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Digital Music's 2001 Winners and Losers
An Anonymous Coward writes: "MP3 Newswire is running two articles that contain their top 8 MP3 winners for 2001 as well as those who top the loser category. So who is this year's #1 winner? The legal industry for all the billable hours they got to roll up thanks to RIAA and MPAA lawsuits. It's a pretty interesting read and the two articles solicit reader opinions on other potential contenders. I can think of Dmitri Sklyarov right off the bat, but I admit I'm not sure if he won for getting the charges dropped or lost for getting arrested in the first place. Rolling Stone has also run their own digital music winners and losers list for 2001."
Dmitri Sklyarov had nothing to do with digital music--he was arrested for a DMCA violation in cracking Adobe's ebooks. Get it right.
Shouldn't we have been on the loser's list somewhere?
Do not but albums from corperate record lables. For one, the music is dry and usually tasteless (with some exceptions) but mainly because you just support them. Buy from indie lables such as dischord, kill rockstars or who ever. go to the ultimate band list (www.ubl.com) and find YOUR own music. We don't have to buy their stuff....the indie music fight has been going on longer then the open source movement, get into it!
"Allez Cusine!"
"Fair or not, RIAA president Hillary Rosen and Osama Bin Laden are interchangeable in the eyes of many Net savvy consumers."
This type of comparison, especially when made in major news publications, is just stupidity. Drawing an analogy between people who do/have done entirely different "bad" things is just inane. I find it hard to believe that this kind of "reporting" can get past the people who look over the publications of Mp3.com and even harder to believe that some people actually agree with the assertion.
Musicnet.com and Pressplay.com were such jokes. They wanted people to pay monthly fees for less-than-cd-quality songs, and then one wouldn't allow them to even burn the downloads, while the other limited you as to what you can burn and can't. How stupid can you get?
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
My thoughts exactly and the thought of million of other people. This goes without saying that the consumer, given enough information and will, CAN have the last word and win, these people often forget the one BASIC rule of consuming... you're SUPPOSED TO DELIVER A GOOD to the customer, you're supposed to SELL something that a consumer WANTS. If something better comes out, people will naturally go to the better offering, which can be any or a mix of variable such as quality features and price. We don't see FORD trying to force us to use 1980 car technology, if they see competition doing something good that adds value, they copy it or try to better it, and they also INNOVATE, you know, that buzzword. What did the RIAA do since 20 years on the technology side, aside from sitting in their pile of money and INNOVATING RESTRICTIONS instead of giving the CONSUMER a better experience, by investing cash in better audio system, heck with all the money they've got, we could have had digital radio STANDARD in north american cars by now! but no, they had to act like old close-minded people that are affraid of change. As a consumer, I don't have to PAY for their incompetence nor their buisness mistakes. I have NOTHING against monopoly or big corporation, as long as they deliver and they make me, the consumer, feel satisfied with the merchandise and if they screw me, well they could at least be clever enough so that I don't notice and still be happy with the merchandise content/quality I've purchased.
We're far from a victory, but it's going somewhere, we're still in the part of public awareness, people are starting to realize that, the napster case and subsequent stories about how the industry is ripping off artists were even stuff found in my local newspaper, which was surprising (usually that stuff stays on the net and doesn't cross media, like the dimitry case for example). Anyways, they won't be able to keep it up, they can stick a zillion protection scheme, raise the price as much as they want to, when they're gonna render the medium useless, people will simply switch medium... like it's the case right now. A lot of us, non-rich, non-marketting, non-ceo, non-buisness people saw decent audio compression comming, if they didn't, well too bad... that kind of retarded reaction usually KILL companies, they should be grateful that they are loaded enough to survive such a blattant mistake, and put their energy on a new buisness model that is a PLUS to the consumer, instead of putting fences everywhere to prefent their cash cow from jumping off their property.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
To people developing products based on their technology, maybe. To the average musician who wants to put their own music on their website? NO. The implications were at one point that could happen, in Jan 2001, but Thomson and Fraunhaugher decided not to persue it. Had they done so, a musician would have had to pay approx. $2000 to license the technology to play or stream MP3s from their own website. Regardless of their motives, they are assisting the independent musicians and consumers. While expanding the customer base due to the recognition factor.
The reason that so many people are still using MP3 over Ogg is the same one as why 33 Million subscribe to AOL. It works for them. Besides, Ogg hasn't gotten the kind of publicity that MP3 has. Ogg.com is Olson's GreenHouse Gardens website. I know musicians who use whatever it takes to get their music heard Real, MP3, WMA, even wav files. Seriously though until someone comes along with a player/ripper that operates as part of the users current media player, doesn't take a quasi-genius to set up, then it's going to remain so. Make it as easy as AOL to set up, and the world will beat a path to your door. (at least that's the hope)
There is at least one thing that I can think of that blows away even Ogg and that's called a CD. or a 16 bit 44.1K Wav file. ANY filetype using compression will not sound as good as the original, not that what you get isn't acceptable, just as FM radio is "acceptable". But if you want to talk sound quality, talk wav or CD.
I believe a big winner should be digital media manufatures. I have spent more money storing MP3's than on playing them. I bought a bigger hard drive to store all the MP3's I ripped from my CD collection. I upgraded the flash memory card on my MP3 player, not to mention the huge stacks of blank CDR discs for making CD's from downloaded MP3's and to play in my Aiwa MP3 car stereo.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Like the RIAA, the FCC is also a winner/loser in 2001. Why?
Pre-2001: With some friendly advice from monster media companies like Clear Channel, the FCC ended ownership controls on radio stations.
The Commission claimed that ending controls would be OK, because Internet radio and other fancy-pants technologies would be levellers that would allow anyone into broadcasting. So Clear Channel & the rest promptly gobbled up the radio stations and turned our airwaves into a cultural wasteland.
End of 2001: The FCC remains strangely silent as the RIAA and their ilk work on chasing the amateur, non-profit (read college radio),and independent webcasters out of the market. Meanwhile, the rest of the digital broadcasting market is nowhere. So much for the FCC's BS about the diversity and the promise of the Internet & other technologies!
End result: If the FCC is a sly and cunning pawn of corporate America, it's a definite winner. This cunning political squeeze play has given Clear Channel and the other big media companies control over digital and analog broadcasting for almost nothing! And the RIAA is pretty darn happy too.
On the other hand, if the FCC is a guardian of the public interest, it's one hell of a loser. Talk about a patsy! They let the media giants take over the American airwaves and stand around with their thumbs in their mouths while the same megacorps usurp the digital realm as well!
Whether the FCC full of frauds or fools, it certainly succeeeded at something in 2001.
Deep in the ocean are treasures beyond compare; but if you seek safety, it is on the shore.
Huh? That makes no sense. Presumably the k numbers you quote are bitrates (kbps). What those numbers signify is how much space a second (or any given amount of time) of audio takes up. That is, a 320kbps file takes up the same amount of space whether it's MP3 or Ogg or AVI.
Of course, the quality isn't necessarily the same. But these compression formats (MP3 and Ogg, at least) are psychoacoustic -- compression is based on what whoever created the format thinks humans will and won't notice. So there's no way of mathematically comparing quality between formats.
It's true that (if I remember correctly) listening tests have generally shown Ogg to have better quality than MP3 at the same bitrate. But I encoded all my CDs to ~150kbps MP3s, and I can't tell the difference between the MP3 and the CD. So, yeah, if I reencoded all my CDs to Ogg, I could probably encode them at ~120kbps and get the same quality. But with hard drives as big and cheap as they are, really, who cares? Ogg is better than MP3, but just isn't superior enough.
Who must continually suck at the bitter fountain of filth spewed by the RIAA, as it gently chokes the life from every alternative source of music in existence. Never mind the entities involved; when you pay more than ten dollars for a CD, you are being screwed. And not only are you being screwed, but the artists themselves are being screwed.
... well, imagine music as a sort of cheddar cheese. And picture the average music listener as a ... a cheese afficianado. Now, say that this cheese costs about four dollars a pound to make, and that you could, if all cheese was supplied directly, pay about six dollars per pound of delicious cheese. Everyone's happy, the cheesemakers get paid a decent living, and the better their cheese is, the more they sell.
Think of it this way. Imagine music as
But WAIT!
Hold on!
Now, all of a sudden, some middleman named Zagat the Great steps in and starts telling people which cheese is the best. And, to top it off, he starts packaging that cheese in special wrappers. Of course, to make sure everything's good for him, Mr. Zagat the Great then ups the price to about sixteen dollars per pound, taking eleven and a half dollars for himself and leaving only half a dollar for the cheese maker. Everyone who wants to sell lots of cheese must go to Mr. Zagat, but in exchange for being famous the cheesemakers get very little in return. Anyone who wants to sell the popular cheeses and thus become profitable, must also suck up to Mr. Zagat, even though Mr. Zagat isn't doing anything to make the cheese. He's just supplying wrapping paper.
To make matters worse, the cheese eaters of the world now have to pay nearly three times the price they used to! And why? Because Mr. Zagat refuses to let anyone else sell the good cheeses! Of course, there are some special places, like Thailand and maybe Hong Kong, where you can by the very same cheese for about five dollars a pound, but Mr. Zagat dismisses that as inferior quality. Secretly, though, he starts funneling inferior cheeses into his own stocks, because now that he controls the entire cheese kingdom, he can decide what is paid for what, without giving a flip about competition or quality.
All of a sudden, some people discover some form of "magic that allows them to exchange the cheese freely among themselves, without paying Mr. Zagat's outrageous prices and the like. Of course, everyone who consumes is happy with this. But Mr. Zagat is not, since it threatens his grip on the cheese industry. So he wipes out anyone who uses the "magic" and declares them to be unethical.
Soon, though, some people suggest a compromise. People can pay a dollar and a half per quarter-pound of cheese, and thus pick what cheese they like, and how much of each cheese to receive via the "magic." But Mr. Zagat says that's entirely wrong too, unless he can tell you where to eat it and what things to eat along with it. That way, he'll at least still have cultural control over the things you do and use, and thus sustain his presence within the economy.
Naturally, that's stupid. So people resort to ferrying cheese in secret, all as Mr. Zagat wails away at the "unfairness" of him not getting his 200%.
Never mind the brazen and utterly ruthless manner in which he foists second-rate cheese onto the world with a wide grin, knowing that no one can oppose him so long as he controls the sources.
Now, who in the seven names of Sega's failed game consoles could say that the world is a better place because of Mr. Zagat?
Yeah, that's right. No one but him.
And that's why the consumer is the real loser.
Thanks so much for bringing this up! Both articles claim that Radio is a loser, and I couldn't agree more. You've pinpointed the exact reason why that is, but most people ignore it, and it's really sad. The radio waves were a hell of a lot more dynamic even three or four years ago, but they've become as dried up and dull as PressPlay or its ilk.
This is a clear case of consumers losing, and I think it's the big reason why people have flocked online to get their music, rather than listen to the radio. It's strange though, because most everyone I know doesn't download as much new stuff as old stuff that they've enjoyed hearing for years.
If you're going to be fed something that you didn't choose, it'd better damn well be great and exciting! If it's not, it's better to eat the stuff that you want to eat, even if it is the same old thing.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
(Score: -1, Offtopic)
IANAL, obviously
Your choice, and your loss. You might, however, read Section 0, Paragraph 2 of the GPL. It is often overlooked:
The output of gcc is not a derivative work (or "work based on the Program") - it is assembly language, with certain strings in it like "compiled by gcc 2.xx", but bears very little resemblance to any actual gcc code. Similar arguments apply to binutils (the assembler and linker). [Obviously, if you compile gcc with itself, you'll get a derivative work of gcc ... but not because you used gcc to compile it!]
But wait! I hear you say. Doesn't gcc come with a runtime library which every program links to? Way ahead of you, bro. From the comments at the top of libgcc1.c:
Then later, in case you missed it the first time:
Similar disclaimers appear in other files that might be construed as "GPL-tainting the output" of a program - the bison templates, for example. I can only conclude that the intent of the FSF is not only quite clear (only to cover distribution of their software, not to restrict use of it) but legally unambiguous.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
...but do not count out big business yet. Seems to me that consumers and their interests do NOT always win. For example:
:)
- I can only choose one cable company, so support phone wait times are up to 6 hours!
- I can only choose one local phone carrier, so I pay rather a lot for that too
- I buy a movie in Hong Kong (where I work often): and I cannot watch it at home. (Okay, I admit, thans to vlc on my Linux box, I can!)
- Living as I do in Camada, I have essentially one option for most air travel (Air Canada), so it is very expensive and service is not good.
- If I want medical care, I get into a political morass... where my patient interests are about last on the list of priorities.
Meaning, while the current P2P sitiation gives rise to some hope, we could otoh very well go back to being controlled by corporate interests, with no freedom to copy music, play it where we want, etc. I would say it's 50-50 right now: will the current free model survive?
Meanwhile I'd better start Morpheus and download what I can while I can.
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
Gimmie a break. Napster Took from Artists and gave NOTHING back to them. Maybe a few bands got some publicity, but that don't pay the rent.
Sorry, my friend, Napster took from the RECORDING INDUSTRY, not the artists. The RIAA had already raped all they could from the artists, so there really wasn't much left that Napster could take...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"