Go, and never darken my towels again - Groucho Marx
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Mindawn's role model for digital music purchases
Movie studios and record labels are powerful empires which were built back when DRM wasn't even possible, because content was analogue. And to this day and age, they still continue making money on VHS and audio tape sales, and don't forget the digital but DRM-free CD-Audio discs. In fact, I could go to the nearest local Bockbuster, rent the latest movie, hook two VCRs and copy it. Does this mean that because it's technically possible to copy a vhs tape (specially in a country with PAL/N where Macrovision is rare), that the local video rental shops are going bankrupt? Of course not. Unlike what the lawyers want people to believe, the vast majority of people don't want to waste time copying stuff and have something some mega-corporations lack, honesty.
INQUIRER hacks have written repeatedly about the DRM menace, and while Apple's iTunes is very popular and often considered one of the most benevolent of DRM music purchase/subscription services, letting you make a fair amount of copies and record songs to CD, for instance), most people still consider DRM an annoyance, or a pain in the back-end, depending on who you ask.
With services using DRM like iTunes or Napster, you are really just renting the song instead of owning it, because they limit what you can do with the files/tunes and songs you purchased. Why is the online music buyer punished with DRM encrypted content, in comparison to someone who walks to a store and purchases a digital CD-Audio disc? Even worse, nobody can give the customer a warranty that the music you are purchasing and downloading today will be playable in the future. Due to the fast "planned obsolescence" nature of operating systems and desktop PC software, are you sure you'll be able to continue listening to that music you bought online in your operating system of choice, 5 or 6 years down the line? Remember that MS-DOS based encyclopedia using IBM Ultimotion video codecs, or Quicktime 1.0, or RealAudio 1.0? Are you sure the whole content is still playable on today's Windows XP? What about tomorrow's Windows-64 ?. What if the company who made the codecs went under? Hrmm...
The "Honesty" business model
While some companies are crying foul, like Robertson's Linspire,
crying foul after the Vole's decision not to allow Linspire
into the Windows Media DRM "party", others dared to think differently. Enter Mindawn, a service created by Shawn
Gordon, a man who founded theKompany.com, which creates developer and desktop software for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X
operating systems under both commercial and open source licences.
Mr. Gordon started getting into music when his company first developed nearly 40 embedded applications for the Linux-based Sharp Zaurus line of PDAs, including media players supporting both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.
With Mindawn's service service, you can purchase full albums or single songs from the company's catalog, and enjoy complete freedom on what you can do with the songs purchased, which are available as highly compressed .OGG or CD-quality ".flac" files. For the neophytes, consider OGG Vorbis an open source, licence free music codec that gives similar results to the popular MP3 format. FLAC is an equally open source "lossless" codec, with which no audio information is discarded from the original CD audio waveform, yet achieving significant size reductions over the original data sizes (often reaching 50%).
Before the hate mail starts arriving. Yes, Mindawn is currently a small company and its catalogue is still quite limited. You won't find material girl Madonna or Peter Gabriel in there. But Mindawn shows that another business model is possible. The company is open and in fact encourages aspiring musicians to upload their songs for sale through the company's site, so the artists can not only get some needed exposure but also healthy royalties for every sale in the process.
The company proclaims the benefits of a DRM-free approach. "There is no difference in buying a perfect copy from us or having an original CD. You can still send around perfect copies if you want to. We believe that in general people don't want to give away something that they paid for. We further believe that just because someone does happen to get a pirate copy doesn't necessarily mean that is a lost sale. We feel that having happy customers by giving them free rein with what they paid for is going to be better for all of us in the long run". It claims: "We like to believe in the basic honesty in humanity, when people are treated fairly -- so why should we impose more restrictions than are available on a typical music CD?".
On the technical side of the Mindawn operation, the company says: "Ogg Vorbis is a royalty- and licence-free, high quality compression scheme that is supported in many different players; meanwhile, FLAC compresses audio like ZIP compresses files -- it doesn't lose any quality but it does result in about a 50% reduction in file size compared to a full-sized WAV or AIFF file. What's more, FLAC files can easily be converted to WAV or AIFF formats -- thus you get a full CD-quality audio file that you can use on any media device, including standard CD players".
The Cost for Buyers, and the Royalties for Artists
I decided to give Mindawn a try, armed with my debit card and my paltry 256 Kbps third-world expensive ADSL
connection. But first let's see what costs you can expect, as a music buyer:
- OGG Vorbis downloads are cheaper, because of the "lossy" compression (like MP3)
- The company charges $0.99 greenbacks per song (up to 10 minutes long) delivered as .OGG
- FLAC format downloads are $1.24 per song (again, up to 10 minutes long)
- Full albums are $6.99 dollars with lossy compression (Ogg Vorbis format)
- Full albums in FLAC lossless format are $8.99
Artists, on the other hand, can get their Mindawn account for $50 usd per year, and this allows them to upload their albums when they want - or even individual tracks as they work on them-. "You can be 'live' within 30 minutes of opening your account," the company claims.
Royalties are paid to artists using two models, one giving Mindawn "exclusive" distribution rights gets the artists 75% of every sale. And non-exclusive content pays the artist 55%. In both cases, artists get paid via Paypal automatically, every month. Record labels are also encouraged to secure distribution deals to their artists through Mindawn.com.
The company has developed free software dubbed MARS ("Mindawn Audio Ripping Software") available for Windows, Linux, and MacOS-X, which can take any music compact disc, WAV or AIFF file as input, and creates Ogg or FLAC files that the artist can then upload to the Mindawn system. I tested Mars on Linux and Windows, which you can see below. The application ripped an existing Audio CD flawlessly.
MARS on Sun Java Desktop Linux
An OGG Vorbis song purchased on Mindawn also plays on the side with RealPlayer 10 for Linux
MARS for Windows
Buying some Music
In less than a minute I had my Mindawn account active, without having to enter anything more than my basic
contact info and e-mail address. Your credit card data is not needed for this, as you can pay using Paypal for Mindawn
payments if you wish to protect it. So I selected a few songs (one of them in both FLAC and OGG Vorbis format) and
headed to the Checkout icon...
I selected "Paypal" instead of credit card, and a few clicks later, I completed the online payment on the Paypal site.
Once back at the Mindawn site, I clicked into the "My downloads" section, and there were my songs, ready to download
using my favourite open source based web browser, with no special software needed and just like any other binary file.
After the download, which took three minutes for a 6.7 megabytes OGG file and around 14 minutes for a CD quality 28mb FLAC file, I plugged in my quality Sony headphones and tried playing both files on Linux, which was a trouble free experience. Real Player 10 for Linux comes with OGG Vorbis support, and MPlayer played the FLAC file seamlessly.
Just to be 100% sure, I booted Windows XP and was able to play the OGG songs in Winamp 5. For FLAC playback I needed to install the free FLAC Plug-in for Winamp and that was it.
The Verdict
The web site, concept and service is flawless. The songs in both OGG and FLAC format sound very good. I couldn't
tell FLAC apart from the quality of a direct CD rip in WAV format. Of course, that depends on the quality of the
singer/artist who's playing. I can recommend Aaron English from the Mindawn catalogue. If the rest of his works are
like the song "All the waters in this world", he's a musician to watch, I mean, listen to.
My other artist choice on the Mindawn catalog wasn't very pleasant. I found Edward Heppenstall's "Don't take me down" song to be a rare, unpleasant mix of Dave Matthews Band and Metallica, with some unnecessary yelling in between silly lyrics like "Don't take me down, cause I'm already here", and "this comes, from me to you... from me to you".
The Electronica and Folk categories in Mindawn.com are currently empty, for instance, so hey, all the e-musicians and analogue artists out there, give Mindawn a try!. There is even a "spoken word" category which means that there are opportunities for book writers as well. In short. Customers have a lot to gain from Mindawn and the record labels have something to learn from them as well!µ
See Also
Prepare to get screwed by Digital Rights Management
Microsoft Windows Media Center 2005 DRM is draconian
Apple Zombies attack RealNetworks
EU wary of Microsoft DRM purchase
BT music site uses WMA
Microsoft intros anti-trustworthy computing"
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