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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."
Shouldn't we have been on the loser's list somewhere?
Personally I consider MP3 itself to be a loser. It is owned and controlled by a cartel (Fraunhaugher and Thomson Multimedia) and people have to pay out their asses to use it. That is what prompted me to take a moral stance and rerip my entire ~160 cd collection into Ogg Vorbis (350k!). And yes, I know about the threats made against the Ogg project by Thomson......
Seriously folks.... why are so many people still using MP3? It can't hold a candle to Ogg Vorbis or even Windows Media. It isn't open, it doesn't sound nearly as good as it has been hyped to, it produces files that are much bigger than an equivalent Ogg or WMA and well..... it's just lame now.
Here's an example of what I mean if you don't believe me:
I have a 350k Ogg of Prisoner of Society by The Living End that takes up 9.07mb on my hdd and the same song as a 320k MP3 takes up 10.5mb!
Now we have some new technologies:
If I want to hear great new music, what should I do. Right now, even with the second list, I am stuck with the set up of the first list. If I am an artist (I am not...) And I want to get paid for my work, I also am stuck with the first list.
As I see it the week link in the chain is promotion. Slashdot is a wonderful community. We have a list of quickies for the day. How about a weekly feature which posts Free(libre) music. Set it up like the Interviews where each person posts a link to an MP3/Ogg/tar.gz/bz2 file and then the top five/ten rated posts get listed and sent out to the sites that promote music.
Yes It will democratize music, with all that it implies. I don't think there is any way to get around it. Niche music like free jazz will probably not be very popular...but we may be surprized with some of the crossovers.
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
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.
If the law is so complex that you need a degree to understand it, and so full of holes that you can hire someone to win for you just by finding them.. then isn't something wrong? if an OS had similar problems - loopholes/bugs then no-one would take it ser...... oh, yeah, now i get it...
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
This is simply untrue - FUD. You can compile closed/proprietary stuff with GPL'ed tools. It's the code that's protected, not the use of the tools.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
You can still find Xolox out there, you need a small "patch" to allow it to continue working. Being that it uses the gnutella-net, it's steady as she goes, Cap'n! :)
Trolling is a art,
Please don't compare someone who has killed members of his own species to someone who is trying to run a profitable business (no matter what you think of that business.)
I agree that you cannot really compare Rosen, Valenti & Co. to the likes of Bin Laden, certainly the urgency of stopping the latter is much greater do to the immediate threat his evil poses to peoples lives - but we still need to be aware that they to represent a deep evil, and a long term threat to the our freedom as a people that is in many ways more scary then that of religious fundamentalists for the simple reason that is is not as certain to fail.
It is easy to paint these people as simply being the ugly side of capitalism - after all it is at the nature of our system that people, and corporations, act in their own best interest, even when they are everything but utilitarian - but it is not that simple. They are not just ruthless capitalists trying to squeeze some money out of us - and what they are attacking is not just our wallets, but our fundamental freedom and self determination in the digital age.
The future that the corporate overlords from whoom our friends Rosen, Valenti and Co. are lackeys have dreamed up a is one where all the information that people access and process is completely controlled by machines loyal not to their users - but to those very corporations. They are working toward establishing a world where the machines which will continue to grow more and more intimately integrated into our very identity and existance are not tools for freedom but chains of bondage - where the promise of unlimited communication becomes instead a reality where our lives have been invaded by machines that control every word we say and hear. And in the name of "security" and "anti-piracy" they are hijacking the governments that are supposed to guard our freedom to force this world down our throats whether we want it or not.
The threat of an information age where the machines we use to access information are not controlled by ourselves, but rather control us, is a distopia beyond the imaginations of the most paranoid technophobes. The road they are trying to lead us down, and for which the resistance is small, is one of the most profoundly dangerous threats to the very meaning of being human that we have every faced - in very real terms, these are people who are selling out humanity to an unholy union of corporations and machines.
Let us not forget that evil wears many faces.
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.
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.
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."
Politics makes strange bedfellows, and your lover one day may be your killer the next. So its time we acknowledge our corporate and even political allies -- if only temporarily, and on this specific issue -- in the fight against the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA for our rights regarding fair use (and beyond) of intellectual property. This is simply about interests. Right and wrong are for the most part relative -- for some things, such as murder and rape, there is a clear right and wrong. For others, such as intellectual property, all is relative and a matter of your viewpoint. It is in our interests that we be able to trade any files we want freely.
So, here's a listof our two allies and the reasons they're our allies. They consist of the audio-hardware industry (i.e., MP3-player makers), the computer hardware industry (i.e., computer OEMs such as Gateway, Dell, IBM, etc etc), and the Hard-drive industry (which is in kept very profitable largely due to people who want to store 80GB of mp3s or wmas).
1. SonicBlue (RioVolt), Archos (Jukebox HD), Intel (Concert Audio), Apple (iPod), TDK (Mojo), and other makers of MP3-players. They are basically immune from any of the RIAA/MPAA's ridiculous attempts to pin responsibility on the makers of a product for the users actions with that product (as, I believe, if the constitution is upheld, so will software developers eventually be). It is not in their interest at all that music be solidly protected and not traded online -- in fact, this is against their interests. The MP3-player business depends on the trading of music files over the internet. Without the swapping of millions of mp3, wma, and ogg files over Morpheus and LimeWire, the companies that make MP3-players are out of business (if that's their only product) or out of one profitable market (if that's one of their products). These companies most likely will fight and fight hard on our side and against the MPAA/RIAA. Right now, most of them are keeping hands off, because business is fine for them, and we are fighting their indirect legal battle for them. But should the restriction of trading threaten their business, they'll step in.
2. Gateway, Dell, IBM, Compaq, Apple, HP, and other OEMs. Part of what supplies their business is the online world of trading. People buy computers expecting to be able to use them to trade sound and video files, and to store enormous amounts of these files on them. Without that ability, their sales will drop, as their products will be less useful. If protections are build directly into the hardware, sales will really take a hit, as people will be more likely to stick with their current systems.
3. Makers of hard drives. The fact that MP3s and WMAs are small for the amount of information they contain hasn't stopped people from obtaining huge amounts of them in GB.
These are three relatively obvious allies that I thought of off the top of my head. There may be many more. Indeed, our allies in one cause -- i.e., MP3-makers in the cause against the RIAA -- may be our foes in another (i.e., the right to modify their firmware software and distribute the modifications). However, that is not relevant. You use and rally people and organizations where they help you; where they don't, you fight against them. It is up to us to figure out who should be our allies for for obvious profit-margin reasons and alert them to the reality of how their interest lies in supporting us.
In response to this, please feel free to comment on any of the 3 allies I mentioned and add some of your own.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen