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MP3: On Artist Protection And Copy Protection
I think that if you spoke with most musicians, you'd be surprised to find out that we hold big record labels in very low regard. Big record labels, owned by larger companies, run by stockholders, are interested in only one thing, and it ain't music. And it ain't musicians, neither. It is, quite simply, profit, and whatever they can do to maximise that profit, they'll do it. I know I'm sounding like Jon Katz here, but in truth a lot of what he says about corporatism fits the music industry perfectly. At the top are rich fat white guys churning out pablum, or thinking up new and creative ways to turn good acts into pablum, because pablum sells more records.
The problem with record labels is, quite simply, that in order to ensure that they make the kinds of money they want to make, they won't take chances. And because they happen to control all the methods of physical music distribution, they're the only game in town. When the only game in town won't take chances, that means that if you want to play, you have to play their game, and you can't take chances either.
Before the Internet, it wasn't even possible to compete against the major labels -- but in the 80s there were still plenty of minor labels willing to cater to your needs. In fact, once upon a time there was a thriving indie music scene -- there were bands able to make a living doing what they did by working with labels who didn't mind challenging music. But something happened: the big labels found out about these small labels, thought they could produce more pablum, and bought most of them out.
Meanwhile, the record industry lumbers merrily along, stepping on all the talent it can find, robbing them blind, making them sign ridiculous contracts that give up most of their rights and bleeding them dry. And a few musicians get fabulously rich in the process -- that's the carrot -- but the rest of the musicians wonder what the hell happened.
That's the problem with the record industry. And one of the biggest problems with a record label is that, despite how much they suck in general, they are phenomenally good at distribution. They know how to get the word out to record stations, they know how to put your CDs in stores, they know how to schedule you on talk shows, they know how to promote -- and they can reach a much, much larger area than you can. One of the biggest selling points a record label has is saying "our distribution network can put your CD in stores worldwide." Every musician wants his music heard worldwide, even if he tells himself he doesn't care. It's part of being a musician.
Here's the theory: the Backstreet Boys have thousands upon thousands of fans in every town they stop in. The Baptist Death Ray, on the other hand, does not. The Backstreet Boys play music that is likely to be played in every city and every town all over the world. The Baptist Death Ray, on the other hand, is a more cultivated taste. So while thousands upon thousands of people in every town might like the backstreet boys, only fifty to a hundred people in every town might like the Baptist Death Ray.
With the Internet, however, this can cease to be a problem. No longer does the Baptist Death Ray have to worry about finding 100 fans at a time. The Internet is distributed, which means among other things that although in reality all of the Baptist Death Ray fans are scattered across the globe, the perception is that they're all hanging out at the Baptist Death Ray's Web site, the Baptist Death Ray pages on Listensmart.com, Mp3.com, MusicBuilder.com, Riffage.com, and Garageband.com. In effect, the Baptist Death Ray has found a viable audience for his music over the Internet that he could not necessarily find via geography.
That is what the Internet should do for independent musicians. And this, my friends, is a genuine threat to the big record labels.
So right now you have musicians like me who make some of our music freely available. We say "listen to this! This is what I sound like. If you like it, why don't you buy the CD?" Pretty simple, not sophisticated, but all new movements start out simple and unsophisticated. In time, this could grow into something the major labels can't stop, and that scares them a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. Once upon a time MP3.com talked a lot about this, before they tried to become another music label themselves. They called it a revolution. They were right, but then they went public and stopped talking about it.
But here's the truth: to support yourself on the Internet all you need to do is sell 10,000 CDs a year at $8 a CD. If you're selling through a model like MP3.com's, you can make 40K a year -- not bad for a musician! 10,000 CDs is nothing to a major label. 10,000 CDs sold in a year means the label drops you and never talks to you again. Your album doesn't even go aluminum at 10,000 CDs.
This means that if the public could get used to buying music online, the major labels would be screwed. They're not willing to sell CDs at $8 a pop, and plenty of musicians are willing to sell them for less. That is a revolution -- a revolution where musicians are suddenly supporting themselves based on whether or not their audience likes what they do and buys their work.
Then there's Napster. Napster seems to follow the model where the plucky indie musicians put their music online and compete against the big labels toe-to-toe. The problem is, Napster doesn't compete against the record labels. Maybe the record labels don't know this, but it's true... Napster doesn't compete against the record labels, it competes against those plucky indie musicians.
It's no secret that despite the "rampant piracy" of people trading MP3s last year, the big labels sold more CDs than ever before. People tend to like buying CDs; there's a psychological difference between downloading an MP3 and going to a store and buying a CD. Consumers aren't buying music -- they're buying CDs, with cover art and liner notes and a little poster inside and a few hidden tracks and a few spoken tracks and perhaps a limited edition signed thingie wedged in between the cover art and the CD itself. The record industry makes big stars, and owning the things that a big star sells is part of the job of being a fan. Trading bootlegs is also part of the job of being a fan, but buying the posters, the CDs, the T-Shirts, all that stuff is as well. Record companies will always make lots of money from CDs, DVDs, and any other physical format that comes after.
So yes, while there may be a billion people trading Metallica songs online, Metallica's fans will still buy Metallica CDs, because to their fans, Metallica is the greatest band that has ever lived. Despite piracy, record labels will be able to make money, gobs and gobs of it. Napster doesn't compete with the major labels -- Napster promotes them, whether either side wants to admit it or not.
Who Napster does compete with, however, are the independent musicans. While independent musicians are trying to convince people that they don't need to buy from major labels, that they can buy direct (for less!) instead, Napster is showing people that they don't need to buy music at all. So on the one hand, you could buy ABCDEffigy at MP3.com, on the other hand, you could scour Napster for all the MP3s and have it anyway. After all, the Baptist Death Ray doesn't sell CDs, he sells music. CDs are freakin' expensive. Liner notes and posters and colored cds and limited edition doodads are the kind of promotional, artistic things that record labels excel at, that they use to justify jacking up the price.
Meanwhile, the consumer looks at a Web site where he or she can spend $8 for a CD, and then looks at Napster and sees the entire contents of the album online, free. Pay, or free. It's entropy, people, it all depends on what requires less energy. Right now, maybe spending the $8 is more convenient than waiting two days on a 33.3 modem. When high bandwidth lines are commonplace, however, that will no longer be the case. The worst part is not that Napster makes it easy to pirate music -- No, the worst part is the overwhelming feeling among Napster users that pirating that music is somehow morally justifiable. Most of the arguments I see say that they're not stealing from artists, they're stealing from record labels who don't pay the artists enough anyway. Well, I have news for you, the artists, even if they don't get the amount that they deserve, still get something with every music sale.
So how does the artist make money? Well, the common response from the free music movement is "touring." But you all need to know about touring. Touring is not a good way to make money unless you have a core audience of a certain size. A "core audience" is an audience that of fans who love your stuff, and will go out of their way to see you play. Now, go back to the top of this article and read the bit about the geographical limitations the Baptist Death Ray has, versus the geogrpahical limitations the Backstreet Boys do not have.
Ideologically speaking, the people who defend Napster may very well be on stronger ground than I am. Perhaps copyright and intellectual property has run its course. Perhaps its abuses call for the complete and absolute revocation of any claim that any artist has to his or her work. Perhaps pirating music through Napster is the just the kind of direct action that we need in order to show the labels who, in fact, is boss.
What I see, however, is the death of a revolution before it even had the chance to get off the ground. I feel that even if Napster loses its court case, it's too late to stop the way things are going. Napster and its supports will, one way or another, win. However, the result of that victory will be that artists will depend more than ever on rich sponsors, which is all that a record label really is. You thought mainstream music sucked now? Wait a few years after you've won. It'll suck worse.
Signed,
The Baptist Death Ray
(bdr@baptistdeathray.com)
And in related news, ewhac writes: "CNet reported about a week ago that AOL has announced it will incorporate copy-protection measures into an upcoming release of WinAmp, the hugely popular music player (upon which XMMS is modeled). The copy protection technology, intended to deter music "piracy," is to be provided by InterTrust Technologies, and is also intended to be part of the upcoming AOL 6.0 release. WinAmp was developed by NullSoft, which was acquired by AOL a little over a year ago for about $100 million in stock.
Personal Observation: May we now conclude that AOL is no longer a customer-driven company? Because I can't imagine a single user actually asking, "Please take away my ability to share stuff with my friends." Sounds like it may be time for a Windows port of XMMS ..."
I can't hear the difference between a quality MP3 rip and the original CDROM. And I've tried with a good pair of headphones.
I think BDR has authored a very well written, thought filled editorial on the state of music in the modern world. I think he missed the largest piece of the puzzle. If you want to make money with anything (be it coding or playing tunes) it needs to be approached as a business.
Sure, sites like MP3.com and tools like Napster make it easier to promote on an international level, but they don't provide all the back-breaking legwork that has to be done to get people to want to look up BDR on Gnutella.
If you want to make money, you need to provide something that people want to buy, and somehow let the people that want to buy know that you have what they want. The Internet and tools like Gnutella make this much easier than it has been, but it has not removed all the work. The internet also makes it easier to post my resume, but if I don't take the time to sharpen my skills and put my resume in the right places, who will look at it? And my resume would be for essentially a one time sale. To make serious money from music, you need thousands of sales. To get thousands of sales, it takes a non-trivial amount of money and sweat and organizational talent.
The SBA (Small Business Administration) states that in the US, 70% of new businesses fail within the first 5 years. The two primary reasons are: lack of working capital and poor management. The Music business is no different from any other business, it takes hard work, and phenomenal organizational skills to make serious money.
And this is the one thing that even BDR admits that major lables provide to signed artists, the labels provide management, marketing, and distribution support. To try to make a living off of music without those things provided by a label, the independent artist will need to provide those things for him or her self.
The bottom line: if BDR thinks that he or she can make a living off of his or her music, BDR ought to find someone to hire to do the business end if BDR is not interested in the blood, sweat, and tears it takes to run a business. There is a reason that Brian Epstein was considered 'the fifth Beatle.' There is a reason that Lars in his interview stressed the importance of Metallica's manager in decision making. If an artist has the aptitude to run a business, great, if not, look for someone that does.
The author finished telling us that people will buy CDs because they like physical things. So how does Napster hurt him?
If people don't know he exists, he sells no CDs. Until ten minutes ago, I didn't know he existed. How would I find out? By going to a store and seeing what's on shelves or watching MTV or Much Music. Assuming he's indie, that's not going to help. So even if I did feel like buying a CD, he still wouldn't get any money.
MP3.com and other sites may help, but they lack the draw of full albums of something you like. Napster provides this.
And while searching for one thing (with Napsters lousy search capability) you always get other results. I may see BDR in there and decide to listen to it, and upon listening, get more. Then, and only then, if I want to buy a CD does BDR have any chance of getting that sale.
Metallica doesn't need this advertising, they have a label doing it for them and tons of fans for word-of-mouth. Baptist Death Ray doesn't have a million dollar propoganda machine and needs whatever help it can get.
I think the benefit of being discovered would outweigh the drawbacks of being pirated a bit.
Think of it like the software world... If I (broke) pirate Photoshop, can Adobe honestly claim to have LOST money? No. They have lost a potential sale, that's all. And if you do it correctly and multiply the cost by the likelihood of me coughing up $1200 or whatever for the full version, you're at like $0.13 oportunity cost lost. Not a lot. If anyone loses out, it's Jasc Software, makers of Paint Shop Pro who sell their software for around $100 (I'm guessing) and have a realistic chance of selling me a copy. Not only this, but being that they sell direct, they make more. Adobe sells through retail channels and can't make as high a fraction of their purchase price in profit.
So, apply this to MP3s and CDs. The traditional view is that BDR loses the purchase if I pirate their album. The 'new' view is that BDR loses nothing if I pirate their album. I suggest that unless I knew about them anyways and was willing to buy their album, they don't lose anything and potentially gain a new fan.
And I'm not saying that Napster is a service. People don't use Napster to help musicians, they just want something for nothing. But I don't think Napster hurts the musicians all that much because broke teens (the biggest Napster demographic, IMHO) don't buy many CDs.
There is one large inductry that has worked out Micro Payments and that is the Telecos. Two minute call to LA 20 cents. Five minute call to NY half a buck.
What ever happened to all of those cyber cash start-up from five years ago?
On On
There are a billion alternatives to WinAmp available. I've registered my version, a long time ago, so I'll just stop upgrading from now on. It's not like I don't have a fully functioning, 100% cool version of WinAmp already. Why the hell would I want to upgrade to a version that limits my choices? They're shooting themselves in the foot, and not even hitting it properly.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Do you recall Courtney Love's lengthy speech to some online entertainment conference? Well she has followed up her words with action. Last week Hole's website posted 50+ rare and live MP3's. Interestingly enough, I met Courtney on a flight from Seattle to LA in January 95, and was lucky enough to have a pen and something to write on handy. She was gracious enough to give me an autograph, and even added a bit of humour to it. It was a Wired magazine cover which she emblazoned "I can uh.... download..." along with her signature. Even in '95 she had a clue - she's obviously taken strides with the changing times and technology.
While I agree that there is a lot of recycled pop crap out there, I think you're being blind by making a statement such as "that's all there was".
There is plenty of original music out there: rap, classical, some rock and alot of others. I think you're just being blinded by the overflow of Britney, Backhole Boys, et. al. See past the glaring crap and there's a lot of good new stuff coming out. How do you find out the good new stuff? Well, there's where Napster and friends come in..... but that's another discussion for another post. :-)
Also, MP3s suck? What bitrate are you listening to? Have you ever heard a 160bit+ mp3 recording made from a digital source? Can you tell the difference? I contend that one cannot tell the difference. MP3s are good, but remember they're only as good as the source they were compressed from and the bit rate they were compressed at.
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
Let's assume for once that the above point is non-arguable [i could make an exception case out of myself, but i won't, because hell I read /. so you could hardly call me a model consumer]. Anyways, I entered college two years ago, and even though I thought my music was eclectic, I noticed and heard other music from others I'd never heard. Amongst most of it was the 'radio crap,' but not all of it.
The point is that because of dorm life and the availbility of a large amount of mp3's, I now have a lot of music that I would never have even considered owning or listening to, real gems of music that never gets played. Some of it indie, some of it really small time label stuff, some of it 'mainstream'[minus one karma point].
Want more details? Going into college I listened to mainstream rock. That was it. Since then I've gone all over the place with my music tastes, with 70's funk, electric, and small time indie stuff that i hear on the radio late at night. No way am I going to buy all of it, but I am much _more_ less inclined to buy the stuff that people want me go after. I have no idea how this will translate when broadband really hits the outside world, but I hope that trend continues, because it means most people aren't as dumb as they seem. Let's hear it for Aphex Twin! The only stuff to code to.
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
Before I start in - well done on the article. Well written, well thought out, and little wry gems like "Baptist Death Ray is a more refined taste" were a nice touch.
;)
It's also nice to see you here, in the comments section, were we can go ahead and wrestle a little. I'm suitably impressed enough to download a song or two that you've provided, and check your music out. (There is, indeed, no such thing as Bad Publicity
There are, however, two very serious flaws in your argument:
1) Treating music as a "product" that can be sold or stolen.
2) The right of a musician to make a living making music.
I'm sure you've heard all the arguments before, but for our studio audience, let's review. Music is fundimentally a SERVICE industry. You show up, you do your thing, the air vibrates, and people exposed to those vibrations either enjoy it or not. The trick there is that nobody else can make the air vibrate the same way you do, so there is a rarity there. Assuming a certain level of quality, there is value in having you vibrate the air for people.
Now if someone happens to have a recording device handy, and they record these vibrations for later playback, what POSSIBLE claim do you have on them? Do you own the air? Do you own their ears? Their memories?
Now it just so happens that the labels have made a huge industry out of selling prepackaged recordings, and they've done so in a way that screws the artists royally. If I were in your position, if I went to a recording studio where I knew my vibrations were being recorded for later resale, then I'd demand a pretty damn hefty fee for my time - because that's what you're being compensated for, your TIME - up front. That the music industry does not work that way sucks, but don't blame the world for your complicity in a broken business model.
This is the crux - as a musician, you provide a service, which takes time. You get paid for that time, but you have no right to expect any compensation beyond what you charge for your time.
Think of it this way - a programmer, working at a bank, writes a new accounting package that streamlines the process somehow and saves the bank 1 billion dollars over the course of a year. The bank, in essence, made 1 billion off the fruits of this programmer's effort - but does the programmer have any claim to that money? Of course not.
Which leads into the "how can a musician make a living?" question. Well, where does it say that musicians have some sort of right to make livings as musicians? I drive race cars in my spare time. (www.wincom.net/trog/) I'd KILL to make a living as a full-time, professional race car driver, of whom there are maybe 1000 in the entire world. In the meantime, I pay, and I pay, and I pay, and I pay, working towards that eventual goal that I might maybe one day achieve (but probably won't) And I gladly take help from any sponsor willing to throw a bone my way. (Wanna sponsor a race car? I'm cheap!)
It's the same way with any other exclusive, limited-access profession. Ask any Olympic athelete, especially that guy over there with the bronze medal in javelin.
IF you can make a living at it - great for you! Wonderful! (really, I mean that. I wish success on everybody with a dream) But don't expect that success to come easy, don't expect that success to be even _possible_, and don't expect to gain that success by exploiting a broken, bogus, and flat-out WRONG concept like "intellectual property". Once them vibrations leave your lips (or your speakers, or whatever) you have no more claim on them. THAT is the reality you are facing. If you can make a living in that reality, cool. If not, well, then frankly Other Careers Beckon.
I don't mean to sound harsh - I empathize with your plight more than this post might indicate. But the world is a harsh place and denial gets you nowhere.
Good luck. I'm going to check out your website later, and if I like what I hear, I may buy your CD. Not because I see the CD as "product" that I want to "own", but because I understand that my PATRONAGE is required if you are to be able to continue making music. Important word, that. "Patron". Another word for "sponsor", a word I'm very intimately concerned with. You're lucky - ever person who chooses to buy your CD, t-shirts, or whatever, becomes a sort of "micro-patron", whereas I'm limited by the surface area on my car.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I can see where this could be a valid case for a secondary (and much cheaper) channel. Given that Courtney says all her expenses (studio time, promotion, tour costs) are recouped from her anyhow, then any micropayment scheme where the artist gets approximately what *her share* of the CD sale would have been can't be wrong.....
--
-=DaveHowe=-
We could build some sort of recommendation engine that linked through to MP3.com content... but then we'd probably get sued or banished a la the meta-auction sites.
I've actually suggested collaboritve filtering / recommendations to MP3.com in the past, and the silence has been deafening. Too bad. I'd use such a service constantly, and as a musician myself, it's an exciting proposition.
-paul"Irony is so September 10th"
Matt Miller, alt.fan.spinnwebe
While I'm sure there are people out there with the attitude you describe, I haven't seen that many of them (a few of them are particularly loud though). There are all sorts of different kinds of people downloading MP3's:
* People desperate for access to more and better music than the radio and stores offer;
* People curious about the technology;
* People (often students) without the cash to spend on CD's if they wanted to;
* People who won't spend money if they can get what they want without cash.
The lost sales only fall in the last group, and if you think about it, these people aren't big spenders on CD's to begin with, with cassette copies, CD-R copies and used CD's already available. The first group (and potentially the second as well) represents new sales. From what I've seen, the first group is larger in both numbers and dollars than the fourth.
If you hear someone saying that the artist has no right to make money off of their work, by all means argue against them. I just don't agree that sharing music removes the right or ability of the artist to make money off of their work. There will always be people willing and able to pay for good creative works.
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Open mind, insert foot.
I suppose I did sound quite negative in my original post. I agree that the record label machine has churned out a lot of music that I do enjoy, and that I do BUY and listen to.
My point was that they do turn out tons of crap for the sole purpose of making money.
Music is art. There are tons of starving musicians who won't sell out, same as there are starving painters, writers, sculptors, etc. Music is entertaining, but it should have a purpose. And that purpose shouldn't be greed, or lust for fame.
Sure, the great musicians and composers were often commissioned, but they were commissioned because of their talent, not because of the media machine.
Manufactured Music is, IMHO, no higher on the music food chain than advertising jingles. It makes me sick.
My disagreement with the article is as follows. Most people interested in the indie scene are interested in the indie scene including sich things as high-fidelity, lo-fidelity, vinyl, and other such esoteric aspects of recorded music. MP3's and the internet will never stop a fan of an indie band from picking up every CD, 7" and bootleg tape they can find. This will of course mean they will want to use Napster to find live and rare recordings, but never as an excuse for legitimate releases.
In case you are looking for an article to read from an insider in the industry, Steve Albini of such fantastic indie bands as Shellac and Big Black has written an article that sums up what a newly signed bands has done to their collective anus by a major label. And he should know, having produced (his real job is a professional recording engineer) bands like Nirvana, Page/Plant, the Breeders, the Pixies, and (ugh)Bush. Take a look.
Chris
being in a band that's both on mp3.com and being traded on Napster, I can say definately that not only are big label bands being traded... right now, for us, it's cool because we are distributing all our demo stuff for free, and for now, people are still buying the CD anyway. But as an artist that isn't on a major label, there is definately a scary side to Napster. The Baptist Death Ray article has really hit home for a lot of unsigned bands on the internet. I think we are all wondering what the future holds. All I can say for sure is that direct interaction between bands and listeners is extremely cool for both sides, the economic benefit that legitimate middlemen provide is gone and the record companies seem to have outlived their usefulness, it's not cheaper for the artist and the fans to distribute directly over the internet... now if we can just find a way to make sure artists we like are supported so they can continue to make music we enjoy. I don't have the answers yet, we still just trying to write the soundtrack ;P L8r, brian@shizit.net
If I bought some music online and the company I bought it from wanted to PGP the MP3 before sending it I would be more than happy. After all, they may well not trust my ISPs employees for example - that's up to them.
If however they wanted to encrypt it in some other format which I needed some kind of 'key' file or such or some special player to listen to it, that's entirely different. It's not much good for me with my MP3 player and they would be restricting MY use of what I have bought.
The former is very much like the privacy you mention that is advocated by many slashdotters not the latter. Once I decrypt a message from a friend, I then have the plain text of the mesage to do whatever I want with. If people sent me messages that it was impossible to extract the plain text from, I would tell them to bollocks.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Wow, if I'm going to go to all that trouble, I think I'll just buy the CD :-).
D
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Here's a simple way to set up a place like MP3.com that can allow people to easily pay for music.
First, you set up a site to host MP3's, with a collaborative filtering system like others have mentioned. This provides some value to draw people in.
Then make all of the users on the site sign up for PayPal (that's why you'd want some value to draw people in). This is they key factor - without an easy way to pay artists, no one will. Then you could let users download songs, and either throw a bit of money at the artist as a way of saying thank you, paying for higher bitrate encoding, or just buying a CD from the artist online by clicking on a link that would generate a PayPal payment through you to the artist.
On the backend, you offer the artists a choice - you'll be happy to host the MP3's for 10% of any money sent to them, or if they want to host their own music you provide a nice framework and links (and possibly caching) for only 1%. This would encourage bands to build their own websites, which is better for the band and for you.
If the site was really successful, perhaps you could offer artists with a lot of downloads and fan support some use of studio time in different cities across the country.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If an artist wants to make millions of dollars, be prepared to sell out. There is no way to avoid it.
Generally this is true, but not always. I have utmost respect for bands like the Dave Matthews Band, the Greatful Dead, and Phish. These bands built a fanbase by playing shows, and appealing to their audience. Not by buying a 30second slot at EVERY commercial break (this pisses me off). Their fans are dedicated to the band, their show changes every night of the tour, and it's very easy to tell the difference between a live show and their latest CD. And they're huge.
My roommates are driving from Moncton, NB, Canada for 11 hours (each way) to Foxborough, Mass. this weekend to see a DMB show where there will be 60,000 people. The show will be amazing. We watch the Listener Supported DVD on a regular basis, but we know that the show will be so much different. You can't get that with manufactured music. The show will sound exactly like the CD because often, it IS the CD.
Manufactured music is (obviously) one of my biggest pet peeves.
Hey Katz, you could learn alot on how to effectively get your point across, without sounding like a holier-than-thou, fanatical know-it-all!
BTW, I have no opinion on this subject (interesting as it is, though), so that didn't influence my above opinions.
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
As long as one is being anonymous via a pseudonym that can't be linked to its real-world owner, most of the issues associated with having such detailed databases are minimized. Does it really bother you as much when a company knows that "someone" has your preferences as when the company knows that you have them? They nevertheless gain a marketing advantage from such knowledge, but it isn't a direct tax upon your soul, and it's probably a fair exchange for the service rendered.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
That's the ENTIRE POINT of what's been said. There are bands out there that can consistently put together a full CD's worth of quality material, they're just not promoted as much by the labels, if it all. When people talk about leveling the playing field, it's so that those bands can enjoy more exposure as well.
But if all you're after is what the labels give you, then you might as well forget about it. The internet will not increase the quality of any artists music. It'll only help more artists reach you.
If all you want is what you've already gotten, then there's nothing here for you.
> is that if you fill them out and load them up to a site like MP3.com or Listensmart.com, a lot of
> those sites just strip them out. ID tags are an "unsupported" feature on a lot of those sites
You need something more sophisticated that ID tags, something that can:
- include information about where the music came from
- include pictures, "cover art", etc
- include lyrics
- include a link to a web page so that you can click on a button and buy the CD
The Ogg Vorbis audio format uses an XML like metadata format which will allow you to store all of this information in the file itself. Then you just need to write the player to deal with it.
Of course, Vorbis also doesn't come with a $15,000 yearly minimum for just putting songs on your web site.
http://www.vorbis.com/
I would also have a hard time calling 'try before you buy' stealing. But (and I am generalizing here) many people seem to have the attitude that if they can get it via napster, why bother to buy the CD.
In an ideal world all people would/could do what you are doing -- sample and then purchase those things that they like. This would benefit music lovers, as they would have a wider variety of stuff, and musicians, as they wouldn't go broke producing music for free.
TANSTAAFL -- if you don't pay the musicians now, in a few years all that will be available to buy/download will be Britney Spears and the like because no one else will be able to afford to make decent recordings of thier work.
Just give the people what they want - downloads on a song by song basis for about $1 per song. They'll pay, the artists can eat, and the record companies can survive too, since there's very little overhead in an electronic transaction.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Yes, but *I WANT* to buy CD's, and I don't think I'm the only one.
My fear is that all this piracy and theft will do nothing but inconvenience me who likes to buy CD's. Suddenly I'll be stuck with CDs that only work on special players or some stupid thing like that.
I have this suspicion(call it a hope) that this "Revolution" you speak of will be the same illconceived revolution that Amazon.com tried to sell us. We will put all the brick & mortar stores out of business by selling direct...
Guess what, it didn't happen.
And all I can say is, "Thank God!"
People should realize that copying publically available information is never theft. By copying your information (say, by hitting save page on the Slashdot comment you posted) I deprive you of nothing: the information is still there. So-called "Intellectual Property" is completely unlike real property in this regard--as Jefferson among others realized. If you take someone else's CD, you are depriving them of the use of that CD. If you copy someone's CD, you haven't harmed them at all. Property rights in information aren't a matter of any natural right the creator has to monopolize something that can be infinitely copied without diminishing; they are solely a matter of public policy considerations that hold that on the balance, society as a whole is better off if the creators are granted a limited monopoly as an incentive to create. The key concepts here are that the monopoly should be limited (e.g. "fair use" exceptions--if copying really were theft, then even copying for purposes of review or backups would be immoral), and that it should only be granted to the extent that society as a whole really does benefit. That's a pragmatic issue, not a moral one.
At least that's what I heard?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying every musician should be a rock star. And I'm not saying that every musician should even be able to "make it" out there. But why is there an ideological problem with a musician being able to support themselves?
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Making music does take skill, and time, and effort. Like every other profession out there, it requires that you practice and improve in order for your skills to be worth the time of other people.
How is it somehow ideologically WRONG for a musician to be able to try and making a living off their work, but it's ok for a teacher, or a programmer, or an automobile manufacturer to DEMAND that they be compensated for their time?
And how is it that it's ok not to pay for music but it's not ok to steal a novel or a painting? Writers, musicians and painters are all artists... some are just more "respectable" than others.
Q: What is the difference between a musician and an actor?
A: The actor gets paid.
Sure, I know that a lot of people "do music" just because they want to become filthy stinking rich, but why do you assume anyone who would like to make a living from their work automatically has that attitude?
+----------------------------------------------
+------------------------------------------------
+ The urge to destroy is a creative urge
Yes, but screening is the easiest part of the whole equation to replace. The classic example of this is this website. /. is little more than a News screening service for nerds. They don't make the news, they generally don't even write the articles, they simply act as a filter (and a place to discuss).
What is needed is a website (or series of websites, one for each specific genre of music) where a group of dedicated music lovers sort through all of the newly available MP3's and sort the wheat from the chaff. They could support their site via advertising and could probably even sideline in selling the CDs that they promote. What makes /. work is precisely the same magic that would make these types of music review sites work. /. readers (for the most part anyway) trust CmdrTaco and crew to pick out interesting geek topics on a regular basis. So we show up and discuss. They make a living using the judgement as to what is truly "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters."
There is nothing stopping someone else from taking the Slashdot engine and making "Music for Goths, Indies that don't Suck," or perhaps "Tunes for Cowpokes, Not Your Same-Old Big City Country." Sure, some of these sites won't know good music from a hole in their head, but some of them probably will know what they are talking about. There will probably even be one that almost exactly matches your own particular music tastes.
It's something to think about anyway.
I think that this is the only way to overcome the current problems with our "distribution system". Sure, there will be people that will never voluntarily support artists (or software designers, or authors, or scientists, etc.), but will simple mooch off the system. I think that the majority of people will recognize that it is in their best interest to "contribute".
It will take some education and it needs to be made easy and convenient for people to do it, but I beleive they will.
P.S. xeno, I'd love to get in contact with you about what you have said.
I use napster myself, but most of the things I
grab are songs that I remember, that touched me,
and most are popular, major label songs. And I'm
definitely not replacing music consumption, when
I love an artist, I buy their CD, even sometimes
popular ones.
My real love though, is music I don't listen to
all the time. Its not stuff I put on in the
background, its stuff from very minor artists and
groups who tend to make their money through
performances, and not the CD's they sell online.
But I have the complete CD collection of Uncle
Bonsai, and you CANNOT find them in a store.
So do I go to napster? No, I go to their web,
where I find they are banded together with other
artists who tend to play the same scenes. I find,
wow, there is a sampler CD. I buy that, find the
artists I love, and start to expand that way.
Now that is the ONLY way to spread music. To make
it accessable to those who haven't heard it
before. But they won't want to hear it, unless
they think they will like it. Alot of my favorite
stuff I heard from friends who shared it with me.
The only way artists are going to spread their
music around is by making sharing smiliar tastes
easier on their online access points.
But they aren't doing it. Like artists everywhere
they are making really obscure, badly designed,
completely unusable, very pretty web sites. At
least the majority are. The few that aren't have
a pretty continuing fan base, and if they start
to do a little creative marketing (bring sampler
CD's of themselves with other artists they like
to distribute at performances, cards with web urls
and so forth), they might find better success.
The internet takes a change in perspective to
take advantage of. Its the only medium where
spreading other people's stuff and relating it
to yours is advantagous.
Nullsoft understood that AOL would do this eventually when they released GNUtella under the GPL. Too bad they never did the same for Winamp -- it would force AOL to release the modified source to Winamp (assuming the GPL is upheld) which would have allowed us to remove whatever crap they inserted. (This really needs its own story). With all the buzz about GUIDs and now this... software REALLY starts to violate privacy.
That is why the FSF encourages owners of GPLed code to give the copyright to them so these things cannot happen.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
People already take it for free. Providing an option to pay is what musicians/studios should do. Screw the copy protection. Put the music up and offer a fair price and a payment method. Those who don't want to pay won't. But those who do want to pay will have an option. $1 > $0.
A news flash for you all: People will still make music if the dont get paid for it. Most of the artists out there arent getting paid at all and they dont mind. Im a programmer and I make music just for the heck of it, and if people like it, great(if not damn them to hell), im not looking for money.
I would like to know what Baptist Death Ray (and other professionals and semi-pros) think of Orange Alley and their bootlegal model. It seems like a great system to me -- though they need to get many more artists involved if they are going to succeed -- but I'm a geek, not a musician.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
This is where the concept of "neighbouring rights" becomes really interesting. At the moment, a composition is protected, but a performance can not be. Performers, as interpreters of creative works, have been floation the neighbouring rights concept for a least a decade now, trying to get their work recognized as copyrightable.
This didn't seem like much of a concern in the days when the performer's income was assumed to be either from per-performance fees or a share of the unit sales of copies of reproductions of that performance. The economics have changed however: the first change was that mechanical reproductions of performances became commonplace (films, audio recordings), and the cost of mounting public performances began to make many forms of public performance unprofitable. The second change is that electronic reproductions of the mechanical reproductions are becoming commonplace, and the old royalty structures that were put in place for deriving income from audio recordings or films of a performance are not adequate to produce income from electronic media for performers.
If you extended copyright to make a performance (a distinctive interpretation of a created work) copyrightable, would there be a possibility of a new revenue model for the electronic reproductions of a performance?
?
And your best point is that no one is entitled to make a living doing anything.
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You're right... no one is. I am not entitled to be a full-time musician who can support myself, and in fact I may never, ever, ever get that chance. That's part of the risk of doing what I do, and part of the risk of doing what you do as well.
My concern is that a lot of people think that when they're using Napster they're helping strike out against the bad guys, and they're not. They're striking out against the little guys -- some of whom are lousy and some of whom are very good at what they do.
A part of the article that I wish hadn't been cut (but it made sense to cut, because of the length) was a part where I said "the cat is out of the bag, the genie is out of the bottle, and no one is going to be able to put them back in their respective bag and bottle." Napster is here to stay, and I don't see as how there's any way to stop the damage that's being done. The music industry, as a whole lot of people have pointed out, is changing forever. I just wanted to make a point that a lot of people are ignoring -- there is a lot of friendly fire in this little turf war...
+----------------------------------------------
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+ The urge to destroy is a creative urge
checkout for example PayPal, and Just Web It.
PayPal is a way to send money over the internet, it is a nice little operation, and convenient.
Just Web It is a free ecommerce/estore site, just right for the entry band selling some albums and an occasional t-shirt, etc.
These may not be the best options, but they help someone who doesn't have coding expertise to set up a web page.
Now we get to the morons who do not see what their little misstep does on the broader scale. I am reminded of the apocryphal story of Atari Computer. Supposedly, they ultimately went under in part because the games for the Atari computer were so popular that everyone hacked them, and the developers ultimately went broke, throwing in the towel. (Anyone remember copy protection?)
of course the hackers were pissed that the company went broke, and didn't connect what they did to the fate of the company.
ultimately, the company got sold and resold many times (history here, and here), and now is a subsidiary of Hasbro.
Officially, there were other market forces at work. But I can not help wondering if these wise fools contributed to the downfall.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I wouldn't, and for the same reason I wouldn't use DivX (the extinct DVD thing, not the codec).
I'm the kind of person who likes to listen to songs over and over and over again. Maybe for you, its $160 a year, but I'd pretty much go broke listening to Blink 182 alone (set flame_retardant_suit 1).
On a practical note, how would I use the service in my car? And do we really want a fleet of discmans with IP addresses? My home isn't the only place I listen to music.
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Prgrammers have no god-given right to compensation. If there's no money in writing code, the market will adjust and fewer people will write code. Boo-hoo. How many programmers write code you actually use? There must be millions. The market is saturated to sickness. Many programmers write code because they love to do it, not because they expect to be compensated. I write code because I like doing it, I like what I create, and I want others to see it. If I make money off of it, cool, but that's not why I do it. If you were trying to make a living as a programmers, you had to expect hard times to begin with. Well, the market is changing, adapt. Finally. What are the implications of fewer programmers? Well guess who we're weeding out? The ones who are in it for the money alone. again, Boo-hoo.
Nah, it doesn't make any sense this way either.
I see now where you are coming from and I agree completely.
rosie_bhjp
A radio maverick jumps to internet only. The Future of Rock n Roll
Invalidating the copyrights on the music will screw the artists more than the industry. A percentage of sales goes to the American Federation of Muscians and is used to promote free live concerts (to schools and such) and to compensate the sidemen on the records.
It's small, but many muscians depend on that little check. Don't forget the side men! -coyo
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I hate buying a CD from any artist just to find out I hate it. If I love the music, I buy the CD. If I hate it, I don't buy. My money goes to the best musicians nowadays.
Favorite Musicians? Well....
There's Monte Montgomery. He is the next great guitar god....
Then there's Phil Pritchett. His latest minor-acoustic-release kinda sucks, but his earlier stuff kicks ass!
I need to get the new Cowboy Mouth CD....
who do i pay when i sing happy birthday?
Apparently, Time-Warner.
http://metalab.unc.edu/team/fun/birthday/
Happy Birthday to You, the four-line ditty was written as a classroom greeting in 1893 by two Louisville teachers, Mildred J. Hill, an authority on Negro spirituals, and Dr. Patty Smith Hill, professor emeritus of education at Columbia University.
The melody of the song Happy Birthday to You was composed by Mildred J. Hill, a schoolteacher born in Louisville, KY, on June 27, 1859. The song was first published in 1893, with the lyrics written by her sister, Patty Smith Hill, as "Good Morning To All."
Happy Birthday to You was copyrighted in 1935 and renewed in 1963. The song was apparently written in 1893, but first copyrighted in 1935 after a lawsuit (reported in the New York Times of August 15, 1934, p.19 col. 6)
In 1988, Birch Tree Group, Ltd. sold the rights of the song to Warner Communications (along with all other assets) for an estimated $25 million (considerably more than a song). (reported in Time, Jan 2, 1989 v133 n1 p88(1)
In the 80s, the song Happy Birthday to You was believed to generate about $1 million in royalties annually. With Auld Lang Syne and For He's a Jolly Good Fellow, it is among the three most popular songs in the English language. (reported in Time, Jan 2, 1989 v133 n1 p88(1)
Happy Birthday to You continues to bring in approximately 2 million dollars in licensing revenue each year, at least as of 1996 accounting, according to Warner Chappell and a Forbes magazine article.
What would be the interest in a online music store that allows you to immediately download the mp3s of the album, right after you have purchased the album. You would still recieve your cd in the mail, but you would be able to immediately be able to start listening to the music you purchased.
Jeff Knox
Um, I think the idea is to highlight the inequities by focusing on what has (lately) become a 'stereotypical' inequity.
...)
There's a measure of postmodern (postcolonial?) irony in attempting to do this by highlighting 'white guys' and pointing to the fact that they're probably 'rich' and 'fat.'
But the very verbal act of highlighting these particular traits seems to indicate that (a) the speaker him/herself is attempting to prove that he/she is 'enlightened' -- or at least aware of the inequities and is attempting to demonstrate this awareness by pinpointing the 'traditional inequities' or (b) the speaker him/herself is attempting to utilize this particular trope -- 'rich, fat white guys' -- to situated an ironic (postmodern) center from which future arguments can be posited.
I see evidence of (a) but don't yet see (b) in the particular text. (And (b), of course, has all sorts of problems. More about these below
The difficulty with this trope is the way in which it is employed and the purposes for which it is employed. If, for example, we knew the race or gender of the author of the text -- then how does the author's gender or race effect the usage of the trope in this context?
Can this trope be used effectively without any knowledge of the author's gender/class/race? If so, then it seems to beg the question: why highlight these particular features of the target you are referring to? What's the rhetorical purpose here? And how is that purpose informed by the author's own cultural (racial/gender/class) status?
And not only that -- but the doesn't the very verbal act of specifying race/gender/class in what appears to be an ironic context become itself as problematic as that to which it is referring to?
Contrary to what the author thinks, the trope in question is not actually decentering the traditional 'western' cultural matrix by highlighting inequities.
Is it not merely highlighting the very matrix it is attempting to subvert with its slick rhetoric of postmodern 'irony?'
(We could, at this point, turn to Kierkegaard for a good explanation of how the 'concept of irony' skirts beween the real and the ideal [Kierkegaard uses Socrates as an example -- views of Socrates by Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes] but we'll skip that for now.)
In the end, the troping seems pretty damn problematic and probably does not have the rhetorical effect that the author thinks it has.
Not only that -- and to make things pretty simple -- it's a tired stereotype whose time has come to be retired. It's even tired when used with ironic (postmodern) detachment. (The litmus test for a sterotype these days is whether it would pass the Letterman test [Letterman being the king of popular postmodern irony]. If Letterman says it and it bombs, then it's tired. If Letterman says it and it still gets a chuckle, then it probably has a few more miles left to it.)
It does not have to be this way of course. It just too bad that the record labels do not have enough competition amongst themselves for the good artists to be able to achieve goal 8.
Where does this blind faith in "The Market" come from? Free markets have to be free to work properly. As Baptist Death Ray has explained quite clearly
Perhaps they have - all they need is web space, which is still there. I doubt that most of the developers are in it for the money. :-)
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Sometimes the people don't do what they know is good for them. That is another driving force for laws. Think of speeding. I contend that most people in this country speed at least 5mph over. Should we stop writing tickets because obviously the will of the people is go as fast as we want? Another example is seat belts. When that started taking effect, people bitched and complained. "You can't make me do something I don't want to do!!". The law was enforced, people got ticketed, death rates in accidents went down, and everyone went, "hey, that's not so bad."
The will of the people doesn't always take into account the rights of other people. Let's assume that people trading mp3s over napster are taking sales away from indie artists (big assumption, I know). The traders want to continue trading free music, that's their "will", even though it is hurting someone else. Do we abolish copyright laws? Of course not.
The people's will only has a part to play in law-making. To make a "good" law, one must step back and see things from all angles, including saftey of the people (hence seat belt laws), and other things.
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
> MP3's are great for sampling music, but I think the quality sucks
With constant increases in bandwidth becoming available, how long before people have forgotten MP3 and are just using CDDA anyway?
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
I'm sure Baptist Whatevertheyarecalled has some loyal fans, but I'm getting a little tired of virtually unknown artists trying to get noticed by "taking a stand" on a hotbutton issue that gets their name in the press.
I don't like Hole's music, but when Courney Love went on her rant about the big labels and MP3's I had to respect her cred on the issue. She sold a buttload of music as an independant artist, then got signed to a major label and had even more success, so it was not like she was starved for media attention. Having worked on both sides of the fence, she had a perspective that the average working "bar band" lacks.
With or without MP3's, you will never, ever, ever sell 10,000 CD's without finding a way to expose people to your music.
A few bands have gambled on net radio and MP3.com as one way to get heard. Others choose to see the Internet as a threat, and continue to glue posters to utility poles like they did in the 80's. Time will tell which model works best.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I hadn't heard of them before (but I had heard Chantmania), but was able to find them with Google. These look like the guys you were talking about:
http://www.dustbury.com/music/bigdaddy. html
http://www.dustbury.com/music/bigdad2.ht ml
Their disks are all distributed by Rhino Records, but apparently only Chantmania is still in print. Some of their songs are on Dr. Demento compilations. Yahoo's CD Discounters online store apparently has their album Cutting Their Own Groove for sale.
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Open mind, insert foot.
I don't think I've ever seen a 256 kb/s mp3!
There are many fallacies in the arguments put around by the various parties in this dispute. Record companies push reports which show that CD sales in college town record stores have been declining. Problem is, the decline happened before Napster (a more credible explanation is college kids having access to ethernet, credit cards, and online stores). Napster claims that is enabling file sharing rather then bootlegging. Problem is, these concepts are tied to ideas of property and its sharing which predate the Internet, and the scale at which it now enables music to be shared. Then musicians claim that they are losing income because of Napster.
Baptist Death Ray state, 'Meanwhile, the consumer looks at a Web site where he or she can spend $8 for a CD, and then looks at Napster and sees the entire contents of the album online, free. Pay, or free.' What is wrong with this statement is that it is NOT a case of pay or free. It's a case of free, or I don't listen to the song. There is no guarantee that if BDR's songs were not available for free, then I would pay for them. Reason? Why should I PAY for BDR's music, if there are better alternatives? I'm not saying that BDR's music is bad, but that there might be people doing better things.
I don't have enough money to buy every CD that is averagely competent. In other words, if I download a BDR mp3, BDR have not necessarily lost $8 on a CD I might not have wanted to buy in the first place.
I've had this discussion with a number of musicians who think that, just because they are somehow 'artists,' then anything they produce should automatically have some kind of value on the market. Wrong. I have a limited income, and I try to spend that on CDs I really like. I like to reverse the musician argument of "I'm producing something, you should pay me" to read instead "I'm spending my money on your product and I expect you to deliver a certain level of quality." Which is advice a lot of them could heed.
$0.02. Ker-chingg!
Baptist Death Ray says that they've got probably 50 to 100 fans per town.
Well, if people freely trade MP3 files, and some of the existing 50-100 fans give BDR mp3 files to friends with the same musical tastes, that could double the number of fans, now 100-200 in each town. And some portion of those will buy the CD. So if you increase your audience, you increase your sales.
How much advertising would it take make 50-100 new fans in each town? I'd bet that's a lot of marketing, which an Indie artist can't pay for. So, let napster spread your music around, and find new fans for you. Yes, many will just download. But it's the true fans that will buy each CD you release. And you will be able to find more of those true fans due to napster.
Major labels don't need the napster free advertising. The larger artists already have tons of fans. And they get radio airplay, and flashy advertising, and tons of other exposure.
I was left with the impression though that his main complaint was a lack of options about how to get his music out to the public while getting compensated for his work at the same time. It was made pretty clear that they would rather not deal with the major record labels for fear of getting a bad deal.
That is certainly a justifiable concern.
Many moons ago I was an aspiring local musician whose band had a modest following. But I quickly realized when we started discussing being signed that I, like BDR, had no desire to deal with the corporate droids I knew were going to interfere in our work. My worst fear was having some producer who Did Not Get It having veto power on what would go on the record and what wouldn't. I'd also heard horror stories about bad deals involving royalties, compensations and the like. My first concern was always our music and I was really afraid of getting sucked into the business side and having to worry more about that than our creative process.
The other option would have been to sign with an Indie label, but this being the very early 80's, Indie's were just starting to take off and I just couldn't believe that they would have the distributive and promotional resources that we would need. Since then Indie labels have come and gone like BDR stated. It was good while it lasted.
The emergence of MP3/Napster hasn't changed the problem one iota from how it existed back then. It's just added one more shitty method (from the artist's standpoint) of getting your music out. Sure you can record a CD with a local studio, promote it, but all it takes is one person to rip it and share it over Napster and you get nothing for it. Unless (as many people have stated) the people downloading it decide they like it and buy the CD from you. IF they can find away to contact your label, and IF they bother to even try.
So what are we left with? Three options. a) sign with a major label and hope you're lucky enough to get a decent deal. b) go the Indie/MP3.com/Napster route and probably get ripped off. c) Give up and get a real job. (Like I did.)
The problem is not MP3's or Napster. The problem is the same as it was 20 years ago. It's the industry. And until someone comes up with a method of distributing MP3's with compensation going to the artist that's not going to change.
What I do have a problem with, is liking that music, habitually listening to that music, but not purchasing that music. I personally feel that if you are going to enjoy this art, you have an obligation to help support the artist, because the only people who can are the people who enjoy said art.
Is it immoral to pirate music? It depends on the artist. Some artists don't mind their music being pirated. Some do. For those that do, I find it to be indicative of a good person if they respect that artist's wishes.
I personally pay them all. I feel better that way, not only because I feel that it is the right thing to do, but that I am supporting my favorite artists.
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
Incidentally, one of the most famous jazz books, the Real Book, is illegal, because it does publish the melody in conjunction with the chord changes, without paying the publishers a licensing fee. Nowadays there is a "New Real Book" out, which provides about 1/3 of the songs for the same price, but is legal.
This is a pretty accurate description of how, for example, amazon.com is set up on the music sales portion of the site. You can listen to streaming clips via Realplayer and then buy if you like what you heard. After I saw Titan AE, thats exactly what I did to make sure I liked the soundtrack enough to pay for it. Sure, Realplayer stinks, but the model still stands. And you *don't* need high bandwidth to use Realaudio.
a windows port of xmms will not be necessary. there is little that aol can do that will prevent you from playing current mp3's in the next version of winamp. if you are familiar with the structure of winamp, you know that the program uses input plugins to support various different file formats. anything that aol wishes to do regarding secure music would have to be done at the input plugin level, since many of the formats supported by winamp (e.g. cd's and .wav files) have no security built in. the only way that aol could force you to use their secure format with winamp would be to remove the current mp3 plugin from the next version of winamp and only distribute winamp with their secure format plugin. however, if they did this, the mp3 format and the winamp plugin interface are documented (publicly in the case of winamp, i'm not sure about the mp3 codec) well enough for a third party to make and distribute their own mp3 plugin. aol will gain nothing and lose face to the users of winamp, and aol would not do this. the next version of winamp will still support mp3 as well as aol's new secure music format.
quite honestly, mp3 will always be around, and no corporation can make it go away (except maybe frauhauffer [sp?], but it's definately not in their interests to make that happen) there will always be players for mp3's, and there will always be encoders for mp3's. no one can make these go away, and so no one can force anyone to stop using mp3's, except by legal action in the case that they can prove that specific person to have mp3's that were illegitimately obtained. for all the talk that has been around for secure digital music formats, no one can force a person to use a secure format that does not offer significant advantages over the use of mp3, or vorbis, or whatever the best freely available non-encrypted music format of the time is.
that, by the way, is why it is important that someone develop a high quality, open video codec soon....
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
If BDR had a table with a BDR CD on it - a physical, plastic and aluminum disk that cost money to produce - and someone walked off with it, they your analogy holds.
But if BDR is singing on a street corner, and someone records the song instead of buying the CD, nothing has been "lost" There's nothing there to steal. BDR owns the pile of CDs on his table, but he doesn't own the air, nore does he have any right to try and prevent the recording - either made from the air around him, or from a CD already sold.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
that's just sick.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
And I know it's a hard business to get into -- but I also know that when you're acting, you're getting paid.
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+ The urge to destroy is a creative urge
It would greatly surprise me if the sound quality of most computers even begins to approach my Adcom CD player, power amplifier and Paradigm Reference 60 speakers.
Even if I hooked up my computer to my Adcom system, I'm pretty sure most sound cards are garbage. Until and unless that changes, the quality you can squeeze out of a MP3 file is not going to even come close to a CD.
Of course if I'm wrong, I'm happy to hear recommendations for exceptional sound cards that would work under Linux.
D
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--
Intellectual property law has always been a compromise between incentive to create on the one hand, and the rights of people to do whatever they want with their (physical) property on the other. Advances in technology have changed the balance between these two needs, and a new, sensible compromise needs to be reached. It is only natural for the record companies to put forward as strong a case as they can to protect their interests; we, the public, must similarly look out for our own interests because often they do not coincide with those of the established music industry.
-rpl
It seems to me that the complete destruction of copyright is not the way to go. The individuals who make a living off of it deserve to make a living, and are doing fair work for fair pay in many cases.
I think that copyrights should have a much shorter duration, 7 years, for example. That way there isn't as much motivation for piracy. Wait a couple years, and it'll be legal anyway. CDs would also, of course, have to come down in price. That's inevitable. Now, I think that a shortened copyright duration could actually be of benefit to the music industry. They could use the old music as free publicity. If you like the older stuff, well come see what they're doing now they've had time to refine their skill as musicians.
Nowadays, in the US at least, copyright durations are on the order of 75 years after the author's death. Even with books, there are many cases where there isn't a single copy left of the book in existance by that time. In the end, humanity loses out because the knowledge contained in that book or the skill of the artwork is lost forever. In the clock repair end of things, I've seen many, many books go at auctions for incredibly high prices because they have very valuable information that's still useful. These are books that went out of print 100 years ago and to this day no one can do a reprint because the copyright hasn't expired yet. By the time it does expire, there won't be a single copy in existance to reprint.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
It made me want to buy an album of hers, if only I wouldn't support the labels as well.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
Two words: collaborative filtering. You find a song you like or don't like, click somewhere to tell mp3.com your opinion. Soon, you can filter down to stuff that's enjoyed by people who share your love of Power Pop, your hatred of Smooth Jazz, etc.
Hey, the record companies are already feeding the public what they want to hear. Otherwise why do they keep selling more and more cd's? Collaborative filtering is already in place in today's music model.
Let's assume that music distributed electronically by whatever means becomes so widespread that big labels will no longer be able to make money from them.
Does this mean the end of the big label?
Hell, no. TheTomcat is absolutely correct in stating that record labels act as screening agents and production and project managers. These activities give them access to the big media distribution centers (radio, TV, etc). Since they'll no longer be able to make money on CDs, their only other option lies in making money through their artists' personal likeness and popularity.
Case in point: How many products is Britney Speaks hawking? How many things have her name on it that someone receives a royalty for? Can she even give her autograph to anyone she wants? Don't scoff, some baseball players CAN'T. Today, professional sports players can make more money with product endorsements. Will the same be true of musicians? In a few years, will all the "popular" artists just be flashy caricatures with an 18 month product life cycle? Think how easy that will be to manage! Get a few good-looking boys from some backstreet neighborhoods (Hey, that's a great name, "Backstreet Boys"), tell them to sign on the dotted line and they will become famous - as an added bonus throw in $50,000 to sweeten the deal (more money than they're ever known). Now put them on the road, manage them, write songs for them and rake in the dough. As an added insurance policy, secretly train another group to take their place in case things don't work out and they decide their plans don't need to be in sync (hey, another great name, "In Sync") with yours. Now that's a cool business plan. I wonder if it would work????
If an artist wants to make millions of dollars, be prepared to sell out. There is no way to avoid it. Big money attracts more big money. Sure there might be some corporate interests that want to see you make big money, but only if they can too. Not to say anyone should starve, but I would think that an artist can better communicate his or her own ideas without having to look over his or her shoulder for the corporate censor.
Perhaps the internet will allow new styles and artists to flourish. There is a need for originality now more than ever before. New ideas mean new possibilities. I'm sure there's a place for individual music distribution right along side the big labels.
First, please everyone stop saying Indie. Its a record company hype word. Second, I came across some good underground music on napster the other day. How? I was searching for some orbital and somebody had put names of similar djs/bands in the title of one of their songs (ie (If you like Orbital, dj liquid, etc etc then check us out) blah band-blahsong.mp3 ) and it actually kicked ass. Poof, there ya go. Just gotta be smart. And now that the above band has been featured on slashdot, im sure a bunch of their music is about to 'magically' appear on napster. :P
mattRadio.org
Shameless self advertising.
-=chiphead
-=-=-=-
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Yes, of course, because that is all that you understand.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Your music sounds like it could be decent but the recording of it just it aweful, I'm sorry.
Maybe if you tried to make some money off of it, you'd be more prepared to go into a studio and really lay it out. It sounds like you all just got into a room and set up a single microphone to pick up the entire thing. Not the right way to do it...
But how can you improve the process without spending money. And why would you want to spend the kind of money involved if you're not intending to get anything from it? Simple. You won't. Is that the world we get to look forward to? A world full of badly recorded garage acts that are making music for the sheer joy of making music versus a world full of people trying to make their living from their music and therefore investing a LOT more time, energy, and money to make it work?
I'd take the later, myself.
--
Oh AAARGH- I am so tired of the application of the open-source ethos to everything. No, music should not be free like software. Unlike software, music created by groups gets worse with every added decision maker. It becomes art catering to the lowest common denominator.
Think about it.
"It's OK, my sheet's got a hole in it!"
It is really easy to say that something someone else created should be free.
But it's theft.
There's a profound difference between someone willingly giving something away (as in open source software) and someone thinking that they can take whatever they want, regardless of the author's wishes.
Too many people here are confused about this. To them, Open Source means "I get to take whatever I want". You can see it the way they bitch at people who put something out there that took a lot of work, free of charge and free for the usage. Pure selfishness. They should be thanking the authors for their work, not castigating them for trivial failings.
The music belongs to the musician. Not you. And while we may all applaud the musician that gives away his or her music for free, we have no right to demand they do so. That's selfish. It is the attitude of a spoiled little child.
And spoiled little children soon find that no one wants to give them anything. People will work for free if they get gratitude in return. If all they get in return is ingratitude, they'll just say "fuck it" and quit.
It is the difference between sharing and theft. Sharing is good. Sharing is people willingly giving what they have to others. We should encourage it. But encourage theft, and we devalue the producers. Do that, and they'll simply stop producing.
The cake is a pie
Good points, as others have said, but I would be more tempted to draw parallels between Open Source and making the score/tabs/chord-progressions available (free, as in speech) for anyone to use.
Musicians are the human equivalent of a code compiler. We read in the source, convert it into instrument code, and out pops the binary album. Sure, you can plug it into a sequencer and play it through your synth, but it hasn't been optimized for the human-performed instrument.
The only way I could see your idealized "survive on concerts alone" becoming a reality in today's world is for the studios to stop producing personal-copy media and move to a "pay per use" streamed model - each use is your own personal concert. You then make it cheaper to listen to one song a hundred times from anywhere than to buy a single blank recordable physical media. The personalized radio model. That way, even if you do decide to capture a copy for yourself, at least you've paid a token amount.
Yup, that might work. We need to take the commercialization process a step further, so that theft of product is inherently more expensive and inconvenient. As that Negroponte fellow over at MIT has said and written many times, atoms cost more to move than bits. The industry needs to take atoms out of the personal picture.
--The more you know, the less you know.
No, music should not be free like software. Unlike software, music created by groups gets worse with every added decision maker
WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING THROUGH YOUR HEAD?!?!?
Do you really think that if I got ahold of the "Source code" - sheet music - to Jimmy Buffet's "Margaritaville", that I could MAKE WHATEVER MODIFICATIONS I saw fit, release "Margaritaville 2.0", and have it INCLUDED on all future REPRINTS of his CD??!
Whatever fucking committee decided to bastardize a song will be PRACTICALLY INVISIBLE TO THE END-LISTENER, and releasing tab or sheet music in the CD *itself* would HARDLY help them to write the song that's already on the CD!! Or do you think the Backstreet Boys put out a preliminary, fully-recorded CD, and THEN submit it to the record company so they can make whatever changes they feel like??!
Jesus fucking Christ!! Lay off the crack!! If you don't think including sheet music or tab would be a nice gesture - if you think it would be DANGEROUS to the recording artists and the integrity of the music - then you are a nazi. Fucking nazi.
Absolutely! That's part of the beauty of the process -- I may share some musical tastes with you, but there are probably a variety of other things I have no knowledge of, that will be suggested to me because you like them.
-paul"Irony is so September 10th"
Matt Miller, alt.fan.spinnwebe
encryption won't work since music must be decrypted to be played back,
and stopping napster won't work since an mp3 is a file at the end of the
day and there are almost as many ways to share files as there are files!
in fact technology won't solve the problem at all.
repeat: technology won't solve the problem.
it can help though. mp3's could have an additional field added (or
an agreed format in an existing field) that would be the "support this
artist link." mp3 players would show it prominantly, and mp3encoders
(or tools like mp3info) could update it. in addition cddb could be
adjusted to support it.
i'm sure people would love to pay money for their favourtie artists -
where do we pay it to? mp3 players, encoders could offer that info.
no, it's not encryption or a copy protection scheme. it depends on the
fans to support their favourite artists. in a way it's more personal
and demands that fans and artists respect one another or at least have
dialogs with one another.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Not just artists, consumers. I emplore you to go back and read points 2 and 3.
-- iCEBaLM
Freeing the slaves constitutes paying them directly, as opposed to not paying them at all, which would be the equivalent of killing the slaves and taking their clothes (and whatever they happened to be producing) in order to drive the immoral slave-owner out of business.
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
Since MP3.com's problem is highly similar to that of the Usenet, why not create a Slashdot-like solution? Before any piece of music gets on to MP3.com (or a similar site), it has to be reviewed by a certain number of people, and SOMEONE has to actually like it. I suspect that this would cut the number of pieces out there by about 90%, and the rest is a matter of taste.
Mythological Beast
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Though in truth they're ripping off the artists LESS than the big labels. However, it seems that as the OMD's get more and more money, they start ripping off their artists more and more.
- -------
HOWEVER, they serve a useful purpose at the moment, and if any of them started trying to actively promote their sites and the artists on their sites they could be genuine sources of income for the people who use them...
Once upon a time AMP3.com actually WAS a genuine source of income, but they're currently embroiled in a legal battle with their ISP...
+----------------------------------------------
+------------------------------------------------
+ The urge to destroy is a creative urge
Philips is currently beta testing its new Expanium portable CD player that plays regular audio CDs in adition to CDRs and CD-RWs of MP3 files.
(I'm going to regret saying this here since it will decrease my chances of being selected, but...)
Until July 17th, you can sign up to be one of 50 members of the general public to get a beta version of the player by going to their website.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
--
I don't know why people complain so much about this. Music that I buy tends to be replayed a very large number of times over the life of the medium, making it an out and out bargain.
Compare this to the $ 25 novel - for the most part, read it once or twice and that's it.
The cost per play of purchased music makes it probably the cheapest form of entertainment there is. What's so bad about paying $ 16 for that?
D
----
I've never found a set of more correct Fake Books than the New Real Book series.
I just picked up the Standards Real Book last month. Terriffic stuff!
--
i believe i have come up with a solution to the troubles which involve:
.mp3, whatever...
t einer-Social.html
- the record industry
- distribution of music
- compensation of artists.
the outline provided below advocates the establishment of a musician's
association that works together with current technical realities (i.e.
napster, mp3, etc.), and still provides a way for musicians to get paid
for their livelihood without restricting the digital distribution of
their music. the current funcions of record companies get split into
two parts: i) distribution, and ii) compensation of artists:
--| musicians's association in a nutshell |-----
- the physical distributors and merchandisers pay into the
musician's pool that pays and feeds the musicians.
- the musicians pool distributes it equitably among its active
producers.
- from the pool comes more new music. which is given away for free
unlimited digital copies for everyone - AIFF,
never again a dime paid for anything that's just DATA.
- the distributors get fresh music, and sell and package more STUFF.
- the distributors pay back a percentage of sales back into the pool.
- so it comes back around and feeds itelf in a positive fashion.
>> that's the most important part.
so all the software is free - but the thing is - if you press a
record or burn a CD and put it on sale, it is something physical,
and a percentage goes back, but the artist is not paid direct - it
goes to the musician's pool, which equitably distributes it to its
members.
income recieved by the association from the physical goods is then
allocated to the artists each month by gathering data on the percentage
of overall downloads from a server (i.e. NAPSTER) that offers them up
for free.
will physical packaging get less and less? i think not. you can download redhat for free, but it is still a best-seller at chapters. people still like something tangible. the distributors will make their living by 'value adding' to the music - making collector's editions and printed art more attractive, and saving people the trouble. the physical distributors job is to make these things continue to be appealing. you can download texts from project gutenberg, people still buy the books to save the trouble of printing them out.
--
i have based this conception for the music industry on my
rudimentary grasp of the economic principles outlined here:
http://home.earthlink.net/~johnrpenner/Articles/S
please pass this along to anyone you feel might be
interested in this sort of development. interested
parties should contact: johnrpenner@earthlink.net
regards,
john r penner.
In the not-so-distant past, even the most popular musicians and artists held full-time jobs, creating music simply to express their own passions and creative juices. The wealthy, full-time rock star is a by-product of the age of recorded music, a creation of (major and independant) the Recording Industry.(tm)
Opening the music distribution system (Napster, Gnutella) is simply taking down the tollbooths on the highway. Quit trying to find a convoluted model for a revenue stream, because there isn't one. Instead, re-evaluate why you decided to make music in the first place, and what you hope to acheive with your art.
Information wants to be Free. Useful Information will cost you.
I really like the neural network that netflix.com uses. Basically, you go through and rate some minimum number of movies on a scale of 1 to 5 or "not interested". Their neural net then uses these ratings with criteria about movies to make recommendations. At first, it gets the recommendations wrong. However, eventually it can get really accurate (like 95%). The problem is that it can never get "bang on" accurate due to the limitations of first tear neural nets. The other problem is, of course, the fact that netflix now has a thorough database about me. Not only do they know what movies I watch, but also how well I liked them. I don't really see any way around this if I want the service of getting recommendations.
Doug Alcorn
For an example, take the MPAA vs DeCSS.
We ALL know how unfeasable DVD piracy would be for joe consumer. But the MPAA has all their DMCA-enforced "access control" causing all inconvinence. Whilst REAL piracy rings are ignored...
For instance... in Hong Kong, Taipai, or even on the streets of San Francisco, Boston, or New York, if you know where to look, you can get substancially cheaper, PIRATED, DVD copies of just about every movie released on the format... and quite a few that haven't. Those that you can't get on DVD, you can get on VCD with little trouble. Hell, you can get a DVD of Episode I if you really want (it was released on Laserdisc in Japan... and promptly converted to DVD by enterprising pirates. Not as good as a REAL DVD, but better than VHS). These are professional piracy rings, who lay out the capital to produce these copies on a massive (economic) scale...
However, all of this is ignored by the MPAA. Instead we get crap like:
Regional encoding
Macrovision
Contractual ban on firewire output
Legal harassment of DeCSS authors/distributors
No japanese track on anime DVDs!!!
etc.
None of which combats REAL piracy rings.... But all of which are a hassle and inconvinence to *ME*, the average consumer, who just wants to view the DVDs that I bought LEGALLY; whenever, wherever, and on whatever hardware I like.
And you can bet your sweet ass that the RIAA regrets the existance of the red book standard which makes it impossible for them to pull that crap... unless they force some propietary format like DVD-Audio on us...
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
There is a 3rd category as well. Data filtration. This is not about going to Macy's (or whatever) and walking away with a brand new sweater.
Radio is the prime advertising venue for record labels. Radio stations (at least in my city) are controlled basically by very few companies. They all play the same CRAP. Song rotations are set for 2.5 hours. They have their wonderfully modelled playlists(A,B,and C lists) and you get such a diverse range of options with these stations.
A)Bubble gum pop
B)Classic Rock
C)Hip Hop/Rap
D)"Alternative" (commercialized)
E)Easy Listenting/Soft Rock
Since my music tastes dont fall into any one of those categories I have to go elsewhere to find music that appeals to me.
This is where .mp3 comes in. I can download 1 or 2 songs of a band I've never heard of, and make my decision then on whether or not I think they are great or suck.
If they are great, I buy the CD. If its just okay, I will probably burn it to CD and play it at some point in the future as background music or something, like a radio station, but I'm picking the music.
And I DO buy the CD. Some things are so good, they are worth the money. Antiloop, Innocence Mission, and Trailer Bride are NOT bands your going to hear regularly on your local radio station (at least not around here), but they are now a part of my cd collection and its all because of MP3. The same is true with software. I download ISO's of crap all the time, but the really good ones, get rewarded with me going out and buying the CD. OpenBSD, BeOS, and Starsiege Tribes fall into this category.
I have a hard time trying to label this as pure stealing, maybe you feel differently. In the end however, my money is going to the musicians/developers that are truly inspiring and offering of real value. The rest is crap I wouldn't being buying anyway so the money they are "losing" is money I wouldn't be spending.
rosie_bhjpA radio maverick jumps to internet only. The Future of Rock n Roll
I agree with you completely. The universe was not created for you, or me, it just is.
That doesn't give anyone a right to make money doing anything. You just do what you can to get by. Hopefully, it is in what you enjoy since you will probably spend so much time doing it.
I also agree with you on the copy stuff. We must protect ourselves from protecting ourselves too much, as well as, protecting ourselves from not protecting ourselves enough. It is a delicate unbalance.
cp -R
Consumers aren't buying music -- they're buying CDs, with cover art and liner notes and a little poster inside and a few hidden tracks and a few spoken tracks and perhaps a limited edition signed thingie wedged in between the cover art and the CD itself.
I don't buy that at all. ever since cd changers came out I have all but forgotten about the media itself. The only reason people buy cds is because they can play them in their car... or take them to a friends.... because their home stereo isn't hooked up to their computer... or their computer is too old to play music and do work at the same time.... there are a number of reasons but the pretty pictures aren't one of them. I can get pretty postcards outside the bathroom of nearly any bar I go to. i have picked them up maybe 4 times in the 2 or so years since they showed up.
cds are only lasting because there are few decent mp3 players out there. I have already convert entirely away from cds and I see it as a matter of time before the rest of the world does too. remember when everybody said cds wouldn't catch on b/c you couldn't record???
Those basic laws of supply and demand tend to set prices for music and sneakers, and just about anything (except monopolies -- but that is a different discussion)
So which things of yours would you not consider legitimate possessions? How about your intelligence, your talents, your ability to produce? If I find a way to get your skills from you against your will for nothing, is that OK?
Well, I usually do buy the CD, in the end, if I like it. I think, though, that a number of points still obscure the apparently clear equation of more mp3 downloads = less sales of product.
Anyway. The few people I know who have gained some sort of temporary exposure for being musicians (record deals, tours, selling out venues, etc.) all worked far harder than just about anybody else I know. You have to work pretty hard just to be on the radar, but I guess you know that. (My brother is in a band in Wales, they work hard, tour a lot, have great reviews, play to sell out crowds, have a bunch of CDs, but I doubt they could afford a 'previously owned' BMW between them, although they do seem to be having a great time). What I'm saying is, it's quite a crap shoot. You have to have a fair amount of luck. Napster's implications have now been superseded by Gnutella, Freenet, etc., anyway. So I wouldn't worry about it, it'll take too much of the time you could be using for your own projects, with which I wish you every success.
Holy shit. Can't we just kill pomo analysis and the cult of irony once and for all? James
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
If we assume the actions of the record companies are indeed immoral
And so if I, for instance, believe that some particular person is immoral, that gives me the right to steal from him? Come on! If you don't like what the recording industry is doing, there are ways to protest besides stealing from them (and incidentally from the artists you claim to defend). Have you ever heard of boycott? Have you ever heard of supporting independant artists?
--nath
No I wouldn't. Consumers don't like them for the same reasons. Do you think I enjoy the musical equivalent of eating spam when I buy a CD? Most of the music I like isn't available through the big labels.. that is, unless I happen to like pop music. I don't like it, but until recently I didn't have a choice - that's all there was.
Now I have an alternative - the web and Napster. I have been exposed to music I never would have just listening to the local radio or following "the charts".. alot of what I listen to isn't even available in places like Best Buy or other major retail outlets.
Nobody likes the big labels or the RIAA. They, unfortunately, have a monopoly on alot of things.. they are gatekeepers and they are holding all the keys. MP3's are great for sampling music, but I think the quality sucks for a variety of music.. it is a lossful compression scheme and it shows. I put up with it only because the alternative is worse - feeding the money-hungry record industry.
E-gold is adequate for micropayments, especially for a busking model (note: I don't use a referrer link when I advocate e-gold, I do this to remain un-biased in case another usable system comes along).
My reasoning is here.
Hell, I'm trying to make a go of it myself, as an entertainment/education software producer (I haven't made any money at it yet, but that's to be expected; I'm still working on the stuff I expect people will like enough to pay for, though I'd appreciate getting a few bucks for the little utilities and learning projects I've been released so far).
This sort of thing I do not mind. Namely, because a lot of musicians create a few songs that are not representative of their music at the behest of a record company, and then the other songs on the cd are different entirely. CDs should not sell on the basis of one song. This is why I like the whole buying by track idea. The reason it was impossible before is that it was technologically and economically infeasible. The internet makes this quite possible. That is why I praise emusic.com highly.
I paid for Windows. Upgraded the Windows 3.1 that came with my computer ages ago. Luckily, I go to the University of Texas, so SE was only $5 for me. (I bought the first edition of win98 for $70 or whatever it was a couple of years back) Sure you can complain that it's buggy, but Microsoft did spend a few years and millions of dollars on it, and it really isn't that bad!.
The interesting thing is, when it comes to unique goods and services, such as Windows (which is unique because it is ubiquitous (sorry, I love that word (and parenthesis))), or the newest Metallica CD, you have no choice but to buy it from that one source. It is a mini-monopoly. So the idea of capitalism, "Don't buy it if it costs too much, get it somewhere else!" doesn't work.
It becomes fuzzy at this point. Who determines what the fair price of Windows is? I think that for software I use for a good majority of the time that I am on my computer, I feel that $80 is perfectly fair. It runs stably on my system, and I rarely (RELATIVELY!) have a crash. Average uptime of maybe 3 days, a few days longer if I don't run Netscape during that time.
I think the reason that $17 is thought of as too much for a CD, or $80 too much for windows is that it is cool to complain about these prices. Seriously, it seems like it is one of the things that people are allowed to officially gripe about and get unanimous agreement.
I personally think that $100 for tennis shoes is too much, and a few of the same people who complain about these damnably expensive CDs are the ones who buy brand name shoes for the brand name. Not accusing anywhere here, thats more of an adolescent thing, but it does happen :).
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
No, people pirate things they aren't willing to pay full price for. What do you think Napster is except a huge black market? Why do black markets exist? When the person in charge of setting prices raises the price of an item people want to buy beyond what they are willing to pay, a black market is likely to be born. As a cheap example, go out and do a survey of windows (huhu) users, and find out how many of those folks actually bought their copy of windows. Assuming everyone is honest, I bet you find there's a majority who pirated windows. Why? Because who is willing to pay $90-$100 for an UPGRADE of windows? Are they kidding? I'll go out and pirate it every time. The way to mitigate the effects of a rampant black market? Lower the price of the item in question. Not to blaspheme, but if Windows cost something like $10-$20 for the FULL version, I wouldn't even bother to pirate it. I'd shell out an amount of money I consider (and probably most consider) to be fair for a copy of windows. I think you see something similar happening here with napster. Who the heck wants to pay as high as $19 for a CD that you only want 2 songs off of? Are they kidding? There's your black market. If the record companies lowered the prices of CDs to $5 or something, again, I wouldn't even bother with napster. I'm guessing that there would still be a few diehards that used napster, but most folks who use it now (IMO) would just buy the CD because it's so cheap. This is the reason I don't buy the RIAA's whining about how napster is hurting record sales. The RIAA's clients are hurting record sales by forcing CD prices so high. The record companies ignore basic market economics at their own peril.
I have noticed among the geek culture that personal encryption is a VERY important thing. A person has a right to use encryption to ensure that her message is only read by the intended recipient. Now what is wrong with musicians and record companies using encryption to ensure that thier music is heard by only the intended recipient, namely those who PAYED for it.
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
One of the things I've been doing recently is ripping/copying mp3s and then sending checks directly to artists. I've only done this twice (it was a recent idea, and I don't exactly have tonnes of time..not to mention I don't even have a land line at home, high speed -- hah!) and so far no response...but I'm an amateur musician, and it's occured to me that maybe, were people willing to pay on an 'honor system' and esspecially if it were easy (not that writing a check and dropping it in an envelope and finding/writing the address and getting a stamp and dropping in the mailbox is hard, but it could be much easier) this would help indies.
A lot of blood sweat and tears goes into music, and musicians have to pay the rent, the same as the rest of us, and making music takes time which cannot be used to do other, more profitable activities. This is the reality of the situation. But by 'cutting out the middle man' (the money-hungry big record lables) and cutting out the need for physical media (not that I think CDs/tapes/etc are bad, but I personally don't need them) we could make things better for both musicians and their listeners/fans.
rark
Here's the thing: I do make my music available in the mp3 format! I WANT you to listen to my music first, to decide for yourself! If you don't like my music, for God's sake don't buy my CD, you'll only get really pissed off.
- -------
On the other hand, if it DOES reach that level of quality you're looking for, then please buy the CD...
The problem is the people who say "this is great music, and I don't even have to pay for it!"
+----------------------------------------------
+------------------------------------------------
+ The urge to destroy is a creative urge
I'm glad to see that the facts here are coming to light. In a very real way sharing files will only lead to more records sold. The irony here is that for years record companies have been giving away huge quantities of free goods as promotional product (at the cost of the artist mind you) to just about everyone who they thought needed it and/or wanted it. Radio station, retails outlets, all employees and their friends all get copies which adds up to many thousands of full copies of the product. In short the practice of giving away music for free is not new and even if the Napster phenonemon is on a larger scale, the upshot of more record sales is only that much greater. People like to hear first what will cost near $20 a piece. To that end new technologies offer great oppurtunity to music comsumers. The ability to find new music and then get new suggestions for other related bands is a huge help in cutting through the swath of music currently available. Check out Gigabeat as one cool solution to this problem. Gigabeat's technology lets you find and download music from the web. Then it generates suggestions for new bands and songs by employing sophisticated filtering methods and algorithms that find similarities between songs. So it's doing exactly what you were asking for - directing you to new music based on your preferences. Getting music you want and learning about stuff you aren't familiar with is all part of the process of discovery and is what makes the experience fun. Its a no-brainer to say that Napster/Guntella is not/can't go away and its now a matter of how to cope with it. Hopefully the folks in charge of the major label content can see that and realize it is actually to their benefit. Plus, as I said before, it really is nothing new. Its just the future. - Brett (aka ... manwiththeplan)
SuperPimps, the makers of PAN are still under a lawsuit with RIAA because RIAA claims PAN is specifically for stealing music. They want the pimps to take out the uudecode/b64 code, thus turning the newsreader into a eunuch. The problem with this is Microsoft IE, Netscape Communicator and News Rover all support automated download of newsgroups. I don't see anything on their sites about a RIAA lawsuit. I suppose you have to go after the people with little money to defend themselves first. At least the Superpimps have some legal support from Andover. Thanks guys!
While not affiliated with Superpimps, Angelo still thinks it is a kickass reader that should not be maimed by stupid baseless lawsuits.
Lowmag.net
Hmm... I know the article's more about indie labels and piracy, but I don't really see why the same principle wouldn't go... basically, make the packaging of the album worth buying... I wrote a thing a while ago:
http://www.dangeruniver sity.net/todcra/rants/rant_whee.html
The basic gist is the packaging argument, but if you actually wanna read the article, hey, go for it.
Anyway, it kinda reminded me of something Bob1 of DEVO said when asked about how he felt about the argument that MP3 trading infringed on Artists' Rights -- "Artist rights? There's never been any! I don't see why they should start now." (http://www.checko ut.com/music/features/info/0,7633,1903378,00.html if you care).
---
"Music is music, but anarchy is stupid." -- Eli Armen-Van Horn
"How does the fact that your government is screwing you over make it OK for you to revolt?"
"How does the fact that laws are unjust make it OK for you to break them?"
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I wish all bands could be as cool as Massive Attack, who released their Mezzanine album on their website (mp3)a month before it was actually released. Apparently being herad is no longer what matters to most bands.. or their managements. Artists.... Yeah right! Rolf
Yep, good or bad, at least she's willing to let the market judge. This guy hasn't gotten there yet.
Have you seen any articles about Microsoft wanting to protect the right to innovate? If so I call BS on the irony meter. It had to be already busted.
Sounds like it may be time for a Windows port of XMMS ..."
Or freeamp, which is already there for W32, and most likely won't be pulling any of these stunts, either.
---
Since when was music free anyway? In ye olde days musicans were supported by a patron who'd give 'em the boot if they didn't like the music. Pieces were also commissoned by the wealthy as public works. Sorry to say, but that type of situation really stifles innovation. Now, step up to the era of the mass printing and emergenece of the middle class--say like the 19th century here. People started owning things like pianos and buying music to play on them. Sheet music was the 19th century equivalent to the CD. That wasn't free by any means, but it was a way for an artist to compose a completely orginal work and reap somewhat of a reward for the trouble. Once we get into the 20th century we have records, tapes and CDs taking the place of sheet music. So, when you say modern music lacks the same spirit it used to, implying that this is because of the money, when was music ever separated from the mondey?
I'll go a little farther out on a limb here to state that we have never had available such a variety of music available as we do today. Yeah, the big labels stifle creativity and all, but take a look at some of the smaller labels out there. There's a lot of them and they are putting some wild stuff out. Of course you do have to go looking for it, but it is out there. Look at what labels like Ninjatune, and Pork records are doing.
Now we get to real issue here. In a utopian society, artists would be supported by the state or by our spoontaneous gratitude. Problem is that nowhere on this planet does this utopian society exist. In reality an artist has to eat, put a roof over her head and somehow pay for equipment and supplies. Yeah atists can get, and most do have a day job, but when do they get a chance to create art? Jobs take up a lot of time and energy. And the worst thing about the muse is that its unpredictible striking in the middle of the night or during the work day, and often abdandoning the artists during the designated 'art time'. So, what else can an artist try to do except sell their work?
The reason that everyone loses is simple.
People pirate things that they should be paying for.
I have customers (teenagers) who have discovered Napster; I overheard one of them complaining because in order to get stuff off of Napster, he had to have his own collection available for download. (These are the same kinds of guys also apparently burn copies of PC and Playstation games for each other without giving it a moment's thought -- they've asked me if I could burn copies of the games I have installed on my store's PCs.)
I was listening to my favorite radio morning show today and they ran a caller poll on "have you ever stolen stuff from work"? There was a guy who used to worked at a deli who decided that "since they can't pay [him] more than minimum wage, they're providing [him] with free food." And this wasn't "making himself the occasional sandwich", either -- he was taking food home to fill the fridge with. Another guy bragged about stealing sound cards and video cards from whatever electronics store he worked for, and selling them to his friends.
I don't think I've ever been so disgusted with humanity as I was after the show.
Humans are too damned selfish to pay for anything. I would chance to say that MOST people would steal something if they could get away with it. Especially if it was something that was being sold for profit.
It's more of the "beating the system" mentality -- like the skript kiddies IRC logs from the other day. Odds are D1cK and J4Ne don't know the first thing about the systems they break into, or the tools they use to do it; it's the thrill of "doing something they oughtn't be" that pushes them on.
People should realize that they are hurting other humans by theft. Ah well... I have little hope that this will change, ever.
As a business owner, it sucks to come to the realization that I can't trust even some of my long-time customers. But as I've told those customers, "when you come in and brag about stealing shit from other people or other stores, why should I trust you to be around my stuff unsupervised?"
Jay (=
9) The label leverages the money earned from mainstream artists to support niche and break-in markets.
If we didn't have the Metallicas, New Kids and Milli Vanillis, we wouldn't have the reissues of the Ellingtons and Armstrongs. We wouldn't have bebop, hard bop or acid jazz. We wouldn't have Ska or Grunge either. We wouldn't have the up-and-coming artists who might become the next mainsteam.
It's a very subtle point that I think a lot of people miss.
--
But still, the prices would be comparable to a CD... $1/song * 15 songs == $15/cd.
I think the record companies would be best to try to hurry up and embrace this instead of spending so many of their resources trying to fight it.
--Ask a silly person, get a silly answer.
I'm not certain I follow your logic here. Going by your assumptions (which I mostly agree with, incidentally), people are right now paying $16-17 (in the US) for a single song. Moving to a system where these people only have to pay $1 for that same song dramatically reduces the record companies' profits. How exactly does that encourage them to generate "even more contrived bands"?
...but I must admit it makes a disturbing mount of sense. Napster won't kill off the buying of CD's (especially as long as people are trying to fulfill Columbia House membership requirements) but it does put a bit of a damper on the smaller independent music scene. Of course, I'm one of those people that has the MP3's and the CD in most cases, for portable convenience...
As far as AOL and Winamp's copy protection doohickey, I was kinda hoping it *WOULD* come to that - I wouldn't mind having to pay for copyrighted MP3 files (at a reasonable price, of course) as long as I could get JUST the songs I wanted. Sound business decision in the making.
"I'm not even supposed to BE here today!"
Musicians have no god-given right to compensation.
I keep seeing this idea trotted out whenever there's a music copyright discussion. It's bullshit, just like the "Bands make their money touring" meme.
Either music benefits society and the individual or it doesn't. If it does, pay the piper. If it doesn't, why are we even discussing trivialities?
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Hehe, I'll presume that was a troll post. But.... 4. dude grow up! outside usa everything is 2X the price with 1/2 the wages of USA, $15USd is too much!
So you're telling me that buying a CD in other countries costs about 4 hours wages on average? Ouch. If that is the case, that is a definite yuckyness.
Average wages in the states are at about $14 an hour. That comes to about an hour of work per cd. That seems acceptable to me. 3. I dont have 20000 minutes to listen to it all so why pay for it.
Its not hurting anyone then. What I was saying that if you like a song, and you listen to it with frequency, you should support the artist. Not that the possession of the information is evil.
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
This is called stealing, and the last time I checked it was against most (all?) major religions, and the laws of most countries.
Well, did you read/hear Courtney Loves rant about the major record labels and how they screw over artists?
Did you read that the Big 5 Music labels settled a case with the FTC basically showing that they were guilty of price fixing?
How about the fact that the Canadian equivalent to the RIAA, the SOCAN, got the Canadian government to institut a blank media levy because they claim all citizens are evil beings who "pirate" music.
Really, if you want to look at this in a religious light, think of Napster as karma, comming back to kick the music industry in the balls.
-- iCEBaLM
Spending so much of their resources? Think about the article for a minute, and what you yourself said: Record companies make tons of money off of CD sales - in profit, that is. And when they're "spending all of their resources fighting it," they're doing two things:
- Skimming just a tid bit off of the top of their iced cake of profit money.
- Spending our resources - because we, the public, are the ones who will/might have to pay more for CDs so that they can rethicken the fat lining of their pockets.
But yes, I think that something must be done. I think for one thing it would be nice if they'd give up harrassing Napster, but for another thing, I wish there was something we could do to save the independent artists.*sigh*
Insert mind here.
By forcing music to be free (beer), you are not weeding out the ones who are in it for the money, you are removing and chance people have of living from making music.
The fact is, People need money to live.
"You had to expect hard times to begin with", you say, but what about the Jazz singer who has a wife and kids? He would have to drop out, simply because he needs to money.
So yes, many make music because they love it, but if you want to produce professional quality music, it costs money. Money to live, money to rent a studio, money for distribution.
If only those who have money to burn can release music, it will be a great loss to the world.
Colin Davis
Sure, record companies exploit artists, but if you don't pay for your music...you have absolutely no right to go steal that music and pay nothing.
Don't I? If we assume the actions of the record companies are indeed immoral, there's a simple (although imperfect) analogy - slavery. Let's just replace "label" with slave-owner, "music" with slaves, and "artists" with slave-labor (Yes, it's reversed). Oh, and replace with "steal" with free, of course.
Sure, the slave owners are exploiting slave labor, but hey, they do feed the slaves a bit, and if you rob that labor away from the slave holders by freeing the slaves, you'll be hurting the slaves - they obviously can't exist without their masters. After all, they need a place to live and something to eat. And anyway, although what the slavers are doing is immoral, the slaves are their property, and you have no right to free them.
Yes, I know the comparison is very imperfect, but it is somewhat valid - and is that Really what you wanted to say in your post?
This is an EX-PARROT!
Come on. Give the guy some slack (grin). He's obviously sitting at behind some desk at some large corporation wasting his employer's time and bandwidth to do what? To post on slashdot. Now if that isn't noble, tell me what is. (argon)
-- nath
I'm all for it where do I sign up.
What do you mean 'Linux in a nut shell', it don't fit.
then you are a nazi. Fucking nazi.
Angry or not, I hereby invoke Godwin's law. You lose.
Then you could let users download songs, and either throw a bit of money at the artist as a way of saying thank you... Hmm.. throw a bit of money at the artist Maybe I'm alone on this, but when I lived in the city many years ago, there was *nothing* so cool as being stuck in a subway, waiting for a train, harried and edgy, and having a good performer start playing. I gladly tossed the guy a buck or two, instead of pocket change, even though I was a poor student (and fundamentally cheap at heart). Those guys did a lot more for me than any jukebox or many CD's I've bought. Many times, they would play some old old familiar standby, turning it from something I tuned out to a favorite. It's more immersive than the radio, Cd, etc -- just like when some movie cranks up a song you've heard a million times, and suddenly it seems *perfect* I only wish there was some way to bring *that* experience to life more often, using today's technology. The closest I seem to comne these days, is the guy with the boom-box or the convertible. And frankly I sometimes feel *those* guys should be paying *me*... damages.
The truth about trolls: They're just spammers, wasting our time/bandwidth and calling it 'free speech'
Nonsense. It's a song either way. One way, you download one file, the other way, you buy one CD. I disagree with those who have the misguided belief that we need to throw away all of our laws and principles because of the so-called "information age".
In Jazz music, there's a tradition similar to the Open Source movement - musicians will take one song and start to modify it to their own whims. Charlie Parker used to take other songs and make riffs on them. (He also had to often had to modify a section, usually the bridge, to avoid paying fees!)
It's sad that modern music has gotten so commercial, but unfortunately, modern music lacks the same spirit that music once used to have. But we can remember that music once used to be different, and that an artist can survive on concerts alone. They used to do it, and if we turn the spirit of music back into sharing, they still can.
I think that using Napster has only intensified my desire to find independent musicians, and here's why: I have already heard everything by famous people that I want to. Either a musician's work is all crap to me (n'sync), their sound only new once and then it becomes repetitive (umm...Men at Work), or I find their music exhilarating and have to have it all even if it is all somewhat similar (Sleater-Kinney). I think that this reaction can best be explained by a comparison to what the net has done for me regarding pornography. The Net has basically made available to me a lot of pornography. I have very quickly tired of the most famous porn stars, few of which I even find attractive in the first place. They are too overexposed already and there are only so many photos available before you have them all. So then I start looking for more obscure porn stars. Of course they don't have the huge camera budgets of the big names, but if you can deal with some low-fi photos there is a lot more out there. None of which would be found by typing "Jenna Jameson" in a search engine, but good nonetheless. It is not quite like i become a fan of indie porn stars and buy their t-shirts and go to see their live shows, but maybe I will go rent their movies once in a while. But I have found and bought a lot more CDs this way than I have rented movies. So artists ( and porn stars) I like make money from me, and the ones I don't like don't, even if I got to listen to their CD or look at their pictures without paying.
"There's one born every minute." - Steve Case
The CNet story is pretty vague about the whole Intertrust thing ... maybe it won't actually restrict your ability to play MP3s, but instead allow you to play whatever crap secure format Intertrust is working on in addition to being able to play all MP3s as usual.
--
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
I have downloaded very few MP3s from Napster/Gnutella/Whatever. What I have done is converted my entire (250+) CD collection to MP3s. Then, I set up a streaming MP3 radio station (or, depending on your tastes, a *steaming* MP3 radio station).
I initially did this so I could listen to my entire collection from work. Until you try it, you have no idea what a rush it is to be able to put 2 weeks of continuous music on random.
At that point, I thought "Hey, I'm already streaming this stuff off, why not let other people listen?", so I put my station up to the public, using Live365 to rebroadcast. Then I got tired of having to rely on my Windoze machine staying up to be able to stream, so I set up icecast (GPL'd implementation of the shoutcast server), and grabbed this cool library called libshout, and wrote a small perl script to send my music data out.
Suddenly, not only am I releasing a GPL'd tool for streaming MP3s, but this has turned into a full-blown hobby. And let me tell ya, if you thought putting 2 weeks of music on random was cool, releasing your first free software on Freshmeat is quite a rush. :)
In the last 2 months, I have spent close to $300 on new CDs to add to my "radio station" lineup. Previously, I think I spent maybe $10 or $20 every couple of months on new CDs.
Plus, I write music as a hobby, and those songs are part of my lineup as well, so as the station gets more popular, my music is exposed to more people. I don't charge for my music, people are welcome to download it for free to do with as they please, but I like knowing that people are listening to (and hopefully liking) my music.
All in all, I think the record companies have done quite well by me.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
I agree, information (at least in the form of art... I'd have to think about other forms) is not property.
If you copy someone's CD, you haven't harmed them at all.
Again I fully agree. However, if you listen to that cd with frequency, I feel that you have an obligation based on the wishes of the artist to support them. They created the art with the tacit assumption that they would reimbursed for spending their time creating art for themselves and for the world. As we do not live in a socialist society (at least in the states), the government does not take on this role. Instead, the capitalistic system reimburses these artists for their time creating art through the transfer of currency. To simply take this art away is not technically hurting them, it is hurting society by sending a message to the artist that his art is not respected nor wanted by his society, or at least not enough to warrant pursuing such a career full time.
The piracy of music is not immoral because you are stealing property from an artist.
Rather, it is the failure of human beings to reimburse a desired artist for their art that is immoral. An artist unpaid but well liked will cease producing art, because they must have money to survive. This hurts society, this hurts the artist, and this hurts you.
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
See this site for a good rant on the subject: It's from the website of the folk singer Richard Shindell, who decided not to renew his contract with one of the major labels and signed with a very small label instead. "Working for the major labels," he says, "is like working for McDonalds hoping to scrape up enough money for lottery tickets."
My point was:
- -------
Big labels still sell CDs because the CDs aren't so much considered "music" as they are "something that a big-name band is selling" -- like a t-shirt that you can play on your stereo.
Small bands, however, don't have the hype behind them for their music to be considered anything other than music.
+----------------------------------------------
+------------------------------------------------
+ The urge to destroy is a creative urge
Watched Demolition Man lately, have we?
--sugarman--
Has anyone actually seen any Baptist Death Ray on Napster? Maybe it's different from USENET mp3s, but what I've seen is almost exclusively large label bands. And let's face it, most people have less of a sense of ethics about ripping off multimillionaires than fellow working stiffs. So those who download BDR are probably more likely to end up buying the CD if they like it. So I'm not sure BDR's fears are well-founded.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
The problem is how to teach people to use their own minds.
Almost but no cigar. The problem is how to reach people who use their own minds.
Let fools be fools. Take every opportunity to give them a taste of their own medicine.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
If you're SAG or Equity (that is, in a union), you get paid. You're also at that point not allowed to work on non-union shoots/shows. Sux for you if yer in an area where most of the work is non-union.
If you're not in one of the unions, you *might* pick up some paid gigs if you're really lucky/good/connected.
I speak from a background in theatre and film, and I've worked on all kinds of sets (as a techie - acting's not my calling).
Actors and musicians both get no pay at the low end because, well, there's more supply than demand down there. At the highest end, they can both do well if they're smart w/ their money, but don't think for a minute that all or even most actors get paid. Most actually work for free in the hopes of getting noticed, especially in independent films and regional/community theatre.
OK, a SAG actor on a SAG shoot gets paid. Once, for the day they work. Forget residuals. They've gotta keep working, it's not like they can resell the same performance over and over. Why should it be the same for musicians?
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
There are some experiments toward it, but as of Right Now, BDR has a point when it comes to a certain segment of musicians. Fair use is one thing (hey, I want to be able to listen to early a disk of Sea Shanties I've got while I'm in the car) but were I to download that music from Napster (not that it would be there), by what efficient means could I pay the artists so that we would all be satisfied?
I visualize a thinning of the crowd when someone steps up and says "OK, now you can assuage your guilty conscience and pay 10 cents per track for the 6 GB of MP3s you've downloaded.Here's the hat, step right up, don't be shy ..."
I'd like to see record companies compete on this basis, rather than stick together like a cowardly pack of losers demanding government protection, but maybe that's just me. There is a HUGE amount of money to someone who can sell good music on a satisfying, cheap, per-track, reduced-middleman basis.
Hopefully, this is something that the small labels will sneak right under the nose of Big Banal Music Incorporated. timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Here's an excerpt from an e-mail conversation I had with someone I met on /.:
/. mp3.com is a GREAT idea. It's great because it's purpose is to provide a medium for independent artists to be heard. But it doesn't work. It doesn't work because there's WAY too much crap on mp3.com. I've spent hours and hours searching the HUGE archives of indie content on that site, and I've come away with maybe 3 bands that I actually found worth listening to. Others were plagued with poor recordings, sub-amateur production value, and
I think it has a few major roles:
1) The label serves as a distribution channel, paying for the actual, physical media, the physical packaging, shipping to its retail outlets.
2) The label pays for artwork. The intellectual property that apears on the traycard, cdlabel and jacket.
3) The label pays for studio time and recording media for the band to actually get their music down into a reproducable form. This includes
production, engineering, mastering, mixing, etc.
4) The label pays for advertisements, television, PoP displays, radio spots, free distributions of singles to media outlets, internet ads, etc.
5) The label promotes and pays for tours, and special events/appearances which in turn, sell more CDs. They find sponsors, venues, do bookings,
arrange transportation, and all the other fun stuff that comes with touring.
6) The label pays for other media production such as videos, websites, and CDRoms.
7) The label provides management and public relations for the band.
8) The label serves as a screen, filtering out the music that won't sell, and contracting that which will. This gets rid of a lot of crap, but filters out some really good stuff.
(I might be missing something...)
The real kicker is #8. The others are a matter of money. #8 is a matter of function.
I think you mentioned mp3.com in your post on
pathetic musicianship and vocalization. When a label functions as a screen, it gets rid of these 'musicians' who think they're great, but are actually terrible, and promotes music that sells.
Now, this has always worked for a label. It's great that a label can screen, but there has always been an element of greed, which usually
produces a mediocre product, at best. This has always been a theme that has plagued the music industry, but has become more dominant in recent
years. Think of the Monkeys and the New Kids on the Block, Milli Vanilli (sp?). Those bands were money makers.
If labels were eliminated, who would serve the function of filter? The role of the label will CHANGE in the near future. Perhaps they won't
even be called a label.
It's also very expensive to lay down tracks in the studio. Studio time is REALLY expensive, but this is a matter of money, so it isn't as
important to me.
---
[end excerpt]
The person who figures out how to make money from recordings without selling the music will be very very wealthy. There is already a great distribution infrastructure (the net) in place, but I believe that the key is filtering the crap.
Never having been involved in the industry, I'll defer to your experience. Apparently actors get screwed about as much as musicians do...
- -------
+----------------------------------------------
+------------------------------------------------
+ The urge to destroy is a creative urge
The reason there are 6 billion humans alive today is the ability to cooperate. Morality (which is actually an odd manifestation of selfishness) is what allows this.
Hopefully one day, we as a species, and not just as scattered individuals, will be able to overcome the Judeo-Christian ethic, and take on a more Anthrocentric ethic. Of course, by then, we probably won't be the same species. Hopefully technology will whip up some truly cooperative beings. Ah well... not in my life time. :)
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
The question is what happens when technology makes it infeasible to make money off music (or any other field of endeavor). The legal means by which profitability could be retained also fundamentally affect our rights to communicate and share non-copyrighted information with each other.
So, should our society put draconian restrictions on the rights of people to exchange information so that musicians (actually, mostly the major record labels) get a guaranteed return? Or should we accept that certain occupations simply become obsolete because of technology?
We don't force people to ride horses (to give blacksmiths and horsefarms work) or run around in handwoven, coarse cloth (to allow the weavers to support themselves). Why should we force people to listen to music on outdated, copy-restricted media? Technological progress causes lots of people to lose jobs, but it also creates lots of new jobs. That's the road we have chosen as a society.
Even if there were no limitation on music copying, many people would still continue to go to live performances, and the Internet would be a great way to promote that. It would also get rid of many people who were in it only for the money and who produce merely formulaic stuff designed to appeal. Getting rid of retail distribution with its star system, marketing, and limited access may well turn out to be overall good for music.
I was just on Napster and didn't find any BDR songs. What is he worried about? [INSERT TROLLBAIT HERE] Is Sisters of Mercy crowding the Goth racks too much for him? Mabye writing music that hasn't evolved since the early 90's is the problem, not distribution. [END TROLLBAIT] I've found several indie-label bands on Napster that i liked enough to buy the CD's for, namely Zen Guerrilla. After downloading one of their albums, i've pruchased two of their CD's. Without access to their songs online, I wouldn't have bothered to buy their CD's. I try to share any cool acts i know of with the Napster comunnity so THEY'LL buy indie albums as well. If you're a local act with no touring or advertising budget, how do you expect to get larger intrest by restricting your songs. Someone in Estonia isn't going to get to hear Webb Wilder if he can't get to Nashville otherwise. Napster works the same way as radio. Lots of pablum, but one can find amazing stuff with a little effort. Access=$ as far as i can tell.
The Geek shall inherit the Earth
See my other post about why music piracy is immoral.
Stealing information is not wrong. However, exploiting information is. Negligence that could harm other people is also wrong.
Case in point, if I hacked a military stem to obtain the remote login to a system that could launch a nuclear missle (which doesn't exist hopefully!), that would not be immoral. If I in turn posted it on my web page, that would be immoral. There is a difference between free information and negligence in releasing information. The lives of a million people are worth more than an invalid (IMO) principle.
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
Nonsense. It's a song either way. One way, you download one file, the other way, you buy one CD. I disagree with those who have the misguided belief that we need to throw away all of our laws and principles because of the so-called "information age".
Did I say that we need to throw our principles away? All that I was saying is that for the delivery of music in electronic format the music companys have to adapt. And IMHO I believe that music over the web will become a legitamite sevice business that people pay money for. Like the ISP business.
I also did not say that we should give up our current way of doing things. I do not believe that music on a physical media will die. It is just too convenient to carry a CD over to a friends house for a party or something like that. I do believe that new forms of distribution will evolve.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
In order to resolve all of the issues regarding music distribution and copyright violations, I believe we need to dispose of one majorly flawed assumption:
I don't care how much Blood, Sweat & Tears you put into it there is no reason you should make a living at it. If it's art then do it for the love of it. If it's a business then you play buy business rules. Don't cry if you can't compete.
People aren't buying your CD? Maybe they don't like your music. At the very least they aren't moved enough by it to pay for it. You don't like that? Don't distribute MP3s. It's that simple.
I hate the major labels as much as anyone. But, I have no sympathy for anyone who tries to compete with them. You want to be famous? Screw you. You just want make a decent living doing what you love? Fine, but that's your responsibility. If people will pay for it, they'll pay for it. Otherwise, just go out to your garage and have fun!
Personally, I'd rather pay 3 bucks to see a mediocre local band live than purchase a CD.
He forgot to mention one point, the sound quality of MP3s is quite a bit less than CD's. Some people might not care, but if youre like me, you like CLEAN sounding music. The difference is sound quality is especially noticable with a nice set of headphones.
I use Napster/MP3's to decide whether or not I like an artist/album before I shell out $15 for a CD that might suck.
Yes, I download music off of Napster (piracy, I guess), but if I like it, I'll go buy the CD. If I don't like it, I will get around to deleting it, sooner or later, honest. I dont want to keep my harddrive full of music I dont like.
I'm all for indie artists, and I have no intentions of stealing their music. They will simply have to trust fans to buy their CD's after they sample it. Real fans WONT steal from the bands they love.
-- A Human Being is nothing more than mobile CO2 factory. Bow to the plants.
OK, forget legality --
Do you beleive it is morally right for you to obtain a product or service for free when the artist producing said product has made clear they wish to be payed for their work? In obtaining their work for free, you are not only expressly going against thier wishes, but depriving them of thier livelihood. How is this in any way right?
This is called stealing
fuck em. they're stealing from all humanity.
imo, copyrights held by companies should last 5 years. copyrights held by the artists should last ~15 years. they have the right to make money off their efforts, but nobody should withhold intellectual property from the public for any great length of time.
same goes for patents and similar bullshit. imo, patents protect your right to make money off your idea. if you're not making any efforts to make money (for a period of time), you lose the patent. that'd stop all these wankers with patents on mp3 encoding, hyperlinking, GIFs, etc. supprising everyone after usage is widespread.
i fucking hate the fact that every part of our society will soon be owned by some company. fuck em. fuck the government too. sooner or later these pricks are going to have to accept people must have control.
theres a big difference between "releasing" to the general public, and selling to the general public! If an artist cant make money off their work, why would they bother? napster DOES steal from the artists, and from the record companies, it doesn't matter how much we hate them; stealing is wrong, and will not solve any of the problems we're aiming against! copyright, and intellectual property laws wont be repealed because a bunch of geeks like free stuff
I have a basic problem with his argument.
... but he also says:
... there's a whole lot of music out there, and people are selective in what they pay for. Someone else may well download the same MP3, decide they love it, and buy the album. I won't, but I have purchased other albums that I first heard on MP3 ... because I liked what I heard.
... promotion is what record companies do best, and you're still competing with them head to head on that front. Maybe that's why you are still not winning.
It's no secret that despite the "rampant piracy" of people trading MP3s last year, the big labels sold more CDs than ever before. People tend to like buying CDs; there's a psychological difference between downloading an MP3 and going to a store and buying a CD. Consumers aren't buying music -- they're buying CDs, with cover art and liner notes and a little poster inside and a few hidden tracks and a few spoken tracks and perhaps a limited edition signed thingie wedged in between the cover art and the CD itself.
This is exactly what I've been saying all along and I agree 100%
Who Napster does compete with, however, are the independent musicans. While independent musicians are trying to convince people that they don't need to buy from major labels, that they can buy direct (for less!) instead, Napster is showing people that they don't need to buy music at all. So on the one hand, you could buy ABCDEffigy at MP3.com, on the other hand, you could scour Napster for all the MP3s and have it anyway.
So which is it? How can it be that MP3s are promotional vehicles for big label consumers, but piracy vehicles for indy music cans? His core argument appears to be that Baptist Death Ray fans are less moral then Metallica fans. He shouldn't really be making that argument -- it's insulting to his fans, and even worse, it's probably not true.
After reading this article, I went and downloaded the most recent BDR MP3 and listened to it. I didn't really care for it, and won't be buying the album, so I just made your download to sales ratio worse. Sorry. That's the reality
I mean, now that indi bands can use the internet doesn't mean that they now have an advantage over the big labels. The big labels are still pouring money into promotion, and if you want to compete with that, sorry to say, you have to do the same. About all you can say is that the internet helps level the playing field a little more. In that sense, the notion that the Internet has completely levelled the playing field is false. The internet can provide a distribution system for little or no cost, but not a promotional system. You can use a web site to promote your album, but if Metallica can spend thousands of dollars on an advertising blitz for their new album, they are likely to do better then you, because, after all, you said it
But something happened: the big labels found out about these small labels, thought they could produce more pablum, and bought most of them out. Here are some labels that do quite well for their rosters: Kill Rock Stars, K, Matador, Merge, Touch and Go, and more... And bands like Sleater-Kinney (kill rock stars) or Belle and Sebastian aren't exactly starving either. Sleater Kinney makes a guarentee of $3000 each show, and sells 100,000 of each record they put out. It's also not uncommon for bands on above labels to sell 6,000 to 8,000. So before you call it a night, don't count the little guy out yet.
Angry or not, I hereby invoke Godwin's law. You lose.
Maybe you should fucking STUDY the law you're invoking before you FUCKING POST OUT OF YOUR ASS!!
Quirk's Exception: Intentional invocation of this so-called "Nazi Clause" is ineffectual.
So, huh, looks like you're stuck trying to fucking respond to my CONTENT, like you SHOULD HAVE in the first place instead of trying to be some fucking l33t 15yo h4xx0r by invoking a USENET law from 1993!
Dipshit.
Grr.. I need to send those moneygrubbing bastards their $30. I've been meaning to for about 5 years. :)
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
Speaking of computer games, if people find record companies so evil, why don't they steal all hasbro games? :)
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
How does the fact that the record labels essentially steal from artists make it OK for you to do so?
Right now, maybe spending the $8 is more convenient than waiting two days on a 33.3 modem. When high bandwidth lines are commonplace, however, that will no longer be the case.
Higher bandwidth may help the unknown artist more than it hurts. Right now, it's a risk to spend a half hour downloading something you've never heard of and might not like. I've often taken the chance and been disappointed, and felt like I wasted my time. So right now, it's a safer bet to download a song by a band I've already heard. But if that same download took 3 seconds, then even if I listen to the song and hate it I won't care as much. I'll keep sampling until I find a band I like, then I'll order the $8 CD from the artist.
At the Streaming Media '99 convention, I listened for several hours to a bunch of Microsoft flaks touting their new SDMI features of WMP. When I asked one of their most technical people what would keep people from doing exactly what you mentioned, or the even more technically unsophisticated step of just playing out the data through a sound card with some Digital Audio interface (AES/EBU, etc.) to a digital recorder, he fled.
SDMI is a fiction.I fully agree that with Napster etc. it's more convenient for people not to search around for underground music, but I don't think that this will be the end of music. (Some) people make music the same way that (some) people code. For the love of the art, it's not going to stop. Hopefully what we will see is the collapse of the current musick business clearing the way for whatever's to come next....
(I'm not being heartless to the people who rely on music for a living, but I don't know what can be done to help them. I release my music for free, but luckily I've also got an IT job that pays well)
Napster competes against indies only so far as indies don't use napster. As someone once said,"Where's the injustice if a fool doesn't take advantage?"
The more indies create services that work with napster the more indies will show up on Napster.
The most important thing to note is: You cannot make more money than exists in your market. If there's 200 buyers with 150 for mainstream and 50 for weird rock, the mainstream musicians will reach 100% of the 150, they'll never get the other 50. If weird rockers want to take avantage of Napster they will reach 100% of the 50.
Each gets the intended market. Where's the injustice?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Whether you called them minstrels or jongueleurs or whatnot, there have always been people who have supported themselves by playing music.- -------
+----------------------------------------------
+------------------------------------------------
+ The urge to destroy is a creative urge
It's not really happening, please note.
It's a funny story and all, but not true. Not too far from what they actually *have* done, but this isn't the gospel truth, say.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
What an overrated crock. Those other stories that you mention were nothing like this one. Only a small portion of the stories have touched on the point of view of the musicians, and none of them brought up the idea of how sharing could have a different effect on mainstream versus indy.
You don't think that music making a transition from a physical object (CD) to a file that can be copied (MP3) is a big deal, and doesn't have interesting consequences? How narrow minded.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Can you make an argument showing conclusively that the variety we have today is *not* largely a result of changes that have allowed people to make money selling "music"?
Anyway, frankly, no, people won't tip, they won't pay, they won't do anything for *free* music. If they don't have to, they won't. Do you realize how few people make money at shareware? *NONE* are making a living on shareware that doesn't have an effective nag screen, and that's despite the relative sanity of a market where an individual consumer can pay someone to add a much-valued feature to a piece of software.
I continue to believe that many people make music because they can make a living at it, and would not make much music if they couldn't make a living
at it, and I continue to believe that, if we do not provide a reliable framework for them to do this within, we are unlikely to see them succeed.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
(I hate replying to a post before I've read all the replies, but bear with me - I've got a show to play tonight, and I've gotta run!)
:). Lemme hear it!
Music doesn't belong to the musician in the same way that, for instance, his pants belong to him, and the word "theft" doesn't apply in the way that you're intimating. It does apply, however, in a weaker sense.
Producing art is never anything *but* a shared experience. Art isn't something someone makes in order to sell -- selling is just an accident. Great art is tough to make, and easy to enjoy, and that's just the way it is. Art that someone else created *is* free for the world -- free for consumption, but not for production, *and the production isn't forced*. You, as a listener, don't owe the artist anything to listen to his/her music, or to hum his/her tune. This is why the strong sense of the word "theft" is innapropriate. The only time that something akin to theft occurs with an artist's creation is when another "artist" comes along and steals the original objet d'art, claiming that it is his/her own work, and enjoys the increased recognition that results. Plagarism, in other words. I'd use the word "theft" in that case, even if the original work itself isn't lost to the world -- just the original artist's reputation! This is gonna be the tough issue in the digitized world, it seems to me... Copying the object and misrepresenting its origin might occur faster than the proper recognition of the artist... (But even now, the boundaries are fuzzy. Are collage artists, or sampling musicians, or others producing original art, or misrepresenting the source? This is certainly artistic "sharing" as most people understand it -- ideas were germinated, spread, mutated, and other ideas were created... hm. I've heard of works that consisted of a frame placed around somebody else's framed canvas, or of a photograph of a photograph, considered by some to be legitimate art.. Too post-modern for me to understand!)
Back to the subject - the issue is not whether or not musicians can still get paid, but whether or not they can receive *recognition* for producing something of cultural value, which is a subtle distinction that most everyone misses. Stardom must not necessarily lead to riches! Not everything must have a price! Artists are only due recognition and respect. Remember, Big Money Rock Stardom is an anomaly in the first place. It emerged from, and is sustained by, the combined technological and cultural accidents of the intentionaly inefficient recording industry ("the gatekeepers"), and a leisure class with some spare change, who used to buy sheet music from songwriters and play piano, but who now buy magnetic media, with the music pre-played by hired cats and/or pretty boys("the consumers"). As the physical realities of the act of recording and distributing music change, the recording industry will change. And as the recording industry (and the cultural context surrounding it) change, Big Rock Stardom could wither away. There will be other ways to voluntarily express your gratitude as an enjoyer of the art, though, besides paying outragous mark-ups to CD-packagers and distributors. Hell, more people might make more music themselves, or they might appreciate a wider variety of music, or they might directly subsidise musicians... and more people will certainly copy the recorded instance of a given objet d'art, copy protected or not. Will they claim it to be their own? They'd better not. That's the problem we need to focus on...
As far as people who perform works for hire, or enter into a contract with an orchestra are concerned -- sure, paying them makes sense, for playing music is presumably a skill that they're good at, and they can work out how much they should be paid with the artist. But the composer? The guy that struggled for years to produce the music that the hired performers play? He'd better be doing it out of love, 'cause I don't owe him any money for following his muse - his art is *his* compulsion, not mine.
But if it's good, it could be mine, too
Sure, they were largely manufactured, but the Monkees had some great songs in their brief two years or so of glory. (And, as I recall from reading a biography of them, in 1967 they outsold the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined!) TWR
99.44% of music is not songs. It is symphonies, concertoes, sonatates, operas, and the like. The only music which is songs is top 40 pop music. So how do you distribute music which isn't top 40 pop music? Or are you _trying_ to eliminate music as part of your micropayment plan?
Secondly, I'm not a hopeless BeOS weenie. I use Linux just as much. It's just that I'm a programmer, and programmers tend to fall in love with BeOS's elegant design.
Another problem with 10,000 CD's @ $8.00 is that much music is signficantly more expensive to record than $40,000. The author's premised is based on all music being able to be produced but obviously he is completely ignorant of any music aside from low-fi pop. A symphony or an opera costs $100,000-$500,000 to record on average, NOT TO MENTION the price of production. And these - in practice - never come close to selling 10,000 units. How is classical going to make money - let alone survive - in the online world? It won't. Recorded classical music will be COMPLETELY destroyed by online delivery, and we will only be able to listen to top 40 pop music.
Jazz, Blues, and Bluegrass artists have never had the option of getting wealthy from selling copies of albums. And yet these genre's have produced consistently far higher quality music than either indie or mainstream rock/pop/country. Just goes to show that money and art really don't have much to do with one another.
Bluegrass and jazz are two of my specialty genres (along with classical). Online distribution will completely destroy recorded classical music first, but I believe it will also destroy recorded bluegrass and classical. Remember, I am a music fan: I do not care how musicians make money; I care about getting recorded music. I am not interested in going out to the bluegrass festivals (for starters, I live in the west coast and they are all on the east coast). I want bluegrass to listen to AT HOME. I DEPEND on recorded music. I can't resort to live music, and the obsolescence of recorded music would be a horrible, horrible step backwards.
My take on piracy in general: If you would have bought it, and instead you pirated it, you have done harm. If you wouldn't have bought it, but it'd be nice to have, (as in people who want to play around with Adobe Photoshop for fun, but don't have the hundreds of dollars to shell out that professional graphics designers have) then pirating it does no harm. If you wouldn't have bought it, but after pirating it and trying it you decide to buy it, then pirating has actually done good. In my case, piracy almost never does harm, and often does good. Now with mp3s specifically, it's like this: Say some band comes out with a hit single. I hear it and I like it. This is the case with something like five or six songs every month. Do I have $80/month to spend on CDs? I think not. So do I go out and buy a CD everytime I hear a song I like? No, I go to Napster (or somewhere else). Would I have bought the CD if I couldn't get it on Napster? NO.
Now, I take these five or six songs, and I go grab the entire album that goes with them. I listen. I like one or two of these albums so much I go out and buy it. I do this because: 1) I like having the CD. It's convenient to have a hardcopy that I can put into CD players everywhere. I could buy a CD-burner and convert my mp3s into hardcopies, but that's more money and effort than it's worth. I also like having the little pamphlet that comes with lyrics and pictures. 2) Morality. I realize that if I decided not to buy the CD because I could pirate the mp3s for free, I would in effect be stealing from the company, and indirectly discouraging the artist whose music I pirated. So now I've gone out and bought two CDs. I keep the other three or four songs, and I don't feel bad about it, because I wouldn't have bought their albums anyway. It doesn't hurt anybody for me to keep the song, and it pleases me.
But it's theft.
No, theft is when you take a physical object from someone without permission. Piracy is when you capture valuable cargo on the high seas. Downloading someone's music without permission is, well, copying without permission. And, like theft, it's a crime, but it's a different crime.
Are there good reasons why this law against copying without permission is in place? Sure, some. Is it enforceable? Maybe. Does it benefit society as a whole? Maybe.
Why am I quibbling over sematics here? Because, sensible ethics and laws are not made through faulty analogies. They're made by considering the benefits and consequences of a particular course of action when weighed against another.
I suppose that I don't disagree with you. I am not someone who demands that work be given out for free. In fact, here is a list of my demands:
1. MTV goes off the air.
2. People listen to a wider variety of music, a portion of it for free.
3. Consumers are able to buy things, not just borrow them for a price and use them only how the lender orders them.
--
share and enjoy
I read over the details of how this "copy protection scheme" works. It is encryption, plain and simple. They encrypt the music, and the software decrypts it. If you purchase it, your software will decrypt it, if you don't, it won't.
;)
If you know anything about encryption in software, and how to reverse engineer programs, this should be quite simple to crack - the same way that DeCSS was cracked by reverse engineering the Xing DVD player. You look at the code in assembly until you can find the decryption routine, and then follow things from there. The key has to be stored in the program, in some convoluted form or another. Either that, or it gets downloaded real-time (incredibly stupid idea).
Either way, to crack this encryption scheme would mean more than just to be able to listen to a few songs. If the recording industries bite on this one, near every piece of copyrighted music will be out there, all ready for download, whenever you want them (with them believing that only people who have payed can listen to it, just in the same way the DVD CCA believed that only registered players could play DVDs)
Thus, this is an extreme danger for the music industry. May they bite this lure dangling in front of them
- Rei
The yellowcake is a lie.
I think that the author has some very good points I use to do a indi show at a small radio station. And I could see the decline of the number of lables comming out with new music. I also am one to love to buy CD and have them in my hands. I just can't get the same feeling with MP3s. I don't feel like I have anything, and maybe that is why people feel like they should get it for free. Since it does not feel like you really have anything with the MP3.
It is said that a child learns wisdom from the parent,
but the truly wise parent learns joy from the child
You know, I was tempted to moderate this down, but I couldn't find an appropriate category, besides which I felt compelled to reply.
How can you not advocate the ignorance of unjust laws. It's called 'civil disobedience' and it has gotten us civil rights and an end to slavery amongst other good things.
As for revolting versus an unjust government. Are you serious? How can such a revolution be wrong? When the government is immoral the moral have an obligation to overthrow it. Peacefully preferable, but violently if necessary. What sane person would advocate unjust tyrrany?
Of course the possibility exists that you were being sarcastic, in which case I merely didn't understand your sarcasm.
The other possibility is that you are a troll, in which case you got me. Reel me in, the hook was definitely taken.
Absimiliard
It seems that the people defending napster and its ilk fall into 2 categories. The first (which appears to be much much smaller) has a philosophical commitment to the free exchange of ideas and art and software and so on. The second, while claiming to be the first, is thinking "free music dude -- why should I pay for it if I can get it free." These are the sorts of people who justify shoplifting by saying "I'm stealing from Macy's (or whatever) not an individual" and who sneak out of restaurants congratulating themselves for getting away with something rather than thinking about the waitress they just screwed over. This is called stealing, and the last time I checked it was against most (all?) major religions, and the laws of most countries.
As I sift my way through these posts (most of which are refreshingly well-thought out...or at least more coherent than the usual troll garbage), I can't help but be kinda struck by this type of argument:
"I don't see how you can call our downloading copyrighted songs stealing. the RIAA is stealing from US by gouging us for CD's!"
Hmmm....okay, that's true, the RIAA is stealing from you. But you're stealing from them too. Stealing to get revenge is still stealing. I don't understand why so many people who have opinions on this issue vehemently defend "two wrongs making a right".
I'm not casting down judgement; God knows I've acquired lots and lots of music that I ought to have paid for. God knows I still do. But I know it's technically stealing...and don't try to trick myself into thinking it's anything more righteous than just that. Why do I download music for free? Because the RIAA makes CD's cost too much. Does that make my theft any less theft? No. It just explains my motive. I'm still doing wrong, now you just have a little insight into what makes me do it.
On second though, let me rephrase that last sentence..."now you have a little insight into what makes me CHOOSE to do it."
People pirate things that they should be paying for.
It's very simple. I pay for EVERYTHING I own. I consider getting on Napster and downloading a CD's worth of MP3s as equivalent to walking into the label's manufacturing plant and stealing a CD. (I don't say store, because then the store loses, not the record company)
Sure, record companies exploit artists, but if you don't pay for your music, neither record company NOR artist gets paid. If you are so worried, then send money to their fan club or something, and get their MP3s, but these people are selling their music so they can eat and get someplace to live. Admittedly, many of them are mega-wealthy, but as the article points out, NAPSTER KILLS SMALL TIME MUSICIANS. This particularly applies to those who sell their music in MP3 form on the internet.
And if you think that $15 a CD is too much, you have absolutely no right to go steal that music and pay nothing. You try working in a job where you aren't paid by the hour, but by your success as a celebrity.
Humans are too damned selfish to pay for anything. I would chance to say that MOST people would steal something if they could get away with it. Especially if it was something that was being sold for profit.
People should realize that they are hurting other humans by theft. Ah well... I have little hope that this will change, ever.
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
Of course, if I want to hear it right, I can get out my cds and listen to them. (Except for a few songs, which I wouldn't be able to get ahold of here anyway.) Maybe those people who don't actually own their music have more of a reason to dislike the lossy compression -- so I can see why they complain about it.
If only the people who really, truly believed that music should be free used Napster and the like, I don't think there would be any problems. Much as I think RMS is a nut, I respect the fact that he really means what he says. Same with a few other people. But the vast majority of those who priate MP3s are just greedy. People who claim that there's a revolution going on, which involves them being able download an entire CD for nothing. Remember, the bulk of the Napster crowd isn't even idealistic Slashdotters. It's those people who previously only knew how to type a letter and connect to the internet. (Also known as AOL). Now they can type, connect to the internet, and open Napster.
Maybe this is how it'll be, eventually. I don't look forward to it. Without a source of income (guess what, internet music distribution certainly has not been shown to make big profits) ...surprise! Most (not all, but the majority) artists will stop making music. The system's screwed up now, but if 'free' (read: stolen, pirated, copied, shared, or favorite word for it) music becomes the norm, it's going to get worse.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
It's not about the indies not utilizing technology, the point is that because people have been spoon-fed crap, when they fire up napster they're going to look for crap no matter how many MP3s that there are that they haven't heard of. The problem is how to teach people to use their own minds. As far as I can see, it's almost a losing battle.
I've never actually used Napster (or Gnutella, etc), and ideologically I have always been kind of neutral about it. (It does promote piracy whatever anyone says, so it is bad, but corporations have been stomping all over consumers, so it is good).
Now I have to wonder whether Napster, etc. are actually good in any way at all. As the article says, people will always buy cds, and the author obviously believes this is true more for big label bands than for the smaller unsigned bands. If this is the case then I have to come down against Napster.
At the same time, I believe that some people will always buy cds of the bands they like, and some won't. It doesn't matter what the band is, it depends on the person.
When it somes down to it I suspect that it comes down to availability. I can buy the Backstreet Boys in any record store, but if I can only buy it on MP3.com I am less likely to bother.
So am I in favour of Napster? I still don't know - in fact I'm less sure than I was. This has made me decide that if I happen upon a band I like, then I will buy their CD.
about musicians maintaining their own pages with mp3s and content
san diego's Superficial
shaolin punk, activist post-industrial
Unfortunately, this would not work. Most modern albums that people buy consist of the one song they overplay on the radio, and the rest of the album is utter crap. So this will only lead to corps. making even more contrived bands (the current boy bands actually had training to "create" their personalities.)
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
If you were trying to make a living as a rock star, you had to expect hard times to begin with. Well, the market is changing, adapt.
Finally. What are the implications of fewer musicians? Well guess who we're weeding out? The ones who are in it for the money alone. again, Boo-hoo.
Sausage King of Chicago
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
BDR has a lot of valid points, but I disagree with some of what s/he says. I think there has to be a distinction made between fans of a band, and listeners. The distinction would be this; Fans tend towards rabidity. They go see the band any time they tour, several times. They buy the T-shirt, the CD, the CD singles, the promo stuff, the posters. They might get the MP3's as well, but they want something tangible that ties that band to them. Ever hear "I dont like insert band name here; they've become too commercial." That would have been a Fan who discovered 'his' band wasn't just known by the select few anymore. But up until that point, they have shares in that band, shares they can wear, listen to, show off about. All tangible. All collectable, saleable, profitable. In the days of (ick) 'Madchester' in the UK, James and the Inspiral Carpets probably were making more money from T-shirt sales than albums, and probably to a lot of folk who'd never heard the bands at all. All you need is a good logo, a hip slogan, and sod the CD sales...
BDR sounds like he's talking about Listeners. Listeners are different. They tape albums, borrow them, mooch MP3s, all sorts. Their loyalty doesnt really exist, they just want background music, summat off the radio. It'll always happen. Forget them. Concentrate on the Fans. As long as you don't make the Big Time, they'll still be there in ten years...
Pax,
White Rabbit +++ Divide by Cucumber Error ++
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
Face it, most musicians start off making money with the tip jar, private (for hire) performances, and hawking tapes and CDs on street corners. Seeing as that tape isn't in most if not any stores, if I want someone else to hear it I might copy it for them - cutting the originator out of a sale.
So why not encourage a good micorcash ewallet open protocol that can be dropped into any damn browser. Then I can buy one song or a set, and maybe even toss a bit of cash into the online tip jar (hey - Ebuskering - patent it quick!).
And continue to remind people that if the creators of music and art can't earn a living at it, they'll have to take Real World Jobs such as CPAs, used car salespeople, or handing out samples of DeathWheeze cigarettes. So it's more CPAs and elevator mussic, or pay the folks who make it, which do you want?
I'd hardly call my jazz CD collection an example of "mediocrity", even though most of it comes from the larger jazz record labels. Sorry, but that's a gross over-generalisation. I've yet to see a group of brilliant musicians who couldn't get a record deal and made a good effort to do so.
Skapunx.net is a cool site that has been around for quite a while. They have an awsome way of dealing with the music scene, and leaving the Indi labels the ability to collect some customers. From each album they archive a few songs, and serve them up free on a real player server. So you get a taste of what is on each album. Now, if you know the bands they play, when you checkout the music you realize that they only do 1 hit per band, and then other songs. So the listener gets a wider taste of the music, and can listen (to some) for free. I have bought more CD's and heard of and gotten interested in more bands through the clips provided by skapunx.net than anywhere else. They also do the whole "portal" deal, connection the people that listen to the music to lables, stores, and other sites.
What? - Einstein
Ever buy a book from Amazon? (Yeah, I know, patents, but when it can't be found locally...) You know that "People who bought this book also liked..." section? And that little agent that recommeds books when you log on...
/., though... I know how much they spent on the album... on the recording alone, and the own the studio, which is a luxury not available to most artists. In the case of music, for most of the kids out there, damnit, free (as in speech) does mean free (as in beer). If they can get it without compensating the person who poured sweat and blood into into it, regardless of how much benifit they gain from it, they will!
Now pair that with a good feedback modifier (I bought it, but it really stank!!!), and you've got a winner. My SO is a singer. I've been working on setting up independant distribution for her latest album in my spare time... web site with 30 second track samples, contacts with genre (very specific... Jewish album) stores and chains, that sort of thing. We're setting up an MP3.com listing, but...
I went through all the Jewish music on MP3.com. Yes, the #1 track's band is sort of good, and catchy, but... there's no real user rating system. It was jumbled and there was no profiled association. Rather discouraging.
I'm starting to get pissed at the socialist attitude on
I know I've written for-sale software - hey, I have to eat, damnit, and I'm not a uni grad student anymore, and I don't live in a world where the government (you know, the government we all love to hate) pays me for my services to society with money from taxes (which, honestly, I'd aprove of, if I could somehow be assured of a honestly benevolent government, which I can't), so I have to extract payment from society in sales. Which is why, damnit, when I sell you a commodity, I'm selling you everything that went into it. My 3D rendered MMPOG with advanced simulation and presentation capacities is damned well worth more than the price of the CD-R I sent it to you on, and I damned well deserve more for it that just your payment. Just because you payed for the media does not mean you payed for the distribution rights. Sure, I'll grant you that you payed for the right to use it on any platform that supports it, and the right to keep using it, but if you get upset because I don't want you burning copies and giving them to your friends in exchange for a few of those herbal brownies they baked, and take steps to nuke any rogue copies that try to access the server, well, fuck you. You're a thief, and I'm not signing over the rights to resell my blood, sweat, and code.
...whew...
And the same goes for musicians. Which is why, ethically, I won't keep any MP3s I haven't paid for the album of (though buying it used, just as buying a book used, is a different story. That's still a copy that the artist was compensated for, on a per copy basis), and I won't tolerate those who do.
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
Somebody PLEASE moderate this parent up.
One other point I would like to add: online delivery will make all serious music extinct, and only top 40 pop music will survive when online delivery overtakes the industry. I believe that CD's of serious music (bluegrass, classical, jazz) will become EXTREMELY valuable and collectible in this time, as it won't be possible to get this music otherwise (because all of the techno-teeny-rebels who steal music only pirate top 40 pop music, and aren't knowledgeable enough to take the serious music).
This should be the choice of the artist. If you want to try to convince artists that this is the way to go, be my guest. I'll be first in line behind you. But just because you think that artists ought to do this does not mean you have the right to act like they are.
The cake is a pie
Good point. This experience taught me that I should examine the articles thoroughly. Have you checked out the CNET article? The facts in it could fit on the head of a bobby-pin, without any special technology, just an 8pt Courier font.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Good for them. It's a great name. I'll check them out. Too bad you don't like my music.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
The patron system is alive and doing well, it is the recording label company. Most people may, or may not, agree that is true. So, lets see what is on a select couple of CDs I have on this desk.
Home of the Brave - Laurie Anderson [(c)1986 Difficult Music BMI] Status is, star Patron Warner Bros. Records Inc.
Vegas - The Crystal Method [a talk soup of BMI EMI publishing, but (c)1997] Status is, star?? (I like it) Patron Outpost Recordings
Both CDs have extensive cover art. Both CDs have the artist listed as producer. Both CDs are the result of a system that has not changed much in 10 years +1 (1997-1986). The existing patron system is a modification of the same system that has been around forever. The rich, powerful, and crafty patron is forever in need of a 'power' fix. Change will allow the artist to be their own patron. All that is needed is to debug the listener.
-d
I agree that the subscription model is going to be the future of music distribution.
In the 80's Michael Eisner made an unbelievable fortune for Disney, the stockholders and himself by recognizing that the movies sitting in Disney's vault were an underutilized asset and released them to video. Parent's bought them, grandparents bought them and nostalgic adults bought them. Cha-ching!
The music companies own the rights to a gigantic library of songs. I don't know about you, but I would pay $15 or $20 per month to have legal, unlimited access to every piece of music in the Big Labels' catalog. By not taking advantage of the flexibility the digital age allows, the record labels are losing money. I can think of ten albums I won't buy because there's only one song I'm really interested in, but I'm not interested enough to pay $15 for it. Maybe there are a few albums or songs that came out when I was in high-school (mid-80's) that I would like to hear again, but aren't even available anymore. Maybe I would create playlists of Elvis or Beach Boys songs. But I'm not going to go out tomorrow and buy all that music at today's prices.
If pirating is easy and the copyrighted material is expensive, pirating will happen. The only solution is to make the copyrighted material cheap enough that it's not worth the trouble. I pirated videos for myself in the 80's. Video movies cost $95. Tapes were $6 and a rental cost $3, so for $9 I could have a copy of Star Trek: Wrath of Khan. Now you can buy a movie on tape for $15-$20, which coincidentally is about the same as 9 1982 dollars adjusted for inflation.
Hmmm... I wonder if I could patent this business model ala Priceline and license it to the big labels for a fraction of a cent per download. Cool.
"Can I finish? Can I finish?
Depends how you do the linking.
It could be I like "Bob's Ska Band", I like "Joe's Trance Tracks" therefore BSB and JTT are linked. That wouldn't give a high ranking to the link, but the link would be there, so you could follow it.
One way you could do both together is to rate each band based on the number of links to it. So if I'm looking at Ska, and I go to BSB's page, then the JTT link will be there. If JTT is a popular outfit, then that link could be higher, even though only 1 person actually made the link. The popularity of JTT pushes it up. It wouldn't be up there with "Mike's Ska Band", but it would be enough to get some people to follow it.
The interface to all this could just be a "thumbs up"/"thumbs down" on each band page. That creates a mesh of links between every band you like, and degrades the link between bands you like to bands you don't like.
So, who's going implement it?
--
Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I have mp3 technology now. I have my diamond rio (pmp300 the one that isnt screwed up) and I have my empeg car player. they can change the specifications all they want, I will be able to re-encode to clean mp3 and do what I want with the music. you will not see everyone in the world drop mp3 because (they released something different, I gotta use that.) If they change winamp, they will kill winamp. (freeamp anybody?) I ignore this fodder, I listen to many smaller musicians, they are in it to play their music, for the art. They still work their regular jobs, but they play music for the love of it. These are the musicians I respect. the ones that whine that their music isnt paying them... I have no respect (I'm not impressed at the baptist deathray music anyways.)
Excuse me... why did you start playing music? to get rich? well it aint gonna happen.
open mp3's are here to stay, and there is nothin they can do to make it go away.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Courtney Love made a pretty interesting speech recently. click the link to check it out. Tony
"How does the fact that laws are unjust make it OK for you to break them?" This is not a valid parallel. The artists are not ripping us off, I don't think many contest this fact. I think the price of a CD is fair. Admittedly, record companies may be a bad idea, but if you're really worried about your so called revolt, why don't you tell artists that you will continue to support them if they leave their label? Why don't you start a campaign to free them from their bonds?
If you want to draw the parallel your way, a revolt would consist of killing random citizens and government leaders in order to free the people. Stealing from artists is not the way to bring about change.
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
I just wish small bands would release their own mp3s and fill in the ID3 tags. There are a couple of bands that I would *love* to have CDs, but I can't find them. One of them, the songs I have are labeled as being by "big daddy". The songs are usually the lyrics of one song sung to the music of another. Really funny stuff. For example they sing "Welcome to the jungle" to "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". (Anybody know anything about them?)
If I were a small band, I would release some of my best songs on mp3. Set up a computer to serve them to Napster and Gnutella, put them on the web, and make sure they had a web address in the ID3 tag so that people who want more could come buy the CD. (Please, Please, Please do this all musicians!!!!!)
If you, as a band, ARE good enough, you WILL get the followers if people download your music. If you DO get the followers, then you can make money touring. If you don't, then very likely your music isn't touring quality. Just because you are a band does not mean you are good. Secondly, the cover art may have been a problem 10 years ago, but now days, hey, GIMP, need I say more? I should think it would be really easy to find someone who likes your music and knows how to use a graphics program that will help you design your covers. As for promo gimicks, well, if you are truly good, interest in your band will reach critical mass and explode without the gimmicks. Yes, trying without a big label backing you is more risky. Hey, you could be the only people who like your music, in which case, no tours for you, go get a real job.
/. They probably increased their listening audience by 1000 fold. Nice job. And all they had to do was write an essay.
BTW, kudos to Babtist Death Ray for getting posted on
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
You didn't convince me that your fear of Napster is any different than the major labels' fear. You believe that the major labels have sold more CD's because of Napster. Wouldn't that be especially true for you? I mean, going from 0 to anything is a big jump. I think there's a leap of faith that you haven't taken yet. The better band you are, the more you should be giving away everything for free. But Napster will bring down lousy musicians as fast as it brings down scamming record labels. As Courtney Love put it, are you afraid of your own filler?
I'd pay for streaming audio.
Say a cent per 5 minutes. That's 12 cents an hour. For the amount of music I listen to, that's around $160 per year. Which is the same as 13 albums (ish). Which is about what I buy (give or take). And the money would go straight to the people who make the music. so every time I listen to a song by REM, REM get a cent (or thereabouts). And I get to listen to any song I like at any time.
I'd pay for a streaming service like that.
My Journal
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
If Nullsoft, as the people who own the copyright to Winamp had realesed Winamp as GPL'd, they would not have to relase any such changes they might make.
The person who owns the copyright on some software can realses that under any liscense they choose. If they were to add proprietry code to Winamp to deal with the copyright issues, then they could easily realse a binary only version, with that support.
Other authors could not, because they would be bound by the GPL, but the owners could, by makeing a non-GPL'd realses of that code.
Remeber that the GPL restricts what other people can do with your code. It does not (and cannot?) restrict what _you_ can do with your own code (cf sendmail and sendmail professional).
then you start to explore.
and, guess what? a lot of those mp3's got hisses, pops, get cutoff at the end, are poorly ordered, sometimes it can be a real chore to get the whole album (always missing a track and whatnot). know what this means? you get a great preview. a really great preview. you hear most of the album. and if it stands out... you (OMG!) buy the cd!!
now, don't get me wrong. you download a hell of a lot more than you buy. but you don't have to buy cd's only to find that there's only one good track anymore.
so after you buy it, whaddya do? first thing: rip it. rip it properly: no hisses, no cutoffs, numbered tracks, etc. and burn it so you can listen to it in your car (on your mp3 cd player -- you have one, right?), at work (on your computer -- you are a geek, right?), or at home (on your computer through your badass sound system).
it's truly a beautiful thing. and if i didn't buy your music, the reason is simple: i didn't like it. at least i found out before i spent anything.
I honestly believe that the music industry is ready for an overhaul. No one can stop the free distribution of music over the WWW, so it may be prudent for the music industry to figure out some new way of profiting. Music may be released in MP3 format as a standard by bands directly, in a low quality compression format, making money from touring and advertising. This way, bands still make thier money. If an industry refuses to change with the times, the customers will recreate the industry in its vision.
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
Rader
There is no coercion in a free exchange of goods. The musician provides the music, you provide the money. There is no coercion involved. It is like saying that you should be able to choose whether or not to pay the grocer for the apple you just ate, because if you were forced to hold up your end of the economic transaction, it would be 'coercive'. It doesn't fly.
Eric Christian Berg
Anyone who happens to run into this thread, please read my refutation of the music piracy argument.
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
Sorry, but selfishly, expediently and anonymously distributing resources in your own direction is NOT civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is about public protest, and publically defying laws in hope that it will stimulate change. The guy who burnt his draft card was doing "civil disobedience", but the guy who sent in fake medical documents showing him to be unfit for service was merely committing fraud and selectively ignoring the law. Civil disobedience is not expediently ignoring laws that you find inconvenient.
I use encryption, sometimes.
But there is a difference in using encryption and using encryption to prevent someone from exercising their fair use rights (DECSS). Or using encryption, then litigation, to prevent people from talking about screwed up products (CPHack).
Fight Spammers!
Why a single patron? Here is an example of a group with a big back catalog and established fan base, leveraging that fanbase as one big virtual patron to avoid having to sign another record deal. I guess we won't know whether it worked until December (I'm not a fan myself,) but it seems like an interesting experiment.
Napster runs on the premise that someone MIGHT have the song one is looking for from that unknown band. They may not and one may still have to run out to a record store or have it delivered to their door.
Also it is possible that they have incomplete copies of the songs. Leaving the potential "pirate" high and dry. Another fact is that while most "artists" (read gluttons) backed by major labels object to mp3's, some don't mind when concerts are made into bootlegs. Isn't this also a form of pirating? If the bands want to crack down on pirating they should attack it all of its forms or else be looked on as hypocrites.
Maybe we should go back to that model. Maybe Baptist Death Ray should try to get Bill Gates to underwrite them while they make their music. Bill could then put the music up on the net (At www.microsoft.com?) in MP3 format for all to listen to, perhaps with a little "Brought to you by Bill Gates" in the MP3 headers. Wouldn't be too hard, I don't think.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What is significant about being white?
Well, a statistically smaller chance of getting pulled over by the cops or thrown in jail, for one. Or being poor.
Although the author makes some interesting points, everyone must keep in mind that he is bemoaning the loss of a potential which has never actually materialized. Specifically, the possibility of a small independent band being able to make a living by selling music. The truth of the matter is that this has never been a possibility. While I sympathize with his hopes, I don't think it was ever a likely possibility. Examine the economics: a band manages to sell 10,000 cd's at eight dollars a pop and profits $40,000--this is the MP3.com model. First off, even if this was possible it would only realistically support a duo or a very, very frugal power trio. Secondly, the expectation that an independent artist/band could sell 10,000 cd's over the internet is completely unrealistic--granted, there could be a few, but they would be a rare exception.
Now for a little history lesson: the author dicusses the era of indie record labels, but I don't think he understands what the reality of the times were. Speaking as someone who was involved in the "indie" scene of the mid-eighties--and I was a late comer to the scene as it was already dying out by 1985--I can state with absolute conviction that, with only a couple of exceptions, no "indie" band ever made a living selling records and tapes. At the time records/tapes sold for around $8 to $10 and the bands got between $1.50 to $2.50 of that--very generous compared to the big labels. But consider the fact that even some of the all-time punk rock classic albums did not sell more than 10,000 copies. In fact, I would bet that SST Records--the biggest and most successful of the "indie" labels--did not have a single album in their catalog which sold more than 40,000 copies over the course of the entire decade.
So how did early punk/indie/alternative stars make a living? Despite what the author claims, the only way small independent bands have ever made money: LIVE MUSIC. The early alternative scene was centered around live bands playing in clubs and albums were for all intents and purposes only a promotional item to entice people to go and see bands in a live venue. It might also surprise people to know that many of the "stars" of the early punk/indie/alternative scene worked jobs like being dishwashers or pet store clerks(Ian McKaye, of Minor Threat, and Henry Rollins, of Black Flag used to work together in a pet store).
Anyone who wants a good idea of what the times were like should get their hands on a documentary called "Another State of Mind" made around 83. It follows many of the biggest early punk bands from the west coast on a cross country tour. As it turns out, they all had quit their jobs and get a hold of a crappy old school bus to house and sleep around 25 people. They managed to make enough to keep everyone from starving and keep gas in the bus. Notable highlights from the film are Mike Ness composing "Another State of Mind" on an acoustic guitar while coming down from a bad time with heroin and the Minor Threat performance at the end.
Of course, if you expand your horizons beyond rock, pop, and country you will find that making a meager living from live performances is the norm for musicians. Jazz, Blues, and Bluegrass artists have never had the option of getting wealthy from selling copies of albums. And yet these genre's have produced consistently far higher quality music than either indie or mainstream rock/pop/country. Just goes to show that money and art really don't have much to do with one another.
If the purpose of audio layer 3 MPEGs is, like so many people claim, to hear artists they would not usually hear, and then buy the record, why is MP3 the format of choice? If you REALLY planned on buying the 44.1 kHz version later, why not go with something infinitely smaller and quicker to download, such as RealAudio? If you were really going to buy the CD later, wouldn't quality be a non-issue, to a point?
Maybe. I don't like them, true, but believe it or not, a substantial number of people actually do. Maybe it's due to marketing and so forth, but since people's tastes obviously don't rely on musical talent, there's no real way to back it up. And, though I hate to say it, I've had real trouble finding music by incredibly skilled but unknown musicians. In fact, they're pretty rare, and major, well-promoted bands create my favorite music.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Right now I think it's reasonable to say that given a choice, people would prefer Napster to work and Winamp to not (as opposed to the other way around). If Winamp suddenly becomes copy-protected, it'll be abandoned for a more free player (like freeamp or older versions of Winamp) overnight.
Aren't you dead?
Look at FreeAmp. It's open source, and has pre-built versions for Linux and Windows.
What guilty conciense? Music should be free, and should have the lyrics and the sheet music published on the band's website.
First off, as somebody who's interested in a lot of "small label" stuff, and as somebody who has used both Napster and GNUtella for finding MP3s, I believe the assertion that it comes down to "free vs. pay" is a bit simplistic. Anybody who's tried finding an obscure artist through Napster can tell you that it is not as easy as typing "Wally Western and the Electrics" in there and downloading the CD. There may be fewer than 10,000 copies of the CD out there, and even today, the majority of people who own the CD may not even have a computer (case in point: the band name above actually existed in the late 80's and early 90's... we self produced three CDs that total sold around 10,000 copies in the Los Angeles area. I'll pay someone $50 if they find an MP3 of our music on Napster [mostly because I don't have copies of a lot of our material myself!]).
Many of the files on Napster (also GNUtella, and the 'old sk00l' way of distributing music.. usenet) are fundamentally broken in some way. Some are downright lousy rips, many are missing bits, all are encoded using MP3... which is quite simply inferior in quality to a CD, even one created from an analog source. Assuming you can find a copy of "Andee Joyce - Love's Not The Thing That Hurts.mp3" at all on these services, there's no guarantee that the MP3 is of reasonable quality. In the above case, it's on MP3.com, but the audio quality is worse than the analog [tape] source, largely due to limitations of a 128kbps MP3. (Disclaimer: it's my wife, BTW)
The movie industry figured out a long time ago that the best way to prevent piracy isn't necessarily elaborate copy protection schemes, gimmiky promotions, etc. but to simply price the product at a point where it's simply not worth pirating. This is the reason why VHS copies of movies went from being US$80 per copy to around US$20. The reason the MPAA is afraid of DeCSS isn't because they're afraid of a "new" piracy problem.. they're afraid that the "cost" of pirating a DVD may fall below a price point that they are unwilling (not necessarily unable) to go below. They are trying to keep the price of DVD content artificially high.
If good quality CDs of independant artists were available through MP3.com (or a similar venue) for $8, I doubt small artists would ever be hurt by piracy. The problem is, MP3.com has no mechanism to produce a "high quality" CD. DAM discs, unfortuantely, are nothing more than crummy 128kbps MP3s written to an audio track. Big deal. A 128k MP3 can never equal the quality of a true "CD" digital audio file.
So, it's a cost/quality issue. Offer better quality at an $8 per disc price, and you'll find piracy no longer being an issue.
Heh... that reminds me of the occasional Gun Amnesty programs put on by the local police. Basically, the police will accept illegal firearms from people, no questions asked. You just walk down to the office and clean your hands of it.
And apparently these programs are quite successful. So I would disagree that a similar MP3 program would be unsuccesful. It's not a direct parallel, but what if there *was* a way to pay the respective artists for the MP3s you've downloaded, and be given a certificate claiming full legal rights for the personal use of those MP3s? It's a little more cumbersome than online micropayments, but if it were handled correctly, I can envision a lot of people cleaning their hands of this whole piracy business.
"fat, rich, white guys ..." I take it this is meant to be pejorative (judging from the tone of the article). What is significant about being white? Or fat, or rich, for that matter? Do all fat, rich, white guys have a set of essential, invariant qualities re the music business? Would poor, skinny, Asian/Black/Whatever guys make better record execs?
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
I came across an interesting idea last week at marillion.com. They're pre-selling their next album online to raise the money to record it that would normally be put up by a record label.
For those unfamiliar with them, Marillion is a progressive rock band from the UK. They've been around for a while (early 80's) so they've developed a fairly large fan base and can afford to do this. They still plan to sign a distribution contract so that the album will be available in stores, but by raising the money to do the recording themselves they will be able to own all of the rights to the music.
Seems like a good idea to me. I wonder if we might see more already successful bands going this route if it works. The only unfortunate thing is that it won't work for new bands who need to get their music out there to be heard.
You can order Marillion's new CD from the link above (I've ordered mine). It's a little expensive with the exchange from the UK, but if you order by July 31 you'll get your name in the liner notes. That sold me :)
That said, I agree wholeheartedly that labels spend a lot of time screening in order to find what's most likely to sell. It's a process that's guaranteed to generate mediocrity, really.
Just because YOU think they should make money doing something else (tshirts, touring etc) doesn't change the fact that BDR gets to choose how to distribute their music, not Joe Napster.
That's what freedom is about right? You get to choose how you make money or what to do with your property?
So if a band who's on a big record label ends up having all their songs on napster, it's a form of promotion, but if the same happens to a band on an indie lable, it will hurt their sales? Sounds fishy to me. Although Napster is a bit much, I have bought CDs due to mp3s, mainly indie cds - because, guess what, they're still out there. Kill Rock Stars, for example, has one or more mp3s per artist up. Check out other labels too: The bottom of this page is a great start, includes Chainsaw, K, Villa Villakula. Others (some may be considered "inbetween") are Restless, Righteous Babe Records, Matador, etc., etc.
-- did you get my letter? / did you get it today? yeah, i got a letter / i threw it away - Sleater-Kinney
"The music belongs to the musician"... HA HA HA (insert evil laugther of big record label CEO right here.Otherwise go back to that planet you live on where music might really belong to the musician. Here on earth, you see, we have these creatures called "Media Tycoons". The music belongs to them.And the movies. And TV. They own EVERYTHING. Face it).
Whatever you call it, it is still both immoral and selfish.
The cake is a pie
There is room for those who excel in virtuall any field to make a living from that field, in their own right. In many cases, the rest have to make do with supporting their interests by other means.
How many people do this job and that job to raise money for their studies, or to pay the rent so that they can take in a tennis tournament??
In short, those who love music enough to find other ways to fund it deserve the respect and support that it should (but doesn't) take to turn professional. Those who don't should take their chances, and find another line of work if it doesn't work out.
As to you actor analogy, consider those who have to begin doing years of repertory work, or other small time theatre stuff (Harrison Ford got his break when he was a carpenter, after having done some acting earlier in his life...). To suggest that times will get hard for you, but that everybody else 'gets it easy' is simply whining. If its so much easier in a different line of work then switch to it and raise the capital for your music there. (And don't be so stupid as to have only one possible line of work)
John
John_Chalisque
I thought we had put this to rest.
Unless you have "undefeatable" hardware protection, you can't stop people from copying a media stream.
It took, what, less than two days, for that MS music protection system to be completely defeated? Even if you can't defeat the format, if I can play it, I can record it.
Of course people should be able to set their own price fro their work. That is what a free market is all about. But just because something SHOULD be a certain way, does not mean that you should turn a blind eye to reality.
-Peter
Downloading free software will not condemn me to any punishment from the law, nor a higher power. At least, there is very little chance of either.
In all borderline actions I commit, I attempt to weigh the overall damage vs. the overall good. I try to be as unselfish as I can.
Why?
I have no idea... It's just the way I'm wired. It's better for the species, anyway.
So, there is at least a small minority of us who actually follow what we feel to be ethical out of honest concern for the well-being of our fellow man. It is my hope that one day this will not be the case. Hence, the post that you responded to.
Pardon my relative lack of knowledge, but is " operant conditioning with positive punishment."
Thanks,
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
I think it's horribly hypocritical of people to complain about how unfair and unusual it is for music to be restricted and controlled, while gleefully taking the results of this control - lots of music in a variety of genres - completely for granted.
Hmm... Funny thing, you don't make any argument to support this premise that the variety of music comes from the oppressive domination of the distributors.
I happen to think that the variety is due to improvements in technology: mostly being able to communicate and travel inexpensively over long distances and increased leisure time due to automated production.
Most musicians can't afford to do this professionally if we don't provide them with a mechanism to make money at it.
Circular logic: they aren't professional if they aren't in it for the money, they won't be in it for the money if there isn't money to be had.
Most music that is produced does not make a net profit. For every song that does become popular and makes a fortune, there are a hundred or a thousand that are ignored.
It isn't because it's "better music" either; do you really think Kenny G, Brittney Spears, and the Backstreet Boys make better music than the typical garage band? How about Milli Vanilli? It's all about promotion and image, about training a captive audience to like something, then telling them to pay for it.
The truth is that most musicians don't have an adequate mechanism to make money. They have a carrot held out of reach by a network of distributors and promoters.
I think a busking model is most appropriate. It removes the necessity of the brainwashing step; people will find what they like and share it with their friends. If it's made easy enough (and between paypal and e-gold it certainly can be easy) and it is explained that this is their primary source of revenue, people will pay, just as they tip when it's expected of them.
shit, I'd totally be willing to pay say a nickel a track for my 20+ gig collection, if two conditions could be met: the screwed up tracks I have, poor recording, etc. can be fixed, I can download new clean tracks to replace them, and if I can also get ahold of tracks that are "missing" (albums where some idiot only ripped the songs that got airtime, not the others), or also get ahold of albums that are currently out of print, or just not stocked at most record stores.
I am not willing to pay what the record companies would otherwise ask for - about $3-$5 per track. Without physical media? without liner notes etc.? without "collectability" features that a material CD would have?
Something is worth what somebody is willing to pay for it. I'm not willing to pay what they're asking. I don't see why they have a problem with increasing their sales 100-fold, and reducing their prices similarly, While almost eliminating costs of manufacture and distribution entirely? What is the big deal? Why are they so stupid?
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yes, music is a form of information, which can be replicated at almost no cost. The consumer gets his music and has to pay nothing (but the electrical bill), the music companies get nada, and everyone's happy, right?
Well, except perhaps for the musician. Who gets just as much nothing as the music company does. And, as everyone knows, TANSTAAFL. ("There ain't no such thing as a free lunch," for those who don't know their Heinlein.) Which means this musician has to get a job doing something that pays. Which means he can only make music in his spare time. And sure, there are people out there who could hold down a 40- (50-, 60-) hour-a-week job and come home with enough energy to create an amazing album...But I doubt there are many. And anyone who did manage to put out good music would be slowed to Pink Floyd's release schedule ("hey, remember us? we used to put out albums in the 70's. You weren't born yet? Oh...Well....Buy our new album anyway! Please?")
When you factor in the fact that all of the producers and sound engineers out there would also have to find "real" jobs, you start to breed an environment where you can't count on all of your favorite groups releasing new music every year...Or even on *one* of your favorite groups producing new music every year. Eventually it would come to the point where it wouldn't matter whether the music was free or not, because there wouldn't be any new music for you to buy.
So you're perfectly right in that, if I download U2's upcoming album instead of buying it, I won't be removing any *thing* from their possession. I will, however, be limiting their ability to create any music for me to enjoy in the future. Thus depriving *myself*, as well as all other U2 fans in the world. Soooo, I choose to buy the album. The day it comes out. Having already listened several (hundred) times to the pirated copy of it that I downloaded in advance of its release.
You can go ahead and reproduce anything you want. Just don't be surprised when you run out of source material to reproduce, since people couldn't afford to produce (without the "re", mind you) any more original stuff.
Thank you, and have a nice day...
Argh! "Irregardless", if you insist on using that word, is a double negative ("ir-", which is a modified form of "in-", + "-less")--logically, it should mean "not without regard" or "regarding". Don't use "irregardless" when you mean "regardless"!
I know I'm being a complete pedant here, but this word always annoys me. Thank you.
---
Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
Take a break, walk away from your computer. Hatred is unhealthy. Show wisdom by not engaging in it.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
This guy is pretty clever. What better way to get exposure to the hardcore internet users than to get himself mentioned on slashdot... and he didn't even have to run around on gas powered shoes or anything.
-- Point? None! Cob.
I believe most of you misunderstand micropayments. The recording industry doesn't want you to pay once. They want you to eventually pay for each time you listen to a song. That's what the industry is heading for. Not very many of us would have any problems with 1$ per song but when it's .05 cents per each time you listen to said song it can add up very quickly.
Believe me the only thing that has prevented something of this nature in the past was and is techonology.
Once they have the ability to monitor how many times you play the song expect a click wrap license and your always on net connection to report to a auditing site the playing of the artists song and a charge added to your monthly bill from the Record lables/RIAA.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
I disagree with the notion that free-exchange technologies themselves screw the artist. It's like a gun -- it's a blunt technology that vastly amplifies the behavior of the user. Some people want to screw the fat music management companies. Some people find joy in ripping off the artist. I WANT to pay the artist. It's that pesky ethics thing again.
On the surface, what it missing is some form of micropayment that isn't yet technically feasible. Perhaps an EFT routing number stored in the MP3 tag information along with the artist name and song title, so that if I like the tune, I can send a buck directly to that artist's account. Maybe some other nifty low-overhead method.
But here's the catch -- it has to be voluntary. The reality that the music industry is unwilling to face is that the genie is out of the bottle. MP3 is a high-enough quality format for most listeners, so there's very little incentive for the listener to switch to an encrypted or otherwise limited format. SDMI is stillborn, and other copyright-control methods haven't even pierced the consumer sphere of awareness. Any near-future encryption and control technology will be quickly decoded and rendered irrelevant.
What will save the indie artist is a culture of contribution and support. A culture of control and enforcement doesn't just play into the existing music industry's hands, it IS them, it creates a NEED for them. On the other hand, a culture of support takes away the thrill of 'screwing the man' from music piracy, and promotes indie artists by sending the message "If you want to hear more of this, send a buck for this song to 325077763:765364:4." You have to focus on the culture surrounding the business before the business model will change, and have people WANT to pay.
I think not...(*poof*)
I like what he said about how Napster people always defend themselves by saying they are ripping off the big companies. I also liked the entire article in general because of the perspective it brings to the whole "Napster is good because it helps small bands get their music out!" lets hear it for BDR!
-Sarkdas (its not the size of the psycho that matters but just how crazy they really are!)
Its rather interesting to see the record label execs decrying the "rampant piracy" that goes on in the music business, when, in fact, its very clear the many of them are participating in the bootlegging process.
I work in a privately owned (read: not a chain like Sam Goodies) record store, and until a couple weeks ago, we sold (somewhat furtively) underground (bootleg) CD's... The store is right across the river from New York City (more parentheses) and thus, the market leans heavily to such genre's as rap, r&b, hip-hop, reggae and all the various types of dance music (trance, freestyle, garage, techno, etc). So we _used_ to sell these quality made underground cd's of all these various types.
Its interesting to note how things appear on the bootlegs, most of which are made in Italy (the bootleg capital of the world), have tracks on them, that aren't currently available in ANY format ANYwhere. One of the most astounding cases I can remember was just last year. It was early May and a CD called KTU Radio volume 3 was out (WKTU is a NY/NJ dance station).
I noticed this one track, of which there was no airplay on the radio, no single released, nothing even on vinyl for DJ's to get. A couple months later in July, the word started to get out about this breakout artist who had a hot single out that everybody wanted. The song track was entitled "Genie in a Bottle" and 99% of us now know that Christina Aguilera is the singer.
So... what was this hot single doing on a bootleg from Italy months before it was released in anyway shape or form ANYWHERE? Good question. Perhaps we should be asking the record label execs how a song from an artist who hadn't released anything commercialy fell into the hands of bootleggers? This wasn't a recording off of the radio mind you, this was of the same quality that you would get when you bought the regular CD.
Once again, I pose the question, who had access to this song? Or the countless others that are available from bootlegs even though they aren't available commercialy?
One other thing to think about. These underground cd's, while they encompass all types of genres (mainly hip-hop, reggae and dance though), all come from the same supplier. How does one bootlegging company know ALL of these genre's so well as to know what to put out right away?
Is this situation that bad? How much does an artist get vs. the record company?
Again, there is a minor error in this parallel. Each sweatshop worker is not producing a unique good with their name on it whose sales reflect their individual work. Also, I don't know about the relative pay difference between what the record company makes vs. the artist, in comparison to the sweatshop analogy.
Again, if your quest is really to kill the record companies, you should try to have the decency to get money to the artist somehow. If you download Metallica songs, and listen to them with frequency, then to me, you are morally obligated to go to paylars.com and send some money his way.
I'm all for Napster and the like, because of the fact that they CAN make record companies either more responsible or obsolete entirely. I just feel that people misuse them, and they are not going towards helping artists and helping society.
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
In this protocol, he sets up an escrow account where people pay for the next recording. When that account reaches a pre-defined amount, he releases the recording. All the released recordings act as advertising for the next one.
Music appreciation is almost purely cultural. People find the music of other cultures weird and unpleasant unless they make a conscious effort to cultivate a taste for it. Parents hate what their children listen to.
It's hard to like unknown bands when their recordings are poorly mixed with cheap equipment, and the most consistent quality of the music you've liked in the past is high production values. I'm not saying you should, but perhaps this explains your preference, rather than the actual bands you like (in other words, perhaps if the obscure bands you don't like had access to the same studios as the bands you do like, you'd like them as well).
There is no question that there are some things that only appear in expensively produced music, and represent significantly different content. For example, the typical garage band can't get an orchestral backup, whether it improves their music or not.
Personally, I like novelty, extremes of complexity and simplicity, and unusual themes. I like them because this is what I decided I should like when I was a teenager. I no longer care about what I should should like (aside from a conscious effort to learn and understand what appeal different entertainments have), but the early self-training based on superficial judgements has remained.
Others decide they should like music that is difficult to produce, or that has some deeper message, or what other people they admire like. Most simply learn to like what they hear most often.
There is no arguing about tastes, but you should understand where yours come from. Would you accept being manipulated by distributors to like their music? Would you resist it if you recognize it? Would that change your tastes in music?
"Is this situation that bad? How much does an artist get vs. the record company?"
4 /love/index.html"?Salon article?/a?. Artists are little more than indentured servants who don't even get to own the products they create. Seems awful close to the sweatshop analogy.
Yes it is. Read Courtney Love's ?a href="http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/1
"Each sweatshop worker is not producing a unique good with their name on it whose sales reflect their individual work."
Which is basically the opinion of record labels of artists' work. It's "contract" work. Like migrant strawberry pickers.
"Also, I don't know about the relative pay difference between what the record company makes vs. the artist, in comparison to the sweatshop analogy."
Well, most artists have trouble breaking even. Sure in this country our average quality of life is so high that just breaking even or being broke is totally incomparable to any person in a third-world country, but still MOST are not raking it in.
"Again, if your quest is really to kill the record companies, you should try to have the decency to get money to the artist somehow. If you download Metallica songs, and listen to them with frequency, then to me, you are morally obligated to go to paylars.com and send some money his way."
I agree with you 100%. We SHOULD get the money to the artists some how. But right now the record companies are the big fat middle men we have to go through. Why? Let's buck the status quo and show them that artists and fans don't NEED the middle men. Hell, if I could buy CDs or music *directly* from the artist, do you really think I'd pay more to a record company instead?
"I'm all for Napster and the like, because of the fact that they CAN make record companies either more responsible or obsolete entirely. I just feel that people misuse them, and they are not going towards helping artists and helping society."
Yes, I have a whole separate rant about Napster. Everybody is bitching bullshit about how Metallica are some "corporate whores" or something. Utter bullshit. Metallica's whole point is that Napster should be talking to THEM. THEM. The artists. NOT the record companies. Napster should have approached *them* and asked if they wanted to do some deal or something. This needs to be done to *start* the process of direct artist-to-fan distribution. What Napster did though is go over to the record companies and say "Hey, those indentured servants of yours make some good music. Let's get richer mutually exploiting them in opening a new market all for ourselves." Napster should be talking to the artists not the record companies.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Ok, CmdrTaco, this is just stupid. If I have my setting set to Plain Old Text and include some HTML, Preview renders the HTML. That makes me think "Preview looks correct. I shall post!". And then when I post my link gets mangled. Conclusion: Preview should be aware of what mode I'm attempting to post in and show the ACTUAL result of what will happen when I hit submit.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
It's not that they don't have access to mail. It's that mail quickly gets expensive when you're sending lots of packages. Note that an indie band selling directly to fans must mail a separate package per fan. They cannot take advantage of bulk delivery rates. On the other hand, a major label can send a whole bunch of CDs in one shipment to record stores for very little money. There's a little markup of the price due to the record store middleman, but the labels don't care about that.
---
Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
No, copy protection is not the only way. There are others. Divine intervention, for instance. Both have some drawbacks though. The latter won't happen; the former won't work.
Yeah...Slashcode. No joke. Think about it: what is moderation but a form of collaborative filtering of comments? With a little hacking, it shouldn't be too hard to turn Slash into a collaborative filtering system for MP3s on a website.
We all know how broken moderation is, and how it can be abused. But it's still remarkably effective at weeding out the garbage.
---
Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
know any OSS collaborative filtering solutions, or maybe some books on collaborative filtering?
The shareholder is always right.
the Baptist Death Ray pages on Listensmart.com, Mp3.com, MusicBuilder.com, Riffage.com, and Garageband.com
These are the new record labels, and they are ripping off artists just like the old record labels. They want musicians to post songs to their sites, and keep ALL the income the generated. It's just a matter of time before they start buying physical record labels. Oh, wait. AOL already did that.
They all offer to sell musicians CD's, but no one is buying them. Plus, the musicians have to create pages at all the sites. Upload their songs over and over again. Re-type all their bios, etc. What a waste of time, not to mention doing self-promotion on all the sites, keeping track of all the message boards, multiple mailing lists, etc.
The best way for the musicians is the keep their mp3's on their own site where they can control the content and look and feel of the pages, keep track of downloads, and run one mailing list. Then have the new record labels link no them - and NOT deep link directly to the mp3 files. The band can then set up a system for micro payments if people like the music they download, and put banner ads on all the pages.
- daniel
- daniel
Turn off your computer and go outside
(Second attempt, forgot to have cookies active)
This is a reprint of an article I wrote for MP3.com over a year ago, on why the SMDI (the record company's proposals for copy protection on computer music files) is massively insecure and can not meet its requirements. The same observations apply verbatum to the intertrust modifications to WinAmp.
April 27, 1999
The music industry appears to want a secure music transmission and storage scheme that performs the impossible: acts a mechanism for preventing or at least tracking the copying of audio data which is played on a user's personal computer. At most, any mechanism they provide will fail once a determined individual or group manages to circumvent the mechanisms used. Most of the possible mechanisms are relatively easy to circumvent.
I hope that this and other critiques of SDMI and similar initiatives will provoke the music industry into more productive directions that are more consumer-friendly and better thought through with respect to economic issues, rather than misusing technology in a vain attempt to solve intractable problems by the creation of baroque copy-protection mechanisms.
Such mechanisms will be bypassed. Even hardware copy-protection mechanisms (like those on the PlayStation) are routinely bypassed. The more such mechanisms inconvenience the user, with restrictions such as location codes or limited playings, the more likely they will be disabled by a large number of individuals.
The probable failure of SDMI to achieve it goals relates to one of the primary design requirements of the system: it must run on user's computers, and the user, not the SDMI player, has control of the hardware and operating system. This makes it nearly trivial for the various mechanisms to be bypassed and allows the simple distribution of bypass programs through the internet. Once one individual creates and publishes a crack, the djinn is out of the bottle and SDMI has failed to accomplish it's goal.
Any SDMI software player must interface with the user's sound card through the operating system. The operating system needs to communicate with the hardware itself through a device driver, a piece of code provided by the hardware vendor. The interface for creating device drivers on any particular operating system is well-documented and published in order to allow hardware manufacturers to develop new hardware that will work with the existing operating systems.
All that needs to be written to bypass all encryption, play limits, and similar mechanisms on a software player is a simple dummy device driver that takes the sound information provided by the program and records it to a file instead of playing it. Such a dummy driver can save the audio stream without loss of fidelity, since it receives the same information that would otherwise be sent to the sound card. Furthermore, since to a program this appears like any other sound device, there is no possible means for detecting this subterfuge without bypassing the operating system.
There is no practical way for an SDMI player to counter such an attack. It would be ridiculous to expect the SDMI player to write to the hardware directly, since that would require the player to include its own device drivers for all conceivable sound cards. Additionally, reasonably designed operating systems like Windows NT or all unix flavors do not allow a program to directly access hardware devices in order to prevent a user's program from performing illegal or inappropriate operations. Also, since the device driver appears to the operating system just like any other soundcard, there is no means for the SDMI player to determine whether it is writing to a real or fake device.
The only option preventing this problem is to have the SDMI player exist as a separate, physical device that takes the encrypted music stream and plays it out directly. Yet how many individuals will accept a separate music output on their computer when most computer speakers only have a single input? How many would be willing to switch cables when they want to stop listening to music and start playing games, or buy "SDMI compatible" soundcards that may be inferior to the one they already own?
Thus, the only goal remaining is the tracking and identifying the source of illegally copied music. This can be done by "digital watermarking," the selective insertion of noise that--although indistinguishable to a listener-- contains embeded data such as the proper owner of a song copyright. If each authorized download includes a different watermark, it would be possible to track the source of illegally copied material.
The problem with watermarks is that they are a security through obscurity scheme. Since they only exist in the noise and, by necessity, have no effect on the audio quality, they can be removed or changed without affecting the quality of the soundfile once the watermark format is understood. As soon as the music industry attempts to seriously track pirates through such a system, the pirates will quickly learn how to circumvent the watermarking. Once a single individual reverse engineers the watermark format, it becomes useless to halt organized pirates. Only the small, casual copiers would be consistently traceable by watermarking, and actually going after them through legal means would be impractical, akin to smashing ants with a sledgehammer.
My belief is that the SDMI initiative is incapable of meeting its goals through technical means. The recording industry's effort would be better spent trying to understand the economics of electronic distribution and focusing on how to create a new and different revenue stream out of electronic distribution, instead of trying to impose technical solutions to an intractable problem.
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
Test your net with Netalyzr
Music | Posted by timothy on Friday July 07, @11:00AM
Every once in a while, it's good to have someone slap you with a reminder [...]
Yeah! Every once in a while is good! Like last week. And the week before that. And a few days before that And the day before. And the same day.
8 articles in June alone regarding MP3's, 17 about Napster in the last two months and 7 YRO articles in the first 7 days of July. Everyone is turning the MP3 topic into their own personal martyr for whatever cause they think is worthy. It's not a revolution of freedom of speech, it's not a culture revolution of the record label owners vs. the bourgeoisie everyman artist, it's not even about the UCITA and whether or not my license to my music gives me various rights, or doesn't. Let's not forget what MP3's are about: portable music. Nothing more, nothing less.
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Musicians, like programmers, work long and hard to get good enough to produce a product that somebody actually wants. Like programmers, they have a choice on what that person needs to do to use that product.
When a programmer hacks out some useful code s/he needs to decide if prospective user get to pay for the privilege. If they want, they can release the code under the GPL, Perl Artistic License, or some other OSS license that let's me use the code for free. In music terms, I not only get a free MP3 or CD (the working program), but I also get the sheet music (the source).
Some programmers want to have more control over their program so they may only release binaries but give them away for free (as in beer). Musically speaking, I still get the free MP3 or CD but if I want to play it myself, I need to "reverse engineer" the music.
Other programmers my decide that I have the privilege of paying them for their program. Musically it means that I have to go out and buy the CD or MP3.
In all three cases, I am bound by the license agreement that the software was released under. As a programmer, I expect anyone using my code to be bound by whatever license I put on my code. Ethically, I honor a software license because I expect everyone else to honor mine. The same should be true of anything that is released, from software to books to music.
After all, isn't a recording simply precomplied sheet music?
PerlStalker
is that if you fill them out and load them up to a site like MP3.com or Listensmart.com, a lot of those sites just strip them out. ID tags are an "unsupported" feature on a lot of those sites (at least, they were at one time, I'm not sure if that's been fixed yet) so most artists generally don't bother with them at all.- -------
+----------------------------------------------
+------------------------------------------------
+ The urge to destroy is a creative urge
The problem is that we're paying for licensing the IP (music), not the artist's work (that's work as in labor).
The recording musician, right now, works for free -- they just expect to recoup their losses later on licensing[1].
Musicians are going to have to (just as a matter of economic necessity) start moving towards models like the Street Performer Protocol, and working on comission for income[2].
---
[1] Live performances are another source of income, but see BDR's observations, and note well that not all recording musicians can really perform. (e.g. good segments of electronica)
[2] Visual artists tend to do this already; it's not really that music is unsuited to this approach, it's just that musicians are historically coming from a performance-based model, whereas visual artists (generally) aren't.
DNA just wants to be free...
If you like my music and pay me for it, I can do more of it. If nobody pays me, fine; I'll do something else. If you like it and don't pay me, who loses?
--
syrynx
syrynx
Just because they don't call it a beta doesn't mean it isn't one.
I'm putting the URL of my Web site in the file names of the MP3s of my music. Anyone who cares to do so can go to the Web site and find out how to send me a voluntary payment.
--
syrynx
syrynx
Just because they don't call it a beta doesn't mean it isn't one.
That's why I've chosen to let people determine for themselves how much, if anything at all, my music is worth to them.
--
syrynx
syrynx
Just because they don't call it a beta doesn't mean it isn't one.
You beat me to it. ;-) :-)
What we have tried to do is hook up with other unsigned bands who have a good local foothold, and link-share. We push them on our friends and fans and they do the same for us (we think!). It seems to work...next step would be for us to travel to and play in each others' towns. The little guys really need to stick together and help a brother out, you know?
Back to your point - We've tried finding odd bands on Napster and there really aren't many there, because Napster is made up of users, and the majority of users are drooling over Britney and NSync right now. (Hork!) You can still get good radio from Shoutcast, though. There are a bunch of good Indian and Asian stations.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
I'm fairly optimistic, because, when I was able to play my music in public, people responded to it warmly and were reasonably generous in tipping. So I put some of my music on a Web site, with links to the aforementioned services. I'll know in a year whether it'll be worth keeping the site up.
--
syrynx
syrynx
Just because they don't call it a beta doesn't mean it isn't one.
We'll all just keep using the brand new version of Winamp with the goold old trusty in_holiestnitrane.dll plugin.
Anybody remember when they replaced Nitrane with a sucky Fraunhoffer (sp?) decoder, because of a lawsuit or something? Install old Winamp, copy plugin to temp, install new Winamp, replace plugin, done.
And *that* is the power of Winamp. Only problem is, all the people that get Winamp free with AOL 6/Netscape won't know about the trick, will think Winamp is a SecureMP3/whatever player instead of a normal MP3 player, and AOL will (try to) win with numbers.
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
The sound quality, to human ears, of a well-encoded 256-320kbit/s is exactly the same as a CD. Go to Ars Technica's archives for a statistical comparison of unencoded and encoded waveforms - at higher bitrates, the only part of the waveform that is affected by the encoding process is well beyond the range of human hearing.
I'm not saying MP3s are good or bad from a philosophical standpoint, but I hate it when people use false arguments.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
First off a disclaimer, I don't use Napster, but I do use Gnutella (or more accurately, Gnut, Free software implementing the Gnutella protocol) which is essentially the same thing as far as your arguments go. I agree that neither system is sufficient to help the artists much, but I don't see them as competing against the artist either.
In the past six months, I've spent at least $50 on CD purchases that I never would have made if it weren't for hearing MP3's from those albums. All of these purchases were from independant labels or direct sales from the band's website. Yes, there are some people who will spend less on music due to systems like Napster and Gnutella, but my guess from observation is that such losses will be far outweighed by people like me who will spend more. In his Napster defence, Boles refers to studies that show roughly the same thing, on a large scale, as I'm saying here.
The big failing with Napster and Gnutella is that, unless you are lucky, they will only feed you with music that you already know about. They offer minimal additional exposure to the artist. I want a system that will help me to find new artists that I like; and I'm sure struggling artists want more people who would like them to discover them.
Even if only 5% of these new fans buy a CD, say Baptist Death Ray gets discovered by 200,000 new people, you'll get the 10,000 CD sales you're looking for to put food on the table and strings in the guitar. You'd also find it easier to sell your next album, and be that much closer to being able to do a small tour. Exposure is the key, and with some modifications, a descendant of Napster or Gnutella could give you the exposure you need.
Basically, what I'm saying is the revolution isn't dying just as it was about to get started, it's just having some growing pains. We need different tools than the ones we've got, and I'm confident that we will get them.
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Open mind, insert foot.
One of the scariest parts of the article gives a terrible feeling of Super Corporate Power that is so prevalent today. We have sat back and let these large corporations dominate us and there has been little to do in the way of fighting.
:-). (Of course, there is no one pirating dishwashers either)
America, in its beginning, was a fight against this type of domination, except that the domination was governmental instead of commercial. In our modern times of fast pace economics and telecommunication we have lots of toys hung in front of us to play with, which each costs us just a little bit of money, and we have lots of little bits of money to spend on toys to keep us satisfied for short periods of time.
Now, I am not a follower of conspiracy theories, because a conspiracy requires active colaboration of the conspirators, but the rich and powerful in the western world, which are the owners of the mega-corporations, are collectively dangling thousands of toys in front of us so that we can give them some small bits of our money. That is there goal. This naturally leads them to do anything they can to protect their ability to dangle these toys in front of our faces and keep them tempting.
The record industry is just one of many markets where this is the case. Another perfect example is... any other developed markey. That is exactly what a developed market is. A quick example, The home appliance industry, where there are only a handful of companies in the world, but they make a zillion brands to give the consumers the feeling of choice and individuality.
Now, we don't sit at our tele-personality stations complaining about the lack of power and choice in the home appliance industry. The appliance engineers might like it if there were more small appliance manufacturers out there for them to get a job with
Anyway, I think the main point of the article is not just whether or not Gnapster is good or bad, or even whether or not there is an important court case there. Its the power of the corporation that is at stake here.
Do we (the mostly fat, mostly dumb, mostly happy) westerners REALLY want to upset the large corporations. Isn't this economic model the one that has unemployment so low right now. Aren't these large corporations what western economic society is based on.
I say, why the hell not. Maybe some kids will go without food in France or America, but they do anyway, so lets give it a shot. Lets say no to the Big Guys if we can and take it back to the basics. Lets not let large corporation develop. Lets make a new law that prohibits a couple of things.
1. Corporations cannot own other corporations that have different names. If AOL buys Netscape then AOL MUST be printed on the box. That way we know that the Kraft Marlboro cigarettes are made by the same people that claim to make cheese that is healthy. This would allow us to at least grasp the size of these companies without hiring a private detective to research them and therefore help us decide if we like helping the creation of this large corporation.
2. There must be at least 5 companies in any one industry that are nationally owned. If there have never been more than 5 in an emerging industry or market, then the companies in that market are forced to allow competition like AT&T was. This would prevent companies from buying out the competition at an earlier stage of the game.
3. Companies that are too broad must be split up into seperate companies or not allowed to merge. Time Warner-AOL-Netscape. Too broad, let companies stay in there industry.
4. A company cannot sell off more than 60% (or whatever) of their stock. There must be someone or quantity of stock that is not splitable so that a person who owns say 10% of a startup, upon going public must keep at least 4% and at a later date cannot sell any piece of that, it is unbreakable. It would be a 6% share that must be sold as a unit. This would "help" keep the company human.
5. Etc.- To be filled in by someone much more qualified than myself.
This is what some portions of the Internet are trying to fight. When you see these new Internet companies act like this, that is the reason. They want to be the only ones to dangle that toy in front of your face so that you have to give them your money. They will do anything it takes to keep that right. In a person we would call that mentality perverse or any number of things, but at work they just say its business.
I say stand up and boycott. Boycott all of the ones that you can. Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Ford, Microsoft, Kraft, Pryca, Nokia, Sony.
cp -R
I thought most people had reached that conclusion about AOHell several years ago.
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/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
A job is simply a common way of diverting cashflow to your person. Music is a beauitful and alternative way of doing this. For people to actually be able to dedicate their lives to making art is a very cool thing. However, in order to do so, either:
1. The artist must be subsidized (i.e. patronage, government programs).
2. The artist must sell his art.
The very wealthy and governments used to do the first. Artists still get some money from the government, but I don't think you can start a hip-hop group and try to get a check from the govrenment. This is because it is EXPECTED for them to sell their art. Changing this social paradigm would take a lot of time, and would likely not occur under a capitalistic system.
The second goes on now. Someone mentioned earlier a sort of Music Industry Darwinism. I agree. Subjectively bad artists do not make money, and therefore cease making art. However, your vote for who gets to stay in the industry is money. If you steal their music, they will not have money, and you are effectively contributing to said artists demise.
I presume most people download artists they like, as the strategy of downloading artists you dislike to harm their art production will not work :) So remember, when you steal their music, you are ever so subtly discouraging them from continuing.
And to those who say "They shouldn't need money, they're artists, they should give away their art." They can no more not need money, than they can choose not to eat. Of course they can get a job, but then they wouldn't be artists, and you wouldn't be downloading their MP3s anymore, because they wouldn't be making them anymore.
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
Okay, time for my off-topic rant of the week...
In the Twin Cities, they had a gun "amnesty" program where they were paying people $50 per gun to turn in their handguns to be destroyed. The idea was to have fewer guns "out there" and make our streets safer. All guns were accepted, no questions asked.
The problems become obvious when you think about it:
1. We were using tax dollars to pay people who were basically throwing away usless old non-functional guns.
2. Any criminal could break into a home, steal a gun, and instead of getting $25 from a dishonest pawnshop they could get $50 from the government. Since no serial numbers were checked ("no time" said officials), the local government bacame the biggest stolen weapons fence in state history.
3. The buy-back program was very good news to gun dealers, who could unload any cheap inventory that was not moving for a quick cash injection, could charge more for their used guns now that there were fewer of them in the area, and expect a lot of new sales from people who had their guns stolen from them.
Okay, I'll stop now... except to say this: the people who came up with this idea are pinheads.
(jphillip: I know that the police-run gun amnesty programs you are talking about are not the same thing. Your mention of it just happened to remind me of this whole foolish debacle.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Normally, the "slippery slope" is held up as an example of a flawed argument, unless you can show that there is, indeed, a tendency for people to follow a certain path.
:)
Unfortunately, that tendency does exist.
People, the question is not "is Napster even distributing BDR". The question is, are people who get used to Napster less likely, or more likely, to be willing to pay BDR for their music?
The answer is: Less likely.
1. We are being told that it is an aberration for us to have to pay for music. True enough. It is also an aberration for us to have the quantity of music available to us that we do now; perhaps we should go back to the situation where we cannot, in general, just decide to hear a given piece of music and do so.
2. People who are saturated with big, well-marketed bands will not waste time looking for obscure indie bands.
I think it's horribly hypocritical of people to complain about how unfair and unusual it is for music to be restricted and controlled, while gleefully taking the results of this control - lots of music in a variety of genres - completely for granted.
Most musicians can't afford to do this professionally if we don't provide them with a mechanism to make money at it. Before we yank this mechanism away, let's think about whether or not this matters. It does to me, and I'm still paying for CD's, whether they're $10 one-shot CD's sold to me by a friend whose band finally got a CD cut, or $17.99 overpriced crap.
(This isn't to say I charge money for the crap *I* write, which I give away freely at this point. But I'm not a professional musician, and my music isn't that good, and I'm certainly not about to try to do it full time.)
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
hmmm...You are from a reasonably unknown band
and you complain napster trading is cutting into
your profits.
Couldn't be that you have some problem promoting yourself on the level grid of the net.
Wheres your imagination?Are you out there in IRC
busting ass,chatting it up about yourselves?Have you posted at least a homemade video?Are you trading banners with other bands and sites?Have you put up a way for fans to tip you on your site?
do you stream shout(ice)cast of your music?Do you
do outragious stuff to draw attention to yourselves,Like whining how unfair life is to a
major news site?Have you planned to make your money from live shows,t-shirts,incedental cd-sales and tips?
Hotdamn,I got a point there.When the playingfield is level and I can face the opponent
eye to eye,I better use similar techniques and have similar skills to theirs.The opponent being of course the industry.
Better to understand the universe than to struggle against it.This universe lives on mp3z and is about to make the industry next to extinct.
What are you left with?The very crap you're complaining about,get used to it,sink or swim,
find your groove and go with it.No-one said it was
gonna be easy,convenient or even tolerable.(alot
like before this state of affairs)No one promised you even an ounce of success without payin your dues.Think of George Thorogood who used to do 50 states in 50 days tours,for years!
Thats right everyone,get out there,bust your ass,the cream will rise the curd will fall.Adapt or die.Remember the Alamo!Break a leg.Dont take any wooden nickles.And most importantly in the words of our Bob,who art a heathen,"fuck 'em,if they can't take a joke."
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
/*
Consider an analogy: I like to build stuff out of Lego. Heck, I think I'm pretty good at it, even. Now, is it valid for me to assume that the world owes me a truckfull of money because I can build cool Lego spaceships? NO! If I happen to come up with some creative way of selling my Lego creations (pay-per-view website, physical copies, lessons, etc.), then kudos to me. I should not, however, get upset when I can't find enough people to pay me for me Lego work
*/
But take this view: you build your Lego creation, and decide to put it up for sale, without the assumption that the truckload of cash is on its way to you, but with the hope that someone may see, like, and buy your Lego creation. Say you set the price of your Lego creation at $5. What you would then expect is that anyone who wanted your Lego creation would give you $5. So along comes someone who comes up to your Lego stand, takes your Lego creation, and walks away. What that person just did is take the terms you set forth for the sale and distribution of your creation and change them without you agreeing to the change.
What BaptistDeathRay is getting at is that it shouldn't be the consumers setting the rules for the distribution of the artists' creations, it should be the artists. If BaptistDeathRay wants to get 50 cents a song, and no one is willing to pay that, then two things should be true:
1. he doesn't get any money from song sales because he didn't sell any songs.
2. (the one people don't seem to agree with) no one else has the songs but him because he didn't sell any songs.
It doesn't make sense to me that if the artist puts his work up for sale for 50 cents and you decide that you want that work but you want to pay 0 cents for it that you should pay 0 cents for it. You should either pay 50 cents for it or you should not have it, because that's the way the artist wants it. If you don't like the terms, don't agree to them, but don't expect that you have the right to change them at any time to suit your wants.
"So many ways to skin a cat, and still everyone uses a great big knife."
It's too bad I don't have moderator points right now; I'd moderate this up. I'm very glad you came out and said this; Slashdot really needs to see this particular post to get a handle on what you're talking about. I got the feeling from your article you were mostly slapping Napster for not actually giving anything back to the indie artists, or to anyone period. I think if timothy would have replaced the word "MP3" with "Napster", the synopsis would have been closer to the truth and perhaps saved you some flames/misunderstandings.
Right now, it's very important that artists, real breathing artists come out in support of free formats like MP3 that anyone, including Joe Artist, can control. I understand the RIAA and several Canadian industry groups want to replace mp3 with some form of "secure" format - in short, something Joe Artist still has to pay the label to use, and something he can't control (among many other things once that contract is signed). On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with expecting to sell CDs and make money. I mean, if you're going to work hard to create it, and you want some compensation, be my guest. (This is why I have a hard time believing Metallica's "commodity/art" ranting; you figure an artist would want their art distributed as widely as possible. Takes all kinds, I guess.)
As well, I rip my CDs for my own personal listening pleasure at home; I'm too lazy to swap CDs, and the "shuffle" function on my MP3 player makes for a nice jukebox. I dare the RIAA to take this away from me or anyone else.
Re: MP3.com, yes, there is a lot of crap on there. Perhaps a user-based rating system could be useful in helping create the first online "hit". As it stands, it's the free market in action there; people decide what's crap and what's not, and buy what they think is good. Isn't that the point of the free market in the first place; the consumer deciding who they want to hear (and, by extension, blow their hard-earned cash on), not the company deciding what the consumer gets to hear and purchase?
Eh, enough ramblling...anyway, you're going into the "pro-MP3" column on my a href=MP3 war roster.
Anti-Napster != anti-MP3, pro-RIAA
Cheers, and will be visiting one of your pages soon...
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
And to face facts, i'm pretty lazy. If i find 3 songs by hole (example) on napster, am i going to search napster for every song by hole and download them all, or am i going to pop over to courtney's web site and pay her a fair price if i can (for me its the second option, as I am more sure that release quality stuff is on the bands website... my 2 cents anyway
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Definately. I can't stomach to listen to MP3 unless it's on a cheap tinny pair of speakers. Trying to listen with headphones or good quality stereo makes my stomach churn as I hear all the digital artifacts from the poor encoding process.
MP3's recording at 256kbps or higher, or WMA at 160kbps is tolerable.
I think if the recording industry were to work with the stereo retailers to help train people on how to listen critically, they'd be able to increase their sales of CD and DVD-audio. The problem today is that most people "can't" hear the difference in quality which is just sad.
I have always liked cdnow.com and such for buying music because I could hear samples of the music. It's even worse Realaudio quality, but it still helped to realize that a CD might have many good songs on it, not just a one-hit-wonder.
The problem I see is NOT with MP3s, or artists giving away music for free. I don't have a problem with that... In fact, I do that on various sites.
The problem I have, and that other artists have, is the growing assumption that music must, absolutely be free and that artists have no right to expect to make money from the music they create. The idea that people will own the MP3 and buy the CD to get a better quality version, or whatever, that doesn't bother me. The idea that someone will download an MP3 and not buy the CD because they don't like the music, that doesn't bother me either. But the idea -- that seems to be growing -- that paying for music is somehow wrong and that all an artist should expect is to get paid from live performances, well, that does bother me more than a bit, especially since the market for live performances is going down the tubes, and has been longer than Napster's been around.
It is the prevalence of this attitude among Napster's supporters -- an attitude that Napster has been encouraging on the sly, I might add -- that is yet another nail in the coffin for indie musicians. And I'm not talking about the ones who want to be rock stars, I'm talking about the people who want nothing more than to make a living from the work they do...
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+ The urge to destroy is a creative urge
/*
the point is that because people have been spoon-fed crap, when they fire up napster they're going to look for crap no matter how many MP3s that there are that they haven't heard of
*/
Another reason that Napster as it currently stands is not and ideal promotional tool for indie artists is that you need to know in advance what you're looking for. If you're a Radiohead fan, you can go type "Radiohead" in the search box and come up with more Radiohead tunes than you could ever want. But if you are looking to discover a new indie band, what name do you search for on Napster? Maybe if the indie artist is clever and names his file "My Song by My Band which sounds like Radiohead.mp3", you've got a chance, but by and large, you're out of luck.
At least with things like MP3.com, you can do a "similar artist" search and come back with a list of artists to try out based on artists you know and like.
"So many ways to skin a cat, and still everyone uses a great big knife."
I know it's offtopic, but I wanted to point out something about #3:
Most cities I know of where this has happened (Oakland, CA) have limits on the number of guns you can turn in (3 guns per person). So, gun dealers couldn't dump huge amounts of guns...
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Try a higher bitrate. They rarely use less than 160kbit these days and I defy anyone to hear the difference between original and copy at 160kbit and more, encoded with a GOOD encoder.
I've even started using VBR at normal quality. Bitrate then hovers between 96 and 196 in most music and averages around 128kbit. You can hear a difference from the original at that level, but you save a few megs per file (on some kinds of music).
Rant mode on, feel free to disregard
I'm quite bored with audiophiles telling me "CDs sound cold" and "MP3 sounds lossy". Of course there has to be a downside to reducing data 10 times or more in size, but that doesn't mean you can hear it. I think the problem is that a lot of audiophiles buy really expensive audio equipment, equipment that amplifies all the errors in the music to an unbearable level. Buy a cheaper setup, then you can't hear the losses. After a while you won't hear the difference between your new bad stereo and the old great one, I promise. The ears adapt.
Rant mode off
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
This is a good article, in general (especially in contrast to, say, Lars Ulrich's semi-coherent ranting), but there's a fundamentally invalid assumption being made-- BDR and the big labels all seem to assume they have some absolute right to make money doing what they do.
Consider an analogy: I like to build stuff out of Lego. Heck, I think I'm pretty good at it, even. Now, is it valid for me to assume that the world owes me a truckfull of money because I can build cool Lego spaceships? NO! If I happen to come up with some creative way of selling my Lego creations (pay-per-view website, physical copies, lessons, etc.), then kudos to me. I should not, however, get upset when I can't find enough people to pay me for me Lego work. Nor should I expect the government to pass laws requiring people to subsidize my work. (Personally, I also don't think there should be ANYTHING stopping people from copying my work once I display it publicly, but that's another rant.)
So, in BDR's case, he seems to get upset because not enough people like his music to make it profitable for him to tour or support himself. Bummer, dude. At least you're enjoying your hobby ('cause that's what it is, in this case). It's a free market out there, and what you've got is not what people want. If you want to make money on a large scale, then cater to a wider audience. If you want to be true to yourself, then continue making your own music and keep the day job.
And as far as the big labels go, they are not owed guaranteed rivers of cash flowing in their doors either. Up until a few decades ago, the technology didn't exist to even make their business model feasible. Since the technology (audio reproduction, mass production, mass media, mass marketing) did come into place, the labels have slurped up their billions because they saw or created a market and tapped it (selling mostly crap, IMNSHO). Now, the technology is shifting and pulling the rug out from under the labels and they're bitching. Well, too bad there guys. It's a free market, so you're going to have to come up with something that people want too.
So, the bottom line is that the rules of the game have changed, and it's time to adapt. Darwinism applies to this game, so if you want to be successful (whatever that means!), you're going to have to come up with the fittest strategy.
Until recently music has been a Measurable Commodity. You go to the store buy a physical item, a medium for carrying music/information, which contains music. Recently, though, the digitization of music has made it an Immeasurable Commodity, the medium for carrying music has evolved into electrons traveling over a wire, which cannot be measured.
The ISP industry was almost the same thing. When bandwidth with was limited it was expensive for an ISP to allow for extended periods of time for a customer to use its services. We as a customer paid by the minute for the use of bandwidth. As technology improved the price for bandwidth plummeted and bandwidth moved from a Measurable Commodity to an Immeasurable Commodity. We now pay a flat rate, by the month, for the service of delivering bandwidth.
Music has made the transition from a Measurable Commodity to an Immeasurable Commodity so the the mechanism for payment has to change, like the payment for bandwidth changed. The big music companies of the future are going to provide a service that you pay $10 to $20 a month for and you are allowed to download as much music as you like. But then again this IJMHO.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.