Where Music Will Come From

em.a18 writes "There is a good article in the NYTimes about how we use music and how it changes after Napster. The article even suggests some good business models. Nicely done!" Yeah you need a free registration to read it, but it's a good piece. I like the quote 'With digitization, music went from being a noun, to a verb, once again. '

Comments

Who needs registration...

[MadFarmAnimalz]

... when you can just go here?

No Registration Required

[DarkZero]

The story, no registration required.

You can all find this yourselves by going to this page and looking for the same headline. They have all of the NYT articles without any registration required.

Re:GNUtella

[Evangelion]

It's Gnutella, not GNUtella.

Gnutella, much like gnuplot, has gnu in it's name for reasons independant of the GNU project. The original versions of Gnutella didn't even have source released at all, let alone under the GPL.

Re:where music _should_ come from

[Golias]

Hundreds of years ago, people like Bach didn't care who played their music, and I'm sure they wouldn't care who played recordings of their music if that had been at all possible.

Setting aside the incredibly dumb anachronism in that statement...

People like Bach were paid by patrons (in Bach's case, a Lutheran Church).

The patronage system fell away as the middle class grew, and artists discovered there was more money to be made by entertaining the masses than trying to anticipate the tastes of some snobby duke. Mass distribution of music (first as piano sheet music and player-piano rolls, later as recordings) lead to people copying it without paying for it, which lead to demands for more strident protection. For as long as there has been "popular" music, this has been an issue.

Why can't we be like that today? We need more open-source bands, using a GNU-style contract:

Then form one. Am I the only one getting tired of all these open-source "advocates" who keep talking about what everybody else needs to do for them.

I thought that the whole point of the Open Source software movement was supposed to be so people with ambition could contribute to the improvement of the code and that this would lead to better software. Some people seem to think the whole point of the GNU public license is to provide them with more free stuff.

Re:where music comes from

[d5w]

I was thinking about this while reading the article. Much of the music I actually listen to these days comes from another setting with different rules: social dance bands. (I'm thinking of contra dance here, but if someone tells me the same applies to other types of social dance I'll believe it.) The primary setting for these bands is at a dance, interacting directly with a floor full of dancers. What's valued in a good dance band is not just the quality of music but the ability to work with the crowd. A recording is an unacceptable substitute in this setting, however perfect.

All the focus on recordings misses the settings where music and recordings still don't mix easily. I buy the recordings of my favorite dance bands, and I'll listen to them as background or to learn tunes, but it's the participatory setting that makes this kind of music worthwhile, and not even a DJ can produce that kind of effect at a contra dance.

Here's the solution

[crosbie]

A business model that will work even without copyright:

http://www.cyberspaceengineers.org/tda/tda.html

Re:Studio costs

[richieb]

If I'm just playing a guitar and singing, there is no need for $100,000 studio or many expensive engineers.

All I'm saying that you don't need all that expensive stuff to produce good music. In fact just take a look at the record that won the Grammies - plain acoustic stuff.

I get the feeling that listeners are getting tired of overproduced music and are looking for more authentic stuff.