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Ideas for a Recording Industry Alternative?
icewalker asks: "There has been a lot of news (here, here, and here) lately about music, copy protection, and other related issues. What I find interesting is that there are literally thousands of free bands out there that are more than worthy of listening too. Free as in they have not sold their souls (not to mention music rights) away to the devils of the music industry. But how does one get to listen to these pioneers of music? The solution could be sites like mp3.com (until the mp3 royalties are forced). But what people want is a locals only site that streams, guess what, the music from free local bands only. Not just for your community but local bands from all over the US (and the world). We need a site that collects these bands and we need a streamer that plays them. No CARP royalty problems since these bands are unsigned and own the music themselves. Make it so that the artists can hopefully sell their own CD's or single songs from the same site. Anyway, mix and bake at multiple bit rates and you have a solution to the copy protected CD (I haven't bought one yet from an Indie Band). The big guys go down because they can't compete with free, better than great music on the web with a low cost distribution. So, where is this utopia? Oh! And dump the necessary registration required to listen (are you listening mp3.com?)."
Any system that allows consumers to purchase songs one song at a time (at a low one-song price), rather than as expensive packages (like CDs) that contain unwanted songs at a high price, will go a long way toward helping small artists get recognition.
Do the artists have to sign some contract to help support the service provided to them?
Isn't this where the music industry started?
Anything you say will be held against you.
Campaigns against general purpose PC's are the best way to control intellectual property. You can instead sell a device that only plays what you allow it to play, which no-one can hack into. Then you allow the device to download from certain sites on the internet, store music in a popular format like OGG, and put in so many features that the user is perfectly happy to give up the ability to play illegal copies in lieu of the features.
With a business model like this, you could find revenue from several different sources. Especially when starting out, who would want to advertise on a web site, or a streaming site where "unpopular" artists are played? Perhaps to start out, one would charge a small fee from the artists themselves to help with the upkeep of the connection and the servers.
Beyond that, as the site becomes more popular, replace it with streaming advertisements, advertisements on the site, and keep a minimal fee for the artists (consider it an investment fee - we'll play you, but there is no guarantee the listeners, or the DJs will like you).
Could this be the new radio?
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
http://www.somesongs.com
Good stuff, cheap. Er, free. Click the "Top Songs" link on the right-hand side to see the songs that have the highest rating. Or any number of other options. It's a cool site, ad-free, for the love of music.
There are a bunch of other sites for finding interesting songs, if you have time to listen to a lot of stuff. They aren't "official", they're all amateur, but they're lovingly crafted with your entertainment in mind. There are links to a bunch of them on http://www.songfight.net
Maybe a slashdotter or two will find somebody new whose music speaks to them.
I had to smile as I read this, because it sounded exactly like I did a few years ago. I decided to try and "discover" some obscure bands that were better than the tripe being played on the radio.
It's the conventional wisdom that we hear so much and that we'd all like to believe--mainstream, big-label music sucks, and all the interesting stuff is being done by small, independent artists--but the fact is that it just isn't true. Independent artists tend to be extremely lo-fi, very unpolished, and more often than not, just plain unoriginal. You definitely can't dance to it. Yes, a lot of mainstream music is shit. But that doesn't mean that everything else is worth hearing. There is a small handful of independent artists who have created enough of a following to find success without losing their artistic integrity, but 99% of them are just the folks who couldn't cut it. The music just isn't there.
Fortunately, we do have big-label artists worth hearing. Eminem is always perceptive and interesting, and Tori Amos is dependably good. Most big music stores let you listen to CDs before you buy, so just head over to the New Releases and poke around until you find that happy medium: a big-name, mainstream musician that you like.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
mp3.com has a lot of bands in various levels of quality. How do I find one that I like? Sure CowboyNeal could make a site with his picks, but what if I don't like his kind of music.
.Mac subscription would give me a service like this).
I think the problem of matching a band with an audience that likes their music is the key problem for internet music distribution to solve. If a band that 99% of the people on the net hate can reach the 1% of people that likes their music, they can still be a success. And this 1% of people will be very happy to finally find a band that they like.
So far my strategy for find music that I like is to find a local band that I like, then do a google search for any positive reviews for the band I already like... then I look and I see what else the reviewer recommends and go try their music out. This has let me find a few great bands that will probably never get played on the radio: (Breech, OO-Soul, and Powder) This works, but it takes a long time to find new music.
I'd love to have a site where I can easily find more bands and buy their mp3's to download directly into my iTunes. And maybe even have their shows added to my iCal. (I wish my
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
I seem to recall that Napster tried something like this when they were trying to prove that their software was more general-purpose than trading copyrighted files. They didn't have too much success with that business model. I don't think any centralized scheme would work without a revenue stream that relied on selling bits.
Check out my homepage for equipment sales.
I've often thought that an internet radio station directed by its listeners would be interesting to try out. I have no time to implement this idea, but maybe someone here could run with it.
The idea would be to allow anybody to become a DJ and create playlists. Listeners could then tune in to any playlist they wanted. Initially, I'm sure it would be pandemonium, but eventually, the field of listenable DJs would narrow. Listener ranking could help eliminate self-serving DJs that just want to promote their pet band or just pick crap. Possibly you could start rewarding the best DJs with funds from advertising to entice people to take the time to create great playlists.
The playlists could be easily distributed to multiple servers, allowing a sort of load balancing if need be.
Some system would need to be in place to ensure that copyright was not violated - probably tight controls on what music was made available on the server, and hence to the playlist authors. It would be nice to allow DJs to upload small clips though for words between the music.
Matt Gundry
Go to www.suzanz.com to check out a really good singer/songwriter who refuses to sell her soul to the record company. This site also has _lots_ of links to other musicians in the SF bay area, if her music doesn't float your boat. Oh, and buy her CD, please!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
This could be a change for file-sharing developers to enhance existing p2p networks, by not only integrating p2p radio, but also links to these bands websites. The end result would be a p2p file sharing network, decentralized streaming radio, and a fully integrated system for people to pay, read "tip" the artists they enjoy listening too.
Planet P - Liberation through technology.
www.enthea.org
Just to show that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way the music industry works now, let's make an analogy between the music industry and the startup Venture Capitalist business. I think this analogy makes sense because that's precisely one of the roles the record labels are supposed to fill: that of a producer. People come to you with (business plans/demo tapes), and you invest money in those you like.
:
So, if your VC was like a record label
- The VC would own 99% of the stock of the company
- The VC would fill all the roles in the startup company, except for the actual product engineering (i.e. music writing/recording). The VC acts as CEO, VP of bizdev, VP of marketing and VP of sales.
- The VC determines at what price your 'product' sell, when and where, if ever.
- You can never get additional funding from any other investors for like, seven years.
- The VC has the right to call it quits at any time.
- You may no quit. Ever. If you do, consider a career change.
Hmm, don't like the conditions. Well, you can't just keep driving up Sand Hill Road. All the contracts are the same!
DZM.
But what about some colaborative filtering , P2P system? Imagine hooking it up with Gnutella so that you can not only download music, but add in your ratings.
Then groups of people with simlar taste find the good stuff they all like.
This sort of happens with your friends, and via USENET groups. I'm much more likely to listen to a recomendation of a fellow news group reader, than a commercial. Of course the stuff I listen to(jazz guitar for example) is hardly ever heard on the radio or MTV....
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Cdbaby isn't a bad choice I hear. They focus on international distribution of indie bands not the localized system that the post is discusssing but they are definitely more amenable to fans than the RIAA.
I really thought that winamp was on to something when they made it easy to publish playlists onto a website that could be viewed by everyone. What was missing was a reasonable way to listen to these playlists, besides going out and trying to download all of the songs. I can think of no better way to discover new music than to find some other individuals who have similar tastes and see what they have found.
One thing most of the ideas for 'what comes after the RIAA falls' ignore is possibly the most important part of why they exist. Mainstream radio stations and recording studios exist not only to sell music, but to tell the sheep-like consumers what they want. There is simply too much music out there for people to listen to it all and make an informed decision on what they like, so most people rely on recommendations - from friends, acquaintances, the guy down the pub, and (most prevalently) the radio.
Also, realize that most artists make nearly nothing from recording; most of an artist's income comes from live performances and (possibly) merchandise. With album sales providing nearly no income, we may as well throw it out entirely.
Free music is all well and good, but it provides neither an easy way for consumers to find what they want/like easily, nor an avenue for popular bands to REALLY make it big - worldwide tours, packed auditoriums, and gaggles of screaming fans.
The RIAA needs replacing with a better system; something that allows artists to get widespread exposure and consumers to get informed advice on what to buy, without all the corruption, money, and indentured servitude. My idea is for a central repository of reviews and a seeding center for free music exchange, sort of a blog-cluster and Napster root server in one.
This system would rely on a set of independent reviewers. Artists send their tracks to them, hoping that the reviewer likes it. The reviewer writes about tracks that interest them. Consumers read the reviewer's column/blog, choosing which ones they agree with, taking recommendations from them, and buying stuff from the artists.
Crapflooding could be a concern, so a fee would probably be required both from the artists (say, X dollars per track reviewed, and Y (\X) dollars for distribution only) and from the consumers (Z dollars per month for unlimited access to all reviewers and tracks).
Reviewers could be corrupted, so their reputation (and thus their audience and market) would depend on their integrity, and a reviewer wouldn't be allowed to take money (or anything else) from anybody for a more favorable review.
All tracks submitted to the service would belong to the artist, but must be freely redistributable. The main value of this service is to help artists and consumers find each other; the downloading is secondary. Plus, word-of-mouth is valuable to artists; the more people that hear their tracks and like them, the more tickets they'll sell to their next show.
The artist owns his/her/their own work. They can package it however they want - they can sell CD's/DVDa's at their shows, they can sell sheet music/tabs, etc.
The barrier to entry is low, but not zero. Anybody who's serious can try their hand at professional music, but trolls will generally be sifted out through both the review process and the cost of repeatedly submitting garbage.
I hope this gets modded up - I'd like to see what people think.
-- Hamster
If you really believe in free-music then you just have to bite the built and provide it and ask for donations just like everybody else (OSS, Public Radio, etc). You just have to write off anybody below 25, and assume that anyone over 25 will kick down a few bills a year for their music. (I do for NRP, and KEXP).
You run the service non-profit, and give the $ to the artists. If you track downloads per user you could ask the user how to divide the money (all user's downloads, all artists, specific artists, whatever). This does assume this service will be a central distribution point, or at least reference-count all distributed media. maybe a flaw.
Artists are responsible for their own marketing. That's the way it should be anyway. I believe that any entity that's responsible for both marketing and distribution will end up looking exactly like a record company.
Building a interest group that gets radio stations to play music from this service seems more "clean" if the group isn't affiliated Mw/ the service itself.
United Artists v2
The Washington Post has an excellent mp3 section focusing on local bands. If you're a DC band you can Post your MP3s there. T&C seem pretty generous - you retain copyright, and just let WP distribute your songs. And anyone who has Chuck Brown available is worth doing business with, definitely.
sulli
RTFJ.
The Jamband/Grassroots scene is one viable alternative. The scene, which has its roots in bands such as the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band, the jamband/grassroots scene is based on the principles of "tour lots, play well, allow tape trading".
Bands like Phish, Dave Matthews Band and John Mayer (three rather different artists) have become very popular primarily because of tape trading and putting on a good live show which varies night to night.
Some sites of particular interest are Homegrown Music Network and Jambase, the latter of which has a huge database of members interested in and willing to promote the bands it serves. Bands seeking to promote shows in certain cities pay Jambase to allow them access to all the members in certain zip codes, cities and states. These fans get promotional material to spread around their area, thus gaining more interest in the concert.
Another great site is archive.org's etree archive which has full concerts of lots of bands (from big names such as Dave Matthews to the unknowns like the Motet) in lossless SHN format.
Of course, the limitations of this scene is that it's basically all wrinkly old hippies noodling away on covers of Grateful Dead songs, but there are innovators such as the New Deal and Disco Biscuits, who play live, improvised trance/breakbeat house. Or Howie Day, a singer-songwriter playing Radiohead influenced songs using loops and samples to create a unique sound. OAR play (somewhat turgid) reggae-rock, and Illinois' Umphrey's McGee present us with an alternate universe of "What if Phish listened to Pink Floyd and Genesis rather than the Grateful Dead?". There's something for [mostly] everyone.
Since you mention it, here's an amusing story about Riffage. I was involved in the original development and engineering of that site, and thought it was a good idea until the sales/marketing types f***ed it all up. That's right, they were greedy, and perhaps a little clueless (IMHO). But at least it was VC money they squandered, and not yours, right? (sorry Ken)
Part of this development involved the auto-email system. We had created a number of test email accounts (rif_test1, rif_test2, rif_test3, etc...) to QA the call-back, account verifications, newsletters, and notifications. You would do this for any site.
Riffage went under, and within a few weeks, all these test email accounts were innundated with spam, and we removed the addresses from our mail server.
I don't know who's running BeSonic now. I haven't been there. Not interested. The people who ran riffage don't talk to me any more. If you want to hear local bands, go out to the clubs.
Don't even mention the word Utopia to me.
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
A very possible solution of the problem of filtering out the 'dross' would be to use moderation techniques much like we do here on slashdot.
The "music distribution site" could allow users to post "reviews" and give point ratings to individual bands/songs. A fairly powerful mechanism for locating and suggesting music that you will probably like could be made by informing the site which bands you already know you like, and then you can be given "try this" selections based on bands that were given high ratings by users who also rated your selections high.
You could try new genres of music by first listening to the highest rated stuff, and then filtering with options like "I agree with this reviewer, what else does this same reviewer recommend?"
More powerful options would let you ignore ratings by reviewers that you disagree with - and/or even meta-moderate people's reviews.
It shouldn't be too difficult to build the system in such a way that shows the preferences of "the masses", but also lets you see the music preferences of "like minded" persons.
Eventually you could have associated with your profile a list of "music mentors" - users who's ratings you consider great, and who will act as your "peers" in suggesting new music.
This seems like the ideal solution to me...
They were very much a big label act when they came out in '69 with "In the Court of the Crimson King" on A&M Records (I think). Greg Palmer and Peter Fripp hit the big time with this album. Ian McDonald and Sinfield seemed to become minor celebrities.
Without the big label, you wouldn't heard of these guys.
But back then, the labels were a little more open to experiment with their acts. Nowadays, the artists tend to be polished and corporate. The acts don't seem to *grow*. They're hip this year and then they disappear.
Maybe that's the problem. It seems back then, an artist didn't have to go platinum every time they put out a record. Today, poor old Brittany's 2nd album didn't do as well as the first (how could it?), and now she's washed up before she's old enough to drink.
Personally, I blame MTV, but I don't think most people know what that means anymore.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I'm with you. It seems that this type of site would have major bandwith costs. How would they recover such costs... let's review:
I'll take this to mean 'free' as in will allow their music to be distributed for free.
Easy: Ogg Vorbis
Does this seem contradictory to anyone else? Only want local bands, but want all bands? I guess I can see something like an Amazon.com system. If you like this band, you might also like... but then we get into the expense issue again.
Onced again, Ogg Vorbis
In this, I might see a solution, that solution being charging some sort of a percent of sales. It would then be in the sites interest to promote the most selling bands in the most selling areas. But isn't this a variant of the RIAA group?
I have a problem with this... the music isn't free! It costs in terms of time, bandwith, advertising, and a whole host of other issues. It -might- be free to then end user to download, but it is definitely not free.
Ok, allowing some one to browse a site with no reg. I'm in, that's easy enough to do.
*they need help from linux coders to help make this happen on open source os.
What if you had a streamed version of a song that people could listen to and rate, coupled with a hi-fi version people could buy?
;)
Track songs based on ratings and sales. Your agent is the market - if a buncha people are buying a song, (or at least listening through the whole thing and rating it well) it must be good.
That's the real inefficiency in the record company - they invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in developing "talent", then see if the market agrees. Problem is the market rarely agrees, so the few successes have to support the numerous failures. You pay $18 for a good CD because of the 100's of crappy CDs sitting next to it that no one is buying.
And yes, I did just fork over my $9 to GoDaddy for the domain name.
paintball
And maybe you could search based on the "sounds like" field; so if you like, say, They Might Be Giants, you search on that and find bands that have been tagged as sounding like TMBG. Then you read the reviews to gauge quality.
The general idea of this is really good.
.... click happens that I wish I had on record.
.... well how about a rating system like slashdot or even better, simpler.... flash your rack perhaps instead called "Sound Your Tune"
Musicians/talent is a dime a dozen...
The music industry spends alot of money on promotion of bands that have yet to prove themselves. This results in less return for artist unless they hit it really big. The money lost has to come from somewhere.
There may be alot of "just can't cut it" talent but as someone who grew up helping band, watching many come and go as breakup and get together happens, not to mention open jam sessions and night club curcuit bands, there is those times when the right combination of talent, equiptment,
Sooo To reduce record industry cost and lost to failures, while increasing returns to artist that do generate worthwhile returns, instead of subsidizing the failures....
We have the internet to help artist and groups establish their success or failure prior to record industry signings.
If you hit a high enough level of success and popularity on the internet then as an artist or group you would have a bit more barganing power with the competition to sign you.... Like sports?
While on the record industry side, this prequalification for success will reduce cost of loses.
And we who listen... we get to hear alot of
The real key is to get out of the house, go to shows, and buy the bands' CDs. The problem with record labels, websites, or whatver, even if they're free, is that they can't help but filter out a lot of stuff you'd like. There's no way to expect someone else to find this stuff for you, and hand it to you. It's like getting an education or learning a craft -- at some point you have to participate actively. If you want someone else to find this stuff for you and feed it to you, you'll get what you deserve. If you really cared about music, you'd be going to local shows, checking out what's new, and seeing local and travelling bands when they're in town. Do them a favor -- instead of blowing all your money at the bar, buy a CD, or maybe a T-shirt. That way, the money goes right to the source. The CDs are usually burned on a band member's computer, and T-shirts printed on their kitchen tables. Most unsigned bands tour at great personal expense -- what they make at a show hardly covers the gas money, let alone food, hotels, van repairs, or that big one, the cost of not working for several weeks. Show some appreciation. Get off your fat geek ass, get out of the house, and participate in life. Who knows, you might even meet some girls...
She's also established her own label, United Musicians which "is founded on the principle that every artist should be able to retain copyright ownership of the work he or she has created and that this ownership is the basis for artistic strength and true independence. United Musicians Artists have their own labels under the United Musicians banner and retain all rights of ownership to their work. By uniting and sharing resources, United Musicians Artists have a stronger organizational base from which to build and flourish in their independence."
Also in the interview, she says that "I don't believe in asking people to spend $15 on something they've never heard before. That's just unreasonable. And radio's so difficult in this country that that's not really an option." (Her latest album is streamed in its entirety from her website.)
Error:
Our approach has been one in which we blatantly give away our music. Any user can download complete songs off our website. All of our music is available from our first, crappy recordings to our new and still crappy recordings. We focus our money making operation on live Gigs. Heck we give away free CDRs of our music to people who ask for it, and it says so on the website.
/. theme of Microsoft(tm) vs. the world. Quality will always stand over quantity even if the majority of persons out there don't even know where to look for quality because quantity has blinded their sight.
One thing which has really struck me with the (hopefully) emminent demise of the recording industry, as we know it, will be the return to local, community based live venues for musical groups. The playing field has begun to level itself, and I don't think there needs to be a necessary effort to control it. In fact it's the control that huge conglomerates have attempted to gain that has crushed the industry in the first place.
As a band we plan to dive head-first into the free music scene. Seeing as though we are first and foremost a live band, our recordings are nowhere near as exciting as a live performance. But when push comes to shove, if you want to carry around some bellyrash in your portable mp3 player, you are more than welcome to without our express written consent.
One way in which the recording industry has everyone trapped is no different that the consistent
eye no eye maid sum gram are miss steaks,
Further, I think this music distribution over the internet could be made into a combination of P2P and central website.
Let's say we set up a licensing-promotional system where composer/artist uploads a song to a website to distribute and promote. Let's say the website serves many music artists. For the promotion of the music, the people who keep up the website get half of the sales, and the artist gets the other half. Someone downloads the music and pays money for the priviledge of using the music. That's promotion, if other people hear it. I think it would be beneficial if the downloader could also post their newly downloaded music on their own personal website on the condition that they charge the very same price they themselves paid and that half of any revenue would go back to the artist. For promoting the artist, the downloader-now-promoter gets to keep half. Each person downloading from him would be able to offer the same song on their own website and get half revenue for promotion, while giving the other half back to the original artist. (yes, it is a bit of a ponzi scheme, but it would put the artist at the top of the "food chain" where they belong, and encourage more people to write music.)
Furthermore, say each song accumulated a rating of +s or -s according to whether the downloader felt they enjoyed listening to it. Let's say also that each rating was attached to the name of a website so that downloaders would be able to see what sites plussed or minused the songs. It would be an quick way to find websites to check for new songs you might like or to see what sites have taste in music that oppose your own.
-SheWhoWalksWithToesLikeCobras Please enter any 11-digit prime number to continue...
WHAT IF...
there were a GNU or Open Music license so you could copyright music say for free distribution but commercial uses still had to pay.Well maybe even a strict GNU and its all free,whatever.
then what if people would donate server space and bandwidth so mp3s,oggs,whatever could be distributed like linux.I know we got P2P but really setting up a GNUmp3.com so you could get Band promo shots and bios would really be the way to start to stick it to the industry.Problematically though mirrors would grow to be huge.Larger than linux mirrors,because,well bands prolly wouldnt take down any songs and it would grow like a music store that copied and sold albums on the spot.Perhaps html serverspace with links to bands songs on their own server or links to grab it from P2P or both.
Imagine that, non profit internet radio stations suddenly can give the industry the finger and go about bringing in a new era of music.
I hope someone reads this.I really want some feedback,ideas and maybe some motivated people to help organize this.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!