music into consideration. Groups like NPD study this and you can talk about this on an actual percentage basis if you do your homework.

I, however, was looking a little further out. There’s no question at this point that CD sales are declining and digital sales aren’t growing fast enough to make up for the gap. I’d like to work to create a new paradigm (or a set of new paradigms) that works for music lovers as well as music creators. Do I think the model we have today with YMU and this device is perfect? No, I don’t. But I think it’s a step in the right direction and many music lovers are going to dig the freedom of unlimited portable music discovery and the piece of mind of knowing that Yahoo! is paying for every track they listen to.

We will get there. It’s my job to make sure we do.

Thanks Michael for the link. Always an honor.

ian

ok differences above aside - i wished for one sec that it was a cell phone too. well can’t ask for too much. yahoo phone… not like this was never a rumor before anyway

Ian, you ignorant slut…

So - hmmmm - I dont understand

- If its only wireless / then I can get streaming music - via - starbucks … and other free wireless place…

- So I load it up (only 4GB) with my music … then ummm …. Can I download music using my houses WiFi? … from Yahoo - or can I just stream? …

- I was thinking- If I could download a individual song or whole CD - that would dissappear or have a limited - number at a time; downloaded ..

- does this not lead to perpetual rebuilding of my song list? .. hmm …

- MAKING IT A CELL PHONE - might be worthy - (google phone?)

Ian, recently ASCAP has requested a federal court to declare that downloads will also require a performance license. So fees similar to streaming, especially the new CRB fees. If this happens, what will happen to this service. Will it be tiered based upon the use (monthly subscription rates based upon use of service)?

Wish you well with the device, but for the reasons I mentioned previously, for the same price I get more from my iPod.

I believe it’s a means situation in most cases. If someone has the means to purchase music the right way, they will. If they don’t have the means, they will opt to steal on file-sharing networks. I haven’t been following the RIAA onslaught of legal battles, but I bet you the average age of the thieves is under 25 - students and unemployed/first low-wage job college grads.

Did I see a proliferation of stolen music among my peers when I was in my early 20s? Absolutely. Do I see it now that I’m in my late 20s? No.

This is not to say that there aren’t exceptions. There’s always the self-rightgeous, tech-nerd crowd who’ll espouse “music wants to be free,” or some other non-sense argument. There are those who have the means and steal anyway because they’re just assholes. However, people generally want to do the right thing.

I contend the majority market of underground, free music is served by those who wouldn’t purchase the music anyway. The RIAA will never make more money by quashing it.

Circling back to the original argument about iPods mostly holding illegal music, if the iPod is owned by a 10-25 year old, I would say that statement is probably accurate. Over 25 iPod owners, not so much. And if you want to make an umbrella statement about iPods, if there are more 10-25 year olds who own iPods than over 25, then yes, iPods are “mostly full of not-paid-for MP3s.”

Novel idea, this music device. However, much like Ed the best part of owning an iPod is that it offers great versatility MP3, video, etc. Also the balance of price point and available memory is out of whack. Explain to me why I’d pay $250 for a device with 4GB of memory when I can buy an iPod with 30GB for the same price???? Not to mention that once I buy the device I then need to lock myself into a $6 - $15 subscription service.

Ian said: “There’s no question at this point that CD sales are declining and digital sales aren’t growing fast enough to make up for the gap.”

Isn’t this inherent to your (and every other subscription service’s) business model?

You charge $144-180 (and with current discounts much less) per year for an entire catalog, what someone would purchase over their whole lifespan. It’ll take you around 50 years more or less to offset physical loss sales with digital subscription revenues for each individual.

(In fact, I would imagine that if you just looked at the download to own market versus loss sales attributed to it, there may actual be a reall offset, maybe even revenue gain.)

But your model which you support on the claim that the music business is losing money actually fosters the music business losing money.

How about a device that works which is not tied to any media player? until then I’m pretty happy with my iPod which has a healthy mix of legal and illegal songs…..

With all due respect to Yahoo Music (and I have been pleased with their service), I was really hoping this device would work wirelessly with multiple subscription services and any internet radio station. By tying users to one service, it comes up about even with the Music Gremlin, which is 8 GB and going for $190 on Amazon.

What’s interesting in the comments is the age divide - at some point teenagers just stopped buying cds (at least the tech aware ones) and that was it. They get all of their music online now…I guess I sort of knew this in the back of my mind but I didn’t realize it fully until now. What I’d like to know is how attractive subscription plans are to that demographic, v. buying DRM free songs online.

@22 - The market is dying for a device that can handle/support multiple subscriber services, online radio, podcast subscription, etc. It obviously would be a capital intensive for a startup, but why a company already tied in to Wi-Fi or cellular hasn’t done this baffles me.

How hard would it be for Cingular and Motorola to get together to introduce a device that isn’t a cell phone but rather an MP3 player that runs over the Cingular’s network? It could have a mobile platform where the user could use Yahoo! Music or Rhapsody, etc. It could have an easy interface to stream things like Live365 stations. And it could have a micro-transmitter or adapter package to go in a car. I assume this has been thought of by thousands of people, yet I have yet to see a quality offering in the marketplace.

There’s something most people are overlooking. It seems, due to the phrasing of Michael’s post, that some confusion arose over to who or what Ian was suggesting had the “illegal music”.

Ian, in the quote’s actual words, implies that the HARDWARE is the issue here. It is the iPods that have the illegal music. The USER is the person who has the illegal music.

Thus, the “off-putting” of the comment comes with the insinuation that iPods are behind the “illegal music” instead of the user. He means, quite simply, to imply and dupe those who aren’t savvy enough that the iPod is - essentially - aiding illegal activities while their player is not. This is not the argument that should ever be made. It is the user, not the device, that uses their player (in this case iPod) to house potentially illegal music. The RIAA has yet to sue Apple’s iPod for copyright infringement. Instead, they sue the USERS.

So, while we have, in the comments, established that there is an age divide and that the comment is true of some USERS, the comment is still off putting and an untrue, misguided marketing slam.

Just remember it’s not the HARDWARE, like Ian says, but rather the USER - and some users at at that.

“Yahoo has just announced a cool new wifi device, called the SanDisk Sansa Connect, that comes ready to listen to Yahoo Music”

This is not a Yahoo device, rather it’s a San Disk device that has bundled Yahoo’s music service. However, you are free to load a variety of other music and from other sources. The hardware is based on the Zing platform, like the Sirius Stiletto. The Sansa Connect was on display January at CES and was pretty much mobbed. This is the first device in a long while that I’m excited to get my hands on.

As a consumer of podcast content I’m wondering about the Sansa Connect:
- Does it allow for subscribing to podcasts, much as iTunes does?
- Can I buy the Sansa Connect and not subscribe to the Yahoo service?
- If I don’t subscribe to Yahoo’s service then could I still download podcasts?
Using this for podcasts without subscribing to the service could be ideal.
I could reload podcasts anytime I’m in a hot spot.
Now THAT would be cool!

Hmmm, another one joining the MP3 player war, who’s next Google?

A lot of people could care less about how they get they’re music. Until they get caught. And it never happens. Cause I think the record companies just gave up. Just buy the toy. Give the company something to feel good about themselves for.

Booyah Michael - you got it.

And I’ll let you know something else.

Right now the only serious buyers of music are the older generation like my parents. Sure there are kids buying CD’s, but a lot of them are now downloading it illegally. Now what happens when we replace our parents as the older generation (i.e. when we become 35+)?

If digital downloads haven’t caught up then that is when the music industry will be in pain. No longer will they have the older generation purchasing CD’s because as they grew up on MP3, they will still download their music.

My parents would rather purchase a CD because it is habit, it is the best quality and you get a physical CD to deal with.

The youth don’t think this way.

Yahoo device?

Misleading headline.

Arrington: “I have every right to listen to them on my iPod without paying anyone else any more money.”

Take that straw man!

No one is asking users to pay twice for music they ripped. However, I do use the subscription service on Yahoo as a way to download music I already on - it’s easier than ripping a CD.

I also use the subscription service to listen to music that isn’t worth paying for, which is most of it. I relate it to buying movies. where I rent much more than I own.

HAHAAHAHA. Usually legal MP3s? Are you taking drugs?

Most of the stuff on mp3 players (regardless of brand) aren’t legal. They weren’t paid for. Here’s some info: a lot of the highest-quality online rips were ripped by low-level studio employees *before* the release, so the artist didn’t even get paid for the CD.

If you seriously believe that most teens or young 20-somethings have mostly (or even partially) legal music on their MP3s, you really don’t understand youth culture today.

Itunes is the *last resort* for music, and it’s generally only used if the music can’t be found freely through LimeWire, BearShare, or Google.

20. goeb said: “Ian said: “There’s no question at this point that CD sales are declining and digital sales aren’t growing fast enough to make up for the gap.”

Isn’t this inherent to your (and every other subscription service’s) business model?”

Response:

Ian’s original post said “Labels and artists get paid for every radio play and every Yahoo! Music download to the Sansa Connect.”

I would assume in Ian’s comment, that “Digital Sales” is referring to sales from pay per song AND subscription services. Thus not leaving sales from Subscription services as a potential cause of the gap.

Late entry…big time loser…born dead….

Music should be free and supported by ads on the download pages. I think the record companies are missing the boat here. They could set up a site with all the music there and have advertisers pay to be listed. The revenue from the ads would be shared with the music industry as a percentage of the downloads. Simple

The old way of people paying for music is gone. Those who still pay, do it for moral reasons that they picked up as children. They were brainwashed to think they had to pay for this stuff, so they know no other way.

Have you ever seen a free newspaper? I suppose you have because they are everywhere and quite popular. All the writers who contribute articles in those papers get paid somehow or they wouldn’t eat.

Bands and groups will not go hungry. They will make money via concerts and advert revenue from the download pages.

Am I crazy or the only one who sees this? P2P is not going away. and will always thrive unless there is a legal means to getting the same value or better.

Brady, you didn’t respond to my point at all. My statement wasn’t predicated on Yahoo trying to rip the studios off, I know they’re getting paid. But they are getting paid much less with subscriptions (a higher % but a lower total by $ rev and /unit) than with CDs and digital downloads.

If Yahoo and any other subscription is particularly successful, it will be particularly painful to the studios.

It would be cool having that big of a library to access. However, I want an all-in-one device. I want to carry one single device that acts as my cell phone, portable (lite) computer, and music center.

It’s trivial to get anything popular from p2p. Isohunt.com + microTorrent = success, with minimal user interaction. Nearly everything is high-quality bitrate (~224kbps VBR is typical), but metadata (ID3 tags) can be a mess, so building a clean library can require a time commitment of an hour an album.

How much is an hour of a pirate’s time worth, and can a label see itself as offering an efficiency gain to that person? If you could have iTunes automatically download every new album (and all the old ones) by every band you like for $20/month, why would you spend tens of hours a month getting/cleaning them all by hand from p2p? This is already a solved problem from a technical standpoint - if there can be podcasts then there can be “casts” for artist discographies, genres, producers, venues, moods, etc.

Huge hard drives almost eliminate the need to download anyway - AppleTV, Sonos, Pandora, etc. could ship a device with a 1TB hard drive preloaded with the top 10,000 albums as rated by users and metacritics - at which point a listener has instant, no-download, skip-around access to everything noteworthy ever recorded. Downloading becomes an automated background patching of the library with new releases rather than a means of discovering or “owning” music. A small device like iPhone could start with a cache of the most popular content and adjust by download after user feedback.

The listener thus shifts from allocating dollars to allocating attention. Enter Web 2.0. How will anyone figure out what to choose from this ocean of possibility? Semi-passively, through Pandora, or actively, through peer recommendations, metacritics, tags, advertising, live shows, Google? It may not matter much.

Music is already quickly becoming a background feature - inside MySpace, video games, cellphones on hold. The music industry will soon be struggling to get any revenue at all directly from the listener, but the sooner the old business model dies, the sooner we can get on with building cool offerings that somebody somewhere (probably advertisers) will pay for. As long as there is plenty of money coming in, and it gets spread around reasonably, it doesn’t really matter whether or not it comes from the end user - they can be monetized or they can pay, like Hotmail does.

The music industry is terrified of giving up end-user revenue because it is so juicy. They will never get the same profit margins from bulk licensing deals negotiated by sharp MBAs & lawyers as they do selling to teenagers and college students with no pricing power. But once they get used to the idea of predictable revenue streams, they may see the light.

I’ll buy this. Cool features.