Slashdot Mirror

here is a small start:

http://www.kompoz.com/compose-collaborate/viewer.playlist?playlistId=1184&memberId=6509
http://www.jamendo.com/en/playlist/99982
http://www.jamendo.com/en/playlist/113052
http://www.jamendo.com/en/playlist/131695
http://www.joshwoodward.com/music/
http://www.bradsucks.net/music/
http://packet-in.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
http://ccmixter.org/playlist/browse/3464

enjoy

There's a couple of different sources and philosophies about how much of each sale (by source) goes to the actual artist.

If anyone can direct me to the proper site, I'd happily send Bob Dylan the $8 - $75 dollars I owe him for his albums that I have been unable to conveniently purchase legitimately.

We like open source around here. So you can keep your Hollywood shit. I, for one, am not interested in their offerings at all. I think you're confusing theft with a -failure to earn-

The original sounds are pretty ugly, there is a guy (brad?) that made some alternative ones, they are better, but it would be nice if they were already included or if they made some new ones that don't suck.

I know you're trolling/joking, but Gaim does have plenty of simleys and sounds, and I'm sure the sounds, at least, will probably work just fine from Trillian.

Because most people aren't pretentious audiophiles, and are quite happy to listen to 128kbps MP3s through the crappy speakers that came with their Gateway box.

Cool! I've always wanted to be a pretentious audiophile! This is a great day! I just wish I had the gear to go along with such an ostentatious title. [sigh]

The treble washout at 128kbps is often times just too much. Have you ever tried to make an audio CD from 128k MP3s? It will generally turn out to be hideous. That's not always the case. I made one from the Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing album and it rocks! Guess I'm not as picky as you would imply--though others would be, for sure. Still you don't have to have a golden ear to be disturbed with lower bitrate MP3s, even on crappy Gateway speakers...

Listening to low quality MP3s can be kind of comparable to the Uncanny Valley effect some people experience when they see photorealistic CG images of humans. They can look really cool but still creep you out at the same time...

Name three rock bands who were never signed by labels and make a living that way sufficient to quit their day jobs.

Easy:

• Celldweller (Featured in several films, movie trailers, TV spot, and video games)
• More Machine Than Man (Currently touring America)
• HeavensDust (Currently touring Japan)

Your turn... give me three examples of RIAA members who have stopped taking their customers to court.

Dozens of such sites exist. Hardly anybody goes to them. A few hard-core people do so they can pat themselves on the back for supporting indie bands, but most people fall in love with some fractin of the crap they hear on the radio. Even psuedo-indie acts like Death Cab for Cutie are in the position they are in only because a record label pimped them like crazy.

I would gladly take 6 times the profit on one third of the sales. BTW, Death Cab for Cutie?? Who the hell is that? I guess the RIAA didn't pimp 'em hard enough, because I have no idea who you are talking about. Must be something you picked up on MTV or the radio cleverly hidden among the commercials for beer and stridex. I'd say it takes more effort to 'find' good music through those channels than it does on a website.

One could easilly make the case that the work done by a record label is more important to the financial success of a music act than the work done by the band itself. When you look at it in that light (and realize that the labels take the brunt of most of the financial risk), it really isn't so eeeevil that they take a bigger slice of the pie.

Payola is illegal. So is price fixing. Hell, most of what the record labels 'do' for a band is shady at best.

I mean, David Gibbon just sat in front of a microphone and crooned for a few hours. Behind every album his band has made, there was an army of promotors, engineers, event planners, office staff, and several layers of management, all putting in 40-hour work weeks to make sure that you and as many of your friends as possible buy the album. They all worked just as hard as he did, and for considerably less money. Yet people consider it this horrible injustice when this ONE EMPLOYEE of the record company, who happened to have the most fun job of anybody involved, doesn't get to hog a majority of the profit for themselves.

Yeah, and Brad Sucks does it all with a desktop computer. Your overhead is useless to an entire generation of new musicians.

So yea, if you are a singer and think that's unfair, go out and try to do the work of all those people by yourself. You will probably end up with a much larger slice of a vastly smaller pie, unless you are just as good at music promotion as you are at being a musician.

Do you work for a RIAA member or something? It's music. People have been making it since the stone ages. Why do you think that it's all of a sudden impossible for someone to create, market, and distribute it without a management team? Indies have the internet. The RIAA is toast.

They may have a record deal, but this album is RIAA free. So you shouldn't feel sullied if you paypal them some cash or buy their album. No funds will contribute to the litigation of minors. More to your complaint; No it isn't really novel, but it's nice that more bands are waking up to this intarweb thing. Maybe next time, they'll release source files like brad does. So they're OK with P2P... I wonder if they are cool with remixing too. That's probably too much to ask of a band doing this just to test the waters. Regardless, I hope this campaign is a success for them. It is evidence that the 'industry' is loosing mind share among its artists. If this succeeds, it will be more damaging to the RIAA than a simple court battle because more artists will follow.

...do what you must but please don't support these labels.

And so for the first time today, we are introducing two new features to iTunes. First we will be introducing RIAA Radar labels on all tunes listed in the iTunes application. If the copyright of the song belongs to an RIAA member it can be flagged and will be by default... Just so you know who loves you ;-) The second feature is by far much more important. We will be introducing collaborative filtering at the iTunes Music Store. You see, the labels have left us no choice here. They won't let us sell you the music you know you like, so we'll help you find music that you'll love but you didn't even know existed." < cuts to new iPod commercial with steamroller driving over massive piles of CDs to the tune of We're Not Friends>

The labels believed that once one company forged a path, everyone else would follow leaving them king of their little fiefdom. Unfortunately for them, Apple was more like an ice breaker in the Arctic. They made their own path and the sea froze behind them. I was of the opinion that they were trying to kill iTunes because they see it as a genuine threat. After reading this article, I am convinced the labels are genuinely too stupid to realize their extremely precarious position. This is, in fact, not a strategy to kill iTunes because of the threat it presents. This is just greed. They really are that stupid. Too bad they don't see the end coming. It'll be like they've been shot in the back of the head. No crys of "Please, please don't kill me! I'll do anything you want! Just don't *BANG*" kind of thing you'd get if you shot them in the face. It's a shame too, because they really deserve to be shot in the face.

There will be no labels for new music soon. Bands will go direct to fans through iTunes, keeping the copyrights to their creations, and making six times the profit margin the old labels would have paid them. They will make the same money going 'gold' as they would have going 'platinum' the old way. You are witnessing a turning point in music history. Music is about to become very diverse and interesting again. Get ready for something besides the same old cookie cutter 'alternative' crap you've been hearing for the last 15 years.

DRM is the compromise the consumer makes to have available to them a quality digital version of a work. Without DRM, there is no incentive for the artist to provide the digital version, as DRM'less digital versions can be immediately redistributed.

Less incentive? Sure. Necessary to perpetuate the current content distribution paradigm? Sure. But no incentive? None at all? Without DRM, nobody would ever create any digital content?

That's a stretch. See http://www.bradsucks.net/ for a counterexample.

A good DRM scheme is one where the consumer's ability to use the work in the manner they wish isn't impacted while the ability to simply redistribute millions of copies is curtailed.

"Good" DRM appears to be impossible, or at least not invented yet, by my standards. Here's how I wish to use digital media: I want to store it on my file server and access it on whatever device I happen to be sitting in front of at the moment. I want to be able to access it with a variety of programs, and when it's out of copyright (I'm an optimist) I want to be able to manipulate it to my heart's content with a variety of tools that I'm able to apt-get (or write myself, if I'm ever so inclined.) I want to be able to access it locally even when my internet connection is down, and even when the content provider I acquired it from goes out of business / stops making content / decides they don't want me to access the content any more. (I don't enter into contracts that give the content provider that power.)

Tivo + Slingbox is close. MythTV is close. CD music has been there for years.

Brad Sucks

Has been doing it for a while now. He's got some really good tracks and scores that you can play with, remix etc. There are also links to other similiar minded musicians/groups. Might not be totally free but it's still pretty cool.

You obviously don't understand the argument. This isn't about whether or not DRM is 'okay'. DRM is fundamentally flawed. It is impossible. You might as well be asking for reverse friction to propel your car instead of those evil fossil fuels.

Has it ever occurred to you that if you consider the entire industry and its artists creatively bankrupt that you don't have to patronize it in any way, shape, or form?

Yep. See iRate and CD Baby for more information.

After all, it's the commercial tripe that's on the iTunes Music Store anyway, right?

Wrong again. Meet Brad. Brad is an unsigned, open source musician. All his files are available for free download at his website. Not just the tunes, but source files too. You are encouraged by Brad to download his music and source to remix and share with friends in just about any fashion possible. Not only does Brad lack the RIAA's bad attitude, but Brad has talent. Brad's tunes are also available on iTunes for $0.99 each.

If it's so horrible, it seems that you shouldn't have any problems not using the iTunes Music Store, eh?

You'd rather downloaders go "steal" music rather than pay for the song? You aren't defending artists. You're defending RIAA policy.

I am greatly disappointed in so far as the chart offered automatically discounts legitimate artists that do not choose to sell their tracks online but give them away for free. Examples being Brad Sucks and the Acedia Music Netlabel under licenses such as the Creative Commons music license. It will take something like the BBC or other mainstream music outlets (MTV or other such dribble) to recognize this music distribution model to get artists any exposure. That being said I can see how from a purely practical level that one would have to rely either on the artists themselves or mirrors to provide statistics which may be skewered. In addition, artists like Brad Sucks may get significantly more downloads from the simple fact of being free (in every sense) rather than another indie band that has only pay downloads.

Bah humbug.

P.S. Brad Sucks is one of my favourite bands

Don't forget about Spam as Music.

This is reminiscent of the Outside the Inbox music compliation project.

"Outside The Inbox", a compilation that has nothing but songs inspired by spam subject lines features a GREAT song about the 419 scam by MC Frontalot.

check out the outside the inbox compilation -- all the song titles are taken from Spam-mails

I'm sorry, but I just don't care. If you are sharing or unlawfully receiving music manufactured by RIAA member companies, you are breaking the law and their "terms of service". If you want the latest Britney Spears or Linkin Park songs, they sell them to you on a shiny disc for $16-$20. If you don't accept that transaction offered to you by those merchants, then you don't get to have those songs. What is so hard to understand about that?
You can justify your actions all you like, but at the end of the day, you are in possession of a merchant's product for which you did not pay. It doesn't matter if you think the price is too high, that the merchant is unethical, or that you should be able to download this product. That's not how this product is offered. If you do not like the RIAA and its component companies, go without the latest manufactured pop. If you steal^h^h^h^h^h "copyright infringe" 12 Madonna songs, you deserve the punishment you will receive if you are caught. I don't think the RIAA should even bother with this bogus amnesty. People who break the law should be punished.
For the record, I am not being a hypocrit here. I haven't bought an RIAA controlled CD since 1996. Rather than steal^h^h^h^h^hinfringe what I refuse to buy, I purchase music from artists who appreciate their fans. For my most recent purchase, the website of the artist has this to say about the sale:

I would appreciate it if you'd copy it and share with your friends. High quality MP3s will be included on the CD if you'd like to send them around.

Now that's an artist who understands his customers, and who deserves your music dollars.
So if you are soaking your cable modem line by letting people download the new Nelly album, I hope you go to jail. These thieves^h^h^h^h^h^h^hinfringers don't deserve any pity from me or the RIAA.