Would you like chips with that?

[Mr Angry]

Virgin Media announces MusicFish (http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/978169/Virgin-Media-unveils-MusicFish-web-offer/).

[Ignitionnet]

The long awaited service arrives. Good pricing, shame most more recent music sucks and I wouldn't pay for access for long once I'd gotten the back catalogues I wanted :)

[Mr Angry]

The long awaited service arrives. Good pricing, shame most more recent music sucks and I wouldn't pay for access for long once I'd gotten the back catalogues I wanted :)

I agree, it's a bit fluffy and ambiguous though.

Other labels who are in discussion have some pretty impressive catalogue to offer if they can nail the deals. It'll be fun to watch how Spotify (and a few others) react.

I think VM have their work cut out for them.

[Ignitionnet]

It's just an initial marketing announcement so no surprise that there's not much detail, I'm sure it will solidify as a product in time as more detail comes to light. I can easily imagine that negotiations are still ongoing.

[Down the Pub]

MusicFish will offer Virgin Media customers the opportunity to stream and download music and video content as part of their broadband package


there was something similar a few years ago, the enticement was a 1 or 2? free tracks to d/l each month plus others at a charge - i can't for the life of me remember what it was called now (it was a bundle of various offers you used to get, i think it was when 10meg first came along), but it was pants as it was full of drm.

[Welshchris]

i quite like the fact that they are giving people the opportunity to stream or download music when already most of the packages are limited at peak times. So in one hand they are saying download ans stream what u like and in another they are whining about how people are affecting the network for others.

[Arthurgray50@blu]

I read that it will cost nearly 7 quid per month, l would pay if they brought out a lot of HD channels, but l certainly would pay for that sort of music system.

[Ignitionnet]

i quite like the fact that they are giving people the opportunity to stream or download music when already most of the packages are limited at peak times. So in one hand they are saying download ans stream what u like and in another they are whining about how people are affecting the network for others.

Someone got STM'd recently then. Leeching from Rapidshare will do that. :)

Downloading a few music tracks won't even get an upgraded M customer throttled and an L or XL customer just won't be able to stream enough to hit STM. Given it'll probably be at most 256kbps or 384kbps MP3 or equivalent you're talking about 15MB worst case which is still more than 230 tracks between 4 and 9PM on XL and 100 on L at 15MB per 5 minute track. Can't listen to 500 minutes of music in 5 hours.

It really is a total non-issue. People hitting STM are either downloading things a bit more interesting than a few music tracks or are multi-user households that need to prise apart their iron clad wallet/purse and give up the extra couple of pounds a month for the service above.

[v0id]

there was something similar a few years ago, the enticement was a 1 or 2? free tracks to d/l each month plus others at a charge - i can't for the life of me remember what it was called now (it was a bundle of various offers you used to get, i think it was when 10meg first came along), but it was pants as it was full of drm.

The 'Broadband Extras' used to allow so many free tracks to be downloaded per month from Napster I believe (or somehwere like that)

[Down the Pub]

The 'Broadband Extras' used to allow so many free tracks to be downloaded per month from Napster I believe (or somehwere like that)


bb extras was the thing....yes, where the d/l's were from i can't remember for the life of me who it was.




found it, it was sonicselector..........http://www.virginmedia.com/broadbandextras/faq/




and was provided via od2, the only page pointing to sonicselector points to a closed nokia music site (a post on another forum mentions that it was indeed run by nokia)

[caph]

Great ... EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner. That probably counts for less than 5% of the albums I buy. One for the mainstream faithful I suspect.

[Ignitionnet]

Great ... EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner. That probably counts for less than 5% of the albums I buy. One for the mainstream faithful I suspect.

Like everything else. You're on a mass market, mainstream ISP after all.

[roughbeast]

The 'Broadband Extras' used to allow so many free tracks to be downloaded per month from Napster I believe (or somehwere like that)

Yes, something like that. I only managed to download 2 tracks successfully. They made it as hard as possible.

Would be good to legitimise some of my 60GB music collection! The proposed Musicfish monthly price sounds reasonable if they have a wide choice of labels and a good back catalogue for ageing hippies like me. Music pirating could be reduced pretty quickly. ;)



https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2010/01/47.png (http://www.speedtest.net)

[Mr Angry]

Great ... EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner. That probably counts for less than 5% of the albums I buy. One for the mainstream faithful I suspect.

As a matter of interest why don't you list the catalogues / labels you're specifically interested in / regularly purchase?

I would be interested to see - given the market share of the labels you name, subsidiarary and otherwise, - just how you qualify the "probably less than 5%" figure you cite.

[caph]

Sorry, must have missed those follow up posts over the past few days. I wasn't ignoring anyone!

Broadbandings, you are of course spot on. It would make no sense to sign a deal targetted at non-mainstream. I guess I was just a bit disappointed that it would be of no use to me.

Mr Angry, to satisfy your curiosity, my purchases this month have been from:-
> Monotreme - 65 Days of Static which is a bit experimental, but Barzin is also on the label - he satisfies my Americana hankerings.
> Fierce Panda - The Raveonettes. Dead Sound is one of my all time favourite tracks.
> Young Turks - the seminal XX.
> Metric Music International - Metric's DIY label. Give Gimme Sympathy a spin on YouTube, she's worth it! Who would you rather be, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?
> Fat Cat Records -We Were Promised Jetpacks. A real belter of an album.
> Labrador - The Radio Dept, possibly my favourite band. I wasn't too impressed with their latest single but I've got high hopes for the new album when it's released.

And that was just this month. I won't bore you listing previous month's labels/albums. Suffice to say that I'm a 4AD kind of guy. The reason I didn't put myself at 100% non major label is that I do occasionally buy the odd charty album. The last one was last month when I bought La Roux's album (now Polydor although they did initially sign to Kitsune Music). I fell in love with her voice when I heard them do an acoustic session on the radio, although I don't think the album quite matched up to expectations. Still, there are a couple of tracks on the album I keep giving a spin. Prior to that it was several months ago that I bought a chart album. I find most are simply not worth listening to.

Next month I've already lined up Fever Ray's album (Rabid Records label) and the very interesting Japandroids album (Polyvinyl Record Co label) - is that really just two guys - amazing! I guess I'm really lucky, I'm allowed to listen to music with my headphones on at work. So getting through 5 albums a month is easily doable for me.

Interestingly, I popped in to the local independent record store this weekend just to experience it, since I'm exclusively an online purchasers now, and it struck my how inferior I thought it was. I'm so used to being able to dip in to reviews, listen to samples, checking out recommendations by others that like the same bands as me, that the walk around the store simply looking at album covers seems all but pointless in comparison.