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Wow, I have never read a more content free article in my life. Jon Katz's entire article contained no opinions nor offered any insights but simply summarizes news that has already been on Slashdot or is easily available from glancing at the headlines provided by the any portal or news site. I hardly ever respond or read Jon Katz's articles but delight in reading the responses he evokes but I recently decided to actually read his articles and have now discovered why he is so badly tolerated by slashdotters. I have responded to the only parts of the article that are actually original content as opposed to regurgitating of readily available news.

Artists definitely have a right to be paid for their work, but branding a whole generation of music fans thieves seems simplistic, even self-destructive
Why is it that Jon Katz not only refuses to mention artist's rights except for this one line but also refuses to accept the fact that people who misappropriate copyrighted material without rewarding the copyright owners is stealing. It isn't like if I started printing copies of his books and gave them away he would respond with "Hey, that's OK information want's to be free,anyway"

Do recording executives really believe that music fans will suddenly give up on acquiring diverse and numerous forms of music for free and go back to buying a handful of expensive CDs a few times a month?
Of course not, and that is exactly why they are trying to shut down Napster.

That wouldn't protect artist's rights or those of music lovers.
Why wouldn't it? Currently the rights of artists to decide who distributes their copyrighted material is being abused regularly by Napster users. Secondly, it would also protect the right of artists to be paid for their work.

This digital genie isn't going back into the bottle.
Agreed, but before the Record labels will embrace the digital revolution they will try their best to make sure they are not going to be robbed blind before investing in or creating an online business model.

Successful negotiatioins between MP3.com and the music would be the sanest step yet in the music wars, and a healthy precedent for other businesses who sell intellectual property as well as artists.
This completely true. If record labels can make deals with MTV and radio stations I don't see why similar deals could not have been made with MP3.com. From the exchange between MP3.com CEO and the RIAA representative when all this started it seems the RIAA just wanted to be unreasonable from the start. This leads me to believe that they are interested in creating such a service themselves if not now then later on in the future and that is why they decided against even considering MP3.com's offers to license the music.

PS: Why does he keep calling MP3.com MP3? How out of it can he possible be?

Well, you might _not_ know about my other project at mp3.com, because it's not current stuff so I don't promote it. But I do write pop/rock songs as well: mp3.com/RFW is the place- that's short for The Room Full Of Windows, my 'song band'. What's more, for every single song I have up there (two DAM CDs available- DAM == 'mp3.com press to order system'), the full lyrics are typed out and listed online on the page. Not everybody takes the time and effort to do that, but I did.

I hope somebody does the cut-n-paste thing (seeing as I've done all the actual typing) and _puts_ my whole lyric collection on this Russian server. It would be with my total approval- the only limit I'd have is that I'll leave it to somebody else to do it, because I'd like the webpage-hit and would be happy to get song downloads in exchange for making this available so freely. The lyrics are, and will remain, copyright Chris Johnson (various dates). However, I am perfectly free to permit them to be kept on a Russian server and doing so does not in any way imply I waive copyright. I just happen to not be a dick about sharing- shock, horror ;)

I don't actually have any song lyrics on mp3.com/ChrisJ except that one of the techno songs mutilates the words, "get out of this one alive" as spoken by a MacInTalk speech-synthesis voice I hacked different data into to make it more distorted and weird :) need to play with more of that. However, there is a lot of 'about this song' material, and that is where I put the technical data on how I made the songs, and if there are any great audio hacks I invariably include how I did it. So even on the instrumentals there is background information included :)

you're welcome ;) now moderate me down, dammit! Hacking MacInTalk voices with ResEdit and a total lack of documentation is simply not geeky! you should have done it in perl while covered in hot grits! ;)

Well, you might _not_ know about my other project at mp3.com, because it's not current stuff so I don't promote it. But I do write pop/rock songs as well: mp3.com/RFW is the place- that's short for The Room Full Of Windows, my 'song band'. What's more, for every single song I have up there (two DAM CDs available- DAM == 'mp3.com press to order system'), the full lyrics are typed out and listed online on the page. Not everybody takes the time and effort to do that, but I did.

I hope somebody does the cut-n-paste thing (seeing as I've done all the actual typing) and _puts_ my whole lyric collection on this Russian server. It would be with my total approval- the only limit I'd have is that I'll leave it to somebody else to do it, because I'd like the webpage-hit and would be happy to get song downloads in exchange for making this available so freely. The lyrics are, and will remain, copyright Chris Johnson (various dates). However, I am perfectly free to permit them to be kept on a Russian server and doing so does not in any way imply I waive copyright. I just happen to not be a dick about sharing- shock, horror ;)

I don't actually have any song lyrics on mp3.com/ChrisJ except that one of the techno songs mutilates the words, "get out of this one alive" as spoken by a MacInTalk speech-synthesis voice I hacked different data into to make it more distorted and weird :) need to play with more of that. However, there is a lot of 'about this song' material, and that is where I put the technical data on how I made the songs, and if there are any great audio hacks I invariably include how I did it. So even on the instrumentals there is background information included :)

you're welcome ;) now moderate me down, dammit! Hacking MacInTalk voices with ResEdit and a total lack of documentation is simply not geeky! you should have done it in perl while covered in hot grits! ;)

I have five albums up for sale at mp3.com:

• anima is rock instrumentals on animal themes, eclectic, with some fine performances
• Extended Play is long-format rock instrumental music- hot, guitar-based jams with some Mothers influences
• Hard Vacuum is a dedicated Noise album that revells in raw sound-as-sound
• The Room Full Of Windows is vocal indie pop/rock from the heart
• The RFW Demos are songs that didn't make the RFW album, but something about them seemed cool enough to put together a demos reel

If anyone had entertained thoughts of maybe getting one of these someday, or for that matter of ever picking up a CD to support some other mp3.com artist, or even downloading stuff...

...could you please do it now, considering the possibility that this entire resource may be destroyed and taken away from the people who have done nothing wrong, all to satisfy the RIAA? :(

I have five albums up for sale at mp3.com:

• anima is rock instrumentals on animal themes, eclectic, with some fine performances
• Extended Play is long-format rock instrumental music- hot, guitar-based jams with some Mothers influences
• Hard Vacuum is a dedicated Noise album that revells in raw sound-as-sound
• The Room Full Of Windows is vocal indie pop/rock from the heart
• The RFW Demos are songs that didn't make the RFW album, but something about them seemed cool enough to put together a demos reel

If anyone had entertained thoughts of maybe getting one of these someday, or for that matter of ever picking up a CD to support some other mp3.com artist, or even downloading stuff...

...could you please do it now, considering the possibility that this entire resource may be destroyed and taken away from the people who have done nothing wrong, all to satisfy the RIAA? :(

I'll master your stuff, if you want, because you're another mp3 musician like I am. I don't have that much reinassance-like music to demo for you but "Tiger" off the 'anima' album includes synthesized piano that sounds better than soundfonts. I'm a High End audio guy using a lot of homebrew analog equipment for this sort of thing, I could certainly do just as good a job on organ music- if you want to do a bit of networking, drop me an email and we'll talk about it. I won't charge you anything because it's easy for me to do- let's work together and get some great music out there- while we still can :P

MP3.com is lisenced with the ASCAP (see here).

• Following last week's announcement by ASCAP of its historic and unique strategic relationship with MP3.com., the reaction from ASCAP members has been uniformly positive, with many expressions of support. Among the most prominent of ASCAP members to issue statements praising the agreement are pop/rock superstar Alanis Morissette and Desmond Child, the writer and producer behind a long string of pop, rock and Latin hits.

So MP3.com was definitely allowed to "publicly perform" the MP3's. I don't know how close that is to digitally reproducing them, but it at least allows radio stations to broadcast the songs.

If you check the RIAA's filing on the lawsuit, you'll see that they are suing MP3.com for copying the data from the CD to MP3.com's computers, not for actually distributing the data. It seems like quite a stretch to me.
--

- it could make it difficult to legally transfer your property from one device to another.

This is damned scary. I can't even begin to count the number of mix tapes I traded with my friends throughout high school and college. Or the tapes I made of MY cds so I could listen to the music I BOUGHT in the car...

I imagine most actual bands and musicians would want their works transmitted freely over the net.

We do.
Here's a quote I think sums up how I feel about this whole mess:
"I know all the sites that have my bootlegs and all my MP3s. Actually, I don't give a flying fuck."
--- David Bowie

The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk

See RIAA's filed complaint here. Paragraph 26:

• In order to create and offer this service, defendant copied every track from 45,000 commercial audio CDs onto its computer services. All or virtually all of these audio CDs are marked as copyrighted and contain explicit notices prohibiting unauthorized copying. ... Included among these infringing reproductions are copies of thousands of copyrighted sound recordings owned by plaintiffs, none of whom has authorized defendant to make any such reproductions.

• Defendant has willfully and with full knowledge of plaintiffs' copyrights made infringing reproductions of thousands of plaintiffs' copyrighted sound recordings for the purpose of operating its commercial My.MP3 interactive service.

They also allege that MP3.com is distributing these "infringing reproductions", but that's not in the actual count itself.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, it seems that this could be a huge precedent that could prevent home users from making MP3 copies from CDs that they legally own.
--

Let's hope the courts come to their senses and see that no laws were actually broken, otherwise my music (shameless plug for Anonymity) will have to find a new home.

• Slashdot and Jon Katz claim to be about people's rights then openly advocate that the rights of musicians to profit from their work be ignored and trodden upon. Slashdot and Slashdotters have proven themselves to be the biggest hypocrites alive with the way they can castigate companies for abusing the GPL (which exists solely because there are copyright laws) in one breathe then say it's OK to
• steal music that was expensive to create, produce, and market.

• Some people have posted comparing the online music revolution to automobiles vs. coaches and printing presses vs. the bookmakers guild and have argued that the record industry should die and be replaced the same way that the coaches and bookmaker's guilds were replaced by automoblies and printing presses. The problem with this analogy is that both those revolutions took power out of the few and gave to the masses. Thus everyone (with enough income) could now print a book or get themselves from point A to point B. The Internet (along with other advances in other technology) have made it possible for anyone to create, market and sell music. Strangely enough after a watching places like
• MP3.com it is clear even though people have been freed of the yoke of music distribution pressure there is still a need for record labels. MP3.com is yet to produce any stars while most people I have met (as well as myself) who use Napster download music from established artists who have cost the record labels million$ of dollars to find, produce and market. So it seems that to compare this so-called revolution to the printing presses vs. bookmakers guilds or coaches vs. automobiles is only valid if printing presses could copy book's painstakingly hand-engraved by bookmakers or if automobiles gave people the ability to sneak rides on coaches without paying

• Concerts. Several people have commented that artists and record labels should give up on trying to make money from CD sales and should look to concerts as revenue earners. There are several flaws with this proposal. How are are small artistes supposed to pay for concerts? With this reasoning an artist can be massively popular but unable to afford to cover studio costs let alone put on shows. This of course will lead to a new ominous figure in the lives of artists: Concert sponsors : who will probably sign exclusive concerts et al until it's the entire record label fiasco again but limited to concerts. Secondly, how about forms of music that don't translate well to concerts. I have been to several rap concerts in the past few years and half of them sounded like shit even though the actual music when played at home/in the car/on a walkman sounded simply heavenly. Does this mean rap artists (the largest growing and second most lucrative music form in the U.S.) don't deserve to be paid but rock groups do?

• The I'm a poor student argument. I am a poor student but unlike most Americans don't believe I have a right to stuff simply because I am alive. The "everyone has this so must I" attitude is probably one of the most disgusting aspects of modern American life. &ltkinda offtopic&gt I just had a discussion with my girlfriend last night where she made the illogical argument that Macy's is like drug dealers because they both sell things that cause youth to commit crime and hence must be punished in some way. Such abdication of personal responsibility is very distressing &lt\kinda offtopic &gt. Not being able to afford it does not give you the right to steal it and then redistribute the stolen music. If someone broke into an HMV or a Sam Goody's, stole some CDs, kept the originals and burned a bunch of copies, then gave them away on the corner
• because he was poor is that somehow excusable?

• The fact that the artists are rich is also a stupid argument. There is no law in the U.S. (where the lawsuits are being filed) that says "To each give according to his needs, but from each take according to his ability". The monetary success of Metallica and Dr. Dre is what gives them the ability to sue Napster. Do you think that struggling college bands whose music is being spread all across the net with no remuneration wouldn't sue if they could affors to and they were being ripped of as much as Dr. Dre and Metallica (every single one of their songs is on Napster). The amount of money the artists have is irrelevant what is relevant is that they are being robbed by so-called fans (who refuse to pay for the music).

• In my original post I asked that instead of the typical bitching and moaning by music pirates we should instead discuss how the music industry (artists included) can survive in a digital world. Please read my
• original post and respond below.

Oh, isn't that _special_. I'm told their recent albums suck and are really weak and lame compared to when they were hungrier. Don't talk to me about grueling creative process :P want to talk grueling? I'm reading this after pulling an all-nighter 12-hour-continuous composing session on the techno album I'm producing- an album which pushes a lot of limits such as tonalities and metrical forms. I have to stay up because I'm heading to the bank to deposit all the change in my pocket after blowing my checkbook to a shriveled heap paying for unexpected rip fees on promotional posters for my released album, "anima". And what does Lars want to do to help out? He wants to take mp3 away from me, to poison the well. Granted, my life would be simpler right now if I did _not_ have access to worldwide media (through of course the obligatory link to my music, which kicks butt in many ways), and it would be easier on me if I had no hope of being a working musician after the open-source independent coder model. Do I thank him for attempting to simplify my life by limiting my horizons? I don't f**king think so.

He's _coasting_. Grueling creative process, hell. Grueling creative process, Lars, is when you're running low on food and you're sick and you're exhausted but you keep going anyway because there is this thing programmers know about called Deep Hack Mode, and DIY musicians know about this as well, know that the journey is the goal.

Plus, I hear that Metallica's recent albums are caving in to commercial expectations and are soft and inoffensive compared to their earlier, hungrier stuff, so it annoys me to see him talking in grandiose terms of their Creativity and Where Metallica Is At That Very Moment In Their Lives. Spare me- if they are becoming old and stale who cares if it's depicted honestly in their music? If I said the piece I just uploaded was Where I Am At At This Very Moment In My Life, they'd put me away ;) it's crazy music, pushes boundaries real hard- uses fiendish polyrhythms and has a midsection where the whole track simply goes insane with schizophrenic counterpoint for a little while. I _like_ music like that and will never get it from the mainstream industry again- the days when they'd release, say, Beefheart's "The Spotlight Kid" with 'Click Clack' doing that, are gone. But that daring is alive because suck it up and deal, I am going to do what _I_ like to hear and mp3 lets me get it heard. I'll fight for that as long as I have breath in my body.

Only one link today- I'm exhausted, disenchanted, people are _still_ behaving like the mainstream industry needs protecting and coddling (I'd sooner cuddle a cobra) and I have no energy to beg after the all-nighter. Much deep thanks to the Slashdotter who apparently bought my CD for $5.99- I love you man (or woman as the case may be) and would love to know who you were, thank you more personally. I thank everyone who's helped me out with downloads and things- it does matter- did you know musicians fight amongst themselves begging each other for a simple download? That's how tough it is to get indie credibility after decades of industry brainwashing. The site (mp3.com), run by mad Michael, is thinking of putting 'pay for play' income on each artist's page, and many people are flipping out, saying "If my fans see that I only made 12 cents that day, they'll leave and not listen to me anymore!" If that _is_ true, it's sad- and incredibly, horribly wrong. Personally, I don't mind that being posted about me because I don't pretend to be anything other than I am- underground, outmarketed, and I need help. But now I'm tired, f**k it, moderate this down into oblivion because I don't count and am not a REAL musician, don't go visit that page in the one link I habitually gave, whatever.

I'm still going to make music anyway. This time in history may just quietly close down and music will never have a freedom movement like programming had with Linux- maybe the RIAA will win and I'll be back to copying off cassette tapes for friends (assuming that is still allowed! The physical media could simply be unavailable to consumers, eventually). But I will still make music anyway- I did it for almost 20 years, secluded in my room with nobody listening, and I can go back to that if that 'broadcasting', mp3 and do-it-yourself and embattled websites- gets turned OFF. And it won't be because I didn't kick up a fuss- it will be from people trying to protect what they see as the music aristocracy, Prince Lars and his creative sensitiveness. *gag* funny, I could have sworn I didn't get any sleep and so this couldn't be a nightmare, could it?

mp3.com has been doing this for a long time now. There are some major bands that have decided to sell music this way (either instead of, or in addition to, traditional CD sales). Even better, a lot of bands that couldn't get a record contract (or, worse, could get a contract like some of the ones I've signed in the past--where you give up control over your music to a company that can't get you into most stores, can't support you, and half the time doesn't even send you the checks unless you harass them) are using mp3.com to sell their music. But even if you got with mp3.com, or a similar distribution method, the same problem exists. In fact, it's even easier for you to buy my MP3 and then upload it to people via Napster than to buy my CD, rip it, and upload it to people via Napster.... I've already mentioned elsewhere in this thread that I think shareware music would be an even cooler idea: You download the songs you want to hear, and if you want to keep them, you send me money. I've convinced a few bands to do this (the price model is usually $1/song, or $5 for a whole album), and I plan to do it in the future. But saying that all bands should be forced to release their music as shareware is like saying that all commercial software should be forced to be sold as shareware.

I love them because I am _smack_ in the middle of the topic: I'm a musician, working hard and putting out a lot of innovative, professional, well-produced music, all on mp3 and in fact on mp3.com.

I hate them because no matter how strident I get, no matter how I rant and make people sick of hearing from me like a guitar toting RMS ( ;) ) there is always another person sounding off the same old lines: "mp3 is illegal because", "mp3 hurts artists", and now there's some "it won't last because eventually they'll just make mp3 illegal" and people are giving up on it, saying "we'll just use mp4 or something!"

No no nooooo! It may not be all that great a format, but the reason we have digital music so ubitiquously is that CD audio (also not that great a format) proliferated and was not constantly being 'upgraded'! Data formats are not _fashion_. There's an archival value to them and the last thing you want is to be churning them like fscking Excel binaryformats. Yes, CD Audio is lame, yes mp3 is lamer and lossy, but it's all relative- many Philips cassettes are lamer still, and those were an accepted format! mp3 needs to look forward to a life as long as CD audio. It's right at the quality point where it's a good general purpose format- and we've not even begun to see its potential. I have a fancy JPEG plugin I use on images- cost me a fair bit but it optimises Huffman coding and does other tricky hacks and the quality of its output rivals the average JPEG encoder at _half_ the file size. It's that good- and the same thing can be done with mp3, I'm sure of it. 128K will end up sounding a lot like 256K in a couple years... if the format is not killed through neglect.

I'm going to ask something from my fellow slashdotters (yah, you knew this was coming, hear me out): please go grab all the songs of mine that you can, at www.mp3.com/ChrisJ , and put them on Napster. OK? Please, as many of you as possible, do this. I do get a few nano-cents from each download but they do not charge _you_, and of course I get nothing from napster exchanges. But I have the capacity as the copyright holder and owner of my songs _and_ the mechanical recordings of them, to _permit_ such exchanges- and I think this is important, because all this noise is how mp3s and napster are all illegal and piracy and theft and a lot of bullshit like that, and I would really like to be able to prove beyond a doubt that the format and even Napster serve _some_ valid purpose, and again I OWN my music and I AM ALLOWED to permit people to trade it on napster! Dammit, it makes me angry to see corporate whores 'protecting my interests as an artist' by stomping on MY listeners or potential listeners and also cutting off MY access to media! It just really makes me angry, OK? They are NOT helping me by doing this, don't be confused about that. I am outright saying I _want_ my music distributed freely over the net and Napster, that I _want_ it to be like instant radio which is entirely promotional in nature and has no relation to micropayments and 'security' and crap like that, that I see tremendous utility in this and that I also have personal feelings of wanting to be ALLOWED to give my music to a person I haven't even met who happens to not have money for it right at the moment (I can sympathise- I myself am living on ramen and spaghettios this week), and... I don't have a RIGHT to take that position?

It's my damn music, not theirs. They have no right to restrict what I may do with it! _I_ am the creator here and owe them nothing.

I don't appreciate this 'to protect the artists' slant, especially when people unwittingly buy into it... the fact is, I am dead serious about trying to build a music/sound engineering career based on these new modes of distribution. I have done my homework, huge amounts of it, and frankly the existing industry is the most horribly harmful thing you could imagine- pretend it's like all software companies are divisions of Microsoft, and they control all commercial software of all types so you can't program unless you cut a deal with them on their terms. They own basically everything and have controlling interest in everything else and are very prone to stuff like looking at your work and then cutting you dead and paying somebody to knock off your program and saying 'see you in court'. It's like a music version of that, and keeps getting worse, until if you don't know the score you wouldn't believe it. I just can't go along with this at all- and it is these people who are trying to kill the new distribution model that _I_ could use to not need them!

Links:
Steve Albini: Some Of Your Friends Are Probably Already This Fucked
Bobby S. Fred: How The Game Works (Scam Indies)

This is serious.

So... when I say go grab all the songs at www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and put them on napster, when I point at the CDs I have up there (which are produced via some neat press-to-order tech mp3.com's invented) and beg people to buy them in support of what I am trying to do here... that is coming from someone who feels, very deeply, that all that could be TAKEN AWAY. Maybe sooner than you think! And maybe you won't give a rat's ass about some bozo musician in Vermont no longer having access to a format (mp3) and a dotcom (mp3.com) that will print up his CDs on an as-needed basis for only nonexclusive rights to the music... but I have to take it more seriously. If this was happening to programmers, slashdot would be up in arms- why does it seem debatable if it happens to musicians? It's the equivalent of programmers having to go to say Microsoft to be 'authorised' to practice their craft professionally. "Oh, you must not be a _real_ programmer, otherwise Microsoft would want to hire you, so therefore it's OK to get rid of gzip- only criminals use it and I heard there are viruses that are transported in gzipped form! Better get rid of tar too while we're at it. Then we can license RPM so that only authorised people are allowed to use it..."

furrfu, another huge rant. I'm sorry :) I swear, I meant to only write a bit. Please, while I still have an mp3.com that will press up CDs for me and give me half, BUY one- please, while I still have an mp3 format that I'm allowed to distribute my own music over the net with, USE it and listen to my stuff and (I hope!) enjoy it and share it with your friends? If that doesn't seem like enough you are _free_ to go buy another CD of mine to make up for the napsterring, I wouldn't dream of stopping you. But I simply cannot go along with coercion, so the end result might be that I am just plain silenced, the format I use stifled or co-opted, the site I distribute from killed through lawsuits (some of which are arguably valid- but they have every right to redistribute _my_ music and in fact they pay me small amounts to do so).

Please? Help me out. www.mp3.com/ChrisJ

I love them because I am _smack_ in the middle of the topic: I'm a musician, working hard and putting out a lot of innovative, professional, well-produced music, all on mp3 and in fact on mp3.com.

I hate them because no matter how strident I get, no matter how I rant and make people sick of hearing from me like a guitar toting RMS ( ;) ) there is always another person sounding off the same old lines: "mp3 is illegal because", "mp3 hurts artists", and now there's some "it won't last because eventually they'll just make mp3 illegal" and people are giving up on it, saying "we'll just use mp4 or something!"

No no nooooo! It may not be all that great a format, but the reason we have digital music so ubitiquously is that CD audio (also not that great a format) proliferated and was not constantly being 'upgraded'! Data formats are not _fashion_. There's an archival value to them and the last thing you want is to be churning them like fscking Excel binaryformats. Yes, CD Audio is lame, yes mp3 is lamer and lossy, but it's all relative- many Philips cassettes are lamer still, and those were an accepted format! mp3 needs to look forward to a life as long as CD audio. It's right at the quality point where it's a good general purpose format- and we've not even begun to see its potential. I have a fancy JPEG plugin I use on images- cost me a fair bit but it optimises Huffman coding and does other tricky hacks and the quality of its output rivals the average JPEG encoder at _half_ the file size. It's that good- and the same thing can be done with mp3, I'm sure of it. 128K will end up sounding a lot like 256K in a couple years... if the format is not killed through neglect.

I'm going to ask something from my fellow slashdotters (yah, you knew this was coming, hear me out): please go grab all the songs of mine that you can, at www.mp3.com/ChrisJ , and put them on Napster. OK? Please, as many of you as possible, do this. I do get a few nano-cents from each download but they do not charge _you_, and of course I get nothing from napster exchanges. But I have the capacity as the copyright holder and owner of my songs _and_ the mechanical recordings of them, to _permit_ such exchanges- and I think this is important, because all this noise is how mp3s and napster are all illegal and piracy and theft and a lot of bullshit like that, and I would really like to be able to prove beyond a doubt that the format and even Napster serve _some_ valid purpose, and again I OWN my music and I AM ALLOWED to permit people to trade it on napster! Dammit, it makes me angry to see corporate whores 'protecting my interests as an artist' by stomping on MY listeners or potential listeners and also cutting off MY access to media! It just really makes me angry, OK? They are NOT helping me by doing this, don't be confused about that. I am outright saying I _want_ my music distributed freely over the net and Napster, that I _want_ it to be like instant radio which is entirely promotional in nature and has no relation to micropayments and 'security' and crap like that, that I see tremendous utility in this and that I also have personal feelings of wanting to be ALLOWED to give my music to a person I haven't even met who happens to not have money for it right at the moment (I can sympathise- I myself am living on ramen and spaghettios this week), and... I don't have a RIGHT to take that position?

It's my damn music, not theirs. They have no right to restrict what I may do with it! _I_ am the creator here and owe them nothing.

I don't appreciate this 'to protect the artists' slant, especially when people unwittingly buy into it... the fact is, I am dead serious about trying to build a music/sound engineering career based on these new modes of distribution. I have done my homework, huge amounts of it, and frankly the existing industry is the most horribly harmful thing you could imagine- pretend it's like all software companies are divisions of Microsoft, and they control all commercial software of all types so you can't program unless you cut a deal with them on their terms. They own basically everything and have controlling interest in everything else and are very prone to stuff like looking at your work and then cutting you dead and paying somebody to knock off your program and saying 'see you in court'. It's like a music version of that, and keeps getting worse, until if you don't know the score you wouldn't believe it. I just can't go along with this at all- and it is these people who are trying to kill the new distribution model that _I_ could use to not need them!

Links:
Steve Albini: Some Of Your Friends Are Probably Already This Fucked
Bobby S. Fred: How The Game Works (Scam Indies)

This is serious.

So... when I say go grab all the songs at www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and put them on napster, when I point at the CDs I have up there (which are produced via some neat press-to-order tech mp3.com's invented) and beg people to buy them in support of what I am trying to do here... that is coming from someone who feels, very deeply, that all that could be TAKEN AWAY. Maybe sooner than you think! And maybe you won't give a rat's ass about some bozo musician in Vermont no longer having access to a format (mp3) and a dotcom (mp3.com) that will print up his CDs on an as-needed basis for only nonexclusive rights to the music... but I have to take it more seriously. If this was happening to programmers, slashdot would be up in arms- why does it seem debatable if it happens to musicians? It's the equivalent of programmers having to go to say Microsoft to be 'authorised' to practice their craft professionally. "Oh, you must not be a _real_ programmer, otherwise Microsoft would want to hire you, so therefore it's OK to get rid of gzip- only criminals use it and I heard there are viruses that are transported in gzipped form! Better get rid of tar too while we're at it. Then we can license RPM so that only authorised people are allowed to use it..."

furrfu, another huge rant. I'm sorry :) I swear, I meant to only write a bit. Please, while I still have an mp3.com that will press up CDs for me and give me half, BUY one- please, while I still have an mp3 format that I'm allowed to distribute my own music over the net with, USE it and listen to my stuff and (I hope!) enjoy it and share it with your friends? If that doesn't seem like enough you are _free_ to go buy another CD of mine to make up for the napsterring, I wouldn't dream of stopping you. But I simply cannot go along with coercion, so the end result might be that I am just plain silenced, the format I use stifled or co-opted, the site I distribute from killed through lawsuits (some of which are arguably valid- but they have every right to redistribute _my_ music and in fact they pay me small amounts to do so).

Please? Help me out. www.mp3.com/ChrisJ

I love them because I am _smack_ in the middle of the topic: I'm a musician, working hard and putting out a lot of innovative, professional, well-produced music, all on mp3 and in fact on mp3.com.

I hate them because no matter how strident I get, no matter how I rant and make people sick of hearing from me like a guitar toting RMS ( ;) ) there is always another person sounding off the same old lines: "mp3 is illegal because", "mp3 hurts artists", and now there's some "it won't last because eventually they'll just make mp3 illegal" and people are giving up on it, saying "we'll just use mp4 or something!"

No no nooooo! It may not be all that great a format, but the reason we have digital music so ubitiquously is that CD audio (also not that great a format) proliferated and was not constantly being 'upgraded'! Data formats are not _fashion_. There's an archival value to them and the last thing you want is to be churning them like fscking Excel binaryformats. Yes, CD Audio is lame, yes mp3 is lamer and lossy, but it's all relative- many Philips cassettes are lamer still, and those were an accepted format! mp3 needs to look forward to a life as long as CD audio. It's right at the quality point where it's a good general purpose format- and we've not even begun to see its potential. I have a fancy JPEG plugin I use on images- cost me a fair bit but it optimises Huffman coding and does other tricky hacks and the quality of its output rivals the average JPEG encoder at _half_ the file size. It's that good- and the same thing can be done with mp3, I'm sure of it. 128K will end up sounding a lot like 256K in a couple years... if the format is not killed through neglect.

I'm going to ask something from my fellow slashdotters (yah, you knew this was coming, hear me out): please go grab all the songs of mine that you can, at www.mp3.com/ChrisJ , and put them on Napster. OK? Please, as many of you as possible, do this. I do get a few nano-cents from each download but they do not charge _you_, and of course I get nothing from napster exchanges. But I have the capacity as the copyright holder and owner of my songs _and_ the mechanical recordings of them, to _permit_ such exchanges- and I think this is important, because all this noise is how mp3s and napster are all illegal and piracy and theft and a lot of bullshit like that, and I would really like to be able to prove beyond a doubt that the format and even Napster serve _some_ valid purpose, and again I OWN my music and I AM ALLOWED to permit people to trade it on napster! Dammit, it makes me angry to see corporate whores 'protecting my interests as an artist' by stomping on MY listeners or potential listeners and also cutting off MY access to media! It just really makes me angry, OK? They are NOT helping me by doing this, don't be confused about that. I am outright saying I _want_ my music distributed freely over the net and Napster, that I _want_ it to be like instant radio which is entirely promotional in nature and has no relation to micropayments and 'security' and crap like that, that I see tremendous utility in this and that I also have personal feelings of wanting to be ALLOWED to give my music to a person I haven't even met who happens to not have money for it right at the moment (I can sympathise- I myself am living on ramen and spaghettios this week), and... I don't have a RIGHT to take that position?

It's my damn music, not theirs. They have no right to restrict what I may do with it! _I_ am the creator here and owe them nothing.

I don't appreciate this 'to protect the artists' slant, especially when people unwittingly buy into it... the fact is, I am dead serious about trying to build a music/sound engineering career based on these new modes of distribution. I have done my homework, huge amounts of it, and frankly the existing industry is the most horribly harmful thing you could imagine- pretend it's like all software companies are divisions of Microsoft, and they control all commercial software of all types so you can't program unless you cut a deal with them on their terms. They own basically everything and have controlling interest in everything else and are very prone to stuff like looking at your work and then cutting you dead and paying somebody to knock off your program and saying 'see you in court'. It's like a music version of that, and keeps getting worse, until if you don't know the score you wouldn't believe it. I just can't go along with this at all- and it is these people who are trying to kill the new distribution model that _I_ could use to not need them!

Links:
Steve Albini: Some Of Your Friends Are Probably Already This Fucked
Bobby S. Fred: How The Game Works (Scam Indies)

This is serious.

So... when I say go grab all the songs at www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and put them on napster, when I point at the CDs I have up there (which are produced via some neat press-to-order tech mp3.com's invented) and beg people to buy them in support of what I am trying to do here... that is coming from someone who feels, very deeply, that all that could be TAKEN AWAY. Maybe sooner than you think! And maybe you won't give a rat's ass about some bozo musician in Vermont no longer having access to a format (mp3) and a dotcom (mp3.com) that will print up his CDs on an as-needed basis for only nonexclusive rights to the music... but I have to take it more seriously. If this was happening to programmers, slashdot would be up in arms- why does it seem debatable if it happens to musicians? It's the equivalent of programmers having to go to say Microsoft to be 'authorised' to practice their craft professionally. "Oh, you must not be a _real_ programmer, otherwise Microsoft would want to hire you, so therefore it's OK to get rid of gzip- only criminals use it and I heard there are viruses that are transported in gzipped form! Better get rid of tar too while we're at it. Then we can license RPM so that only authorised people are allowed to use it..."

furrfu, another huge rant. I'm sorry :) I swear, I meant to only write a bit. Please, while I still have an mp3.com that will press up CDs for me and give me half, BUY one- please, while I still have an mp3 format that I'm allowed to distribute my own music over the net with, USE it and listen to my stuff and (I hope!) enjoy it and share it with your friends? If that doesn't seem like enough you are _free_ to go buy another CD of mine to make up for the napsterring, I wouldn't dream of stopping you. But I simply cannot go along with coercion, so the end result might be that I am just plain silenced, the format I use stifled or co-opted, the site I distribute from killed through lawsuits (some of which are arguably valid- but they have every right to redistribute _my_ music and in fact they pay me small amounts to do so).

Please? Help me out. www.mp3.com/ChrisJ

Apparently you have never had to travel much with a pda, cell phone AND a portable MP3 player. I have-It sucks. I can't wait for the day that I have one little device that can handle all of that. Be even better if this little critter were net connected so it could stream all my tracks from my My.MP3.com account. Say goodbye to my backpack full o' cds!

There is a moog-influenced station at mp3.com looking for mp3 submissions from moog-influenced artists. Some interesting stuff here, if you're into analog-techno.
--

And of course I never spam- I am incredibly hesitant to even use email to try to set up a relationship with a person related to what I'm doing with music or sound engineering. I wrote CmdrTaco- once- asking if he wanted me to record some special Geeks In Space music and sounds to _give_ him in hopes I might get a mention. Never heard back, never tried again- I'm deathly afraid of being thought of as spamming.

Yet you HAVE to market- you HAVE to network, or you're dead- and my awareness of how bad spam is tends to have a profound effect on the way I network. It's like it is forcing me to evolve laborious ways of dealing with it- ways that might be the only good ways of coping with needing to market in a world where connectivity is so vast that 'spam' can mean almost anything.

You, reading this (whoever you are) did not 'ask' to hear from me. Nobody solicited my comment on the slashdot comments page. Yet, the purpose of the thing is for me to cover Natalie Portman with hot gr^H^H^H^H^H^H to make insightful comments ;)

As such, I find that I wait eagerly, hoping to see mp3 related Slashdot articles- because when there is one, I become relevant to the discussion, and I'm telling you, Slashdot is a powerful resource- anybody would want to have their product or service 'slashdotted' (even a free one) but the thing is, Slashdotters are so aware and even touchy about being exploited that you can't bullshit- when I get a chance, I take an _hour_ to type up the best statement of where I'm at on the subject. I put more effort into it than some article authors- I have _been_ a Slashdot article authors- I basically show my respect for the community by proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am listening, am part of the community, am in a two-way communication rather than just blathering at people. Sometimes I try to sneak in geek creds and screw up- I mistook "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" for "Cryptonomicon" :)

Because of paying attention to this, I can even make a post that says "BUY MY ALBUM!" all over it in boldface all caps as an intentional parody of desperate hype- because the post _was_ a plea for help getting more respect and credibility for indie mp3-reliant artists, and thus it was on topic. (Yes, that link is real and so is the plea- see how this works? Meta-hype, but honestly I am not fooling about wishing people to buy my nice $5.99 CDs, but here I am talking _about_ the approaches I have to take to be certain I am not doing any variation on spamming)

And because I am willing to be part of the discussion and talk about what I've needed to do in order to take responsibility, I can finish up my comment by just saying a little about where I'm at today- in a way it is on a personal note, but the comment is not ONLY about the personal note, it is entering the discussion about 'legitimate spam' and then allowing my 'legitimate' needs/concerns to be mentioned. Those needs are as follows- BUY MY ALBUM! AHAHAHAHAHAH! *g* No, seriously... well, sure I'd like to see that happen but that's not where I put my priorities. I put giving people free downloads higher on the priority list because I am trying to prove that you _can_ succeed by applying the opensource model to music- and so, there is this specific song that I desperately want to kick ass on the mp3.com charts. That song is "Fire Dragon", which you can download directly from that link without even having to log into anything or leave the slashdot page, and it's 4.7 megs, techno with an extremely high quality production (geek cred again- I physically built equipment to get the drums equalised so that the bassdrum is heavily subsonic and the snare barks really loud :) ) and is actually in 7/4 time, sort of geek techno that is slightly too intellectually demanding for the mainstream music industry :) I'm currently downloading another mp3.com artist friend's entire page for a second time because I like his music and am trying to help him in the charts- he is corruptdata .

Exposure is life- and spam is worthy of the most horrible punishments, so somebody like me has a lot of work to do in order to promote. Basically I have to _be_ part of the community and be actively a part of the discussion while still trying to stand up for the things I do that I am passionate about and desperately want to tell people about :) it can feel like revolution, this being-a-mp3-artist, what with the incredible forces trying to destroy my best hope of distribution for my ART. What if they get mp3s themselves banned or made illegal somewhere? That would be restraint of trade against me, and nobody really considers that! So I keep trying to push it, trying to do this 'popularity', 'promotion' thing _knowing_ that if I manage to get that 5 minutes of fame, I will have a lot to say about the RIAA and the industry and lots of links to raise people's awareness about the abuses of the industry, and that not every mp3-using musician will be so motivated to make such statements.

And at the same time I work just as hard to avoid even the appearance of spam, and have put a lot of effort into trying to educate other net-musicians about why spam is bad and why it makes you vulnerable to losing your account clicky clicky ;) So it's not so much a 'balance' in the sense of 'doing the right amount of spam': it's a question of finding out "When is promotion NOT spam?", realising the answer is "When it is part of a desirable dialogue", and taking the EFFORT, far more effort than it takes to talk and not listen, to be in such a dialogue and include the things that I care so much about, instead of spamming them.

I could have posted just URLS to my stuff here and it would have taken a lot less time, and still to some extent met _my_ needs- but that to my mind would have been spam, because I would not have been listening or being part of the discussion at all. Maybe the fact that I put promo links alone will make some people feel this is still spam- I don't know. I only know that this post of mine is the best analysis I can do of what is spam and what is legitimate- and to me, it's all about whether the communication is two-way. I'll of course be reading all the followups if any, because I _do_ read Slashdot, it's not a pose or drive-by spamming of mp3 links. I think that's key- if every spammer took half an hour to talk with you about what _you_ were talking about and open a dialogue in which they could also mention their wares- there would be no spammers.

Because what defines a spammer, in some way, is that they completely are not interested in YOU at all and are not listening at all and are entering no sort of dialogue at all. In a way, though I tolerate the ones who spend their _own_ money to do that (like flyer-printers, postal mail promo), even those are not the wave of the future, because it is meaningless- you can't distinguish yourself from anybody else that way, and there's so much noise that it all becomes meaningless. That is not only pollution, it is also _useless_...

I really hope I do better than that. Slashdotters know me, periodically get tired of me ranting about mp3 and moderate me down to make me shut up for a bit, they can get my personal email and look at my user page and go to airwindows.com and download all the XPMs and tiles they want to prove that I make stuff for Linux- or look at the GPLed software I wrote to prove that I am a free software author (if not a good one :) ) and basically, I don't need to work too hard to seem like not an intruder. I "live here" as much as any slashdot reader.

So if people like the idea of that kind of community or _want_ to have one of their own kicking ass on mp3.com and giving press conferences slamming hell out of the abuses of the RIAA and the industry- they can stop buying Metallica CDs for a minute, and come up with $5.99 to buy one of my albums or simply take some of their time to download my latest song. You wouldn't believe how helpful that can be- even a mere download, like what you would do on Napster that arguably hurts an artist, is a huge help to an independent mp3.com artist, and even if the album is only $5.99 I see more from it than the major label artists get per album (I get half) and the system for making them is really cool! You get the CD in like two-three days- it's completely press-to-order, they are geared to printing one copy of a CD and its cover to order, something that was never technically possible before! Plus I do cool covers ;) so really, you have no idea just how helpful this support would be _and_ it's damn competitive with major label ripoff! :)

Whoa, got a little enthusiastic there ;) I'll stop before I go farther offtopic. The topic _is_ 'spam vs. promotion'. I think I just got carried away in the direction of promotion... if I only talked about that it _would_ be sort of 'essence of spam'. Thankfully, mostly I didn't :)

And of course I never spam- I am incredibly hesitant to even use email to try to set up a relationship with a person related to what I'm doing with music or sound engineering. I wrote CmdrTaco- once- asking if he wanted me to record some special Geeks In Space music and sounds to _give_ him in hopes I might get a mention. Never heard back, never tried again- I'm deathly afraid of being thought of as spamming.

Yet you HAVE to market- you HAVE to network, or you're dead- and my awareness of how bad spam is tends to have a profound effect on the way I network. It's like it is forcing me to evolve laborious ways of dealing with it- ways that might be the only good ways of coping with needing to market in a world where connectivity is so vast that 'spam' can mean almost anything.

You, reading this (whoever you are) did not 'ask' to hear from me. Nobody solicited my comment on the slashdot comments page. Yet, the purpose of the thing is for me to cover Natalie Portman with hot gr^H^H^H^H^H^H to make insightful comments ;)

As such, I find that I wait eagerly, hoping to see mp3 related Slashdot articles- because when there is one, I become relevant to the discussion, and I'm telling you, Slashdot is a powerful resource- anybody would want to have their product or service 'slashdotted' (even a free one) but the thing is, Slashdotters are so aware and even touchy about being exploited that you can't bullshit- when I get a chance, I take an _hour_ to type up the best statement of where I'm at on the subject. I put more effort into it than some article authors- I have _been_ a Slashdot article authors- I basically show my respect for the community by proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am listening, am part of the community, am in a two-way communication rather than just blathering at people. Sometimes I try to sneak in geek creds and screw up- I mistook "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" for "Cryptonomicon" :)

Because of paying attention to this, I can even make a post that says "BUY MY ALBUM!" all over it in boldface all caps as an intentional parody of desperate hype- because the post _was_ a plea for help getting more respect and credibility for indie mp3-reliant artists, and thus it was on topic. (Yes, that link is real and so is the plea- see how this works? Meta-hype, but honestly I am not fooling about wishing people to buy my nice $5.99 CDs, but here I am talking _about_ the approaches I have to take to be certain I am not doing any variation on spamming)

And because I am willing to be part of the discussion and talk about what I've needed to do in order to take responsibility, I can finish up my comment by just saying a little about where I'm at today- in a way it is on a personal note, but the comment is not ONLY about the personal note, it is entering the discussion about 'legitimate spam' and then allowing my 'legitimate' needs/concerns to be mentioned. Those needs are as follows- BUY MY ALBUM! AHAHAHAHAHAH! *g* No, seriously... well, sure I'd like to see that happen but that's not where I put my priorities. I put giving people free downloads higher on the priority list because I am trying to prove that you _can_ succeed by applying the opensource model to music- and so, there is this specific song that I desperately want to kick ass on the mp3.com charts. That song is "Fire Dragon", which you can download directly from that link without even having to log into anything or leave the slashdot page, and it's 4.7 megs, techno with an extremely high quality production (geek cred again- I physically built equipment to get the drums equalised so that the bassdrum is heavily subsonic and the snare barks really loud :) ) and is actually in 7/4 time, sort of geek techno that is slightly too intellectually demanding for the mainstream music industry :) I'm currently downloading another mp3.com artist friend's entire page for a second time because I like his music and am trying to help him in the charts- he is corruptdata .

Exposure is life- and spam is worthy of the most horrible punishments, so somebody like me has a lot of work to do in order to promote. Basically I have to _be_ part of the community and be actively a part of the discussion while still trying to stand up for the things I do that I am passionate about and desperately want to tell people about :) it can feel like revolution, this being-a-mp3-artist, what with the incredible forces trying to destroy my best hope of distribution for my ART. What if they get mp3s themselves banned or made illegal somewhere? That would be restraint of trade against me, and nobody really considers that! So I keep trying to push it, trying to do this 'popularity', 'promotion' thing _knowing_ that if I manage to get that 5 minutes of fame, I will have a lot to say about the RIAA and the industry and lots of links to raise people's awareness about the abuses of the industry, and that not every mp3-using musician will be so motivated to make such statements.

And at the same time I work just as hard to avoid even the appearance of spam, and have put a lot of effort into trying to educate other net-musicians about why spam is bad and why it makes you vulnerable to losing your account clicky clicky ;) So it's not so much a 'balance' in the sense of 'doing the right amount of spam': it's a question of finding out "When is promotion NOT spam?", realising the answer is "When it is part of a desirable dialogue", and taking the EFFORT, far more effort than it takes to talk and not listen, to be in such a dialogue and include the things that I care so much about, instead of spamming them.

I could have posted just URLS to my stuff here and it would have taken a lot less time, and still to some extent met _my_ needs- but that to my mind would have been spam, because I would not have been listening or being part of the discussion at all. Maybe the fact that I put promo links alone will make some people feel this is still spam- I don't know. I only know that this post of mine is the best analysis I can do of what is spam and what is legitimate- and to me, it's all about whether the communication is two-way. I'll of course be reading all the followups if any, because I _do_ read Slashdot, it's not a pose or drive-by spamming of mp3 links. I think that's key- if every spammer took half an hour to talk with you about what _you_ were talking about and open a dialogue in which they could also mention their wares- there would be no spammers.

Because what defines a spammer, in some way, is that they completely are not interested in YOU at all and are not listening at all and are entering no sort of dialogue at all. In a way, though I tolerate the ones who spend their _own_ money to do that (like flyer-printers, postal mail promo), even those are not the wave of the future, because it is meaningless- you can't distinguish yourself from anybody else that way, and there's so much noise that it all becomes meaningless. That is not only pollution, it is also _useless_...

I really hope I do better than that. Slashdotters know me, periodically get tired of me ranting about mp3 and moderate me down to make me shut up for a bit, they can get my personal email and look at my user page and go to airwindows.com and download all the XPMs and tiles they want to prove that I make stuff for Linux- or look at the GPLed software I wrote to prove that I am a free software author (if not a good one :) ) and basically, I don't need to work too hard to seem like not an intruder. I "live here" as much as any slashdot reader.

So if people like the idea of that kind of community or _want_ to have one of their own kicking ass on mp3.com and giving press conferences slamming hell out of the abuses of the RIAA and the industry- they can stop buying Metallica CDs for a minute, and come up with $5.99 to buy one of my albums or simply take some of their time to download my latest song. You wouldn't believe how helpful that can be- even a mere download, like what you would do on Napster that arguably hurts an artist, is a huge help to an independent mp3.com artist, and even if the album is only $5.99 I see more from it than the major label artists get per album (I get half) and the system for making them is really cool! You get the CD in like two-three days- it's completely press-to-order, they are geared to printing one copy of a CD and its cover to order, something that was never technically possible before! Plus I do cool covers ;) so really, you have no idea just how helpful this support would be _and_ it's damn competitive with major label ripoff! :)

Whoa, got a little enthusiastic there ;) I'll stop before I go farther offtopic. The topic _is_ 'spam vs. promotion'. I think I just got carried away in the direction of promotion... if I only talked about that it _would_ be sort of 'essence of spam'. Thankfully, mostly I didn't :)

And of course I never spam- I am incredibly hesitant to even use email to try to set up a relationship with a person related to what I'm doing with music or sound engineering. I wrote CmdrTaco- once- asking if he wanted me to record some special Geeks In Space music and sounds to _give_ him in hopes I might get a mention. Never heard back, never tried again- I'm deathly afraid of being thought of as spamming.

Yet you HAVE to market- you HAVE to network, or you're dead- and my awareness of how bad spam is tends to have a profound effect on the way I network. It's like it is forcing me to evolve laborious ways of dealing with it- ways that might be the only good ways of coping with needing to market in a world where connectivity is so vast that 'spam' can mean almost anything.

You, reading this (whoever you are) did not 'ask' to hear from me. Nobody solicited my comment on the slashdot comments page. Yet, the purpose of the thing is for me to cover Natalie Portman with hot gr^H^H^H^H^H^H to make insightful comments ;)

As such, I find that I wait eagerly, hoping to see mp3 related Slashdot articles- because when there is one, I become relevant to the discussion, and I'm telling you, Slashdot is a powerful resource- anybody would want to have their product or service 'slashdotted' (even a free one) but the thing is, Slashdotters are so aware and even touchy about being exploited that you can't bullshit- when I get a chance, I take an _hour_ to type up the best statement of where I'm at on the subject. I put more effort into it than some article authors- I have _been_ a Slashdot article authors- I basically show my respect for the community by proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am listening, am part of the community, am in a two-way communication rather than just blathering at people. Sometimes I try to sneak in geek creds and screw up- I mistook "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" for "Cryptonomicon" :)

Because of paying attention to this, I can even make a post that says "BUY MY ALBUM!" all over it in boldface all caps as an intentional parody of desperate hype- because the post _was_ a plea for help getting more respect and credibility for indie mp3-reliant artists, and thus it was on topic. (Yes, that link is real and so is the plea- see how this works? Meta-hype, but honestly I am not fooling about wishing people to buy my nice $5.99 CDs, but here I am talking _about_ the approaches I have to take to be certain I am not doing any variation on spamming)

And because I am willing to be part of the discussion and talk about what I've needed to do in order to take responsibility, I can finish up my comment by just saying a little about where I'm at today- in a way it is on a personal note, but the comment is not ONLY about the personal note, it is entering the discussion about 'legitimate spam' and then allowing my 'legitimate' needs/concerns to be mentioned. Those needs are as follows- BUY MY ALBUM! AHAHAHAHAHAH! *g* No, seriously... well, sure I'd like to see that happen but that's not where I put my priorities. I put giving people free downloads higher on the priority list because I am trying to prove that you _can_ succeed by applying the opensource model to music- and so, there is this specific song that I desperately want to kick ass on the mp3.com charts. That song is "Fire Dragon", which you can download directly from that link without even having to log into anything or leave the slashdot page, and it's 4.7 megs, techno with an extremely high quality production (geek cred again- I physically built equipment to get the drums equalised so that the bassdrum is heavily subsonic and the snare barks really loud :) ) and is actually in 7/4 time, sort of geek techno that is slightly too intellectually demanding for the mainstream music industry :) I'm currently downloading another mp3.com artist friend's entire page for a second time because I like his music and am trying to help him in the charts- he is corruptdata .

Exposure is life- and spam is worthy of the most horrible punishments, so somebody like me has a lot of work to do in order to promote. Basically I have to _be_ part of the community and be actively a part of the discussion while still trying to stand up for the things I do that I am passionate about and desperately want to tell people about :) it can feel like revolution, this being-a-mp3-artist, what with the incredible forces trying to destroy my best hope of distribution for my ART. What if they get mp3s themselves banned or made illegal somewhere? That would be restraint of trade against me, and nobody really considers that! So I keep trying to push it, trying to do this 'popularity', 'promotion' thing _knowing_ that if I manage to get that 5 minutes of fame, I will have a lot to say about the RIAA and the industry and lots of links to raise people's awareness about the abuses of the industry, and that not every mp3-using musician will be so motivated to make such statements.

And at the same time I work just as hard to avoid even the appearance of spam, and have put a lot of effort into trying to educate other net-musicians about why spam is bad and why it makes you vulnerable to losing your account clicky clicky ;) So it's not so much a 'balance' in the sense of 'doing the right amount of spam': it's a question of finding out "When is promotion NOT spam?", realising the answer is "When it is part of a desirable dialogue", and taking the EFFORT, far more effort than it takes to talk and not listen, to be in such a dialogue and include the things that I care so much about, instead of spamming them.

I could have posted just URLS to my stuff here and it would have taken a lot less time, and still to some extent met _my_ needs- but that to my mind would have been spam, because I would not have been listening or being part of the discussion at all. Maybe the fact that I put promo links alone will make some people feel this is still spam- I don't know. I only know that this post of mine is the best analysis I can do of what is spam and what is legitimate- and to me, it's all about whether the communication is two-way. I'll of course be reading all the followups if any, because I _do_ read Slashdot, it's not a pose or drive-by spamming of mp3 links. I think that's key- if every spammer took half an hour to talk with you about what _you_ were talking about and open a dialogue in which they could also mention their wares- there would be no spammers.

Because what defines a spammer, in some way, is that they completely are not interested in YOU at all and are not listening at all and are entering no sort of dialogue at all. In a way, though I tolerate the ones who spend their _own_ money to do that (like flyer-printers, postal mail promo), even those are not the wave of the future, because it is meaningless- you can't distinguish yourself from anybody else that way, and there's so much noise that it all becomes meaningless. That is not only pollution, it is also _useless_...

I really hope I do better than that. Slashdotters know me, periodically get tired of me ranting about mp3 and moderate me down to make me shut up for a bit, they can get my personal email and look at my user page and go to airwindows.com and download all the XPMs and tiles they want to prove that I make stuff for Linux- or look at the GPLed software I wrote to prove that I am a free software author (if not a good one :) ) and basically, I don't need to work too hard to seem like not an intruder. I "live here" as much as any slashdot reader.

So if people like the idea of that kind of community or _want_ to have one of their own kicking ass on mp3.com and giving press conferences slamming hell out of the abuses of the RIAA and the industry- they can stop buying Metallica CDs for a minute, and come up with $5.99 to buy one of my albums or simply take some of their time to download my latest song. You wouldn't believe how helpful that can be- even a mere download, like what you would do on Napster that arguably hurts an artist, is a huge help to an independent mp3.com artist, and even if the album is only $5.99 I see more from it than the major label artists get per album (I get half) and the system for making them is really cool! You get the CD in like two-three days- it's completely press-to-order, they are geared to printing one copy of a CD and its cover to order, something that was never technically possible before! Plus I do cool covers ;) so really, you have no idea just how helpful this support would be _and_ it's damn competitive with major label ripoff! :)

Whoa, got a little enthusiastic there ;) I'll stop before I go farther offtopic. The topic _is_ 'spam vs. promotion'. I think I just got carried away in the direction of promotion... if I only talked about that it _would_ be sort of 'essence of spam'. Thankfully, mostly I didn't :)

And of course I never spam- I am incredibly hesitant to even use email to try to set up a relationship with a person related to what I'm doing with music or sound engineering. I wrote CmdrTaco- once- asking if he wanted me to record some special Geeks In Space music and sounds to _give_ him in hopes I might get a mention. Never heard back, never tried again- I'm deathly afraid of being thought of as spamming.

Yet you HAVE to market- you HAVE to network, or you're dead- and my awareness of how bad spam is tends to have a profound effect on the way I network. It's like it is forcing me to evolve laborious ways of dealing with it- ways that might be the only good ways of coping with needing to market in a world where connectivity is so vast that 'spam' can mean almost anything.

You, reading this (whoever you are) did not 'ask' to hear from me. Nobody solicited my comment on the slashdot comments page. Yet, the purpose of the thing is for me to cover Natalie Portman with hot gr^H^H^H^H^H^H to make insightful comments ;)

As such, I find that I wait eagerly, hoping to see mp3 related Slashdot articles- because when there is one, I become relevant to the discussion, and I'm telling you, Slashdot is a powerful resource- anybody would want to have their product or service 'slashdotted' (even a free one) but the thing is, Slashdotters are so aware and even touchy about being exploited that you can't bullshit- when I get a chance, I take an _hour_ to type up the best statement of where I'm at on the subject. I put more effort into it than some article authors- I have _been_ a Slashdot article authors- I basically show my respect for the community by proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am listening, am part of the community, am in a two-way communication rather than just blathering at people. Sometimes I try to sneak in geek creds and screw up- I mistook "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" for "Cryptonomicon" :)

Because of paying attention to this, I can even make a post that says "BUY MY ALBUM!" all over it in boldface all caps as an intentional parody of desperate hype- because the post _was_ a plea for help getting more respect and credibility for indie mp3-reliant artists, and thus it was on topic. (Yes, that link is real and so is the plea- see how this works? Meta-hype, but honestly I am not fooling about wishing people to buy my nice $5.99 CDs, but here I am talking _about_ the approaches I have to take to be certain I am not doing any variation on spamming)

And because I am willing to be part of the discussion and talk about what I've needed to do in order to take responsibility, I can finish up my comment by just saying a little about where I'm at today- in a way it is on a personal note, but the comment is not ONLY about the personal note, it is entering the discussion about 'legitimate spam' and then allowing my 'legitimate' needs/concerns to be mentioned. Those needs are as follows- BUY MY ALBUM! AHAHAHAHAHAH! *g* No, seriously... well, sure I'd like to see that happen but that's not where I put my priorities. I put giving people free downloads higher on the priority list because I am trying to prove that you _can_ succeed by applying the opensource model to music- and so, there is this specific song that I desperately want to kick ass on the mp3.com charts. That song is "Fire Dragon", which you can download directly from that link without even having to log into anything or leave the slashdot page, and it's 4.7 megs, techno with an extremely high quality production (geek cred again- I physically built equipment to get the drums equalised so that the bassdrum is heavily subsonic and the snare barks really loud :) ) and is actually in 7/4 time, sort of geek techno that is slightly too intellectually demanding for the mainstream music industry :) I'm currently downloading another mp3.com artist friend's entire page for a second time because I like his music and am trying to help him in the charts- he is corruptdata .

Exposure is life- and spam is worthy of the most horrible punishments, so somebody like me has a lot of work to do in order to promote. Basically I have to _be_ part of the community and be actively a part of the discussion while still trying to stand up for the things I do that I am passionate about and desperately want to tell people about :) it can feel like revolution, this being-a-mp3-artist, what with the incredible forces trying to destroy my best hope of distribution for my ART. What if they get mp3s themselves banned or made illegal somewhere? That would be restraint of trade against me, and nobody really considers that! So I keep trying to push it, trying to do this 'popularity', 'promotion' thing _knowing_ that if I manage to get that 5 minutes of fame, I will have a lot to say about the RIAA and the industry and lots of links to raise people's awareness about the abuses of the industry, and that not every mp3-using musician will be so motivated to make such statements.

And at the same time I work just as hard to avoid even the appearance of spam, and have put a lot of effort into trying to educate other net-musicians about why spam is bad and why it makes you vulnerable to losing your account clicky clicky ;) So it's not so much a 'balance' in the sense of 'doing the right amount of spam': it's a question of finding out "When is promotion NOT spam?", realising the answer is "When it is part of a desirable dialogue", and taking the EFFORT, far more effort than it takes to talk and not listen, to be in such a dialogue and include the things that I care so much about, instead of spamming them.

I could have posted just URLS to my stuff here and it would have taken a lot less time, and still to some extent met _my_ needs- but that to my mind would have been spam, because I would not have been listening or being part of the discussion at all. Maybe the fact that I put promo links alone will make some people feel this is still spam- I don't know. I only know that this post of mine is the best analysis I can do of what is spam and what is legitimate- and to me, it's all about whether the communication is two-way. I'll of course be reading all the followups if any, because I _do_ read Slashdot, it's not a pose or drive-by spamming of mp3 links. I think that's key- if every spammer took half an hour to talk with you about what _you_ were talking about and open a dialogue in which they could also mention their wares- there would be no spammers.

Because what defines a spammer, in some way, is that they completely are not interested in YOU at all and are not listening at all and are entering no sort of dialogue at all. In a way, though I tolerate the ones who spend their _own_ money to do that (like flyer-printers, postal mail promo), even those are not the wave of the future, because it is meaningless- you can't distinguish yourself from anybody else that way, and there's so much noise that it all becomes meaningless. That is not only pollution, it is also _useless_...

I really hope I do better than that. Slashdotters know me, periodically get tired of me ranting about mp3 and moderate me down to make me shut up for a bit, they can get my personal email and look at my user page and go to airwindows.com and download all the XPMs and tiles they want to prove that I make stuff for Linux- or look at the GPLed software I wrote to prove that I am a free software author (if not a good one :) ) and basically, I don't need to work too hard to seem like not an intruder. I "live here" as much as any slashdot reader.

So if people like the idea of that kind of community or _want_ to have one of their own kicking ass on mp3.com and giving press conferences slamming hell out of the abuses of the RIAA and the industry- they can stop buying Metallica CDs for a minute, and come up with $5.99 to buy one of my albums or simply take some of their time to download my latest song. You wouldn't believe how helpful that can be- even a mere download, like what you would do on Napster that arguably hurts an artist, is a huge help to an independent mp3.com artist, and even if the album is only $5.99 I see more from it than the major label artists get per album (I get half) and the system for making them is really cool! You get the CD in like two-three days- it's completely press-to-order, they are geared to printing one copy of a CD and its cover to order, something that was never technically possible before! Plus I do cool covers ;) so really, you have no idea just how helpful this support would be _and_ it's damn competitive with major label ripoff! :)

Whoa, got a little enthusiastic there ;) I'll stop before I go farther offtopic. The topic _is_ 'spam vs. promotion'. I think I just got carried away in the direction of promotion... if I only talked about that it _would_ be sort of 'essence of spam'. Thankfully, mostly I didn't :)

And of course I never spam- I am incredibly hesitant to even use email to try to set up a relationship with a person related to what I'm doing with music or sound engineering. I wrote CmdrTaco- once- asking if he wanted me to record some special Geeks In Space music and sounds to _give_ him in hopes I might get a mention. Never heard back, never tried again- I'm deathly afraid of being thought of as spamming.

Yet you HAVE to market- you HAVE to network, or you're dead- and my awareness of how bad spam is tends to have a profound effect on the way I network. It's like it is forcing me to evolve laborious ways of dealing with it- ways that might be the only good ways of coping with needing to market in a world where connectivity is so vast that 'spam' can mean almost anything.

You, reading this (whoever you are) did not 'ask' to hear from me. Nobody solicited my comment on the slashdot comments page. Yet, the purpose of the thing is for me to cover Natalie Portman with hot gr^H^H^H^H^H^H to make insightful comments ;)

As such, I find that I wait eagerly, hoping to see mp3 related Slashdot articles- because when there is one, I become relevant to the discussion, and I'm telling you, Slashdot is a powerful resource- anybody would want to have their product or service 'slashdotted' (even a free one) but the thing is, Slashdotters are so aware and even touchy about being exploited that you can't bullshit- when I get a chance, I take an _hour_ to type up the best statement of where I'm at on the subject. I put more effort into it than some article authors- I have _been_ a Slashdot article authors- I basically show my respect for the community by proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am listening, am part of the community, am in a two-way communication rather than just blathering at people. Sometimes I try to sneak in geek creds and screw up- I mistook "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" for "Cryptonomicon" :)

Because of paying attention to this, I can even make a post that says "BUY MY ALBUM!" all over it in boldface all caps as an intentional parody of desperate hype- because the post _was_ a plea for help getting more respect and credibility for indie mp3-reliant artists, and thus it was on topic. (Yes, that link is real and so is the plea- see how this works? Meta-hype, but honestly I am not fooling about wishing people to buy my nice $5.99 CDs, but here I am talking _about_ the approaches I have to take to be certain I am not doing any variation on spamming)

And because I am willing to be part of the discussion and talk about what I've needed to do in order to take responsibility, I can finish up my comment by just saying a little about where I'm at today- in a way it is on a personal note, but the comment is not ONLY about the personal note, it is entering the discussion about 'legitimate spam' and then allowing my 'legitimate' needs/concerns to be mentioned. Those needs are as follows- BUY MY ALBUM! AHAHAHAHAHAH! *g* No, seriously... well, sure I'd like to see that happen but that's not where I put my priorities. I put giving people free downloads higher on the priority list because I am trying to prove that you _can_ succeed by applying the opensource model to music- and so, there is this specific song that I desperately want to kick ass on the mp3.com charts. That song is "Fire Dragon", which you can download directly from that link without even having to log into anything or leave the slashdot page, and it's 4.7 megs, techno with an extremely high quality production (geek cred again- I physically built equipment to get the drums equalised so that the bassdrum is heavily subsonic and the snare barks really loud :) ) and is actually in 7/4 time, sort of geek techno that is slightly too intellectually demanding for the mainstream music industry :) I'm currently downloading another mp3.com artist friend's entire page for a second time because I like his music and am trying to help him in the charts- he is corruptdata .

Exposure is life- and spam is worthy of the most horrible punishments, so somebody like me has a lot of work to do in order to promote. Basically I have to _be_ part of the community and be actively a part of the discussion while still trying to stand up for the things I do that I am passionate about and desperately want to tell people about :) it can feel like revolution, this being-a-mp3-artist, what with the incredible forces trying to destroy my best hope of distribution for my ART. What if they get mp3s themselves banned or made illegal somewhere? That would be restraint of trade against me, and nobody really considers that! So I keep trying to push it, trying to do this 'popularity', 'promotion' thing _knowing_ that if I manage to get that 5 minutes of fame, I will have a lot to say about the RIAA and the industry and lots of links to raise people's awareness about the abuses of the industry, and that not every mp3-using musician will be so motivated to make such statements.

And at the same time I work just as hard to avoid even the appearance of spam, and have put a lot of effort into trying to educate other net-musicians about why spam is bad and why it makes you vulnerable to losing your account clicky clicky ;) So it's not so much a 'balance' in the sense of 'doing the right amount of spam': it's a question of finding out "When is promotion NOT spam?", realising the answer is "When it is part of a desirable dialogue", and taking the EFFORT, far more effort than it takes to talk and not listen, to be in such a dialogue and include the things that I care so much about, instead of spamming them.

I could have posted just URLS to my stuff here and it would have taken a lot less time, and still to some extent met _my_ needs- but that to my mind would have been spam, because I would not have been listening or being part of the discussion at all. Maybe the fact that I put promo links alone will make some people feel this is still spam- I don't know. I only know that this post of mine is the best analysis I can do of what is spam and what is legitimate- and to me, it's all about whether the communication is two-way. I'll of course be reading all the followups if any, because I _do_ read Slashdot, it's not a pose or drive-by spamming of mp3 links. I think that's key- if every spammer took half an hour to talk with you about what _you_ were talking about and open a dialogue in which they could also mention their wares- there would be no spammers.

Because what defines a spammer, in some way, is that they completely are not interested in YOU at all and are not listening at all and are entering no sort of dialogue at all. In a way, though I tolerate the ones who spend their _own_ money to do that (like flyer-printers, postal mail promo), even those are not the wave of the future, because it is meaningless- you can't distinguish yourself from anybody else that way, and there's so much noise that it all becomes meaningless. That is not only pollution, it is also _useless_...

I really hope I do better than that. Slashdotters know me, periodically get tired of me ranting about mp3 and moderate me down to make me shut up for a bit, they can get my personal email and look at my user page and go to airwindows.com and download all the XPMs and tiles they want to prove that I make stuff for Linux- or look at the GPLed software I wrote to prove that I am a free software author (if not a good one :) ) and basically, I don't need to work too hard to seem like not an intruder. I "live here" as much as any slashdot reader.

So if people like the idea of that kind of community or _want_ to have one of their own kicking ass on mp3.com and giving press conferences slamming hell out of the abuses of the RIAA and the industry- they can stop buying Metallica CDs for a minute, and come up with $5.99 to buy one of my albums or simply take some of their time to download my latest song. You wouldn't believe how helpful that can be- even a mere download, like what you would do on Napster that arguably hurts an artist, is a huge help to an independent mp3.com artist, and even if the album is only $5.99 I see more from it than the major label artists get per album (I get half) and the system for making them is really cool! You get the CD in like two-three days- it's completely press-to-order, they are geared to printing one copy of a CD and its cover to order, something that was never technically possible before! Plus I do cool covers ;) so really, you have no idea just how helpful this support would be _and_ it's damn competitive with major label ripoff! :)

Whoa, got a little enthusiastic there ;) I'll stop before I go farther offtopic. The topic _is_ 'spam vs. promotion'. I think I just got carried away in the direction of promotion... if I only talked about that it _would_ be sort of 'essence of spam'. Thankfully, mostly I didn't :)

And of course I never spam- I am incredibly hesitant to even use email to try to set up a relationship with a person related to what I'm doing with music or sound engineering. I wrote CmdrTaco- once- asking if he wanted me to record some special Geeks In Space music and sounds to _give_ him in hopes I might get a mention. Never heard back, never tried again- I'm deathly afraid of being thought of as spamming.

Yet you HAVE to market- you HAVE to network, or you're dead- and my awareness of how bad spam is tends to have a profound effect on the way I network. It's like it is forcing me to evolve laborious ways of dealing with it- ways that might be the only good ways of coping with needing to market in a world where connectivity is so vast that 'spam' can mean almost anything.

You, reading this (whoever you are) did not 'ask' to hear from me. Nobody solicited my comment on the slashdot comments page. Yet, the purpose of the thing is for me to cover Natalie Portman with hot gr^H^H^H^H^H^H to make insightful comments ;)

As such, I find that I wait eagerly, hoping to see mp3 related Slashdot articles- because when there is one, I become relevant to the discussion, and I'm telling you, Slashdot is a powerful resource- anybody would want to have their product or service 'slashdotted' (even a free one) but the thing is, Slashdotters are so aware and even touchy about being exploited that you can't bullshit- when I get a chance, I take an _hour_ to type up the best statement of where I'm at on the subject. I put more effort into it than some article authors- I have _been_ a Slashdot article authors- I basically show my respect for the community by proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am listening, am part of the community, am in a two-way communication rather than just blathering at people. Sometimes I try to sneak in geek creds and screw up- I mistook "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" for "Cryptonomicon" :)

Because of paying attention to this, I can even make a post that says "BUY MY ALBUM!" all over it in boldface all caps as an intentional parody of desperate hype- because the post _was_ a plea for help getting more respect and credibility for indie mp3-reliant artists, and thus it was on topic. (Yes, that link is real and so is the plea- see how this works? Meta-hype, but honestly I am not fooling about wishing people to buy my nice $5.99 CDs, but here I am talking _about_ the approaches I have to take to be certain I am not doing any variation on spamming)

And because I am willing to be part of the discussion and talk about what I've needed to do in order to take responsibility, I can finish up my comment by just saying a little about where I'm at today- in a way it is on a personal note, but the comment is not ONLY about the personal note, it is entering the discussion about 'legitimate spam' and then allowing my 'legitimate' needs/concerns to be mentioned. Those needs are as follows- BUY MY ALBUM! AHAHAHAHAHAH! *g* No, seriously... well, sure I'd like to see that happen but that's not where I put my priorities. I put giving people free downloads higher on the priority list because I am trying to prove that you _can_ succeed by applying the opensource model to music- and so, there is this specific song that I desperately want to kick ass on the mp3.com charts. That song is "Fire Dragon", which you can download directly from that link without even having to log into anything or leave the slashdot page, and it's 4.7 megs, techno with an extremely high quality production (geek cred again- I physically built equipment to get the drums equalised so that the bassdrum is heavily subsonic and the snare barks really loud :) ) and is actually in 7/4 time, sort of geek techno that is slightly too intellectually demanding for the mainstream music industry :) I'm currently downloading another mp3.com artist friend's entire page for a second time because I like his music and am trying to help him in the charts- he is corruptdata .

Exposure is life- and spam is worthy of the most horrible punishments, so somebody like me has a lot of work to do in order to promote. Basically I have to _be_ part of the community and be actively a part of the discussion while still trying to stand up for the things I do that I am passionate about and desperately want to tell people about :) it can feel like revolution, this being-a-mp3-artist, what with the incredible forces trying to destroy my best hope of distribution for my ART. What if they get mp3s themselves banned or made illegal somewhere? That would be restraint of trade against me, and nobody really considers that! So I keep trying to push it, trying to do this 'popularity', 'promotion' thing _knowing_ that if I manage to get that 5 minutes of fame, I will have a lot to say about the RIAA and the industry and lots of links to raise people's awareness about the abuses of the industry, and that not every mp3-using musician will be so motivated to make such statements.

And at the same time I work just as hard to avoid even the appearance of spam, and have put a lot of effort into trying to educate other net-musicians about why spam is bad and why it makes you vulnerable to losing your account clicky clicky ;) So it's not so much a 'balance' in the sense of 'doing the right amount of spam': it's a question of finding out "When is promotion NOT spam?", realising the answer is "When it is part of a desirable dialogue", and taking the EFFORT, far more effort than it takes to talk and not listen, to be in such a dialogue and include the things that I care so much about, instead of spamming them.

I could have posted just URLS to my stuff here and it would have taken a lot less time, and still to some extent met _my_ needs- but that to my mind would have been spam, because I would not have been listening or being part of the discussion at all. Maybe the fact that I put promo links alone will make some people feel this is still spam- I don't know. I only know that this post of mine is the best analysis I can do of what is spam and what is legitimate- and to me, it's all about whether the communication is two-way. I'll of course be reading all the followups if any, because I _do_ read Slashdot, it's not a pose or drive-by spamming of mp3 links. I think that's key- if every spammer took half an hour to talk with you about what _you_ were talking about and open a dialogue in which they could also mention their wares- there would be no spammers.

Because what defines a spammer, in some way, is that they completely are not interested in YOU at all and are not listening at all and are entering no sort of dialogue at all. In a way, though I tolerate the ones who spend their _own_ money to do that (like flyer-printers, postal mail promo), even those are not the wave of the future, because it is meaningless- you can't distinguish yourself from anybody else that way, and there's so much noise that it all becomes meaningless. That is not only pollution, it is also _useless_...

I really hope I do better than that. Slashdotters know me, periodically get tired of me ranting about mp3 and moderate me down to make me shut up for a bit, they can get my personal email and look at my user page and go to airwindows.com and download all the XPMs and tiles they want to prove that I make stuff for Linux- or look at the GPLed software I wrote to prove that I am a free software author (if not a good one :) ) and basically, I don't need to work too hard to seem like not an intruder. I "live here" as much as any slashdot reader.

So if people like the idea of that kind of community or _want_ to have one of their own kicking ass on mp3.com and giving press conferences slamming hell out of the abuses of the RIAA and the industry- they can stop buying Metallica CDs for a minute, and come up with $5.99 to buy one of my albums or simply take some of their time to download my latest song. You wouldn't believe how helpful that can be- even a mere download, like what you would do on Napster that arguably hurts an artist, is a huge help to an independent mp3.com artist, and even if the album is only $5.99 I see more from it than the major label artists get per album (I get half) and the system for making them is really cool! You get the CD in like two-three days- it's completely press-to-order, they are geared to printing one copy of a CD and its cover to order, something that was never technically possible before! Plus I do cool covers ;) so really, you have no idea just how helpful this support would be _and_ it's damn competitive with major label ripoff! :)

Whoa, got a little enthusiastic there ;) I'll stop before I go farther offtopic. The topic _is_ 'spam vs. promotion'. I think I just got carried away in the direction of promotion... if I only talked about that it _would_ be sort of 'essence of spam'. Thankfully, mostly I didn't :)

And of course I never spam- I am incredibly hesitant to even use email to try to set up a relationship with a person related to what I'm doing with music or sound engineering. I wrote CmdrTaco- once- asking if he wanted me to record some special Geeks In Space music and sounds to _give_ him in hopes I might get a mention. Never heard back, never tried again- I'm deathly afraid of being thought of as spamming.

Yet you HAVE to market- you HAVE to network, or you're dead- and my awareness of how bad spam is tends to have a profound effect on the way I network. It's like it is forcing me to evolve laborious ways of dealing with it- ways that might be the only good ways of coping with needing to market in a world where connectivity is so vast that 'spam' can mean almost anything.

You, reading this (whoever you are) did not 'ask' to hear from me. Nobody solicited my comment on the slashdot comments page. Yet, the purpose of the thing is for me to cover Natalie Portman with hot gr^H^H^H^H^H^H to make insightful comments ;)

As such, I find that I wait eagerly, hoping to see mp3 related Slashdot articles- because when there is one, I become relevant to the discussion, and I'm telling you, Slashdot is a powerful resource- anybody would want to have their product or service 'slashdotted' (even a free one) but the thing is, Slashdotters are so aware and even touchy about being exploited that you can't bullshit- when I get a chance, I take an _hour_ to type up the best statement of where I'm at on the subject. I put more effort into it than some article authors- I have _been_ a Slashdot article authors- I basically show my respect for the community by proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am listening, am part of the community, am in a two-way communication rather than just blathering at people. Sometimes I try to sneak in geek creds and screw up- I mistook "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" for "Cryptonomicon" :)

Because of paying attention to this, I can even make a post that says "BUY MY ALBUM!" all over it in boldface all caps as an intentional parody of desperate hype- because the post _was_ a plea for help getting more respect and credibility for indie mp3-reliant artists, and thus it was on topic. (Yes, that link is real and so is the plea- see how this works? Meta-hype, but honestly I am not fooling about wishing people to buy my nice $5.99 CDs, but here I am talking _about_ the approaches I have to take to be certain I am not doing any variation on spamming)

And because I am willing to be part of the discussion and talk about what I've needed to do in order to take responsibility, I can finish up my comment by just saying a little about where I'm at today- in a way it is on a personal note, but the comment is not ONLY about the personal note, it is entering the discussion about 'legitimate spam' and then allowing my 'legitimate' needs/concerns to be mentioned. Those needs are as follows- BUY MY ALBUM! AHAHAHAHAHAH! *g* No, seriously... well, sure I'd like to see that happen but that's not where I put my priorities. I put giving people free downloads higher on the priority list because I am trying to prove that you _can_ succeed by applying the opensource model to music- and so, there is this specific song that I desperately want to kick ass on the mp3.com charts. That song is "Fire Dragon", which you can download directly from that link without even having to log into anything or leave the slashdot page, and it's 4.7 megs, techno with an extremely high quality production (geek cred again- I physically built equipment to get the drums equalised so that the bassdrum is heavily subsonic and the snare barks really loud :) ) and is actually in 7/4 time, sort of geek techno that is slightly too intellectually demanding for the mainstream music industry :) I'm currently downloading another mp3.com artist friend's entire page for a second time because I like his music and am trying to help him in the charts- he is corruptdata .

Exposure is life- and spam is worthy of the most horrible punishments, so somebody like me has a lot of work to do in order to promote. Basically I have to _be_ part of the community and be actively a part of the discussion while still trying to stand up for the things I do that I am passionate about and desperately want to tell people about :) it can feel like revolution, this being-a-mp3-artist, what with the incredible forces trying to destroy my best hope of distribution for my ART. What if they get mp3s themselves banned or made illegal somewhere? That would be restraint of trade against me, and nobody really considers that! So I keep trying to push it, trying to do this 'popularity', 'promotion' thing _knowing_ that if I manage to get that 5 minutes of fame, I will have a lot to say about the RIAA and the industry and lots of links to raise people's awareness about the abuses of the industry, and that not every mp3-using musician will be so motivated to make such statements.

And at the same time I work just as hard to avoid even the appearance of spam, and have put a lot of effort into trying to educate other net-musicians about why spam is bad and why it makes you vulnerable to losing your account clicky clicky ;) So it's not so much a 'balance' in the sense of 'doing the right amount of spam': it's a question of finding out "When is promotion NOT spam?", realising the answer is "When it is part of a desirable dialogue", and taking the EFFORT, far more effort than it takes to talk and not listen, to be in such a dialogue and include the things that I care so much about, instead of spamming them.

I could have posted just URLS to my stuff here and it would have taken a lot less time, and still to some extent met _my_ needs- but that to my mind would have been spam, because I would not have been listening or being part of the discussion at all. Maybe the fact that I put promo links alone will make some people feel this is still spam- I don't know. I only know that this post of mine is the best analysis I can do of what is spam and what is legitimate- and to me, it's all about whether the communication is two-way. I'll of course be reading all the followups if any, because I _do_ read Slashdot, it's not a pose or drive-by spamming of mp3 links. I think that's key- if every spammer took half an hour to talk with you about what _you_ were talking about and open a dialogue in which they could also mention their wares- there would be no spammers.

Because what defines a spammer, in some way, is that they completely are not interested in YOU at all and are not listening at all and are entering no sort of dialogue at all. In a way, though I tolerate the ones who spend their _own_ money to do that (like flyer-printers, postal mail promo), even those are not the wave of the future, because it is meaningless- you can't distinguish yourself from anybody else that way, and there's so much noise that it all becomes meaningless. That is not only pollution, it is also _useless_...

I really hope I do better than that. Slashdotters know me, periodically get tired of me ranting about mp3 and moderate me down to make me shut up for a bit, they can get my personal email and look at my user page and go to airwindows.com and download all the XPMs and tiles they want to prove that I make stuff for Linux- or look at the GPLed software I wrote to prove that I am a free software author (if not a good one :) ) and basically, I don't need to work too hard to seem like not an intruder. I "live here" as much as any slashdot reader.

So if people like the idea of that kind of community or _want_ to have one of their own kicking ass on mp3.com and giving press conferences slamming hell out of the abuses of the RIAA and the industry- they can stop buying Metallica CDs for a minute, and come up with $5.99 to buy one of my albums or simply take some of their time to download my latest song. You wouldn't believe how helpful that can be- even a mere download, like what you would do on Napster that arguably hurts an artist, is a huge help to an independent mp3.com artist, and even if the album is only $5.99 I see more from it than the major label artists get per album (I get half) and the system for making them is really cool! You get the CD in like two-three days- it's completely press-to-order, they are geared to printing one copy of a CD and its cover to order, something that was never technically possible before! Plus I do cool covers ;) so really, you have no idea just how helpful this support would be _and_ it's damn competitive with major label ripoff! :)

Whoa, got a little enthusiastic there ;) I'll stop before I go farther offtopic. The topic _is_ 'spam vs. promotion'. I think I just got carried away in the direction of promotion... if I only talked about that it _would_ be sort of 'essence of spam'. Thankfully, mostly I didn't :)

These are very nice sentiments. Now- please allow _me_ to give you a copy of my latest track ("Fire Dragon", a neat innovative techno piece in 7/4 time with loads of attitude). OK? It's tempting to throw every link I can at you, because of the enthusiasm you show for supporting people like me- if you want them I posted the "Screw Lars- pay us!" post above this one- but it goes both ways. I want to let you have this music (so new it didn't exist at all yesterday- the net is cool, instant distribution, you get my music _as_ it's being produced instead of waiting on the machine to digest it), and I want you to have this free as MY gift to you. You can't even pay for it yet, don't try! The CD isn't done! So I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you enjoy it all the more knowing the artist is personally giving it to you in appreciation of your great supportive attitude :) (this goes for anyone being supportive- giving money to 'paylars.com' is _not_ a requirement tho :) why not just give the money to _non_ majorlabel artists?)

What about the rest of us?

There's this assumption that only major label acts count, that the rest of us are geeky guitar player or ReBirth-diddling dirtbags who don't _deserve_ to be popular. This, in the face of legis lation that rapes musician's interests even worse than usual- now musicians will be pressured into contracts that sign away their music FOREVER to the label. Is that fair? Is that right? If Metallica are part of that system do they deserve sympathy? Certainly. Do they deserve for people to support it just because Metallica are associated with it? Well....

Meanwhile, I for one am feeling much like the Linux camp in "Cryptonomicon"- the guys with the free tanks that get 60 mpg and go 120 mph with air conditioning and cruise control and fuzzy dice. I go "Please, download my music! I've been playing and composing for more than fifteen years and my heart and soul is in the work, plus I build my own equipment and share my information and ideas freely with others and offer to help people get samples off my tapes if they want any!" and then what?

I'll tell you what- then I post in Slashdot threads, because I love Slashdot and this musician is user #580... there are lots of musicians who read Slashdot. There are lots of _listeners_ who read Slashdot. Yet, I won't bother even asking if I can get a feature on the way I am trying to bring free-software principles into music, because it'd be 'promotion'- but Lars Ulrich GETS THE FEATURE on Slashdot, and the 'Pay Lars' site GETS the hits- why? Because they are 'newsworthy'! Because they are MAINSTREAM and joking about how some website wants to pay them is considered more important than my sweat and blood and heart and soul. It's a question of numbers. How are you going to stop the mainstream industry from smothering you if you just feed it every chance you get? Even bad attention is attention!

TO HELL WITH THAT. I may not be able to get a Slashdot feature- I _wrote_ a Slashdot feature and am friendly with roblimo, but I am just too close to this one- maybe the mainstream media still makes a sick joke of journalistic objectivity but _I_ take it seriously enough that I won't try to 'sneak in' promotion in the guise of an article, even a good passionate persuasive one. Somebody should write that article, though. How many Slashdot articles have given hits to Metallica, the RIAA and their supporters, and how many have supported the musical equivalent of free software and Linux- the artists out there trying to use mp3 for good, inventing a whole new marketplace dynamic based on what free _software_ has taught us? Are we to be totally ignored, do you _really_ want to just only support the major labels here?

And meanwhile- heck with being shy, Metallica is not shy, the RIAA are not shy, and I for one am getting steamrollered. BUY MY ALBUM . Yes, I know that every song on it (actually I have _five_ albums up at mp3.com) is downloadable at no cost- I'm doing that on purpose, dammit! It's important to me that I give freely- I also share my production tips and technical tricks with musicians on the mp3.com boards quite freely. BUY MY ALBUM anyway. There are several to choose from, my favorite is 'anima' a set of rock instrumentals based on animal themes, some are really damn good music. You can hear them all you want, totally free, with my blessing- download them from that page and there's no strings attached and I'm not _forcing_ you to do anything. I'm asking, like someone who has just seen yet another Metallica publicity-boosting article even here on Slashdot where I go to get away from that crap, to BUY MY ALBUM . The Metallica is what, $14? $17? MY ALBUMS are all $5.99- if they'd let me set the price lower, I would! And I'm _still_ getting 50% of that, more per album than Metallica will ever see. Buy the damn things! Argh! *g*

Not only that, if you go here like I am piteously begging you to do- you can download, again free with my total blessing, the first track on another killer album I'm putting together- a groundbreaking techno album so new I don't even have a cover for it or a CD of it yet! The sound rivals or kicks the ass of any major label release in this genre, especially bass-wise, and the music is TOO INNOVATIVE for the labels to cope with- the whole album is techno in unusual time signatures! "Fire Dragon" , the first track to be created (not 'released'- when I do 'em you get 'em that day!) is in 7/4 time! It still dances, but this stuff is too innovative for anything but FREE MUSIC as we indie artists are doing it. You'll never see anything this fresh on a major label! They're even kicking Clive Davis out of Arista so they can get safer and more corporate!

You can even get "Fire Dragon" direct from here and not even visit the page- here is a link to download the mp3 file without even leaving Slashdot. It's only 4.7 megs, even if you're not into fierce innovative techno please give me just the seconds or minutes to download the song anyhow? You might like it, and as an indie musician I really could use the support. :)

And _while_ I'm at it, I want to mention some really nice people- a sort of coalition of artists (of which I'm one) gathering together to try and promote their work in the face of this horrible indifference and in spite of how much more power the major labels have- Liquid Dreams Records . I am just one of _lots_ of neat independent bands working together on this, and we deserve the page-visit and listen! Trust me that there's a lot of wonderful stuff... one of my favorites was corruptdata , who does neat fierce electronica that I kept listening to over and over and over :) please, go hunt down the free indie artists and talk about us and support us! Do you _want_ to be listening to nothing but re-releases of Metallica for the rest of your lives? (besides which, depending on their contract they might not even own their music at all)

They said "I ain't gonna play Sun City"- now it's time to say "I ain't gonna waste my time talking about major labels!" To hell with 'em! Please help us real artists- and not 'help us to get signed' either, hell with that, it's too horribly corrupt, help us establish a new industry, one that is decentralised like Linux! Because you know what?

WE OWN OUR MUSIC. We are _allowed_ to use mp3. And we're doing just that- HELP us.

-chris

What about the rest of us?

There's this assumption that only major label acts count, that the rest of us are geeky guitar player or ReBirth-diddling dirtbags who don't _deserve_ to be popular. This, in the face of legis lation that rapes musician's interests even worse than usual- now musicians will be pressured into contracts that sign away their music FOREVER to the label. Is that fair? Is that right? If Metallica are part of that system do they deserve sympathy? Certainly. Do they deserve for people to support it just because Metallica are associated with it? Well....

Meanwhile, I for one am feeling much like the Linux camp in "Cryptonomicon"- the guys with the free tanks that get 60 mpg and go 120 mph with air conditioning and cruise control and fuzzy dice. I go "Please, download my music! I've been playing and composing for more than fifteen years and my heart and soul is in the work, plus I build my own equipment and share my information and ideas freely with others and offer to help people get samples off my tapes if they want any!" and then what?

I'll tell you what- then I post in Slashdot threads, because I love Slashdot and this musician is user #580... there are lots of musicians who read Slashdot. There are lots of _listeners_ who read Slashdot. Yet, I won't bother even asking if I can get a feature on the way I am trying to bring free-software principles into music, because it'd be 'promotion'- but Lars Ulrich GETS THE FEATURE on Slashdot, and the 'Pay Lars' site GETS the hits- why? Because they are 'newsworthy'! Because they are MAINSTREAM and joking about how some website wants to pay them is considered more important than my sweat and blood and heart and soul. It's a question of numbers. How are you going to stop the mainstream industry from smothering you if you just feed it every chance you get? Even bad attention is attention!

TO HELL WITH THAT. I may not be able to get a Slashdot feature- I _wrote_ a Slashdot feature and am friendly with roblimo, but I am just too close to this one- maybe the mainstream media still makes a sick joke of journalistic objectivity but _I_ take it seriously enough that I won't try to 'sneak in' promotion in the guise of an article, even a good passionate persuasive one. Somebody should write that article, though. How many Slashdot articles have given hits to Metallica, the RIAA and their supporters, and how many have supported the musical equivalent of free software and Linux- the artists out there trying to use mp3 for good, inventing a whole new marketplace dynamic based on what free _software_ has taught us? Are we to be totally ignored, do you _really_ want to just only support the major labels here?

And meanwhile- heck with being shy, Metallica is not shy, the RIAA are not shy, and I for one am getting steamrollered. BUY MY ALBUM . Yes, I know that every song on it (actually I have _five_ albums up at mp3.com) is downloadable at no cost- I'm doing that on purpose, dammit! It's important to me that I give freely- I also share my production tips and technical tricks with musicians on the mp3.com boards quite freely. BUY MY ALBUM anyway. There are several to choose from, my favorite is 'anima' a set of rock instrumentals based on animal themes, some are really damn good music. You can hear them all you want, totally free, with my blessing- download them from that page and there's no strings attached and I'm not _forcing_ you to do anything. I'm asking, like someone who has just seen yet another Metallica publicity-boosting article even here on Slashdot where I go to get away from that crap, to BUY MY ALBUM . The Metallica is what, $14? $17? MY ALBUMS are all $5.99- if they'd let me set the price lower, I would! And I'm _still_ getting 50% of that, more per album than Metallica will ever see. Buy the damn things! Argh! *g*

Not only that, if you go here like I am piteously begging you to do- you can download, again free with my total blessing, the first track on another killer album I'm putting together- a groundbreaking techno album so new I don't even have a cover for it or a CD of it yet! The sound rivals or kicks the ass of any major label release in this genre, especially bass-wise, and the music is TOO INNOVATIVE for the labels to cope with- the whole album is techno in unusual time signatures! "Fire Dragon" , the first track to be created (not 'released'- when I do 'em you get 'em that day!) is in 7/4 time! It still dances, but this stuff is too innovative for anything but FREE MUSIC as we indie artists are doing it. You'll never see anything this fresh on a major label! They're even kicking Clive Davis out of Arista so they can get safer and more corporate!

You can even get "Fire Dragon" direct from here and not even visit the page- here is a link to download the mp3 file without even leaving Slashdot. It's only 4.7 megs, even if you're not into fierce innovative techno please give me just the seconds or minutes to download the song anyhow? You might like it, and as an indie musician I really could use the support. :)

And _while_ I'm at it, I want to mention some really nice people- a sort of coalition of artists (of which I'm one) gathering together to try and promote their work in the face of this horrible indifference and in spite of how much more power the major labels have- Liquid Dreams Records . I am just one of _lots_ of neat independent bands working together on this, and we deserve the page-visit and listen! Trust me that there's a lot of wonderful stuff... one of my favorites was corruptdata , who does neat fierce electronica that I kept listening to over and over and over :) please, go hunt down the free indie artists and talk about us and support us! Do you _want_ to be listening to nothing but re-releases of Metallica for the rest of your lives? (besides which, depending on their contract they might not even own their music at all)

They said "I ain't gonna play Sun City"- now it's time to say "I ain't gonna waste my time talking about major labels!" To hell with 'em! Please help us real artists- and not 'help us to get signed' either, hell with that, it's too horribly corrupt, help us establish a new industry, one that is decentralised like Linux! Because you know what?

WE OWN OUR MUSIC. We are _allowed_ to use mp3. And we're doing just that- HELP us.

-chris

What about the rest of us?

There's this assumption that only major label acts count, that the rest of us are geeky guitar player or ReBirth-diddling dirtbags who don't _deserve_ to be popular. This, in the face of legis lation that rapes musician's interests even worse than usual- now musicians will be pressured into contracts that sign away their music FOREVER to the label. Is that fair? Is that right? If Metallica are part of that system do they deserve sympathy? Certainly. Do they deserve for people to support it just because Metallica are associated with it? Well....

Meanwhile, I for one am feeling much like the Linux camp in "Cryptonomicon"- the guys with the free tanks that get 60 mpg and go 120 mph with air conditioning and cruise control and fuzzy dice. I go "Please, download my music! I've been playing and composing for more than fifteen years and my heart and soul is in the work, plus I build my own equipment and share my information and ideas freely with others and offer to help people get samples off my tapes if they want any!" and then what?

I'll tell you what- then I post in Slashdot threads, because I love Slashdot and this musician is user #580... there are lots of musicians who read Slashdot. There are lots of _listeners_ who read Slashdot. Yet, I won't bother even asking if I can get a feature on the way I am trying to bring free-software principles into music, because it'd be 'promotion'- but Lars Ulrich GETS THE FEATURE on Slashdot, and the 'Pay Lars' site GETS the hits- why? Because they are 'newsworthy'! Because they are MAINSTREAM and joking about how some website wants to pay them is considered more important than my sweat and blood and heart and soul. It's a question of numbers. How are you going to stop the mainstream industry from smothering you if you just feed it every chance you get? Even bad attention is attention!

TO HELL WITH THAT. I may not be able to get a Slashdot feature- I _wrote_ a Slashdot feature and am friendly with roblimo, but I am just too close to this one- maybe the mainstream media still makes a sick joke of journalistic objectivity but _I_ take it seriously enough that I won't try to 'sneak in' promotion in the guise of an article, even a good passionate persuasive one. Somebody should write that article, though. How many Slashdot articles have given hits to Metallica, the RIAA and their supporters, and how many have supported the musical equivalent of free software and Linux- the artists out there trying to use mp3 for good, inventing a whole new marketplace dynamic based on what free _software_ has taught us? Are we to be totally ignored, do you _really_ want to just only support the major labels here?

And meanwhile- heck with being shy, Metallica is not shy, the RIAA are not shy, and I for one am getting steamrollered. BUY MY ALBUM . Yes, I know that every song on it (actually I have _five_ albums up at mp3.com) is downloadable at no cost- I'm doing that on purpose, dammit! It's important to me that I give freely- I also share my production tips and technical tricks with musicians on the mp3.com boards quite freely. BUY MY ALBUM anyway. There are several to choose from, my favorite is 'anima' a set of rock instrumentals based on animal themes, some are really damn good music. You can hear them all you want, totally free, with my blessing- download them from that page and there's no strings attached and I'm not _forcing_ you to do anything. I'm asking, like someone who has just seen yet another Metallica publicity-boosting article even here on Slashdot where I go to get away from that crap, to BUY MY ALBUM . The Metallica is what, $14? $17? MY ALBUMS are all $5.99- if they'd let me set the price lower, I would! And I'm _still_ getting 50% of that, more per album than Metallica will ever see. Buy the damn things! Argh! *g*

Not only that, if you go here like I am piteously begging you to do- you can download, again free with my total blessing, the first track on another killer album I'm putting together- a groundbreaking techno album so new I don't even have a cover for it or a CD of it yet! The sound rivals or kicks the ass of any major label release in this genre, especially bass-wise, and the music is TOO INNOVATIVE for the labels to cope with- the whole album is techno in unusual time signatures! "Fire Dragon" , the first track to be created (not 'released'- when I do 'em you get 'em that day!) is in 7/4 time! It still dances, but this stuff is too innovative for anything but FREE MUSIC as we indie artists are doing it. You'll never see anything this fresh on a major label! They're even kicking Clive Davis out of Arista so they can get safer and more corporate!

You can even get "Fire Dragon" direct from here and not even visit the page- here is a link to download the mp3 file without even leaving Slashdot. It's only 4.7 megs, even if you're not into fierce innovative techno please give me just the seconds or minutes to download the song anyhow? You might like it, and as an indie musician I really could use the support. :)

And _while_ I'm at it, I want to mention some really nice people- a sort of coalition of artists (of which I'm one) gathering together to try and promote their work in the face of this horrible indifference and in spite of how much more power the major labels have- Liquid Dreams Records . I am just one of _lots_ of neat independent bands working together on this, and we deserve the page-visit and listen! Trust me that there's a lot of wonderful stuff... one of my favorites was corruptdata , who does neat fierce electronica that I kept listening to over and over and over :) please, go hunt down the free indie artists and talk about us and support us! Do you _want_ to be listening to nothing but re-releases of Metallica for the rest of your lives? (besides which, depending on their contract they might not even own their music at all)

They said "I ain't gonna play Sun City"- now it's time to say "I ain't gonna waste my time talking about major labels!" To hell with 'em! Please help us real artists- and not 'help us to get signed' either, hell with that, it's too horribly corrupt, help us establish a new industry, one that is decentralised like Linux! Because you know what?

WE OWN OUR MUSIC. We are _allowed_ to use mp3. And we're doing just that- HELP us.

-chris

What about the rest of us?

There's this assumption that only major label acts count, that the rest of us are geeky guitar player or ReBirth-diddling dirtbags who don't _deserve_ to be popular. This, in the face of legis lation that rapes musician's interests even worse than usual- now musicians will be pressured into contracts that sign away their music FOREVER to the label. Is that fair? Is that right? If Metallica are part of that system do they deserve sympathy? Certainly. Do they deserve for people to support it just because Metallica are associated with it? Well....

Meanwhile, I for one am feeling much like the Linux camp in "Cryptonomicon"- the guys with the free tanks that get 60 mpg and go 120 mph with air conditioning and cruise control and fuzzy dice. I go "Please, download my music! I've been playing and composing for more than fifteen years and my heart and soul is in the work, plus I build my own equipment and share my information and ideas freely with others and offer to help people get samples off my tapes if they want any!" and then what?

I'll tell you what- then I post in Slashdot threads, because I love Slashdot and this musician is user #580... there are lots of musicians who read Slashdot. There are lots of _listeners_ who read Slashdot. Yet, I won't bother even asking if I can get a feature on the way I am trying to bring free-software principles into music, because it'd be 'promotion'- but Lars Ulrich GETS THE FEATURE on Slashdot, and the 'Pay Lars' site GETS the hits- why? Because they are 'newsworthy'! Because they are MAINSTREAM and joking about how some website wants to pay them is considered more important than my sweat and blood and heart and soul. It's a question of numbers. How are you going to stop the mainstream industry from smothering you if you just feed it every chance you get? Even bad attention is attention!

TO HELL WITH THAT. I may not be able to get a Slashdot feature- I _wrote_ a Slashdot feature and am friendly with roblimo, but I am just too close to this one- maybe the mainstream media still makes a sick joke of journalistic objectivity but _I_ take it seriously enough that I won't try to 'sneak in' promotion in the guise of an article, even a good passionate persuasive one. Somebody should write that article, though. How many Slashdot articles have given hits to Metallica, the RIAA and their supporters, and how many have supported the musical equivalent of free software and Linux- the artists out there trying to use mp3 for good, inventing a whole new marketplace dynamic based on what free _software_ has taught us? Are we to be totally ignored, do you _really_ want to just only support the major labels here?

And meanwhile- heck with being shy, Metallica is not shy, the RIAA are not shy, and I for one am getting steamrollered. BUY MY ALBUM . Yes, I know that every song on it (actually I have _five_ albums up at mp3.com) is downloadable at no cost- I'm doing that on purpose, dammit! It's important to me that I give freely- I also share my production tips and technical tricks with musicians on the mp3.com boards quite freely. BUY MY ALBUM anyway. There are several to choose from, my favorite is 'anima' a set of rock instrumentals based on animal themes, some are really damn good music. You can hear them all you want, totally free, with my blessing- download them from that page and there's no strings attached and I'm not _forcing_ you to do anything. I'm asking, like someone who has just seen yet another Metallica publicity-boosting article even here on Slashdot where I go to get away from that crap, to BUY MY ALBUM . The Metallica is what, $14? $17? MY ALBUMS are all $5.99- if they'd let me set the price lower, I would! And I'm _still_ getting 50% of that, more per album than Metallica will ever see. Buy the damn things! Argh! *g*

Not only that, if you go here like I am piteously begging you to do- you can download, again free with my total blessing, the first track on another killer album I'm putting together- a groundbreaking techno album so new I don't even have a cover for it or a CD of it yet! The sound rivals or kicks the ass of any major label release in this genre, especially bass-wise, and the music is TOO INNOVATIVE for the labels to cope with- the whole album is techno in unusual time signatures! "Fire Dragon" , the first track to be created (not 'released'- when I do 'em you get 'em that day!) is in 7/4 time! It still dances, but this stuff is too innovative for anything but FREE MUSIC as we indie artists are doing it. You'll never see anything this fresh on a major label! They're even kicking Clive Davis out of Arista so they can get safer and more corporate!

You can even get "Fire Dragon" direct from here and not even visit the page- here is a link to download the mp3 file without even leaving Slashdot. It's only 4.7 megs, even if you're not into fierce innovative techno please give me just the seconds or minutes to download the song anyhow? You might like it, and as an indie musician I really could use the support. :)

And _while_ I'm at it, I want to mention some really nice people- a sort of coalition of artists (of which I'm one) gathering together to try and promote their work in the face of this horrible indifference and in spite of how much more power the major labels have- Liquid Dreams Records . I am just one of _lots_ of neat independent bands working together on this, and we deserve the page-visit and listen! Trust me that there's a lot of wonderful stuff... one of my favorites was corruptdata , who does neat fierce electronica that I kept listening to over and over and over :) please, go hunt down the free indie artists and talk about us and support us! Do you _want_ to be listening to nothing but re-releases of Metallica for the rest of your lives? (besides which, depending on their contract they might not even own their music at all)

They said "I ain't gonna play Sun City"- now it's time to say "I ain't gonna waste my time talking about major labels!" To hell with 'em! Please help us real artists- and not 'help us to get signed' either, hell with that, it's too horribly corrupt, help us establish a new industry, one that is decentralised like Linux! Because you know what?

WE OWN OUR MUSIC. We are _allowed_ to use mp3. And we're doing just that- HELP us.

-chris

What about the rest of us?

There's this assumption that only major label acts count, that the rest of us are geeky guitar player or ReBirth-diddling dirtbags who don't _deserve_ to be popular. This, in the face of legis lation that rapes musician's interests even worse than usual- now musicians will be pressured into contracts that sign away their music FOREVER to the label. Is that fair? Is that right? If Metallica are part of that system do they deserve sympathy? Certainly. Do they deserve for people to support it just because Metallica are associated with it? Well....

Meanwhile, I for one am feeling much like the Linux camp in "Cryptonomicon"- the guys with the free tanks that get 60 mpg and go 120 mph with air conditioning and cruise control and fuzzy dice. I go "Please, download my music! I've been playing and composing for more than fifteen years and my heart and soul is in the work, plus I build my own equipment and share my information and ideas freely with others and offer to help people get samples off my tapes if they want any!" and then what?

I'll tell you what- then I post in Slashdot threads, because I love Slashdot and this musician is user #580... there are lots of musicians who read Slashdot. There are lots of _listeners_ who read Slashdot. Yet, I won't bother even asking if I can get a feature on the way I am trying to bring free-software principles into music, because it'd be 'promotion'- but Lars Ulrich GETS THE FEATURE on Slashdot, and the 'Pay Lars' site GETS the hits- why? Because they are 'newsworthy'! Because they are MAINSTREAM and joking about how some website wants to pay them is considered more important than my sweat and blood and heart and soul. It's a question of numbers. How are you going to stop the mainstream industry from smothering you if you just feed it every chance you get? Even bad attention is attention!

TO HELL WITH THAT. I may not be able to get a Slashdot feature- I _wrote_ a Slashdot feature and am friendly with roblimo, but I am just too close to this one- maybe the mainstream media still makes a sick joke of journalistic objectivity but _I_ take it seriously enough that I won't try to 'sneak in' promotion in the guise of an article, even a good passionate persuasive one. Somebody should write that article, though. How many Slashdot articles have given hits to Metallica, the RIAA and their supporters, and how many have supported the musical equivalent of free software and Linux- the artists out there trying to use mp3 for good, inventing a whole new marketplace dynamic based on what free _software_ has taught us? Are we to be totally ignored, do you _really_ want to just only support the major labels here?

And meanwhile- heck with being shy, Metallica is not shy, the RIAA are not shy, and I for one am getting steamrollered. BUY MY ALBUM . Yes, I know that every song on it (actually I have _five_ albums up at mp3.com) is downloadable at no cost- I'm doing that on purpose, dammit! It's important to me that I give freely- I also share my production tips and technical tricks with musicians on the mp3.com boards quite freely. BUY MY ALBUM anyway. There are several to choose from, my favorite is 'anima' a set of rock instrumentals based on animal themes, some are really damn good music. You can hear them all you want, totally free, with my blessing- download them from that page and there's no strings attached and I'm not _forcing_ you to do anything. I'm asking, like someone who has just seen yet another Metallica publicity-boosting article even here on Slashdot where I go to get away from that crap, to BUY MY ALBUM . The Metallica is what, $14? $17? MY ALBUMS are all $5.99- if they'd let me set the price lower, I would! And I'm _still_ getting 50% of that, more per album than Metallica will ever see. Buy the damn things! Argh! *g*

Not only that, if you go here like I am piteously begging you to do- you can download, again free with my total blessing, the first track on another killer album I'm putting together- a groundbreaking techno album so new I don't even have a cover for it or a CD of it yet! The sound rivals or kicks the ass of any major label release in this genre, especially bass-wise, and the music is TOO INNOVATIVE for the labels to cope with- the whole album is techno in unusual time signatures! "Fire Dragon" , the first track to be created (not 'released'- when I do 'em you get 'em that day!) is in 7/4 time! It still dances, but this stuff is too innovative for anything but FREE MUSIC as we indie artists are doing it. You'll never see anything this fresh on a major label! They're even kicking Clive Davis out of Arista so they can get safer and more corporate!

You can even get "Fire Dragon" direct from here and not even visit the page- here is a link to download the mp3 file without even leaving Slashdot. It's only 4.7 megs, even if you're not into fierce innovative techno please give me just the seconds or minutes to download the song anyhow? You might like it, and as an indie musician I really could use the support. :)

And _while_ I'm at it, I want to mention some really nice people- a sort of coalition of artists (of which I'm one) gathering together to try and promote their work in the face of this horrible indifference and in spite of how much more power the major labels have- Liquid Dreams Records . I am just one of _lots_ of neat independent bands working together on this, and we deserve the page-visit and listen! Trust me that there's a lot of wonderful stuff... one of my favorites was corruptdata , who does neat fierce electronica that I kept listening to over and over and over :) please, go hunt down the free indie artists and talk about us and support us! Do you _want_ to be listening to nothing but re-releases of Metallica for the rest of your lives? (besides which, depending on their contract they might not even own their music at all)

They said "I ain't gonna play Sun City"- now it's time to say "I ain't gonna waste my time talking about major labels!" To hell with 'em! Please help us real artists- and not 'help us to get signed' either, hell with that, it's too horribly corrupt, help us establish a new industry, one that is decentralised like Linux! Because you know what?

WE OWN OUR MUSIC. We are _allowed_ to use mp3. And we're doing just that- HELP us.

-chris

What about the rest of us?

There's this assumption that only major label acts count, that the rest of us are geeky guitar player or ReBirth-diddling dirtbags who don't _deserve_ to be popular. This, in the face of legis lation that rapes musician's interests even worse than usual- now musicians will be pressured into contracts that sign away their music FOREVER to the label. Is that fair? Is that right? If Metallica are part of that system do they deserve sympathy? Certainly. Do they deserve for people to support it just because Metallica are associated with it? Well....

Meanwhile, I for one am feeling much like the Linux camp in "Cryptonomicon"- the guys with the free tanks that get 60 mpg and go 120 mph with air conditioning and cruise control and fuzzy dice. I go "Please, download my music! I've been playing and composing for more than fifteen years and my heart and soul is in the work, plus I build my own equipment and share my information and ideas freely with others and offer to help people get samples off my tapes if they want any!" and then what?

I'll tell you what- then I post in Slashdot threads, because I love Slashdot and this musician is user #580... there are lots of musicians who read Slashdot. There are lots of _listeners_ who read Slashdot. Yet, I won't bother even asking if I can get a feature on the way I am trying to bring free-software principles into music, because it'd be 'promotion'- but Lars Ulrich GETS THE FEATURE on Slashdot, and the 'Pay Lars' site GETS the hits- why? Because they are 'newsworthy'! Because they are MAINSTREAM and joking about how some website wants to pay them is considered more important than my sweat and blood and heart and soul. It's a question of numbers. How are you going to stop the mainstream industry from smothering you if you just feed it every chance you get? Even bad attention is attention!

TO HELL WITH THAT. I may not be able to get a Slashdot feature- I _wrote_ a Slashdot feature and am friendly with roblimo, but I am just too close to this one- maybe the mainstream media still makes a sick joke of journalistic objectivity but _I_ take it seriously enough that I won't try to 'sneak in' promotion in the guise of an article, even a good passionate persuasive one. Somebody should write that article, though. How many Slashdot articles have given hits to Metallica, the RIAA and their supporters, and how many have supported the musical equivalent of free software and Linux- the artists out there trying to use mp3 for good, inventing a whole new marketplace dynamic based on what free _software_ has taught us? Are we to be totally ignored, do you _really_ want to just only support the major labels here?

And meanwhile- heck with being shy, Metallica is not shy, the RIAA are not shy, and I for one am getting steamrollered. BUY MY ALBUM . Yes, I know that every song on it (actually I have _five_ albums up at mp3.com) is downloadable at no cost- I'm doing that on purpose, dammit! It's important to me that I give freely- I also share my production tips and technical tricks with musicians on the mp3.com boards quite freely. BUY MY ALBUM anyway. There are several to choose from, my favorite is 'anima' a set of rock instrumentals based on animal themes, some are really damn good music. You can hear them all you want, totally free, with my blessing- download them from that page and there's no strings attached and I'm not _forcing_ you to do anything. I'm asking, like someone who has just seen yet another Metallica publicity-boosting article even here on Slashdot where I go to get away from that crap, to BUY MY ALBUM . The Metallica is what, $14? $17? MY ALBUMS are all $5.99- if they'd let me set the price lower, I would! And I'm _still_ getting 50% of that, more per album than Metallica will ever see. Buy the damn things! Argh! *g*

Not only that, if you go here like I am piteously begging you to do- you can download, again free with my total blessing, the first track on another killer album I'm putting together- a groundbreaking techno album so new I don't even have a cover for it or a CD of it yet! The sound rivals or kicks the ass of any major label release in this genre, especially bass-wise, and the music is TOO INNOVATIVE for the labels to cope with- the whole album is techno in unusual time signatures! "Fire Dragon" , the first track to be created (not 'released'- when I do 'em you get 'em that day!) is in 7/4 time! It still dances, but this stuff is too innovative for anything but FREE MUSIC as we indie artists are doing it. You'll never see anything this fresh on a major label! They're even kicking Clive Davis out of Arista so they can get safer and more corporate!

You can even get "Fire Dragon" direct from here and not even visit the page- here is a link to download the mp3 file without even leaving Slashdot. It's only 4.7 megs, even if you're not into fierce innovative techno please give me just the seconds or minutes to download the song anyhow? You might like it, and as an indie musician I really could use the support. :)

And _while_ I'm at it, I want to mention some really nice people- a sort of coalition of artists (of which I'm one) gathering together to try and promote their work in the face of this horrible indifference and in spite of how much more power the major labels have- Liquid Dreams Records . I am just one of _lots_ of neat independent bands working together on this, and we deserve the page-visit and listen! Trust me that there's a lot of wonderful stuff... one of my favorites was corruptdata , who does neat fierce electronica that I kept listening to over and over and over :) please, go hunt down the free indie artists and talk about us and support us! Do you _want_ to be listening to nothing but re-releases of Metallica for the rest of your lives? (besides which, depending on their contract they might not even own their music at all)

They said "I ain't gonna play Sun City"- now it's time to say "I ain't gonna waste my time talking about major labels!" To hell with 'em! Please help us real artists- and not 'help us to get signed' either, hell with that, it's too horribly corrupt, help us establish a new industry, one that is decentralised like Linux! Because you know what?

WE OWN OUR MUSIC. We are _allowed_ to use mp3. And we're doing just that- HELP us.

-chris

What about the rest of us?

There's this assumption that only major label acts count, that the rest of us are geeky guitar player or ReBirth-diddling dirtbags who don't _deserve_ to be popular. This, in the face of legis lation that rapes musician's interests even worse than usual- now musicians will be pressured into contracts that sign away their music FOREVER to the label. Is that fair? Is that right? If Metallica are part of that system do they deserve sympathy? Certainly. Do they deserve for people to support it just because Metallica are associated with it? Well....

Meanwhile, I for one am feeling much like the Linux camp in "Cryptonomicon"- the guys with the free tanks that get 60 mpg and go 120 mph with air conditioning and cruise control and fuzzy dice. I go "Please, download my music! I've been playing and composing for more than fifteen years and my heart and soul is in the work, plus I build my own equipment and share my information and ideas freely with others and offer to help people get samples off my tapes if they want any!" and then what?

I'll tell you what- then I post in Slashdot threads, because I love Slashdot and this musician is user #580... there are lots of musicians who read Slashdot. There are lots of _listeners_ who read Slashdot. Yet, I won't bother even asking if I can get a feature on the way I am trying to bring free-software principles into music, because it'd be 'promotion'- but Lars Ulrich GETS THE FEATURE on Slashdot, and the 'Pay Lars' site GETS the hits- why? Because they are 'newsworthy'! Because they are MAINSTREAM and joking about how some website wants to pay them is considered more important than my sweat and blood and heart and soul. It's a question of numbers. How are you going to stop the mainstream industry from smothering you if you just feed it every chance you get? Even bad attention is attention!

TO HELL WITH THAT. I may not be able to get a Slashdot feature- I _wrote_ a Slashdot feature and am friendly with roblimo, but I am just too close to this one- maybe the mainstream media still makes a sick joke of journalistic objectivity but _I_ take it seriously enough that I won't try to 'sneak in' promotion in the guise of an article, even a good passionate persuasive one. Somebody should write that article, though. How many Slashdot articles have given hits to Metallica, the RIAA and their supporters, and how many have supported the musical equivalent of free software and Linux- the artists out there trying to use mp3 for good, inventing a whole new marketplace dynamic based on what free _software_ has taught us? Are we to be totally ignored, do you _really_ want to just only support the major labels here?

And meanwhile- heck with being shy, Metallica is not shy, the RIAA are not shy, and I for one am getting steamrollered. BUY MY ALBUM . Yes, I know that every song on it (actually I have _five_ albums up at mp3.com) is downloadable at no cost- I'm doing that on purpose, dammit! It's important to me that I give freely- I also share my production tips and technical tricks with musicians on the mp3.com boards quite freely. BUY MY ALBUM anyway. There are several to choose from, my favorite is 'anima' a set of rock instrumentals based on animal themes, some are really damn good music. You can hear them all you want, totally free, with my blessing- download them from that page and there's no strings attached and I'm not _forcing_ you to do anything. I'm asking, like someone who has just seen yet another Metallica publicity-boosting article even here on Slashdot where I go to get away from that crap, to BUY MY ALBUM . The Metallica is what, $14? $17? MY ALBUMS are all $5.99- if they'd let me set the price lower, I would! And I'm _still_ getting 50% of that, more per album than Metallica will ever see. Buy the damn things! Argh! *g*

Not only that, if you go here like I am piteously begging you to do- you can download, again free with my total blessing, the first track on another killer album I'm putting together- a groundbreaking techno album so new I don't even have a cover for it or a CD of it yet! The sound rivals or kicks the ass of any major label release in this genre, especially bass-wise, and the music is TOO INNOVATIVE for the labels to cope with- the whole album is techno in unusual time signatures! "Fire Dragon" , the first track to be created (not 'released'- when I do 'em you get 'em that day!) is in 7/4 time! It still dances, but this stuff is too innovative for anything but FREE MUSIC as we indie artists are doing it. You'll never see anything this fresh on a major label! They're even kicking Clive Davis out of Arista so they can get safer and more corporate!

You can even get "Fire Dragon" direct from here and not even visit the page- here is a link to download the mp3 file without even leaving Slashdot. It's only 4.7 megs, even if you're not into fierce innovative techno please give me just the seconds or minutes to download the song anyhow? You might like it, and as an indie musician I really could use the support. :)

And _while_ I'm at it, I want to mention some really nice people- a sort of coalition of artists (of which I'm one) gathering together to try and promote their work in the face of this horrible indifference and in spite of how much more power the major labels have- Liquid Dreams Records . I am just one of _lots_ of neat independent bands working together on this, and we deserve the page-visit and listen! Trust me that there's a lot of wonderful stuff... one of my favorites was corruptdata , who does neat fierce electronica that I kept listening to over and over and over :) please, go hunt down the free indie artists and talk about us and support us! Do you _want_ to be listening to nothing but re-releases of Metallica for the rest of your lives? (besides which, depending on their contract they might not even own their music at all)

They said "I ain't gonna play Sun City"- now it's time to say "I ain't gonna waste my time talking about major labels!" To hell with 'em! Please help us real artists- and not 'help us to get signed' either, hell with that, it's too horribly corrupt, help us establish a new industry, one that is decentralised like Linux! Because you know what?

WE OWN OUR MUSIC. We are _allowed_ to use mp3. And we're doing just that- HELP us.

-chris

What about the rest of us?

There's this assumption that only major label acts count, that the rest of us are geeky guitar player or ReBirth-diddling dirtbags who don't _deserve_ to be popular. This, in the face of legis lation that rapes musician's interests even worse than usual- now musicians will be pressured into contracts that sign away their music FOREVER to the label. Is that fair? Is that right? If Metallica are part of that system do they deserve sympathy? Certainly. Do they deserve for people to support it just because Metallica are associated with it? Well....

Meanwhile, I for one am feeling much like the Linux camp in "Cryptonomicon"- the guys with the free tanks that get 60 mpg and go 120 mph with air conditioning and cruise control and fuzzy dice. I go "Please, download my music! I've been playing and composing for more than fifteen years and my heart and soul is in the work, plus I build my own equipment and share my information and ideas freely with others and offer to help people get samples off my tapes if they want any!" and then what?

I'll tell you what- then I post in Slashdot threads, because I love Slashdot and this musician is user #580... there are lots of musicians who read Slashdot. There are lots of _listeners_ who read Slashdot. Yet, I won't bother even asking if I can get a feature on the way I am trying to bring free-software principles into music, because it'd be 'promotion'- but Lars Ulrich GETS THE FEATURE on Slashdot, and the 'Pay Lars' site GETS the hits- why? Because they are 'newsworthy'! Because they are MAINSTREAM and joking about how some website wants to pay them is considered more important than my sweat and blood and heart and soul. It's a question of numbers. How are you going to stop the mainstream industry from smothering you if you just feed it every chance you get? Even bad attention is attention!

TO HELL WITH THAT. I may not be able to get a Slashdot feature- I _wrote_ a Slashdot feature and am friendly with roblimo, but I am just too close to this one- maybe the mainstream media still makes a sick joke of journalistic objectivity but _I_ take it seriously enough that I won't try to 'sneak in' promotion in the guise of an article, even a good passionate persuasive one. Somebody should write that article, though. How many Slashdot articles have given hits to Metallica, the RIAA and their supporters, and how many have supported the musical equivalent of free software and Linux- the artists out there trying to use mp3 for good, inventing a whole new marketplace dynamic based on what free _software_ has taught us? Are we to be totally ignored, do you _really_ want to just only support the major labels here?

And meanwhile- heck with being shy, Metallica is not shy, the RIAA are not shy, and I for one am getting steamrollered. BUY MY ALBUM . Yes, I know that every song on it (actually I have _five_ albums up at mp3.com) is downloadable at no cost- I'm doing that on purpose, dammit! It's important to me that I give freely- I also share my production tips and technical tricks with musicians on the mp3.com boards quite freely. BUY MY ALBUM anyway. There are several to choose from, my favorite is 'anima' a set of rock instrumentals based on animal themes, some are really damn good music. You can hear them all you want, totally free, with my blessing- download them from that page and there's no strings attached and I'm not _forcing_ you to do anything. I'm asking, like someone who has just seen yet another Metallica publicity-boosting article even here on Slashdot where I go to get away from that crap, to BUY MY ALBUM . The Metallica is what, $14? $17? MY ALBUMS are all $5.99- if they'd let me set the price lower, I would! And I'm _still_ getting 50% of that, more per album than Metallica will ever see. Buy the damn things! Argh! *g*

Not only that, if you go here like I am piteously begging you to do- you can download, again free with my total blessing, the first track on another killer album I'm putting together- a groundbreaking techno album so new I don't even have a cover for it or a CD of it yet! The sound rivals or kicks the ass of any major label release in this genre, especially bass-wise, and the music is TOO INNOVATIVE for the labels to cope with- the whole album is techno in unusual time signatures! "Fire Dragon" , the first track to be created (not 'released'- when I do 'em you get 'em that day!) is in 7/4 time! It still dances, but this stuff is too innovative for anything but FREE MUSIC as we indie artists are doing it. You'll never see anything this fresh on a major label! They're even kicking Clive Davis out of Arista so they can get safer and more corporate!

You can even get "Fire Dragon" direct from here and not even visit the page- here is a link to download the mp3 file without even leaving Slashdot. It's only 4.7 megs, even if you're not into fierce innovative techno please give me just the seconds or minutes to download the song anyhow? You might like it, and as an indie musician I really could use the support. :)

And _while_ I'm at it, I want to mention some really nice people- a sort of coalition of artists (of which I'm one) gathering together to try and promote their work in the face of this horrible indifference and in spite of how much more power the major labels have- Liquid Dreams Records . I am just one of _lots_ of neat independent bands working together on this, and we deserve the page-visit and listen! Trust me that there's a lot of wonderful stuff... one of my favorites was corruptdata , who does neat fierce electronica that I kept listening to over and over and over :) please, go hunt down the free indie artists and talk about us and support us! Do you _want_ to be listening to nothing but re-releases of Metallica for the rest of your lives? (besides which, depending on their contract they might not even own their music at all)

They said "I ain't gonna play Sun City"- now it's time to say "I ain't gonna waste my time talking about major labels!" To hell with 'em! Please help us real artists- and not 'help us to get signed' either, hell with that, it's too horribly corrupt, help us establish a new industry, one that is decentralised like Linux! Because you know what?

WE OWN OUR MUSIC. We are _allowed_ to use mp3. And we're doing just that- HELP us.

-chris

Well... do you know why my GPLed code still has the same value it had back when linux/gpl/opensource was IPO heaven? I'll tell you why- because I'm perhaps a bit strange and that concept, that the stuff I _shared_ had a speculative value, never even 'computed' for me. It's a big nil pointer for me, because to me the value of the stuff I share _is_ that sharing, is the RELATIONSHIPS I create by doing so. _that_ is where the value is and that is where Linux started and why it will always have a core value that can't be swept away...

I've built a recording studio (obHype: mp3.com/ChrisJ) and several times now, I've offered to help out CmdrTaco and the whole Geeks In Space crowd, which would be fun and not too hard for me to do. And you know, from the viewpoint of a linux-stock millionare, I can see how the help of some dude in Vermont building equipment with a soldering iron and wirestrippers might seem nice but pointless- more fun to buy your own! Bigger mixers, more tracks, etc etc etc since money flows like water!

Well- he ain't a linux stock millionare anymore. I'm not sure how many of the Slashdot people's plans are still feasible- but _I'm_ still there, offering to help. What I offered never had anything to do with money and demands nothing from Taco and company but sharing- let me help out, let's play, let's see what we can do.

Look around- there are a _lot_ of Linux things that are utterly unaffected by the crash. People trying to 'rub it in' about the obliteration of those wild valuations? It's like they're speaking a different language- and they always were. ESR may be shocked or hurt by all this, because it hits him where he lives- he always bought heavily into wanting Linux legitimised by business and valuation. Some of us always resisted this pressure to redefine the value in money and profit terms. Now maybe it'll be easier to make the point that Linux is not a phenomenon based on money.

*g* anybody considered the idea that if there _is_ another Great Depression and everybody's reduced to living off pentium IIs and such ( ;) ), they won't be able to afford The Microsoft Tax, and will _have_ to turn to Linux and proliferate it, not because it is a lottery ticket to wealth, but because it is free?

I think somebody needs to ask Metallica to review their contract. Do the words "work for hire" appear in it? Read this: http://www.livedaily.com/archive/2000/2k01/wk3/Ame ndmentToCopyrightActCo.html

Basically, it is possible that Metallica does not own its own songs- making their pleas for respect for their artistic work kind of ironic. I realise it might come as a bit of a shock to consider that record industry contracts are being changed to alter them so that, rather than the company owning your artistic creations for thirty-five years outright, the company owns your artistic creations FOREVER. That's exclusive ownership, you don't get a say. Did you know of this? Does Metallica know of this? Does Metallica have a provision in their contract stating their albums are work for hire due to the involvement of engineers and producers and such? If so, and this law-change would appear to be retroactive and apply to existing 'work-for-hire' contracts, Metallica does not own any of their music- they'd own nothing and are also probably barred from producing work other than for the company that will wholly own anything they produce. If anyone can check on this it would be very interesting...

I own my mp3.com stuff. Their contract gives them nonexclusive rights, so they also get carte blanche to do what they wish with the stuff I give them, which I'm happy with, but it does not sign over ownership of the music or the mechanical recordings to the company- which I am still more happy about. Try that with a record company contract. There is a very good chance that Metallica are goddamn slaves and don't even realise it. Ask them about their contract! But don't be too hard on them as they had damn-all chance to negotiate even a word of it, with 20 million other bands clamoring to be exploited.

I'm not at all sure there is morality to be had in defending the record companies the way things are going. The concept of civil disobedience seems more and more relevant...

"Wolf" www.mp3.com/ChrisJ

Please PUT this on Napster, if possible with a name or metadata like "Wolf (on napster by personal request of the artist Chris Johnson!)". I'm on a Mac so I can't make spammy filenames like that :) and napster doesn't actually help me at all because people downloading stuff off mp3.com directly helps me- but that doesn't matter because I want to help _Napster_. If someone could do that, or could do that with all my stuff both there and at mp3.com/RFW, that's over 170 megs of mp3s that are specifically on Napster by personal request of the artist. It may hurt my chart rankings over at mp3.com if nobody ever has to go there again ( ;) ) but I don't care. I _really_ would like to personally ask that stuff of mine be put on Napster so that I can say "Hey- I am a musician and I _want_ Napster! I _asked_ for my stuff to be there. Are you trying to cut off my avenue of distribution?" and have that be a SERIOUS ARGUMENT. Nobody has a right to cut off my avenues of LEGAL distribution just because the medium is being used for other purposes.

So _please_ would someone grab all my stuff and put it on Napster? Hell, if it helps I'll ask somebody in writing. Does anybody know if it might help for me to ask someone in writing, just to authoritatively establish that at least one working artist legally and legitimately WANTS their stuff on Napster and requested that it be there? It seems to me that could help blow a hole in the "It's just plain illegal!" concept. It's just a tool...

To some extent you're pre-supposing a scarcity of resources. One of the major points in the explosion of technology is that this scarcity isn't continuing. I can tell you that for less total money than some of you put into your PCs, I as a musician and sound engineer (www.mp3.com/ChrisJ for obligatory examples :) ) am able to produce completed work that, technically, kills a lot of stuff released by the mainstream industry throughout history, and on top of that I have access to types of tools that the engineers of the 50s and 60s and 70s would have killed for.

On top of this I have access to global distribution simply due to my using the mp3 format, which is popular and downloadable, so not even _distribution_ is an insuperable problem.

If I have access to all this for so little money, a level of production and distribution that _used_ to require not only million dollar recording studios and mastering houses but also fleets of trucks and distributors, doesn't that say something about how the rules are changing?

And if I can (through a lot of years of study and work and a certain amount of saving and buying and a lot of mad hacking of equipment) do this NOW, what does that suggest about the future prospects of indie film directors and actors and cinematographers as the technology advances to the point where essentially anything imaginable becomes 'filmable', not for billions of dollars but out of the home?

I would humbly argue that 'consumer-grade' camcorders will eventually beat Cinemascope given enough years- and I will stubbornly argue that, given a world full of people to draw on, there is going to be a _lot_ of stuff out there more interesting than backyards and dogs. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that only through media cartels can real Art be created- and... *g* well, maybe that _is_ what some people are suggesting, but my God, such a thought!

The big error, the big oversight here is the unspoken assumption that "because you make something, you can find a market for it". That's, unfortunately, bullshit... certainly both in computer software and in music, the market is distorted by bigger players who control access to distribution and promotion. This is so obvious that people don't see it, it's taken for granted that a cartel totally dictates what you can market in these industries. Yet, it presents a nasty barrier for entry, and blocks the use of capitalism by individuals.

I do music because I like to- I like making it, I can usually pick out something of mine that about anybody would like (it varies a great deal- which is a negative, if you're a cartel: I'm not supposed to be a working artist, I'm supposed to be an easily categorisable disposable artist to be squeezed dry in a single burst of major exposure, then ditched). The thing to remember about my music freeness, determination to make _everything_ downloadable without penalty and withhold nothing, determination to cooperate with anybody who wants to use sampling and take bits of my music for their own use without compensation- is that, just maybe, I have a clearer idea of the real issues here than a lot of people who still believe there's a free market for music (or software).

As I see it- promotion is _everything_. Being known, being publically recognized, is infinitely more valuable than trying to coerce a return on particular artworks or programs- because it is the only thing that can stand against the forces of a cartel controlling the relevant industry. If you are going all business, make a little record label and hammer out good relationships with some stores and pressing houses and a studio and mastering house- guess what? You can't force the cartels to give you distribution. You are _completely_ outmatched there. It is _impossible_ to pursue a 'push' model of product distribution in the face of industry cartels- and if that's where you've put your energies, you're doomed.

If you go all 'free' you're pursuing a 'pull' model. How many really gifted Linux programmers are starving right now? By the same token I see 'free music' as the _only_ reasonable choice (even to the extent that I'll happily talk about all that and tip other people off to it- and I'm told by other people doing this that it actually works!). Instead of 'give, and depend on the gratitude of fans' being a dumb idealistic approach, it is actually the only bulletproof approach- because it is a 'pull' model. You _can't_ force people to listen to and buy your music when you're up against cartels- but no matter how outmatched you are, you can _give_ it away and if people are so happy that they want to help you, nothing can stop them! (speaking of which, did you go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW and download a bunch of free music yet? ;) )

I'm totally, dead serious. In some ways I'm claiming a pretty serious breakdown of capitalism, that it's not possible for an individual to push their product onto the market in the usual business sense. I _am_ claiming that. But I'm also advocating the solution, which is that in an era of such great connectivity, exposure and ability to get attention are far more valuable than the ability to get your stuff _shoved_ on people- when your horizon is as large as the world, suddenly _everyone_ is 'shoving' their crap onto you, and it all blurs and becomes totally valueless and meaningless. Truth becomes incomprehensible when people will say anything to con you ('innovation'), and in that condition the ability of some small capitalist to get their _demand_ through becomes nil. You can't out-hard-sell a planet full of cartels.

But! As Linux has shown, with this global horizon, there's the capacity for little pockets of generosity and no-strings-attached sincere stuff to get attention, even in the face of the constant deafening roar of the cartels and media. Somebody says, "Hey- didja know you can download all the source for linux and hack with it and you're _allowed_ to?". In the same spirit I say, "Didja know you can download _all_ of my songs on all my (buyable) CDs totally free and not only are you allowed to, I'm kind of passionate that you should never _have_ to cough up money for 'em?" It's partly the simple idealism of "Screw this hucksterism, I want to give stuff", but in some cases (certainly mine) there's also "Things have gone so far out of balance that now, not only do I _want_ to give stuff, but it's the only possible way to earn supporters".

And so, off I go- not only producing good music and stubbornly making it freely available, but also publically offering access to the master tapes for anyone who wants samples, and in fact on Slashdot I've repeatedly offered to let opensource programmer types record music in my studio (you get here, I can't do roadtrips) for FREE when I could legitimately charge $75 an hour, easy. I still offer that- anybody wanting should talk to me. I'm also offering free access to the Geeks In Space people. It's hard to know what more I could offer, but if I think of anything I shall offer that as well :) because (a) I get a kick out of it and like being that way, and (b) again, I see a benefit in it for me, a _social_ benefit not a coercing one. The more I can give the more valuable I become and the more likely it is that I'll keep busy, start doing more work with others, to the point where eventually I can ask $75 an hour sound engineering and it'll seem like an incredible bargain- or have 1% of music listeners buy my ($5.99) CD and have that amount to a cozy nest-egg.

But the important thing is that that doesn't come first. It can _only_ happen if I give so well that it's appreciated, if I work hard enough to be able to really offer something.

So final anti-hype- if anyone could go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW and give suggestions on what _more_ I can do to give something valuable to people for nothing, I'd be real pleased :) I'm starting work on a techno album which will be pretty unusual, and need to fit in some equipment building in the form of a fancy EQ for my drum sounds. More albums? Better terms for offering studio time? Do people want schematics for the equipment I'm building, or the modifications I make to the gear I have? As might be imagined I'm holding nothing back whatsoever- and like it that way. So, anything else people want?

The big error, the big oversight here is the unspoken assumption that "because you make something, you can find a market for it". That's, unfortunately, bullshit... certainly both in computer software and in music, the market is distorted by bigger players who control access to distribution and promotion. This is so obvious that people don't see it, it's taken for granted that a cartel totally dictates what you can market in these industries. Yet, it presents a nasty barrier for entry, and blocks the use of capitalism by individuals.

I do music because I like to- I like making it, I can usually pick out something of mine that about anybody would like (it varies a great deal- which is a negative, if you're a cartel: I'm not supposed to be a working artist, I'm supposed to be an easily categorisable disposable artist to be squeezed dry in a single burst of major exposure, then ditched). The thing to remember about my music freeness, determination to make _everything_ downloadable without penalty and withhold nothing, determination to cooperate with anybody who wants to use sampling and take bits of my music for their own use without compensation- is that, just maybe, I have a clearer idea of the real issues here than a lot of people who still believe there's a free market for music (or software).

As I see it- promotion is _everything_. Being known, being publically recognized, is infinitely more valuable than trying to coerce a return on particular artworks or programs- because it is the only thing that can stand against the forces of a cartel controlling the relevant industry. If you are going all business, make a little record label and hammer out good relationships with some stores and pressing houses and a studio and mastering house- guess what? You can't force the cartels to give you distribution. You are _completely_ outmatched there. It is _impossible_ to pursue a 'push' model of product distribution in the face of industry cartels- and if that's where you've put your energies, you're doomed.

If you go all 'free' you're pursuing a 'pull' model. How many really gifted Linux programmers are starving right now? By the same token I see 'free music' as the _only_ reasonable choice (even to the extent that I'll happily talk about all that and tip other people off to it- and I'm told by other people doing this that it actually works!). Instead of 'give, and depend on the gratitude of fans' being a dumb idealistic approach, it is actually the only bulletproof approach- because it is a 'pull' model. You _can't_ force people to listen to and buy your music when you're up against cartels- but no matter how outmatched you are, you can _give_ it away and if people are so happy that they want to help you, nothing can stop them! (speaking of which, did you go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW and download a bunch of free music yet? ;) )

I'm totally, dead serious. In some ways I'm claiming a pretty serious breakdown of capitalism, that it's not possible for an individual to push their product onto the market in the usual business sense. I _am_ claiming that. But I'm also advocating the solution, which is that in an era of such great connectivity, exposure and ability to get attention are far more valuable than the ability to get your stuff _shoved_ on people- when your horizon is as large as the world, suddenly _everyone_ is 'shoving' their crap onto you, and it all blurs and becomes totally valueless and meaningless. Truth becomes incomprehensible when people will say anything to con you ('innovation'), and in that condition the ability of some small capitalist to get their _demand_ through becomes nil. You can't out-hard-sell a planet full of cartels.

But! As Linux has shown, with this global horizon, there's the capacity for little pockets of generosity and no-strings-attached sincere stuff to get attention, even in the face of the constant deafening roar of the cartels and media. Somebody says, "Hey- didja know you can download all the source for linux and hack with it and you're _allowed_ to?". In the same spirit I say, "Didja know you can download _all_ of my songs on all my (buyable) CDs totally free and not only are you allowed to, I'm kind of passionate that you should never _have_ to cough up money for 'em?" It's partly the simple idealism of "Screw this hucksterism, I want to give stuff", but in some cases (certainly mine) there's also "Things have gone so far out of balance that now, not only do I _want_ to give stuff, but it's the only possible way to earn supporters".

And so, off I go- not only producing good music and stubbornly making it freely available, but also publically offering access to the master tapes for anyone who wants samples, and in fact on Slashdot I've repeatedly offered to let opensource programmer types record music in my studio (you get here, I can't do roadtrips) for FREE when I could legitimately charge $75 an hour, easy. I still offer that- anybody wanting should talk to me. I'm also offering free access to the Geeks In Space people. It's hard to know what more I could offer, but if I think of anything I shall offer that as well :) because (a) I get a kick out of it and like being that way, and (b) again, I see a benefit in it for me, a _social_ benefit not a coercing one. The more I can give the more valuable I become and the more likely it is that I'll keep busy, start doing more work with others, to the point where eventually I can ask $75 an hour sound engineering and it'll seem like an incredible bargain- or have 1% of music listeners buy my ($5.99) CD and have that amount to a cozy nest-egg.

But the important thing is that that doesn't come first. It can _only_ happen if I give so well that it's appreciated, if I work hard enough to be able to really offer something.

So final anti-hype- if anyone could go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW and give suggestions on what _more_ I can do to give something valuable to people for nothing, I'd be real pleased :) I'm starting work on a techno album which will be pretty unusual, and need to fit in some equipment building in the form of a fancy EQ for my drum sounds. More albums? Better terms for offering studio time? Do people want schematics for the equipment I'm building, or the modifications I make to the gear I have? As might be imagined I'm holding nothing back whatsoever- and like it that way. So, anything else people want?

The big error, the big oversight here is the unspoken assumption that "because you make something, you can find a market for it". That's, unfortunately, bullshit... certainly both in computer software and in music, the market is distorted by bigger players who control access to distribution and promotion. This is so obvious that people don't see it, it's taken for granted that a cartel totally dictates what you can market in these industries. Yet, it presents a nasty barrier for entry, and blocks the use of capitalism by individuals.

I do music because I like to- I like making it, I can usually pick out something of mine that about anybody would like (it varies a great deal- which is a negative, if you're a cartel: I'm not supposed to be a working artist, I'm supposed to be an easily categorisable disposable artist to be squeezed dry in a single burst of major exposure, then ditched). The thing to remember about my music freeness, determination to make _everything_ downloadable without penalty and withhold nothing, determination to cooperate with anybody who wants to use sampling and take bits of my music for their own use without compensation- is that, just maybe, I have a clearer idea of the real issues here than a lot of people who still believe there's a free market for music (or software).

As I see it- promotion is _everything_. Being known, being publically recognized, is infinitely more valuable than trying to coerce a return on particular artworks or programs- because it is the only thing that can stand against the forces of a cartel controlling the relevant industry. If you are going all business, make a little record label and hammer out good relationships with some stores and pressing houses and a studio and mastering house- guess what? You can't force the cartels to give you distribution. You are _completely_ outmatched there. It is _impossible_ to pursue a 'push' model of product distribution in the face of industry cartels- and if that's where you've put your energies, you're doomed.

If you go all 'free' you're pursuing a 'pull' model. How many really gifted Linux programmers are starving right now? By the same token I see 'free music' as the _only_ reasonable choice (even to the extent that I'll happily talk about all that and tip other people off to it- and I'm told by other people doing this that it actually works!). Instead of 'give, and depend on the gratitude of fans' being a dumb idealistic approach, it is actually the only bulletproof approach- because it is a 'pull' model. You _can't_ force people to listen to and buy your music when you're up against cartels- but no matter how outmatched you are, you can _give_ it away and if people are so happy that they want to help you, nothing can stop them! (speaking of which, did you go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW and download a bunch of free music yet? ;) )

I'm totally, dead serious. In some ways I'm claiming a pretty serious breakdown of capitalism, that it's not possible for an individual to push their product onto the market in the usual business sense. I _am_ claiming that. But I'm also advocating the solution, which is that in an era of such great connectivity, exposure and ability to get attention are far more valuable than the ability to get your stuff _shoved_ on people- when your horizon is as large as the world, suddenly _everyone_ is 'shoving' their crap onto you, and it all blurs and becomes totally valueless and meaningless. Truth becomes incomprehensible when people will say anything to con you ('innovation'), and in that condition the ability of some small capitalist to get their _demand_ through becomes nil. You can't out-hard-sell a planet full of cartels.

But! As Linux has shown, with this global horizon, there's the capacity for little pockets of generosity and no-strings-attached sincere stuff to get attention, even in the face of the constant deafening roar of the cartels and media. Somebody says, "Hey- didja know you can download all the source for linux and hack with it and you're _allowed_ to?". In the same spirit I say, "Didja know you can download _all_ of my songs on all my (buyable) CDs totally free and not only are you allowed to, I'm kind of passionate that you should never _have_ to cough up money for 'em?" It's partly the simple idealism of "Screw this hucksterism, I want to give stuff", but in some cases (certainly mine) there's also "Things have gone so far out of balance that now, not only do I _want_ to give stuff, but it's the only possible way to earn supporters".

And so, off I go- not only producing good music and stubbornly making it freely available, but also publically offering access to the master tapes for anyone who wants samples, and in fact on Slashdot I've repeatedly offered to let opensource programmer types record music in my studio (you get here, I can't do roadtrips) for FREE when I could legitimately charge $75 an hour, easy. I still offer that- anybody wanting should talk to me. I'm also offering free access to the Geeks In Space people. It's hard to know what more I could offer, but if I think of anything I shall offer that as well :) because (a) I get a kick out of it and like being that way, and (b) again, I see a benefit in it for me, a _social_ benefit not a coercing one. The more I can give the more valuable I become and the more likely it is that I'll keep busy, start doing more work with others, to the point where eventually I can ask $75 an hour sound engineering and it'll seem like an incredible bargain- or have 1% of music listeners buy my ($5.99) CD and have that amount to a cozy nest-egg.

But the important thing is that that doesn't come first. It can _only_ happen if I give so well that it's appreciated, if I work hard enough to be able to really offer something.

So final anti-hype- if anyone could go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW and give suggestions on what _more_ I can do to give something valuable to people for nothing, I'd be real pleased :) I'm starting work on a techno album which will be pretty unusual, and need to fit in some equipment building in the form of a fancy EQ for my drum sounds. More albums? Better terms for offering studio time? Do people want schematics for the equipment I'm building, or the modifications I make to the gear I have? As might be imagined I'm holding nothing back whatsoever- and like it that way. So, anything else people want?

The big error, the big oversight here is the unspoken assumption that "because you make something, you can find a market for it". That's, unfortunately, bullshit... certainly both in computer software and in music, the market is distorted by bigger players who control access to distribution and promotion. This is so obvious that people don't see it, it's taken for granted that a cartel totally dictates what you can market in these industries. Yet, it presents a nasty barrier for entry, and blocks the use of capitalism by individuals.

I do music because I like to- I like making it, I can usually pick out something of mine that about anybody would like (it varies a great deal- which is a negative, if you're a cartel: I'm not supposed to be a working artist, I'm supposed to be an easily categorisable disposable artist to be squeezed dry in a single burst of major exposure, then ditched). The thing to remember about my music freeness, determination to make _everything_ downloadable without penalty and withhold nothing, determination to cooperate with anybody who wants to use sampling and take bits of my music for their own use without compensation- is that, just maybe, I have a clearer idea of the real issues here than a lot of people who still believe there's a free market for music (or software).

As I see it- promotion is _everything_. Being known, being publically recognized, is infinitely more valuable than trying to coerce a return on particular artworks or programs- because it is the only thing that can stand against the forces of a cartel controlling the relevant industry. If you are going all business, make a little record label and hammer out good relationships with some stores and pressing houses and a studio and mastering house- guess what? You can't force the cartels to give you distribution. You are _completely_ outmatched there. It is _impossible_ to pursue a 'push' model of product distribution in the face of industry cartels- and if that's where you've put your energies, you're doomed.

If you go all 'free' you're pursuing a 'pull' model. How many really gifted Linux programmers are starving right now? By the same token I see 'free music' as the _only_ reasonable choice (even to the extent that I'll happily talk about all that and tip other people off to it- and I'm told by other people doing this that it actually works!). Instead of 'give, and depend on the gratitude of fans' being a dumb idealistic approach, it is actually the only bulletproof approach- because it is a 'pull' model. You _can't_ force people to listen to and buy your music when you're up against cartels- but no matter how outmatched you are, you can _give_ it away and if people are so happy that they want to help you, nothing can stop them! (speaking of which, did you go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW and download a bunch of free music yet? ;) )

I'm totally, dead serious. In some ways I'm claiming a pretty serious breakdown of capitalism, that it's not possible for an individual to push their product onto the market in the usual business sense. I _am_ claiming that. But I'm also advocating the solution, which is that in an era of such great connectivity, exposure and ability to get attention are far more valuable than the ability to get your stuff _shoved_ on people- when your horizon is as large as the world, suddenly _everyone_ is 'shoving' their crap onto you, and it all blurs and becomes totally valueless and meaningless. Truth becomes incomprehensible when people will say anything to con you ('innovation'), and in that condition the ability of some small capitalist to get their _demand_ through becomes nil. You can't out-hard-sell a planet full of cartels.

But! As Linux has shown, with this global horizon, there's the capacity for little pockets of generosity and no-strings-attached sincere stuff to get attention, even in the face of the constant deafening roar of the cartels and media. Somebody says, "Hey- didja know you can download all the source for linux and hack with it and you're _allowed_ to?". In the same spirit I say, "Didja know you can download _all_ of my songs on all my (buyable) CDs totally free and not only are you allowed to, I'm kind of passionate that you should never _have_ to cough up money for 'em?" It's partly the simple idealism of "Screw this hucksterism, I want to give stuff", but in some cases (certainly mine) there's also "Things have gone so far out of balance that now, not only do I _want_ to give stuff, but it's the only possible way to earn supporters".

And so, off I go- not only producing good music and stubbornly making it freely available, but also publically offering access to the master tapes for anyone who wants samples, and in fact on Slashdot I've repeatedly offered to let opensource programmer types record music in my studio (you get here, I can't do roadtrips) for FREE when I could legitimately charge $75 an hour, easy. I still offer that- anybody wanting should talk to me. I'm also offering free access to the Geeks In Space people. It's hard to know what more I could offer, but if I think of anything I shall offer that as well :) because (a) I get a kick out of it and like being that way, and (b) again, I see a benefit in it for me, a _social_ benefit not a coercing one. The more I can give the more valuable I become and the more likely it is that I'll keep busy, start doing more work with others, to the point where eventually I can ask $75 an hour sound engineering and it'll seem like an incredible bargain- or have 1% of music listeners buy my ($5.99) CD and have that amount to a cozy nest-egg.

But the important thing is that that doesn't come first. It can _only_ happen if I give so well that it's appreciated, if I work hard enough to be able to really offer something.

So final anti-hype- if anyone could go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW and give suggestions on what _more_ I can do to give something valuable to people for nothing, I'd be real pleased :) I'm starting work on a techno album which will be pretty unusual, and need to fit in some equipment building in the form of a fancy EQ for my drum sounds. More albums? Better terms for offering studio time? Do people want schematics for the equipment I'm building, or the modifications I make to the gear I have? As might be imagined I'm holding nothing back whatsoever- and like it that way. So, anything else people want?

The big error, the big oversight here is the unspoken assumption that "because you make something, you can find a market for it". That's, unfortunately, bullshit... certainly both in computer software and in music, the market is distorted by bigger players who control access to distribution and promotion. This is so obvious that people don't see it, it's taken for granted that a cartel totally dictates what you can market in these industries. Yet, it presents a nasty barrier for entry, and blocks the use of capitalism by individuals.

I do music because I like to- I like making it, I can usually pick out something of mine that about anybody would like (it varies a great deal- which is a negative, if you're a cartel: I'm not supposed to be a working artist, I'm supposed to be an easily categorisable disposable artist to be squeezed dry in a single burst of major exposure, then ditched). The thing to remember about my music freeness, determination to make _everything_ downloadable without penalty and withhold nothing, determination to cooperate with anybody who wants to use sampling and take bits of my music for their own use without compensation- is that, just maybe, I have a clearer idea of the real issues here than a lot of people who still believe there's a free market for music (or software).

As I see it- promotion is _everything_. Being known, being publically recognized, is infinitely more valuable than trying to coerce a return on particular artworks or programs- because it is the only thing that can stand against the forces of a cartel controlling the relevant industry. If you are going all business, make a little record label and hammer out good relationships with some stores and pressing houses and a studio and mastering house- guess what? You can't force the cartels to give you distribution. You are _completely_ outmatched there. It is _impossible_ to pursue a 'push' model of product distribution in the face of industry cartels- and if that's where you've put your energies, you're doomed.

If you go all 'free' you're pursuing a 'pull' model. How many really gifted Linux programmers are starving right now? By the same token I see 'free music' as the _only_ reasonable choice (even to the extent that I'll happily talk about all that and tip other people off to it- and I'm told by other people doing this that it actually works!). Instead of 'give, and depend on the gratitude of fans' being a dumb idealistic approach, it is actually the only bulletproof approach- because it is a 'pull' model. You _can't_ force people to listen to and buy your music when you're up against cartels- but no matter how outmatched you are, you can _give_ it away and if people are so happy that they want to help you, nothing can stop them! (speaking of which, did you go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW and download a bunch of free music yet? ;) )

I'm totally, dead serious. In some ways I'm claiming a pretty serious breakdown of capitalism, that it's not possible for an individual to push their product onto the market in the usual business sense. I _am_ claiming that. But I'm also advocating the solution, which is that in an era of such great connectivity, exposure and ability to get attention are far more valuable than the ability to get your stuff _shoved_ on people- when your horizon is as large as the world, suddenly _everyone_ is 'shoving' their crap onto you, and it all blurs and becomes totally valueless and meaningless. Truth becomes incomprehensible when people will say anything to con you ('innovation'), and in that condition the ability of some small capitalist to get their _demand_ through becomes nil. You can't out-hard-sell a planet full of cartels.

But! As Linux has shown, with this global horizon, there's the capacity for little pockets of generosity and no-strings-attached sincere stuff to get attention, even in the face of the constant deafening roar of the cartels and media. Somebody says, "Hey- didja know you can download all the source for linux and hack with it and you're _allowed_ to?". In the same spirit I say, "Didja know you can download _all_ of my songs on all my (buyable) CDs totally free and not only are you allowed to, I'm kind of passionate that you should never _have_ to cough up money for 'em?" It's partly the simple idealism of "Screw this hucksterism, I want to give stuff", but in some cases (certainly mine) there's also "Things have gone so far out of balance that now, not only do I _want_ to give stuff, but it's the only possible way to earn supporters".

And so, off I go- not only producing good music and stubbornly making it freely available, but also publically offering access to the master tapes for anyone who wants samples, and in fact on Slashdot I've repeatedly offered to let opensource programmer types record music in my studio (you get here, I can't do roadtrips) for FREE when I could legitimately charge $75 an hour, easy. I still offer that- anybody wanting should talk to me. I'm also offering free access to the Geeks In Space people. It's hard to know what more I could offer, but if I think of anything I shall offer that as well :) because (a) I get a kick out of it and like being that way, and (b) again, I see a benefit in it for me, a _social_ benefit not a coercing one. The more I can give the more valuable I become and the more likely it is that I'll keep busy, start doing more work with others, to the point where eventually I can ask $75 an hour sound engineering and it'll seem like an incredible bargain- or have 1% of music listeners buy my ($5.99) CD and have that amount to a cozy nest-egg.

But the important thing is that that doesn't come first. It can _only_ happen if I give so well that it's appreciated, if I work hard enough to be able to really offer something.

So final anti-hype- if anyone could go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW and give suggestions on what _more_ I can do to give something valuable to people for nothing, I'd be real pleased :) I'm starting work on a techno album which will be pretty unusual, and need to fit in some equipment building in the form of a fancy EQ for my drum sounds. More albums? Better terms for offering studio time? Do people want schematics for the equipment I'm building, or the modifications I make to the gear I have? As might be imagined I'm holding nothing back whatsoever- and like it that way. So, anything else people want?

The big error, the big oversight here is the unspoken assumption that "because you make something, you can find a market for it". That's, unfortunately, bullshit... certainly both in computer software and in music, the market is distorted by bigger players who control access to distribution and promotion. This is so obvious that people don't see it, it's taken for granted that a cartel totally dictates what you can market in these industries. Yet, it presents a nasty barrier for entry, and blocks the use of capitalism by individuals.

I do music because I like to- I like making it, I can usually pick out something of mine that about anybody would like (it varies a great deal- which is a negative, if you're a cartel: I'm not supposed to be a working artist, I'm supposed to be an easily categorisable disposable artist to be squeezed dry in a single burst of major exposure, then ditched). The thing to remember about my music freeness, determination to make _everything_ downloadable without penalty and withhold nothing, determination to cooperate with anybody who wants to use sampling and take bits of my music for their own use without compensation- is that, just maybe, I have a clearer idea of the real issues here than a lot of people who still believe there's a free market for music (or software).

As I see it- promotion is _everything_. Being known, being publically recognized, is infinitely more valuable than trying to coerce a return on particular artworks or programs- because it is the only thing that can stand against the forces of a cartel controlling the relevant industry. If you are going all business, make a little record label and hammer out good relationships with some stores and pressing houses and a studio and mastering house- guess what? You can't force the cartels to give you distribution. You are _completely_ outmatched there. It is _impossible_ to pursue a 'push' model of product distribution in the face of industry cartels- and if that's where you've put your energies, you're doomed.

If you go all 'free' you're pursuing a 'pull' model. How many really gifted Linux programmers are starving right now? By the same token I see 'free music' as the _only_ reasonable choice (even to the extent that I'll happily talk about all that and tip other people off to it- and I'm told by other people doing this that it actually works!). Instead of 'give, and depend on the gratitude of fans' being a dumb idealistic approach, it is actually the only bulletproof approach- because it is a 'pull' model. You _can't_ force people to listen to and buy your music when you're up against cartels- but no matter how outmatched you are, you can _give_ it away and if people are so happy that they want to help you, nothing can stop them! (speaking of which, did you go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW and download a bunch of free music yet? ;) )

I'm totally, dead serious. In some ways I'm claiming a pretty serious breakdown of capitalism, that it's not possible for an individual to push their product onto the market in the usual business sense. I _am_ claiming that. But I'm also advocating the solution, which is that in an era of such great connectivity, exposure and ability to get attention are far more valuable than the ability to get your stuff _shoved_ on people- when your horizon is as large as the world, suddenly _everyone_ is 'shoving' their crap onto you, and it all blurs and becomes totally valueless and meaningless. Truth becomes incomprehensible when people will say anything to con you ('innovation'), and in that condition the ability of some small capitalist to get their _demand_ through becomes nil. You can't out-hard-sell a planet full of cartels.

But! As Linux has shown, with this global horizon, there's the capacity for little pockets of generosity and no-strings-attached sincere stuff to get attention, even in the face of the constant deafening roar of the cartels and media. Somebody says, "Hey- didja know you can download all the source for linux and hack with it and you're _allowed_ to?". In the same spirit I say, "Didja know you can download _all_ of my songs on all my (buyable) CDs totally free and not only are you allowed to, I'm kind of passionate that you should never _have_ to cough up money for 'em?" It's partly the simple idealism of "Screw this hucksterism, I want to give stuff", but in some cases (certainly mine) there's also "Things have gone so far out of balance that now, not only do I _want_ to give stuff, but it's the only possible way to earn supporters".

And so, off I go- not only producing good music and stubbornly making it freely available, but also publically offering access to the master tapes for anyone who wants samples, and in fact on Slashdot I've repeatedly offered to let opensource programmer types record music in my studio (you get here, I can't do roadtrips) for FREE when I could legitimately charge $75 an hour, easy. I still offer that- anybody wanting should talk to me. I'm also offering free access to the Geeks In Space people. It's hard to know what more I could offer, but if I think of anything I shall offer that as well :) because (a) I get a kick out of it and like being that way, and (b) again, I see a benefit in it for me, a _social_ benefit not a coercing one. The more I can give the more valuable I become and the more likely it is that I'll keep busy, start doing more work with others, to the point where eventually I can ask $75 an hour sound engineering and it'll seem like an incredible bargain- or have 1% of music listeners buy my ($5.99) CD and have that amount to a cozy nest-egg.

But the important thing is that that doesn't come first. It can _only_ happen if I give so well that it's appreciated, if I work hard enough to be able to really offer something.

So final anti-hype- if anyone could go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW and give suggestions on what _more_ I can do to give something valuable to people for nothing, I'd be real pleased :) I'm starting work on a techno album which will be pretty unusual, and need to fit in some equipment building in the form of a fancy EQ for my drum sounds. More albums? Better terms for offering studio time? Do people want schematics for the equipment I'm building, or the modifications I make to the gear I have? As might be imagined I'm holding nothing back whatsoever- and like it that way. So, anything else people want?

Then, reading the inventor's interview, I was blown away by how good his attitude was. He GPLs: I GPL. He _specifically_ and eloquently objects to the notion of 'security features'. He's clearly coming from an audiophile sort of place- I'd given up hope of finding that in compressed digital music at _all_- I currently like mp3s because they distort pretty smoothly and unaggressively, the attempt to deliver 'bright clear spectacular highs' will inevitably produce horrid distortions and breakup, just as it does in hardware and analog audio, only much worse. Now here's somebody with an actual clue concerning himself with issues that mean a great deal to me! Wow. I kinda like that.

My take on the matter as an active and increasingly prolific net musician is this: I'm happily using mp3 128bit from BladeEnc, partly because I dislike the notion that I have to shell out big bucks to Xing or somebody (no laughing in the back there! I hear Xing is actually pretty unmusical, 'flashy' sonically) just in order to produce my work- also I know mp3 is well established, and again it degrades kind of euphonically compared to some stuff I've heard.

CD audio is _already_ severely severely compromised. It is. I can't get over how people get into these arguments over what sounds better or worse and miss how degraded CD sound already is... I would say with my recent work, it is about the same degradation in quality going to 44.1/16 as it is going to 128k BladeEnc. I'm not fooling- this is due to my use of a customised 48/20 ADAT with custom coupling caps throughout the analog board, combined with the removing of all the (wave soldered!) anal hiss control caps which are only there to change the op-amp noise levels from -104db to -73252346 db for crazed silence freaks ;) oh, and it feeds a custom analog board through custom cabling into the computer's A/D converters through more custom cabling. (To hear all this working, listen to songs off "anima", which uses the whole setup- expect the beginnings of a techno album soon. The album "Hard Vacuum", which is pure Noise, is actually even harder on an encoder, recorded direct to 44.1/16 and I kept the masters...)

Which is to say, I _know_ mp3 is quite flawed. I can mix and master to make this as unintrusive as possible, but it's still on a level with very good cassette tape (say, Nakamichi Dragon decks) at its best. That can be quite listenable. It can also be useful- when you start dealing with very high transparency equipment like I use, the performances have to be at a higher level, and it's easy to fake yourself out by mixing so that the slightest mistakes become obvious. If you record pretty dry it can be very unforgiving, though real punchy and involving- there's no room for error at all. I do this and then mix to 44.1/16 and then mp3 and by the time that's done, it's much harder to find flaws because the transparency just isn't there anymore :)

However, I will still be among the first to go with Nanny Ogg (gotta love the pterry references! Didn't even clue to this right away) and will even do special high-resolution mixes tailored to stress the new format to the limit- given two things.

• tools that run on a PowerMac, or which can be easily built in MPW, which I'd be willing to struggle with for the cause- I'm _no_ C programmer. I'm a drummer ;) (well, and bassist and guitar player etc etc etc)
• somewhere to PUT the damned music. I have 177.1 megs of _compressed_ music on the Web at mp3.com, _all_ freely downloadable. That is orders of magnitude beyond what I can get for my own website, which I'm quite happy with for what it is, but it charges $1 a meg, roughly, and I'm paying $45 a month all things considered.

I _like_ hearing about this stuff. I hope this works out. I hope this sees Slashdot again and somebody comes up with a Mac version of the programs, no matter how klugey, so I can work with the format and see what I can get out of it.

Count me in- just so happens that the contract with mp3.com is NONEXCLUSIVE rights to my recordings. If anyone sets up an Ogg Music site, I can right now throw five albums of original material on it, producing custom mixes (which I needed to do anyway for a private 'audiophile CD' project I was working on) and at least some material (Extended Play, Hard Vacuum, and anima) of very demanding audiophile quality to show off the format. All I need is the web space and the software...

(*g* dare I say it, wouldn't it be cool if I was some kinda bigshot on mp3.com by the time this happens? I'd _loooove_ to be on some sort of Successful MP3.com Musician soapbox when I start saying these things like 'use GPLed codecs' and 'no secure format bullshit' and 'there's this format called Ogg' ;) Therefore, I would be thrilled if people went and downloaded music from http://www.mp3.com/ChrisJ which is all free as in beer and speech (meaning, if you want a sample from it I'll actually let you sample individual instruments off my master tapes with my total blessing and cooperation, instead of being a dick and forbidding it), and which is fine music and great for showing off stereos and much of it makes for a nifty Bass Test, especially "Koala" which has huge warm fretless bass and a nearly subsonic string pedal tone to freak people out with... end parenthesis)

:)

Then, reading the inventor's interview, I was blown away by how good his attitude was. He GPLs: I GPL. He _specifically_ and eloquently objects to the notion of 'security features'. He's clearly coming from an audiophile sort of place- I'd given up hope of finding that in compressed digital music at _all_- I currently like mp3s because they distort pretty smoothly and unaggressively, the attempt to deliver 'bright clear spectacular highs' will inevitably produce horrid distortions and breakup, just as it does in hardware and analog audio, only much worse. Now here's somebody with an actual clue concerning himself with issues that mean a great deal to me! Wow. I kinda like that.

My take on the matter as an active and increasingly prolific net musician is this: I'm happily using mp3 128bit from BladeEnc, partly because I dislike the notion that I have to shell out big bucks to Xing or somebody (no laughing in the back there! I hear Xing is actually pretty unmusical, 'flashy' sonically) just in order to produce my work- also I know mp3 is well established, and again it degrades kind of euphonically compared to some stuff I've heard.

CD audio is _already_ severely severely compromised. It is. I can't get over how people get into these arguments over what sounds better or worse and miss how degraded CD sound already is... I would say with my recent work, it is about the same degradation in quality going to 44.1/16 as it is going to 128k BladeEnc. I'm not fooling- this is due to my use of a customised 48/20 ADAT with custom coupling caps throughout the analog board, combined with the removing of all the (wave soldered!) anal hiss control caps which are only there to change the op-amp noise levels from -104db to -73252346 db for crazed silence freaks ;) oh, and it feeds a custom analog board through custom cabling into the computer's A/D converters through more custom cabling. (To hear all this working, listen to songs off "anima", which uses the whole setup- expect the beginnings of a techno album soon. The album "Hard Vacuum", which is pure Noise, is actually even harder on an encoder, recorded direct to 44.1/16 and I kept the masters...)

Which is to say, I _know_ mp3 is quite flawed. I can mix and master to make this as unintrusive as possible, but it's still on a level with very good cassette tape (say, Nakamichi Dragon decks) at its best. That can be quite listenable. It can also be useful- when you start dealing with very high transparency equipment like I use, the performances have to be at a higher level, and it's easy to fake yourself out by mixing so that the slightest mistakes become obvious. If you record pretty dry it can be very unforgiving, though real punchy and involving- there's no room for error at all. I do this and then mix to 44.1/16 and then mp3 and by the time that's done, it's much harder to find flaws because the transparency just isn't there anymore :)

However, I will still be among the first to go with Nanny Ogg (gotta love the pterry references! Didn't even clue to this right away) and will even do special high-resolution mixes tailored to stress the new format to the limit- given two things.

• tools that run on a PowerMac, or which can be easily built in MPW, which I'd be willing to struggle with for the cause- I'm _no_ C programmer. I'm a drummer ;) (well, and bassist and guitar player etc etc etc)
• somewhere to PUT the damned music. I have 177.1 megs of _compressed_ music on the Web at mp3.com, _all_ freely downloadable. That is orders of magnitude beyond what I can get for my own website, which I'm quite happy with for what it is, but it charges $1 a meg, roughly, and I'm paying $45 a month all things considered.

I _like_ hearing about this stuff. I hope this works out. I hope this sees Slashdot again and somebody comes up with a Mac version of the programs, no matter how klugey, so I can work with the format and see what I can get out of it.

Count me in- just so happens that the contract with mp3.com is NONEXCLUSIVE rights to my recordings. If anyone sets up an Ogg Music site, I can right now throw five albums of original material on it, producing custom mixes (which I needed to do anyway for a private 'audiophile CD' project I was working on) and at least some material (Extended Play, Hard Vacuum, and anima) of very demanding audiophile quality to show off the format. All I need is the web space and the software...

(*g* dare I say it, wouldn't it be cool if I was some kinda bigshot on mp3.com by the time this happens? I'd _loooove_ to be on some sort of Successful MP3.com Musician soapbox when I start saying these things like 'use GPLed codecs' and 'no secure format bullshit' and 'there's this format called Ogg' ;) Therefore, I would be thrilled if people went and downloaded music from http://www.mp3.com/ChrisJ which is all free as in beer and speech (meaning, if you want a sample from it I'll actually let you sample individual instruments off my master tapes with my total blessing and cooperation, instead of being a dick and forbidding it), and which is fine music and great for showing off stereos and much of it makes for a nifty Bass Test, especially "Koala" which has huge warm fretless bass and a nearly subsonic string pedal tone to freak people out with... end parenthesis)

:)

Then, reading the inventor's interview, I was blown away by how good his attitude was. He GPLs: I GPL. He _specifically_ and eloquently objects to the notion of 'security features'. He's clearly coming from an audiophile sort of place- I'd given up hope of finding that in compressed digital music at _all_- I currently like mp3s because they distort pretty smoothly and unaggressively, the attempt to deliver 'bright clear spectacular highs' will inevitably produce horrid distortions and breakup, just as it does in hardware and analog audio, only much worse. Now here's somebody with an actual clue concerning himself with issues that mean a great deal to me! Wow. I kinda like that.

My take on the matter as an active and increasingly prolific net musician is this: I'm happily using mp3 128bit from BladeEnc, partly because I dislike the notion that I have to shell out big bucks to Xing or somebody (no laughing in the back there! I hear Xing is actually pretty unmusical, 'flashy' sonically) just in order to produce my work- also I know mp3 is well established, and again it degrades kind of euphonically compared to some stuff I've heard.

CD audio is _already_ severely severely compromised. It is. I can't get over how people get into these arguments over what sounds better or worse and miss how degraded CD sound already is... I would say with my recent work, it is about the same degradation in quality going to 44.1/16 as it is going to 128k BladeEnc. I'm not fooling- this is due to my use of a customised 48/20 ADAT with custom coupling caps throughout the analog board, combined with the removing of all the (wave soldered!) anal hiss control caps which are only there to change the op-amp noise levels from -104db to -73252346 db for crazed silence freaks ;) oh, and it feeds a custom analog board through custom cabling into the computer's A/D converters through more custom cabling. (To hear all this working, listen to songs off "anima", which uses the whole setup- expect the beginnings of a techno album soon. The album "Hard Vacuum", which is pure Noise, is actually even harder on an encoder, recorded direct to 44.1/16 and I kept the masters...)

Which is to say, I _know_ mp3 is quite flawed. I can mix and master to make this as unintrusive as possible, but it's still on a level with very good cassette tape (say, Nakamichi Dragon decks) at its best. That can be quite listenable. It can also be useful- when you start dealing with very high transparency equipment like I use, the performances have to be at a higher level, and it's easy to fake yourself out by mixing so that the slightest mistakes become obvious. If you record pretty dry it can be very unforgiving, though real punchy and involving- there's no room for error at all. I do this and then mix to 44.1/16 and then mp3 and by the time that's done, it's much harder to find flaws because the transparency just isn't there anymore :)

However, I will still be among the first to go with Nanny Ogg (gotta love the pterry references! Didn't even clue to this right away) and will even do special high-resolution mixes tailored to stress the new format to the limit- given two things.

• tools that run on a PowerMac, or which can be easily built in MPW, which I'd be willing to struggle with for the cause- I'm _no_ C programmer. I'm a drummer ;) (well, and bassist and guitar player etc etc etc)
• somewhere to PUT the damned music. I have 177.1 megs of _compressed_ music on the Web at mp3.com, _all_ freely downloadable. That is orders of magnitude beyond what I can get for my own website, which I'm quite happy with for what it is, but it charges $1 a meg, roughly, and I'm paying $45 a month all things considered.

I _like_ hearing about this stuff. I hope this works out. I hope this sees Slashdot again and somebody comes up with a Mac version of the programs, no matter how klugey, so I can work with the format and see what I can get out of it.

Count me in- just so happens that the contract with mp3.com is NONEXCLUSIVE rights to my recordings. If anyone sets up an Ogg Music site, I can right now throw five albums of original material on it, producing custom mixes (which I needed to do anyway for a private 'audiophile CD' project I was working on) and at least some material (Extended Play, Hard Vacuum, and anima) of very demanding audiophile quality to show off the format. All I need is the web space and the software...

(*g* dare I say it, wouldn't it be cool if I was some kinda bigshot on mp3.com by the time this happens? I'd _loooove_ to be on some sort of Successful MP3.com Musician soapbox when I start saying these things like 'use GPLed codecs' and 'no secure format bullshit' and 'there's this format called Ogg' ;) Therefore, I would be thrilled if people went and downloaded music from http://www.mp3.com/ChrisJ which is all free as in beer and speech (meaning, if you want a sample from it I'll actually let you sample individual instruments off my master tapes with my total blessing and cooperation, instead of being a dick and forbidding it), and which is fine music and great for showing off stereos and much of it makes for a nifty Bass Test, especially "Koala" which has huge warm fretless bass and a nearly subsonic string pedal tone to freak people out with... end parenthesis)

:)

All these people say that they use Napster legally, but I wonder how exactly can that be done? The majority of legal MP3's are from unknown garage bands that are found on the net, through MP3.com or wherever else. Seeing as these bands are unknown, and the masses would have no idea of their name, then that makes searching for an unknown band almost impossible. Napster REQUIRES that you know of either the band name or the song name PRIOR to conducting the search, unless you are just randomly typing words in the search box. Because there are no built-in methods for promoting artists then how could someone realistically use Napster for legal purposes?

I am fairly certain that everyone that has used Napster has used it illegally as that is it's draw - the fact that there are illegal MP3's available for download. Had there been solely legal MP3's, do we honestly believe that it would of gotten to the magnitude that it is at today?

Don't forget to boycott big music labels and movie studios.

I've been doing this for about 18 months now. I haven't bought a new CD or movie title during that time, and I have no plans to do so in the near future.

Instead, I buy exclusively from places like Second Spin, which sell used CDs and DVDs. I don't mind buying new pr0n DVDs once in a while, as those studios aren't in bed with the major media companies.

Yes, I'll grab a current hit single once in a while via Napster. I certainly don't loose any sleep over it.

To quelch my need for new music, I've recently been tuning XMMS to the "Hi Fi" channels on MP3.com and, quite frankly, there's a lot of good music out there. I was going to bring a radio into my cubicle at work, but the streams I find online are usually so much better. I'm slowly weaning myself from the top-40 stuff on the radio.

The MPAA & the RIAA must bend with the coming storm, or they will break.

You should take road trips up to Brattleboro, Vermont, to record your segments of the show at my studio :) here's what it's been doing lately

It'd be fun- think about it. We could compose weird music and make new sound effects. Each Geeks In Spacer could deploy in a different geographical location and track down their own recording studio operator! It could be east coast versus west coast full-on geekness mp3 madness! What could be more fun? :)