Slashdot Mirror


The AudioGalaxy Story

mouloid writes "Now that Audiogalaxy is blocking all songs. One of the ex-programmers of AG writes about his days with the AG team." Interesting read.

4 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. The Moral Thing to do by FreeUser · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The moral thing to do, of course, is to actually buy the CDs and put money towards the artist, to reimburse them for providing you with nice music.

    No, the moral thing to do is to send the artist one or two dollars directly, rather than buying the CD.

    Artists are generally at the mercy of the recording labels, and are typically paid $0.25 for each cd sold, while the recording label pockets the vast, vast majority of the profits. Supporting those institutions which are ripping off the artists, of which the recording industry is by far the worst offendor, is a very immoral act. Your $1.00 to the artist for downloading their entire CD off of whatever p2p or distributed service you use puts a great deal more money in their pocket than buying the CD legally does.

    When it comes to buying the music online, where artists are paid fractions of a penny per song, the difference is even more pronounced and the artist treated even less fairly by the recording label. Download the ogg or mp3 file for free and pay the artist via fairtunes, or directly, instead. You will be doing a great deal more to support the artist than you will be if you go and buy their CD legally.

    Note: I say this is the moral thing to do, not the legal thing to do (for those too clue-challenged to tell the difference). IANAL and am giving moral, or ethical, not legal, advice.

    But the vast majority of college students are just too selfish to realise that.

    Hearing that from someone who is promoting a "support the music industry, it is your moral imperetive" shill is really precious. I would simply point out that, for anyone defending the RIAA on this tack, to ponder the following words:

    Pot. Kettle. Black.
    Mote. Beam. Eye.
    Glass Houses. Stones.


    In comparison to what the Recording Industry has done to artists over the last 70 years, the p2p services and the worst non-commercial copyright violators on the planet are saints, and that includes those college students you so deride.

    --
    The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
  2. Yes! by citizenc · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Because the indexing worked so well, that meant you could queue up a song and the system had a good idea of where to find it. It would look for someone who had a file with the same artistID/songID pair, and then alert the two clients to begin the transaction. Once you began downloading a particular file, it would make sure you would only get the file with that specific file size/check sum. Doing it this way also allowed the satellites to resume easily and transparently. It was awesome to jump on the web site before you went to bed, queue up a few hundred songs, and when you woke up in the morning most of them were there. You didn't have to care about who had the songs, it did that for you. I can't stand having to micromanage my downloads, having to pick 5 different versions of a file to assure myself of getting one of them. Some of the newer p2p apps are much better at this, but still none can compare.
    YES! This is, by far, what made AudioGalaxy so much better then Gnutella, OpenNap, KaZaa, FastTrack, and any of the others. The result of the above feature is that you could find the rarest stuff out there, because the system would automatically start transfering the song when it found a host.

    Does anybody know of any other applications which operate in a similar manner?
  3. Re:Audiogalaxy lost it. by medcalf · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It's funny. The files the RIAA really wants to stop, Brittany, Nickelback, etc. are available on any one of the hundreds of P2P providers out there, they aren't stopping a single pirate by shutting down AG, but the lesser knowns and out of prints now are homeless.

    Just think about this for a second. Which is the greater threat to the RIAA, 1000000 ripoffs of the latest Brittany single (maybe a thousand real sales lost) or the possibility of independent artists finding a way to distribute music and make money without needing the RIAA's member companies? I'd bet that RIAA is way more worried about the latter than the former.

    --
    -- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
  4. Archie? by complexmath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think it's kind of funny that so much controversy has been going on over what is basically a re-engineeering of one of the oldest internet services. Why not just resurrect Archie?