The band Daft Punk is taking advantage of the marketing tools that the Net has to offer. Management company Intertrust Technologies Corporation has signed a deal with Virgin Records (Daft Punk's label), music publisher Zomba Music, and producer Daft Life to set up a membership club for the band's new album, "Discovery."

When "Discovery" is released on March 12th, the record will include a membership card in the Daft Club. The card will give fans access to exclusive Daft content until December 31st, 2002. Membership to the "Daft Club" will give fans the opportunity to become members of their own online club, with access to a large amount of free, digitally-protected content.

"Daft Punk has in mind a range of things that members will see over the following months. "It will be a continuous content experience with all sorts of digital surprises ... This is a first for a rock band. It's a way to provide genuine added value. Real music fans go to the record store at midnight to buy a new CD when it comes out. This is a way to reward them," said Intertrust VP strategic markets Simon Scott in an interview.

More detailed information about Daft Club will be available with the release of the forthcoming Daft Punk album.

I kinda like Daft Punk's music.

Free digitally-protected music if you buy their album? LOL.

Download the full album for free and wait for the "digitally-protected content" to show up on Napster without protection later.

I must agree with anon, that that kind of approach often doesn't work. It's however nice to see that a band offers something more to people buying CDs than a plastic disk and the right to play the music.

I think this will be interesting for people like me who are looking at building their sites/ careers into music subscription models.

Here are some questions:

1) Will anyone be bothered to take the digitally protected audio, run a cable from their computer into a digital recorder of some sort and burn an unprotected MP3 from it? Will the Daft Punk tracks therefore end up on Napster?


2) Will the Intertrust protected tracks, now or in future, involve audio watermarking to protect the tracks? And will Virgin/EMI follow up any discoveries of piracy with legal action (ie taking their own fans to court)?


3) Once Napster as we know it is dead, will there be a Napster Mark II (a service as popular and easy to use as Napster) which people will use to pirate the content above?

4) Will the value of the Daft Punk service / other content be so high that fans will want to subscribe even if they *can* get the tracks for free on Napster?


www.tobyslater.com

You know what you just said is pretty adolesent, right?

Hey whatever happened to saying..

"Hey, this will be really cool for Daft Punk's fans!"

Number 1: Not many people, probably 2 or three.

Number 2: What other kind of protection?

Number 3: Probably. But not as popular, probably.

Number 4: Wasn't it.. they buy a CD and they get a pass to it or something?


Anyway, this is all the FANS. That go and buy shit.. that scream during concerts, that travel 4 hours in a broken down Crown Victoria to hear the sound check..

Daft Punks music is the coolest most original type of music ever its awesome i love it

I bought Daft Punk's "Discovery" because I like the music. I didn't find out about DaftClub until I opened the package and saw the card. I figured this might be cool, so I went online and started downloading the software. They really keep you in the dark as to what you're getting into, but they tell you that the software consists of DaftPlayer and other 'exciting' bonuses. The DaftPlayer turns out to be a music player that doesn't have many features, like winamp or something, but it plays their .saf format files.
Secure Audio Format. That just means it's meant to only be played on DaftPlayer software on one computer of your choice and NOWHERE else. While I'm sure there is a way around this, I can't understand why Daft Punk or Virgin records would want to give you bonus material that you can only listen to at your computer. Who listens to music exclusively on a computer?? I think the most common form of listening is still on a stereo, but i could be wrong. I consider myself pretty wired; I use a computer all day long at work, and then at home for a few hours every day. But I still know that a stereo will sound better than a computer anyday, no matter what compression format you use or what soundcard/speaker you use!
Here's the weirdest part:
Part of the 'bonus' software that you are required to download is this InterRights port, meant to manage digital copyrights. One of the 'features' of this software is to document everything you download from DaftClub (which consists of a few extra remixes currently).
Another thing it does is document every time that you play a song using DaftPlayer. It knows what you listened to (as long as you d/l'ed from DaftClub) and when. It sends this info to a server somewhere for some reason that I can't logically figure out unless it's marketing purposes. They call listening to a song a 'transaction' and give each one a unique serial number.
Strange, but true.
I don't know how I feel about this invasion of privacy, even though InterRight claims the service is anonymous.
I'm going to leave the software installed for now, waiting to see if the content increases enough to justify the 'security measures'.
I'll keep you all updated.
-grublord