Slashdot Mirror
Universities Begin to Ban Napster
Anonymous Coward writes "CNET's News.Com has a story about universities beginning to ban access for Napster users. The schools cited excessive use of bandwidth (with 5% of total bandwidth going to Napster) and the RIAA's lawsuit as reason for it. Take a look at the story here."
I know Slashdot is a big MP3 proponent but I'm just DYING to know how you people with GIGS of mp3's on your hard drive can justify ripping off musicians this way. How many musicians have given permission for their stuff to be freely downloadable like this?
Sure, the music industry sucks ass and don't deserve the cash, but ultimately by pirating MP3's and filling your CDR's with them doesn't help the individual artists one bit. Musicians are already getting screwed by the industry at large, they DON'T need to be doubly screwed by people pirating their music this way.
Please enlighten me...just HOW is this MP3 craze really helping artists? I don't want to hear any 'theoretical' answers either, about how musician A 'could' distribute their music with MP3's and avoid the record companies...I'd like to see some REAL EXAMPLES of it and see if the artists are REALLY PROFITING from MP3's. All I've heard so far is lame excuses and pontifications about 'freedom' of speech.
From where I'm sitting, MP3 is just another word for WAREZ, plain and simple.
'Some of your friends are probably already this fucked'
Check _that_ out- a balance sheet for a typical major act _success_ on the order of 3 _million_ dollars of sales selling a quarter million copies.
Gross profit, $710,000.
Artist Royalties, $351,000.
Actual artist _income_ after all items on balance sheet and recouping of advance- $4,031.25!
That's right- after paying for the studio, mastering, video budget, processing+transfers etc, after the tour (earning 50,000 gross on expenses of 50,875 not counting manager or agent's cut), the band that got a 'quarter million dollar' advance to pay for all the tech toys and tours and professionals, the band that made THREE MILLION dollars of business for the record company, have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month.
You're crazy if you think almost anything wouldn't be an improvement. I don't know, maybe I can't satisfy you that mp3s can help artists. How exactly is mp3 exposure going to cost the artists _more_ than pay to play in LA and all that crap? At what point does mp3, free-as-spam-but-less-annoying distribution start to make artists capable of doing better than the industry- say, earning them _half_ as much as they'd make working at 7-11? You have no idea how fucked musicians actually are (to use Steve Albini's apt term for the condition...). Are you a musician? I am, and I'm building a studio- I've already talked with one slashdotter about recording him free for the purpose of making mp3s, and I've been talking to another artist I recorded who's currently living in Lithuania, about putting some of his back catalogue out there. Exposure is life- but there's something more important that that, and it's control and cashflow.
When artists don't have control over their own businesses, they're hosed- and that's what happens with the normal industry, it's 'Let us take care of it!' and the results are a damned wasteland. mp3 does not directly make artists money- but guess what? It is a key part of a strategy for the artist to take control of their own destiny and start running things themselves. Some might be tour-minded, and build on their talent and a popularity in mp3 to travel the world on a shoestring, paying their way by booking small gigs, saving up for their own PA and equipment and RUNNING THE BUSINESS effectively. They might make a bit more than working at a 7-11! But they'd be living their dream and not paying to play. Some (I like this option) will do extensive studio work, to become able to create amazing high-fidelity sonic experiences in music- and would give away the mp3s forever, but if you want to help them, BUY A CD. Not even an mp3.com cd (interestingly, mp3.com does not go for exclusive rights like a record label does), but a homegrown CD. First few, burned off a CD-Rom burner, and then it's time to save up and have a crate of CDs burned professionally- there are loads of people who can do this and throw in 1, 2, 3 or 4 color process inserts, even shrinkwrap, having the whole thing done to a 'mainstream' quality level. Of course if you're in it for the long term you set yourself up with the physical plant, printing your own art or pressing your own CDs in industrial duplicators... and so it goes.
Yeah, it's hard work, but you can earn money through hard work, and you can't really earn money with the industry, so why not? And mp3 is one very important thing- it is promotional material that YOU DON'T HAVE TO PAY FOR! You don't have to PAY people to distribute mp3s of your work. They will anyway, particularly if it's any good! What you do from that point will illustrate who you really are, and whether you deserve to earn anything...
Go read this: Major Labels: some of your friends are probably already this fucked. Think about it. One part of Tim Yohannon's intro article is particularly telling, I think:
1.It doesn't really matter what you say or what you sing, but how you conduct your business and what your motivation for doing it is.
2.It is only by being completely separated from governmental and corporate sponsorship, collusion, or connections that one can really claim to be "alternative" or "independent".
3.Unless there is an ongoing class consciousness to one's communication and expression, then it is inevitable that you will be assimilated into mainstream values, no matter how culturally "hip" you attempt to be."
This neatly sums up what I want to do with my abilities as a musician and sound engineer. It's not _about_ what style I use or what gear I can offer in my studio- it's about why I'm doing it and where I'm going with it.
For a long time, I didn't know what I wanted to do with that side of my life. I knew that the dream of being a musician for money was a fantasy, but I didn't have what you might call the radical consciousness to come up with any alternative. I sort of wanted to work with the tech side of things, but to what end? To be signed to a corrupt machine and help con other people and probably spend all my own money doing it? To languish obscurely playing with mixers? Who's listening? What would I be doing it for?
I think I have a better handle on these questions now. I'm siding with the punks, the indies, freaks like Zappa (the greatest independent music businessman ever, long live Zappa!). I am dedicating myself to giving people access to tools and information they need to do this kind of work and produce this kind of art themselves, rather than thinking they need to buy into the industry game to get it done. Sometimes I'll make money. Sometimes I'll spend it. Right now I'm in debt and am sorting out the hopped-up ADAT I'll be basing the studio around. (tweaker alert- Alesis LX-20 is a _beautiful_ machine to soup up, all the audio circuitry is on a daughtercard you can remove and tinker with! And there's loads of clearance for substitute parts, and you could shield the whole audio daughtercard. Sweeeeet).
So, highly-scored AC, you may say MP3 is just another word for warez to you- I say you don't sound like a musician yourself, and are not qualified to pass judgement on this. I am, and I've done more homework than you- and I would say conclusively that MP3 is the new radio, and furthermore it is a breakthrough in public access to production of media that's equal to open source and Internet collaboration on software. There are many similarities.
You don't directly make money on mp3. You don't directly make money on commercial music publishing either, you can play rock star for a few months if you're lucky and end up in debt for thousands of dollars. The difference is that with mp3 YOU GET TO CONTROL your business- if your music doesn't have a business, don't expect to make money, but if you do, even something as random as selling band mousepads or nerf guns imprinted with the band logo or pet rocks, you get to totally control your mp3 output, use your own mixes, sell your own merchandise and hire your own people and run all this yourself, taking whatever profit there is for yourself.
Do you really think major label acts get to choose their own mixes (hint: Nirvana was not allowed to use their own mix for "In Utero", you think you'd get more clout than Nirvana circa 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'?), manage their own expenditures (bands are legally required to produce things like videos under contract, but it is the band that pays for ALL aspects of this, not the label) and so on?
It's not so different from open source. It's really not. Power is being able to control YOUR OWN situation. Using mp3 as a promotional tool is an important part of being able to control the other aspects of your own music business- you give it away but you're not signing yourself over to any contractual requirements, are not waiving your rights to your own material or signing it over to the corporation outright. This is incredibly powerful.
Or would you rather go and personally try to buy space for your single on Top 40 radio?
Well, in theory, the whole purpose of wiring dorms with high-bandwidth connectivity is to promote _academic_ use, not for commercial/business purposes. At Stanford, for instance, students pay like $80 for a _year_ of 10/100BaseT connectivity to the campus backbone. That's subsidized for academic reasons, not so students can share MP3s. So the situation is even a little different from that with @Home.
But the fact is, you give high bandwidth to a bunch of people who generally don't have a lot of money (as most students don't), you're going to see a lot of piracy: software, games, music, videos, whatever.
Interestingly, a student I know told me just last night that apparently the academic version of Office 2000 sends a serial number to Microsoft over the net, and if you disconnect from the net on installation, it requires you to call an 800 number before it lets you install the software. This is apparently not true of the non-academic version. This is obviously to prevent an entire dorm from just copying one copy of the academic version of O2K.
Adam
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
...but the bandwidth concerns are legitimate. Bandwidth is an expensive thing, after all. Of course, colleses should be upgrading to 100BT at least; these networks are meant to be used for research but I've noticed that 10BT networks seem to get clogged very easily at colleges (recently there hasn't been a night where I could do almost anything on the Net because RIT's network, and that of its chosen ISP, were down or choked with who knows what). Research cannot be done with a clogged network.
This is a troubling issue. Censorship shouldn't happen at universities. But this isn't censorship (see below for my explanation oh why it's not). And hogging significant portions of a campus network's bandwidth just so you can get MP3's is very inconsiderate, if not outright rude.
I remember the old days, when people didn't rely on Napster to get their MP3's; those methods work just as well today as they ever did before. Even if Napster is banned, that doesn't mean you'll be unable to get your music fix. Banning Napster is certainly a Bad Thing. But you can't deny that Napster is a bandwidth-hog by its nature, and it's clogging up very expensive networks that were never meant for this purpose.
Now, the RIAA lawsuits are another matter entirely. I hold that the RIAA has no legal grounds for suing Napster, since the software does not itself infringe on any copyrights, and even states that it's not meant to be used to infringe on them (OK, so everyone knows that it is meant precisely to infringe on copyrights, but thanks to our wonderful legal system only that which is written down has any legal bearing at all). Frankly, I think the RIAA's going to spend millions of dollars on a suit which they'll lose out of technicalities.
Oh, this is so easy, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. You want concrete examples? Here, take this one...
In 1998, I found out that the world is a hell of a lot bigger than I thought. Why? Well, I'm a metalhead. I love metal. Unfortunately, I (mistakenly) thought that metal was just about dead. Turn on a radio or eMpTyV, and you will see very little evidence of metal. There's some industrial rapcore shit (e.g. Limp Bizkit, Korn) that is being labelled as "metal" by The Media, but of course, this type of music is rarely of interest to real metal fans. (Oh, and I guess they pay lip service to has-beens like Metallica and Megadeth, who have indeed made great metal in the past, even though they've switched genres over the last few years.)
So I wasn't buying much music at the time. I couldn't find anything good.
Then I heard about something called MP3 that would let me listen to music from the Internet. Also, at about that time, I heard that Peter Jackson was making a 'Lord of the Rings' movie, and someone commented that they wished Blind Guardian would do the soundtrack. Alas, like most Americans, I had no clue who the heck Blind Guardian is. Guess what I did? I grabbed an MP3 player from Aminet, and I downloaded a Blind Guardian MP3.
At that moment, I discovered that Metal is alive and well. Healthier and better than it has ever been, in fact. It simply isn't covered by the American media companies. But it's out there. Now I have found and previewed hundreds of bands that will never, ever be played on any radio/television station in America, and have bought somewhere around 400 or 500 CDs from online shops, recorded by bands that most people have never heard of. I think about 8 of those CDs are by Blind Guardian.
Many of these are expensive imports, but it's worth it. Oh, but there's North American bands in there too. Yep, believe it or not, You Can Still Rock in America -- but only the Internet people know that you can.
I'm guessing that it has all added up to about $6000 so far. (This is a rough estimate.) That's $6000 in sales to one single customer (me), which never would have happened if it weren't for MP3s.
Hope this helps.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I am the primary network administrator for a small college. Last term we had a serious problem here with one student consuming huge quantities of bandwidth moving bootleg movies in VCD format, so we've been doing a lot of thinking about this issue.
Let me tell you this: I have zero interest in wasting time blocking you just because you happen to be bootlegging. I won't even notice that you're bootlegging unless you're being a bandwidth hog in doing so: one FTP session looks much like another from the outside.
If you are being a bandwidth hog, you're harming your neighbors, and I will stop you from doing that. Everyone on campus should be able to get a fair share of the bandwidth, and if you and your pals are hogging it all, I don't care if you're moving VCDs or Linux ISO images; I'm going to raise a fuss and, if necessary, happily shut you down.
If I get a note from the RIAA saying you're bootlegging, I'll do what's necessary to keep them from suing the college's pants off, because it's damn cold in Massachusetts right now and we can use all the pants we can get. But if you're bootlegging without hogging, I honestly don't give a damn.
Do you have any clue how TINY the percentage of profits a musician actually makes off of the sales of his/her album?
I think most musicians, even a lot of the big-name stars who have the most to lose from mp3 piracy (as opposed to freely releasing an mp3 themselves), support the mp3 revolution. Tom Petty and (in a big way) David Bowie come to mind as examples of people who have really embraced the new medium.
For a brief, freakish time, recordings as a medium were intensely profitable for a very few musicians (but never so much for them as for record companies). Those days are over. MP3s represent a brand-new way to use recordings for their original purpose -- a marketing tool to sell either the live performance or the sheet music.
The beauty of it is the beauty of the internet -- I no longer need to grease the palms of radio DJ's, I no longer need to get an "in" with a major label -- many of the barriers that formerly blocked new musicians from "making it" are now gone, and a band can even be from Midland, TX or The Netherlands and a guy like me could stumble across them. Or even Italy. (Just three of my favorite bands that I never would have heard of through the standard radio play / movie soundtrack / local bar circuit methods.)
The recording industry is corrupt. (Duh.) Most of us musicians, even those of us who are in the system, have seen it as a necessary evil. MP3's are a way around them!
(Braveheart mode on)
FREEEEEEDOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM!
(Braveheart mode off)
One band I know of is even using mp3's to give fans who are musicians the opportunity to make their own remixes!
All in all, mp3's are pretty cool for those of us who are artists. Most musicians are NOT whores to the music industry (much as they've tried to be) and lose almost nothing; many of those who are tied in with big labels have already embraced the new medium.
MP3's aren't going anywhere, and those who fight against them will only lose their money in the end.
just my 2 zorkmids