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Article from sonicnet.com
UPDATE: Offspring Nix Plan To Offer Free Download Of New LP
Band, Sony Music compromise, will release single instead.

Senior Writer Teri vanHorn reports:
The Offspring have nixed plans to offer their new album, Conspiracy of One , for free download before its release in stores.

The decision, made Thursday night, ended a two-day legal standoff between the punk band and its label group, Sony Music, who disapproved of the download plan. Each side had planned to sue the other.

"We were two seconds away from having a 'Reservoir Dogs' ending to this matter," Offspring manager Jim Guerinot wrote in an e-mail to sonicnet.com on Friday. "We both had lawsuits ready to drop in New York Friday morning."

The Offspring, whose hits include "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)" , still plan to offer a free MP3 of the album's first single, "Original Prankster," starting Friday. As part of the promotion, fans can register to win $1 million, a contest initially linked with the planned full-album offer. The single download will be available through the band's official site, offspring.com, as well as other Web outlets including MTV.com, radio station sites and retail sites. (Sonicnet.com's parent company, Viacom, also owns MTV.)

Sony Music, which owns the Offspring's label, Columbia, had planned to seek an injunction against the band and a temporary restraining order. Meanwhile, the Offspring had prepared a breach of contract countersuit. Both parties signed a standstill agreement Wednesday declaring a 48-hour waiting period and met to discuss the matter in Sony's New York offices, Guerinot said.

The Offspring finally agreed not to release the album online because the lawsuits would have been paralyzing, Guerinot said. Sony's suit would have prevented the band from proceeding with its plans to offer the album online and would've nixed the $1 million contest for fans. The Offspring's suit would have prevented the band from releasing Conspiracy of One this year and would've delayed a planned tour.

"The band and I felt that the bulk of what we were trying to accomplish happens off the single being downloaded, and to sacrifice our fan promotion, album release and tour was just too much," Guerinot said.

"It sucks," he said, "because once people get their hands on the music, fans will have to turn to Napster and other distribution methods to take a listen, but they won't be able to find the songs at www.offspring.com. We will be the only site on the Web that will not have the Offspring's new music."

The Offspring's plans to release the album online nearly a month before its Nov. 14 commercial release marked one of the bravest moves ever by a major artist in regard to digital downloading.

A statement from the band issued Sept. 15 suggested the Offspring don't believe free downloads would hurt the sales of Conspiracy of One . That philosophy contradicts what major labels, including Sony, are claiming in their pending lawsuit against Napster. "It's just sad that they were trying to do something cool for their fans and smart for them, and they got shot down by the bastards that be," 22-year old fan Jason Marks, of Colorado Springs, Colo., wrote in an e-mail. "I don't think any fans will be mad. I'm not, just disappointed. I'm sure they did what they could, but once it became clear they wouldn't be able to do shit if they tried to go ahead [with it], they had no other choice but to say, 'Screw it.' "

"They're still the coolest band in the world," Marks said.

Spokespeople for Sony did not return calls Friday.

I don't know how everyboyd else does it, but I find new music through streaming radio stations (especially good ones like Sonicnet). There's no way that I could afford to buy as mcuh music as they stream, and even if I did have infinite money, or I could find everything online, I wouldn't have any clue as to what I wanted to buy/download. And, the variety on some of these places (like Sonicnet) is unbelievable. Without having to download literally thousands of MP3's and categorize them, I can just choose a type of music, hit play, and it'll play for hours and hours (sometimes days) before I hear a single repeat. Sure, it's got ads like regular radio, but I can get radio stations that I could NEVER get over the air (like electronica stations), and the playlists are huge. Personally, I'm not going to give up listening to streaming radio online anytime soon.

How about major label record contracts that pay artists next to nothing for their hard work and then lock them into indentured service for years, with no way of getting out, and in some cases, can cost you a hell of a lot more than just the rights to your music. Now that's viral.

Who can blame them? Clearly libraries will be the only place to go now that book prices are skyrocketing.

He re you go...

UMG owns the following labels: A&M Records, Decca Record Company, Deutsche Grammophon, Geffen Records, Interscope Records, Island Def Jam Music Group, Jimmy and Doug's Farmclub.com, MCA Nashville, MCA Records, Mercury Records, Motown Records, Philips, Polydor, Universal Records, and Verve Music Group.

Artists include: Bryan Adams, Aqua, Erykah Badu, Banda Eva, Cecilia Bartoli, Beck, Bee Gees, George Benson, BLACKstreet, Mary J. Blige, Andrea Bocelli, Bon Jovi, Marco Borsato, Boyz II Men, Boyzone, The Cardigans, Jacky Cheung, Claudinho & Buchecha, Counting Crows, The Cranberries, Sheryl Crow, DMX, E o Tchan, Melissa Etheridge, Mylene Farmer, Kirk Franklin, Peter Gabriel (North American rights only), Vince Gill, Guns'N'Roses, Johnny Hallyday, Herbie Hancock, Hanson, Dru Hill, Kyosuke Himuro, Hole, Enrique Iglesias, Al Jarreau, Jay-Z, Elton John, K-Ci & JoJo, B.B. King, Diana Krall, Patti LaBelle, Eric Levi (ERA), Limp Bizkit, Live, LL Cool J, Luna Sea, Marilyn Manson, Reba McEntire, Brian McKnight, Metallica (excluding US and Japan), Molotov, Nine Inch Nails, 98N , No Doubt, Joan Osborne, Florent Pagny, Luciano Pavarotti, Rammstein, Andre Rieu, Rosana, Spitz, Sting, George Strait, Texas, Shania Twain, U2, The Wallflowers, Caetano Veloso, Stevie Wonder, Trisha Yearwood, Zucchero, ABBA, Aerosmith, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, James Brown, The Carpenters, Eric Clapton, Patsy Cline, John Coltrane, The Commodores, Bing Crosby, Count Basie, Bo Diddley, Bill Evans, Ella Fitzgerald, The Four Tops, Judy Garland, Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday, Buddy Holly, The Jackson Five, George Jones, Brenda Lee, Loretta Lynn, The Mamas & The Papas, Bob Marley, Bill Monroe, Van Morrison, Nirvana, The Police, Smokey Robinson, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Cat Stevens, Rod Stewart, The Supremes, The Temptations, Conway Twitty, Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, and The Who.
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I just don't understand why they're pursuing the model. Check out Sonic Net's personalized radio service -- I believe it's essentially the same model as standard radio, where royalties are payed for songs played, but a) it isn't trying to do an end-around on the current music business model and b) it allows you to listen to an amazingly wide variety of music without owning the CDs.

I'm not eager to go back to listening to music I already own while waiting for the buffer to be filled between tracks.

The central point in Mr. Curry's article is that formats, essentially radio stations buying playlists from a market research firm rather than trusting the taste of their DJs, are what is good and pure about radio today, and that we should spread the white light of formats to Napster and Gnutella.

Formats have destroyed the creativity and the variety in radio. It is now possible to drive cross-country listening to the radio and not hear one new song. I'm sorry, Mr. Curry, but some of us don't want to listen to the same Top 3 song at the top of every hour. Some of us would like to have radio introduce us to exciting new artists, not to rehash the same tired old songs that every other radio station plays. The tragedy of this practice is that most of the DJs at these boring radio stations are people who feel passionate about music, people whose taste I would love to explore, if they were only given the opportunity to express that taste. But they are not given that opportunity. Rather, they are forced to play a bland repetition of songs that no doubt bores them as much as it bores me.

Those who seek something new and different from music have either turned to college or public radio, or have found their way to Napster and internet music. Napster is refreshing precisely because it does not have formats. Once can download whatever music they like to their hard disk, create a huge playlist, and random play to their hearts content. Napster provides depth, so that one can listen to Cat Power and Erik Satie and Black Flag back-to-back, should the mood strike you.

It is a characteristic of old-school people who find themselves in a new paradigm to attempt to clothe their previous medium in the new technology and to pretend that they are modern. WorldClassRock is a great example of this. Los Angeles is a vast, diverse radio market provided with an abyssmal selection of radio stations. Channel 101.9, and later channel 103.1, were a brief break from this monotony. In both cases, though, they could not establish a profitable presence on the dial. My own theory is that they were killed by their own playlist. The listeners of those radio stations truly wanted the "world class rock" that the stations claimed to have, and were instead provided with playlist rock. For a while it was a different playlist, and was a novel break, but soon other radio stations copied their format enough to make their station sound old and tired. One had hoped that going online would allow the radio statio to take advantage of the novel features that the internet provides. Throw out the playlist! Listen to your DJs! Perhaps support real-time user rating of the songs you play. Or support two parallel streams at the same time, so that if a person doesn't like what is on one stream, they could listen to the other. The internet, after all, does not have the same limitations on the available number of frequencies that broadcast radio has. Alas, so far it appears that WorldClassRock is the same old playlist, the same old commercials, and the FM stations offered, just broadcast over a different medium, but perhaps it is too early to tell. One can still hold out hope that their true spirit will emerge in time.

I do, however, hold out some hope for SonicNet, which allows users to tailor their music feed in much the same way that My Yahoo! allows user to select the news articles they want to see. The selection is still a bit limited, but what is encouraging is that SonicNet is trying to do something different and creative with the technology rather than pushing the same thing threw new wires.

The nerds on the internet in general have very good taste in music. We want the same variety and creativity from our music that we put into our own work. Mainstream radio hasn't given this to us, they've given us Brittany Spears and Third Eye Blind played over and over and over, and we've gone to Napster. Those who escape from the roof will think twice before coming in through the front door again. I'm sure that Mr. Curry means well, but I'm afraid he simply doesn't Get It.

Been done already: Radio SonicNet. Nice, but doesn't work on Linux, because it is made by greedheads, for "consumers".

Where everytime you make a wish, somebody thought of it a while back...

from the article

If one looks at these Clock based Formats as a sequence, you immediately notice the playlist like structure. Each hour starts off with a station ID, followed by a Top3 hit -->Station ID -->Recurrent hit (usually 3-5 years old) --> Jock Banter/Contest tease or promo -->commercials -->Station ID --> Time/Temp --> New Release etc etc etc.

I view these elements as boxes, to be filled in from the known content pool, which resides in the stations' library (digitally as with the Dalet system). This "filling of the boxes" occurs based on a certain rule-set, usually created and maintained by the format creator. In our radio station example the main box categories are defined across all known content (Top 40 hit, New Release, Golden Oldie etc) along with meta tags very similar to the ID3 specification: think of tags like Genre, Artists, Uptempo, Ballad, Group, Solo etc.

The trick is to subsequently fill in the boxes while abiding to the rules, such as separation, but also "clash-rules" so we don't play too many ballads back to back or to female performers in the same situation. (According to our format example at least!)

Try over here

Interesting rant, I read for a bit and couldn't find out why he quit MTV (and tried to do it on-air), was it because of the lawsuit?

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show me where the sonicnet article says that Napster is suing the offspring.

someone. please.

until then, slashdot really needs to do some sort of story verification.