Groundbreaking e-music service - including streaming and free downloads - offered by Ann Arbor District Library
Thanks to an arrangement with digital music publisher Magnatune, anyone holding an AADL library card now has the option of streaming audio or downloading music directly onto their computer, grabbing individual songs or entire albums.
According to Eli Neiburger, AADL associate director, Ann Arbor is in the forefront of such e-music technology. “We’re not aware of another library that is offering this service,” he said.
However, before you jump online to download Lady Gaga’s latest, you should know that the service is not meant as a cheap way to fill gaps in your pop tunes library.
“The Magnatune collection isn’t so much a way to get the music of your favorite artist as it is a way to be exposed to new artists in a way that you get to keep the music,” Neiburger explained.
“They collect across specific genres, and they select very skilled and professional musicians. So whatever you are interested in — hard rock or electronica or blues or jazz or early music, choral or classical — they’ve got some excellent artists for you that you that you may not have heard of.”
He said it the e-music service is an extension of the library’s traditional mission to expose patrons to new artists, whether they be writers or musicians. According to Neiburger, there are currently 943 albums available, consisting of 12,448 tracks, with that number growing weekly.
He said the service, which has been offered since April 4, is proving popular.
“We’ve had just short of 18,000 tracks heard — it’s being very heavily used by the community,” Neiburger said. “And it’s about half and half between people downloading albums and streaming them.”
The library pays Magnatune $10,000 a year for the licensing. According to the company’s CEO, John Buckman, the AADL is the only library with which it is currently working.
“I'm thrilled about both the license (and) the fantastic job the library did in presenting our music, and look forward to working with more libraries in the future,” he wrote on the company’s Web site.
Magnatune’s music can be downloaded as songs or as albums. In addition to the more standard MP3 format, higher quality FLAC downloads are also available.
Anyone who lives inside the Ann Arbor Public School District is eligible for a library card at no cost “because you have already paid through your property taxes,” explained Neiburger. People outside of the school district can purchase an AADL library card.
“If you’re an avid reader you probably have a library card. This is a good way to provide services to people who may not be avid readers or provide an additional service to people who are already using our collections,” Neiburger added. "We've heard from people in the community who have said they've signed up for a library card to be able to use this service. That's the advantage of digital content … it’s a whole new way to use libraries.”
Comments
paul wiener
Wed, May 25, 2011 : 2:19 a.m.
Wanna see a truly great music database? Take a look at the Naxos Music Library. It's not free. It's so humungous and genre-inclusive it's hard to believe it even exists, but it does. It's amazing the A2 public doesn't have it, unless you pay the U-M tuition, of course.
paul wiener
Tue, May 24, 2011 : 11:25 p.m.
The service may be a good one, but paying $10,000 for it is absurd. Get all the music you never heard of! Leave it to librarians to think that young people - and a few older ones - don't know how to get all the free music, including Lady Gaga's, that they want. Moreover, many websites and musicians give away free new music, and there are many free streaming sites with an infinite amount of albums and tracks.....iTunes itself provides thousands of radio stations tuned to very specific kinds of music, much of it "new." You can listen to Pandora radio for a year and never exhaust it. You can dial up almost any song or musician on Grooveshark. You can discover really new music and share it with friends on The61. So who's bright idea was it to pay for what you can get for free?
DBH
Wed, May 25, 2011 : 2:19 a.m.
"So who's [sic] bright idea was it to pay for what you can get for free?" Perhaps someone who felt an ethical responsibility to be part of the mechanism for reimbursing the artist(s) for their product?
Macabre Sunset
Tue, May 24, 2011 : 6:46 p.m.
I understand the appeal. But what has shocked me about the library system is that they no longer archive newspapers and magazines the way they did in decades past. Try to find an issue The New York Times from last year, for example. Can't be done. It seems that libraries are switching from information collection to entertainment centers. That may make them more popular with the ADHD set, but it's not healthy in the long run. That $10,000 is being mis-spent.
Peregrine
Thu, May 26, 2011 : 2:05 a.m.
If more patrons make use of this music service than would looking up year-old editions of the New York Times, and if the music service costs the same or less than the newspaper archive, then wouldn't this money be better spent on the music service?
avida2reader
Tue, May 24, 2011 : 7:19 p.m.
Are you referring to keeping paper copies of newspapers and magazines? Because if you are that's unsustainable amount of space to take up and not worth it because you CAN get copies of all of that content through the library in a digital format. Go here to access all the NYT from 1851- current day <a href="http://www.aadl.org/research/browse/newspapers" rel='nofollow'>http://www.aadl.org/research/browse/newspapers</a> and here for magazines <a href="http://www.aadl.org/research/browse/magazines" rel='nofollow'>http://www.aadl.org/research/browse/magazines</a> -- if you have a library card simply login in the site and you access all of this from HOME. And if you don't have a card visit any of their 5 locations to access them on any of their internet computers. There's a LOT that the library offers that people don't know about - just ask!
Ashok Gopalakrishnan
Tue, May 24, 2011 : 5:39 p.m.
Very glad to read that CD quality downloads are also available. I downloaded Watercolor by the Kerry Politzer Trio; sure enough, the songs are in 16 bit / 44.1kHz CD quality, but compressed to save disk space. Comes with the cover art, but no liner notes. It looks like it costs AADL $10,000 per year to license Magnatune's catalog. That is a fair bit of change, I think, and do wonder if it can be sustained in the long term. It might not be such a bad idea to charge a nominal amount from library users to defray some of the costs. If you go to websites like HDTracks, they charge quite a bit even for CD quality downloads - around $10-$12 for an album. If AADL were to charge under $5 for a full-length CD quality album, I would be willing to pay it. Now, getting the big labels to sign on to something like this - wishful thinking?
singalong
Tue, May 24, 2011 : 5:26 p.m.
This is an impressive accomplishment, and selfishly, I love the idea of having that kind of free access to so much music. However, I have to wonder, what does this do to the artists, who are already underpaid? I understand that one of the great things about the library is to provide free access to art (literature, music, movies). But, to have free music at this magnitude feels to me like we're robbing the artists. 12, 448 tracks, and growing weekly. At least on itunes, you pay a buck each, and feel like you've given something back to the artist for his or her work. Or have we decided that musicians should be volunteers?
rusty shackelford
Tue, May 24, 2011 : 7:25 p.m.
The library is paying a licensing fee, some of which goes to the artists. Musicians are aware that most of them will be lucky to ever break even on an album. Most non-famous musicians are happy with these arrangements (and even, to a lesser extent, don't mind free downloading) b/c it increases the number of people who come to their shows--which is where they earn $.
DBH
Tue, May 24, 2011 : 5:35 p.m.
My guess (and it is a guess) is that the artists that give permission for their work to be available to the public in this way (and they probably are getting a cut from Magnatune, though, at this point, the cut has to be minuscule) feel it is worth the greater exposure of their work to the public. If you enjoyed something of theirs from this service, that would increase the chance that you would purchase something of theirs not on Magnatune.
David Cahill
Tue, May 24, 2011 : 5:04 p.m.
Eli has done it again!