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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.
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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...
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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.