What would make you pay for music downloads?

[Tapio Dmitriyevich]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Bit_rate

BTW for everything digital audio related you're welcome at hydrogenaudio.org. It's the where the audio geeks are. Lot of developers (lame mp3, tak, wavpack, flac, foobar2000, winamp, nero aac) there... And me.

[eclassical]

     A few things that would make downloads more attractive:
     Album art, both front and back covers at 500 or higher, and liner notes in .pdf format.

Hello, drogulus!

We've started to improve our cover art recently:

http://www.eclassical.com/cover_art/index.html

As with everything done by a really small company such as ours, it takes time to find larger images for all of our thousands of albums (as mentioned, the label's sometimes don't have them, so it's manual work finding larger images). But it's a start! Most notably, we found cover art for the Hänssler CLASSICS covers that were larger than the sometimes 80x80 (really small) pictures found on their own site.

And, yes, I have sent the link to Hänssler as well, so that they may use our larger (but not huge) pictures where they have the small ones.

Great suggestion, drogulus, and you are not alone in requesting this.

We will continue to add larger images. As for booklets in PDF, it's only UK label Signum that has that so far (among our label partners). I think the other labels will follow as soon as they realize that it would be good for business. Why not email them and ask for it? If they put it up on their sites, we can get it and offer it on our site.

http://www.eclassical.com/eclassic/eclassical?page=label_presentation

Rikard

[drogulus]

    Rikard,

     I think the industry will ultimately see that the Chandos model is the way to go for classical music downloads. At least I hope that this will be the case, and there're signs things are moving in that direction. Right now they offer downloads in either Windows lossless or very high bitrate mp3 (one example I checked was a LAME 3.97 -V 0 extreme ~206 kbps). They sell the .wma's on their site and the mp3's both on-site and on Amazon (and presumably on other sites as well in the future, if they aren't already doing so).

[BorisG]

Nothing.

[eclassical]

    Rikard,

     I think the industry will ultimately see that the Chandos model is the way to go for classical music downloads. At least I hope that this will be the case, and there're signs things are moving in that direction. Right now they offer downloads in either Windows lossless or very high bitrate mp3 (one example I checked was a LAME 3.97 -V 0 extreme ~206 kbps). They sell the .wma's on their site and the mp3's both on-site and on Amazon (and presumably on other sites as well in the future, if they aren't already doing so).

You are probably right!

This is our latest file added to our catalog:

Code Select Expand


Bruckner-EC16484-Symph_No_3_Wagner_Symph_in_D_min_first_version_1_Moderate_mysterious.mp3
  Audio : Mpeg 1 layer 3
  Estimated Duration: 19:56.65s
  320 kbps  44100 Hz
  Frame size: 1044 bytes
  Joint Stereo: (Intensity stereo off, M/S stereo off)
  No emphasis,  (c),  original
  ID3 v1.1 tag
     ----------------
     title   : Symphony No. 3, 'Wagner Sympho
     artist  : Sir Roger Norrington
     album   : Bruckner - Symphony No. 3, Fir
     track   : 1
     comment : www.eclassical.com - Symphon
     genre   : Classical
     ----------------
  ID3 v2.3.0 tag (more info on http://www.id3.org/)
     ----------------
     COMM : (lang: ) : www.eclassical.com - Symphony
     TIT2 : Symphony No. 3, 'Wagner Symphony' in D minor, first version/1: Moderate, mysterious
     TOPE : Sir Roger Norrington
     TCOM : Anton Bruckner
     TRCK : 1
     TCON : (32)
     TALB : Bruckner - Symphony No. 3, First version
     TPE1 : Sir Roger Norrington
     ----------------


We will probably go from MP3 320 to FLAC (lossless) in the future (when FLAC is more common and more requested). We are also cooperating with http://www.mindawn.com who offer a subset of our catalog as Ogg Vorbis and FLAC (you choose).

I like how Chandos are doing it. Maybe every record label will start their own store, but I wonder if we, who have been doing this since 1999, could add something with our experience and customer dialog, maybe, maybe not. The future will tell. Maybe there will be both aggregate stores such as ours and the labels' stores side by side. Which model would be best for the consumers? Both?

Cheers!
Rikard

[Tapio Dmitriyevich]

For me it's uninteresting where I purchase audio files. The only point is, they should be lossless and not too expensive (I wouldn't pay more than 2/3 of the original CD price even for a lossless file format).