A.
Business case
Many
music websites list and sell music CD, but they didn’t allow users to listen to
a short demo clips in order to figure out if they knew and liked those songs
before making a purchase.
Making
CD music and shipping fees also added extra cost to music buyers.
Most
of people listen to music over radio. They didn’t even know the title of a
song. How could they know which songs to select? Some people preferred a few
songs in a CD, but they have to purchase the entire disk, so many opted to
listen to free music videos on YouTube.
Most
of CD players in cars or at home supports mp3 player. Therefore people could
select all favorite songs saved in a USB keys. A 64GB USB key could store
hundreds of favorite songs for a long car trip without exchanging music CD.
Don’t
forget that buyers could use any free software to convert music in a CD to mp3
files anyway. Thus selling CD didn’t prevent pirate CD or mp3.
Why
didn’t music retailers let potential buyers listen to a short demo of a song in
form of mp3 before making a decision?
B.
Develop a website with demo songs
It's
not hard to develop a web site to let users listen to 1/3 of a mp3 file, and
decide to buy (add to cart) or not.
1.
Convert all songs into mp3 files stored in sales directory
2.
Use special mp3 software to cut the last 2/3 excluding end of file. Save these
demo files associated to the original mp3 in the other folders in database.
3.
On the web site, only shows partial demo mp3 files for users listening to.
4.
If they wanted to buy, they could click on a button below that song to add it
to shopping cart.
5.
When user selected a song to buy and add to cart, web site saved the pointer of
that partial mp3 file, which pointed to the original mp3 file in the another
folder.
6.
When users check out and pay; they also need to create an account with username
& password for re-download. Show them a list of purchased original songs in
mp3 for downloading. Those songs are stored in different folder(s) than the
demo mp3 songs.
7.
In the download page, give each user a reference number with their username and
password. So, the can open the download page and download those again within 1
hour of payment with reference number, their username and password. This helps
users with issues of home Internet interrupting their downloads, but prevent
users shared the reference number for illegal downloads.
8.
You can organize songs of a album in a folder, i.e. each album is in a folder.
The only thing was the pointer from demo songs to original songs.
Example
of pointers in database
Column #1 (demo) Column #2 (original
songs)
d:\BangTam\Toivannho.mp3 f:\BangTam\TLTM\Toivannho.mp3
d:\DTLuan\Toivannho.mp3 f:\BangTam\TLTM\Toivannho.mp3
This
is a duet song by both Bang Tam & Dang The Luan, but buyers may search
under names of Bang Tam or Dang The Luan. However both showed to the same
folders for demo and original songs.
C. Search lyrics of a song
Most music listeners over the radio would likely remember a few phrases of a song. Therefore, storing lyrics of all listed songs for users to search would also be a good option.
Each search result, i.e. selected lyrics, would include a link to its demo song, so users could verify that. Of course, users could add that song in to their shopping cart as usual.
Notes: Each file format has special characters called End of File (EOF), so the reader of that file knows where that file ended. I heard that if you left around 3 seconds before the end of a mp3 file, you saved the EOF for that truncated file, i.e. that mp3 file is valid.
Each file format has special characters called End of File (EOF), so the reader of that file know where that file ended. I heard that if you left around 3 seconds before the end of a mp3 file, you saved the EOF for that truncated file, i.e. that mp3 file is valid.
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