Slashdot links to a Kuro5hin story? What's next, they're gonna make chips outta chicken feathers?
Erm. Wait.
-- A winner is you!
Re:Kuro5hin
by
JabberWokky
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Slashdot links to a Kuro5hin story?
Yeah? What's so surprising? K5 was hosted with the help of/. for a brief period, and the editors discussed the various methods of moderation back when it was first being implemented. I'd say the only loathing going on is that of a certain facton of K5's readership (including what's his name who made a big stink when he left Slashdot, and now I can't even remember who he was. Signal 11? Or did he just spoof the mod system?) who hates and despises/. for, imo, juvenile reasons. Sour grapes and "I'm leaving now and you'll all be sorry when you miss me!" diatribes marked the exit of some of the more vehement/. bashers on K5.
I'd say the lack of cross links between the two (since they share pretty much the same thematic news) is the fact that the majority of "stories" are comments on articles elsewhere on the net. So, when they share stories, most submittors just link to the primary source. Some of the meta news sites will credit with "Spotted at foo", but neither K5 or/. generally does, although it happens enough to make me think the submittors are the ones not crediting the link (which, again, imo, is unnecessary. If I wanted to read Fark, I'd go there).
-- Evan
-- "$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
what they should do...
by
Lord_Slepnir
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Hopefully AG will take a cue from Kazaa, go out of bussiness, and have another company (such as Sound Universe) located on an obscure Pacific Island with no extradition treaty take over the task of managing the central server and the distribution of the client....
Don't most Slashdot readers read K5?
by
ALoverOfPeace
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
That's pretty old news, I would think most have seen it already.
I read it a few weeks ago. The author attempted to portray his company as an innocent victim of the RIAA, and I certainly wouldn't support what they did. However, AudioGalaxy, at least the later versions, were a piece of trash. The most recent one before they were shutdown had tracking software that you couldn't not opt-out of. They were in the p2p business to make money through gathering consumer information and violating privacy, and I would support them no more than the RIAA.
original audiogalaxy blew
by
j1mmy
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Anybody remember the original audiogalaxy? It was basically a glorified FTP search. For the sites it indexed, it also listed up/down ratios, access restrictions, etc. Both it and scour were the first ones out the door in terms of sharing beyond a P2P client. They both started hunting down windows shares, then indexing open windows shares (the owner of which would have no idea), then trying random logins to FTPs, etc. I had all this crap in my server logs as they tried to break into my Samba shares and FTP site to index my content. I had to ask to be removed more than a few times. Bastards.
Re:Good plan, though
by
colmore
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Burn the CDs, see the show and buy a T-Shirt, the artist will get a much greater percentage of your money.
Record Labels and distributors get something like 90% of CD revenue.
-- In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Making me miss 1999 again
by
Skyshadow
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
His little sections about "corporate culture" made me realize what it was I really miss from the.com boom:
It wasn't the free soda, it wasn't the shitload of money thrown at everything (well, ok, I miss that, too), it wasn't the company buying beer on Fridays or paying for lunch...
What I miss is the "bright" and "young" aspect. The Silicon Valley of 2002 seems to have gotten a lot older. It makes sense -- most of the young people like myself moved out when they got laid off. Now, at 25, I'm still the youngest person in my office (and in many offices I interviewed in while I was job hunting). As such, many of the companies are lacking that energy that made working during the boom seem, well, special.
I miss that.
-- Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
That's because they are not listed in the obituaries...they are buried in a small mass grave just outside of town. The bottom of the tombstone inscription reads: R.I.[A.A.]P.
--
Crapdot News from birds. Stuff that splatters.
Re:Audiogalaxy lost it.
by
OwnedByTwoCats
·
· Score: 3, 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.
Nope it's been available for a really really long time as a "harvester" of sorts.
napshare allows you to set up bot rules to snag everything that matches "butthole surfers mp3 moving to florida" will attempt to snage EVERYTHING that matches that search. so if you leave it running for a week, you're hard drive will be full of 90,000 copies of that song.... that's the bad part. the good part? leave it going overnight, and delete the 80 crappy ones and keep that one 256VBR ot 192 bitrate mp3 that was encoded propery and with a good encoder.
remember just getting it is the easy part... getting an mp3 that isn't crappy is the hard part.... only one out of every 20 mp3's of the same song is worth downloading, the other 19 are crap. and the ratio is getting worse.
-- Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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:
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.
Re:Good plan, though
by
ScumBiker
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
IAAM (I am a musician) and I know for a fact that most bands don't get shit for the CDs that are sold by the majors. We sell CDs at our live shows and we get all of the profit. Same with t-shirts and hats. The majors are in reality no different than the Mafia, except that they don't kill people (that I know about anyway). All they are in existence for is to rip off musicians and songwriters. I do both, I sell jingles to local radio stations and work (on the side) on background music. I make enough to (barely) pay for my equipment.
*The numbers in this rant were acquired from Sniffer Pro.*
Personally, I'm glad AG is down. At my university of choice AG was taking up, at any given time 50%-80% of the badnwidth. That is just ridiculous. It was the only (music) sharing software the campus hadn't blocked (aside from Good ol' Hotline, RIP). Of course, everyone knew how to use AG, 10 people used Hotline (myself included). Maybe.
It just got frustrating being taken down to 4K for legit downloads. My roommate started playing with Gentoo. That's a fun install if your bandwidth is castrated. When I was needing to do work, it was frustrating to know that I couldn't get decent connection rates because everyone else was getting their fix it Britney and N'Sync. Of course, I was also occasionally nabbing things from HL(got to test drive XP[thank you, but no]), but I didn't care what rates I got there. There was always a resume DL feature.
Though, honestly, it wouldn't have been as bad if they'd download and close the connection. I think 60-70% of the AG traffic was out-going.
If AG is truly dead, may they rest in peace. I, OTOH, enjoy my bandwidth.
Fun with word wrapping...
by
Enry
·
· Score: 4, Funny
What I miss is the "bright" and "young" aspect. The Silicon Valley of 2002 seems to have gotten a lot older. It makes sense -- most of the young people like myself moved out when they got laid
Found something more interesting than coding, eh?
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?
Re:Good plan, though
by
joshsisk
·
· Score: 5, Informative
If you think it's a myth, check out this article by Steve Albini. In case you don't know who he is, Albini is a career musician who, among his other accomplishments, produced at least one Nirvana album.
Make sure to check out his royalty breakdown at the bottom, based on his experience working in the record industry. It's pretty interesting stuff.
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
Re:Very intresting
by
Scrameustache
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
oh man, the submission didn't provide much detail, so i did something i, and most other/.'ers don't do often, i read the article
Good lord! Its a good thing most/.ers don't read the article! Could you imagine the slashdot effect if they did! The whole internet would blow up!
Don't encourage them!
--
You can't take the sky from me...
This story proves the RIAA's real motives
by
Uttles
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
How does something gain value? There are a few ways, but the best way for something that's readily available to gain value is to manufacture scarcity. That's right, make people think they can't get the stuff anywhere else, and all of the sudden you can charge them an arm and a leg for it.
This is what the RIAA has done, and continues to do. This is why the RIAA wants to make mp3 sharing illegal, unless of course you're paying them for songs on their labels. You see, if we can share any music we ever find, on a label or not, popular band or garage band, then the manufactured scarcity of good music is destroyed, and therefore it loses it's monetary value. When that happens, the bands will start making all the money off of touring or other means, because with all that competition they'll actually have to earn their money, and that will in turn put the RIAA and those big labels out of business because they won't be needed. Who needs sony's promotion when people just want to see your concert because they heard all your mp3's?
I could go on and on about this, but I just wanted to say a quick word or two because reading this article really made me see that this little theory of mine is pretty close to what's actually happening. AG and it's community really did open my eyes up to music I never would have appreciated before, and some of the band names I had never heard of and haven't heard of since. There's great music out there by all sorts of people and the only reason the RIAA, labels, or anyone for that matter can make money from a lot of the crap bands (like the lip-synching N-SYNC) is because they unethically (and hopefully one day illegally) control the market so that people can't get access to other, more original, artists.
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?
Re:It's simply expensive to tour
by
colmore
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If your band can only fill a 200 person bar on a 3 band ticket, then you're not going to be profitable no matter what. There have been some great bands in that position, but never any profitable ones.
However, if you're able to draw 1000 fans or so in an urban setting, if you aren't making enough money to at least pay for equipment, hotels, and studio time, then someone is giving you the shaft.
as someone on VH1s "1 hit wonders" said "first thing you gotta do is get a good accountant and a good lawyer, and then get another good lawyer to look after those two guys"
-- In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Spyware in AG
by
MADCOWbeserk
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
While I agree that AG really did start shoving spyware down its users throats, you had many alternatives to the "official" AG satellite. The source was free, and there were several third-party satellites that didn't have spyware. I don't think they were really money grubbing as you suggest, but they needed to earn money somehow in order to support the servers and pay thier salaries. AG could have folded long ago due to bankrupcy.
AG was the best system for music, nothing else can match its organization and variety without having a central server. Decentralized P2P can never match centralized P2P.
Re:Good plan, though
by
kidlinux
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Did you read the whole article? Like this part, for example:
"I bought a ridiculous number of CDs while I worked there, because I found out about music that I wouldn't have otherwise."
I can say the same thing. Over a half of my 200 CD collection is due to AudioGalaxy (it was my file sharing app of choice.) That's 100+ legitimate CD purchases due to file sharing, and file sharing only. Gee, who'd have figured, eh?
If Kennon Ballou did it, and I did it, it makes me wonder how many other people did too.
-- -kidlinux.
Time to re-think p2p
by
emil
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Self-contained, proprietary p2p agents will be stomped by the RIIA et al. We need a core GNU distributed p2p agent. The agent should implement all downloads via stripped-down HTTP and perhaps all search functions as stripped-down LDAP. It should not be audio/video centric.
If the agent is released by some party as "GNU p2p" under the GPL, we might be able to get the FSF and also MIT to defend it, as well as the EFF.
Each of the remaining p2p players needs to endorse and convert to the new protocols before they get stomped by the RIIA. Kazaa and friends can still stamp their version with all their spyware and other "value-add."
As the agent matures to circumvent blocking techniques, the network moves as a whole.
If the thing is POSIX, this might be a good way to get a minimal Cygwin on a whole lot of systems.
The one thing that has been able to put a stop to Microsoft at this point is the GPL. Perhaps it could be useful against the RIIA - somebody should try and see. The value of the IP behind any of these systems is not that great - the GPL would be a fantastic curve-ball.
p.s. IANAL, nor am I a win32 programmer, so I really don't know what I'm talking about.
While I agree that Audiogalaxy was, by far, the best p2p system (if you were looking for mp3s, that is), this story depicts it in a pretty flattering way.
I'll take it step by step (disregarding whatever views I have about RIAA and it's business model): RIAA sells music. They have the rights to the music (this may not be entirely correct, but I'm over-simplifying. Walk with me). AG lets people share that music - that is, they help someone get the music, who have not paid for rights to it. AG is a company, who wants to make money. They charge other companies money, so they can ship programs with the Satellite. AG is now, effectively, making money off of RIAA's property, without them getting a dime.
This is not strange, people. RIAA needs to protect it's own backyard. They may, or may not, make a whole lot of money, but they can't just stand beside and watch this.
Now, I agree that RIAA's (or rather, the companies whose interests they protect) business model is flawed, outdated and unfair. Unfair to both the artists, who create what RIAA sells, and the consumers who buy what the artists create. Compare RIAA to an estate agent. They take, what, 10% from the seller? RIAA takes more like 90%, leaving the artist with the crumbs. They can do this because no one else is providing the artist with an advance, with studio time, engineers, directors, etc. But all of this costs, and guess who's paying the bill? The artist, that's who. So a record company is more like a mix of an agent and a bank, with really, REALLY high interest charge.
All of this is about to change, fortunately - and it's not gonna be because companies like Napster, Audiogalaxy and Kazaa tries to make money off of anyone elses back. It's because, finally, some of the artists are staring to wake up, and smell the coffee. I'm not talking about "Really Small Garage Band" or "Joe Troubadour" here either, but BIG artists like Courtney Love, Michael Jackson, Elton John, Bono and Bruce Springsteen. Rapper Mos Def recently likened his deal with MCA to slavery (he ended up in that deal when MCA bought Rawkus), Michael Jackson claims the Big Five record companies are treating everyone bad, and black artists even worse, Courtney Love sewed Universal, claiming that record deals are unfair. Things are really about to happen, and when they do, we will see different distribution channels, new means of running radio stations, music television networks, concert promotions, everything.
One more thing though - one of RIAA's biggest concerns with Audiogalaxy, I think, was not that everyone and their brother was getting the new Britney track for free, but that new, unestablished artists saw this as a new way out. They could hire cheap studio time, get their music out there, do live performances, selling their own CDs, and become successful without the "help" of RIAA's world encompassing music monopoly. And that, my friends, scares the fsck out of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like its back to newsgroups.
Erm. Wait.
A winner is you!
Hopefully AG will take a cue from Kazaa, go out of bussiness, and have another company (such as Sound Universe) located on an obscure Pacific Island with no extradition treaty take over the task of managing the central server and the distribution of the client....
That's pretty old news, I would think most have seen it already.
I read it a few weeks ago. The author attempted to portray his company as an innocent victim of the RIAA, and I certainly wouldn't support what they did. However, AudioGalaxy, at least the later versions, were a piece of trash. The most recent one before they were shutdown had tracking software that you couldn't not opt-out of. They were in the p2p business to make money through gathering consumer information and violating privacy, and I would support them no more than the RIAA.
Anybody remember the original audiogalaxy? It was basically a glorified FTP search. For the sites it indexed, it also listed up/down ratios, access restrictions, etc. Both it and scour were the first ones out the door in terms of sharing beyond a P2P client. They both started hunting down windows shares, then indexing open windows shares (the owner of which would have no idea), then trying random logins to FTPs, etc. I had all this crap in my server logs as they tried to break into my Samba shares and FTP site to index my content. I had to ask to be removed more than a few times. Bastards.
Burn the CDs, see the show and buy a T-Shirt, the artist will get a much greater percentage of your money.
Record Labels and distributors get something like 90% of CD revenue.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
It wasn't the free soda, it wasn't the shitload of money thrown at everything (well, ok, I miss that, too), it wasn't the company buying beer on Fridays or paying for lunch...
What I miss is the "bright" and "young" aspect. The Silicon Valley of 2002 seems to have gotten a lot older. It makes sense -- most of the young people like myself moved out when they got laid off. Now, at 25, I'm still the youngest person in my office (and in many offices I interviewed in while I was job hunting). As such, many of the companies are lacking that energy that made working during the boom seem, well, special.
I miss that.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
That's because they are not listed in the obituaries...they are buried in a small mass grave just outside of town.
The bottom of the tombstone inscription reads:
R.I.[A.A.]P.
Crapdot
News from birds. Stuff that splatters.
Nope it's been available for a really really long time as a "harvester" of sorts.
napshare allows you to set up bot rules to snag everything that matches "butthole surfers mp3 moving to florida" will attempt to snage EVERYTHING that matches that search. so if you leave it running for a week, you're hard drive will be full of 90,000 copies of that song.... that's the bad part. the good part? leave it going overnight, and delete the 80 crappy ones and keep that one 256VBR ot 192 bitrate mp3 that was encoded propery and with a good encoder.
remember just getting it is the easy part... getting an mp3 that isn't crappy is the hard part.... only one out of every 20 mp3's of the same song is worth downloading, the other 19 are crap. and the ratio is getting worse.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
IAAM (I am a musician) and I know for a fact that most bands don't get shit for the CDs that are sold by the majors. We sell CDs at our live shows and we get all of the profit. Same with t-shirts and hats. The majors are in reality no different than the Mafia, except that they don't kill people (that I know about anyway). All they are in existence for is to rip off musicians and songwriters. I do both, I sell jingles to local radio stations and work (on the side) on background music. I make enough to (barely) pay for my equipment.
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
Kur5hin gets slashdotted...that'll do wonders for diplomatic relations..
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
*The numbers in this rant were acquired from Sniffer Pro.*
Personally, I'm glad AG is down. At my university of choice AG was taking up, at any given time 50%-80% of the badnwidth. That is just ridiculous. It was the only (music) sharing software the campus hadn't blocked (aside from Good ol' Hotline, RIP). Of course, everyone knew how to use AG, 10 people used Hotline (myself included). Maybe.
It just got frustrating being taken down to 4K for legit downloads. My roommate started playing with Gentoo. That's a fun install if your bandwidth is castrated. When I was needing to do work, it was frustrating to know that I couldn't get decent connection rates because everyone else was getting their fix it Britney and N'Sync. Of course, I was also occasionally nabbing things from HL(got to test drive XP[thank you, but no]), but I didn't care what rates I got there. There was always a resume DL feature.
Though, honestly, it wouldn't have been as bad if they'd download and close the connection. I think 60-70% of the AG traffic was out-going.
If AG is truly dead, may they rest in peace. I, OTOH, enjoy my bandwidth.
What I miss is the "bright" and "young" aspect. The Silicon Valley of 2002 seems to have gotten a lot older. It makes sense -- most of the young people like myself moved out when they got laid Found something more interesting than coding, eh?
Does anybody know of any other applications which operate in a similar manner?
If you think it's a myth, check out this article by Steve Albini. In case you don't know who he is, Albini is a career musician who, among his other accomplishments, produced at least one Nirvana album.
Make sure to check out his royalty breakdown at the bottom, based on his experience working in the record industry. It's pretty interesting stuff.
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
oh man, the submission didn't provide much detail, so i did something i, and most other /.'ers don't do often, i read the article
/.ers don't read the article! Could you imagine the slashdot effect if they did! The whole internet would blow up!
Good lord! Its a good thing most
Don't encourage them!
You can't take the sky from me...
How does something gain value? There are a few ways, but the best way for something that's readily available to gain value is to manufacture scarcity. That's right, make people think they can't get the stuff anywhere else, and all of the sudden you can charge them an arm and a leg for it.
This is what the RIAA has done, and continues to do. This is why the RIAA wants to make mp3 sharing illegal, unless of course you're paying them for songs on their labels. You see, if we can share any music we ever find, on a label or not, popular band or garage band, then the manufactured scarcity of good music is destroyed, and therefore it loses it's monetary value. When that happens, the bands will start making all the money off of touring or other means, because with all that competition they'll actually have to earn their money, and that will in turn put the RIAA and those big labels out of business because they won't be needed. Who needs sony's promotion when people just want to see your concert because they heard all your mp3's?
I could go on and on about this, but I just wanted to say a quick word or two because reading this article really made me see that this little theory of mine is pretty close to what's actually happening. AG and it's community really did open my eyes up to music I never would have appreciated before, and some of the band names I had never heard of and haven't heard of since. There's great music out there by all sorts of people and the only reason the RIAA, labels, or anyone for that matter can make money from a lot of the crap bands (like the lip-synching N-SYNC) is because they unethically (and hopefully one day illegally) control the market so that people can't get access to other, more original, artists.
~ now you know
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?
If your band can only fill a 200 person bar on a 3 band ticket, then you're not going to be profitable no matter what. There have been some great bands in that position, but never any profitable ones.
However, if you're able to draw 1000 fans or so in an urban setting, if you aren't making enough money to at least pay for equipment, hotels, and studio time, then someone is giving you the shaft.
as someone on VH1s "1 hit wonders" said "first thing you gotta do is get a good accountant and a good lawyer, and then get another good lawyer to look after those two guys"
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
While I agree that AG really did start shoving spyware down its users throats, you had many alternatives to the "official" AG satellite. The source was free, and there were several third-party satellites that didn't have spyware. I don't think they were really money grubbing as you suggest, but they needed to earn money somehow in order to support the servers and pay thier salaries. AG could have folded long ago due to bankrupcy.
AG was the best system for music, nothing else can match its organization and variety without having a central server. Decentralized P2P can never match centralized P2P.
Did you read the whole article? Like this part, for example:
"I bought a ridiculous number of CDs while I worked there, because I found out about music that I wouldn't have otherwise."
I can say the same thing. Over a half of my 200 CD collection is due to AudioGalaxy (it was my file sharing app of choice.) That's 100+ legitimate CD purchases due to file sharing, and file sharing only.
Gee, who'd have figured, eh?
If Kennon Ballou did it, and I did it, it makes me wonder how many other people did too.
-kidlinux.
The one thing that has been able to put a stop to Microsoft at this point is the GPL. Perhaps it could be useful against the RIIA - somebody should try and see. The value of the IP behind any of these systems is not that great - the GPL would be a fantastic curve-ball.
While I agree that Audiogalaxy was, by far, the best p2p system (if you were looking for mp3s, that is), this story depicts it in a pretty flattering way.
I'll take it step by step (disregarding whatever views I have about RIAA and it's business model):
RIAA sells music. They have the rights to the music (this may not be entirely correct, but I'm over-simplifying. Walk with me).
AG lets people share that music - that is, they help someone get the music, who have not paid for rights to it.
AG is a company, who wants to make money. They charge other companies money, so they can ship programs with the Satellite.
AG is now, effectively, making money off of RIAA's property, without them getting a dime.
This is not strange, people. RIAA needs to protect it's own backyard. They may, or may not, make a whole lot of money, but they can't just stand beside and watch this.
Now, I agree that RIAA's (or rather, the companies whose interests they protect) business model is flawed, outdated and unfair. Unfair to both the artists, who create what RIAA sells, and the consumers who buy what the artists create.
Compare RIAA to an estate agent. They take, what, 10% from the seller? RIAA takes more like 90%, leaving the artist with the crumbs. They can do this because no one else is providing the artist with an advance, with studio time, engineers, directors, etc. But all of this costs, and guess who's paying the bill? The artist, that's who. So a record company is more like a mix of an agent and a bank, with really, REALLY high interest charge.
All of this is about to change, fortunately - and it's not gonna be because companies like Napster, Audiogalaxy and Kazaa tries to make money off of anyone elses back. It's because, finally, some of the artists are staring to wake up, and smell the coffee. I'm not talking about "Really Small Garage Band" or "Joe Troubadour" here either, but BIG artists like Courtney Love, Michael Jackson, Elton John, Bono and Bruce Springsteen.
Rapper Mos Def recently likened his deal with MCA to slavery (he ended up in that deal when MCA bought Rawkus), Michael Jackson claims the Big Five record companies are treating everyone bad, and black artists even worse, Courtney Love sewed Universal, claiming that record deals are unfair. Things are really about to happen, and when they do, we will see different distribution channels, new means of running radio stations, music television networks, concert promotions, everything.
One more thing though - one of RIAA's biggest concerns with Audiogalaxy, I think, was not that everyone and their brother was getting the new Britney track for free, but that new, unestablished artists saw this as a new way out. They could hire cheap studio time, get their music out there, do live performances, selling their own CDs, and become successful without the "help" of RIAA's world encompassing music monopoly. And that, my friends, scares the fsck out of them.
:wq!