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Napster Clone With Pay Per Download
Judg3 writes " This story over at Wired.Com talks about a new Napster clone with a twist, pay per download. Yep, thats right. MoJoNation offers a "cross between Napster and eBay," says Jim McCoy, the 30-year-old CEO of Autonomous Zone Industries, the makers of Mojo.
They want to create the first file-sharing economy of agents, servers, and search engines in which senders and receivers can agree on prices for each transaction and use micropayments to get paid.
These payments are called (aptly enough) mojo. Their web page doesnt say much, well ok it says nothing. But theres some activity over at SourceForge. Though not a whole lot." Micropayments are definitely a holy grail for the internet: It could affect web pages too: I'd pay a micro-payment to yank banner ads from websites I frequent. And I'd pay a few cents to download a new track. The last question is how micro is micro enough? A half cent per web page? A Quarter per audio track?
That's because you weren't a commercial radio station. Read the post before you reply. Sheesh!
I'd pay a micro-payment to yank banner ads from websites I frequent.
...
I think it's interesting that you say this, as most of us have learned to ignore the top part of a page where the banner habitates.
I think I saw an article somewhere (handy, eh?) that went into the problems with banner ads and how people are learning to ignore them. Smart(er) companies are realising this and forgetting the regular banner ads altogether.
It's kind of funny how these banner ads have taken over our web surfing lives, but with all of the marketing that probably goes into making them, no one realises that people often skip them. The cool ones are the ads that aren't in the typical banner ad shape, sometimes taking up the right column of a news page. Even if the text is sideways, I can't help but look at it.
... my 2 cents
rLowe
----- rL
I believe the Wall Street Journal .Com Web site also makes money.
Just trying to help.
:)
ELITISM: It's always lonely at the top. Uninvited company is rarely welcome.
If you could split up one incoming payment into many outgoing payments, it would then be a good service. However, they still have to do something about the trust problem. With no 3rd party observers, there's no reason to trust them.
What I meant about the musicians being willing to be paid, is that they may take it as evidence that the person who paid was engaging in unauthorized copying. It might be legally dangerous to send them money this way.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Mayeb CmdrTaco will loes hsi jbo ovre thsi mistaek.
Come on, it isn't that hard. Send the track encoded with RC5 (or your favorite block cipher), and only after the recipient has acknowledged receipt of the entire track and paid for it, send the decryption key.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
for "The Plant" by Stephen King (I'm blessed with some smart customers.)
/. readers who email me with an account number enough for :^) The
I won't bore everyone with my rants about trying to contact Courtney Love.
*sigh* -- Even email saying "go away, and leave me alone!" would be nice.
I can even click
Stephen's tip, as long as the ol' e-gold promotional account holds up!
hard thing is to think in grams instead of dollars (where the Casino helps).
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
The break down is like this:
We charge you:
4% per transaction + $0.25
Our cost in terms of Merchant Visa+payment processor:
3.5% per transaction + $0.23
Fairtunes then gets:
0.5% per transaction + $0.02.
With that little bit that we take we use it to pay for servers, computers, lawyers, accountants, banking, stamps, envelopes, cells, faxing, stationary, and labour costs.
We will not make any money on this any time soon!
When we have sufficient volume we will REMOVE ALL SERVICE FEES. If we were sitting on a load of venture capital there would be no services fees but this is not the case. This is a completely independent venture. We are affiliated with no big business.
Sure I would love to accept PayPal but we are Canadian. They do not service Canadians. And it isn't easy for us to open an office in the US. If it was we'd do it.
Be as negative as you want but we are not making money of this. And fact of the matter is, a whole lot more money goes to the artist through us in terms of percentages then when you buy a CD.
One of the co-founders of Fairtunes,
Ho, bandwidth costs money, and if you are demanding uncompressed WAVs, they're going out of buisness, and you are going get old and die waiting for the download to complete.
Right now, CDs are the best way to get uncompressed digital audio, and it's going to stay that way for the next couple years. Perhaps the custom CD stores will come to help here.
Anyway, I'm not sure if you are just trying to up the ante in a trollish way, but I agree with the general point. Compressed audio should be sold at a discount relative to the price of CDs.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Digital cash is data representing and redeeemable a certain amount of money, which is very hard to forge and, once created, can be passed from person to person without contacting the service which creates and manages it. Digital cash can be stolen if you send the data over insecure channels, or store it on an insecure machine as the provider will pay the real money to anyone who presents the digital cash.
Your apparent idea of "digital cash" which doesn't represent a fixed amount of a real-life commodity is absurd. It is to my description above as monopoly money is to bank notes: an amusing toy, possibly mistaken for money by small children, but of no real value.
Internet-available account transfer services (meaning, you contact the service every time you want to send money to someone, and you can contact them to confirm that you've received it) are sufficient, and they are available. E-gold is an example (it is also a peer-to-peer system which allows micropayments and works with any SSL-supporting web browser). There are still security risks, but you only need one secure line, instead of establishing a secure line with every person you want to send money to.
What do you mean by "open source" anyway? Neither of these systems necessarily requires special software on the client side, so there's nothing that needs open-sourcing.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Thanks to Napster et al, music is now free. And it should be. For years, we've paid money, for the most part, for the "medium", i.e. CDs and tapes. Now that the medium is our Internet connection, we pay our ISP for that. The music itself is free. The record industry will have to accept that their industry is disappearing. It won't be the first industry to become obsolete, and won't be the last. Current "big-label" artists will need to accept the fact that they might not be able to make millions of dollars per year anymore--at least unless they go on tour. I'm in favor of supporting artists, at a reasonable level. A reasonable level is NOT millions of dollars per year. There are thousands, if not millions, of artists in the world that would love to make even a meager earning doing what they like to do. And with the music economy that's evolving, they'll be able to. At the same time, artists earning millions of dollars a year will probably end up earning less. That's not piracy, that's the free market in action. I suspect artists will soon make little money off of the music itself, and will make money by going on tours: I.e., working. The age of just recording a few songs and retiring as a millionaire is over. Artists, like the rest of us, will now have to work (play concerts) to earn a living. I don't think that's a bad thing, nor do I think we should feel sorry for anyone. I certainly will not cry if some artist that was earning $5 million a year to lay on the beach now earns only $100k to lay on the beach. Craig Steiner
I bet the RIAA is laughing their collective asses off - what the hell kind of threat is posed by downloading MP3s onto payper?
Maybe if it's the kind of scrolled payper that those player pianos use, but I can't see jogging around my neighborhood wearing a player piano mechanism...
M$: "We're #2!"
If everyone sends me a quarter, you will never see another banner ad again! I promise!
-cibrPLUR
What the parent troll said.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Hardly naivete -- this was precisely my point.
RIAA need no longer grease radiostations, who in turn also collect from advertisers, but can get music in my ears at lower cost to them, so RIAA can vend their services and related IP products. By artbitraging the chain of distribution, the market is helped on both sides. It is true that the poor radio stations will suffer somewhat, for this devalues the amount they can charge for ads, but so what?
Cybergold does this in a slightly different way, yes, but its the same notion -- the net makes it possible to broker our attention, a commidity for which *WE* can now charge, so that relevant product gets into our hands more and more cheaply, and we are compensated for the inconvenience of previewing products in which we have no interest.
No....
YOU'RE STILL STEALING IT....
YOU IDIOT
this line is inserted to get rid of that bloody lameness filter.....
to illustrate with an other example, sometimes companies introduce products that fail to earn a profit, an unpopular CD for example. After lowering the price to stimulate sales, the price they charge does not cover the cost to manufacture (note that I'm using "price" and "cost" accurately, unlike your post). In this case, the investors in the company pay the advertising (and lose money), not the customer. And you are quite right, if they lose money too frequently, there will be no more produced.
To reiterate, "price" is a function of the market at the time of the sale. If it covers costs, there is a profit, if not, there is not. Customers pay for final products and services, not for factors of production.
click my email addy
fox this shit rob..im a lazy drunken bastard and dont know how
,
faeryman
I don't envision the market actually paying for (and abiding by) license-to-use until we have some sort of never-degrading, indestructible (or at least, trivially easy to back up) medium for holding the licensed product.
But we don't have that now. I don't expect the RIAA to give me a new CD when mine gets a skip.
Maybe the micropayment services could compete with one another for your business by offering various guarantees for the replacement of lost media. They could easily recoup the cost of this by selling the list of stuff you bought to some ad people.
Uhm, slightly OT, but uhm, you have to be an idiot to be willing to pay to remove ads from websites when you can visit several places and download software that does this for FREE...
http://www.junkbuster.com/
and
http://www.guidescope.com
Both act as a proxy that allows you to enable or disable ad filtering. Banners, ad boxes, etc, just show up as a little broken image icon on your screen. I use Guidescope, and personally, I think it rocks.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In the future...we hope
That's no reason to use them now. I don't care what they do might possibly do in the future, or what their hopes and dreams are, I care about the service they are providing now, which basically sucks.
Well give youself a pat on the back for being skeptical, but let me ask you this, oh trusting e-gold user. How do you know that e-gold ACTUALLY backs up your deposits with real metal? Have you seen it? Are they audited by a third party?
With e-gold's old system, anyone was permitted to go see it. With their new system, they are audited by a very well-respected 3rd party. Furthermore, you can have them send you a check for the amount in your account, and you'll usually be communicating with the person you're sending the money to, so you immediately know whether or not the money was transferred. They can only screw you once before you realize it (this is the basis of most trust: if they screw you once, you can sick the cops on them, if that doesn't work, they lose all the future profit from your business anyway).
These fairtunes guys, OTOH, are asking you to trust that they'll send your money through, with no way for you to confirm that they sent it, and no 3rd party observers of any kind.
They could cheat you and the musicians over and over again and probably get away with it.
So why should we trust them?
Right... and all I need to do in that case as the patron is track down each artist's home page, and then manually transfer money from my e-gold account to theirs, not to mention I have to have an e-gold account in the first place. Quite a lot of work for micropayments, no? Ditto with PayPal.
If the musicians were interested in doing this, the best source for their music would be their homepage.
A directory of musician's home pages with free music and e-gold payment forms would be fairly easy to set up and more convenient to use than a Napster/Fairtunes combination. It would also be more trustworthy and provide better MP3 downloads. Filling out the transfer forms would be something to do while you download the files (whether the ones you're donating for, or new ones while you donate for ones you've downloaded in the past).
At any rate, paying through e-gold is simpler than the forms you have to fill out at Fairtunes.
This may come as a shock, but musicians' music is being freely distributed as we speak, without their permission!
Some of them are also trying to sue people who are distributing it. They certainly aren't helping the distribution process, by distributing well-made MP3s. I would rather pay people who don't try to hold a legal stick over my head and who help the free distribution process, to encourage others to do the same.
If you want to know where my sympathies lie, read my essay on the economics of giving products away and asking for donations. I think it is important to reserve your donation money for people who ask for it. It is also important for them to disclose how much they are getting in this manner, so others can see that what they are doing is profitable and follow their lead.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Perhaps in the future, but right now they have lots of expensive lawyers, which gets you a lot in this country. Hell, they just about bought out the presidency with Bush and Chechnya (yeah, I know that's not how it's spelt).
Wait, I have to go contact Bubbles and see if she can talk to a few squirrels to get help.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
How come they don't use PayPal? It's already got a pretty big user base, and it works. Micropayments are a real thing now. With their new payment method, they must be hoping to get a share from the payments to fund the project, instead of being free. Which is fine, but inconvenient.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
slightly offtopic, but... as soon as micropayments technology gets widely distributed any service provider with a lot of users but small revenue will be tempted to charge for their service: a search engine could for instance charge $0.05 per search. while this would hardly be noticeable by users in rich countries, it would split the internet community in two or more classes: users from the global south would suddenly be locked out from a lot of internet content. people from europe and the usa keep forgetting that in africa people can't even afford condoms (but make big conferences instead about how to "educate" people to make use of them)
and now for something completely different
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Since I'm not sure a pay-service would compete well with a multitude of free services, I can't really comment on the viability of such a system.
I have a hunch that if it caught on, it would do more to make money for those violating copyright, more than to support actual artists.
As for Rob's comments on micropayments to remove ads, I think that's a step backwards. I, at least, do not want to pay to read cnn.com, slashdot.org, or any of the other web sites. If they wish to place ads, that's fine. My proxy does an excellent jobs of removing them from webpages, and it doesn't cost anything.
If web hits were to cost money, they would quickly accumulate into a ridiculous amount, for anyone that utilizes the web for anything useful.
I can see how people with a vested interest in direct payment for web traffic would support such things, since it would mean a guranteed income of a size greater than ad revenue, for practically every site. Especially given the devaluation of ads by the commodity nature of internet traffic.
For the actual people involved, paying out of the pocket seems less desirable.
A half-cent per web page? You've got to be kidding...mine are worth at least a penny! And that's pretty bad.
Just follow the day, and reach fo
"I'd pay a micro-payment to yank banner ads from websites I frequent."
Ummmm, why would you pay to remove banner ads from webpages when you can use the Junkbuster Proxy or Guidescope (among other methods for removing banner ads) for free (in both senses)?
--
--
The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
While there is a trust issue with Fairtunes (I'm not accusing, but there's no reason to trust strangers who say they'll pass along money honestly when nobody can check whether they did), the point was that there are cheaper ways to transfer money even though this is a non-profit service.
I'm in on the same side, philosophically, as you guys (don't believe me? read this!), I just see it as a poor execution of a good idea.
BTW, I'm also Canadian. That's why I offer to take donations on my site with e-gold but not PayPals.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Now this is an interesting wrinkle on the whole Napster game. I wonder what "the free market" would say a fair price is for a single song on MP3? Especially given that the ISP charges/transmittal costs are cycling towards zero (on the margin anyway).
Just a thought from an errant economist.
ELITISM: It's always lonely at the top. Uninvited company is rarely welcome.
Anything that makes the net exclusive--at all--is bad, bad, bad. I mean, making it so that people in poor countries can't afford to surf the net is just bloody wrong. We may just be talking pennies--or fractions of pennies--per page, but it would still add up, to the point where some people jsut couldn't afford it. Not to mention that if you didn't own a credit card, well, sorry, no internet for you. But mostly, it's just the idea. Paying for the net--ugh. That's the point of the internet--it's free. That's what makes it better than your local newspaper. It's free, and it's FREE. Damn, I hate this idea!
Anyone remember "Mummer's Dance" a few years back? Loreena McKennit and her self-run recording label Quinlan Road had some success promoting herself; 3 million copies of "The Book of Secrets" sold (a bit shy of your 12M mark, but still a lot of CDs), music in a couple soundtracks, etc. From interviews, its clear she's accomplished this for the sake of artistic control, but it was a lot of work over a lot years; the aforementioned album was her sixth...
OTOH, this is still pretty rare, and it does require a lot of determination and business sense on the part of the artist, which is too bad; it would be nice if, when all the dust settles from this, someone figures out a way that artists can focus on their art without getting screwed (by their agents, publishers, or their consumers)...
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
if you think of the artists as residing in a stable co-evolved system with paying fans, and free music fans as the hardy weed species that chokes out the source of the artist's "food" the analogy might be more complete
Actually, popular music has worked on the Streat Preformer Protocol for most of human existance. Now those musicians didn't make much money, but almost none else made much money either, so that's not a valid comparison.
Formal art music also used the SPP. It was just the few rich people and the church which were donating lots of money instead of lots of poor people donating a little bit of money.
Anywho, there is plenty of historical evidence for the streat preformer protocol. The only remaining qustion is will the anonyimity of the internet kill the "tipping culture." The internet is still too young to really predict the effects of this anonymousness, but the body of music fans which will not contribute to their artists deserves to have it's artists defect to other types of music (or just quit).
BTW> Attaching advertising to mp3s would not be a bad thing if the advertising is attached to the mp3 comment (say an embedded web page) and not to the audio.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I wonder if they are working on a new standard streaming cipher for this kind of exchange? Symmetrical Streaming ciphers are so much faster than RSA for this type of thing that we should have a simple to implement client/server protocal.
We still could use a simple quick RSA transaction at the very end of the download for payment and streaming cipher key exchange.
FWIW, FairTunes is working on a way to aggregate donations (i.e. a shopping cart model) so that e.g. you could mark $.25 for donation every day, but not actually pay until the total was $10 or more.
Besides, the musicians have not said that they are willing to be paid this way.
So these musicians will be throwing away the checks they receive? Not bloody likely, I think...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
If Napster had the RIAA wetting itself, these new developments probably mean they need to buy new underwear.
The whole "Shutting down Napster" thing is something of a Red Herring. Allow me to pose a few questions and you will see why.
1)How much money per album/single do bands get?
2)How much does it cost to record an album?
3)How much do record companies make from an album/single?
4) What, in fact, are record companies for?
Bands get very little money per CD sold. Rolayties rarely run to as much as £1 (US$1.50). Recording is expensive, but not prohibitivly so. The biggest bar-to-entry into the music industry is getting signed by a company. Why? Because record labels do the distribution and the promotion. They also get most of the money. If you don't have a label, you have to be <b>very</b> lucky.
OK, now picture a new scenario. I record my songs for £1000 (US$1500). I sign up to an online distributer. They sell my songs for download for 35p (50c). I get 90% of that, £3.80 (US$5.40
) for a 12-track album. I'm richer, the service is richer, the consumer is richer, the record company loses.
That is, perhaps, the future of music. The RIAA is scared that it will be cut out as the middleman. If a service come about where performers could sell direct to the public, it is bound to be a hit. I'm sure many of the big-boys would swich to it, were it not for their slave-contracts with the record companies.
The system would require separate uploader (artist)and downloader (customer) registration, but I'm sure it's the way forward. The RIAA know this, and want in on it. That is why they will persue their competitors, like Napster. THey want to be the only companies capable of offereing ths service, to keep tying bands into their contracts at less favourable terms.
Will it work? I think so, unfortunatly. The commercialzation of the Inernat may be inevitable, but we don't have to like it.
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined. -- Homer Simpson
Great, let's give the UN one more reason to invade...
My mom is not a Karma whore!
No matter what technical problems stand in the way,
People will always be able to pirate music. The idea of secure digital music is preposterous.
The music industry will still want to make money. If they can't make money by selling music, they'll make it by selling convenience.
I still buy CDs, even though almost everything I listen to is available from Napster and other sources. Why? Because it's much more convenient for me to have a CD than it is for me to download mp3s and move them about. (The sound quality on CDs is also better.)
As long as CDs remain more convenient, the recording industry will continue to make money off them. Very soon, though, mp3s will be as convenient as CDs (for the masses, not just us geeks). When we get to that point, and digital distribution is painless and easy for every schmoe, the industry will make money by making it easy to subscribe to music.
For $10/month, you'll get all the high quality digital music you want. You might be able to get it for free somewhere else, but for ten bucks, might as well do it the legitimate way. Heck, almost everyone pays $30 for cable TV, and they could steal it with no problem. It's just not convenient to be on the wrong side of the law when legitimacy is so cheap.
What is a "fat-pipe connection"?
In network slang, connections are sometimes referred to as "pipes". A "fat-pipe" is one with a high datarate (also sometimes called 'bandwidth') and hence the ability to pass large amounts of data quickly.
But is every musician on the web? How do I send money to someone who isn't on the web? Fairtunes on the other hand can work independently of the web. No web prescence, no problem. We'll still find that artist and get them the money.
If you can use PayPal (i.e. if you're American and the music group is American), you can send money for no transfer cost.
Big IF there. :)
If they were really serious about providing a service, they'd also list other means by which you can pay the artists directly, instead of insisting that all the money go through their own hands
We are currently working on this. We can only do so much at once! :)
Besides, the musicians have not said that they are willing to be paid this way.
We will be sure to post the first time someone actually refuses money. Would you refuse a check that came in the mail? As a musician would you care if your money came via a royalty or via a tip? Money is money is it not?
Matt
co-founder
Fairtunes.com
I don't think all the difference is in the level of pricing -- it's in the measurability of the pricing. If people can easily measure how much they're using, they'll cut back.
People are aware of how long they are on the phone because they get charged by the minute. A minute is something that people can relate to.
People get charged by the kilowatt for running electrical appliances. There's no good way to tell how much each appliance costs per minute.
It is true that if the payments are small enough, people won't cut back. But it also depends on the total usage, etc. If your local phone bill added up to $300/month, even if you were getting charged $0.001 per minute, you'd cut back too.
I think people would pay micropayment of $20-40 a month to access quality sites, but the level of traffic would certainly go down. Advertising is much better because you can surf all you want and you don't have to pay anything.
Ralph
If you would like to send Rob money, monthly, I don't see why you don't just do it now.
The "knee-jerk" reaction here, is that because you find Slashdot valuable enough to pay a subscription fee, it's alien to you that someone might not want to.
A volunteer system of payment is acceptable for something like slashdot (plus its ads, but I too, like the parent, filter them out...I wouldn't click them anyway.), even if it isn't a viable economic model for information.
Quite frankly Slashdot doesn't provide a service that justifies any payment, in my opinion. Its news model is based upon submissions from readers, which end up linking to other sites, like CNN or ZDNET.
Its comment system provides nothing more than usenet or mailing lists, except that it's centralized around links to articles on these other sites, and mindless editorials constructed to increase ad revenue. Plus you get the added advantage of being for all intents and purposes censored by its elitest moderation system.
So while you may find its storage, or the content worth paying for, please don't attempt to force your values on me. Rob took a hobby, and for all intents and purposes, sold its userbase to a company for millions of dollars, and continued employment.
It is great as a pseudo-free service, but it'd be a cold day in hell that I'd have a credit card, very much used it to pay micropayments to read OOG's adventures. I'd be more apt to pay the author than Rob Malda for OOG's tales.
I'd be more apt to pay CNN for *THEIR* articles, than I would Slashdot. (But news should be free, anyway)
1.The money is worth more to us in the hands of an artist than it is in our pockets. We'd much rather have famous artist X proclaim they got a $100, than for us to have an extra $100 with which to go buy some more pizza.
You'd rather that the Backstreet Boys quietly stuff another $10,000 into their pockets (chump change to them; certainly no reason to call a press conference) than pay off your student loans.
Yeah, right.
You might send it along because you had to, as a matter of ethical and legal obligation, but really given the free choice (someone gave you the money without requiring you to send it someone), I don't believe for a second that you'd donate that large amount of money to a band you don't like. Hence, it is not more valuable to you in their wallets than in yours.
I believe you're probably honest, but you haven't even faced the real temptation of handling that money yet. If you start handling the kind of money that makes pop music superstars take notice, you might find it a lot harder to not skim off a few bucks (or a few tens of thousands) for yourself when nobody's looking.
I see no reason for people to trust you unless you have some competent and trusted auditor looking over your shoulder.
2.If we were stealing your money then why would why charge you a service fee?? Wouldn't we get more money without a service fee?
To make it look as if you're breaking even on donations, rather than the totally unbelievable idea that a couple of university kids are paying 5% of what everybody else does.
If you were running a scam, you would certainly do things like that to make it look like you're honest.
Speak up if you have suggestions on the trust issue.
Fine. Require the musicians in the directory to have a PayPal or e-gold account, and just be a directory to these accounts, never touch the money yourself, or send along real paper checks that you can't cash yourself. That would make you 100% trustworthy.
As for paying for your servers, you have two major choices: advertising, and mass-market busking. Either would work, though I think people would appreciate you choosing the second option (and you are in a uniquely appropriate situation of having a customer base that understands the benefits of paying without being forced).
Actually, I'm planning to do something similar to this (kind of a cross between this and freshmeat.net) at buskware.com (nothing there yet, nor at buskware.org, which will be an advocacy/discussion site for buskware and mass-market busking). However, it will be aimed primarily at computer programs, and more specialized sites for other things (like music) will serve the donors' needs better than one centralized solution.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
> A half cent per web page?
When that happens, the current trend toward two paragraphs per page on a Web site will suddenly become a trend toward two words per page.
And then we'll be back to the old-fashioned penny-per-word style of writing. If you think Katz is a windbag now, wait until he starts getting paid by the word.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
How would it be handled with all of those failed/aborted downloads? If it's 10 cents per track, and I get 65% of the track, do I get charged 6.5 cents??
You raise some interesting points, and I thought of one more: What's to stop someone from doing what the cuckoo's egg group is doing: Offer legit named MP3's, yet when you download them, its just the cry of the cuckoo bird. Sure, it would be annoying to download a song you want, and then get some crap - but it would be a lot worse if you were paying for it. Unless some controls were setup to avoid such things, (assuming the micropayment thing caught on really), there would probably be a few people who tried to stiff others out of some cash. Sure, 20 cents to one guy is nothing, but what if he hits 5,000 people with his garbage tracks?
(Shameless plug): ProcessTree - Put your idletime to use.
4% plus 25 cents is way too expensive. It makes microdonations infeasible.
And straight out of the FAQ:
If you use something like e-gold, you end up losing about a total of 4% in the put-money-in, transfer, get-money-out sequence, regardless of the size and number of transactions. [...] All the musician needs is to create a free e-gold account and list it on their home page.
Right... and all I need to do in that case as the patron is track down each artist's home page, and then manually transfer money from my e-gold account to theirs, not to mention I have to have an e-gold account in the first place. Quite a lot of work for micropayments, no? Ditto with PayPal.
If they were really serious about providing a service, they'd also list other means by which you can pay the artists directly, instead of insisting that all the money go through their own hands.
Other means like what? I suppose they could list the address of the artist, but you could find that out yourself, the way they do.
Also, read the FAQ, they aren't audited by any third party, and their reasoning for why they wouldn't just pocket the money is very unconvincing
Well give youself a pat on the back for being skeptical, but let me ask you this, oh trusting e-gold user. How do you know that e-gold ACTUALLY backs up your deposits with real metal? Have you seen it? Are they audited by a third party?
Besides, the musicians have not said that they are willing to be paid this way. I would much rather give money to musicians who give permission for their music to be freely distributed.
This may come as a shock, but musicians' music is being freely distributed as we speak, without their permission! What can it hurt to have the musicians benefit some from the distribution of their music, given that it's happenning? Even better, we can leave the record companies out of it like we've always wanted to. How nice...
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Good point. The inconvenience I'm willing to put up with is inversely proportional to how much I have to pay. I was speculating that the proposed service was going to end up charging a significant sum, if only because the copyright holders will want their cut and have grown used to getting, say, a dollar or more per song (never mind that their 'manufacturing' and distribution costs are much lower in an online model). For that kind of money, my tolerance level would be about nonexistent.
Huh? You're confusing me pinkboy ;) All I'm saying is that it'd be annoying to have some slimy little bugger charging people for access to the music which I put up for free... screw tips, my CDs cost way less than RIAA ones and if you buy one you actually _get_ something. Charging people to listen to something is stupid, better to give them something real for it :)
If you have an account, you know it takes about 5 minutes to create one. People don't have one because they don't have a reason to.
The potential number of people with e-gold accounts is larger than the number with credit cards, especially in the demographic who is likely to get the idea behind giving money away. It's hard for a young person to get a credit card, but easy to get and fund an e-gold account.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
No buddy, you're the ignorant one! Music production IS expensive, and the bands pay for every penny of it! The labels ONLY pickup the manufacturing cost which is what is cheap. A good studio will run 1000 for a day. multiply that by the 30-60 days it can take to record an album, add to that the price of a producer which is usually 1 to 2 percent of all album sales (up until he or she dies....) then another half of a point for the enginer, who instead might be paid a flat fee or say 30g. Add to THAT the cost of mastering prolly 2 or 3 g's. Add to that the 2- 3 thousand dollar cost to get the tape, guitar strings, drum heads, drum sticks, pick and paying guitar tech and such, add a couple more thousand for the team of techs who comes it an sets everything up the first two days. Any studio musicians or whatever are given either a flat fee of several tens of thousands, or a point or 2 depending on who they are and what they did. Add to that, living arrangements, cause bands rarely recording the in the same city they live in.
Sure sound VERY cheap to me, doesn't it to everyone else? It's a waste of money to record a band that ISN'T going to be huge for AT LEAST one album.
Derek Greene
At any rate, paying through e-gold is simpler than the forms you have to fill out at Fairtunes.
We would welcome any comments and suggestions you have on making our website more user friendly and trustworthy.
Also how would we integrate the e-gold system into our site? We'd have to have a person manully verifiying everything. Or write some pretty crazy scripts to interface with their website as it currently stands. There is no nice server to integrate into like I can with visa cards.
they are audited by a very well-respected 3rd party.
Who?
why should we trust them?
Why shouldn't you trust us? If I wanted to steal money I think there would be a lot better ways of defrauding the public than through our looney scheme of depending on YOUR goodwill. If you really think we are scamming everyone, we now prominently display how much has been scammed (i mean sent), on our homepage. As you can see we are now filthy rich and will close our doors tomorrow and skip the country :).
Matt - mgoyer@fairtunes.com
co-founder
Fairtunes.com
A good example of where something like the street performer protocol has been very succesful ( IMO ) is with the member supported radio stations. These radio stations get their funding from a loyal membership base as opposed to advertisers. They cater to the niche markets and typically have a more interesting lineup of shows.
But then, radio stations have advantages small artists don't. The big one is that they have unlimited air time to ask for donations.
In conclusion, I don't think the SPP is bad, but it has limited use and is not a good option unless you have enough exposure to make it work.
I like another poster's suggestion that the RIAA populate the files and they should guarantee the whole song.
Hi.
/. community, I have submitted almost every type of post, ranging from preeminent insights to over-the top and vulgar flames. I've trolled, been trolled, shot from the hip and been torched when speaking-of-that-which-I-do-not-know. But for me at least, there is one situation I find myself in time after time. I suddenly have an insight into some topic that has no relevant story to post in. I post anyway, only to lose karma and have my insights buried as (-1: Off Topic), and few regular readers ever get to see them. I've taken to operating a couple of UIDs in order to burn or preserve my karma as appropriate, but I find it all rather cumbersome. I like this UID, and I dislike logging in different accounts several times a day.
I am a typical Slashdot reader. I have a couple of accounts, and I am posting this from my 'troll' account because it is rather off-topic, and deserves to be modded down. But this is a serious post, and I encourage you to read on:
As a typical member of the
I have been waiting for Slashdot to open up some persistent sids on recurrent topics, and maybe even list them on the front page. I've written this suggestion to Hemos and Taco both, though it probably just got lost in the noise. So, in the spirit of Open Source Everything©, I hereby introduce my own unsanctioned Open Editorial Decision©. See, I realized one day that the trolls had taken to making their own sids, so I thought to myself, 'how can I harness this phenomenon in a positive, productive way?'
And so I've decided to create the following sids:
Open Source Advocacy
Operating Systems
Hardware
Sci-Fi / Anime
Slashdot Culture
Technology and Politics
Trollsville
Now there is a place for us to go to vent our spleen, contribute, rant, spam, joke about, whatever you may want( within the limits of legality, of course) and yet remain entirely on-topic.
I know this is rather pushy of me, but it really is for the best. Now, if you find yourself with a brilliant insight for the Slashdot crowd, and there aren't any relevant stories to post it on, you've a place to go without thrashing your karma.
I have already made FP! introductory posts at each of the sids. C'mon by and tell me what you think. Especially the Slashdot staff- I realize you may be irritated at my forthright feature-creep, but there are so many worse things I could be spending my time on, while this is actually positive, useful, and will hopefully increase banner ad revenues for you. Oh, and I assure you, I hereby state that I hold no claim to the design or ownership of any aspect of this idea. I just wanted a feature, and utilized the 'Open' philosophy to my advantage, with the tools on hand.
Thank you very much,
-=(V)0(V)0cr0(V)3=-
This is more like an explosion of a very hardy species (clever free music downloaders) which drives a weaker species (artists) to extinction.
This is a stupid analogy since the free music downloaders have no music without the artists.
The solution to the whole thing is pretty fucking simple: Artists release music for free and put up web pages which say "give us money if you like our music." the fans can chose to pay or not to pay, but the fans that don't pay will have no influence on which artists produce a lot of music, i.e. if you don't give the artist you like some money so that he/she can quit their day job then you will see very little music out of that artists. It's a pretty fucking simple system, so the fans wil eventually figure out that supporting the artists they like is worth it.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
You live in the UK.
Who?
Central Group of Ontario is their 3rd-party escrow agent. They know exactly how much gold there is, and they can't touch it without their say-so.
Also how would we integrate the e-gold system into our site? We'd have to have a person manully verifiying everything. Or write some pretty crazy scripts to interface with their website as it currently stands. There is no nice server to integrate into like I can with visa cards.
Absolutely wrong. Didn't you even look into this? It's a payment service! Of course it's designed for automatic verification!
If I wanted to steal money I think there would be a lot better ways of defrauding the public than through our looney scheme of depending on YOUR goodwill.
Hmm, people send you money, without expecting you to do anything that they can check. Sounds like an awfully good scam to me!
Anyway, there's no reason that someone has to be using the best of all possible scams to be running a scam. There's a reason the phrase "criminal mastermind" exists - most criminals aren't.
If you really think we are scamming everyone, we now prominently display how much has been scammed (i mean sent), on our homepage.
...and, of course, you'd record it accurately if you were scamming everybody.
Your whole argument comes down to, "You should trust us because we're telling you to trust us." It doesn't fly.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
It kind of reminds me of DNS married to a Napster type client combined with something like DigiCash.
I was just thinking about the possibilities of webhosting in such an environment. The following is all supposition of how such a webserver might behave:
If you think about it, it wouldn't be too hard to write a webserver which utilized this network. For instance, you request an url, the server would simply serve it up as any normal webserver would (all locally). However, if the server reached some capacity threshold, it would begin to broker the requests out via redirects to other servers. Sort of like insurance against being slashdotted :-) The corporate webserver sort of serves as a SOA (Start of authority).
Such a webserver would probably have to send the webserver down to the various hosts (via Java or some other like technology) to ensure that the environments were identical (for example: if the site housed dynamic content served via servlets etc...).
While interesting, the security implications are tremendous. I'd hesitate before having a real e-business site hosted in such a fashion. How would certificates function in such an environment, or would they? Certificates guarantee that you're talking to the right organization, in this model it'd have to have some sort of mechanism to transition the user over to a sister and possibly untrusted site.
One last thing to think about, this sounds kind of like the Aglets with an accounting system.
-- Good judgement comes with experience. -- Experience comes with bad judgement.
i couldn't get to mojonation.net.. but i did try http://www.mojonation.com, it sounds like a better idea anyway.. free quality entertainment
Thanks. It's rumored that if /. readers ask the right guy, they'll get a tiny smidge ;^)
of the filthy yellow metal for NOTHING.
In fact (careful, self, there is math ahead here) I'm told that accepting e-gold
can be cheaper than plastic for MACROpayments -- even if you don't do the
smart thing and sell it in direct competition with OmniPay, the major
wholesaler of e-metal.
I do not have a bank account because I don't need one, if I want cash checks
I sell e-metal & buy one or the other. I prefer using it over my wireless-web phone,
a story that was (finally) recently broken by a West-African(!) dead-trees paper.
JMR
(Disclaimer: I work for OmniPay, which pays me in e-gold and ok! I'll stop posting
on this thread now!)
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
I see that a lot of slashdotters here have already made up their mind that this project is evil/sucks/is never going to work/dumb. There are tons of reasons why any particular project may succeed or fail but the model behind this one actually looks like it might work.
The way I understand this there are two unrelated "payment" systems involved: the first is a reputation-based system with "Mojo" as its currency. It is designed to increase reliability and reduce the amount of junk on the system. People that have unreliable systems or post junk will have bad reputation and won't get much "Mojo". The other payment system is voluntary, it involves real money and it lets people compensate the producers of the original material, while the Mojo system will only let you pay other users of the system for the storage, CPU and bandwidth involved in distributing the data.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Leech Zmodem comes to mind.. I think it just didn't send the CRC back for the last block, or something? can't remember.. great for avoiding ul/dl ratios =)
How does that benefit the artist? (Assuming of course that the original assumption is correct..) It's all very well to improve the end-users method of hearing the music, but if no-one's paying the author for it...
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
The thing aoubt production of music (#2) is that technoloical advances make it easy/cheap, i.e. if more people buying home studios then home studios become cheaper. Also, development of artist (#1) should really be the job of the artist anywho since the record companies do should a crappy job (ala Britney Spears). Anyway, we can now see that #1 and #2 should be done by the artist while #3 can be done by the fans and the artist.
Finally, copyrights were created to force record companies to compensate artists, but fans supporting artists is a non-issue.. let me repeat that "fans supporting artists is a non-issue." Why? It's pretty fucking simple, no artists == no music, so the fans of Joe Artists will need to pay Joe or Joe will get a day job and the fans will not get much new stuff by Joe. Now, Joe needs to be a savy buisness man to make shure that it's easy for his fans to pay him, but that's not really that difficult.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
"My suggestion is to use an aggregate payment system tied in to a database which allows registered members to exchange credits or points on the system - In other words, you charge up your account ... and can then distribute "points" to anyone else on the system." (From this thread at Hack the Planet)
Confirmation once again that like causes produce like effects, and that all events are products of their times. And what times? An historical inflection point, year zero of a new phase in human society. These ideas are everywhere now, "in everyone's heads". A crucial point: systems like this can only work if they are built on open and non-proprietary foundations, (ie. "platforms without the platform vendors" ie. nobody owns it) So all of these similar initiaves need to become interoperable.
This is a neat idea, unfortunately it does not make taking Mp3s legal. You are still breaking the law if you take an mp3 from napster, whether or not you pay the artist. The artist does not own the copyright on the song, the record company does. As a result, the record company is allowed to have whatever stranglehold they want on the distribution of those songs.
That's the way it is. I don't like it, but that's the way the law reads. What we need is a company that will sign artists and allow those artists to be paid fair compensation for internet distributions of their material.
This is tough because despite the fact that record companies make a lot of money, they still spend a lot of money promoting bands. Most of the bands downloaded off Napster have already been promoted with millions of investment dollars. At Mp3.com, you can get some stuff, but it takes hours of previewing to find something good. The record companies have a lock on the radio stations, so you can preview stuff while driving to work, etc. but its only their stuff.
Only when artists have direct control over the promotion and distribution of their work, will we be able to legally compensate those artists directly.
I see people referring to this as costing a few cents, but we can't fool ourselves...a $16 cd with 16 songs on it....the monopolistic pigs are gonna charge $1 per song, no ifs ands or buts about it. i'm gonna continue to use the opennap networks, and support the artits i like by buying their cd's if they're not ridiculously overpriced and going to their concerts.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Just out of interest, do major computer enthusiasts and people who truly feel for music generally mix well? Music, aside from what many of us have experienced in our lifetimes and socialized to accept, is not about financial gain. Sharing, loving, feeling. There are many positive things music is about and there are no overtones of financial gain with music in its pure form- what it was meant to be. The richness of music is already there. So,if a real music artist, their managers and whoever else can wake up (almost literally it seems) and realize this, they can stop looking in our pockets for it. Can't people do something as simple and kind as share anymore? Or is this behavior only allowed in limitied situations which scrupulous yet greedy entreprenuers have not found a loophole in which to turn sharing into a business transaction?
Just out of interest, do major computer enthusiasts and people who truly feel for music generally mix well? Music, aside from what many of us have experienced in our lifetimes and socialized to accept, is not about financial gain. Sharing, loving, feeling. There are many positive things music is about and there are no overtones of financial gain with music in its pure form- what it was meant to be. The richness of music is already there. So,if a real music artist, their managers and whoever else can wake up (almost literally it seems) and realize this, they can stop looking in our pockets for it. Can't people do something as simple and kind as share anymore? Or is this behavior only allowed in limitied situations which scrupulous yet greedy entreprenuers have not found a loophole in which to turn sharing into a business transaction?
it would mean a guranteed income of a size greater than ad revenue, for practically every site
I doubt it. On the Web, 1% of the sites get 99% of the hits. For the other 99% of sites, micropayments would barely pay for the hosting (if you're lucky). If you're not lucky, people just stop visiting the site altogether. Nothing is guaranteed.
Answer to the first part, charge them when the download is complete. If they dont send an ack for the last packet, double charge them.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
The thing aoubt production of music (#2) is that technoloical advances make it easy/cheap, i.e. if more people buying home studios then home studios become cheaper.
I see no evidence yet that amateur musicians using consumer grade recording equipment can produce music that compares with professionally produced music. To be sure, the amateur produced music on MP3.com is unlistenable (solely in terms of recording quality), while most professionally produced music is of extremely high recording quality. Barring exceptional and unforseen changes in recording equipment quality, this will continue.
Also, development of artist (#1) should really be the job of the artist anywho since the record companies do should a crappy job (ala Britney Spears)
The very fact that you have heard of Britney Spears proves that they are doing a good job developing her. As a challenge, name one single artist you have heard of who has been completely self-promoted (without the benefit of an agent promoting him). To go further, name somebody whose music was compelling enough to self 12 million copies of a single album, entirely through self promotion.
Anyway, we can now see that #1 and #2 should be done by the artist while #3 can be done by the fans and the artist.
MP3.com has existed for 4 years, and has yet to develop a compelling new artist of international acclaim. In that time, the record companies, both independent and major, have developed hundreds of such artists. Now you are saying that not only do artists not need the services of the agent (MP3.com), but they can do it by themselves. Well, there is just no evidence to support your claim. Until you can show me an artist who comes to prominence without the benefit of a record company, I cannot validate your claim.
Finally, copyrights were created to force record companies to compensate artists, but fans supporting artists is a non-issue.. let me repeat that "fans supporting artists is a non-issue." Why? It's pretty fucking simple, no artists == no music, so the fans of Joe Artists will need to pay Joe or Joe will get a day job and the fans will not get much new stuff by Joe. Now, Joe needs to be a savy buisness man to make shure that it's easy for his fans to pay him, but that's not really that difficult.
The very fact that artists now need to become businessmen is greatly detrimental to the art. In the current system, artists simply need to produce music which people like in order to be popular. The record companies took care of promotion, and selling themselves. And, I repeat: no recorded music artist has ever become popular without the aid of record company promotion. Now, in the new system, only the artists who now how to sell themselves will be heard, and the time, enegery, and stress which they have to do business will eat into their music creation processes. How many of them will just hire agents to do the work? How many music agent companies will emerge as a result? How will these new entities be any different (or any better) than the current record companies?
yup. thats one reason why we need the equivalent of digital cash. simply pay a fixed sum to a local store like a phone card and get (say) $100 is digi cash. then use the digi cash card like a credit card online. if it runs out - throw it away and start again. we also need a subscription model for music - pay something nominal/mo and download ANY song from any artist upto a max of (say) 300 songs/mo. i'd pay for that too.
This way, a dorm-kiddie on a T1 can fill up half of his 60Gig drive with MP3s, connect to Mojo, and watch the mojo karma roll in. I guess it could then be sold off, so you can actually MAKE money on this scheme (by hijacking university bandwidth; hmm...).
I think this is in principle a good idea exactly because it really encourages people to post stuff. I think that almost all recent music would quickly be posted on the site by people fishing for suckers. I think this is great. Napster could still run alongside, sort of the "poor man's trading program," but if you need something really rare, you'd log in on Mojo and pay for it, or, stay logged in on Mojo and hope people download from you so that you don't have to pay.
Problems (many already mentioned here; somewhat redundant):
1. Morons and idiots are still using the Xing mp3 encoder and other inferior products. From the filename and size you don't see how well it was encoded--not until you've paid for it. The system would encourage people to encode their MP3s using the fastest encoders available, which also happen to be the ones producing the most horrible results. (benchmarks). How would we reward good citizens like me who use only LAME 3.8x -V1 -h (which is what everyone with working ears should be using, by the way...)? Sure, it eats up CPU cycles...
2. Here's a get-rich-quick scheme: make up filenames like "Britney Spears-live rare bootleg Sao Paulo98-Pinball Wizard.mp3" That would earn you some uploads! Of course the file itself would be a recording of you lauging (all the way to the bank). So you would need an E-bay type ratings system for each user, that would show a username in red, for example, if they had bad ratings. But if you get bad ratings just use up any credit left in your account, ditch it and start all over again with a clean one, or get your buddy to write compliments like on Ebay. I just don't see how this would self-regulate.
Shit... need to go .. submit!
So, there I was, last night. Downloading classical music. Yes, I kid you not, classical music. 2 Rachmaninoff Piano Concerti (Nos. 3 and 4, if you wanted to know). Also, Dies Irae and Lacrimosa from Mozart's requiem, two preludes by Rachmaninoff (G#-m and C#-m), and Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre. all off napster and opennap.
I would say, all in all, that it is possible. As to performers. Until people regularly use ID3, v2 or even v1.1 to its full potential, constantly, you wont know the performer. that's true. determining whether it's, as you put it, "drug-store quality" or "world class" is a simple matter of listening to it. And, if you need a label or tag to tell you which of those categories a performance falls into, I don't think you really care. Finally, if you are a true classical music fanatic, you wouldnt be listening to music in the low-fi mp3 format anyway, would you?
last, an interesting idea. Not mentioning performers is a way of avoiding copyright issues. After all, the performer, and the label recording the performance, has copyright over a certain performance of a classical piece. But, the pieces themselves, the composers of which have mostly been dead for 50+ years, are in public domain. And I can't imagine it's particularly easy to prove, simply through 128Kbps audio, who the performer is, thus avoiding the copyright issue.
- phrank@nycap.rr.com
Don't eat shrimp candy, just a heads up.
Those payments should be way down there since the companies don't have to pay hosting costs. The database server can't be too expensive compared to moving that amount of data around.
at 160k and above, lame/blade (the current best free tools) start to excel. but for space savings and overall quality, frau/128 is an ideal compromise.
I'd estimate that I'd have to go to lame@192 (or higher) to equal frau@128. and frankly, mp3 is lossy even at its best; so why not optimize a bit more in the space savings direction; the quality loss is really minimal.
I don't mind the fact that frau is so slow to encode; I only encode once for each song, anyway.
--
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
You're right. Better tell Amazon, eBay, etc. to go ahead and shut down because people will never give them (some 3rd party) access to their bank and checking account.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Plus, IIRC, EMusic sponsors projects like FreeAmp, which is actually one of the best MP3 players I've ever used. The playlist interface is quite different from WinAmp, but nice when you get used to it. Try it out, you'll be surprised. And they're gradually adding features, too. I think the newest beta can do CD audio. And, just looking at the page, they're working on building Ogg Vorbis support in.
-RickHunter
He wanted to give me a dollar for it, and wasn't sure how that could be arranged. He was quite serious, too- although he had very particular tastes, 'Alleycat' hit him so hard that he felt obliged to pay me for it.
I straightened him out pretty quick ;) first of all, the album 'Alleycat' is on is only $5.99. It has a nice attractive cover and includes other worthy tracks (though none of them are Electric Blues but Alleycat). Six bucks is not a huge amount- he could get the CD.
Failing that, I had the option when I uploaded the track to make it 'streaming only'- which is a joke anyway, but theoretically it could be withheld and people prevented from downloading it. I chose to make it freely downloadable on purpose- you simply can't focus entirely on money because as an artist there's an even more important currency, the currency of attention. It may not make sense to everybody, but I WANT my tracks in the hands of people who absolutely love them. I would rather be paid nothing to have my tune in the hands of someone who just loves it than be paid a dollar to have it stuck on some Zip disk somewhere. There's a future in finding the listeners who love what you do- there's no future in being paid money to get filed away as just another musician.
I have a new track up, 'B17 Flying Fortress' (it went live real quick! Gratifying), which illustrates 'what I would do with money': compare the sound of it with the sound of 'DeHavilland Mosquito'. As usual not everybody might like it but some people probably will :) and as usual, it is available for free download with no expectation beyond that. There's no CD for 'Wounded Skies' yet or even cover art, so you can't buy that ;)
My point is that it's up to me to decide these things. If I decide I want to give music away and simply allow people to pick up a CD if they want to encourage my making more music (and at that, pricing the CD as low as I'm allowed to do), well then I'll do that. It's not stupid- I rate in the upper percentiles of money earners on mp3.com, because a lot of people try to squeeze money out of every little bit of music they do, pricing their CDs really high (and they're only mp3.com CDs) and making everything streaming only, and that doesn't follow the rules for internet business- the 'shelf' is too big and there are too many more generous musicians on the 'shelf' next to 'em, and they end up getting hurt.
By the same token, this micropayment Napster clone sounds crazy to me. I know I've asked for my stuff to be shared on Napster, very publically and explicitly: I can also say that certainly nobody from this new Napster clone has contacted me asking for payment information and where to send the 25 cents. I can only assume that for the most part it is 'Napster Clone in which you pay THEM per download' and I would ask, what's the point in that? I certainly do not want people being made to pay 1/4 cent to download my music when they can download it for no 'micropayment charge' at mp3.com/chrisj and will always be able to (if mp3.com drops the ball on this I will simply find another place to host my music- or an additional, recommended place to host my music)
I'm sorry, but mp3s are not a profit model. They are a promotion model. The idea of doing micropayments on them is repugnant- next someone will be selling a winamp which charges $0.0001 per song played. Who gets this money? Certainly not the artist. It seems that in some ways Internet independent music will be "meet the new boss- same as the old boss" (no STR for CmdrTaco ;) ) and as soon as the old RIAA slimeballs are forced into irrelevance, new slimeballs will be revealed as being there all along, behind the new scene. You'll know them by doing the math- when all the little micropayments add up to $30,000 a day, and the artists get $1000 for Britney Spears, $900 for Backstreet Boys, $800 divided up among everybody else, then you'll know who the new slimeballs are.
I refuse to be a part of the RIAA slimeballs, and I'll refuse to be a part of the replacement slimeballs. If that means crippling my 'career' then so be it. Frankly I doubt it- I think in the modern day being a slimeball becomes a handicap because it's too easily uncovered and the information gets around very quickly. I will be very interested to see if I'm right :)
NONE of the online music services have classical music.
Napster has an EXTREMELY thin selection of classical music. Exactly none of the selections list the performer of the piece. Only people who are extremely new to music, or extremely casual about music, do not care who the performer was. The serious music fan needs to know the performer, the conductor, and all of the soloists. On the MP3's on Napster none of this info is available. For all the downloader knows, the selections are ripped from the 50 CD's for $25 that they sell in metal boxes in drug stores, instead of the world class performers.
MP3.com has a very poor selection of classical music. It has, basically, no orchestral music, save for some guys who have conducted a MIDI orchestra of a piece (yeesh!). I have downloaded instrumentalist selections from MP3.com, and the sound quality is just AWFUL! Basically, my experience confirms my original fear about classical music: it is too expensive and difficult for amateurs to record, so it either comes out sounding like crap (solo stuff), or just isn't recorded because the results would be astoundingly bad (orchestral stuff).
There are technical limitations as well, why classical is not successful on line. A classical peice usually consists of several "tracks" on a CD, and for some inane reason, people who put the stuff online make a separate file for each movement of the piece. This makes it almost impossible to track down a whole piece of music (Napster is chocked full of "Beethoven Sym. #5, mvmnt 1", but often you cannot find movements 2-4).
Most classical music demands a good acoustic environment, and when your hard drive is spinning, and your fans in the computer are throbbing it is not possible to listen to anything except loud, throbbing pop music.
The MP3 format is designed for pop music; its only ID fields are "artist", "album", and "song". Classical music does not have "albums", and "songs", and has at least two artists per recording. It also needs more specialized fields such as "conductor", "soloists", "orchestra", "opus number", and the like.
Classical music is much too long to download over the internet. The typical symphony is 40-70 minutes in length, and the typical opera is much longer. The only music amenable to download are five minute pop songs, not longer pieces of music.
Classical music is in serious danger of being left behind as the world moves to online delivery. It demands to be left in CD format, until the technology catches up with its demands (which are considerably higher than pop music). However, if pop music moves away from CD into the online world, classical music will also die (whether or not it makes online), because the classical CD business depends on the pop CD business for the infrastructure.
Classical music being one of western civilization's two or three greatest achievements, this would be an extremely tragic event of mammoth proportions. And nobody seems to care!
I apologize for my rudeness in my earlier post, I was annoyed at what seemed like a condescending lecture. I think I perceived it wrong.
That's no reason to use them now. I don't care what they do might possibly do in the future, or what their hopes and dreams are, I care about the service they are providing now, which basically sucks.
Surely you can see the circular reasoning going on here. It's going to continue to suck for as long as no one uses it! We have the advantage of dealing with such small amounts of money--The service charges at this point are worth it to me to make a statement against the music industry, and place a small bet on the off-chance that this fairtunes thing goes big and gets press.
They could cheat you and the musicians over and over again and probably get away with it.
So why should we trust them?
Point taken. Personally, I trust them because I see them to be like me, young idealists who are disenchanted with the industry, and want to put enough time and resources into the project to make a company out of it. Naive? Perhaps, but like I said, there's so little money coming out of my pocket I'm willing to take a chance at the opportunity to make a statement.
At any rate, paying through e-gold is simpler than the forms you have to fill out at Fairtunes.
Fairtunes is also brand new, and since its existence is based on this very idea, it can be tailored to make just this kind of transaction painless. They have plans in the works to write plugins for for the major media players that allow you to tip the artist when you play their song. Who else knows what they could come up with?
And any officially sanctioned scheme like you describe would legally have to involve the record company. So by participating in it I don't achieve my goal of excluding the record company.
Some of them are also trying to sue people who are distributing it.
And I certainly would be less likely to tip musicians who had openly declared war on me.
But think about this: how likely are people going to be to try this until they're shown it works? Stephen King can afford to, and isn't bound by a draconian exclusive contract that forbids him from writing books on his own. I see this as the chance to show them it CAN work, and leave them with less reason to try and litigate against me. Of course the leeches at the RIAA will still try, but how will anyone take their rhetoric about it being "for the artist" seriously if the artists don't support their actions?
...reading your essay now, but there'd be no way to finish it and the comment on it before this discussion thread was dead...
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Don't worry, I read it. The fact still remains, however, that you've never seen the metal, and the principle still remains that everyone must draw a line of trust somewhere, else we lock ourselves in remote dwellings in central Montana and not interact with anyone. Them's the breaks.
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This model will probably come to pass, but this company will not be the one to do it.
.25, since that will hurt their CD sales. Expect $1 - $2/ track charges. Their monopoloy on the licensing of the songs will allow them to do this.
Legally, they will get nailed, just as mp3.com already has (for Beam-It) and Napster will be. Quite simply, they don't own any of the licenses for the music they are trafficking in, much less the users who have simply ripped a few tracks from a CD they own. What legal rights does a pirate have for compensation for his pirated works? Nada.
Postulate. The RIAA companies will initiate such a service soon, after Napster and its competitors have been shut down.
The genie is out of the bottle with regards to mp3 files. No amount of interference can stop the illegal trade of mp3 files amongst users. The best the RIAA companies can do is to act as a middleman. People will be willing to pay a premium to have the service of a Napster-like central repository. Anyone who has used both Napster and Gnutella has realized that Napster's central sercer system is the way to go here in terms of speedy searches, and is superior to Gnutella for the trade of mp3 files. People will be willing to pay a small amount for that service.
The inevitable conclusion is that the RIAA companies may eventually act as middleman between users trading mp3 files. However, they will not offer microcharges as small as
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
Maybe Napster like services will migrate towards both free music and paid premium downloads. No doubt there is a need for free music samples, especially from new budding artists. There is also the need for limiting access to premium works where an artist wants a per copy payment for their work.
Whatever your security needs, streaming is a good method of delivery. If you want to get really tough you can ^^^ the stream with the start address of the file as it is stored on your hard drive. This would be easy to do and as long as there are no commercially available cracks for sale it would be so difficult to recopy, that losses do to piracy would be under 1%.
The other point is that the the RIAA is somehow ok with compressed audio if payed for, but would go ape shit over uncompressed audio. Why? Becuase I can use the uncompressed audio for whatever I want. the compressed has to be used for what it was compressed for (ie mp3). sure you can uncompress it, but it sounds like crap.
- daniel
- daniel
Turn off your computer and go outside
In the Netherlands, Mojo is the biggest concert promotor, arranging the big tours of bands. So I don't know if MojoNations did a very thorough check of their name being in use or sounding like something known...
The Virtual Bookcase: book reviews
If you buy Photoshop, your license to use Photoshop is not tied to the CD, and you can get a replacement in case of loss/damage.
I think the market will make them set up a reliable distribution service. You would not expect them to drop the connection half way through the download any more than you would expect the record store to sell you a scratched CD.
Indeed. One of the things that most people forget is that the record companies are in several different business at once:
Napster, and this new service, only purports to do #3, and MP3.com purports to do #1 and #3 (and I would argue that it does #1 poorly, as no artist it has developed has reached internation acclaim). Most of the expense in making a record are in #1 and #2 (which most online services don't do at all). The online services think that because they do #3, that they deserve all of the revenue for the item, even though that is merely the final step in the process (i.e. they depend on outsiders to do the difficult and costly part, yet apparently give them no benefits).
My prediction for the advent of mainstream commercial online delivery is that the industry will become more horizontally integrated rather than vertical integrated, and that they record companies will contract with online delivery companies (such as MP3.com, and whatever ends up with Napster) to actually delivery the music, but they themselves will continue to develop and produce music (something which they are very good at, and which no online distribution company has yet demonstrated competence in).
How would it be handled with all of those failed/aborted downloads? If it's 10 cents per track, and I get 65% of the track, do I get charged 6.5 cents??
Also, how would they handle the initial population of files? If I use the software, and offer my collection of mp3's (ripped from discs I own), do the copyright holders receive a cut of money that others pay to get my stuff? Do I get anything like credit towards use of the service?
I admit, I haven't delved too deep into their (really, really thin) page, but does the RIAA give their servers all of the files to offer?
Good idea - definitely more palatable to the monopolists than Napster, but it seems like there are a lot of potential shortfalls.... I'm hopeful, though!
The problem is that to my knowledge, there's no decent free ripper with good error-correction for Windows. No, EAC does NOT count. It's beta as hell, it pukes on hybrid data/audio CD formats (CD Extra, anyone?), and I've done ripping on a CD (with no visible scratches) where it'll do one track at 1.1x and on the next track it'll drop to 0.3x for no apparent reason. Bluntly, CDParanoia blows it away.
But then again, people won't really stand for 1.1x ripping anyway. If you ask people why they use crap like AudioCatalyst they'll probably say because it's fast. People are impatient enough that they'll want their MP3s nownownow, quality be damned.
Why? Because it's much more convenient for me to have a CD than it is for me to download mp3s and move them about. (The sound quality on CDs is also better.)
I don't think it's more convenient with CD... they are so short... At most 70 minutes and then you have to juggle them out and replace with another, where as with mp3's you just start a big mean playlist and listen to it for hours, or just chose another playlist when the current one is finished.
Almost all my CD's are converted to mp3 and reside on my harddisk and i listen to them rather then going through the trouble of finding the cd and then moving it around...
And the sound quality is more or less how you encode it. Atleast that's what i've understood
any old joe can encode using ... low bit rate blade/lame ... but if I can get Frau. encoded mp3's
Remember, the LAME encoder is thought to be as good as Fraunhofer's and it's Free (but may be illegal because certain necessary and irreplaceable algorithms for creating MP3 data are patented).
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I think the difference between the Napster debacle and something like alcohol prohibition is that prohibtion took a legal product (alcohol) and made it illegal. The Napster problem focusses on the fact that Napster is accessory to an activity already established to be illegal: unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material. To a musician, making their recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge is tanamount to theft of their livlihood and art. And yes, it's illegal. Whether you go out and buy the CD the next day is completely irrelevant if you were never given permission to copy the work in the first place. Think of it this way: if you steal $50 from someone, and send them a check for $500 the next day, you're still guilty of theft. The law doesn't care if the victim is better off in the end. The law is the law. If you don't like the law, stop whining and do something about it. Organize, demonstrate, and vote.
Napster could have been a very useful tool for music lovers, musicians, and the recording industry, but I think it's gotten out of hand. I agree with Lars wholeheartedly, and I think it is the duty of mega-bands to take a stand, because while Metallica won't feel the pinch of lost CD revenue, less successful musicians will. In the end, Napster users are just whining because they want something for nothing, at the expense of artists. Which, as a musician, I find absolutely disgusting.
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
I don't know all the details, since the site is slashdotted and not available, but this seems much worse than Napster. Instead of giving away copyrighted material, now people are going to be selling it, and the company that facilitates this illegal transaction is going to get a cut of it?? Please tell me that I have misunderstood the concept of this story.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
The RIAA does NOT pay radio stations to play their music. The radio stations pay royalities to the copyright holders to play music.
You would probably be very surprised at the extent of royalties to copyright holders in the music industry. They also get royalties from online samples which places like Amazon.com have, and from jukebox play. They get royalties every time a song is played on TV or in a movie ("Happy Birthday" was copyrighted for a very long time, which is why they always songs "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" in TV's/movies).
There was a big lawsuit about this in the 1920's, which is surprisingly relevant today. The record companies sued the radio stations because they were playing their music for free, and not giving any money to the producers of the music. The radio stations argued that radio play actually increased sales because it acted as free promotion for the music (sound familiar?)
The radio stations lost.
As a result, commercial radio stations have had to pay a royalty every time they play a song on the radio.
And, btw, before someone brands me a hypocrite after reading my anti-music-theft rant in this thread: some bands willingly make MP3s of their music available, and so downloading this music is not illegal. The problem is when copyrights are blatantly ignored.
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
how funny
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From what I understand, advertising based revenue models on the internet have basically been declared obsolete, because money could not be recouped from them. I bet this would be much more true for music, than for general services. It costs a heck of a lot more to record and produce a modern rock album or a symphony, than it does to deliver an online greeting card.
Furthermore, it is potentially extremely dangerous to mix advertising with music, because the music itself may become commercialized. If there is a commercial when I download the music, what's next? Will the artists start singing jingles and put advertising into their music? Will orchestras start playing the theme jingles for products in between movemnts of a symphony? Let's just pay with it and be done, so the music does not become further diluted.
I'm just wondering how(if) they're going to guarantee the quality of what they're charging for. I mean, if it's a napster clone, then following the performance of napster, 3/5 of my paid downloads will turn out to be of little or no quality, or incomplete tracks. So I'll end up paying for a few songs, then deciding that even at 1 cent a song, it's not worth it. A possibility that occurs to me is that their client could be made to only accept songs that can be identified through CDDB, this would allow the client to check the length of the song (+- a few seconds). The only problem here is that it would exclude any cd's or songs not found in the cddb database. just a thought, it'll be interesting to see if they even address this, or if they just ask for money for the same ol' incomplete songs and faked filenames.
You can take a cd in the car, or your living room, or bedroom. Most people don't have computers in every room like some slashdot folks. Even if they do, they might not have a laptop to take in a car with them. CD's are useful almost everywhere. MP3 players are very expensive, especially when most people already have a CD player.
Though I usually try to stay away from GUI programming, I believe they all can tell whether or not they are minimized, and can control their size. They could stop downloading if you minimize. Nothing prevents you from sleepung, unless it required mouse movement, too. That's what one of those pay per hour of banner viewers does. That was easily circumvented, but John Q. Guywhoissecretlyattractedtokittens won't bother to do that. He is busy downloading porn. I think that is the best idea. Of course, RIAA would have to administer it and get all the money, and would probably not support Linux.
Even if Napster were shut down, someone would code a copy that hides itself in SMTP packets or something. I've met too many frightening MP3 addicts to believe that we can ever go back to a pre-Napster world. Pay for music? Yeah, right...
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
Micropayments are definitely a holy grail for the internet
I'm sorry, this makes me sad, perhaps because on the internet I'm a user, not a publisher.
I live in France where for about 15 years they've had this thingy called the Minitel, which is basically a really dysfunctional Internet where you pay by the minute. It sucks pretty big time.
Please, I know things may happen whether we like them or not, but don't you like the free as in beer Internet? Don't you think it's tainted enough by money and commercialism as it is? Don't you see what a horror having to check your wallet whenever you do anything on the internet will be?
I know the term is "micro"payments. That sounds like your wallet doesn't take a significant hit. But don't be fooled.
Do you like highway tolls? Would you like to pay for every little trip you took in your car, more or less according to the hour or the type of road you drive? That kind of scheme already exists, and it's called taxes, and we pay plenty of those already. You want to pay "micro"taxes whenever you scratch your nose?
This makes me sad.
Isn't this worse (from the industry's point of view) than Napster? Now regular netizens like me can charge others $$$ for mp3s and other files downloaded from me. Now I can make money off my mp3 collection. I should rush to put all my MP3s online.
I prefer a model like the "Street Performer Protocol" recently utilized by Stephen King. I'm also fond of voluntary contributions to artists and other creators. What I would not like to see is a huge bazaar where Joe Average gets 5 bucks for trading the latest Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling gets nothing for writing it.
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I don't think that any "pay" version of something that we already have for free (as in beer) will ever work. There will *always* be another method of filesharing. For instance, look at the proliferation of "distributed services" like FreeNET, Gnutella, etc. These services simply cannot be shutdown from a central server. Like the internet, these services are completely impervious to even a nuclear attack. Furthermore, if one country decides that these services are illegal and subsequently kills the connection to the software's home website (which would basically be their only method of recourse), then there will be a plethora of other overseas developers and hosts that will pick up the project in defiance.
Furthermore, the media attention given to anything of this nature simply adds fuel to the fire. If you want proof, look at the surge of users that Napster has seen over the last few days since the judge's decision to shut down the service.
In short, if napster dies there *will* be some other free service to replace it, and that service will probably be distributed (to make it harder for the law to put a finger on it).
On a sidenote, I would like to appeal to the developers of GNUTella and FreeNet to make searching for files faster. As it is, the primary advantage of Napster (with its centralized server) is its ability to search for files with much greater speed.
# They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. --Fran
This does not seem like a good answer to user-shared music issues. I couldn't sell you a song to which TW/AOL owns the copyright. Specific to Napster and RIAA, perhaps TW/AOL could use a similar technology to accopmlish the same goal. Viral markeing at its best. You get a song from my drive, TW/AOL charges you and credits me for having good taste! Specific to subscription based content owned by a small organization or individual, this could be really nice.
Meanwhile, there's a lot of nice stuff free at MP3.com - just because it's not from a huge, "popular" artist doesn't mean it's not good.
Won't the RIAA get even MORE pissed, because OTHER people are making money directly off their stuff? Personally, I think as soon as it becomes commercialized, the RIAA wins the copyright battle (for this piece of software). In fact, I am even sorta inclined to think they should... Besides, doesn't this have all the same problems Napster did -- no RIAA affiliation, central body that can be sued?
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every thing on the ineternet is already free i am willing to wade through some pop ups to get free stuff the thought of having to pay even a penny for an mp3 is sickening to me, i would rather not have the internet if we had to pay for stuff
lose != loose
This is a neat idea, unfortunately it does not make taking Mp3s legal. You are still breaking the law if you take an mp3 from napster, whether or not you pay the artist. The artist does not own the copyright on the song, the record company does. As a result, the record company is allowed to have whatever stranglehold they want on the distribution of those songs.
Who cares about breaking this stupid law. The point is not to avoid breaking the law. The point is to change the system (and maybe the law). If good unsigned artists make as much from donations as signed artists then artistx will not sign label contracts and not give up the copyright to their works. Now, I'd really like to see fairtunes tell you the artists opinion about your coping their music, so people would not pay the people like Metallica and Dr. Dre who support the current oppresive sytem.
We do not need more internet labels like mp3.com or more internet music distribution startups like Napster. All these companies are built arround the concept of "screw the artists" just like the current labels. We need non-profit orginisations to give artists buisness advice so they can make it without the RIAA, the labels, the radio stations, Mp3.com, or Napster.
The record companies "promotion" money is spent on bribery and one-hit wonder star manufacturing. I think it's pretty clear that this is a waist of resources.
The record companies "production" money is also a big waist. Independent production become easyer as better and cheaper home studio equipment is released. We must be nearing the point where a smart artists could do a better job with a *good* home studio which they built themselves. I mean execptional people like Trent Reznor were doing this a long time ago, but the equpment is much more available now.
I agree that Napster and Mp3.com are not good ways to discover new bands, but ways to discover new bands will evolve once more fans and bands start using the internet.
Example: If you wanted to promote artists you could set up a web page which offered a new song/mix to download every day. Artists would love the promotional exposure (once you had a lot of daily hits), so you would have a reasonable number of good unsigned people to make these songs. People would check out your seb page to lissen to todays act just like they check out an online comic strip every day.
Also, if your no main stream pop then you stand no chance of getting air time on a major radio station regardless of what label signed you, so you may as well stick to giving the college radio station DJs free copies of your songs. This type of promotion could be done with mp3s just as well with CDs.
Example: set up usenet newsgroups for diffrent types of music. Artists could post high quality mp3s of their songs and college radio DJs could read the newsgroups for mp3s they might want to air. This pretty much removes the need for a label to send copies of the CD to various DJs. Now, the people who read the news group have a lot of shit to throw away, but that's not a really big deal for a serious DJ. Plus, people with some authority would post messages saing "that was really good." Instant meritocrasy.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Long-distance telephone calls and electricity are both metered services. Many people do feel a tension while they are on the phone, at least while making an international or other expensive call. At the same time, very few people worry about powering a lightbulb, even though doing so costs a few cents per hour. Electricity charges mainly serve to make people turn off the lights when they go to bed. The difference is clearly in the level of pricing:
less than a cent per minute and people use as much as they need (electricity)
10 cents per minute, and people ration their usage a little (long distance phone calls)
40 cents per minute, and people ration their usage a lot (international calls)
M$: "We're #2!"
I disagree. I am using a firewall program called AtGuard (which has been discontinued and bought by Network Associates) which does a *great* job of blocking all banner ads, including java applets, etc. The heuristics this thing uses must be pretty good, b/c as far as I can tell, it is not eliminating anything but ads. When turning the software on and off and viewing my favorite pages; no non-related ad content is killed, but when turned on, *everything* (regardless of location on page) that is advertising is whacked.
In response to the post "Sure, lets all use Junkbuster and make sure nobody makes any money whatsoever... that way we can shut down this stupid Slashdot.org website and put Malda and his boyz out of business.. "
Do you work for the RIAA/MPAA/BSA or something? Do you and your ilk actually think about the rhetoric that you spout? Guess what? In business, no one "deserves" and damn thing. If you sink a gazillion dollars into personnel, R&D, and somebody comes along with a better distribution model, oh *fscking* well. That's capitalism. Millions of business fail every year, don't go crying when technology and your target market finds a easier/cheaper way to obtain your services/product. And before you start with your moralizing and backward ethics, read this and this. If people could obtain free COPIES of hotdogs or gold bars or whatever, believe me, they would. Stealing, pheh.
"Slashdot - Better living through moderation."
Slashdot - Better living through moderation
Quarter a track, yeah! You only pay about a dollar a track now, on CD, and digital music would be...well, just a LITTLE cheaper to distribute. The only costs would be recording and advertising--no manufacturing, whatsoever.
Me paying them to listen to their music? Are they kidding? Why should I listen to some new piece of crap, when I can hear it on the radio for free?
I expect new market economies to go the other way -- RIAA will have to pay *ME* (as they presently do pay radio stations) to audition streams of their new offerings.
Ultimately, serious market models will have artists (and not big label enterprises) bidding for mindshare, indeed, perhaps paying *US* to listen to samples of their offerings. Those that are great will rise to the top, and then they can charge us for performances, other services and perhaps recordings of that and their later works should we decide we want to hear it upon demand.
Sigh. Thanks for summing up the opinions of the vocal but immature minority, and providing fodder for the arguments of those who oppose the revolution in media delivery. Those who favor conventional methods will fail, but thanks to people like you, I'll still have to buy my CD's at Best Buy for a rediculous $15 for a while.
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Ian Peters
If ever micro-payments per web page become a reality, with all the porn I download everyday, I go bankrupt within a week! Espacially with all the pop-up shit I have to go through to get to the meat!
wiZd0m
I've been downloading so much I think I may single-handedly get emusic to reconsider the program ;)
Seriously subscription services are the way to go... I get to pay the artists while retaining the freedom to sample music at will without watching my budget... Emusic also sells by the track (99 cents) but, shit I'd owe them about $1500 right now if I paid that way!
I highly recommend going to emusic and browsing around a little... in my case it took about 5 minutes to decide they had enough to justify $20 (you only get the 9.99 price if you commit for 1 year... if you commit for 3 months the price is $15). Sure it's one of those lame auto-renew unless you cancel it deals... but they are very upfront about it and have cancel button right at the top of the page when you log in.
Someone's going to think I work for them but I'm just a VERY satisfied consumer who can't quite get over the wierd feeling of getting MP3's legally :)
I usually dont reply to anonymous cows,but,I felt bad for you since you had to lie about having friends.
Of course its illegal,would it be civil disobedience if it weren't?Naturally to a cow
contentedly grazing on a "Frampton Comes Alive"cassette copy,the world doesnt need to be a better place.
I can tell you why I do it,How do you presume to tell me my motive?If thousands of others are inadvertantly helping the cause,who(of any importance)is to bitch?
Contented grazing cows don't usually notice till the pizzle is already in.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
There is another site like this, also unfinished, at TipTheHat.com looks like a good idea, but still needs work.
I stole this sig from a more creative user.
I guess my domains bigmojo.net and bigmojo.org might be worth something now.
I would pay like a dollar to be promised a high bandwidth download with the song in perfect condition instead of doing time consuming search with half the results only partial songs, or songs with skips or any other deformalitys in them.
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
So why hasn't Slashdot implemented this? I know I've seen the suggestion brought up before....
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
How many Lira would you be willing to pay? I believe in my heart of hearts that the venerable Italian currency (at 1800/$) might be the internet currency of the future...but that's my opinion, your mileage may vary.
http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/17/da_rude_vs_mind machine.html
Go there. The "Artist" has a record label.
Come on guys, what's with all the grammar and spelling mistakes lately? It's kind of annoying, it doesn't really portray slashdot as a professional news site, which it is, whether you like it or not. I specifically remember Andover saying "We love the site, except the occasional spelling and grammar mistakes" when they bought you guys. I may be a nit-picker, but I do feel it's important :)
??? And this has exactly what relation to the issue of whether or not those people who do use the net would be willing to purchase credit on line for micropayments?
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
"...I'd pay a micro-payment to yank banner ads from websites I frequent..."
So.... what banner-ad supported websites will be saying is, "pay up or we'll make your downloads miserable???" Last I checked, extortion was illegal.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
after reading childll's post and visiting his user page, suddenly i notice that the front page is not configured the way i am used to - and then i notice that slashdot now thinks i am childll. and here is a post in his name to prove it! i did nothing but read slashdot - this is not a hack, my real username is quonsar. WTF?!?!?!?!
As long as there are programs such as Napster and Gnutella and Freenet and about a dozen others, no one but the clueless will actually pay for their MP3 downloads.
"You gave away 47 MIIIILION dollars!? You IIIIIDIOT!" - Ren & Stimpy
I used fairtunes yesterday. I filled out the form and submitted one of my favorite bands, Qkumba Zoo $20. I've had their mp3's for 2 years and never owned an album. I really didn't want to go out and buy one of those metal coasters, but I really wanted to support them. So I used fairtunes.
I accidentally pressed the submit button twice and they caught it and sent me a message:
---------------------------------------
Thanks for your contribution to Qkumba Zoo. But we have a question. Did you
mean to charge $20 twice? If you did that's cool.. If not then we'll refund
one of the transactions for you.
Just let us know.
Matt
ceo / co-founder
Fairtunes Inc.
www.fairtunes.com -- 204-292-1321
---------------------------------------
I support this organization in principle. I believe the model of music-as-product is dying and the model of music-as-service is returning. I like the fact that I can completely bypass the Record Label and send my money directly to artist.
I have to agree that the most important part of this service is open accounting and I told them. They told me their working on it and I tend to believe them from all the attention they've got in the past 2 days. If I thought they were a fraud or had any evidence of it I would be the first to blow the horn. I'm trying to contact the band to see if they actually received the money, but that will be a while.
This is a service in its infancy, so don't expect too much too soon. I'm just glad I had a way to tip one of my favorite musicians without buying the CD.
Wildmage
------
wildmage
Memoirs of a Mad Scientist
You geniuses have left out production costs. It costs ALOT of money to make a CD. If you don't like the price of a CD, either a) don't buy them and buy the "warmer" analog tape (which btw, manufacturing wise, cost much less, less as in pennies, for record labels to have made for distribution.) of b) write letters and demand lower prices. I don't bitch and moan about cd prices and i've got quite a collection. They cost no more than tapes used to, and vinyl before tapes and 8 tracks et cetera (remember to adjust fo rinflation.)
Oh btw, you also forgot the overhead of having a website to sell your albums on digitally.
mp3 160kbps 16bit/44.1khz takes up qute a bit of space.
Derek Greene
Yeah, yeah. Look, I'm all for sharing, too, but unfortunately you can't make a living giving stuff away for free. Most musicians I know do love to play, and like nothing better than giving a show. However, they also need to eat, make car payments, and pay rent like the rest of us.
Napster Clone Wiht Pay Per Download
Wiht? What an ugly name for a napster clone!
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
-jlg
ps. use Debian! www.debian.org
To allow a charge-per-download sucks. The whole idea of Napster was to take advantage of "fair use", but this is not fair use, because it is the commercial sharing of copyrighted material. A punk-ass 13 year old should not be able to make money off of his illegally (or legally) obtained collection of Metallica. The legal owners and licensees of that material should be allowed to make money off of it, nobody else. A person who just has a copy should be able to trade with his friends, but not for commercial gain.
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.
No no no! We can't have this type of digital "micropayment". Consider the long-term ramifications this will have on future generations? We'll be promoting a corporate-controlled government.
People wont work towards their pursuit of happiness. Instead we'll all be working for a pay voucher, stabbing each other in the back in order to climb the ladder for an early promotion or raise. And we'll have "micropayments" for everything. It'll be tied into our DNA. We wont be able to move anywhere without having to pay for our time.
Sure in some ways it'll make things easy. Checking out at the grocery store would be simple if we could just press our thumb to a pad and pay for the whole thing. But what about tips at a restaurant? What if that waiter is actually an 31337 ha>
But whats really the worst is when these "micropayments" become commonplace, and we're using them to regulate everything we do. A micropayment to turn on the TV, a micropayment to switch channels, a micropayment to hail a taxi, a micropayment for each drag of a cigarette or a micropayment for each breath of smoke-free air. It'll all spiral downwards if we endorse these micropayments. We'll be rats hitting the feeder bar for pellets when we let ourselves be bound to invisible payments for everyday actions.
Micropayments might seem like a cool idea, $.03 to get rid of banners on a web page, but thats a limited use for the net. If, or rather, when, that micropayment scheme makes the jump from the net to real every-day life, we're going to start going down-hill towards the type of culture that we only see in Sci-Fi movies.
How about we leave it as it is - free.
Perhaps this is a step in the right direction (users being able to obtain music without dropping $18 for a CD with blah blah blah...), but why pay? Even if the music costs, say, $1 per download, the costs could easily be recouped through advertising. Sure, nobody likes looking at banner ads, but would you rather A) pay $1 for every MP3 you download, or B) look at a couple of banner ads in exchange for being able to download an MP3 without fear of the RIAA coming after you/shutting down the service/etc.?
=================================
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
I choose to promote the free music movement.Therefore I will continue to use gnutella.
I follow many musicians dream to eliminate
the middleman,represented by the RIAA.
Imagine a level playing field without the
Industry cramming "synthetic flavor of the day"
down out throats.Let the REAL cream rise.
Remember if you dont pay for it they'll go away,leaving only those who make music for the love of it,not money or adventure.Let the REAL cream rise.
So dont forget to leave a tip for your fav
bands and go to their shows.We've a long fight ahead.
Sure its capitalist thinking,as a musician
I want as many as possible to hear me and I wanna
get my money.Screw the suits.Its time for a change.
Too bad for those caught up in the system,presently contracted artists that is.All wars have casualties.Its time for a change.Evolve
or die.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
The real problem I see with this system is, after it makes its run through the courts, it will end up like home cd recorders, the RIAA will get a cut, and the artists will get nothing.
they're truely "micro".
.5 cents each time you refreshed Slashdot??? It'd still cost more then anyone would want to pay... now if it went down to .005 the more you clicked, not so many people would object...
If it's ever going to work it has be setup so that the more you use something the less per charge it is....
Imagine having to pay
(BTW, how much do you think it costs for each loading of slashdot.org?)
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
What? The RIAA members make billions every year selling uncompressed audio on CDs. It's third parties that started the whole compressed MP3 thing, and they did it for practical bandwidth reasons. It certainly wasn't the RIAA who decided that everything on Napster sounds like shit.
Of course, what the RIAA would like would be some sort of DVD-like authenticaiton/copy-protection mechanism, but it's going to be damn hard to move the existing CD and MP3 userbase over to something else.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
It must be nice to not need money to live. I wish I were you. Don't you like making money?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Right, but all of them (Usenet, Yahoo and Slashdot) were operated for a long time by enthusiastic volunteers for the fun of it, and were it not for idiotic banner ads, they would still be operated like that.
I am merely saying that it MAY very well run counter to your interests to do so.
Yes it might, but it doesn't, since removing the commercial aspect from the internet is exactly my goal. I liked the internet as it was 5 years ago, it was a vibrant place, people were motivated by gaining attention, not by accumulating money or patents. All useful services were already in place then. Everything was a bit harder to use, and that was good because it kept away the idiots.
--
You people will now have to buy your music, serves you little thieves right.
You will need money, you may not be familiar with it, it comes in bills and coins.... an album usally costs $15 or something like that.....
My opinions are the truth
PayPal.com and other solutions are not as well-suited for such distributed systems for a number of reasons. First of all, it places some dependence on a centralized, commercial service, requiring people to upload credit card information and such.
I spoke with Jim McCay for a while at the recent Berkeley conference on Anonymity and Unobservability, most of our discussion centered around the anonymity aspects of MojoNation. The micropayment scheme utilized is based on Chaumian ecash, which has the nice properties of being fairly small and straightforward.
User anonymity is ensured by the cryptographic blinding of ecash tokens during the withdrawal (issuing) stage of the protcol. Therefore, the issuing authority (MojoNation until some different infrastructure is set up) is not able to link payments received by "merchants" and the customers that used these tokens. The downside of Chaumian cash (as opposed to that of Stefan Brands) is that all verification to prevent double spending needs to occur on-line. This requires some central MojoNation issuing authority (or some distributed subset of varying authorities) that needs to be contacted for the verfication.
One main aspect of MojoNation that still lacks anonymity is actual peer-to-peer operations. Currently, these just have IP-layer connectivity for usability reasons...but this is hardly anonymous.
Jim pointed out that nothing prevents the eventual "plug-and-play" functionality of some anonymous channel - such as a mixnet (ZKS Freedom, Onion-Routing, etc.) - to be used between peer connections. While speed might be affected, the anonymous micropayments scheme fits right into a future addition of anonymous links.
It's going to be interesting to see MojoNation and other such systems develop.
napster didn't invent mp3s. I was downloading them long before napster was even thought of. Why use unreliable napster when you have tons of ftp sites and irc channels? Even usenet has some good mp3 groups.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
In the limit, I suppose we could agree that's true. But for mp3s to be useful, most people encode them at 128 or 256 k/s.
If you can't hear the difference between mp3s and CDs, or if you don't care, then you're just a lucky duck. You'll probably save yourself a bundle. If you want to hear the difference ("come to the dark side") just dig out a CD you have somewhere, and download the mp3. Do a little A-B comparison and you'll notice that the mp3 doesn't quit hit the highs and lows like the CD does. The resolution (detail of the music) is also decreased a bit by the mpeg compression.
Be careful otherwise you'll turn into a nut, ever looking for better sound quality and spending thousands of dollars on stupid things like speaker cables. But might as well listen to good quality music insofar as it's convenient ;-)
baldeepHow does this make it legal? Instead of downloading illegally copied music freely one will have to pay, albeit very little, it still doesn't seem to be the answer to the problems napster is facing.
It would seem like a good idea if it were record companies who were trying to provide this as a service to those interested in electronic copies of music, but it's not.
Why is there no spoon?
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
All the people saying: "wont the RIAA get more pissed because other people are profitting from it", "isnt it worse to sell copyright material illegally than give it away"... I think you are missing the point
surely the idea of this system would be that some of the money for each transaction GETS PAID BACK TO THE RECORD COMPANY (and hence, we can hope, eventually back to the artist).
In other words, combining Napster-like peer-to-peer digital music distribution method, with the artists, record companies and 'industry' happy because they still get money.
In other words, a compromise.
In other words, a Napster that the RIAA will be happy with.
It seems like a great idea to me. I just cant believe none of you can read between the lines to see that without Taco spelling (haha!) it out for you.
MojoNation seperates the payment of the creation of the content from the delivery of the content.
Burris
I beleive that what Taco is saying is that, since he runs a site that draws most if not all of its revenue from advertising, it would be hypocritical of him to use Junkbuster to block ads on other sites, thus depriving them of their revenue.
Personally, I'd support micropayments on /., with the notion that there was a periodic cap of say, $5 or $10 per year. What I gain from reading /. far outstrips that payment.
pooptruck
Sorry for the lack of response here from us Mojo Nation developers.
The source code was uploaded as a tar.gz to sourceforge on Sunday afternoon. The binaries should be available tomorrow (August 1st) sometime in the afternoon or early evening. We've been without good connectivity for the weekend while at defcon (read: none of us had modems or an isp to dial into since defcon's net access had such a poor uptime).
PS I'll be surprised if anyone actually notices this comment since I posted it 36 hours later..
There's a new organization called Fairtunes.com where you can send a mini-payment ($1, $5, etc.) to the musical artist of your choice. It's an attempt at the "tipping jar" model of artist remuneration.
I think it's worth checking out.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Hi! I'm Zooko, Chief Hunchback at Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow.
Until last Saturday, Mojo Nation was a secret project that only four coders had ever touched. As of Saturday, it became a public open source project.
We have a lot of work to do, starting by fixing the bugs in the beta and writing protocol documentation.
I just wanted to make it clear that the "tipping" feature is intended for users to voluntarily pay the legitimate content provider who deserves the credit for the content that you are viewing. This is separate from the Mojo payments that you pay to other users in return for use of their disk space and bandwidth.
Also I want to point out that Mojo Nation is useful for any type of content. You can define a new content type by editing a simple XML template. We currently have templates for music, Project Gutenberg-style texts, Debian package files, and World Wide Web pages. (I couldn't find a list of the valid fields for an RPM package file at 3:00 A.M. at DefCon, so I hope someone else out there will create that template.)
I'm glad you folks are interested in Mojo Nation. I think it is a deeply important idea, and I'm really excited about it. Keep your eye on the SourceForge site -- things should start really moving now that Mojo Nation is public knowledge!
Regards,
Zooko
who thinks this "I'd pay a micro-payment to yank banner ads from websites I frequent" is ironic.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Just get a text-based browser, or play with yours to get it text-based.
I have nothing against Napster. I use it all the time as a way of getting music that isn't available commercially, checking out bands before I buy the CDs, and generally spreading an art form. I put my art online for all to see because I value the spreading of information and art more than I value getting money. This isn't Napster though. This is somebody charging for a service that should be free.
half-a-cent to view a webpage once MAYBE. Quarter to listen to the audio track...ONCE! I do hope Rob didnt mean quarter to download the track and keep it. That's insane!
Derek Greene
You're right, of course. I noticed that much, anyway.
I don't agree with the laws but that doesn't mean I don't have to obey them.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
Junkbuster has suffers from the same problems as spam-fighting email filters. You are either going to eliminate non-banner ad content or you are going to still get some banner ads. There are no perfect heuristics which will allow you to determine what is a banner ad and what is not.
Let's make an assumption that there WAS such a hueristic and that the Junkbuster 'solution' was widely used. What are some possible results of that?
I can understand many people's dissatisfaction with the current web advertising model, but subverting the means by which the content you enjoy is created is counter productive.
The biggest reason why subscriptions don't work on the net is that there is no way to try them out to know if you are really getting what you want. Me, I was a regular reader of Slate, and actually was one of the few that paid a subscription for it. But I completely understand how hard it would be for anybody else to plunk down their money without ever reading the magazine.
/. ?? Most certainly yes. Even for content I was unsure of I would spring a few cents for. Once! Of course, the micropayments would have to flow through a trusted source...
Now micropayments, on the other hand, are less of a problem. Would I pay $0.01 per day for
-rt-
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
People will pay for content. (At least I regularly do.) But they are generally not interested in paying a random person for a plentiful resource.
What this is is some moron seeing ebay, and seeing Napster, and asking himself how he can cash in on this phenomena without having a clue about what is going on. Some clueburgers.
1. The equivalent is available free.
2. He is at more legal risk than Napster.
What is going to happen is that nobody will bother to show up, and even if they did the lawyers would show up right after. And yet another huckster will be left thinking that he would have made it rich had he just had the right idea before someone else did.
*sigh*
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
> I'd pay a micro-payment to yank banner ads from websites I frequent.
Why, when you can do it for free with Junkbuster?
http://www.junkbusters.com
Micro payments? I think that is the wrong way to look at it. First of all, the internet and the web is and MUST remain free for the whole world to benefit. If some wise corporation starts making money with this, we're history. At least I know I wouldn't pay or support any micro-payment system. I'll go full time to Freenet instead.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Actually /. owes me money. Taco forces me to obsessively reload the page and read all the trolling-for-Scooby Doo and highly-rated-linux-rules-platitudes posts. I'm a highly paid professionaly so all this wasted time is coming out of my bottom line. I think the US government should look into filing a suit against /. for the damage it does to the productivity of computer professionals. I'm sure there are internal memos between CmdrTaco and Hemos acknowledging /. addictive effects and targeting children. Just look at the anime cartoon character on the front page!!
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Autonomous agents? Micropayments? New paradigm of information distribution? Is Nicholas Negroponte[1] somehow involved?
*HEAD EXPLODES*
[1]Negroponte is head of the MIT Media lab and use to write a column in the back of Wired that never failed to mention one of these buzzwords.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
What fun is pirating music if you have to PAY for it?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Would you pay $10 for a free "patch" (most likely Napigator) that lets you use Napster even after the official servers get shut down?
Some people would. God bless eBay.
For more information, click here.
I don't understand why so many people think the Napster model is the way to go in the for-pay distribution business. For all its glories, Napster is, quite frankly, a hassle. Even when I manage to find an offering of what I'm looking for, about 1 in two of my Napster downloads succeed. Not to mention the times that I've invested half an hour in getting something from a person running a 28.8 modem only to have them shut off the machine before the download completes. Why would anyone offering product for money retain a distribution model that relies on a loose confederation of oft-unreliable amateurs? I'm willing to put up with it if it doesn't cost me anything, but if I'm being charged, I want something better. They'll sell a lot more of their stuff if they simply put put the material on a solid server with a nice fat-pipe connection.
By the way, if Napster ever goes off-line, there's a site that provides a browser interface to the Gnutella stuff without your having to run Gnutella itself (take the Napster hassles and multiply by 3 and you have Gnutella). www.gnute.com.
Think of slate.com, for example. Originally a subscription based service, Microsoft gave slate.com's founders (Michael Kinsley-I think??) boatloads of money to get the service up and running and did not require the service to make a profit for several years. However, not enough people came to make it successful and they just recently made the service free.
The only subscription based service that I can think of as doing well is the Motley Fool, which is a finance site. And I think that they offer up to the second info, which makes it so attractive to the stock market set.
Just a final thought if I have to start paying micropayments for content, does that mean I *still* have to pay ISP fees?
This is another view of the world.
Interesting idea, and the thought of paying micro payments to view/hear/whatever content has got me thinking a bit.
:-)
The first problem is that we need an open-source, reliable and secure digital cash protocol for this to work over the entire net. Mojo doesn't seem to fit this bill, because I would imagine (and I am guessing here) that it's going to be just a bunch of CGI's. I also predict that people will use them to launder credit card numbers etc. through them, but anyway....
Once we have a really good digital cash protocol that everybody accepts and starts using, we need to then work out exchange rates dynamically and properly - if the internet currency is different to real currency then the price you pay today for your content will be different to what you paid yesterday.
There is then the problem of security. Ideally we would want a peer-to-peer system whereby your client pays the site directly. The problem here is how does the site get the money back out of the net economy into his bank, and seeing as all he is actually receiving is a string of bits, what is going to stop people printing (or rather sprintf()'ing) their own money?
Because of these issues, we need to get a broker involved somewhere. The broker is going to need to take his cut, and the broker can probably also fix the exchange rates thereby controlling the value of the currency. If the broker wanted to shut out a given country, he could just fix the exchange rate of that country high, etc. That's a lot of power and one that has traditionally fallen with governments rather than companies attempting to make a profit. There may be a conflict in intrests, so maybe the way to do this is to actually get a government to do this, but then we need to ask which one? All very complicated.
It's only after those issues are addressed that we can really start talking about micropayments en masse. This particular site is cute (legally dubious), but it doesn't scale up outside onto the rest of the net. Maybe one day somebody will actually do something about this and the quality of content might even rise. I'd put more hours into my website if I though I was going to get money from it!
I'd pay a micro-payment to yank banner ads from websites I frequent.
The reaction to this statement has been interesting to say the least. Half of the posts I've seen today are responses like "Use junkbuster, stupid", or "Are you too lazy/stupid/ignorant to control what comes down your own connection (that you paid for)?"
Right now, most banners are controlled by some autonomous "advertising service", be it DoubleClick, AdFu (heh), or even some web hosting services (like Yahoo/GeoCities). They're easy to block: they all come from a specific domain; route *.doubleclick.net into oblivion and you're done. Ads have been "tacked on" to sites to increase (or produce) revenue, mainly because its easy for smaller sites to do this than to seek out ad content themselves. All a site owner has to do is sign on with an ad provider, and they're provided with a steady stream of advertisers that wouldn't possibly be interested in them alone.
What if ads were indistinguishable from the regular content, at least in terms of the HTTP semantics? What if slashdot just stuck those Lineo ads in some static content in the front page, pulling lineo.png out of the same directory as a slashdot.png or even that ugly Billy Gates image? Televisions don't change to the "advertising channel" at high noon when the network overlord declares it to be "ad time", why do most websites pull static images from addresses like http://ads.foo.com/annoy-user-with-ad.cgi ?
If ad content was blended seamlessly with a site, then the micropayments idea would make sense, at least to the content provider trying to make a living off of his/her website. The world would get the Slashdot with commercials every ten minutes, while the "subscribers" would see the feature-length HBO version. You're free to ignore the ads, and you're even free to set up a fancy perl script to filter them if you can.
It's the unpredictability of where ads occur that causes them to be viewed, right? I block web ads easily through squid, but I haven't rigged up a device to guess what time television commercials come on to filter those.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
any old joe can encode using crappy xing or low bit rate blade/lame. even the cd rip might be crappy. and don't even talk about improper setting of id3 tags.
but if I can get Frau. encoded mp3's with clean rips and proper id3 tags; sure, I'd pay micropayments for them.
afterall, encoding with Frau. at 128k takes a lot of compute time to encode with this software. yes, its the best. but on my high end k7 system, it still takes hours to encode a whole cd album. running thru all 400+ of my cd's; well, it takes a rip/encode/name farm just to make finite work of it. even with the linux Frau. version (which is command line and batchable), I'd still pay small amounts for "blessed" and clean copies of mp3's.
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Oh boo hoo, so we all use junkbuster and nobody's idiot banner ads get through. OMFG, it's the collapse of the NEW ECONOMY!$#@! Nobody will be able to make money now that I'm not seeing yet another banner ad for Britney Spears' latest video or PUNCH THE MONKEY AND WIN $20 (just to name two typical pillars of web commmerce).
I am not required to help anyone's web page make money by looking at their banner ads or clicking on them. If they don't like that, they can institute a user login/password scheme of some type. Not helping someone make money != stealing. I am downloading their content across my connection on my money and my time. They set up a server and opened it to the world, so arguing that they deserve some sort of compensation is rather moot. Companies that embrace this business model should know what they're getting into.
I'd like to see a site that is actually making money off banner ads and isn't a porn/warez site.
----- The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they will be when you kill them.
Lets sell our illegal music instead of just giving it away. A whole new way to breedy greedy people, prevent freedom of information, and start law suits. Yay.
The idea of making sure everyone is contributing evenly is interesting, however...
Would that make CmdrTaco a half cent whore?
Are you sure it's a minority? IINM, the whole music industry is currently marketed towards immature people. Well maybe still a technical minority, but quite substantial nonetheless. High school kiddies listen to a lot of music.
I couldn't help but notice the comment about how it'd be nice to rip ads from webpages. But, I was distracted by the flashing at the top of http://slashdot.org/ telling me that I should be IBM Certified.
Nice. Rough night?
Why is there no spoon?
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
Don't be naive.  You don't listen to it on the radio for free.  You pay for that music every time you buy a product from somebody that advertises.  As the saying goes, there really isn't any such thing as a free lunch.
I don't know if this would work for the big artist (RIAA Fiends), but there are honest, nice people, out there that would like to give back to the small artist. It's already starting to work to some extent in the Blogger Community using a different serivice...
I for one would love to see micropayments take their place on the web. The only problem I would have is giving away too much.
-----------------------------
Mojo will rule the formats, for I, Mojo Jojo have created it as the all-powerful format, thereby ensuring that Mojo will rule the formats, which will allow me to carry out my evil scheme!
This is possible because I, Mojo Jojo, created the plan which allowed me to develop the format with which I can conquer Townsville!
(Oh, has anyone got a banana?)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They want to create the first file-sharing economy of agents, servers, and search engines in which senders and receivers can agree on prices for each transaction and use micropayments to get paid
AMIX (American Information Exchange) was the first "market for paid file sharing" I'm aware of, and I think there have been a few others.
AMIX used a centralized file and transaction server and proprietary software for the clients.
(The latter was an error IMHO. They could have saved a lot of time and money by writing for VT-100-emultaing terminal programs to go cross-platform. Their project started before Mosaic came out, launched and died before commercial use of the Internet, the web, and browsers-as-OS-neutral-platforms rose).
They died for lack of promotion to get a critical mass of merchants and customers involved.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I would only use this service under these circumstances: 1. The file I am looking for is rare 2. I am guaranteed that I will receive that file in high quality format (or as high as I am willing to pay for...) 3. Fast and reliable connection Just another thought... this service could possibly be used to transfer illegal documents, say... U.S. nuclear secret. A discontent U.S. scientist could transfer this secret to... say a Iraq spy and make a few bucks while doing it...
The content I enjoy is or was for the longest time created by enthusiastic volunteers (Usenet, Yahoo, Slashdot etc.). The internet was not intended to be and should not be about money; advocating solutions such as junkbuster or WebWasher is therefore rational.
Furthermore, I am the sole owner of my computer, my monitor and my bandwidth, and I will control how my property is used; downloading and displaying blinking and distracting banner ads is not one of the uses I elect to sanction.
--
Coem no. Thsi si a populra siet, peopel expetc reasonabyl hihg standarsd, nto hafl arsde shti spellign. I knwo whta yuo will sya, "tI wsa a tyop", btu ni teh titel? I dot'n thikn os!
Sotr ti otu!
I do understand what you are saying, but it is not economically accurate. When you purchase a product, you make the decision "I'd rather have the product than the money" sheerly on the basis of how you value the alternative uses for the money and the use of the product. You do not consider the advertising in your decision.
And it is not accurate to reply, "but the price is higher because of the advertising" because prices are determined solely by what the market will bear, not by cost of ingredients or manufacture.
4% plus 25 cents is way too expensive. It makes microdonations infeasible.
If you use something like e-gold, you end up losing about a total of 4% in the put-money-in, transfer, get-money-out sequence, regardless of the size and number of transactions. So you easily put $20 in, dole it out to hundreds of musicians in pennies, and over $19 would come through. All the musician needs is to create a free e-gold account and list it on their home page.
If you can use PayPal (i.e. if you're American and the music group is American), you can send money for no transfer cost.
If they were really serious about providing a service, they'd also list other means by which you can pay the artists directly, instead of insisting that all the money go through their own hands. Also, read the FAQ, they aren't audited by any third party, and their reasoning for why they wouldn't just pocket the money is very unconvincing (hmm, thousands of dollars going through your service every day to already-rich musicians, many of which you don't listen to and some of the most profitable you actively dislike, but even given the free choice, you'd rather send it to them than pocket it or redirect it to your own favorite musicians. Yeah, right).
Besides, the musicians have not said that they are willing to be paid this way. I would much rather give money to musicians who give permission for their music to be freely distributed.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
What's to stop me setting up a Napster-like sefver in Iraq?
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined. -- Homer Simpson
My biggest beef isn't encoding, since my computer area is noisy enough to offset any differences between the encoders that I can hear. No, my copmplaint is with people who have ugly ripping errors, gaps, skips, bad intros/outros and whatnot. For chrissakes, people, LISTEN to your freaking rips before you encode, or at least listen to your mp3s before sharing.
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If you establish an account with E-Gold, you can give or receive nearly infinitesimal sums of money electronically. Of course, they take a cut of it, but someone has to manage it. And, the nice thing is that you can PAY into it using your currency, and then give gold, and then the PAYEE can turn it from gold into THEIR currency, at will.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The article is a little vague but it seemed like they were going to ask record companies (i.e. sony was mentioned) if they wanted to participate instead of just letting people trade anything. Is that the case? If so, you won't find any Metallica on there.
I can't see anybody *wanting* to make micropayments for something that they can get for free on napster or a half-dozen other services. I don't think this system is going to be the exact same.
As for paying for viewing sites ad-free, I don't really want that to catch on. Because then people like me who aren't going to be doing that (and who's junkbuster keeps on breaking mysteriously) will have to look at ads saying "MAKE THIS AD GO AWAY FOR JUST $.25!!" So annoying.
Exactly one of which is not now, at least nominally, supported by advertising; in particular banner ads.
Furthermore, I am the sole owner of my computer, my monitor and my bandwidth, and I will control how my property is used; downloading and displaying blinking and distracting banner ads is not one of the uses I elect to sanction.We could argue about the "sole owner of your bandwidth" issue, but I understand your point. I am not saying that you CAN'T legally, or even ethically, use junkbuster. I am merely saying that it MAY very well run counter to your interests to do so. There may always be people willing to provide useful and interesting content completely free (including free of advertising), but I don't think you can count on that.
Damnit rob ispell much?