The Ubuntu One music store and free software for profit

Posted Mar 8, 2010 18:27 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
In reply to: The Ubuntu One music store and free software for profit by juliank
Parent article: The Ubuntu One music store and free software for profit

Yes... as implemented..U1 is required. And the syncing feature is great convenience service for those who want it. But its not strictly necessary for purchasing or listening to music. The bundling of U1 into the purchasing processes is a deliberate implementation choice that ties the act of purchasing music to holding a U1 account instead of allowing direct to device downloads. 7digital's own documentation concerning the Business API specifically says that direct downloads are allowed. The pre-existing 7digital Blackberry app is a concrete example of that. Canonical could have chosen to build the rhythmbox plugin similar in design to the Blackberry 7digital app and have it download music directly to the device. Users could then choose to then sync that music back into U1 like any other data file.

Why is the music purchased from 7digital via a rhythmbox plugin more worthy of default syncing than music sitting in the standard XDG Music folder that rhythmbox and other applications looks in?

Is the default location where purchased music from U1MS appears on your system not made part of the XDG Music path so that other XDG aware music players can see the music purchases? Is the U1MS music synced to a hidden directory that will be difficult for novice users to find on their own without asking for help finding it?

Is it really in the best in the best interest of users to have music hidden in a difficult to find folder that only one application knows how to see by default?

-jef

The Ubuntu One music store and free software for profit

Posted Mar 10, 2010 15:12 UTC (Wed) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (3 responses)

Very interesting thoughts, Jef.
I just assumed that Canonical will get a cent form each song, but that
might not be the case (although I think 1 cent would still be resonable ..
they had to develop the shop and support it.)

But the U1 angle is interesting, because having your music online may lure
a lot of people to sign up for U1. Storing 7digital songs in U1 is great
business, because they have to store each song only once (+backups) in
their infrastructure so with a few terabytes of music on EC2 they could
provide U1 songs for millions of Ubuntu users, as long as the songs are
from the same source. So hosting synced songs from one source is a very
high margin business. (Otherwise you have to have song fingerprinting etc
to keep your storage requirements low .. that probably the reason Apple
bought Lala.com)

As for U1 in general and the store in peticular I think most of Canonicals
products are very rough around the edges for the first few releases (U1 in
karmic totally sucks compared to dropbox, but they will get there)

The Ubuntu One music store and free software for profit

Posted Mar 11, 2010 17:27 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm not sure Canonical is "storing" songs in U1 in the way you are suggesting, with only one copy for many individuals to save space. So far I've seen no discussion that U1 works like that. That would be very interesting to know.

In fact I would assume that the business plan here is to have song purchases consume as much space as possible and count it against each user individually. in order to entice people to pay the U1 subscription fee for additional storage beyond the free 2 Gig. I think Canonical is banking on recouping costs via the U1 subscription fee for moving beyond the free account storage limits.

But Canonical doesn't like talking about how it actually makes/loses money...so its just a valid to speculate about per-song revenue as it is to speculate about subscription fees. 7digital's public per song revenue affiliates program is only for driving traffic back to the 7digital webstore using the public API. This public affiliate program is probably how Songbird developers get their 7digital kickback...but storefronts like U1MS which make use of the 7digital business API can't participate from my reading. I'd welcome some clarity on that point. Knowing that Canonical was getting a cut of song revenue could make a difference on how people choose to buy music. If you knew you had a choice of purchasing music via mechanism that gave money back to open source developers versus one that did not..would you choose the mechanism with the kickback to developers?

Whatever arrangement Canonical has with 7digital to make use of the business API is private. But from the 7digital literature it sure seems more likely that Canonical has paid 7digital to get access to the business API.

The Ubuntu One music store and free software for profit

Posted Mar 13, 2010 16:34 UTC (Sat) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't really know anything about the business side of things, but I do know that they don't save the same file again for every user. I read that in some bug report or answer on Launchpad. Can't find it atm, sorry.
AFAIK most online storage solutions don't store the same file for every user. Even Wuala.com who offer encrypted storage make sure that the same file gets encrypted the same way to safe storage (they use their crypttree stuff to make access secure .. papers on their website if you want to know more, don't ask me)

Besides saving the Canonical/the provider tons of storage hashing files can be very convenient for users, because uploading popular files is often not necessary, only hashing is.

And they can still charge every user for each file. Hashing etc. does not prevent that at all.

The Ubuntu One music store and free software for profit

Posted Mar 13, 2010 16:38 UTC (Sat) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntuone-client/+question/...