Is AOL music crazy?

A few months ago, I found out about AOL Music's Music Archive. Now, I would like to know, is AOL Music crazy?

For one, it has the music and videos from all the popular artists like U2, Madonna, Ashlee Simpson, etc, etc. It lets you watch these videos and music FOR FREE. These are the same videos that iTunes and Google Video are charging 2 bucks a pop for and will only give you a 30 second preview. Yes, I know, AOL Music has advertising, and services like iTunes and Google Video don't. But is that enough to justify the cost of the contracts with these big-name record companies?

Furthermore, these videos and songs can also be downloaded to the hard drive, as long as they are QuickTime, which is the format most of these songs and videos are stored in, simply by clicking "Save page to disk" and then rummouging around in the folder that results from saving the page. This video file can then be copied onto your portable player, or shared with your friends or whatever, even if it's not legal.

And yes, the quality of these videos is not that great, but it's certainly no worse than the quality of iTunes or Google Video, whose primary target is the iPod, which doesn't have a very big screen anyway. So what gives? What lets AOL Music literally give away music that so many other companies are trying to make money with?

I use AOL Music all the time. It's simple, it's quality, and it's free. In fact, as an ex-AOL user, I haven't had a single problem with them besides billing, in which they are the devil.... four months I tried to cancel and continued to get billed.

But why do the record companies let AOL do this? Either the record companies are getting cheated (especially the way you can download the stuff, but most users don't know you can do that), or AOL is going to be bankrupt in short order from that huge contract that they would be paying for.

AOL isn't going bankrupt. They provide the same service that any music channel provides and pay for it with the same exact thing. Advertisement.

Every video you watch on AOL starts with a commercial. They get money for that. Infact, if you think about it, AOL shows more commercials than MTV probably shows. Not to mention banner ads.

Really? Because I don't see any ads. Probably because I've got an adblocker installed. :D

There really isn't many ads at all, I'm suprised too. I used to use yahoo videos and that had 30 second commericals consistently, plus banners. Aol has even a bigger collection as well

AOL?

Is that even allowed?

It's even easier than that. If you use Mozilla Firefox you can just right click and click "View Page Info", go to the media tab, find the video on the list, and click save as.

I have a huge pile of music that I downloaded from AOL music. I sure hope it isn't illegal to do that.

Your avatar is appropriate, joe :p


IF THAT IS YOUR REAL NAME!!