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Would Free Music Sell Cars?
rhfrommn writes "An opinion piece on news.com says the old method of selling music CDs is doomed and suggests the best new method is to give away the content. No more 'piracy' or 'rights management' to worry about! The author discusses ad based models, giving music away as a promotion (buy a car, get 1000 hours of music free type stuff) and other methods. All based on cheap hardware like MP3 players as the new medium to replace CD."
The best way to sell cars make them free.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
You can get as many free hours of music as you want now. It'll be that way in the future.
Buy 1000 hours of music, get a free car!
:-)
I'm sure more people would fall for that
Daniel
Carpe Diem
I mean would it be normal music from acts I like, or would it be "See the USA in your Chevrolet" type stuff?
I remember getting free music with a McDonald's meal once. One of those cardboard punch-out disposable phonograph records with the catchy menu jingle recorded on it. And if the class sings it successfully through to the end, you win like a lot of money or something.
Catchy, but not exactly chart-topping stuff.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Hah, don't think you can trick me again with a rediculous story like this!
Nothing from nowhere I'm no one at all
It seems every body is looking for one big thing to replaces the current selling records model of the industry. A lot of things like this and othere like online music sales will probably work to keep it profitable.
No more 'piracy' or 'rights management' to worry about!
Then why am I going to have to buy a $30k car to get my music..
This is nothing new... your still "selling" the music
I'm still paying or going through more hoops then kazaa or friends to get it.. then its not worth it.
I don't understand..
I sure wouldn't base my decision on whether to buy a model of a car on if the dealer gave away "free" music. I prefer to make my choices based on my age old method
1. - Does it go fast?
2. - Can I afford it without having to sell an organ?
3. - What kind of stereo does it have?
or does it?!
The analogy to the coal story is very interesting, but its just like radio: the discs go to radio stations, who are paid to play certain songs. And while there may have been a cost savings for the central heating model, you know darn well that when the landlord controls the thermostat, you go cold. Its happened in countless apartments where we get a cold spell before "the heat is turned on" and all I could do was bundle up and shiver.
The same thing is happening with music. I get free music all the time in elevators and shopping malls and on radios. But it sucks, and leaves me cold.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
"Ripping" a copy of a friend's music CD, or grabbing a track from a Napster-like service on the Internet, is stealing, plain and simple.
Music fans, seeking to justify this casual act of larceny, claim they're really supporting an economic boycott of a usurious and uncreative music industry. "Cybershoplifting," reply the record companies, seizing the opportunity to impose their opaque and onerous copyright schemes on the listening public.
While the battle rages on, piling up legal fees and taking the joy out of music, a simpler solution is on the horizon. The best way to stem this tidal wave of thievery is to give the music away.
Free content, by itself, is not at all that unusual. Broadcast television is "free"--at least to the viewer--courtesy of ad-supported subsidies, as are radio, many concerts and sporting events. But even those services commanding a fee today should become free tomorrow as the economics of music distribution take radical new shape.
To understand how, we would do well to look at a very different industry, but one with surprising parallels to music: 19th-century fuel delivery. In the late 1800s, when a tenant sought to warm a cold apartment, she had to buy her own coal from passing coal wagons and then haul it in coal buckets up to her fourth-floor kitchen. This apparently straightforward transaction brought with it considerable challenges for wagon drivers.
Theft was endemic. Stories abound of coal wagons stripped of half their load by street urchins before a first delivery could be made. Various solutions to improve security were proposed, including various patented coal locks. The ultimate solution, however, proved to be something quite different: a new distribution model that made coal theft irrelevant. It was called central heating.
Coal distributors sold their product efficiently in one large delivery to apartment landlords, at the same time removing the incentive for individual tenants to steal. Landlords could pass a significant part of the savings on to tenants in their bill for monthly rent. Everyone benefited, even the families of the coal-stealing urchins.
Similarly, it is the power of low-cost distribution, combined with subsidized free services, that will save and transform the music business. Stealing will become equally irrelevant.
It is the power of low-cost distribution, combined with subsidized free services, that will save and transform the music business.
To understand how, consider these statistics: The U.S. music industry collects $12 billion per year from CD sales to about 50 million active fans. That means each person spends an average of $250 per year to purchase around 15 albums a year.
Now, $250 per year is a very interesting number. By next year $250 will buy an MP3 player with a 100GB disk. That disk will hold over 2,000 CDs. Even strapping on headphones 15 hours a day, a listener would still need over four months to cruise through every track. For many people, 2,000 CDs is all the classical, jazz or rock music they will ever care to collect. For others, it's just about enough to fill a summer vacation with tunes. But it's a lot more than 15 CDs.
With these economics, distributing music on flashy plastic disks one album at a time seems, well, like heating your kitchen with coal. And $250 is not too high a price for a marketer--even those outside the music business--to spend acquiring customers, especially those dedicated fans holding an ad-supported player in their hand 15 hours a day.
Imagine the possibilities. Buy a new Kia? Get 1,000 albums with every car. Purchase a lifetime subscription to the Boston Symphony Orchestra? Receive an MP3 player with a library of the world's 2,000 most important classical music selections. Sign up for a new cellular contract? Get unlimited access to music from over 30,000 indie bands.
The economics are such that it would take only one leading company to break the music distribution mold. Among MP3 player makers, Apple Computer, with its p
Who would buy a car based on the amount of music you get with it? Everyone buys cars based on the amount of chrome it has.
---
Vin Diesel
Best Windows Freeware
This is less logical than an Iraqi press conference. So if people could then freely copy this music, why would anyone want to pay to get it in the first place to gie away with their products?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Just change the genetic code so people are born without ears.... Now Hertz can rent Ears along with their cars.
"Times may change, but standards must remain the same." - George Carlin.
I hear there's this great new wireless technology that actually sends out free music through the air. There appears to be a way of supporting it through advertising revenue, but who cares, it's live broadband music streaming.
No more tinny-sounding RealPlayer broadcasts, this is high-quality stuff we're talking about. Free content for all! And the best thing is, the end-user hardware requirements are very inexpensive. I hear it's called 'radio' or something. Apparently people are working on actually sending video images in the same way. Imagine the possibilities!
When you give a lot of CD's to someone when he is buying a car, isn't that unfair competition? Or is the buyer of the car free in his choice of music? Lately I heard stories about a major operating system developer that gave you a internetbrowser for free when you bought their product. What about that?
I have gigs and gigsof MP3s but don't own a car.
Trolling is a art,
Painters know that they can't sell the same painting to thousands of people (since prints are cheaper) so they just sell one painting (or a limited number) for a big chunk of money and then people make copies (prints) and sell them, give them away, whatever.
Let the music companies sell only 500 CDs to the highest bidders assuming that after the first 500 CDs, everything else will be a copy. They make the same money as before (but with a lower volume) and the masses get free/cheap music.
Hell, I can't afford to buy all the music I like now.... and at least prices for CDs wouldn't be set artificially high.
I've always thought that places like McDonalds and Taco Bell would be great record labels - sign a band and give the music away for free with purchase of goods. But DRM would be necessary in order to keep people coming in the door.
I, for one, would love this. Maybe that is why McDonalds is rolling out WiFi?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I'm sure I'm missing something, but why do artists need labels any more?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I like my albums and cd's. Free music on mp3 players? I'll pass. I'm not opposed to newer formats, but if I can't hook it up to my stereo somehow, I'm going to pass. And Ad-based music distribution? Yeah, that's working real great for the radio stations, just look at how well clear channel is doing...
i mean sure, this is an interesting idea and all, but the probably with his liking it to the coal delivery men of years past, is that unlike music, each piece of coal didn't have a different worth than the other.
so, basically how does this work? artist gets paid per 'download' by the record company? sure, then every artist in the world gets signed with the record people, their thinking being if they got 100 downloads, its money for them with no real payout to the artist.
i'm sure someone in the biz can give a better explanation than i, but i don't see this working as a business model.
Are you MORE than your SPINAL COLUMN?
Sure, they'll "give" you 1000 hours of music but will write it off as an operating expense in the books. It's attempt at propping up the artificially high values they put on music.
Trolling is a art,
I don't buy a lot of CDs cause I can hardly afford them. But dude, let me buy a car instead, because that sounds like the best way to buy music.
at least no only will think about nicking the car. The free muisc pumping out of the showrooms will scare away the thiefs.
Probably the customers as well...
1. Bundle music services that no one uses with cars that no one will buy
2. ???
3. Buy car manufacturer that makes good cars, and scrap ties to RIAA!!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"Nothing in life is FREE." That goes for the music too. I'm sorry, but the price of a car is a lot to pay to get "free" music. Does anyone remember when mp3.com was sending out free CDs of 100 songs apiece of this same type of free music? The music was only halfway decent... nothing to sneeze at. I don't see this type of marketing going over very well with the public. I think the American public is smarter than that.
But how will artists and their agents and lawyers get paid? This time we can turn for answers not to coal distribution, but to an industry much closer to musicians' homes: the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP licenses, collects and redistributes music royalties from music performance venues (like radio stations, concert halls and so on) to the artists. It determines who gets paid what by polling these venues to see whose music gets played and how often.
To determine reimbursement in an MP3 player world, a small sample of users could be invited periodically to voluntarily, and anonymously share their listening history stored in the player. Then, just as in the ASCAP model, payments collected from the music player distributors (Kia, the BSO and the like) would be split among the copyright owners. No fuss, no complexity and no secret CD police.
Makes a lot of sense to me. To get this off the ground, it only takes one company to tie up with some mp3 player makers. If it succeeds, others will be quick to jump on the bandwagon and the RIAA will be left wondering what hit them.
This wouldn't work at all for bands on smaller independent labels, other non-pop genres (jazz, blues, etc). Reads like another big step toward musical homogenization to me.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
We already have this, it's called radio.
You want a suggestion on how to modernize the music industry? It's simple: put more interesting content on the media.
Sound is FAR too easy to capture and distribute. Trying to lock that up is like trying to lock up light. Even if DRM is perfect in the eyes of the RIAA, garage bands can do their own redition of a song, free of restriction. As a matter of fact, that'd be in demand.
Provide more content on the CD, like a music video or interview with the artist. Heck, stop selling music CD's period. Make them DVD's where the music has accompanying video to go with it. *Shrug* I don't care.
The RIAA's biggest problem is they're not doing enough to make us want to buy their stuff. We can't even return it if it doesn't suit our tastes. What kind of shitty business practice is that?
"Derp de derp."
I cant see tracks of the Chemical Brothers, Aphex Twin or Arab Strap being given away for free.
The 1000 hours would be of of the type you wouldnt want in the first place, made up of muzak or *shudder* country and western.
i can already see the ATF/SWAT teams kicking down his doors for even proposing this nosensical farce...
Will the metal benders show supposedly hipster Hollywood how to do business? Wouldn't surprise me. The CD is the automotive equivalent of the hand crank started motor. Of course supplying content in bulk will apply to any high dollar item. Homes, electronics, cars, boats, etc.
I was told once that the music industry makes a lot of money selling and distributing the CD itself, not just the content. Apparently this is a big profit center that will be eliminated with bulk distribution. My guess is that the industry will find digital distribution more profitable regardless, but in their typical fashion, they will resist common sense to the end.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
Would you report on an Op Ed piece that was pro-open source, or commending MSFT on something?
Because this is just drivel.
You can opine and gripe about how you feel you're entitled to free music, movies, software, etc, etc, but realize most dont share your views.
Socialism is a bust. You aren't entitled to shit. You have to earn it. Get used to it.
Apparently it doesn't matter that CD sales per release are actually rising.
Gloat after its fallen dude. You suffer from premature ejaculation too?
will it get me laid?
Would free cars sell music?
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
The other day I found myself at CompUSA paying $40 for Red Hat. Why on earth would I pay money for that when I can get an ISO and burn it for free?
In my case, it was because I was at a datacenter and needed to reinstall the system (the vendor forgot to install it). I could've either taken a trip back home (30 minutes), downloaded and burned a CD (an hour), and taken a trip back (30 minutes), or I could drop by CompUSA and pay for a copy (20 minutes). Savings to my client by paying for software? 1.75 billable hours.
If there's any hope in selling data as a retail product, it'll be in models that completely ignore the actual data on it.
There's my case (needed it quickly), but there are many others.
Some people just want to rummage through piles of stuff, find a gem, claim a prize. That whole Hunter/Scavenger instinct is still with us, you know.
Shopping at a record store is a social activity for many people -- something that's harder to do with a real person by a computer.
There have been many times that we browsed Blockbuster Video (yes, they suck, but that's a different story) in search of a movie and ended up there an entire hour because we became so engrossed in searching (and ended up with 3 or 4 movies by the end of it). A web site can offer the content, but seldom can it recreate that experience.
The content cartel should capitalize on this, because their current business model's days are numbered.
Who wants to be a rock star if they have to stand up in front of hot lights and tear out their vocal chords every night? And look happy about it?That sounds like work!
Rip. Burn. Walk.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
i have a car with a custom subwoofer box, a 6 disc changer, a nice amp, an in-dash cd player, and so on.
i never listen to it. the previous owner of the car installed all that crap. i bought the car to drive, and when you have one of the worlds best sounding motors(*1), drowning it out with music is a crime.
who buys a car based on the factory stereo, or the music that comes in the car ? shouldn't car buying revolve around performance, safety, and price ?
*1- S38B35 US spec, with catalyst
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
You mean that century-old technology that was bought up by Clear Channel in the late 90s and now requires you either to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars up front or sign your life away to an RIAA label to get your song on the air? The same tech that nobody can use for broadcasting purposes without close to a million bucks and an army of lawyers up front?
Uh, thanks, but no thanks.
Visit me on the web at Permanent4.com.
I'm a big fan of a bunch of small bands that depend on CD revenue for things like eating. On the one hand, I can't imagine that they'd care if their music got bundled with the latest SUV because soccer moms and dads would *hate* the music.
Sure, this may make some sense for ultra-corporate music, where it's just a commoditized product, but I can't see it working for music that's less than completely corporate and mainstream.
And Britney Spears Corp. is making more than enough money as is, even with P2P and other piracy. Why would they be interested in giving it away for free?
So, I'm not sure who exactly this concept is supposed to benefit. Not consumers, who just get more crappy music, and not either small bands or giganto-corporate bands. Other than that, it sounds kind of innovative, though.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
that's exactly what i want. i have been waiting for someone to sell me ford-approved music. or do you think they would actually let you choose which songs they would sell you. no, this would be one ten-hour disk for everyone. i'm sure they'll be enough songs for everyone to hate.
i like choosing my own music.
Furthermore, his payment model is pretty much based on ratings. In a system like that, good content won't win out any more (maybe less) than it does now. (Which does bring up the question: is the stuff on TV crappier than the music being sold in stores? On the one hand we have Joe Millionaire. On the other we have Christina Aquilera. But you can still find some pretty good CDs if you look for them.) Lots of promotion will still make artists more money than good songs.
So... I don't think I like the "future of music" any better than the present.
blah blah blah
This is one of the stupidest ideas I have read in a long time.
When I buy a car, I care about the features of the car. Adding in stupid junk like 1000 hours of music is an annoyance, not something I would be happy about.
The key to selling music is selling it at a low enough price that people prefer the reliability and quality of purcahsed music to the hassle, unreliability, etc. of pirated music. It is truly as simple as that.
-Michael
Threshold RPG
But free pussy would.
I think this would be a terrible idea, look at what I would have to listen too:
BMW - 1,000 Free hours of Kraftwork
Honda - 1,000 Free hours of SES
Cadillac - 1,000 Free hours of Elvis
NO NO NO....
Ave Molech Setting
The author makes the claim that:
Apartments::Heating as Cars::Music. That's simply not the case -- it's comparing the success of apples with the potential success of oranges. Apartments are something that need heat, so it's natural for the landlord (or rental company) to include heating -- it's simply more efficient for everyone for it to be central. However, with cars this analogy does not hold. How, precisely, is it more efficient to sell music with cars? Couldn't you simply buy the same 1000 CD's online and have a similar overhead cost as the car dealer? Essentially, all they will be doing is increasing the final selling cost of the car by including music in the sticker price. I completely fail to see how this changes the nature of music buying, or how it benefits anyone.
What you are missing are a few very important points that the media cartels, in their extraordinarilly disingenuous rhetoric regarding non-commerical copyright infringement by individuals, would very much like you not to notice:
In short, if it were about the artists well being, free(dom) music and media would be a slam dunk. It benefits everyone
It is interesting that those with such entitlement mindsets feel they should be able to earn money indefinitely (at least life+70 years) for one bit of work performed sometime in the past, while the rest of us accept that, if we wish to earn money, we must continue to work each day of our lives (weekends and vacation sometimes excepted). Given the profitability of, and real value offered by, live shows one must truly wonder why an artist, much less a publisher. would think they are entitled to proceeds from anything other than their live work. Four centuries of monopoly entitlements will, alas, do that to an industry and even a culture, to the detriment of nearly everyone (a few moghuls and poster children excepted)
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
"Now, each Cadillac Behemoth comes with your choice of ALL the oldies or ALL the classics! Or, for a limited time only, BOTH!"
So, with this deal, would I be restricted to J-lo, Britney and N-Sync, or would I be able to get the Voivod back catalog?
Stick Men
There is no such thing as FREE, subsidised maybe, cheap crap maybe, but not FREE.
Get over yourselves, because 'FREE' dosen't exist.
You could buy that much for just one penny!
Of course, you'd continue to get (and be expected to pay for) CDs for as long as you own your car...
BlackNova Traders
You're a marketing genius. Ford Ranger truck + country and western promotional = BIG SALES.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
There is an important distinction that needs to be made in all of these "alternative music distribution" discussions. What seems to work - even perhaps optimally - in the short run, may not be feasible in the long-run.
... think ventue capital for an analogy) and [2] marketing/development costs. Of course, this is just a claim, the verity of which is debatable . But it should be debated.
In many of these discussions, we take as given the current stock of music. Artists have already produced (and largely been compensated) for their music. But in the long-run, we need to consider how our proposed distribution system would support the creation of new music.
The standard argument offered by RIAA and other pro-industry parties is that while price does not reflect production cost, this apparent "outrageous" mark-up can be attributed to [1] a risk premium (the "for every one group that succeeds, we invest in 100s that fail" argument
You a smart mofo.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. Now this idea, like all those moments, will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
That was the equiv of a +1 mod from me, 'cept I am all out of points.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
- Rampant corporate greed on the parts of the record companies.
- Absolute inflexability in the sales model (why can't I buy my music song by song at a reasonable price?).
- Prices are too damned high. (Oops, see #1)
- Most new music is garbage (but that's been said for the last 50 years, so it's a debatable point).
- The economy is in the toilet!
Sell good music at a fair price in a consumer friendly format and music sales will rise. Putting out the same over-priced formulaic crap while treating your customers like criminals will only continue to hurt music sales. This isn't rocket science, people!Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
To sell more stuff give away free crap. It doesn't matter how worthless or useless it is: Sales will rise. Strange but true.
In my case, it was because I was at a datacenter and needed to reinstall the system (the vendor forgot to install it).
Contradicting yourself does not help increase cedibility.
I see commercials on TV all the time where dealers promise $5,000 guaranteed for your trade in or other such nonsense when you know that they're just going to add it in during the negotiations on the price of the new car. You don't get anything for free.
You can't replace the CD.
Well you can, but not with a lossy encoding scheme such as MP3. There are plenty of people out there, myself included, who simply do not like( or cannot even abide )the warbly sound of lossy compression, and would resist phasing out of high-resolution audio formats.
If anything will replace the CD, it will be SACD or DVD-A, not mp3.
it works for TV and radio.
will it work for mp3 music ?
maybe...
but for what kind of music ? will some company sponsor the kind of music I want to hear ?
What ? Me, worry ?
I'll just have to steal cars now.
There's a tonne of money to be made on music, I don't know why people don't see this. Record companies should sell MP3s for a dollar each. That simple. I would pay $1 (and stop using Kazaa) for high speed xfers, no more broken downloads, consistent file naming, good quality recordings. If the web page let you preview songs and had buttons for "Show similar music" as well as a Top40 list by music type people would come. How many times have you heard a song you love on the radio and not known what to search for on Kazaa? Would you pay $1 for a web site that helped you find that song and download it? Of course!!!
Forget DRM, if you had a compelling product at a reasonable price Kazaa would naturally go away. Most people don't steal an apple from the fruit stand as they walk by. Why? Because they think the store owner is an honest person asking a fair price for a good product. The RIAA is the cause of [ Napster | Kazaa | Morpheus ] not the cure.
They'll either love us or die.
Their choice.
I hate that this idea has sunk in through popular culture. Copying works is not the same as stealing. Copying a book, song or other media doesn't deprive the copyright holder of anything.
It does reduce to potential for a sale as once someone has an illegal copy of a CD, it means they don't have to buy a 'real' copy.
It's very hard to say that person-to-person copying reduces overall sales of entertainment. It is easy to say that large individual pirates that produce illegal copies of CDs and movies, then sells them on the street does though. Person-to-Person copying is too unreliable to scale well. Even napster was too much of a pain in the arse if you wanted to get whole albums easily (IMO). It was only worthwhile if you had a lot of time on your hands (and a fast internet connection). Now that I'm working all day I don't know how I"m going to find the hours required to find all the songs on an album, make sure they all download and then test them to make sure they work. The store is just much faster.
... but this idea is even more stupid.
But I wonder if it really has to cost $500k to produce an album. How much did it cost Wilco to produce "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot?" According to this article it cost $300k. But according to this story, it only cost $85k.
The labels have until now had a cartel on album production, which has kept both production and distribution prices artificially high. So if you can cut production costs and cut distribution costs, why do you need the labels at all?
Ah, for promotion!
But what if you're not one of the top ten stars in a label's roster? What sort of promotion do you get? Go into a music store and see how many of the hundreds of artists whose albums are on the shelves actually have any promotional posters or other advertising. The percentage is quite small.
So again I ask, why does anyone need the labels?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I just got satellite radio, and it is cool. I love Kazaa. Here is the deal: I would pay $25 a month for a complete music solution. An ultimate site that offered every major label (and most of the others) content available for download. No limit, in mp3 format. Also, access to satellite radio in my car at home included. No restrictions. Each song downloaded is registered by the company, and the downloaded stuff gets X amount of cents per d/l. One massive, all in one, no reason to go anywhere else site. And still sell cd's in the stores for reasonable prices. if every cd were 9.99 or less i would still buy my faves and stay subscribed to the music site. not everyone will do this, but i bet most of the 500,000 current xm radio subscribers would sign on. remember, the download selection would have to be EXHAUSTIVE.
raretshirts.com - cool vintage t-shirts
Why would a record company sell 2000 albums for $250 when they can sell 15 for the same price? What would they gain? I'm not convinced changing the distribution model will generate more sales. Speaking for myself, better artists would induce me to buy more recorded music. And I don't download, I buy.
If I were a president who got into power on stolen California energy money and started a war in the middle east to distract people from my illegal theft of the presidency, I'd just declare martial law and force people to buy things like CDs. The rest of the world's dictators will follow when they see how easy it is. You've just got to keep your faith in your conservative values and you can't lose.
Pretty soon, the car will be free too, as long as you purchase 100,000 gallons of gas.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Besides the nice packaging, universal portability, and feeling of having a tangible product, there's the all-important issue of sound quality. I'm sorry, but 192kbps MP3s are just unacceptable if you really want to appreciate Dark Side of the Moon. There's also something about the cohesiveness of an entire album as opposed to individual songs. Again, Pink Floyd is the most obvious example, but you can find many "concept albums" by many artists that have to be listened to in full, in order to fully appreciate the music.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
It may be that rec industry will have to cut salaries and maybe fire some people, much like high tech industry had to do. I think if a major artist makes 250k / year they should be happy, who said fast cars and even faster women were required to be a successful artist?
IMHO (and this is a very simple truth) there will be piracy until music has found its true value. Not $18/CD, but maybe a few cents per song, or just given out for free. Why pay 15+ for a CD that only has 1 or 2 good songs you will listen to.
Life is change.
P.S. Itâ(TM)s true that artists make most $ from concerts, one a few cents from each CD goes to the artist. Canâ(TM)t remember where this was but after breaking down the price of a CD the actual cost to make it, pay the artist, pay for advertisements, distribution, etc. was just around $1. (In 10,000+ volumes)
Live free or die.
Hamburgers in your face
French fries between your toes
Dill pickles up your nose
and don't forget those chocolate shakes
Made from polluted lakes
McDonalds is your..... kind of place
There are other versions as well.
1000 hours of free music when you buy a car? it's not an incentive if music is free anyway. That's like saying "buy our car and we'll throw in some free air for you to breath".
Perhaps I should have been more clear in my initial post. I understand and agree with everything you've said. But my point was that from the perspective of view of the artist, why would you want to sign on with a label, since everyone knows that the labels screw artists?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Huh? You mean they won't let us listen to the radio? Or maybe you mean they won't let us change the channel.. because you know if we don't listen to the commercials on the radio, that's stealing.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I get as much free music as I could ever want on my car..humm I guess some one allready figured out this whole advertising to pay for music thing.
And furthermore, why does the RIAA not allow this model? Why should they when they can use their monopoly to prevent change and stay smug in the current model? Why charge $1 for a song when they can charge you $15 for it and bundle 9 other songs you don't like? Why should they since they want music to be by subscription so they can milk you on a monthly basis rather than a fair trade: pay for what you need? Why should they take a risk on something new that people want when they can use monopoly and police to force people to swallow the same shit they've been shovelling at them for years? Indeed.
/joeyo
2^5
problem. You must have content, worth giving away. This appears to be the RIAAs' problem as well. The big companies music ALL SOUNDS the same. Music sales are not doomed, just the force fed, self serving market scheme the record labels have become used to. Net radio, cheap cd production are going to allow the expiremental and the new become a force again. The cookie cutter 90% profit model is a thing of the past, and if the labels don't realize it soon they will be extinct, government regulations or no.
No one has the 'right to profit' either offer a service or product people want and are willing to pay for...or go the way of the Dodo bird.
The RIAA needs to take a lesson from the MPAA, put so much stuff on a CD that it becomes a hassle to copy, and bring the price down, a CD costing more than a cassette is FSCK'n ridiculous.
When I can buy a DVD with a movie and the soundtrack for less than a cd soundtrack, there is somthing wrong in recordland.
All this said I broke down and replaced some music that I had on tape, it finally bought the farm...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
It's the end. With WinMX I can download more music than I can possibly listen to on my NEX II.
But I did buy 2 Faith Hill CDs because she was entertaining the troops a few weeks ago.
>"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz
>(blatently stolen sig)
Blatantly stolen from where. Not `the wizard of oz`, certainly, as that line doesn't exist there. Unless you can prove me wrong!
2.0 hours - 20 minutes = 1.66 billable hours.
The eMarker website seems to be down (gone?) so I can't check the list of available stations that keep compatible logs.
I would doubt that some of the stations I listen to are on the system as they're independently owned (not part of the ClearChannel megacorp).
Seeing that it's just a timestamp, you'd think that any station should be able to handle it, as long as they retain good logs.
Luckily I've been able to call the station up in the past, and they've been able to tell me the song, but only if I can call when the same DJ is on air (college radio). If I can't call until much later, then the chance of finding out the song diminishes.
The second part of the idea was that this would turn music into an impulse buy. Right now $15 CDs aren't impulse buys for me. I *really* need to know I'm going to like it before I drop cash. At $1 a song right then and there in my car, it's not that much different than going through the KrispyKreme drive-through.
"... base on cheap hardware like MP3 players as the new medium to replace CD." That's moronic. MP3 is a fine (although plenty inferior to other codecs *cough* ogg *cough*) format for storing masses of music on a computer or pocket sized player, in order to play them back on some cheap headphones, but the low sound quality would never permit it to *replace* the CD, even if MicroF***, the record industry and God went into a joint venture to make it happen. The succsessor of the CD has to lie in optical media, preferably a format allowing greater storage than a DVD, or at least a smaller disk with DVD capacity, perhaps even dual layer. Mini players like, todays MP3 players, will only be viable as the primary method of music distribution when data storage becomes so cheap, and audio recording becomes so good, that you can listen to 4000 songs, in perfect quaility (as in no human detectable difference from live) sound or your iPod.
there was supposed to be a less than sign in front of r@p in the title of my original post. I'm sure you can figure out what I meant
What about people like me who can't afford a car because it is too expensive. Would the offer hold for second cars as well?
It is not the hours of music that the marketing schmucks in the RIAA see, it is revenue based on an object - specifically, that which contains the content, be it CD, MD, LD, DVD, cassette tape, vinyl disk, or (God forbid) 8-track. Because an MP3 is so easy to transport, you can't establish revenues on that. And an MP3 player can be pulled off of. Give it time, the RIAA will collapse on its own weight. All they have to do is screw up on one tax return and the IRS will be on them like white on rice.
This sig no verb.
Sorry, the coal-stealing analogy is a little off.
In my opinion, being a recording artist is going to be closer to being a visual artist. There are tons of similarities - you usually have a single talented 'artist' that creates for the joy of creating, and little if any support structure to get the 'art' out there. Most people have very selective tastes in what they like, and collect a little bit to decorate their life with.
Fine artists have a hell of a time supporting themselves making gallery art, and they typically have to get a 'commercial' style job to pay the bills - graphic design, web design or equivalent. I see this happening with recording artists soon too - the bottom is dropping out, and recording artists will have a very difficult time supporting themselves, and will have to find other means to pay the bills (tunes for commercials maybe - I hear Moby sold every track on his last album to corporations before it went gold), and make their own music on their own time.
In the future you'll have very few Picassos and Monets, and very few rock stars. The content these people create will be viewable (listenable) for free, and you'll have to find other means to pay the bills.
D
Sad, pathetic, losers unite - www.zerosexlife.com
Does if matter if you change the channel on the radio? What are you going to change it to? ClearChannel 95.1, ClearChannel 95.5, ClearChannel, 95.7......
I think if the music industry weren't panicked into stupidity they would agree. Give away MP3s. Sell CDs. Also sell posters, T-shirts and concert tickets. The internet is your friend. MP3 trades are your friend. (I'm not sure where this leaves Hollywood, but the music industry is on the wrong side of the fence for their own best interests.)
mt
McDonalds Lettus and Tomato
Lore
Come on. Everybody knows ClearChannel 95.3 is the best.
"Ask not for whom the bone bones. It bones for thee." --Bender
hehehe "Fuck Bush".
But merely masking/hiding the actual cost.
The car dealer/builder who bundles a DVD chock full o' crap still has to pay something to the record company so that they can then distribute the scraps to the artist. They dealer prob gets a much reduced price, but not 'free'.
The dealer damn sure isn't going to eat that cost. It WILL be passed back to the consumer.
The $15,000 car now costs $16,5000. You just won't see it on the sticker.
The new Honda Accord can be had with a navigation system for $1200 and CD-based mp3 player is a standard option now as well. (around $500 i think) /. when speculative piece of garbage of an article like this makes it in. The comment about cheaper media than CDs makes no sense. CDs are extremely cheap - 20 cents per 700mb is LOW and most people who listen to music on their pcs already have cd burners. :)
It must be a slow news day at
Free this, free that. I want a supermodel to come with my next new car purchase, FREE of charge. They want to sell cars, right? Oh, and I want the Swedish Bikini Team to change my oil every 5k miles. We all can dream
I have no doubt that on paper there will eventually be a point where the RIAA, or some other agency, will say that they've lost more money to piracy than they've taken in. Maybe they already say that, I don't really pay much attention to them. They will still be profitable though because losses due to piracy don't actually cost them any money from the balance sheet that matters.
There are some tangible costs associated with being the music industry, and the way they maximize their profits is by minimizing investments where they don't get a large return on their investment. This means that unless you happen to look and sound a lot like what's already selling in a given demographic you won't get signed. Bad for consumers who don't fit into whatever the music industry is currently pushing (and slowly evolving) but that's business.
So what do you do if you're an artist who can't get signed? Go independant. There's room for the independant music industry. There's probably a lot of money to be made for the first company that gets it: Give people what they want. So sell music on mp3 with optional CDs or vinyl. Don't worry about piracy, you don't lose money from that and maybe you'll make an additional sale. The artists won't get rich as the most popular RIAA artists but guess what? There's no gaurantee anywhere that you'll get rich regardless of your ambition, talent or luck.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Concepts like this have some merit and there are anlagous examples (althought with due respect to the author coal may not be the best one;-)
The idea is that the real money maker will be the hardware with the cost of the content being accounted for in the total price.
This is where I would like you to bear with me:
The LEGO company, thats right I said Lego, has used this analagous concept to profit in this manner. They make a robotics controller brick, the RCX (in this analogy an MP3 player), that we have seen here on slashdot before. It has spawned an active hacker community (File traders), that has created new software, sensors etc. Most companies would send out the legal teams (RIAA) to stop all of the reverse enginerring. LEGOs view is that to run all of the software and sensors you still need to by the RCX from them so they profit. In addition, every time you by an RCX you are still paying for their software (the music), its included so no loss to them.
The RIAA announced today that Congress had taken a prudent measure necessary to protect the USA against terrorism by passing HR-666 "Levy on New and Used Car Sales."
An anonymous spokesman said, "This is good news. It is clear to everyone that a 10% levy on car sales is necessary to compensate music companies for losses sustained to those terrorist pirates."
John Bloggs (name changed), an unemployed twenty-three year old welder from Ohio said, "This is crazy. My old banger died last week, and now I can't afford to replace it. I'll never buy another CD again."
The young man spoke under conditions of anonymity. He was concerned that his family might become RIAA targets.
The RIAA was upbeat, but urged caution. "These are early days yet, the war on terrorism is far from over."
Next week, Congress debates HR667, "Levy on gasoline sales"
So the current distro model of CD's goes away, and everyone gets their fix via "free" megacompilations.
I buy a car, and get several thousand hours worth on a HD mp3 player.
Next month, my fave band puts out some new music. What?? I have to go buy a new car to get it on the new megacompilation? Or just go get a new cellphone contract?
This idea sucks. Bundling 'Free' music with expensive things like cars and even MP3 players would put it far out of reach of many people. How are teenagers working at the local Burger King gonna be able to afford this sort of 'Free' music? I hate "Sales and Marketing", and all the crap it produces.
Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy
My car already has a device that plays free music: the radio. In case you were wondering, it did not in any way affect my choice of which car to buy.
Create a new media. Patent technology and license only with the terms that the device will only output analog audio.
Allow stand alone copiers. The copier will mark on the copy that it is a copy. It will also mark on original that a copy has been made. This way, people cannot sell copies in the market. At the same time, user can make as many copies as desired (for car, backup, portable etc). If a copy has been made, then original cannot be sold. The media will have a digital signature and write once media (small portion, where digital signature and copy information is written. The rest of the medium could be rewriteable. After few rewrites, you may run out of write-once area. At that point, the media can only be used to copy analog contents. Allow easy detection that this is a copied content and this media has been copied.
Hardware manufacturer should be given royalty for each album sold for upto some period of time, provided their hardware is not hacked. This will reduce the cost of hardware, and will encourage them to create more fool-proof system. Also, this would discourage illegitimate players, since they will become more expensive.
Allow unlimited analog copies.
The reason, why DVD copy protection failed is because of fatal mistake that hardware decoding will be too expensive and hence computer DVD-ROM should be allowed to have software decoding. Today we know, hardware decoder doesn't cost much. Ofcourse the second reason was how to display analong content on monitor. I am sure some solution could have been found for this too. The above scheme can also be applied to DVD-ROM.
Now if I had few billion dollars....
Give the music away.
Use the internet as a means to get yourself heard. Radios play your song, everyone's heard it, everyone's downloaded it; Bang, your popular.
Money could still be made by the artist for live concerts. Be it in your favorite pub, stadium or concert hall. People love to see bands play live and will pay for it. Above and beyond rental of the facilities and hiring some staff there is not a log of cost. In the case of playing a small venue the artists wouldn't have to worry about costs, as they are paid by the venue's owner. Artists would still bring home the bread, the people would still get their music.
The only problem is the artist no longer needs to sign a restrictive contract with a label, and salespersons need a new way to market cars.
Ok, people. The guy gave the example of buy a car, get free music. Come up with your own example of what product you might buy that getting some free music along with it might motivate you to buy (And no, saying a CD is not a viable answer) - for example, what if one company started giving away free music with their MP3 player to make it more attractive than an iPod? Someone like a Big 3 automanufacturer could certainly negotiate a deal with the content companies that would allow you to pick your own music. That would probably be valuable marketing data for both the car manufacturer and the record company. (The car manufacturer would have an inside track on what music to use to advertise which cars to specific demographics, for example.)
/.ers are a creative bunch - what other business models could we propose that would keep the media companies from trying to pass new laws that limit piracy, keep artists alive and fed, and allow us to use entertainment data in the ways that we want?
The point is to come up with a vaild scenario where entertainment companies continue to make money, artists continue to be compensated for making art, and people get to use it whatever way they want.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the current model (as the RIAA sees it) is that record company supports artist, record company distributes music, one person buys CD, rips it and sends it to everyone on the web so no one else has to buy the CD. That's a financially unviable proposition for both the record company AND the artist. While this is not reality, this is the way the RIAA sees it, and, importantly, this is the way they are convincing your government to see it - which is why we get things like the DMCA. (On a side note, how many of those of you who say, "Music should be free!" ever send money to the artist to make up for the fact that they didn't get _anything_ for making the track that you downloaded? Artists may get screwed by the content companies, but at least they get something.)
The important aspect of the article is that in the coal scenario, the coal providers were subject to theft, so they came up with a way to sell in bulk to someone who provided the associated service to consumers. They changed their business model. So,
What if, for example, a building had a central entertainment server that stored music and video, which would be accessible from an entertainment station in your apartment? Rather than pay-per-view, the data was just there for you to use as part of your monthly rent. Watch movies or listen to music all day - download it to your MP3 player to take with you, whatever. It's included just like your utils.
Or, if you're not a heavy entertainment consumer, perhaps some buildings might treat entertainment data more like telephone service, rather than heat. You get charged on a per-use basis.
Some buildings might go one way, some might go another way, or those might just be alternatives that you could select.
In both of those scenarios, the building could track data for ASCAP so that artists were appropriately compensated. Artists might even try negotiating with certain buildings/realty companies directly. Larger buildings might be able to provide anonymous demographic data back to the media companies which would enable the media companies to track what is popular - you might even get a discount off your rent if you agreed to that.
There are probably lots of reasons why what I'm suggesting won't work. It may even be a bad idea. But, don't just be critics - if you don't like my idea, tell me why you don't like it or you think it won't work and come up with your own.
John
"The plural of anecdote is not data."
Anything that can be represented in digital form can be endlessly replicated, almost for free*, so the only barriers are:
1. Convenience (Tangible)
It gets easier every day, but some are working to make this harder with things like copy protection, but that protection only needs to be circumvented once.
2. Conscience / Patronage / Fear (Psychological)**
I might think that I'm stealing and think that I'm a bad person or I might think that by paying I'm voluntarily supporting art or I might be afraid of breaking a law and getting caught.
The music industry is waging battle on both fronts, but both of them are easily overcome and neither will ever actually render it impossible to make copies of digital content. They're just numbers.
Software, which is also just digital content, has a huge advantage here because for most of us, patronage is important, but on the tangible front, the software company typically provides a service in exchange for my money, like support and upgrades.
What service does the music industry provide to me, the buyer of a particular CD? Although some would, I'm not suggesting that the music industry doesn't provide some service to the music community, like financial support and access to expensive recording equipment, but they're just collecting our money and partonizing art with it, while taking a large chunk in the process.
I'm not sure how this battle will play out, but I'm not part of the music industry and I'm done speculating.
Music is data and data can be copied.
* My computer requires electricity to run and I did pay for my computer.
** I buy music to patronize the bands I like and will continue buying music.
buy a car, get 1000 hours of music free
So... won't there still be 'piracy' and 'rights of management' issues when the car buyer makes the 1000 hours avalible on gnutella?
I think having to buy a car for a few thousand dollars to pirate music is worse than having to by a cd for $10.
Umm, I don't think that will solve piracy issues at all. Or did I reeeeeeeealy miss something?!?!
"90% of everything is crap"
If I got an MP3 player pre-loaded with 1,000 CDs, that doesn't mean I'd have a year's worth of music, it means I'd have maybe 10 CDs that I'd consider worth listening to.
The car could come with a device in the dashboard that would serve up music! The music could be paid for by ADS! Brilliant!
Then, (get this...) we could even offer different types of music all in one package! (maybe we'll call them "channels"... better yet. "stations"!)
Even better... We could hire people to introduce each song so that you would know which artist performed it (THINK of the revenue in CD sales this could generate!!!).
We could even allow record companies to bribe us to play THEIR music! (Ca-ching!!! Hellooooo new beach house!! hehe)
Now, here's the kicker... Who needs a car!?!? We could... (man this is amazing) allow people to... (get this
Think of the possibilities!!
Of course, some people won't want their FREE music. We'll have to have other "stations" that just offer political commentary or jokes... or even crazy antics interspersed between songs!
The possibilities are ENDLESS!!!
I can't BELIEVE nobody's thought of this yet! Maybe the US PTO will let me patent this idea... I don't think anyone's heard of it yet...
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
The article almost gets it. The key to successful music distribution is not bundling it with other products, but rather fixed buffet pricing.
The article does a good job at outlining categories such as jazz, pop, oldies, and pricing each group separately. Prices like $40/yr for jazz or older catalog, and slightly more for teenie bop pop would sell well.
The distribution model could be backed with 200 mp3 cd compilations sold at $10-15 a pop.
Basically, DRM could be used to reduce the cost of music, but also make it more convenient and simultaneously greatly increase industry revenues
Does nobody care about sound quality here?
MP3's are great for mobile use etc... but if you really want to listen to something on high quality audio equipment they are sadly lacking.
Better flight searching coming soon.
I got free music when I purchased my car. I got a radio.... Big deal... When someone dies, they usually start to loose grip with reality, It's sad actually.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Instead of offering free music with a car, try offering it along with the delivery mechanism, such as high-speed internet access or satellite radio. The service provider uses a portion of the price to pay the artists (or record companies), the customer gets the convenience of quick delivery of the desired material (instead of bland ClearChannel), and the service provider has a killer app to distiguish themselves from the competition until it becomes a standard service. This already works for sat radio, and is moving into the internet arena. Eventually, as internet access goes wireless, these two worlds will merge. I'm not sure why it is taking so long in the internet space, probably because copying isn't an issue with sat radio (the reason why it isn't is not because people don't copy things off the radio, but because if you can tell your radio to play any song you want, who needs a copy?).
I don't think music would help cars sell very much, because most auto owners already have songs they like on CD, can listen to radio, and probably listen to only a certain selection of music (under a few hundred worth, which is hardly incentive in comparison to the cost of a car).
However, I remember hearing recently about some US auto dealers that were offering a year's worth of free gas when you buy a new car. Of course, the cars were jags or something like that, not cheap, but a year's free gas is a good incentive - probably a lot more so than music - and especially with the rise in gas prices in the last 6+ months
1000 hours worth of music costs more than the car. Dealerships should charge for the music and give the car away
That's right! Just sign up for the Car of the Month club, and you'll get 15 free CDs (not including shipping & handling) when you buy your first car.
Each month, we will send you a brochure for the featured car of the month and other available selections. If you want the featured car, do nothing. It will be shipped out to you automatically in two weeks. If you aren't satisfied within 30 days of receipt, just send it back. We'll refund the purchase price. (Taxes, title, license and delivery charges not refunded. Mileage in excess of 15 miles/day will be charged at a rate of $10/mile and automatically deducted from your refund).
As an added bonus, just tape a penny to this card and we'll throw in a free Yugo! (No returns)
This would only work if "content" were a commodity like rice or eggs, which everyone would want the same kind of and which is pretty much interchangeable. Before the .com bubble burst, there was a lot of this "content is a commodity" type of thinking. It was wrong.
I am patenting it. Because I can muhahahahhahahhaha
Then I am going to sell it, and your going to be like "dude that was my idea" but you know what, it doesn't matter!
The biggest flaw in this idea is that it is yet another attempt to solve the wrong problem: how to build a life support system for record companies. I wish these pundits would read and understand what musicians are saying increasingly in their writings : that the whole music piracy brouhaha is not about musicians, it's only about record companies, and that we really don't need record companies.
Most musicians by far make a living with paying gigs, not CD sales. Recording contracts are carefully structured so that all expenses come out of the artist's share, which ends up being zero. CD sales benefit musicians by giving them exposure which translates into gigs. A musician gets this same exposure whether someone buys a CD, listens to a song on the radio or downloads it from Kazaa.
Replacing the entire record industry with free distribution wouldn't deprive musicians of anything except the opportunity to let the record companies control their careers. And as an added bonus, it would mean one less source of big-money whispering into the ears of lawmakers.
His chit-chat about BMI and ASCAP polling people to determine how money is divided among the artists is a key. And where does this money come from?
Reading between the lines, it sounds like it comes from the variuous products. So that $299 iPOD becomes $549 with unlimited rights to fill it with whatever music you can get your hands on.
Now that may not be so bad, if true. It sure beats what the music industry is trying to do. Charge everyone a premimum tax on storage and players, and then STILL not allowing you to just put anything on them without paying for a CD. Therefore, you pay twice under their scheme.
Would you pay a $250 premium for an mp3 system that you could legally put whatever you want on it from whatever source?
I agree with most people here in saying that "why would I buy a car to get free music, when it's free?" Giving away free things for free with a non-free thing doesn't add incentive to buy that non-free thing.
However, there is one way in which it adds a very small incentive. This small incentive could be larger if record companies did not exist.
Right now I've got an mp3 of every song I like that I can think of. I am at college and can download piles and piles of mp3s day and night. And disregarding storage space the only thing keeping me from doing it is the fact that I can't think of what to get! You have to know the artists/band/singer and/or the song title in order to get a song! Knowing all the words and the melody doesn't even help if you don't know which words are the title. Google might be able to find the title to go with the lyrics, but that's about it.
Giving away 1000s of songs for free with other stuff would add incentive to buying it because it saves me the trouble of having to know song names and titles. Heck, they could just give me a list of bands and I'd be like, oh yeah! those guys! that's the one I forgot! (downloading....).
Here is how it could make a lot of money if record companies didn't exist.
1) put no-name bands on the cd, one or two songs from each.
2) since they are no-name it will be hard to find their songs on p2p networks. So the band's website will get hits where there will be links to buy the cd, download a couple more tracks, and concert dats.
3) if the band is good, then this scenario will result in them making lots of money. That's if record companies didn't exist.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
The music of small bands would only be available in compact cars.
What were you expecting?
I am patenting it. Because I can muhahahahhahahhaha
... is that you?
Jeff Bezos
As much I like this idea and I could see it work as a good business model, I can see a potential consumer abuse issue here.
What if you could only get your music in return for commiting yourself to something? e.g. You get your 1000 hours of music with your car, but what if you also have to have adverts plastered on your car as well? What if publishers made deals to ensure you had to buy a particular product in order to get a particular piece of music. What if teeny-bopper type music was only available with alcopop drinks (dodgy combination)? What if Disney media products were only available to those who bought a particular brand of washing powder? It is well know just how brilliantly Disney has exploited pester power to sell its products.
The system may do away with DRM and copy protection, but that wouldn't stop publishers exploiting the concept and shacking up with advertisers/manufacturers to say you can only get this piece of music for free if you buy Product X. I see this as very dangerous, it could be used to exploit consumers in a way never seen before.
Such a scheme could only be in the consumers interest if there were very, very tough laws to regulate the system, otherwise publishers and manufacturers in general would abouse the system.
It's easy. Just make a directory for the album, rip each track to a file to track-$x.wav where $x is the track order, encode to the desired bitrate, and have XMMS sort by path/filename. Just make sure to disable the 2 second pause between tracks.
That sounds dumb.
...Michael Jackson...a few moghuls and poster children excepted...
...when Michael Jackson was the poster child, and not wanting a sleepover with the poster child.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Shouldn't that be "Sould they give away a free car if you buy 1000 hours of music?" Maybe then I would buy some more music.
Exactly what I thought. How would getting 1000 free songs when I buy a car be any kind of incentive when its all free anyhow?
"Free air with any purchase!" whoo.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
...The author discusses ad based models...
.com crash is that not everything under the sun can be funded via advertising. We already have most of television, radio, and the printed news media being funded via ads. A number of web sites get a significant amount of their revenue via ads. The trend here is that we keep expanding what advertising pays for with very little attrition at the legacy end of the spectrum. There are only so many advertising dollars available in the market, and they can only be spread so thin. With the recent trend for ad-creep in previously ad-free venues such as movie theatres, the room left for large industry shifts into ad-based revenue generation is practically non-existant. I'd rather pay a reasonable fee for a product than pay higher costs on everything else to cover all the layers the money goes through.
A secondary lesson we ought to have learned from the
... but you are certainly caste-ing yourself... as a consumer serf (aka "American").
Nothing personal, I am one myself. I spent a half an hour last night researching Wendy's Dave Thomas' life and recalling for my wife the "Where's The Beef?" Wendy's advertisements and musing how that really made Wendy's.
Afterwards I felt sort of spent, used, and kind of stupid (btw, remember those ads... cultural phenomenon!). Also, for some reason I felt like eating something with lots of colorful packaging.
The problem with sampling is that it means small groups, with limited appeal, are going to get nothing. This sounds like a great deal for the top 40 type artists; they can reap the vast majority of the payments while starving out the indies.
Buy this music, get a FREE car.
Now THIS would be a value add that people could sink there teeth into. Why download an album for free when you could BUY it and get a FREE car!?!
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
Like MP3 players. Or hardrives that come with "100 greatest albums" to get you started on your music collection. Or some such nonsense. Reminds me of those CDs you used to find at frys of "100 great programs" that were all freely available shareware and freeware that were just compiled on one CD so you didnt have to download them (this was when CD-roms were fairly new and internet access generally limited to 14.4kb.) Sell the media with the content as the value added.
I'd bet a lot of that $500,000 production cost is money the recording company paid back to themselves. If they owned the recording studio, the CD pressing plant, and the print shop for the album liners, that money just goes from one division to another of the same company.
I have to ask myself - do I really want 1000 hours of Koreana?
(No, I don't drive a Hyundai)
If they started doing that, that actually might increase CD sales, as people would see that the RIAA isn't so bad... Plus, it would introduce more people to music, and the RIAA (or whatever recording industry) could easily place a button that allows you to 'add song/cd to cart.'
He should have stopped the article right here. The rest of it is just theoretical blah blah blah.
The immediate and relevant issue is: What to do about a culture that has come to accept and embrace this theft?
It's time to accept the fact that a significant percentage of people are lawbreakers; they don't give a damn about copyright protection, and they never will.
Now -- what are you going to do about it? Prosecute them? Tax them? Cripple their CDs or their computers? Force their ISP to sniff their packets? Or just let an entire industry fall down dead like a dinosaur?
These are big, dramatic questions, and they need big, dramatic answers. Don't cop out by pursuing silly hypotheticals. ("Get 1,000 albums with every new car." Give me a break.)
If digital music is free, how do the musicians get paid? I hear this all the time. The answer is obvious - they get paid by ticket sales to live concerts. That's where musicians make the big bucks anyway, and there's no way to copy a live performance.
--rather have a modular vehicle, be able to upgrade, change configuration, power plant, etc, readily. Sedan to pickup to SUV to sally soccer mom minivan, and etc. Buy "a chassis" that you keep forever, have several easily swapped bodies and whatnot for different purposes, make the engines/drivetrains whatever easy to upgrade or change for a specific purpose, have it so the vehicles electronics-the "dash" be modular as well, plug and pray. You never have to junk the whole thing, nor buy an entire new one. We had a thread on this before, it's a nifty idea.
survive. Drop CD prices to $4.99!! Personally i would rather have my music on CD if I could buy 3 or 4 CD's for the same price as one Brittany Spears album. I would be plenty happy to buy TONS of music. I just can't justify spending $15 on a damn CD that I don't even know for sure I like. So what do I do? Download a couple of songs and give it a spin, find out you don't like the CD and never buy it. CD's only cost $0.01's to manufacture anyway. Pellets go in, CD's come out. Come on tell me, if you could buy a CD for the same price as a gut bomb at Macindon's would buy a handful on a whim?
...and these are the same official police statisticians and PR people who report when their "dynamic undercover investigational multi jurisidctional task force" compadres "seize a quantity of dangerous drugs to get them off the streets and fight tarism", and then in the vid on the TV they show like two bags of boo and call it 528,000$ "street value"? Them guys?
heh heh heh everyone has seen THAT dodge before on the teevee.
D.A.R.E to take basic math is what them dudes need.
No idea on "numbers of protesters" reported, while they "guarded the community". I would be more interested in hearing them estimate how many "crooked lying CEOs and politicians" they bagged on a daily basis instead of constantly PROTECTING them like they do now.
Just like milosevich's cops in yugo when he was finally deposed, the last people to get hip to what's going down and to "protect the people" were the cops. Never fails.
Worst waste of police protection and military protection right now? Not saddam, not the shrub, nope, it's those mercenary bozos guarding the Bilderburger Group meeting scheduled for Versailles, France soon. They could save millions of lives across the planet and trillions of dollars from being stolen by arresting whomever is giving them orders and all the people at that meeting. They would be global heroes, instead, they'll cash their normal check with some overtime. whoopedy zing.
I get it! In other words, these new "music slots" are money! Just like gold and silver coin, screwy paper bank "notes", Food Stamps, my two-fer-one grocery coupons, old clam shells, shiny beads, and gold pressed latinum? Cool!
Can see them being traded and quoted and charted on Yahoo finance right now.
I am sick of people who latch onto MP3s as the "wave of the future" and conveniently forget that it is a lossy, compressed distribution format where parts of the audio signal are purposely removed to reduce file size.
There are some mighty talented professionals (i.e. engineers, music industry technicians) out there slaving away to get their sounds just right, cleaner and better than ever. Even CD-standard 44.1Khz/16-bit is far from state of the art.
MP3s (or pick your compressed format of choice) are good for what they are, but it really pisses me off when people start going on about how this is the "future" of music.
A lot of musicians think that they can reasonably become a professional musician, and make enough to survive merely by their music[often saying this when they have a fast food style job which just pays the bills]. Labels to them are the keys to doing this. whether labels do this or not, i don't think is the question but the thought that a little band thinks that it should sign onto a label because it's the only way to get distributed to hundreds of thousands of potential fans is one surefire way to lose all your music/whatever.
my old band, Dionysus and the Revolution Sufferred from this. To them, becoming famous, was at least somewhat important. mabye i'm wrong...and mabye i'll end up a dry musician with little talent after years of being forced to do other things to survive[a year and counting] with all my time--- but the idea of signing to a record label to me doesn't seem like a good one.
but yes...the problem is most people think the labels are good. it's only the clueful ones who don't...etc
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Don't see too many paintings by *live* painters going for big bucks.
Do you actually give a damn if buying a certain model means that you get music?!?!?!
Now think about this concept another way: You're on the market for a new stereo. Or a DVD player. Or a computer. Or a CD burner. Or a television. Or hell, even something as small and cheap as headphones. Now, getting one free song for every dollar you spend makes a hell of a lot of sense. (Notice I said one free song, not one free minute of music.) You would receive some sort of credit at an Internet music distributor, along with a user ID and password. This distributor will then allow you to download songs, or for an additional price of S&H, specify entire albums (assuming you have enough credit), singles, or custom mixes that they will burn (for a few bucks), if necessary, and ship to you.
Visa or some other credit card company could come up with the Visa Music Card. For every ten dollars you spend (a figure I pulled out of my ass), you get a free song. You could accumulate these "song points" as long as you wish and eventually order entire albums. Hell, so many song points could be substituted for the costs of burning, shipping and handling, if you so wish.
Buy books on music, or specific music artists? You could get credits to download songs made my those artists. Trade used CDs at special used CD stores that credit your song account instead of paying you a measly two cents for a brand new, mint condition album for which you paid 20 bucks. Buy concert tickets, get credits. Hell, spend money on any music-related product or service, including music recordings, and get points. Who is gonna say "no" to this? It's perfectly legal. It would be paid for by the companies offering the products linked to the credits. In other words, the headphone manufacturer would pay the music distributor 50 cents when they sell a 10 dollar set of headphones, and that would add up to 5 cents per song, let's say, 2 of which get paid directly to the artist whose shit got downloaded. That's better than nothing, considering that folks can download the songs for free. That offsets the loss of people who buy the headphones to listen to pirated music, as they'll pay this 50 cents even if they choose not to use the service. It will send 5 cents times a million billion transactions flying around every part of the music industry.
But wait, there's more! Use your music credits to obtain sheet music, guitar tabs, or other merchandise aimed at those consumers who like to make their own music. The possibilities here are ENDLESS. Buy a guitar, get credit! Hell, the same distributor could let you pay for the songs by credit card, a few cents per song with a minimum purchase of, say, 10 bucks (what's that, 50 or more songs?) and guess what? Your Visa card that you use to pay for this shit will now give you credit for yet another song! Buy credits and send them electronically to friends inside an electronic greeting card. Shit, the VISA card could even have flash memory on it that can store a few songs, and this could be used for zillions of purposes. I pulled all the financial figures out of my ass, of course, but with a little bit of analysis, I think that if the stupid RIAA started using creativity instead of tyrannical communist fascist dictatorship legislation, scare tactics and bullshit, they would make the poor artists (whom they proclaim to protect) a hell of a lot more money than they make now. Statistics would show artists which songs are downloaded the most, so they'll know what's popular and what's not. There are infinite reasons to use creativity. And this is one of them.
Ok. Now it is definitely time for alcohol.
Does anyone else think that the argument using coal distribution as an example falls apart with the fact that coal is a perishable, unrenewable resource whereas digital recordings are infinitly reproducible. His point assumes one source, but music copying produces many and his model is therefore moot. Another thing, ASCAP & BMI etc. collect performance revenues but not mechanical royalties or other sources of income.
It basically boils down to the Mainstream vs. the Underground. There will always be an Underground, as represented by thinking people who understand the fact that you must do a little bit of digging to get fresh, relevant, intelligent "content." Underground heroes will continue to be the ones who both appeal to these senses and also who don't bitch about not being millionnaires.
The Mainstream has already sucked all of the creativity out of music. Once a musical product is economically viable, expect to see crappy clones of that kind of music everywhere for a long time. This "free content" idea--which, by the way, I think is pretty much here anyway (offhand I think of the X-Games and the retailers there giving away mix CDs of various crap artists)-- will just continue to perpetuate this. It is just a more blatant model of "selling out." How about "Coke Music"? The Rolling Rock music festival? Cripes, Woodstock became a brand and is now completely sterile, politically correct and hellishly mainstream.
So will free music sell cars? Sure, why not? Music is the new "commercial art" and mainstream music will invariably be bland, devoid of thought, and say nothing new because the so-called artists will have to cater to their sponsors. Goodbye, Creativity... it was nice sort of knowing you.
--rather have a modular vehicle, be able to upgrade, change configuration, power plant, etc, readily. Sedan to pickup to SUV to sally soccer mom minivan, and etc. Buy "a chassis" that you keep forever, have several easily swapped bodies and whatnot for different purposes, make the engines/drivetrains whatever easy to upgrade or change for a specific purpose, have it so the vehicles electronics-the "dash" be modular as well, plug and pray. You never have to junk the whole thing, nor buy an entire new one. We had a thread on this before, it's a nifty idea.
This *is* a modular vehicle. Assume the drivetrain is one module, the front of the body is another module, the rear of the body is another module, and the frame is yet another module.
Problem is, the things which make a good family sedan do not make a good pickup truck, just to start with.
People want gas mileage. To get gas mileage, car companies have slimmed the weight of a rear axle, removed the weight of the driveshaft, and put a compact engine sideways in the cramped engine bay (since we want to maximize passenger space and keep the car small for fuel efficiency and ease-of-parking in urban environments).
In a pickup truck, the user's needs are not to haul people, but to haul bales of hay or horse trailers... or the obligatory load of best friend's furniture for pizza and beer at the end of the month...
A bigger motor is required in order to be able to safely maneouver (ie. pull onto freeway with a yacht on the trailer and 6 kegs of beer in the back) and, even if it put out enough power, a smaller motor simply wouldn't last long under those loads. (Consider bearing loads on the crankshaft, never mind the ring loads from always having to floor it to get anywhere...). Also, to be able to support the 2,000lbs of crap in the back, a stronger structure is needed - a big steel frame. And somewhere you have to be able to bolt up the Class-4 hitch or 5th wheel trailer... these aren't generally required in a sedan and would add to the weight, meaning poorer performance and less gas mileage.
Vans and pickup trucks are often very similar structurally. The Aerostar and Ranger, for example, use almost identical frames; as do the S10 and Astro. The Durango/Grand Cherokee is just a Dakota frame with a tall station wagon body plopped on.
Before the Japanese taught American manufacturers how to cut corners and slim out the steel, American cars used to be almost all full-framed, as opposed to a unitbody tin can. At that time, rolling chassis were built, and then the body assembly was bolted to it. The car was as modular as you can get - want a Buick V6 in your Chevrolet Caprice Classic? Call the dealer, and he'll order it from the factory. Want an Oldsmobile Rocket 455 V8 in your Pontiac Laurentian? Can be done. Chrysler and Ford got into the action in similar ways to GM. Even though the car was modular, you seldom see someone taking the body off the frame of their Caprice Classic to bolt on an Oldsmobile body with leather seats.
DeLorean tried this, too. All the body panels bolted on, and were to be replaced in the case of an accident. And the Pontiac Fiero. And the Checker could have been upgraded/modernized - solid steel frames, bulletproof drivetrain which would have been easily swapped when it eventually wore out, and all the body panels were bolted on to be easy to repair after an accident, unlike today's crap.
Besides, can you imagine the nightmare? Designing a wiring harness for every provision of every feature that might be demanded? (Oops, have to upgrade my wiring harness, this engine option requires a pre-heated oxygen sensor downstream of the catalytic converter...)
Of course, you *can* build it if you want it badly enough. I've built a Buick V6 powered Chevette. I've seen a Cadillac 500 in another Chevette. I've helped wire a Fiero to accept a Cadillac Northstar V8. I wired a dual-engine Dodge Caravan C/V (windowless cargo Caravan) that had its original worn out 2.6L Mitsubishi driving the fro
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
...I hear ya on the unpracticality of it now with most vehicles. Some sort of "easier" config would be practical within weight and needed power and ruggedness obviously, like you have pointed out.
heh, and I'm certainly old enough to remember solid steel cars with full frames, all my earlier vehicles were like that. Hmm, 3 out of 4 that I own now are STILL like that, ha! I was at one time really considering modding a vw bus I had, use like a rabbit front wheel drive for "normal" driving around, then put some detroit v-8 in the rear. Never did it, but certainly thought about it. Mostly money at the time and not owning a garage and where I lived. I compromised by doing a full rebuild with bigger jugs and all the cheaper doodads.
sleepers, too funny, I like that dual engined one you mentioned, sounds cool. Last couple years I lived with my folks was in a suburb of detroit in the 60's, saw lotsa nice cars, that were then made *much nicer*. Friend of mine had a comet, with a SOHC ford cobra 427 he squeezed in, that was sorta quick, real ratty body, etc. I don't remember exactly but seems like it ran low 11's. Too many fast cars to remember now. Hmm, another friend had a falcon with a 289 with wicked nasty compression, 14:1. that moved right along. You'll like this with your handle, got an aquaintance of mine down here in georgia, for like YEARS he lived in this really cheap apartment thing built over a nice big garage he rented. He accumulated daytonas and superbirds and parts while they were still cheap, just kept putting his money into them. He had *plenty* of them. Finally one day he gets engaged, he took ONE of them and sold it and took the money and paid cash for a house, a nice house. He's still building hotrods and doing custom work last I talked to him, several years ago now.