Slashdot Mirror

Comparing lossless to lossy compression isn't fair, so do what I do and convert the lossless stuff to MP3 for your favorite portable (I burn them to CDRW's which play on everything I've got).

If it was download mix burn they might actually have a point...

There is plenty of music that is legally and freely distributed using the
"download mix burn" model:

http://www.etree.org/

http://www.furthurnet.com/

http://gdlive.com/

http://www.sugarmegs.org/

http://www.kapoho.net/

http://www.alternativetentacles.com/mp3.php

Just to name a few. Why should my rights to enjoy this music be taken
away? Why should rights of the artists to chose a free distribution
business model be restricted?

Don't tar us all with the same brush: "download mix burn" does not mean copyright
restriction!

I've used it a lot over the last few months - found out about it on the original free streaming website Sugarmegs.org

So, to use a software analogy, Red Hat and Mandrake are performances of the work Linux. Well, does Mandrake really trumpet the fact that it?s Red Hat based? Not really anymore. Does Red Hat actively recognize Mandrake's contributions to popularizing linux? No. Do both distributions include proper credit to the authors of their content? Yes.

I think the OAL is more about song writers than performers. I do not believe that a performer could release a conventionally copyrighted song under the OAL. This would probably be a copyright violation because no royalty would be paid to the work's owner under the original copyright. On the other hand, if Willie Nelson had released "Crazy" under something like the OAL, then he would be associated with the work, not Patsy Cline.

Ultimately, though, songwriters make money on royalties. I don't see how they can do this under the OAL, so I don't think it has a chance for any group or artist that relies on album sales. For those that rely on performance revenue (like the Grateful Dead), the the license would make perfect sense, because it would promote distribution of the performance recordings and create new consumers. For example, I always thought the Grateful Dead were about a hippie drug culture until I downloaded and burned a concert for a fried and discovered that they were a really, really good performance band. I would have never discovered this if they had not given away the rights to record their concerts.

So, in the interest of spreading the love :-)> . (Beginners should try anything from '77 or '78. That's Gerry Garcia on lead guitar, BTW.)

Ho boy... not hardly. I have acess to thousands of hours of high quality live music from musicians all over the country... plus it's legal, with the artists' consent, no ads involved, and more importantly, no damn record companies!!

Check out sites like etree, sugarmegs, and gdlive for examples of how music is thriving on the net in a noncommercial environment. But I suppose those sites, though working well for users, have actually been crushed also... as the standard for 'crushed' apparently is 'failing to make money for corporations'.

Besides... really, Napster and the like sucked from the start, interesting computer science concept and great place to download mp3's of questionable quality at 1KB/sec though... if that's what you're into.

-Jackson

I am totally disgusted by the way the popular music is created and distributed now-adays. A big name band gets noteriety by getting their song played to death on the radio, and everyone seems to go along with this, somehow thinking that the changing songs on the radio indicate what songs we are supposed to like. Then the band makes money from millions of people buying the album, usually for the one song on the radio. (I'm not specifically referring to metallica here.)

I'm a fan of performance-oriented bands, such as Widespread Panic, Phish, the Dead, etc. Most "Jam-Band" fans recognize that the studio recording is nothing but a shadow of these bands, a mere echo of what they are capable of at a live performance. They don't try to make thier songs "radio-friendly" in order to sell albums. They just play great music, which their fans reward by attending shows, and telling their friends about the band. And these aren't garage bands either.. (nothing wrong with small bands, just making a point.)

EVERY jam-band that I know of allows live recordings of its shows, and allows free non-commercial trading of the recordings. And in the case of the Dead, this free-trading has gone on for DECADES! You don't have to listen to the exact-same song that has only been released on one album. You get to hear variations as the bands sound changes and evolves.

Sugarmegs.org has been making this kind of music freely available for many years, in many formats. The etree facilitates the cd-quality distribution of such shows.

There is an extraordinarly large archive of band's-that-do-this's mp3s at sugarmegs. Theyve even got copies of their communication with the band's lawyers on the entire legality of the situation. For a brief period of time, distributing grateful dead concerts over the internet was illegal. But it was soon found out that this was simply because the lawyers had not decided what to make of internet based distribution yet.

BTW Please spare us your hippie-music bashing.. grateful dead and phish have a number of excellent songs.. and a few horrible ones. (I don't know what phish was thinking when they wrote "bouncing 'round the room.) They were probably on some weird drug that I've never heard of.

Ah well, the phish concerts I have attended have been some of the most fun I've ever had.

Interesting idea. Most of the music I listen to are "Jam Bands" (Grateful Dead, Phish, Widespread Panic . . ). They all have for years actively supported the free distribution of tapes of thier shows. These days thier are tons of sites posting thier shows like this one Sugarmegs.org.

The interesting this is, that they all make tons of $$$$ touring! I have gigs of thier shows and plenty of CDs to boot. I attend thier shows.

So in the end I give lots of money to the bands (tickets are expensive) lots of money to the Big companies (I buy all the new CDs) and I get MUCH MORE variety via MP3.

The only think uncommon about this scenario is that there is a huge infrastructure behind trading of these particular bands and it has a long (~20 year) history.

What record company wouldnt'd want to sign the next Phish? No promotion costs and HUGH profits!

Everyone has to learn about a band before they can be fans of that band. Tape trading allows new fans to check out bands. It is It is very similar to swapping mp3s (or other formats) on the web, only it has been around a few decades longer. in fact, the web has allowed for quicker and more trades (see links at end of post for more info on this). This has resulted in a boom to the jamband scene.

So others know, the scene is not made of just the big names you know of (and that many people think of as "hippie dippie bands"). There are in fact hundreds of bands in the scene that range from a more classical jam style to jazz to funk to Latino, etc. There is no one style of jamband (Check out Jambase.com for dates of a jamband playing in your area).

What I am trying to say is what the jamband community has known for a long time, allowing your music to be traded free of charge to the public, can pay off in many other ways in the long run (more ticket sales, album sales, merchandise sales, etc.). We are in a new age, where record labels need to learn that a 35 minute CD for $16+ is no longer acceptable, and the fans have the power now to prove this. As it has been said many times before, labels are going to have to figure out new ways of doing business because the old model just doesn't cut it anymore. These labels have to come to a realization, stop fighting the inevitable, and change their models of business. We are in an age where the consumer has the upper hand, and many more companies are learning this the hard way.

If you are interested in seeing more of the jamband community and how it operates check out these sites (these are only a few of the thousands of sites on the web about/for tape trading, if you are seriously interested in more sites or information just follow the links from these pages):

etree.org - This is a community dedicated to freely trading tapes (only of bands that allow it) via shorten format (a non-lossy form of compression).
Sugar Megs - a community that trades full shows in the mp3 format

www.sugarmegs.org

Microsoft offered to pay for the BW needed for sugarmegs if they would change their streaming files from ra to asf. This was a pain for me since I couldn't listen to sugarmegs streams under linux any more. Once microsoft pulled their support, I figured I would do what I could and offered to stream files for sugarmegs at a new pop we've got that had BW to spare -- the only catch -- I'm offering to stream ra files only. My guess is the large shift I saw from ra to asf streaming providers on the net was due to a Microsoft campaign to pay for BW for the most popular streaming sites in exchange for them switching their streaming formats.... like what happened with sugarmegs.

As far as the streaming goes, you don't have to license anything to stream ra content. Just stream it through http, your streaming server is your web server. Go with a apache, and you have unlimited streams (bottleneck will be your bandwidth). The only time you need to buy a real audio server license is for streaming LIVE content, and most of the streaming content out there is not LIVE. You can get a free version of ra server for up to like 60 streams or so (can't remember exactly) if you need to stream live content. All that we really need is a free open source encoder to encode live audio/video to ra formats and pass it off to apache somehow for the serving of live content feeds (for radio stations, or events, etc...).

The ra streaming mirror I've got setup for sugarmegs now is just an old pieced together PPro 200 w/96 Megs and scsi 2 drives running OpenBSD 2.6 / Apache 1.3.9, its saturating a full T1 at peak times serving pre-encoded ra files through http -- top shows ~52 Megs ram free and ~95%idle cpu. I'm very pleased with performance.

I know another admin that streams pre-encoded asf files. It took him 3 nt servers at > $20,000 in hardware to saturate his first T1. He may not have paid for the streaming licenses, but he paid out the ass for the hardware and os to run the free asf streaming server stuff (he did go overkill though, all dual processors, all raid 5, etc...). If he had went ra, he could have spent $2,000 on hardware and got the os and http server software to fit his needs for free, and in my opinion not sacrificed reliablity at all.

The Dead started a movement in music that is very similar to the open source movement, and readers of /. would be wise to know about it as it offers parallels to the software industry. The model is now being followed by literally hundreds of "jam bands" (see JamBands.com).

The model is simple: play lots of concerts, improvise so every concert is different, allow people to freely record and trade your concerts. You get free publicity, and if you are any good people will buy tickets for your shows and buy your albums.

Another band called Phish used this same model. Without any radio or MTV play and no hit singles this band now regularly sells out 20,000 seat venues. They just sold 75,000 tickets for the new years show where they were the sole performers (they could have sold more but the place wouldn't hold any more). These guys are all millionaires and people trade their MP3's all day (and DAT's and CD-R's through the mail too). They have an official policy regarding MP3 trading since they even have their own MP3's available for download for fee!

You wanted to know how many other bands encourage the trading of their music, look at this, the bands that allow taping list. Note that these are bands that allow fans to record their live concerts and trade the recordings. Some of the big bands on this list are Perl Jam and Dave Matthews Band. There are many other small bands that are using MP3 for publicity that don't explicitly allow fans to record the live concerts.

This site, Sugarmegs is devoted to trading MP3's of live concerts and is fully condoned by all of the bands. The bands traded are Grateful Dead, Phish, and many other bands that allow trading of their music under the same model such as Widespread Panic, Medeski Martin & Wood, Moe., and others.

There is a lot of free music out there and it's not all hippie jam bands. There are many jazz artists that allow recording and trading such as Branford Marsalis, John Scofield, Medeski Martin & Wood, Bill Frisell, and Ken Vandermark. Almost all bluegrass is tradeable and some of the major bluegrass festivals have special sections for people to setup microphones (Merle Watson Memorial Bluegrass Festival, for instance).

There is a movement in free music (and subsequently free promotion of artists!). Much like free software, not all copying of music is copyright infringement!

Burris

• the Etree - high quality (no lossy compression) Internet distribution via volunteer FTP sites
• SugarMegs Audio - modem-friendly; everything from RealAudio to mp3 and Shorten

Of course trading tapes and DAT's is no different at all than trading mp3's. I think maybe where Deadabase got in trouble is that they tried to portray themselves as the "official site on the net" for downloading Dead shows, a big no-no.

I will be really worried if they go after Sugarmegs.

They can have my 4-6-69 Set II when they pry it from my cold dead fingers!

I think also, that the bands themself should take a part in the decisions made on music in this era of technology. For instance, bands like the Grateful Dead, and Phish have, for all their careers allowed the taping and distribution of their live shows, as long as they were distributed non for profit. These made the bands successful before they were on any major labels, and as of now, there are hundreds of these "bootlegs" available all over the internet in RA and mp3 format, and this is accepted by the band, the record company, and the consumer. BTW, check out Sugarmegs Audio to see what I mean, there are many other great bands besides the two aformentioned that deem this acceptable.