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State of Online Music: RIAA's Efforts Paying Off
melquiades writes "The NYT (regreq) has a new article about online music, suggesting that the recording industry's war against P2P is paying off: pay-to-download services are rising in popularity. "Largely because of tough actions by the record companies to combat free music sites through the courts, legislation and even through techno-guerrilla tactics, there is a noticeable change of sentiment in a small segment of the downloading cognoscenti. Though their numbers are low, many are the early adapters who spot a trend first." Though the article falls into the common fallacy of equating P2P with illegal copying -- I'm one of the numerous artists who wants people to download my music for free -- it sums up the state of affairs well, particularly in this quote from online music consultant Michael Haile: "Record labels know what consumers want. We all do. They want a Napster you pay for. We all know that. But why would the labels want that at all? Making CD's is like printing money.""
There is no way of telling what the RIAA is doing is bad OR good. Unless, of course, they go back in time and prevent what they did from happening, then compare the two results.
In conclusion, lets not get all fussy about it. Its a bogus concept.
-1337 P1R8
Really? I never knew that... I thought I just wanted to listen, and was willing to pay if that's the only way I could listen... I thought the record companies wanted me to pay. Or have the laws of economics been changed again?
No they don't. People want a Napster that you don't pay for.
Because they are downloading a lot more pirated porn, thank God for cable.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
Nobody downloads music off of the internet illegally anymore. Please move on.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that pay services have gotten much better in the past 18 months, with far more selection? Just maybe?
No, no, it's because they killed napster. Idiots.
Are there limits to what I can have at one time? How much are they? Are there lots of Audiogalaxy type material (rare songs, live songs, etc)? Is it fast, or would I get better downloads and searches using carrier pigeons? Most important do I get to burn the songs to CD, keeping them forever, or until a "contract" is up?
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
While admitting to downloading some redily avalble music, I mostly looked for some more obscure europian bands from 70s and 80s. They are long out of print, and there is no hope for new CDs. Now, thanks to RIAA, those musicians will be forgoten forever.
but I really don't mind paying for the music I listen to. I amek money and if someone produces something I want to hear, I'll pay for it. Everyone deserves to eat. The RIAA is not winning a campaign... I bet there is just as many people willing to pay for such services (did they even exist a year ago?) I stopped using Napster once it became controversial. I realized I was stealing. No Kaaza or free services replaced it. I was actually hoping for a napster-like pay service.
So there.
And who exactly are these "early adapters (sic)" who want to pay to share files? Isn't this the way the Mafia does business? "Sure, you can bring in as many caes of liquor/kilos of coke/hookers that you want, Vinnie. Just make sure Uncle Don gets his share, you know what I'm sayin'?"
Imagine that the record companies are supposedly finding success in what we've wanted all along.
The answer has not been to stomp out the P2P networks. They will always be a fact of life, especially as consumer bandwidth gets faster. The answer is to look at this new technology and figure out how to embrace it as a business model.
P2P networks have flaws. Most kiddes can't label their MP3s correctly. Inevitably, The 1 person who has the song you're really looking for is on dialup. It goes on and on, but with P2P, you get what you pay for. Having a centralized pay for download service overcomes these issues. By paying a hosting company to host your MP3s, you're almost guaranteed good download speeds and properly labeled MP3s.
Now, if they RIAA had listened back in 1998 when people were telling them this, maybe they wouldn't be so hated.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
News.com is running an article on a study that KPMG did... in which they state that the ??AA need to embrace downloadable music and videos and to stop/reduce using copy protections to thwart piracy.
pay-to-download services are rising in popularity
That's kind of like saying this new car model we introduced last year is selling better than it was 2 years ago.
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
1. Kill Napster and its offspring.
2. Create limited pay service, charge insane fees, limit "Fair Use."
3. ?
4. Profit!
Fuck the RIAA, fuck their asshole until it is purple donkey asshole. Long Live Freedom of Choice, Freedom of Music, and Freedom from Big Business.
I just don't listen to music that i haven't already previously purchased the CD of anymore, unless i legally downloaded it for free. Fueling the RIAA is not something i care to do, whether it be fuelling their arguement that there is demand for their garbage, or whether it be fuelling them with money. I know this is redundant, but support local music.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
The only thing RIAA has done is force P2P Net Technology to become more and more Powerful.
and thats all they've accomplished in the real world. I farey land they made the DMCA etc.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
However, I would like a place where I could download very high quality, RAW .wav or Ogg Vorbis or MP3 files for, say, $0.50-$1.00 each. Maybe $5.00 for a whole album. From a fast server. That are not in some sort of DRM vault.
This way, I own the music. I can do whatever I like with it: burn it to a CD, put it in my portable player, whatever I want to do within my fair use rights. And I also don't have to (effectively) pay additional money by trying to hunt someone down with the file I want at the quality I want, with a good connection that won't stop halfway through the download.
Merely having the record industry collect money for "allowing" other people to share music peer-to-peer is not sufficient.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Maybe they're not as dumb as we think - maybe they know that downloading music helps record sales, and maybe they actually DO want users downloading music.
Just as long as the service that does it is theirs.
What if the long term RIAA vision isn't that you can't get your DRM music off your CD, but you can only get it off and send it with software and hardware from the record companies (or their affiliates?) Maybe this is all just a play by the record companies - they only print their music in a format certain devices can read and transfer, and they only allow themselves or their affiliates (Sony records - sony cd players?) manufacture the equipment that can read the CD's.
Now not only do they get to charge you for the CD, but they'll charge you $1 to send a song to your friend, and charge him $30/month for a license to the software that lets him play it....
paintball
many are the early adapters who spot a trend first
Just because someone is doing it before anyone else doesn't indicate a trend.
Well, I'm sure pay-to-download services are rising in populatiry. Prior to a year or so ago, there WERN'T any.
TODO: Something witty here...
Making CD's is like printing money.
So is providing pay-for-use downloads, except you save on the cost of CD manufacturing.
We're going to make information free Mr. Anderson, whether you like it, or not.
I found a great site with free .ogg
electronic/ambient music:
http://www.kahvi.org
They sell CDs too.
Record labels know what consumers want. We all do. They want a Napster you pay for. We all know that.
Actually, no, thats not what people want. People want the original Napster, in all its free goodness. This is why KaZaa and the like are popular (despite their crappiness); because people like free stuff!
but NOT from the crapware sites like musicnet. Some well-known artists do sell their tunes online as mp3's, either individually or though real mp3 services.
sulli
RTFJ.
The RIAA would love to take all the credit and say that the music subscription sites succeed because the P2P services are getting worse, but that's simply not true. The guerilla tactics hardly put a dent in my p2p experience. It sounds to me like the subscription services are just getting better. They know what we want, they've just been afraid to offer it to us because they coudn't put together a viable business model.
to NYT posts
no matter the story...
no matter what...
i will not register...
please make them stop!
Is all the music tv stations... I was talking to a friend about this the other day, and he hardly even downloads mp3's now because he has mtv2 and loads of other channels so there is allways somthing he likes on.
:-)
Just my 1 penny's worth
pay-to-download services are rising in popularity
Maybe because they are legal and consumers are being educated on what constitutes piracy?
they quote the emusic subscriber numbers and try to compare that to the number of kazaa downloads/users. that's silly. kazaa, gnutella and the likes are that popular due to pr0n. not music.
What's it going to be like when internet2 is pervasive? When every home is wired with fiber optics for 100 Mb net access, or 1000 Mb access or whatever? You will be able to download the equivalent of a present day CD in a few seconds. You will have a handheld with 100s of gigabytes of storage and, thanks to BlueTooth Rev. 17, you'll be able to beam an entire movie at DVD quality to a friend's handheld in a matter of seconds.
In this future world, perhaps about five to ten years from now, how on earth will RIAA prevent music and video piracy? It seems doubtful that drm initiatives will succeed; people have an enormous incentive to bypass it, and as bandwidth increases, that incentive will only grow.
I think eventually we'll have to come to some sort of compromise between the content producers, marketers, and consumers, and settle on some sort of "reasonable fair use" doctrine as once existed with cassettes and VCRs.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Also, from the article:
Maybe it's a nitpick, but they seem to be painting the situation as if we have two monolithic, unified forces here -- the RIAA and Evil Internet Pirates (tm) (or Righteous Anti-RIAA Guerilla Freedom Fighters (tm)). The use of the term "apostasy" implies that there is some kind of central body or authority to the P2P movement, which isn't true. I'm pointing this out because it's indicative of the mindset the "mainstream" is in -- they don't really know what the situation is, even those who are paid to write about it.It certainly could just be poor word choice, and the writer actually does know the difference, but since it's the New York Times, I'm inclined to think it's ignorance rather than poor editing.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Printing CDs is very much like printing money, in that the CD buy itself is worth next to nothing, however after it is printed, it can be worth some amount.
However, thats where the similarities end. The problem with most digital information is, you can replicate it as many times you want. This makes copying it a lot easier, since you dont have to move the entity worth something, you just have to replicate it. So in a wierd sort of way, you are creating wealth every time you rip a CD.
The losses that the RIAA talks off, aren't in terms of actual money lost by them, but rather in terms of unearned revenues. They want you to pay to get a replication of that CD you were downloading. Which is fine, however, its also why music piracy is so widespread and not thought of as a criminal activity by the general public. Why should I pay for something that I can replicate without harm to the original. Why should I loose cash in order to gain this wealth, when I can _create_ this wealth while keeping my cash.
The idea of pay per download will work fine, to a point. However, the only way I see the music industry clamping down of music piracy, is if they manage to get DRM going. Once DRM really gets going, music piracy is going to a little closer to counterfeiting money. (However, it will never be the same, since cash actually represents value, while digital information has inherent value).
- Tempestdata
... and now that I finally installed it last night, I can start downloading more.
Sorry for dropping the amount of illegal downloads from me, guys! It won't happen again. (Well, at least until I fill this 80 Gig puppy... It should only take a couple weeks.)
Karma: NaN
Someone must be confused. The last comment about why would record companies wouldn't want Pay-to-Download shows me that he/she is completely lost.
Printing a CD = Overhead to burn, print the sleeve/label and distribute, etc.. Its physically shareable, and it does not have an expiration date, its possible to copy, etc..
Digital File = No overhead of CD, depending on format - it's signed to playable only on the machine you downloaded to (MS's format supports this) - thus not sharable or movable. Distribution is a breeze... Its possible to put an expiration date on the file (MS again)... Bla, Bla, Bla....
Hard media is the only way to go, otherwise were screwed
We want a napster that you DON'T pay for. We want to get lots and lots of music for free. Also, we want to, in the midst of all this, buy lots of CDs. In fact, we want to buy CDs more when we can download music for free. Why? Beats the hell out of me. But Napster in its prime was a win-win situation--record sales were at their highest ever, while people listened to more music than ever--and it might not be a bad idea to go back to it and wait until it breaks until we try to fix it.
As a consumer, I DON'T want to pay for mp3s. Maybe I'm being a luddite, but I have a problem paying money for something I can't hold in my hand, even software. Maybe it might be different if I was able to download CD-quality audio, but I think I'd still rather buy a CD. I like flipping through the booklet while I listen to the music. I like getting stickers and posters and stuff with it, and I'll buy a CD with well-designed packaging over a thousand downloads any day. It's too bad labels just get cheaper and cheaper. Oh well--the CDs I sell will always be fun to look at (not to mention listen to); I guess that's the most I can do, outside of becoming a media mogul and dictating good design, thereby sacrificing the bottom line and getting fired.
c-hack.com |
I find emusic to be great because they carry albums from several artists I enjoy. (They Might Be Giants and Banco De Gaia to name a couple). Go browse on the site; you don't need to be a subscriber to find out what is in their catalog and hear samples.
They also offer completely unrestricted access. I regularly slurp several albums worth of MP3s from them into my collection. It's completely legal and supports the artists.
One Buck Forty or Die
I thought this was one of the best things I've read on this well worn subject in awhile.
Hopefully, some company out there will come up with a good system that will support a pay per download system.
I want to be able to have a solid client, where I can set up my payment method, and manipulate account details.
I want to have a searchable database of available titles.
I want to be able to download the songs at different bit rates. I don't mind if the higher bit rates are a touch (and that means under 10% more!) more expensive - that's reasonable. Most people are satisfied at 128. Give the audiophiles what they want as well.
I want to be able to download in different formats. MP3? Support it. Ogg? Support it. MP3 Pro? Support it. Get the idea - be flexible!
I want to be able to get the difficult to find songs. I like electronic music. One of my favorite program from college was EM Soundscape on KBIA. I hearrd stuff that you cannot find. I'd like a way to get that.
I want to see the consumers and the artists benefit. Take care of them, record companies, and your bottom line will take care of itself.
I'm not asking for too much, am I?
-- Ravensfire
"But we decide which is right, and which is an illusion"
Tough actions may be a contributing factor but more than likely it's the guarantee of good quality at a reasonable price. You know... what we've been asking for all along!
Paying a reasonable fee for good quality music is a lot more attractive to me than hunting for mp3s on Kazaa that are poor quality, incomplete crap. You need to download a few different versions of the same song to find the best one because someone out there doesn't know how to use MusicMatch very well.
The true pirates aren't going to pay anyway but they are a minority. The majority of us who could give a crap either way are just looking for the best bang for our buck. $20 for a CD with one or two good songs on it is an incentive for us to use Kazaa. A decent price and a guarantee of good quality music we want... of course we'll switch!
Duh.
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
"It's completely legal and supports the artists"
How much money do the artists actually see when you download a song?
Recently the UK Govt found the CD producing cartel of price fixing, but only in the past.
here
They say that they can find no evidence of continued law breaking so they will take no action.
and yet the prices stay the same
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
So some artists distribute their work legally on P2P networks. But what is the point? Wouldn't it be much simpler and more convenient just to publish a URL and serve files with http?
People sometimes suggest that mirroring files saves bandwidth, but that can be done with http as well, and in general P2P services are quite wasteful of bandwidth, not choosing the most direct route for sending files but some meandering path between lots of peers. That's because they aren't optimized for efficient network usage, but for avoiding detection of who is sharing which files.
If one day, everyone decided that they didn't want to download any more pirated MP3s, would we still need P2P networks?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
...pay-to-download services are rising in popularity.
Oh, gee, the horror! You mean I actually have to pay for a piece of entertainment media! Fucking capitalist pig-dogs!
It hurts when I pee.
Is that there's no standardization of filenames/filetypes. This causes people to just select huge chunks of their search results for download, hoping that SOME of them will actually go through. This increases the bandwidth usage, meaning slower downloads and more failures, meaning people select even MORE of their search results.
:)
If someone would make a cross-platform P2P client/MP3 (or perhaps this would be a good opportunity for OGG) player/ripper/encoder that got album/track names from CDDB, and named the files in a standardized way, it would be a lot easier to download whole albums from various people, reducing bandwidth usage, which would further increase the number of clients. I'd be a lot more likely to leave gnutella runnning all the time if there weren't always a gazillion people trying to download ALL of my MP3's at once.
It could also give preference to downloads that are less redundant throughout the network, and maybe have some way people can "moderate" so that phony ones put out by the RIAA to corrupt the network can be identified.
I'm not much of a programmer, but I think it would be a great idea if someone else wants to take up the challenge...
Hey, they have Noam Chomsky and George Carlin - maybe I'll subscribe! :)
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
The groups that support the RIAA (the big 5) simply want what they have always wanted. To maintain ownership of the music, on both the production and consumer sides. The artists sign away the rights to music they create and the RIAA wants us to sign away our money for limited use. RIAA and company want to keep it that way on the consumption side. They assumed that CD was the answer, because you couldn't duplicate the CD cheaply.. problem solved. They didn't see that it would cost a few cents to copy CDs in the future. So they want to remove that control yet again. I'm not shocked by any of this anymore.
Just as if there were a cure for cancer, who in the business world would release it to the public. Not only would people start to live longer, all the pharmaceutical companies would go broke. Or the 100% renewable fuel source.. the energizer battery that lasts a lifetime.. so on and so forth.. Music, food, and healthcare should all be free! *Love, peace and happiness*
The **AA organizations will only buy into the idea of P2P services if and only if it serves them to move us closer to a world where all media is pay-per-view or pay-per-listen. This is their ultimate goal, and Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti, etc, sit at home and curse the fact that those lousy, cheating, criminal, consumer bastards can buy a CD or DVD and play it more than once without paying again.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
"Record labels know what consumers want. We all do. They want a Napster you pay for. We all know that. But why would the labels want that at all? Making CD's is like printing money."
In the case of selling the music online, wouldn't this be like making money without paying for the cost of ink and presses etc?
However this is like drawing blood from a stone
"Web broadcasters, whether lone teenagers or the Web sites of actual radio stations, will be required to make retroactive payments for all songs they have played in the last four years"
Most laws are made for the now. Making a law, especially one such as this, retroactive is - to say the least - insane. If I did something that was perfectly legal 10 years ago, should I be jailed today if a law making it illegal suddenly becomes retroactively effective?
Go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do pay big companies an extensive amount of money - phorm
They're actively trying to twist the statistics to support their whiny anti-download position. I'm part of several polling groups and in the last few weeks I've done at least THREE polls (all from different polling groups) that tried to force you to answer "I don't buy cd's because I download everything I want for free".
Fact of the matter is I, like many people I know, download music off services like kazaa because who wants to pay $20 for a cd to get one song just to find out the entire rest of the CD sucks... And most of us will never sign up for pay download services because if you actually use the service much it easily approaches the cost of buying cd's.
Google is beating p2p networks sharing pr0n with its image search.
people actually listen to the 40 "free" digital music channels?? I thought those were just shite
Damn. Every time one of these articles gets posted all it turns out to be is whining about the RIAA shutting down P2P sharing and someone's right to steal music. Unless you wrote and performed the music yourself that you're trading, what right do you have to trade it? Please someone intelligently defend the right to trade music you don't own the rights to. There's some good reasons and legitimate reasons to do it but I'm wondering if any slashdrones are capable enough of rational thought to come up with any.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
When Bill Clinton indicated that the average income of families in Arkansas went up 100% while he was governor. I specifically recall Perot stating, "Now see here, if you make 1 penny in a day, and then make 2 pennies the next day, that's 100% growth. But you still can't buy a cow patty in a Texas dairy farm for 2 cents." Yes folks, that right.. we now have 2, count em, 2 people using the Pay-Napster service! We have doubled our market share!
And was not at all thrilled. I'm perfectly willing to pay for stuff I listen to, that's fine. However, PressPlay (the service I tested) is absolutely ridiculous. Firstly, you can only listen to music in low-bitrate streams, unless you use up one of your precious 'download' credits to download it. Now, you'd think that downloading a track lets you do anything with it, right? Wrong. You download a DRM-crippled piece of garbage track. To get a REAL audio track, you have to use one of your (even-scarcer) "burn" credits. Oh, subscribe to PressPlay and "download" a few hundred tracks? Better keep paying them, because as soon as you cancel your subscription, your tracks become worthless. I haven't even gone into the service itself - the music available is crap. Everything they have is either old or from obscure random artists. It was totally unacceptable, and I think RIAA needs to look at their own services and create a service that provides any music file you want in a format that's portable (MP3/OGG) for one low price per track or monthly subscription for x tracks. None of this tiered-pricing crap.
actually, I think their prefferred title is "the idle rich"
If I had lots o cash to waste, SURE, I'd buy from e-music.
Instead I took my 100 free songs and bolted.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
"I get at least 30 albums a month or so at 10 bucks a month. That's 10 cents each." Nice math, bucko.
I just wanted to point out what should be a little bit obvious. The record companies own the music. As frustrating as that is sometimes, they make the terms because they own it. I am a software developer and am a bit concerned about the "freedoms" people expect from things that are software. Because something is a bunch of bits does not mean that it is free. Because you didn't have to buy something of substance like a microchip or a slurpee doesn't mean that it did not cost money to produce to pay people like you and I.
It seems at times that some people have some "high moral ground" as they demonize companies - granted some companies are pretty easy to demonize - but are only really after something for nothing, a free lunch.
Is it really illegal or is it "sticking it to the inherently evil big guy" or is it a moral stand or is it that "I just want free music because, well, then I don't have to pay for it, duh."
If it is legal and okay and whatever, fine. If it isn't, how much is your integrity worth to you?
Then it occured to me that if I buy it, the label gets the cash. I just mailed The Vines a buck instead.
That's what we should do when we download music we really like.
Can I bum a sig?
If I had mod points, I would mod this down solely because of the use of the inane acronym "OMFG!"
Please, keep this sort of giggly exclamation with the junior high-school girls where it belongs.
Each time I see it, I cannot help but envision a group of 12-year-old girls in study hall congregated around one of their friends, engaged in a feverish yet banal discussion:
GROUP OF GIRLS: Oooh! Tell us what happened, Patty! Ooh!
PATTY: OMFG! Johnny asked me to the spring dance! (hands cover mouth in disbelief)
GROUP OF GIRLS: OMFG!
PATTY: OMFG!
GROUP OF GIRLS: Let's go eat some fudge.
So you see, please avoid using "OMFG" in the future. Thanks.
I thought it was early adopters. NYT is trying too hard with the buzzwords.
.
Hehe, yeah but mtv2 is crappy compressed digital tv so the quality of the audio is even worse than mp3.
Still, at least digital tv doesn't contain any spyware...
Yet!
But wouldn't a wider range of music available for sampling on digital tv (and digital radio) encourage more CD sales and perhaps more people going to gigs?
Napster was a piece of shit - I want an AudioGalaxy.
sic transit gloria mundi
uhoh, is it that mysql -u root -p obvious? ;)
"Old man yells at systemd"
Say what you want but all though the years most people who use these types of copying tools are making illegal copies. This screws the few who want to legitimately use these tools. It also screws everyone else because companies try to put bad copy protection schemes on their products. Long run no one wins.
As for music you are stealing food from the families of musicians and songwriters families who have to live off the few cents royalities they get on a CD or when sheet music is sold. Same goes for movies being copied. Do some study on how the entertainment industry works, you are mainly cheating the artists you supposedly like.
Sure you have a few artist backing your illegal copying, but look at who they are, mainly no bodies or has-beens who are glad someone even knows who they are.
Bottom line because you think a company makes too much money its okay for you to rip them off. If you don't like a companies prices then protest by spending you money elsewhere and let them know you are doing it. When the companies revenues drop they will flinch and change. But by continuing to steal music you are going to screw everyone. Your theft will cause companies to get penality taxes on blank media, and screwed up copy protection schemes used. Companies will sign less new bands or more formula-music. Your cheapness pentalizes everyone else.
I find a lot of the rest of the article wrong as well. "Just six months ago, this sort of talk [about actually paying for music] would have been unthinkable, downright apostasy." No... actually, a lot of reasonable people were complaining that music was simply too expensive. You know, we've all been buying music for YEARS. We didn't all just forget about paying for things, we just realized that the music cartel has an unhealthy amount of control.
I have no sympathy for you if you get a virus from an MP3. You should have noticed the extension wasReally, they're advocating some kind of huge website where you can find lots of varied bands in some kind of unrestricted format that you can download to your computer. Boy, this is starting to sound a whole lot like the service we've all been asking for! And it's sounding more and more like what Napster used to be, and what Kazaa is now. Strange how that works.
sheephead
7d9e63e9501751ff4bf9307989d5623d *SheepHead
I was in the studio a couple years ago when Noam Chomsky was recording his latest album. He and Cornell West had a little "talking" rap going on.
Me, I sat off to one side just digging the shit out of it -- these two aged hippies just bopping and rapping like there was no tomorrow.
I stayed late -- long after the session had ended. Noam and West were talking about what it means to be a "radical Christian." West (you'll remember) always refers to himself as a radical Christian. He derives his basic spiritual vibe from Chekhov, Hegel, and Miles Davis.
But Chomsky was tired. He didn't feel much like sparring. He sorta stayed in the corner of the room, his feet up on a ratty sofa, and wondered whether or not there was any Chivas in the little bottle the soundman kept underneath the console.
"No Chivas, Noam," said the soundman.
West laughed at that. "Chivas? You're shitting me."
"Not me, Cornell," said Noam.
"Damn. If you want some badass Hegelian synthesis, I advise Jack, man. Jack D. all the way."
Noam said he hadn't had a shot of Jack Daniels since the march on the Pentagon. Then he laughed and remembered how he and Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsburg sat out on the Washington Mall, burning incense, and screaming "Howl" at the top of their lungs.
Man oh man. I'll never forget that recording session with Noam and Cornell.
Damn.
The RIAA has nothing to do with online pay services gaining in popularity.
Why? Because there WERE no places (or at least no well known places) to buy music online during the reign of Napster and early P2P services. Well maybe MP3.com, but the RIAA sued them too.
Instead it is rising because there has been a demand for this capability as soon as it became possible to create reasonable sized music files of a reasonably quality. It was basic economics which brought this about, not the RIAA. If anything, the RIAA has done everything they can to hamper services like this, even pay ones unless they actually CONTROLLED those services.
That is what this has always been about for the RIAA, not piracy, but who controls the sales. They want there to be *only* RIAA pay services and no 3rd party ones and they will sue companies like MP3.com and such who sell non RIAA music unser piracy laws to try to make and keep it that way.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
For those who agree that the artist and not the RIAA should be supported, I suggest www.cdbaby.com Only for Independent Musicians and the artist gets paid $6-$12 per CD. They also make a point of saying that they use no software from Redmond. Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with them other than the large amounts of cash I have sent.
What we (consumers or music-downloaders) want is not services we have to pay for. The less cost, the better -- with no cost being best.
However, most of us do accept the fact that we have laws that require we pay for things. With a choice between illegal and low-cost, many of us will choose low-cost. (Doesn't mean that's what we really want, just that some of us are willing to pay rather than pirate.)
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
As the poster mentioned, this definetly falsely implies that peer-to-peer programs are not legal.
Here's an introduction to one of his latest books. From what little I've read though, he ultimatly makes different conclusions than the article.
Also: Why do these articles alternately refer to peer-to-peer programs as "sites"? Sure, they have sites often associated with them, but it's a small part of the whole thing, a complete misnomer. Oh well.
This section is appears to leaning towards FUD. Yes, Kazaa has become a minefield of spyware - but there is Kazaalight and other things out there to help, which is of course, not mentioned. Yes, there are viruses out there, but they cannot be transmitted through MP3 files, and most file sharing programs make a very clear distinction between executables and media files. As far as bad files go, Kazaa and others have a variety of helpful methods to help, from user comments on files, to more active methods being implimented in different P2P systems.
If you're looking for new pirated movies or something, expect to occasionally waste time on mislabelled files - mostly by fans, really. This is understandable. But if you're looking to see if you like Carol King, you can expect to find the music you are interested in, without many problems. To imply that it is inconvenient and dangerous to search for music on a P2P network is misleading at best.
Well - when asked, most will TELL you they use nothing right now. The same word-of-mouth that made Napster so popular hasn't stopped because Napster has gone away. Even without that, anyone with access to a search engine would know about Kazaa and the like as long as they had any interest and willingness to install a program that simply asks for a username, password and share directory before allowing you access to anything you are interested in.
The morals and ethics of file sharing with unaproved music files are definetly questionable - but the avaialbility and popularity of P2P programs are definetly not as questionable. I can't help but see most of this article as either anti-P2P FUD, or very poorly researched information.
Then again, perhaps it's just knowingly false just to get interest, disagreement, and publicity.
Ryan Fenton
"Largely because of tough actions by the record companies to combat free music sites through the courts, legislation and even through techno-guerrilla tactics, there is a noticeable change of sentiment in a small segment of the downloading cognoscenti. Though their numbers are low, many are the early adapters who spot a trend first."
I love it. These fucking idiots in the record industry didn't even offer pay for download services when Napster and their ilk came on the scene. These dildos aren't inventing a new trend, they're finally getting a clue - many consumers find their product too damn inconvenient. I have to go to a physical location, find a physical CD, get assaulted by mind numbed liberal children who think their GenY hipness overrides my GenX old-n-bustedness, just to find the latest Incubus. God forbid I be unfortunate enough to not have a virgin megastore nearby when I want a copy of Nina Simone ("who?"). And then, what I have is stuck on a piece of shit plastic disk that - when scratched - is nothing more than a shiny coaster.
Then enter P2P networks. I can get any song, anytime, anywhere, in multiple formats (ISO, CDA, MP3, OGG, WAV, et al). Hell, it's free too...I'd pay on a per song basis - but hey, that would eliminate 90% of the crap some 'arteests' put out today.
The record industry may have gotten a clue just in time to save their asses for the short term and justify their narrow field of vision, but don't expect them to be around much longer if they don't overhaul their business models. Put out a quality product, give greater flexibility in buying the product, and learn to deliver the product - not expect it to be picked up.
That my friend, is statistically impossible, given the current state of affairs.
sic transit gloria mundi
You want people to download your music for free, I can only assume, because you have either what is called a "TRUST FUND" or a "DAY JOB." Once you have had some success, and rely (even in small part) on record sales to pay for supplies, like say, food, then you become not against free music, but a little more conservative on the subject.
I and most of the musicians I know really do want people to be able to download tracks, spread the gospel, etc., but start getting nervous when a paid cd can actually seem *more* inconvenient than Kazaa Lite.
What do I want in a label? I want them to get their heads out of their asses and be creative about finding new and better ways to market my music -- finding a good blend between locking up people who would rip us off, letting people share music they love, but most of all making the *purchase* of music the most convenient and satisfying way of obtaining it.
The general perception among the working stiff musicians I know is that the one area that free P2P services has killed us is in "buy the hit" sales. It used to be that if someone heard your tune on the radio and liked it enough to want it, a certain proportion would tape it off the radio, netting you nothing. Another proportion would buy the single, and then another proportion would buy the entire cd for that tune and to hear what else was on it. My current possesion of an entire Kittie CD proves that I can fall into that category. The concern now is that Kazaa is the new radio-taping, but the ranks of people who fall into the net-you-nothing category have swollen exponentially. Keep in mind that for smaller-time musicians (lets take a lot of jazz musician as an example) solid airplay doesn't really net you much until it *translates* into something - better gigs, tours, or record sales.
You can quote statistics all you want about the growth of the industry, but there's a very large contingent of musicians who are not super famous, but are known and making a living, for whom the sale of 100 cd's is meaningful in making the rent. If even a few download a single radio song off Kazaa and are satisfied enough to not bother with the cd, then that performer may have just lost someone who could have become a lifelong cd-buying fan if they'd committed to the whole thing.
Soooo. . .I am not pretending to write a treatise on industry economics here, just trying to sum up some of the concerns (biases, myths, whatever) that I've heard from real people trying to make a living in music. People not beholden to record companies, but even more nervous about seeing 30 tracks and entire albums of their music show up on a service where they are free for the taking.
Let the anti-cabalist orange-pelting resume. . .
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
You've just described emusic.com, but with a better selection
With recording costs at record lows as amatuer recording quality soars, the recording industry is becoming less and less needed. It is becoming easier to slice out the middle man, and deal with artists directly.
local sound, man. Local sound.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
And on a related note, how are your new batch of slaves doing? Good thing nothing ever changes, like slavery and IP.
Not every "big business" professional thinks like the knuckle-draggers at the media companies. The brainiacs at KPMG have been very critical of how the music biz has handled this issue. The music industry has been ignoring huge potential markets, which *is not* in the interest of their shareholders. Read more about it here:
www.boingboing.net
I see stuff like this all the time.
Free, legal music for iTunes users.
They have an objection to people downloading their music without paying them for it.
If they could get everyone in the world to download music, pay for it, and not have to print another CD, they'd leap at the chance.
... is the plight of the Webcasters, which was briefly touched on in the article. There are a lot of great webcast stations out there (just got introduced to radioio.com... wow.) that are going to probably have to shut down their doors due to the excessive royalty fees that the silly Librarian of Congress set for them.
... = $0.33...
That's not to say that such fees shouldn't exist. It's just that they are excessive, given many webcasters' revenues.
The real issue here to me is the idea of paying for services. Many people are perfectly willing to pay for services, as long as the services add value for the users. I loved Napster (when I could get it to work on my campus)... the lure of free music was impressive. I've used Kazaa a bit, so I can say that free stuff is great... but even with Kazaa, there's the problem of not getting what you wanted. I remember downloading a song on Napster that I had been searching for for weeks... only to find out that the song I downloaded was a terrible cover of the original.
As the article points out, consumers will pay for something if it is worth it. I've seriously considered eMusic a few times... it sounds like a pretty good deal. Likewise, if someone started up a webcasted radio station that "required" payment for listening, I would think about it (or in the radioio.com case, I'd pull that credit card right out and pay up, as long as it was reasonable... like $20 or so for a year). I have no trouble paying for entertainment or anything else, even if I can find it free elsewhere... especially if paying will get me something extra.
It's all about value... I can either spend time on Kazaa and take my chances, or I can pay some reasonable bit of money for a guaranteed bit of entertainment. Seriously, this just makes sense.
-Jellisky
(Did anyone else notice the terrible math in the article?
"I get at least 30 albums a month or so at 10 bucks a month. That's 10 cents each."
Ummm... $10.00 / 30 albums != $0.10
*sighs* Where have the basic arithmetic skills of people gone?)
The vast majority of music sales in Europe go to the RIAA companies, in case you didn't know.
Emusic is the way to go. Well worth the money.
It is NOT because of their overbearing tactics that some people are weaning away from Napster/Gnutalla/Limewire/etc.
It is because, primarily, they suck. Marginal results, unknown quality, often slow connection speeds.
A serice like emusic.com will fill the bill, when and if they get more selection. $10/month, for straight mp3's at good d/l speeds, online previews. Lots of off-mainstream music, but no heavy hitters. No Pink Floyd, no Beatles, ad infinitum.
Include some/all of those artists, and emusic will be a winner. $10/month is EASILY worth the ease of use over Napster and its clones.
here goes - I have an audible account and an iPod. Audible doesn't ship their files as mp3's - they're a propriatory format (.aa - AudibleAudio) that only work with computers you have an account set up on, up to three and you can't edit the files (like, to take out the "THIS...is AUDIBLE" intro to each track). BUT. You can copy the files to an iPod. You can burn them to a CD as audio (and technically rip it back, but it's a hassle, a waste of media and greatly increases the file size). You can do this an unlimited number of times. And if you cancel your audible account, you still keep the files.
Here's the question: is this GOOD DRM? Is there such a thing? (going on-topic) with the exception of emusic, I haven't seen a p2p alternative that isn't DRMed to the point of unuseability. I'll pay for MP3's on a per track basis (that's essentially what I do at audible) that I can load up on my portable or rip.
Triv
Then I could get people to download my songs for free.
Dang, I just wasn't thinking. The horrors of a Star Trek punk band....
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
One important difference is that Freenet doesn't guarantee retrievability of data, rather the more popular and recent the data, the more chance there is that it can be retrieved. This makes it more like a publication system (think radio or TV) than a distributed file-system.
I'll leave out location because I'm sure the RIAA scours slashdot... However if you can't find an event, it could be an interesting project to start one in a city near you (note: I have no idea what the legal implications are, as I'm sure they are unprecedented).
I am a software engineer by day and a musician by night, so I'd say I have multiple interests in this discussion.
The bottom line is that it should be the normal way of things that people get paid for their work, whether that work be developing the latest glamor software application, cranking out a less-than-glamorous piece of software, creation of some hit recording, or contributing that music you heard the last time you rode an elevator.
The problem we are being confronted with in both software and music is that technology is short circuiting the traditional mechanisms through which money is exchanged for work/product. I do not profess to know the answer, but I do know that it IS wrong to expect musicians to go unpaid for their efforts. I think it is also wrong to expect software engineers to work at the top of their profession without financial reward.
What we need is some way to ensure that these products, recorded music and software source code, can be exchanged under curcumstances that cause their creators to be reliably compensated while allowing the consumer of this work/product reasonable use of it. HOW we do that, I do not yet know.
http://www.bradhill.com/blog/archives/00000021.ht
Indeed - Brad has some minor corrections to the article.
Ryan Fenton
I would like to pay the piper. Unfortunately, I am paying the piper's trained monkey who caries the hat around and "skims" off his share.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
I browsed around emusic and it looks interesting.
I guess since their music is all MP3s they don't
have any DRM stuff which gets in your way,
but does anyone know if they have watermarks in
the files?
Let's say it's the Twilight Zone, and somehow the RIAA made the pay service that had everything you wanted. What would it have on it?
Here's what I'd like to see:
1. $30 or so a month flat fee. Most consumers only buy 2 CDs a month, so this is about the same amount of money they get for that, and as long as that person keeps their membership, it's guaranteed money.
2. Infinite downloads. Whole catalogs of music from all the big 5 or maybe a service where indie bands could stick their stuff on it too. Pay your $30 a month, download whatever you like. This would save the RIAA a ton of money in distribution and manufacturing CDs.
3. Full album art, print it yourself. (Make sure you have a good printer.)
4. Full use. Burn it to a CD, put it on your portable, whatever. Hell, they could even limit it to where you can do whatever you please with it, you just can't give it to someone else.
5. Multiple formats/bitrates. How do you like your compressed music? Variable bit-rate OGG? 64k "CD quality" WMA8? Regular old 128k mp3? High bitrate mp3 pro? Any way you like it, all the way up to perfect CD quality (I guess that'd be about 256k mp3, or whatever equivalent) or regular mp3 quality for the dial up users who don't want to wait all day. Or even 96k "sample" versions.
It won't happen in a million years, but it'd sure be cool. They'd just use the money to keep screwing their artists anyhow.
So, I admit it. I didn't read the article due to the registration, and no one has posted it here yet. But I have a few observations on the subscription music services. Are these true peer to peer networks? Or are all the possible songs available to download located on servers somewhere? If it is p2p, why should I have to pay a third party to simply access files on Joe Users computer if he chooses to share them?
Secondly, what format are these files being distributed in. Are they mp3's or god-awful wma's? I dont want my only source of music through the net to be locked into some proprietary format. And what about quality. Are subscription services going to guarentee a high-quality rip? I'm dont want to pay to download some shmo's chopped up and noisy version of a file. What about longlivity? You can bet that these formats will be among the first to comply with DRM and the pallidium initiative.
This is where I think OGG needs to really bust a hump to get into the mainstream music media. Imagine a whole RIAA sponsered subscription service ruined when the file format they offer becomes passe. Who's gonna want to download low quality lossy mp3s that cant be space shifted to other devices, or repeatedly burnt to cds. If the OGG format remains undefiled by all the DRM nonsense, it stands to become a VERY popular format. As soon as Joe User starts getting locked out from his usual fair-use activities, he's going to be looking for alternatives. We need to be pushing for the mass acceptance of a free, non-crippled standard right when things start to get digitally locked up. My only fear is that the RIAA will probably attempt to smack down a DMCA on technologies that attempt to empower their users.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
It seems like everytime one of these RIAA/record company discussions comes up, everyone says that the record industry has been ripping people off for years and that they need to develop a new business model now that technology is ahead of their time.
:P). CD's, radio, and the Internet are just ways for people to hear about your band and get a taste of your music. If you ask me, the true artform is a live performance/concert.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended an electronic music event. One of the performers really caught my ear, his music was simply amazing. I stuck around after the show and talked to him for a while, I asked where I could hear more of his music and he said (surprisingly enough) to check the internet.
I was shocked to hear a musician telling me to check kazaa and other p2p programs to find his music, so I asked him about it. He said that he saw the Internet as a promotional tool. (much like radio for commercial artists). Then mentioned that he made his real money from shows (much like a lot of electronic musicians and DJ's these days).
At first I didn't get it.. but looking back, it makes perfect sense. If you think about it, a real musician that has a true passion for music enjoys performing in front of an audience and playing for their fans. Going to a show, and feeling the energy of the people around you is something that can't be replicated digitally (at least not yet
the article falls into the common fallacy of equating P2P with illegal copying -- I'm one of the numerous artists who wants people to download my music for free
Well, since you have the time to post articles here instead of chasing groupies, I'd have to guess the RIAA couldn't care less whether or not people are downloading your music for free - since it seems probable you aren't going to get very many people to PAY for it. Correct me if I'm wrong on that.
Of course, YOU fall into the fallacy of assuming that the RIAA opposes P2P because they want to provide people like yoursef from sharing your music - which you are and should be free to do. I've always understood the RIAA is interested in protecting the copyrights of their members - which are being violated-a-plenty by P2P.
Somehow it doesn't seem right to charge a man $70 a month for a *gaming* DSL provider, when he isn't going to be doing gaming or any other ping-dependent activity. My cable modem costs about half that, and it works fine for pretty much anything he'd be using it for.
"Largely because of tough actions by the record companies to combat free music sites... the war against P2P is paying off
Hmmm. Who's had a lesson in economics? Obviously not whoever is suggestioning that the efforts of the RIAA and others have caused an increase in pay P2P sites and their usage. Have they ever heard of ceteris paribus? Obviously not all of the other variables have stayed the same in this instance to allow them to analyze whether there is a relationship between the two. These services weren't really established a year ago. The number and effectiveness of free file sharing networks has changed, the availability of broadband has changed, the economy has been in an upheaval, the amount of good music seems to be decreasing, and this list goes on. Many of us could come up with dozens of reasons why the actions of the RIAA and others have likely NOT caused or even made a dent in the use of pay P2P sites. The fact that one event followed another means nothing!!!
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Man, you're puttin' me on.
RIAA's efforts paying off. eew! :) They use it, focused, for the things it is good at and are not addicted, surfing around all day, like me. :) These people wants to use the internet but has not been offered any alternative.
Ok, so there came a new media, a new concept, the world wide web, powered by the internet.
Every single company with a product have tried to wrap itself around it, make their product up to date. Some people failed and some had success.
The only one who were sitting on their hands were the entire music industry, ignoring what was going on. While more than one generation now has embraced the internet into their daily lives as a natural part of it, the music industry still keeps pretending it's a brand new thing. When your friends comes and visit you, their kids are not amazed that you have a internet connection, no, if you can say you have a 2mbit connection, then you might be able to boast a little.
So now "we" have educated people that the only way you can get music from the internet is by using P2P software or the likes. There are no alternative. Just about everybody knows that this internet thing is a great resource for getting information about just about everything and yet there is this big black hole when it comes to music.
A couple of years ago, one might say it was time for them to get their act together but now they have a major salvage operation on their hands and it am sure it's not helping telling people that they are criminals without being able to point them in a direction to a legal alternative.
So many people have embraced the use of the internet today, I have family members who I never would have thought would ever own a PC who now has one, uses the internet. Hey, these people even have a more "healty" attitude towards it than me.
They don't have "banner filters", hell they even have digged out their credit card to pay for Real Player, go figure. And still the music industry can't figure out how to make one cent on the internet.
Of course the fact that there is no legal option, does not make it right but it sure is a lot easier to show people what you thing they are doing wrong if you can show them what you think is right, and buy-the-CD is not going to cut it.
I know, they won't settle for less than total control. Unless they can be 100% sure that it's unbreakable, they won't use it. Maybe that wouldn't be such an issue if they had been able to form the right mind-set from the beginning.(I know, sounds evil). It comes back to what I mentioned before, now we have people growing up with the internet and have learned how you get music which happens to be the wrong way.
I have no sympathy for those whining bastards what so ever, they have had plenty of time to figure out a solution. It's just that 100% control thing I guess.
As long as they are refusing to rethink their entire business strategy and keeps fighting those windmills they are in a never ending battle.
Of course the winds may turn if they can manage to slip their big brother software on Joe sixpacks pc but then again people might also decide that the product they have to offer is not worth the choking feeling of the iron hand.
And then there is the entire issue of them only pushing their low quality crap. I like music made by people who love making music, not by people who love to see themself on TV. But I see no one trolling anything else than a new pair of tits that might can sing.
All they semms to want to sell is those "listen to the CD 10 times and trow it away" band. Even most new rock bands these days seems to be so damn molded into something where the image is not about the content of the CD but the cover that the teenage girls can get wet with. All music that gets a decent promotion or heavy rotation on MTV, is in the "buy, listen once and throw away" category. So now that we have taught everyone that music is only entertainment and not an artform, how can anyone wonder that people don't have any respect for it or those that perform.
my sig
The biggest problem with a for-pay p2p service is the fact that it's p2p. Why would I pay someone else for the right to download music from you? It would make more sense for me to pay to download music from a distributor. Napster was never meant to be a pay service, and has no way to guarantee quality of anything. If I'm paying for it, I'd better be damn sure the quality is what I expect (i.e. better than a 128kbps that someone taped off the radio and then transferred to his computer by playing the tape near a microphone while sneezing in the background).
So, in other words, paying for a pure p2p system (ie napster) makes absolutely no sense.
Frankly, those who insist that this is a fuss about copyright, rather than money, by simply asserting their right to copy and distribute commercial recordings when and where they choose, copyright be damned, are playing into the hands of the recording industry. The recording industry wants this to be seen as a a life-or-death battle for the survival of copyright itself. It isn't. It's a fuss about getting the U.S. legal system to adjust the language and interpretation of copyright law in order to come to terms with new technological capabilities. Eventually, this will happen. But, if the recording industry is able to portray the other side as opponents of copyright and proponents of "stealing" digital media, then the adjustment will likely be expensive and draconian, affecting everyone's ability to use the net freely and openly.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
...maybe some people weren't lying when they said "I don't *want* to be stealing music, but there's no pay service that meets my requirements. Could it be that people are actually ethical and truthful sometimes?
.ogg for home use.
That said, I'm still not currently paying for music online. But I've downloaded maybe one song in the last six months, so I'm not really in the market for a music service; I'm too busy ripping my (legally purchased) CDs to
SablKnight
So what is this, officially sanctioned RIAA propaganda? ;)
I think the biggest stumbling block to the whole pay for napster thing is the inability to sell a cd.
Sure you can download the singles, but being able to charge 10 bucks for 1 or 2 good songs is pretty much crucial to the way the music industry works today.
Aside from the money issues, it would sure make organizing music a lot easier. Ogg, tar, and XML I think could be combined to make a pretty good format. One file in the tar called CDProperties.XML, and the rest oggs, mp3s, wmf, or whatever. Maybe even incorporate videos. The hardest part may be adding the functionaility to winamp and other players since they are generally designed around one file, one song.
The ability to sell a package would make it much these services much easier to market.
With the recession, I have found that my local Rasputin's records has bursted with newly released CD's in the used bins within a week or 2 of a general release. I've hardly needed to buy a new CD in ages, I hardly even look at the new bins anymore. I did the other day and was blown away to see double CDs retail for $36. License to print money indeed. Fuck that.
Yep, I've stopped file sharing. Not because it's any harder, but because using Rhapsody is that much easier.
I don't have to search through a bunch of random hits on FastTrack or Gnutella.
I don't have to wait for a download to complete.
I don't have to check the file to see if it's good, then manually file it in a folder.
I just pick the song I want to play, and it plays. I don't really care about downloads, because I don't want all the albums in my library taking up space. My cable modem works great and is always on.
So I've bought in. $8.33 a month is a bargain for a jukebox in the sky. Could it be better? Sure. There are a few artists I wish would make their songs available. And as soon as a competitor comes along that includes that music, I'll switch.
This is healthy competition, and we should encourage companies like Listen.com who are providing a valuable service and (gasp) able to make a profit on it.
"I get at least 30 albums a month or so at 10 bucks a month. That's 10 cents each."
Yes, I'm sure this guy is a real tech junkie, early adopter hardcore geek type, what with his mad basic math $k1llz and all.
Does anyone proof this stuff?
E
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland
You know, E-music has a FANTASTIC idea. 10 bucks a month for unlimited downloads of great quality (192k in my opinion) is a great business model. Unfortunately, they have one major problem. I did a search for Conjure One (Rhys Fulber's new solo project, which is a fantastic disc) and it turned up no results. If you have ever searched for it on Kazaa, you know as well as I do, that only a few tracks seem to be out there (I'll be damned if I share mine, this is a great disc, everyone should buy it). So even if you signed up for e-music, you still need to go buy the actual CD, which isn't something people want to do if they are paying to download their music. So, E-music does have the right idea, just not enough to catch my intrest yet. Until a service with Napster like variety, CD perfect quality, and Incredible available bandwidth comes along at a good price, E-music probably won't see many customers.
However, I will give them this...$9.95 a month (The one year upfront is kinda lame) is a very reasonable price, if they had everything.
You can get browsers with spell checkers built into them. Or at least, they're available for Mac OS X. Works automatically on any text you enter in a textarea.
The RIAA or whatever you call it have no weight over here so we will continue to swap this stuff and any other stuff we like. You can keep the guys in jackboots over there as we have grown out of them :)
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
It was done at one point, where you could broadcast radio in kind of a P2p fasion, bout 5 years ago? 4 years? anyway, it got shut down.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Interesting,
I've looked at Rhapsody before and it's trash. I'm not paying for streaming -- If I pay for music, I damn well plan on owning it.
Now, scanning the E-Music listings, there's quite a few things on there I'd like to grab. Forget for a moment that I have means to sample all the music I want (pretty much) via some tasty DirectConnet hubs. I am still happy and willing to pay the piper if they give me a service worth a damn.
So, I might sign up for E-Music. Why not, I can drop $10, leech for a weekend, cancel the service.
Two things though:
What bitrate do they encode at?
Can I sign up for just a month?
They do that really annoying thing where they don't want to give nearly enough information on their front page, and try to sucker you into a "FREE" trial before you do anything else. Just give me the info and let me sign up, fer chrissakes.
Having been a saxophonist for many, many years, I listen almost exclusively to a *lot* of jazz. However, on the standard P2P model (or at least WinMX, which is what I've used in the past), I'm pretty much at the mercy of random people to even have specific artists that I'm looking for, working under the hopes that I'll get what I want providing I have something of equivalent value to trade.
This is probably one the things that I like about e-music is that they have a decent jazz selection that I can listen to previews of and have unlimited downloads at my leisure at a good bandwidth. A lot of the retail market doesn't usually have what I want, probably because most of what I listen to isn't mainstream..
I personally see them eventually building this into some kind of centralized repository that maybe someday we can even have all of our out-of-print albums available in this kind of distribution model.
Though I really hate a lot of what the RIAA and the MPAA is pushing in trying to get DRM into every electronic device we own (ESPECIALLY since I'm pretty sure most consumers DON'T WANT IT), I'm personally okay with paying for this kind of distribution model as long as I get to move my downloads over to whatever computer and/or device that I want without ever getting hassled.
NOTE: I am in no way affiliated with e-music or its partners. I just subscribe to the thing.
This is not true more people download their music now than they did with napster. This is because Kazaa is actually superior to napster. It is easier to download songs because one gets files from multiple sources. I find all popular stuff on Kazaa with great ease, and I find obscure stuff, too. The RIAA admits all of this in this brief. (It's 67 pages, a long download.)
Feel good, we're winning. The RIAA doesn't know what to do. They need to appear to be fighting piracy to their shareholders, but any move they make is a bad one. Each time they shut down a network it allows one based on superior technology to flourish. Going after individuals demonizes them way too much.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
I listen to quite a bit of ebm and gothic/industrial, and I'd say the primary reason these are only niche music markets is that most people don't like them. They're simply not styles of music that most people like to listen to. I've played samples for all sorts of people, and very few are receptive at all to that style (most find it "too dark" or "too depressing" or something of that sort). I doubt that even a multi-million dollar advertising campaign would suddenly make Front 242 sell 15 million copies of its albums.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
What is a fair price per track, though? Assuming an average CD ($15.00 for 12 tracks), you could pay up to $1.25 per track. Everyone seems to be suggesting that it should be much cheaper than that (I think someone in here said $.25/track). Would I pay $.25/track for music? Sure, IF they had the bands I listen to, but when you listen to the odd assortment of bands that I listen to, that is a crap shoot. Even P2P is a gamble with some of the bands I like, and I usually end up getting the CD online, burning and distributing so that others can find them too.
Maybe if they set up a system like this (Can't find what you like? Tell us, and we'll find it for you), I would be more open to the idea.
CODITO, ERGO SUM: I Code, therefore I am.
If you subscribe to EMusic, perhaps you can answer a couple of questions I'd like to have answers to before throwing down $45 for a 3 month subscription.
..
What bitrate do they encode at?
What kinds of download speeds do you get?
I'm up to artist #4670, and I have to say, I'm reasonably impressed. Not overwhelmed, but the good thing is that it's mostly independent artists on there, so there have been a good 30 or 40 albums I'd download right off the bat. I'm happy to pay what they're asking for that, provided the service is good
I can't see how this works as a viable longterm business model. Serious music fans like myself are more likely to drop cash for the short term subscription, leech everything they want, and maybe check back in a year. Fact is, I still buy a lot of CDs, even though my mp3 collection is up around 800 albums. If services like this exist and get better, why would I ever spend more than 0.30 cents an album? By that logic, unregulated P2P probably leads me to spend more money on music....
Then again, what do I know? My music consumption habits are certainly not the mainstream; the "average" consumer is probably looking for something different. Not to mention with a lot more major label BULLSHIT on it.
Ha! I actually do have an account on K5 but I haven't posted much. I don't like the way it forces you to sift through *all* posts, instead of using a threshold like Slashdot. For a site with that many users, I think you should be able to select a threshold.
P.S. Is Poliglut really back up? It seems that way...
What if the long term RIAA vision isn't that you can't get your DRM music off your CD
That's not going to happen. There will always be an analog hole because there will always be audiophiles who can strap on a double blindfold and hear the difference between a watermark and no watermark. Even the proposed CBDTPA bill had a rule stating that if the publishers were to encode a work so as to prohibit fair use, the motion picture companies would be liable for $2,500 per copy.
and they only allow themselves or their affiliates (Sony records - sony cd players?) manufacture the equipment that can read the CD's.
Either you have fair use via the analog hole labeled "Line Out" on the back of your computer, or you have a severe case of anti-trust violation.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What's it going to be like when internet2 is pervasive?
Internet2 will not be pervasive. It will serve only academic sites. If Internet2 were to go commercial, then it would become part of Internet1. High bandwidth to the home is not Internet2; it's simply called extreme broadband.
Will I retire or break 10K?
As a consumer, I DON'T want to pay for mp3s. Maybe I'm being a luddite, but I have a problem paying money for something I can't hold in my hand
MP3 and Ogg files are something you can hold in your hand. Unlike DRM'd formats, you can burn them to a CD and listen to them in any compatible pocket player. (There aren't many Ogg players yet, but you can still bug your manufacturer to add Tremor support.)
I like flipping through the booklet while I listen to the music.
So download the JPGs and print them.
Will I retire or break 10K?
So... you've never paid a cover charge to hear a band? ... You can't listen to it wherever you want.
Metallica and several other bands have a policy to let fans record and redistribute the band's shows.
Will I retire or break 10K?
>>"What bitrate do they encode at?" Well, they encode at 128k, more than adequate for most purposes, but clearly not for the music archivist. >>"What kinds of download speeds do you get?" As far as download speeds, I've seen stuff where I'll pretty consistently get anywhere from 200-300k bytes/sec. >>"I can't see how this works as a viable longterm business model. Serious music fans like myself are more likely to drop cash for the short term subscription, leech everything they want, and maybe check back in a year" You know, I thought of this too but I opted for the year subscription anyhow. I think they have a large enough selection to keep me busy for a while, and they do seem to add enough music periodically to keep me interested. It seems that if you're REALLY eclectic, then you'll be spending a lot of time there. "Fact is, I still buy a lot of CDs, even though my mp3 collection is up around 800 albums." Yup. I have almost 600 myself, but purchasing CDs has been a harder sell for me lately because 1) there isn't a huge retail selection of things that I like and I *hate* most homogenized mainstream pop, 2) most of what I *do* like is out-of-print, too expensive, or too difficult to find, and 3) I could never listen to everything I have now. I've made it a habit that if I'm going to buy cd's, I'll mostly buy from the used cd sections in stores or download from e-music. >>"If services like this exist and get better, why would I ever spend more than 0.30 cents an album?" Hmmm. Don't know. I'm going to take a wild guess here, so please don't take my word as gospel. Any additional input surrouding this is appreciated: My thought would be that maybe it could end up a little like the video business - you come up with a hit album and keep it off the legal mp3 sites for a while, then maybe after the popularity dies down to a certain threshold, then they can release it on mp3 format. The main thing is that once they get you on a subscription, you're pretty much guaranteeing them a certain amount of business, one that they can quantify and captilize on older music that they don't pay as much attention to anymore. Hmmm... this is a scary thought: I wonder if they could use that as an excuse to stop producing older CDs and flood the market with their newer stuff... The one thing that I've noticed with e-music is that they seem to have agreements only with certain labels (as you stated, there's a some independents, which probably explains why I like a lot of the jazz that's on there). That means that there's also a pretty large gap in what they carry until they can get new agreements signed. They've indicated that they're working on this, which I'm willing to support if it means I'll get more bang for the buck on my subscription. I'm definitely an early adopter on this. What I'd REALLY like to see is that they've purchased rights to a lot more out-of-print music. That would REALLY catch my attention!
So some artists distribute their work legally on P2P networks.
Legally? Are you sure? How much did they pay for the underlying musical compositions? And don't tell me they wrote them themselves.
Wouldn't it be much simpler and more convenient just to publish a URL and serve files with http?
No. For one thing, hosting of big files costs money. Look at the bandwidth alone: 80 MB for an album, times however many listeners.
People sometimes suggest that mirroring files saves bandwidth, but that can be done with http as well
You can't have your fans mirror your files if most residential Internet access providers block incoming requests on port 80.
What you want is multicast, and you're not going to get multicast unless and until the ISPs figure out how to charge for that.
Will I retire or break 10K?
AGH. Forgot the Paragraph tags and posted the above without previewing. Sorry. Don't know how to edit a post.
Ah, a fellow drummer! Cheers!
The only thing you need is to have some start capital for - Band equipment - web site.
And what about paying your songwriters? An unauthorized recording of a copyrighted musical composition infringes the copyright on the musical composition.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Not only is 25 cents per track 1/5th the price you might pay for a CD, but it also doesn't take into account the fact that some tracks are worth more than others. /. Readers are forever complaining that most CDs only contain 2 good songs (thankfully not the ones I buy). Part of the motivation for wanting per track downloading is so they can save money by only buying the 2 songs.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
Make the out of print material available at a reasonable price. At any given point 80% of all music is totally unavailable at any price, its locked away to create a false music economy and demand for the labels "Band D'Jour". That was the draw of Napster and later others. I could find Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts or Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Dot Bikini, or the latest Nirvana. The access to the music is what it was about. Locked away music doesn't benefit anybody, the artist, the label, or the public.
Locking up the culture of this country for the benefit of companies who are based outside of the USA is a far bigger crime than sharing White Christmas or Britney's latest.
LET MY MUSIC GO!
Sharing =/ Piracy =/ Theft
Surely, that implies that you only record your own songs
What if, by coincidence, your so-called "own songs" happen to be "substantially similar" to a previously published musical composition? Substantial similarity is the standard for copying under United States copyright law, and this article shows just how easy it is for substantial similarity to kick in.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Thanks for the info.
128k/sec is not sufficient. It's significantly lossier than higher bitrates, and while I'm not the penultimate audiophile, I expect at least 192k.
Oh well, guess the industry heads can keep on trying.
Is it really worth it - there's monthly subscriptions on top of which it's generally MP3 or some other compressed format and only works for a limited time - factor in the download costs and it's hardly worth bothering. Besides I have no interest in the trash the industry generally peddles.
Have I just had incredible good luck? Am I using P2P on a different planet or something? Gnutella "scales" just fine for me, and I don't have any trouble with it.
I've had one bad download from P2P, 3 minutes of silence or hiss. Oh no! ;) I picked another result, clicked a button, and switched windows. Oh the time! Oh the trouble! ;) Do people just need to learn about ALT+TAB? You don't sit there watching the download attempts, do you? If that's the case, RIAA has nothing to fear after all. Maybe you do need to buy a $20 shrinkwrapped piece of %$^$^ with one good song on it.
This article tells how britney and a few others are to start speaking out against online piracy.
If 99% of consumers use the industry's easy to use pay sites and 1% access the "free but you need to be running linux and be technically competent" sites then the music industry will go away and leave us alone. It won't be worth the cost to fight the remaining 1%.
I don't owe Joe Sixpack access to free music. Frankly, I don't care if they screw him for every cent he has, just so long as they go away and leave me to enjoy using and hacking Linux.
And no I am not worried about not being able to access music on my Linux box because its all protected by DRM. If I realy want it, all I have to do is buy a cheap "DRM Player" and a good quality microphone. I just record the sound straight into the sound card. My Linux system isn't going to take any notice of any watermarks and so long as my none-paladium hardware keeps working I can't go wrong.
The Washington Post today looks at the RIAA's new ad campaign, which features music stars asking consumers not to download. "Hey, I've got a mortgage on a $10 million pad in the Hills. I gotta get paid!"
> "I don't have to worry that the song I'm downloading isn't a 5 minute loop of someone taking a shit."
;)
Wouldn't it be easier to just download files that are called "someone taking a shit" or something to that effect if that's what you're after? I'm sure those are very rarely falsified.
the faq says emusic keeps 50% and give 50% to the "artist or label". It ALSO says that emusic pays per song... So I don't know which is true. Do they pay more out if I download a hundred songs then if I download 10? Do they take half my subscription fee and split it amoung the songs I download? How much does the label pass on to the musician?
What with the current state of P2P software and the online community in general, music piracy via computers is a trend that started recently, and unbeknownst to the RIAA, it will never stop. I don't know exactly what this means for everyone involved, but national sentiment is quite a match for many possible actions that the government might take (if any are to be taken at all). Looks like Microsoft has already started to get thier money-grubbing hands on DRM, which I feel may inadvertantly contribute to thier death. In a nation where everyone wants to pirate music, nobody will appreciate an operating system that tries to hinder them, no matter how tight of a grip it currently has on the market (and besides the USA, very few other countries actually PAY for Microsoft products ;)
Usually the songs people want are the singles being played on the radio. Back in the day when LP records were $8.99, vinyl singles cost less than $3 and you got a B side too. So that's two songs. Even adjusting for 15 years of inflation, that might be $4 if they were still sold. So that could be considered the absolute upper bound of what people would pay for inferior compressed MP3 quality.
Overall, the philosophy is to attack the availability problem from two
complementary directions: to reduce the number of software errors through
rigorous testing of running systems, and to reduce the effect of the remaining
errors by providing for recovery from them. An interesting footnote to this
design is that now a system failure can usually be considered to be the
result of two program errors: the first, in the program that started the
problem; the second, in the recovery routine that could not protect the
system.
-- A.L. Scherr, "Functional Structure of IBM Virtual Storage
Operating Systems, Part II: OS/VS-2 Concepts and
Philosophies," IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 12, No. 4.
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