Slashdot Mirror
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?)."
mylocalbands.com is trying to do this.
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.
"popular format like OGG".
Kinda like a mainstream desktop operating system like Linux?
- oZ
// i am here.
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)
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).
You can't have it both ways. Local bands, or somewhere else's local band? Every band is local somewhere.
At any rate, mp3.com had for years - and I presume they still have - charts and artist lists sorted by region, so that you can just listen to "local" bands. They already tried exactly what you're talking about.
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.
Um, mp3.com for years. Have you even looked at it?
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?
Um, did you cut and paste that from mp3.com's prospectus from a few years back? It's all been said (and done) before. And look where it got them, and their share price.
Oh! And dump the necessary registration required to listen (are you listening mp3.com?).
Sheesh, just make up a fake email address and you're done in 10 seconds.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see how this ill-informed "idea" made it to slashdot.
This utopia exists.
It is called besonic.
It has been online for over two or three years (previously known as Riffage), and has a gigantic list of music online for free, as well as albums available for download from thousands (believe me, there are a lot) of bands from all over the world.
The great part about besonic is that just to be an Artist is free (you can post your own music completely free, charge euros - 'cause that's their currency - for albums, everything.) - the only thing that costs is the albums (that can also be sent in cd form to your home address) and a full artist service, with a custom web site and everything.
Can't believe nobody's heard of it here. Then again, I'm big on music and recording and everything...
Spaceman40
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Yeah, sounds great. You just left one part out. Who's gonna pay for all this? The bandwidth alone is going to be astronomical.
There were a bunch of dot-bombs with this idea, and they all burned through their funding without ever having a hope of turning a profit.
How am I going to know if I like a band's music enough to buy the whole CD? I gotta download the songs and listen them to a while before I'm gonna be willing to plunk down my hard earned cash and buy their product. If they're gonna give their music away, they just need to use the existing P2P networks, not create a new one.
Of course media companies, as agents, try to extract as much rent as possible from their principals -- the consumers. They try to shape our tastes to easily, cheaply copied versions of artists they know consumers already like. They try to extract as much as possible out of their existing set of artists and invest as little as possible in discovering new talent. This is just the typical kind of agency cost you have in any principal-agent relationship.
If the market were properly competitive, with a sufficient number of media companies all competing hard with each other for the attention/money of the consumers, then we'd have an optimal balance of filtering and discovering done by the media companies, and consumers would have good, reasonably priced music from interesting artists satisfying all kinds of tastes without having to invest in discovery for themselves. The problem is that I think we have a few media companies that are too large, so that the agency problem is a big deal. The media companies can afford to shirk and persist in being complacent and feed us recycled garbage over and over again simply because there are so few of them and they dominate distribution.
If we really want to solve the problem, a site offering lots of free indie music will not do the job. We need to find agents as alternatives to the media companies who can perform this filtering function and discover good talent for the consumers who can't afford to do the search themselves. That requires a trust relationship to be built up between the agents and the consumers (so we'll respect their choices), and a pay structure to provide incentive, and sufficient competition to keep the agents honest. I think that's a much harder problem and one that may not be solved by technological means alone.
See MEME INTERVIEW
Or WARD REVIEW
Ok that's in french so maybe WARD INTERVIEW would be better? (Scroll down for English)
Or hey just visit our site
Feel free to browse and if you have ideas for how we *could* place our music on the web cheaply and easily then please please let us know!! All help credited and appreciated!
Oh and feel free to buy a nice t-shirt.. they keep us releasing... ;-)
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
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
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.
Here's a statement for you: In my humble opinion micropayments are the way forward.
Why? Firstly, music is now effectively a post-scarcity commodity. That means it has a replication cost of zero, which also means it's effectively impossible to charge for it. Oops, that's the RIAAs business model down the tubes, hence the fact that they are trying to reintroduce scarcity back into music with DRM.
If we assume they fail however (and economics says they will) then what comes next? I say the ability to send small amounts of money easily and quickly to artists. I hear new music all the time, mostly off the radio. When I hear a track, I don't want to have to track down the album or (more often, for trance) single and buy it on CD, wait for the CD to arrive and then rip it, when I can just press a button and have it available right there and then. I want to be able to do this, but I also want those artists to be rewarded so they continue to make kickass tracks.
If I can send a few euros to my favourite artists, I'm happy. But it's got to be easy. Let's address a few common complaints against this system:
1) Nobody will pay. - there will be a balance between people who pay and people who don't. The system itself will find this equilibrium. At first yeah, I expect some artists will croak because it's new and people don't understand that "you, yes YOU" have to pay up to let them continue. Once there have been a few high profile failures, people would get the idea. We pay with gifts to street performers because it's traditional and a part of our culture - hopefully music tipping would become the same.
2) Artists could not make a living from it. I think they could. It depends on how long the system takes to scale up of course. To start with, perhaps artists could not make a living from it. It might take years, decades even! Look at free software. I think people, the majority of people, could be supported writing free software, by doing contract work (you want this feature, pay me and i'll write it for you) and variations. But Linux is not yet at the point where the market for that is big enough. It would be the same for music.
3) It's not technically possible. No, not yet, that's why I'm working on Genio/PingID/SourceID/whatever-the-hell-it-is-toda y: at pingid.org - digital identity is necessary to allow for low overhead financial transactions imho. It's the first step. Bandwidth is fairly simple, you can use p2p techniques or IP Multicast when it finally arrives to allieviate those issues. And of course such an economy would be decentralised anyway.
4) Who will filter out the dross. As one poster (rightly) pointed out above, quite a lot of unsigned music is rubbish. The record companies do one thing, and that's choose the best of the independant artists. Yes, they manufacture artists as well, but my point is that we need a way of filtering the wheat from the chaff. My solution to this is the reviewer heirarchy - people review tracks that enter the system in their particular musical taste. Reviewers on the next tier up read those reviews, choose the most promising tracks, and choose them, then reviewers above them do the same etc, and you end up with the top 40 of the gift economy.
I think it can work. But I don't have time to start, and it would take years to build it up. But now surely must be the right moment in history to attempt it.
Why not use what we have here: 250,000 readers, 2 or 3 posters ;) and many countries and genres represented.
We don't need to serve the mp3s themselves, just link to an exciting artist that isn't signed. (No new Madonna songs, IOW. She's already got enough exposure.)
Perhaps have an artist interview once a month or more), music software reviews(mp3 and recording), some sort of voting on a /. top ten, whatever.
As long as we don't have any mp3s here, there shouldn't be any bandwidth/legal problems.
Of course - the flag icon still isn't fixed (even after I sent one in) so maybe this will fall on deaf ears. (Pun intended.)
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
mp3.com (biggest >1.5 million tunes, now owned by Universal Vivendi who, so far, haven't messed it up too much)
IUMA (based in the USA, but international)
Besonic (based in Germany, but international)
mp3.de (based in Germany, but international)
Soundclick (based in the USA, but international)
(Garageband based in the USA, but international)
France mp3 (based in France)
Vitaminic (free + pay - based in the USA, but international)
Washington Post (yup, the newspaper)
Online Rock (based in the USA, but international)
Peoplesound based England
mp3.com Australia (not the same mp3.com - based in Australia, but international)
Emusic (pay and not really indie per se, but smaller label and re-release oriented, based in USA)
Artistlaunch (based in the USA, but international)
mp3 Poland - (Based in Poland - mostly domestic)
Good Google will searches turn up more small sites, thousands of independent artists' sites with free mp3's, some smaller labels that have free samples, many, many links pages. The biggest problem here is that it takes time to separate the wheat from the chaff. There is some incredibly good stuff out there and a lot of crap.
Use Google - many local newspaper sites have mp3 sections for local artists and there are many mp3 sites that are specifically for local talent.
If you're not familiar with mp3.com, it can be daunting in the sheer volume of material (no pun intended). And they accept material of all (musical) quality from absolute crap to incredibly good. They have many genre-based top-40 style charts and new-release charts. Walking through those is a natural first step. One concept they have that can be a big help is "stations" - really a euphemism for fan-generated lists of tunes by various artists. The tunes can be played separately or sequentially. So, when you find an artist that you like and get to their page, click on the "stations now playing" tab. On that page could be one to several "stations" where you might find additional good material that someone else has taken the time to comb out and list. I've seen lists from 2 to 200 tunes long - this can expand your options very quickly.
I have looked for ogg sources and found precious few. Unfortunately, Ogg is still a long way from critical mass.
Sigs are bad for your health.
The only way to fund bandwidth is to create coupon clipper sites. That is, put up a fund for a particular purpose and when the fund's principal is generating enough interest, fund bandwidth from that interest. Let's say a T-1 costs $500. That's $6000/year in interest income. At a reasonable assumption of 6% interest, that would make the originating fund need to be $100,000.
I would see this as putting in a one time payment of maybe $20 for a share in a non-profit corporation devoted to establishing permanent free bandwidth services. The majority of votes would determine whose 'free' service would see the light of day first. This would only take you approx. 50,000 participants to get your first free service. That seems difficult but not impossible. Surely there are more than 50,000 people who want to ensure that there is no RIAA hegemony? But beyond that, money that is donated before reaching 50k will accumulate interest and reduce the ultimate number of members needed.
Then again, with bandwidth prices likely to be on a long-term slide, as time goes on, the same money is likely to give greater and greater bandwidth.
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.
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,
Or somebody writes a streaming frontend to a good P2P system, and so all the bandwith, storage, management and all is shared, in the best of the Internet traditions. Do you think the RIAA wants P2P to die because of the pirated music? OF COURSE NOT!!! They want P2P to die because it offers a better distributing mechanism then they can ever hope to offer.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.