Would You Rent a Song For a Dime?

An anonymous reader writes "What's worse than a padlocking every song so that they will only play on certain devices? How about selling (renting) you songs that work on no devices? Astonishingly, this is what the music industry thinks we need. Warner Music is spending $20 million to back Lala, a startup devising a service to convince people to 'buy' 'web songs' for 10 cents each; these are then kept for safekeeping only by Lala with no download privileges. Industry insider Michael Robertson leaks the facts on this scheme, along with a seekrit URL so you can try it out."

Would you lick my balls for a quarter?

I would rent a song for a dime if you would lick my balls for a quarter.

Re:Would you lick my balls for a quarter?

It's easier than what the RIAA makes us do for two and a half songs.

Zis is verry funny!

Def.: the Slashdot Effect: Look here, a secret URL [lala.com] I just found, but shhh, don't go there and don't tell anyone!

One Question for Miss Morissette: Slashdotting a music service that is essentially nothing but a denial of service (a.k.a. sham), which effectively puts it out of service for a while, is that

a.) ironic, or

b.) a self-fulfilling prophesy?

Imaginary Property

So now we're meant to pay ten cents for the right to imagine we have imaginary property?

Re:Imaginary Property

As long as it's an imaginary ten cents...

Re:Imaginary Property

Is that what you buy cheap french cars with?

(cue piano music)

Imagine there's no Lala,

And paying for is to buy.
No Warner below us,
Above us, metro wi-fi
Imagine all the artists
Getting paid the full amount.

Imagine there's no IP
Nor music tax for you
Nothng to lawsuit over
And no Sony too
Imagine all the people
Owning what they have

You may say I'm unAmerican
And your lawyer's just begun
I hope someday you'll .torrent
And the world will be as one.

Re:(cue piano music)

Completely offtopic here, but the other day I overheard the 14-year old daughter of a friend of mine remarking on what a beautiful song David Archuleta had written to sing in American Idol, and how he should have, like, totally won the competition if only for that.

I excused myself, went to the bathroom upstairs and laughed uncontrollably into a towel (to muffle the sound) for about five minutes.

*laughs*

I wish I had mod points for you two. For $0.10 apiece you can pretend I modded you up.

Re:*laughs*

I wish I had mod points for you two. For $0.10 apiece you can pretend I modded you up.

Mod Point Rule #1: The Mod Point Fairy only gives you mod points when you don't want them.

Re:(cue piano music)

These are the kids that will be running the country soon. I would have suffocated myself.

It's called a jukebox

We so need to organize a protest at this one diner near where I work. They have the audacity to "rent" songs for a whole quarter a song (or 5 for $1), for just one listen! If I'm paying for it, I want the right to my song, dammit!

Look, I'm all for actually owning the digital music you buy, but I think we're jumping on this for the wrong reason. It's not so much that they are ripping us off of our rights (which they aren't), as it is a stupid business model. There are so many other, better legal alternatives out there, I don't see this one flying.

Re:Imaginary Property

So if we pay per song, aside form the obvious distraction of having to make all of our own song playlists (radio pays people for that same job) we also get to pay about $2.00 per hour for the rental of songs. Between commuting and the work day, let's call that ten hours of rental radio, $20 per day. So by the end of the second week you could have purchased a href=http://shop.sirius.com/edealinv/servlet/ExecMacro?nurl=control/StoreDirectory.vm&ctl_nbr=2640&catLevel=1&catParentID=7874&scId=7874&oldParentID=7870>satellite radio and had the same thing minus the hour a day of lost productivity while you fiddle with your playlist.

If you can listen, you can save

If you can listen, you can save, and it won't be long before a hack for that is posted on slashdot.

Harrumph

Music Search: nerdcore

Sorry, no matches for you.

Sorry, no business for you.

Doesn't seem so bad...

So they're letting you listen to a digital copy one time? Time to start firing up the flash ripper and start scraping the site. Chances are they're not sticking stupid DRM or watermarking in their own 'secure' player.

Granted having your entire music collection in fla is annoying, you can probably can convert it to something a little more usable.

Sounds like a great source for large volumes of music.

Re:Doesn't seem so bad...

http://next.lala.com/api/AutoComplete/songAutoComplete?prefix=bt [lala.com]

Pass URL encoded downloadToken to:

http://next.lala.com/api/Player/getTrackUrls?flash=true&webSrc=lala&widgetId=LalaHeadlessPlayer&T= [lala.com]

url gives you the mp3 url, it's not a full mp3, sounds backwards, but it's a start to downloading from them.

Re:Doesn't seem so bad...

To expand on that previous finding, here's a script that lets you download any song you want:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;
use JSON;
$|=1;

die "$0 <search param>" unless $ARGV[0];
my $root_url = "http://next.lala.com/api/AutoComplete/songAutoComplete";
my $content = get "$root_url?prefix=$ARGV[0]";
my $ref = from_json($content);
my $num = 0;
foreach (@{$ref->{data}->{list}}) {
  print "$num : $_->{artist} - $_->{title}\n";
  $num++;
}
print "Download which? > ";
my $req = <STDIN>;
die "not valid" if ($req < 0 or $req > $num);
my $download_url = "http://next.lala.com/api/Player/getTrackUrls?flash=true&webSrc=lala&widgetId=LalaHeadlessPlayer&T=" . $ref->{data}->{list}->[$req]->{playToken};
my $play_url = get $download_url;
my $play_ref = from_json($play_url);
my $download_link = $play_ref->{data}->[0]->{url};
print "Getting: $download_link\n";
my $filename = $ref->{data}->{list}->[$req]->{artist} ."-" . $ref->{data}->{list}->[$req]->{title} . ".mp3";
print "Downloading to $filename\n";
system("wget -O '$filename' $download_link");

It's quick, it's dirty, but it works:

perl download.pl tiesto
0 : Tiesto - Ten Seconds Before Sunrise
1 : Ti&#195;&#171;sto - Forever Today
Download which? > 0
Getting: http://cfs-listen-52.lala.com/contentfs/content?t=NjU1MzVVNDM2OTE1OQ%3D%3D-vSOzDPPcV8VwbKW6Bwdv%2FQ%3D%3D
Downloading to Tiesto-Ten Seconds Before Sunrise.mp3
--2008-05-27 18:16:09--  http://cfs-listen-52.lala.com/contentfs/content?t=NjU1MzVVNDM2OTE1OQ%3D%3D-vSOzDPPcV8VwbKW6Bwdv%2FQ%3D%3D
Resolving cfs-listen-52.lala.com... 209.237.235.158
Connecting to cfs-listen-52.lala.com|209.237.235.158|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 3609494 (3.4M) [audio/x-mpeg]
Saving to: `Tiesto-Ten Seconds Before Sunrise.mp3'

What?

The website clearly says "Get MP3s for your iPod". Is the submission incorrect, or is there a catch to said MP3s? Because the submission clearly states that anything from Lala won't play on any devices. That was the whole point of posting this here for people to be outraged, I imagine.

Re:What?

From http://next.lala.com/#howitworks :

Want MP3 downloads?
You can buy DRM-free MP3s for your iPod or other portable device for just 79 [cents] more.

So, it's a lot like Amazon MP3 but with a "trial version" feature, except you have to pay for the trial.

Also, my CAPTCHA is "patents". How apropos.

Re:What?

I believe this "submission" a way to get people on the site so that lala can tell their investors "We had 1 million hits within one day of launch."

Slashdot fell for it and is now giving a never heard of site massive traffic which will appear positive to investors.

Sshhh don't tell anybody about this

Click here [imeem.com]

Unlimited free music with links to purchase it if you want. 100% legal. 100% major labels. Tons of obscure stuff too.

Renting isn't so bad

My major objection to DRM on music I buy is simple: if there is DRM on it, I don't really own it.

If I am renting the music in the first place, DRM doesn't bother me so much. Exhibit A is the Rhapsody online music service, which is essentially a flat-rate music rental service. I have discovered that I like Rhapsody very much. I am finding new bands that I like, bands I had never heard of before, much faster than before I had Rhapsody.

Depending on what you get, Rhapsody is $12 to $15 per month. If this plan really is a dime per track, that's a cheaper rental than Rhapsody. The big question is coverage. If the new plan only lets me rent the latest pop acts, I'm just not interested. (Rhapsody has over 4 million tracks, including all sorts of cool things: Herbie Mann flute albums, Bill Cosby comedy albums, progressive rock, etc.)

When Rhapsody helps me music I really like, I then go and buy the music on CD, so that I will really own it. I'd be happy to do the same thing with this new service.

Will the service succeed? I'd say that depends very much on the specifics. How do you pay them that dime per track? If they have a convenient way to add dimes to your account, such as selling gift cards in Best Buy, it might become wildly popular; if you have to jump through a bunch of hoops (agree to a 20-page EULA, pre-register, enter a valid credit card number, pre-pay in $30 chunks, etc.) most people will just say no.

Assuming it's convenient, would I "rent" a song for ten cents? Sure. Why not?

steveha

Disclaimer: I work for the company that owns Rhapsody, but it's not my job to sell it to you or anyone else.

this might works for many people

If this is a web interface, and a user can log in from any computer, then there is no problem.

Honestly, any music one buys online is going to have a limited lifetime. The best one can hope for is that you can make a copy to CD and not lose much in the transcoding. But how many people burn to CD? For most people the just put on their computer or another device.

While I think this service is maybe inferior to something like Amazon, it is superior in many ways to ITMS. If I can pay a dime to put something in a jukebox, then play it from anywhere I can log on, what is the problem? I might make even more sense to use this service that labouriously moving all my music from on device to another.

That is if I hadn't already bought half of the music I will likely buy in my lifetime. I have many gigabytes of music that I have bought over my life. If I was a kid with a computer, a smart phone, and internet access at school, this would be a wonderful deal. An album for a dollar. I can play on anything I normally play on? Sign me up! You may think of the expense, but how much are kids paying for ringtones, SMS, and the like.

I know we have a kneejerk reaction around here to paying for things, and we believe that music wants to be free, but perhaps the objection here is more based on what we consider the norm, not rational thought. Perhaps music is not about listening to the same album a hundred times because we can only afford that one album, or listening to whatever is free on yahoo. Perhaps there is some value in having a collection of songs, that one chooses our of personal taste, and then having access to those songs over many devices located in disparate geographical area. As I said, i would not do this. I would just buy the CD or download the album. But I can imagine such a thing maybe finding a small market. It would suck to have all the music go away, though.

Re:Cracking the "DRM"

The 'Download Helper' extension for Firefox works just fine. The playback in VLC (on Kubuntu 8.04) was just peachy.