News coming from almost every blog that myspace will soon be bands the ability to sell their music on their myspace page. The music can be previewed, purchased, and downloaded through a flash app that gets added to your myspace.
The app was developed by a startup called Snocap which was co-founded by Shawn Fanning of Napster fame. Snocap first showed off their flash app over a month ago on the myspace of The Format. I don’t know how they became the first trial customer but it was certainly a fantastic choice. The band’s latest release, Dog Problems, is a fantastic album and will probably hit my top5 of 2006.
I actually gave the service a try when it launched. You first sign up for an account with Snocap which can be done through the flash application. Then you have to tie a PayPal account to your Snocap account. Paypal is currently the only payment method but Snocap’s site mentioned that other options will be coming soon. This makes the signup process a bit longer as you get directed to Paypal’s site to allow Snocap to automatically charge you for purchases. Though the extra step is annoying, I didn’t really mind it because it means one less company has my credit card information. Once you’ve done this you just choose the songs you want to purchase, click purchase, and you’re done. The songs are available for download immediately. Now here’s the really great parts of the service…
- Each song is just 79 cents
- Songs are DRM free! They’re just plain old MP3s. Put them on your iPod, play them in whatever player you prefer, and never worry about licenses
- The bitrate of the songs are 192kbps. iTunes, for example, is 128kbps
- You can download the song an unlimited amount of times so you don’t have to worry about deleting it. Every time you login to your snocap account it lists every song you’ve purchased and makes it available for download
I only noticed a couple drawbacks. First, it’s only available to US residents. Luckily I live in states but being Canadian you notice these things. Second, there’s no discount for purchasing the whole album. This isn’t a huge concern when each song only costs 79 cents.
None the less, this is such a great service. As someone who actively tries to find new music I come across a lot of small bands and 90% of them offer downloads through their myspace. Amazingly, a lot of these bands are so small that I can’t even find their stuff on p2p or torrent networks. But being presented with the option to immediately download an EP for the price of a latte and never have to worry about DRM is such a compeling offering. If I was Apple I wouldn’t be too worried, I can’t imagine there’s a single major label that will have the foresight to use Snocap. Not that I care, I just looked at the last 40 albums I played and only 2 were on major labels (and one of them is only because The Decemberists just signed with Capitol Records!).
The Financial Times is reporting that artists “will be able to set their own price, MySpace will establish a minimum figure to cover the costs of running the service, with any money above that divided between the site and the artists.” It will be interesting to see what the minimum figure and percentage split will be.
Your argument about bitrate is irrelevant since 128 kbps AAC sounds as good as 192 kbps MP3.
I did a quick search on google and the comparisons of encoding I found here, here, and here would lead me to believe that 192kbps MP3 does sound better than 128kbps AAC.
For clarification, AAC is the encoding scheme used by Apple for the iTunes Music Store. It should also be mentioned that Yahoo’s Music Store, Real’s Rhapsody service, and Napster all use 192kbps WMAs (Microsoft’s encoding scheme)
What about eMusic? $10 a month for 40 downloads, DRM free MP3 files encoded at a Variable bit rate that seems to be 192kbps or greater. It’s mostly Indie music from what I see. Only problem I see is that it’s subscription, so you have to download your 40 songs a month to get the 25 cents per track price. Read about it on Wired. I have not tried this service.
i have no idea why one would ever claim that 128 kbps sounds better than 192 kbps. by the way, did a cyborg write that comment? irrelevant? c’mon.
eMusic.com is great in terms of selection, adding the entire catalogs of indie labels seemingly every day (Touch and Go was just added recently, for example). The monthly subscription can be a pain, but if you use any sort of calendar program and can schedule reminders, that’s easily addressed. The biggest problem I have is in keeping track of all the new stuff added. Their RSS feeds are seriously lacking, and with the wealth of catalog releases coupled with new releases that are posted each day, it can be a bit overwhelming.
i subscribe to emusic and enjoy it. one thing that i find irritating is that if you don’t fulfil your monthly quota at the end of the month, it isn’t carried over – just reset.