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Written by Otis Hart, asap
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Wednesday, 18 April 2007 |
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Other Music, a quirky independent record store in downtown Manhattan, lies next to a shuttered Tower Records. The music giant closed months ago, a victim of the digital revolution, where the best things in life really are free if you know where to find them.
Other Music, meanwhile, is still standing. Despite astronomical rent and an industrywide malaise, the cramped, one-room shop has somehow survived, even thrived, by selling independent CDs and vinyl to a hip customer base that’s nothing if not Web savvy.
But the empty shell of an icon across the street is a constant reminder of what can happen if you cling too tightly to the past. After years of surviving in spite of MP3s, Other Music now hopes to survive because of them. The bite-sized store is going, well, byte-sized. Starting Monday, Other Music will sell MP3s.
Goodbye Tower, hello iTunes.
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LAUNCHING ONLINE
It’s all but unheard of for an indie retail store to launch a digital outpost. When Josh Madell, co-owner of Other Music (www.othermusic.com), decided to take the plunge six months ago, he said no one had made the transition yet. Since then, Rough Trade(www.roughtradedigital.com), a prestigious record shop in London, has started a pilot program, but is wading in slowly.
“At the moment there’s not that many because the technical side of it is expensive,” Madell said. “People are used to clicking and downloading very smoothly, and it’s not cheap to put together a site like that.”
The cost of launching an online operation may be daunting, but Madell’s site will still be a minnow compared to the leader in digital music. According to marketing research firm NPD, Apple’s iTunes sold 70 percent of the songs purchased on the Web last year, largely due to the success of its ubiquitous iPod. An Apple spokesman declined to comment on Other Music and Rough Trade’s forays online.
Other Music will match iTunes’ price of $9.99 an album and charge $1.11 per individual song, about 10 cents more than iTunes. Rough Trade is slightly more expensive at $1.35 for most tracks, while album prices vary.
Madell acknowledges the elephant in the room, but he doesn’t seem the least bit intimidated. Madell believes most iTunes customers are interested in the hits — something the stridently independent Other Music has never bothered to focus on anyway.
“iTunes is a lot closer to Wal-Mart or Best Buy,” Madell said. “They have a lot of good music in there, but their main business is mainstream pop music.”
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DRM-FREE
It’s a good thing Madell doesn’t care about selling the next Diddy single — because he can’t. Madell has opted to sell MP3s without any copy-protection (the industry term is digital rights management technology, or DRM). Selling digital music without DRM is something major labels have largely refused to do, though EMI — which owns Capitol Records and Virgin Records — recently struck a deal with iTunes to sell DRM-free songs starting in May.
“I always thought (DRM) was a phantom issue,” Madell said. “Selling CDs every day, I sell premium digital files with no copy protection on them. It’s impossible for me to understand why labels would be so concerned about selling lesser-quality compressed files when anyone can pop a CD in and put a premium-quality file on the Web in a second.”
As anyone who has ever downloaded a song from iTunes knows, you can’t copy the file or play it on anything but an iPod. That’s because Apple uses a DRM technology called FairPlay to curb piracy. Every MP3 sold at Other Music and Rough Trade will be DRM-free.
“The sooner DRM-free is adopted by everyone, the sooner the market can become a level playing field and can become competitive,” Stephen Godfroy, director of Rough Trade, said in an e-mail.
Another advantage the indies hope to use to lure customers is sound quality. iTunes files are compressed to 128 kbps (kilobytes per second), compared to file compression of 1,411 kbps for a CD. Other Music and Rough Trade will sell MP3s that play at 320 kbps. (Starting in May, iTunes will sell some EMI tracks at a file compression of 256 kbps for $1.29).
But $1.11 is still a lot more than nothing, which is exactly how much many hip music fans pay for their MP3s these days. But Madell believes, perhaps idealistically, that Other Music customers are a special breed.
“I’d like to think that our corner of the world is less prone to stealing music,” he said. “It’s so easy to say ’I don’t care about ripping off Avril Lavigne, she’s a millionaire, she’s part of this big corporate thing, she’s so manufactured, she’s clearly all about money anyway.’ Whereas, the music we focus on is by starving artists, almost across the board.
“I like to think that people want to support those artists and those labels and indie retailers.”
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asap reporter Otis Hart is based in New York. | Only registered users can write comments.
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