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Will Legal P2P Music Distribution Succeed?
SnowWolf2003 writes "It looks like a couple of people are trying to find a way to distribute music legally over P2P networks. The latest is Mercora (with more information here). Also Napster 2.0 is due for release sometime next week. Can any of these Windows alternatives to Apple's iTunes compete though with the inherent restrictions built into the wma format? Note MusicMatch has just launched a windows based service with fewer restrictions equivalent to the iTunes policy. More importantly, can these P2P services lure enough people away from restriction free Kazaa to make themselves successful, where P2P networks rely on a large user base?"
It won't. As long as there is a free alternative, no matter what the chances are of getting sued, some people will use it. Why? Because they don't want to pay for that kind of stuff. Some people are too cheap to pay a dollar per song, or something like that, and want to just get loads of music, illegally or legally.
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no one will pay. DRM will drive us away. people want freedom, not cheapness.
It's pretty simple, if people can continue using programs like kazaa for free, why would pay for same thing? Marketing 101, less for more doesn't work.
will people pay for something they can get for free (with no loss of quality between paid and free)? the answer is clearly YES. people do it all the time - bottled water, software, open source software, etc. most people like to support the creators of content they buy, and they also like to get perks that comes with purchasing the goods (i.e. customer support, piece of mind, etc.)
so the RIAA - if you build it, they will come. let p2p be and stop suing your customers.
smd4985
The cost to serve a four megabyte MP3 file is pennies. If I'm a musical artist, I'm more than happy to swallow that cost if I'm getting fifty cents or a dollar per song.
If I'm selling my own music over the Internet, I want people to come to my site and eat up my bandwidth. If I can establish some loyalty, and make my site a repeat destination for my fans, they're likely to check back regularly and see what new MP3's I've created.
If my music gets sold by P2P networks, I've lost the ability to make my home page the primary source of purchases for my music. Sure, I'll save a few pennies in bandwidth fees for each user who downloads from P2P...but chances are I'll paying the P2P companies much more than that for administration.
No, if you're a musician, you want people to rely on your website for all downloads of your music. And you'll be thrilled to pay any bandwidth fees that are incurred by people purchasing music, as those fees are trivial.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
No.
I use EMusic.com. It's reasonably priced, and download rates are awesome. If a similar service were offered for more mainstream music, I'm sure it would succeed, especially when you take out the P2P problem of just hoping somebody with a good connection and a low queue and has the song you want just happens to be connected at the same times you are.
Unpleasantries.
How are you going to regulate P2P? Sure, the RIAA can develop software that corresponds with them (e-mail, whatever). This server can provide a key for a given P2P server after the software logs in, kind of like Kerberos I guess. BUT, this isn't going to work very well with peers running the servers...after all, none of the P2P servers can really be trusted by the RIAA.
It seems that within days (or hours), some sort of Kazaa Lite will be released that allows you to login to the P2P system without any correspondence with the RIAA. I guess they could require the servers to verify keys with the RIAA server too, and when someone running the lite version runs a server, sue them as they are now.
The bottom line is this. They can't stop everyone from stealing music. Their goal should be to stop the majority. Based on the current RIAA business model, I really don't see this happening anytime soon (or maybe ever).
If you want to follow Napster's progress, send us your e-mail There is nothing more than some animations and that input box in napster.com. Is that the real website of napster?
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
Maybe a large percentage would switch if they could get the music quickly and keep it indefinetly, and they could pay 4 it without really thinking about it.
If someone wants to sell music they should simply distribute it from some fast servers. Even people who don't give a damn about copyrights might buy then because it'd be easier and faster.
The question about legal P2P is this: Why should I pay money for the songs AND provide expensive upstream bandwidth to the system, AND get chewed out by my ISP/netadmin for resource use, when I can pay for the song and only use downstream to pull it off the service's computers? This could work, but the prices would have to be marked down dramatically, and the seervices would have to get ISPs to sign on and stop labelling anyone who uses their already metered upstream as a war criminal. I don't see that happening, not until upstream bandwidth becomes much cheaper.
Well, you know what they say...
"Nothing is taken seriously, until Microsoft takes it seriously"
I can't wait until Microsoft releases their own P2P file sharing application. It's only a matter of time...
Bottom line, the price on iTunes and MM are too high. To buy an entire album you almost always need to buy track by track and the total price and at $1 a pop, that works out in many cases close to or higher than a CD but with restrictions and an inferior product. Also, search for DMB on iTunes and you gets asked if you meant Dave Matters Band. Irony (or whatever it is called) not withstanding on that last point...
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
People will be either willing to pay for the bandwidth of distribution, or for the content. Not both.
the subject should read napster.com.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
What about hat Cringely's Snapster?
[don't mod me up.. or down]
- Reliance : if you can have reliable services (constant file disponibility, etc)
- Quality : high bitrate, good encoding
- Extra services : Album covers, lyrics, bonuses, videos; "If you liked X, why don't you check Y" links between different types of music and bands
- Wide range of music : propose almost all the existing music, from indie bands to classical music, including live shows, etc
- Artist friendly : show you are not Evil, people will like it and support you
- No DRM or alike: hard, but I certainly won't ever buy music if the format is closed or "DRM-controlled"
etc.
The Internet has the technical potential to be The Ultimate Media network distribution. People could promote their bands with it, etc.
We just need people to work on a clean, honest distribution schema and create such a company. This is not gonna be the easy part.
theefer
Will Legal P2P Music Distribution Succeed?
It's pretty much going to have to.
The Internet is fast, it's cheap, and it's everywhere. Would the RIAA be able to make more money from trying to shut down P2P trading or from embracing the new medium (new, ha) and creating a profitable business model.
At some point their obstinacy has to give way to bottom-line thinking, lest they let legal fees become a constant drain.
The coolest voice ever.
"Individual songs may be burned or copied to CDs without restriction, although CDs with the same order of songs can only be burned five times to prevent pirates from churning out scores of full copies."
... [trails off into usual slashdot rant]
Duh!
I think this clearly shows how little marketing people understand DRM technology. As soon as something leaves a DRM system it can be copied freely. The first CD you burn can then be copied a million times using standard CD burning software!
When will they give up with all the DRM annoyances. There are a lot of people that just want mp3 files (or ogg or whatever) and are happy to pay for it. At the moment we get more restrictions on music we download from their crappy sites than we do if we buy the damn CD.
They are forcing people into using these dodgy p2p systems because they won't let people download music in the format they want. Ooh didums are people copying your music -People don't want DRM that's why! If they buy some music they expect to be able to play it on whatever OS or music system they choose.
RIAA have to get a grip on reality
Windows Media. I don't like it at all.
I'd rather buy a CD. Besides actually getting something physical, it contains fewer restrictions and features better sound than it's lossy counterparts on the computer. If I were to download something, it better be compressed in Ogg Vorbis or Flac (broadband is on the rise). Why should I pay to download a song in a closed format, when I can't do with it as I want?
I don't know what music you listen to, but I listen to music where albums often are themed or have a story -- where every song is a part of the complete. The album art is also a part of the experience - same as the quality of a pressed Compact Disc versus a home-brew one (I've heard about CD-Rs that last no longer than a year, because of the shitty quality) . I would've give that up for the one-hit wonders (tm) starred on the radio today. Never.
Anyways; this is probably a blessing for those who actually like the one-hit wonders (tm). Because they won't have to buy the "fillers" that is so common on pop music albums today.
When it comes to p2p networks - why should I share a 'buy2play'-file using my bandwidth? That would only earn the distributor's money in the form of having to serve less bandwidth?
By the way. Is the MusicMatch service US only? Will the "buy2play" P2P-services be US only?
So far we don't have any good models of sustainable businesses that don't have ongoing revenue streams. There are going to be some great discussions on the Micropayments Vs. P2P topic at the Future of Money Summit (www.futureofmoneysummit.com) when Dr. Ron Rivest of MIT, Kurt Huang of BitPass, Todd Pearson of PayPal, and Margaret Reid of Visa tackle this topic.
Can any of these Windows alternatives to Apple's iTunes compete though with the inherent restrictions built into the wma format?
from News.com.com:
The self-funded company even plans a smidgen of peer-to-peer distribution, according to Sampath. Songs bought through the service will all be wrapped tightly in Microsoft copy-protection technology, but people may be able to download them from each other's computers in order to save on bandwidth costs and download times, he said.
Something like this would need to be centralized. No one is going to pay for P2P. Plus the only way to maintain quality control is by serving the files yourself. Bittorrent or something similar might be put to use to ease the strain on a server, but the .torrents would have to be centralized. Of course people would still be able to cheat this system. I'd be willing to pay a small fee if I knew that I were getting a high quality d/l. There's too much uncertainty on Kazaa (so I've heard)
For 9.99 or 14.99 a month, I can get 2000 songs. This isn't a solution everyone, because most of what they have is indie labels. But if you're like me, into punk, techno and hip hop you should def. check it out.
Disclaimer: Its not unlimited. 2000 songs a month and you'll get capped or terminated or something, and you won't find the latest and greatest from the RIAA.
Disagree.
If someone would build in a tracking system (not by user, before you go nuts, by songs and discs), the system could automatically recommend free samples of upcoming artists who chose to participate in such a promotion.
For instance, I listen to a relatively unknown band named Porcupine Tree, who sound a little bit Prog and a little bit Hard Rock, with some great harmonies and things mixed in. If a service were to suggest them to you after you downloaded the right amount of music in the right composition and then give you a free sample, Porcupine Tree's fan base might have just increased by one. Then, you might download some more of their music (which you pay for), browse around their website, or maybe you hate the stuff and never listen again. But you've listened once, and that's what matters.
This is the type of music distribution that P2P needs. Incentives and Exposure for the artists. A working P2P model would incorporate the consumer's neophobia into give-aways and freebies designed to help out the music service (people will be downloading more music) and up-and-coming bands.
Frankly, people who download music don't really care if it's coming from P2P, or a central server, or whatever.
The only issues here are:
1: Will people pay for it?
2: What is its quality (i.e. is it encumbered with DRM)?
If people will pay for it, then P2P might not the right topology for distribution anyway. Peers will always be flaky; central servers can always be made much more robust than the average peer.
Make an "album." Give two cuts away on your website under an open license as a demo. Kind of like a brouchure. Encourage people to pass them around as much as they'd like, however they'd like.
You're not putting them into the public domain. You retain your authorship rights. Just allow free distribution for noncommercial use.
If they like them people will find your website no matter how they came by the cuts. Google is a wonder and a mystery.
Sell 'em the rest of the album at five bucks a pop. This way you avoid the whole micropayment nonsense and it's worth dealing with your own merchant account (assuming you can get one for web sales, of course).
If your stuff is any good it will drive people to you just as surely as airplay drives people into the record stores; and since you're giving stuff away for free and not charging extortionate rates for a download file people will be less inclined to "cheat" the good guy.
Then don't sweat the people who cheat. They aren't your customers anyway. A dime you'll never see in the first place isn't a dime lost. Isn't that part of what we're trying to convince the RIAA of in the first place?
A penny saved is a penny earned. Unless you're being penny wise and pound foolish.
KFG
But of course we are nowhere near this point yet. The music industry probably needs to spend another three years with it head stuck in the sand and a near death experience on CD sales to see that it needs to change. It will at some point take the obvious route people had been recommending for years, but only when they are the brink of extinction.
Our economy is filled with cartel-like behavior (OPEC, cable TV, media) that will be very painful to break, the record industry is no different.
I know inherently what I've just said is wrong, but hear me out.
The target market of the above services are more or less ignorant that the product they are consuming has to be paid for by someone. When I turn on the radio do I have to think about paying for it? No. When I turn on the TV? Well, not most of the time, okay there's cable and/or satellite, but I could just use an antenna, and I usually don't think about having to pay for a specific show and with radio I don't have to think about paying for a specific song.
I think this was more true when Napster was out, and maybe it is now, but people generally don't want to have to pay for music. Not because they can't, but because they don't feel they should have to. They view the distribution service as something that is free, just like TV and Radio. Most people don't notice or realize that TV and Radio are paid for by adv. spots. Thus the reason these DVR's are getting into so much hot water.
I tend to fall along those lines as well. Yes, the music needs to be paid for somehow, and iTunes is reasonable in it's methodology, but even iTunes is a step backwards from Napster.
Not saying I have the right answer, but I really feel that's the predicament we're in. Napster more or less got it right the first time, and had they not been shut down they would have a monopoloy on P2P right now, and no one would have given Kazaa a second thought unless Nap started doing something stupid like bundling in Spyware...oh wait, that doesn't stop people.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
bottled water
There's no restrictions built into WMA (aside from the lack of source/format documentation). Just like there's no restrictions built into AAC. Apple, like Microsoft, have built DRM on top of their formats, but unlike Apple, Microsoft are providing the SDK for DRM freely. If you examine the options available with the SDK you can make the rules as loose as you like, more "free" than iTunes have, it's just no-one seems to want to do this.
Is accuracy too much to ask for?
Shouldn't you get some sleep soon, KFG? Looks like you've been up a while...
I think the point of having a P2P network would be to get music known, not save costs. Sure, your homepage might be nice if you get someone there, but what you need is promotion. Why do you think so many independents want to join the iTMS?
A good legal P2P network could provide much the same, without requiring the huge central that iTMS is. With digital signing, the quality of the files would be guranteed. The one thing missing though is incentive for consumers to use their bandwidth to run "someone else's" net.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
but how do I pay? Credit card - no, not possible since I am a student. Paypal - no, I have heard too many stories about lost money, insecurity etc. Other ways?
have any of the guys observed that timothy has posted all the articles since yesterday? i bet everyone's out havining fun and timothy is boring us. ;)
This NOT P2P. P2P=Peer to Peer - this is client-pays-for-access-per-access-to-server.
Get it right - it's why it won't succeed. The power of P2P is that what you have that I dont and I want I will soon have and so on, the same applying for every user of the system.
There's no library that can be assembled like the one that we assemble when we all put all our books together on the same set of shelves.
Any 'service' such as these, especially insofar as they incorporate any DRM/copy protection features, is simply broken.
Speaking of broken, so is this 18th century copyright model. Which, incidentally, it isn't. Copyright as institued in its American inception would never have allowed this to happen. Lobbiests have, through the power of political peer to peer networking, mutated the copyright into a beast that protects them while they do all the evils it was designed to prevent.
While I'm on the subject of broken things, so is the RIAA business model. We have them on the coals - lets keep them there till they burn. There was music and art long before RIAA - there will be long afterwards. Anyone who's read the recent Wired mag has probably seen the charts that illustrate the one-to-one correspondence in the decrease of new musical offerings to their CD sales. They should consider themselves fortunate its not worse than it is given the crap that they are offering for sale.
Death Dances Only With The Living
You get no reliable library on P2P because that's not the way it's designed. If you want rare, obscure, or reliable stuff, you need things like iTMS or MMS. If you want popular, current, modern stuff, then P2P is fine.
So if for $1 per song I can access all of Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra (from master even), that is just *impossible* on P2P because no one on P2P has access, likes, or owns those songs, than Apple can make mucho money.
It's because the two systems operate on different premises:
iTMS: Reliable access, fixed content, diverse nature
P2P: Free, whatever is popular
There is *always* a chance to find Nat on P2P, but the chances are much higher you'll find Brittany Spears, Garth Brooks, or Backstreet Boys, just because of the demographic of users and the number of copies available in the first place.
GPL Deconstructed
I'm not sure if that's completely correct. The WMV format might have these restrictions. I downloaded one of them once and I couldn't move the file out of the folder i originally downloaded it to. Windows would not let me move it no matter what. I've also downloaded wma's and when I go to play them windows media player says I don't have the license for them or something. You may be right and I may be wrong, but I have seen restrictions associated with these formats.
This already goes on at etree. Does the slashdot crowd turn a blind eye to this because they are looking for "pop(ular)" music? I would hope that the folks here are willing to step out of the mainstream and support bands that allow taping.
Regards
Most banks offer debit cards that can also be used as pseudo credit cards (they're sometimes called checkcards). They work as credit cards, but just deduct immediately from your account. They will work fine for places that only accept credit cards.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
These three letters spell failure for legal P2P: WMA
Or you could substitute these three synonymous letters: DRM
It is the Digital Rights Management properties of Windows Media Audio that will destroy any and all legal P2P schemes. DRM is just double-speak for "You can't do what you want to do with what you legally own." Sorry! I want to own and be able to download copyrighted music and other material legally, but I also want MY FREEDOM TO ENJOY IT UNRESTRICTED by any DRM crap. Until that happens, no one will get my money. (Apple's iTunes suffers the same DRM trouble, though their implementation is quite user-friendly.)
One other requirement for me: I also need acccess to a lossless version of the music too before I'll buy.
Then it's fun-at-the-workplace time...
success
Why don't you all people forget about the P2P hype and start using services like http://www.magnatune.com/? The future is not in the technology but in the people selling their music.
I am not going to pay for the "privelege" of hosting music on my equipment that other people pay to download. No way. And I am not going to pay to download someone else's music.
Why?
Its this simple: sharing music on P2P is fair use. That simple. They can pass all the laws they want, buy and sell senators and representatives, they can sue grandmothers and burn books - but I don't care.
FILE SHARING IS FAIR USE! When you download a 128k MP3 from some teenage kid's computer, chances are they used MusicMatch or RealJukebox to rip the song. Those programs just plain suck. They are fast, but there are plenty of ripping artifacts. Then, they are compressed using Xing or FhG, and they suck.
So, unless everyone swears by EAC's Secure Mode ripping, and everyone uses FLAC or SHN files, there is nothing worth paying for out there.
Why do people insist on using the umbrella term "P2P" for Napter or its spawn? It was server based. In addition, I doubt if any of these new legal services are going to be peer-to-peer, how could one possibly keep it legal, when it is inherently not controlled centrally. So the answer is no, legal P2P services can't succeed, they're not even being tried!
If I'm buying music over the Internet, I do not want to deal with any number of different web site interfaces and payment methods in order to do so. A common system with high speed, known reliability and familiar interface would be a good selling point and encourage to buy.
iTunes sales numbers have blown all expectations, and are currently well over one million songs.
iTunes is expected to be released for Windows this year, and there are rumors that it will be bundled with AOL as the default music player- this would mean that every single AOL user would be sent to iTMS by default.
iTunes Music Store has shown quite convincingly that people are willing to pay for music, so long as the cost is reasonable.
I would pay just to get CD quality music, I hate downloading music that is horrible quality and has problems. Since they dont need to pay for bandwidth their prices SHOULD be cheaper. And maybe if its just a monthly fee for unlimited downloads it would be pretty good. Only problem I see is, I'm not going to be able to find music from every artist I'm looking for. there has to be some way to get everyone into it...
The facts are that without totally locking down all hardware around the world and applying death penalties and enormous fines:
1. Theres no way of providing un-breakable DRM'd songs.
2. Free file-sharing will always be around.
3. People will only pay for music if they want to.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I'm working ( no matter what it looks like). I've got a coffepot just a few meters away. The moggie is comfortably curled up on my desk next to my keyboard. She likes it when I'm working, something about watching other people do it I think.
Ry Cooder & V.M. Bhatt is playing at a soothing level. Highly recommended.
Sandlewood incense is burning on one side of the room, vanilla cavendish on this side.
I wish I had a bit of Sake or Cognac (and it's Sunday. Blasted blue laws), but otherwise life is good. I'll sleep tomorrow.
Or the next day. Whatever.
KFG
It seems like even back in the napster days when CD-Rs were still newish, but media had become so cheap I had ripped copies of all my friend's CDs and stuff from the library and then finally used Napster to develop a huge collection of singles. I felt like I had it all at that point and that was years ago. Then Gnutella was fun and I started downloading stuff I already had rather than trying to find it in the archives, same with Kazaa. It was just more convenient to download it than to find it.
I think this is something that is being overlooked is that everybody already has everything they want at this point. Time to quit? Oh, sure. Whatever. So, the kids who didn't have broadband and CD-Rs way back when are the only ones who get screwed.
I think the most shocking fact for the RIAA should be this one: the lasers in 48X CDRs are rated at a thousand hours burn time. That means these ultra cheap consumer devices are made in such a fashion that according to specs each one should produce 48,000CDs in its lifetime. Game over dudes.
And now we're talking DVD. Let's see, seven hundred songs per disc? This is such a Quixotic battle.
If you ask people who drink bottled water, they think they are getting better quality water with a better taste than they can get from the tap (even though they aren't getting better quality, they think they are).
In Minneapolis, the tap water comes from the Mississippi river, and in a hot dry summer, the water suffers from the lowered river level. It smells clearly of an algae smell, tastes bad and suffers from increased turbidity. And then there's the chlorine, flouride and other year-round "features" of tap water.
Even low-budget bottled water is at least highly filtered if not reverse-osmosis filtred, and tastes much better than tap water. Some of it really is spring water as well.
If I drink water to drink just water, I almost have to use bottled because the tap can be quite foul. I use tap for cooking, though, as I'm not a total zealot. Some day maybe I'll get an RO filter for the kitchen.
The big problem I see with Mercora, is that everything needs to still be vetted by the powers that be. Everything needs to go thorugh official channels.
I can't find live stuff (Especially multiple tapings and multiple levels?), no thanks. I'll stick to DC++, Soulseek and BT, thanks.
Not to say that this software is completely useless. I think if the software is NOT bloatware/adware, has a decent interface+built-in player, that it could be an interesting way to explore new music. Depends on the speeds that I get for the downloads really.
We've got a third round of DMCA lawsuits on our hands. The RIAA is using the DMCA to extort some more money for EMI and Sony...and this time they sued Jewel by mistake! RIAA Sues Jewel
But only on reasonable terms.
I have about 20Gb of MP3s. They're all mine. Ripped from CD's I own. Occasionally my CD was too badly damaged to get a good rip, so I've gotten a copy of a rip from a friend who owns the same album. Legal nit-picking aside, I think I have every legal right to do that.
I've never bothered with Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella or their like. I make intellectual property for a living, and I believe artists and creators ought to get paid for their work. (A discussion as to whether they actually _do_ get paid anything by the music publishers is beyond the scope of this rant.)
I want to buy more MP3s, legally. But I'm not going to bother with these half-assed more-expensive, more-restricted offerings. Sooner or later, they'll realize they have to offer equivalent or greater value to the consumer to win their business.
I want to listen to my newly-purchased songs in WinAmp, right along side my existing rips that I legally own. And if I want to put them on my laptop and listen to them while traveling, so be it. And MP3 players, while cycling. And maybe burn some to a CD to listen to in my car. It's my music, I can do what I want with it. Anything less is unacceptible.
Buying an entire album one song at a time and ending up paying _more_ than that album costs down the street at a bricks & mortar store? And getting a crippled, compressed, proprietary format that locks you to one CPU (what if it dies?) and only certain players? Who thought that was a clever idea?
The end of insane music publishing margins and selling the same music multiple times to a consumer (vinyl, tape, CD, DVD-Audio, MP3, etc) is here. The industry needs to learn to trim the fat like everyone else, and actually deliver value. And, to treat their customers like customers, not criminals.
I want to buy music. A lot of it. I'd probably drop $300 the first week such a reasonable system were available. And that's just the start. But lose this stupid business and operational model that they keep coming up with. Nobody wants less for more.
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
I seem to remember a paper written by one of the founders of TiVo. One of their original ideas was a video-on-demand service for cable where if someone put in a request for a movie, the system would query other cable boxes in the neighborhood to determine if any of them had a copy, and download it from there if someone local had it. The user still needed to buy a "license" to view the movie. As far as the user was concerned, his on-demand movie worked like it always did, but the system was much more efficient because not every request would involve a server. In fact, the more popular a movie is, the less server bandwidth it would consume!
Some content distribution will have to move to P2P, if for no other reason than to save on bandwith costs. The person who figures out how to do it (while keeping content providers happy) will make a lot of money.
Im actually against music being distributed digitally, rather then through CDs (or DVDs). Call me a freak, but I find music to sound too crappy in MP3 (or ogg, or whatever). Yeah, its ok for POP songs, but if Im listening to classical, or The Beatles, I want to hear it was it was intended to be heard.
I dont see ever getting this quality online, even with broadband. I buy only CDs, and then rip some, and listen to the CD in my stereo. When I buy a CD, I have a hard copy of the best (sort of) quality, that I can then compress to my liking.
I like CDs, though there is a place for digital music of course (sampling).
... art is truly valued by the majority of society. Which is to say maybe never.
... but not ha-ha.
How about this as a theory. How often have you heard an artist explain that they can't help doing what they do? That it's a spiritual fulfillment? Well then, isn't that the reward in and of itself? And maybe subconciously sensing this, society feels that it doesn't need art per se but that if someone feels good about producing it, well then it can be appreciated. But should society pay for it? Historically, it seems the answer is no. It isn't as if, except in relatively rare occasions, that art is asked for on commision (think big picture here e.g. were musicians approached for hire to invent "punk" music as a useful contribution to society or we hire bands for concerts or entertainment but not to create specific songs for us).
So maybe musicians produce music because it satisfies something inside of them. And maybe that's the payback i.e. feeling good about expressing yourself and connecting, perhaps, with others.
Now the music industry is about making money and their M.O. is ostensibly peddling other people's art. But if most of society doesn't really feel the need to pay for it, then what hope is there for any selling scheme if a free source exists?
It seems that the preceding reasoning would mean the music industry should focus on those circumstances where music is readily payed for i.e. the concerts, film scores, etc. The production of CD's would then be viewed as a form of advertising and hence an expense, not a profit making venture. In that light, you would conclude that the music industry should embrace P2P since advertising doesn't get much cheaper.
Funny world
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Of the 1$ iTunes charges per song
12 cents goes to the artist
40 cents go the the website(in this case iTunes)
30 cents go to the record label
10 cents go to affiliates like Amazon/AOL
There's a very simple solution. Route *all* money coming in through ASCAP rather than the RIAA. ASCAP divvies the money up among the artists (probably based on a statistical model of file distribution), and sends a chunk to the RIAA so they'll sit down and shut up.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Actually, there are a lot of things a paid service can offer that pirate P2P can't:
Guaranteed quality
Much better browsing
No spoofing or hoax downloads
legal P2P can offer those, but you're still left with:
Download speed
Most P2P systems don't offer very reliable download speeds. I suppose a BitTorrent system could work, but I question how well it could scale up to hundreds or thousands of different songs for each user. The number of users who are logged in at any given time who have the correct song might not be that high. Also, most users has asymmetric download.
If you're doing a paid service for relatively small files like music, it seems to make more sense to just own your own servers and pay for your own bandwidth. Much more straightforward to users, and not that expensive in context.
My video compression blog
Until the inevitable tin-ear posts "But 128kb AAC is indistinguishable from the CD".
Its predictable.
I guess this guy stands to make a lot of money then.
Short Answer:
No
Why?
Greed.
If they decided to charge a reasonable amount per song, say 2 cents, it might fly. 99 cents for a encoded track is absurd. They're not cd quality and I would still have to burn them to get a hard copy.
Secondly, selection is poor. Provide me with your *entire library*. Then we'll talk.
In other words: Put down the crack pipe. Get with the program.
As other posters have said, check out EMusic, which is exactly what you are describing. You pay a monthly access fee, and get virtually unlimited downloading (you're limited to 2000 songs over a 30 day period, but how many people would actually exceed that?). It has a good community, great music, gives you recommendations and they add new music on a regular basis. What's more, the music is completely unrestricted and it's owned by Vivendi Universal, so by using it you're encouraging the RIAA to move towards freer models.
eMusic. Unlimited downloads, unlimited burning. LAME VBR rips. Costs less than a CD per month.
Questions?
How is downloading your music from iTunes/Musicmatch/Napster 2.0/whatever P2P? there's no 'peer to peer'... you're downloading it all from a central server like you would any other data. It's not coming from someone else's personal computer that's sharing the data.
" ... art is truly valued by the majority of society. Which is to say maybe never"
Art is valued; it generates billions of dollars a year.
However, I'd point out that the bulk of what's downloaded is probably not art in the sense of being original, beautiful, touching people's lives, etc etc. Its pop-pablum designed to be like toilet paper; you use it once throw it in cold water, and flush it away.
But people are paying for it, so its hard to say people don't *value* it, you're asking for a kind of freudian respect where people *feel* the value of art.
They probably do, but not in the context of a Brittany album. No offense to Brittany, who has a billion dollars and a nice ass.
iTunes is still better. The songs are always there, they're always of excellent quality, the speeds are pretty good, previews are fast and free, AND you get exclusive content from artists up to and including such greats as Jimmy Buffett, David Bowie, Elvis Presley, and others. Can something that amounts to Napster with a fee come close to the impending Windows version of that?
Instead of sending the music over the network, office-exchange.com lets users exchange their music offline. Basically it lets you maintain a list of your own music, movies, etc. and then request things out of the libraries of the people you work with. They get an email asking to deliver the movie or music to you. Although it's kinda dumb for music (mp3s work better), it works great for DVDs or for technical books. Since only the original media is shared, it's legal.
Disclaimer: I believe that the internet should is a resource that should be free to people, the same way that air is. I also believe do not believe that people should be charged money for intellectual property such as music or programs (however charging for the material that programs, and music are stored on [ie: CD's] is ok, as is charging for the service of performing the music or offering tech support for the program.
Having said that...
As the computers and the internet have become more prevalent in lives of the everyday person/consumer it has, IMO, had a revolutionary effect of the lives of everyday people. It has given them more power as consumers to communicate with one and other about products that are on the supposedly "open" market. Now the consumers can, and many of them do use to internet as a tool to provide, up to date, if not instantaneous, honest information to one and other about anything and everything that is out there to buy. Prior to the internet consumers had to rely on their own experience with products, or the experiences of other people they knew (a number far less than the people who are available communicate with on the net today.) Of course they could rely on dead-tree-media such as magazines, and books, which are not nearly as convenient as the net is for information. Lastly, they could of course rely on the people selling/making the product that they were buying to provide them with non-bias judgment of the products that they sell/make.
As the complex adaptive system that we call the internet, and its user base have evolved it has become, IMO, the most power tool for information transfer that the human spices have ever experienced; and now it has evolved into a truly revolutionary tool that people can use to actually give each other stuff that they would have to otherwise have to pay for. Now people can trade, music, picture, PDFs, and programs just to name a few. Note: that when I say "revolutionary" I mean not only that it is new and cutting edge, but that it is causing people to actually rebel against profiteering corporations that have been ripping off consumers for years.
In the case pf P2P people are actively rebelling against the recording industry. A industry that charges upwards of $20.00 for a few pieces of plastic, paper, and ink that cost the company that produces them for sale no more than a few dollars to produce.
Basically what I'm saying is that P2P was inevitable when the recording industry charges so much for something that costs so little. It is a direct result of their greed, and now there is just nothing they can do to completely stop it.
UnuMondo's post put it the best "The era of paying for music is over." And to quote Chuck D "P2P means power to the people."
-r.future
Note: this has been posted by r.future (a person who spends way to much time on the internet!)
The way execs have responeded to P2P is retarded, but music should NOT be free. Cut out the middle man that is the RIAA, but it's simply selfish to consider that just because open source programs can be free for all that there can be a similar business model for music too. The open source coders are the weekend warriors of the tech world, but they don't pay the bills by working on an open source project. "Blah blah Metallica is rich blah lets steal from them" you say? I don't care how rich someone is, it doesn't give you the right to copy the work that made them rich. They got rich cause someone shelled out money for their product. If you don't think it's worth it, or you don't think that they should be rich then go without their music, don't tell yourself it's ok to copy it.
Yawn.
I won't buy music via online distribution systems until they can distribute them in lossless formats like Shorten, FLAC, WavZip/Pack, or Monkey's Audio.
if they made the price cheaper. Honestly, at 99 cents USD a song, and me living in Canada, that is not cheap. In fact, I'd still be paying the same price and I'd have less freedom to do what I want with it. Also, a couple of the bands I really like (such as Olivia Tremor Control and Circulatory System) have 20+ tracks on an album... some of them being less than a minute long. Why would I pay 26$ CAD for 20 songs when I don't have the original cd, cover art, etc. and DRM restricts what I can do with it? Now, that in mind, I do buy a lot of albums... it's pretty much my hobby... however, I mostly buy vinyl. I would love to have the ability to download the vinyl in electronic format... but at a dollar a song (buck-thirty canadian), it's simply not worth it. Perhaps if it was something like 25 - 50 cents a song, for 2.50$ an album... well, I'd be all over it.
Here is an example:
You purchase the rights to a large storage device (100GB+) and very fast Internet connection (100mbit+). People pay you with thier rights of thier music that they encoded themselves in exchange for storage of thier music just in case thier copy gets ruined.
This is how the underground elitists operate. It is very profitable for them to put $100+/mo into storage and Internet connection at a colocation service in return for the rights to $10,000+/mo worth of music rights in return.
This is not illegal. Thanks.
It is called furthurnet. :p
It a legal P2P system.
How is it legal.
All the artists that can be downloaded/traded
etc allow live taping of their music.
No you can't download their store released stuff
but you can get all the concerts you want that is available on the network at the time.
Really it boils down to this.
Write your favorite artist and ask them
why they don't allow live taping of their music.
Was anyone aware metallica allows live taping?
You can freely trade their live concerts.
Just don't go after the ride the lightning album.
So either pick better artist's to like
or write to them and demand they change their greedy little ways.
it's a great way to get your customers to pay your bandwidth costs. Of course it'll be heavily encumbered with digital restrictions. So yes, they'll be p2p, but it'll suck for the consumer.
Oh, and what the hell's with $1 a song? At that price it's on par with buying a CD used, but without either a) nice packaging and b) a reliable backup of the data (remember those articles on how cheap cd-rs can only last a few years?). Then again that price is probably half buying it new, and the used market won't matter if the RIAA members 'retire' the CD format in favor of p2p.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Hi... A bit off topic but 4 mb costing pennies is a bit too expensive don't you think? Most places give you more bandwidth then that. You should be able to get 3 gigs for a dollar at the least.
Hmmm... Pie...
I dont get how people can call all of these alternatives P2P. Itunes is not P2P. And unless you download music from other people, and not from their servers, there will never be legal P2P.
You have to check out this awesome app...technically it's not P2P, but what it does is find free MP3's online for you, and then reccomends new ones based on how you rate them.
It's also open-source, multi-platform:
http://irate.sf.net/
sig? uhh, umm, ok
My essential problem with formats such as WMA, is that I don't get the freedom to do with my property (albeit digital property) as I please.
Regardless of what kind of encryption trickery anyone can come up with, someone will either a) break it (DVD), or b) copy it to another format.
So, I think people should sell music online, using formats like MP3 and OGG.
Sure, there will always be pirates, but I think that a fair amount of people would want to legally pay for music, especially if they know that the artists, and not some fat and overpaid record company executive, would reap the benefits, and so be encouraged to produce more music.
I really hate people who think up half baked quotes, and then attach them to their postings as "anon" - Anon
"I hate people who fabricate unintelligent quotes to add to their work seemingly by some 'anon' sage" -- anon
I looked at the MusicMatch site to get an idea how similar it is to iTMS from Apple. It's pretty close, except for a real problem: Deactivating a computer is permanent. That, and I couldn't find out what format the songs from MusicMatch are (or a list of players for the "legal" music).
I don't think that you can really call, MusicMatch's service or Napster 2.0 a P2P service. They're all really just a new way of the corps selling stuff to consumers. There's nothing peer here. Move along.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
why pay money for emiminem faggot when u can get tons of great music for free. best bands arent signed cos they wont compromize and know that music is like food and air and water and speech -- free -- and i dont mean that electronic shit i mean proper bands with proper instruments who play live i dont use kazaa cos its evil $pyware so i use xnap on my gentoo boxen but i dont use sun java cos they wont open source -- and they wonder why sun is dying
P2P will definitely survive. But P2P isn't the true future. The "industry" will be broken into two pieces: commercial and non-commercial, and the non-commercial aspect of the industry will be a hundred times larger, and serve as a breeding ground for artists. Touring will not be as important. More effort will be focused on marketing and distribution and online merchandising. P2P will be one of the major marketing mediums but will eventually be overshadowed by aggressive efforts on the part of the independents to establish larger, better quality sources of content.
Aside from the standard arguments, P2P is flourishing because of two things that are outside the control of the current copyright wars:
Convience - Being able to grab content very quickly and conveniently.
Performance & Availability - P2P works because the bandwidth needs are divested among the online populace.
These two issues will eventually be addressed as broadband becomes more common and economical, and web sites make more of an effort to expand the content they offer and aggregate other content into single points of presence.
P2P has never been about stealing. It's always been about convience. The media have just exacerbated the existing frustrations felt by their market by refusing to acknolwedge how they got into this mess in the first place: by not giving their consumers enough choice and convenience.
Every day, things get worse for the traditional business. In addition to the industry's refusal to aggressively pursue innovation, they've stagnated the state-of-the-art by cranking out bland, formulaic product that is devoid of depth. Meanwhile 99.9% of artists who won't sell-out their soul have less of a chance to exploit the traditional marketing and distribution mediums, and most are asking themselves why they'd want to in the first place.
The massive considation of the media has made things worse, but it's helped the underground industry. P2P is just one sign that people are fed up with the crap being passed off as art. There are many more things to come.
I see a future where there are alternate networks in cyberspace that feature tons of new artists that have never had a voice before (as evidenced by many noble efforts such as IUMA, Songramp, MP3.com, etc. but this is going to grow dramatically), and this spawns influence over the mainstream media, all the while the RIAA keeps trying to figure out who they can sue instead of paying attention to what consumers really want.
Given the current manifestations of the "legal" music download services however, there is no way I would touch most of them. Pay a monthly fee and then lose the right to listen if I stop my subscription? Give me a break. Pay for a song but I can only listen to it on my computer or on my computer and one or two alternate systems... no... I payed for it, I should be able to burn it to a cd,or take it with me while walking through the park on my portable mp3 player. I should be able to copy it to my desktop machine, linux OR windows in some truly portable standard media format. I should, in fact, be able to copy it to my work compouter, my home desktop, my laptop or any number of other places if it is conveinient for me to do so. It is MY music if I purchase it! I can do that today if I were to buy a cd in a store (well most cd's), though I have stopped all cd purchases until the RIAA gets there priorities straight as I am NOT going to help support their campaign to extort money out of 12 year old girls who live with their single mom in a housing project or a woman who doesn't even own a computer with an operating system that could run kazaa!
I believe in paying for what I want, a reasonable price for a reasonable value. I may be willing to pay a bit more for conveinience but not for added restrictions.
Ask the RIAA executives how much MORE they would be willing to pay for a car they could only drive on certain roads and even then only for as long as they paid the monthly fee, yes even after the car was completely and totally paid for!
The Matrix is real... but I'm only visiting!
Are you asking if pay services that allow music download will ever succeed? There are plenty of other areas of music downloads that are perfectly legal that don't involve buying music over the internet. (I'm thinking first of Grateful Dead shows, Phish shows.... but there are other examples).
Apple's store already seems to be a success. Hopefully they'll get a windows client out soon.
"Someone produces something of value, you *should* pay for it. If a band produces good music, traditional social programming tells us, they should be rewarded for it."
No, actually, people buy what's cheapest (or free). While people will pay for thing they perceive of value, between free radio and the whole P2P phenomenon, people don't see any value.
It doesn't help that Hollywood has shifted gears to producing fewer CD's hoping for the next nsync or brittany. There is no "loyalty" any more; laugh at the dead, or chicago, or the stones. They got an audience and kept them through 4 decades. That takes work and talent, something record companies no longer have.
I wrote an essay about the subject at sharethemusicday .
The big problem I see with the online sites is not the legal issues but the usability. mp3.com and other free mp3 downloads use a web browser to serve music. Bad! We need a more sophisticated client, like p2p or bit torrent (or like the audiogalaxy satellite). I can't remember if winamp is good at managing mp3 downloads.
I advocate a voluntary compensation method as the only credible way to compensate artists (and I fault commercial music webhosts for not allowing musicians to include tipjars). I would rather donate money to artists after having the opportunity to listen to all them. (When the Courts ruled against Verizon last March, I vowed to stop listening to commercial music altogether). Instead music webhosts feed the musicians' illusions that labels are still searching for talent to sign. Do you know musicians pay $100 a year to put their music on mp3.com?
But I would happily pay $10 a month to a music hosting site that provides an easier interface for managing downloads and files. Looks like none of the music hosts have really tried that yet. (Musicmatch--which is more of a pc application-- is probably the best of the bunch for that, and even they aren't that good).
I'm surprised that mp3.com isn't using bit torrent to distribute the bandwidth load. Mp3.com should create a private p2p2 network using authentication to share all files in the mp3.com universe.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
You're looking for something like iRate radio:
Once it "learned" what I liked, I found it much more convenient than dl'ing random tracks off P2P. There's a couple other projects, like Audioscrobbler, that are attempting this kind of thing as well. It's the Fuuuuture, Marty!
--
Power to the Peaceful
Being a recent c-span junkie I came across an hearing on filesharing that I think brought up some interesting points...
The main thrust of the issue as I see it is that organizations like the RIAA are legitimately losing money from p2p, but it's only because they refuse to give up any control in the way their content is distributed. They've had a strangle-hold on the market for decades and now they're crying because they didn't think of p2p first. Networks like kazaa have been trying to work with the RIAA to get licensed content from RIAA, but have been turned down at every opportunity.
Chuck D summed it up well when he said "As far as I'm concerned P2P means 'Power to the People'" I don't think that the proponents of P2P filesharing are anti-business necessarily, but the one's in control have for such a long time been the execs in the music industry that many see the losses they're taking right now as a leveling of the playing field. P2P isn't going away, and the sooner the RIAA recognizes that and plays ball with networks like Kazaa, the sooner everyone benifits and makes money.
Anyone interested should check out c-span's site at c-span.org and look for this video (requires realplayer):
Sen. Subcmte. Hearing on File Sharing & the Entertainment Industry (10/02/2003)
go about 2 hours and 1 minutes in to hear Chuck D's testimony... I must say it really made my day to hear the RIAA and MPAA get verbally spanked so eloquently!
Just curious, I've been thinking about giving emusic a whirl, but your post raises a question:
On the site, they advertise "Unlimited CD burning, unlimited transfers". Nowhere in their TOS could I find anything related to transfer limits. Not that I plan on downloading 2000 tracks a month, but I'm assuming you're using hyperbole. Any idea what the real limit is? (God, I hate companies that lie in their advertising)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
But few consumers now are going to buy the horseshit that we should actually pay for broadcast-quality content without some sort of value-add to the material.
Their options are to come up with something better or fail miserably.
If they think a failure and using the law amd the courts and attacking their best customers to protect their content and distribution monopoly will help them, their dropping profits and declining stock prices are telling quite another story.
Tech Public Policy stuff
...for those bands that choose not to get in bed with the RIAA, and allow their music to be distributed freely.
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
... they cut the price exactly in half.
A dollar a song is absurd. I really *COULD* record the song off the radio for free, and with a really good radio it would sound approximately as good as a 128kbps MP3. Would I somehow be outside my rights to do that?
For 50 cents, though, I could get a 16-track album for 8 bucks. That's reasonable, and convenient.
+++ATH0
In much of the deep southeast, tapwater has a high mineral content that gives it a faint sulfurous odor. Throughout the midwest and southwest, the water is very hard and has a definite earthy flavor. The tapwater in these places is certainly very high quality due to public health standards. But it is water that stinks and tastes like dirt even when run through a cheap faucet filter. For these people, bottled water is definitely higher quality in a definitely perceptible manner.
Regarding pay-to-download, there could very well be a quality difference as well. If you're P2P-ing it, you don't know the source of the MP3. It could have been ripped at a low bitrate or with a crappy ripper. Hopefully these pay-to-download services will offer consistent high-quality encoding. I hate that wavering sound you get in the high frequencies in low-quality MP3s. I subscribed to EMusic for a couple months, downloaded a few tracks, and then quit because their MP3s were low bitrate and sounded like it.
And also, I recently purchased several old arcade game roms from StarRoms after reading a Slashdot article that mentioned it. I did this even though I knew where I could get them for free, despite the fact that sites distributing these ROM images are routinely shut down by C&Ds from IP owners. I did this because it is comforting to legally own something, and I also did it to make a statement:
Today's digital technology allows for archival and on-demand transmittal of copies every single piece of intellectual property ever created. There is no excuse for anybody to not sell or give away their IP over the internet. Don't shut down video arcade game ROM sites and then NOT sell the ROM images you are "protecting". Record labels, don't go sueing people for file swapping until your entire catalogs are available for purchase online. If you sell it, people WILL buy.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
Despite the way some have tried to dismiss it, the doctrine of first sale is a very unresolved issue in law that has everything to do with the definition of "copy" and the technical details of the functions of digital devices.
So, if this system is working that angle, as it seems to be, then it could be quite interesting. It's one thing to charge for music like I-tunes, but it's quite another to set up an E-Bay like exchange network for digital music where the participants can also make cash dollars.
On the one hand, since it's commercial, you create a record of each transaction and hence there is a degree of individual liability.
On the other hand, since it's commercial you create the opportunity for REAL piracy: illicit trade in copyrighted works for cash.
It is possible to imagine that this could turn out to be the system that makes the RIAA say --damn, we should have worked with Kazaa. At least up to this point nobody in the digital world is challenging the RIAA as the body to collect profits from the works in its collections. This could change soon and ironically, though not surprisingly, due to the RIAA's own efforts.
A secondary E-Bay like market could be huge and it's not clear at all that it would not be legal as well. In concept it would be completely acceptable under the law, but in practice it is quite easy to imagine people bending the rules about deleting thier existing copy. They speak of Windows2997 Super Duper Double Cross Your Fingers Stick a Needle in Your Eye encryption, but imagine some outgoing young innovator finding a way to convert his existing MP3 collection to this format and forging his ID in the market. Whoo, tempting proposition.
Why do I as a listener need to spend hours on end in order to find the music I like? I'm generally NOT interested in surfing/downloading/burning/ripping music, I just want to listen to it!
Give me a service that makes me personalized playlists based on my current mood, make it automatically suck the mp3's down to my player (via server or p2p - hopefully a combo) and let me treat my mp3's as I do my webcache. By allowing p2p, getting music might be quicker if it can be fetched locally. As well, you might be able to work offline (in ad-hoc modes. Say at a jazzclub...).
So, I want a personalized, precachable radio that allows me to skip and rate. I will of course be willing to pay for such a service, although it has to be a fixed price solution - otherwize I have to keep a copy of my songs.
I will also buy some CD's, for whenever I sit down in front of my stereo to listen to high quality music, but they also need to be more reasonably prized (say 5-8 bucks).
Legal P2P will succeed when the laws which ban the sharing of music are put to death. IP law is a joke and only serves to keep people in an artificial state of wealth - while simutaneously eroding a cultural backbone in the name of greed.
Face the facts - music is something to be shared by a culture, not kept locked away for the privilaged few.
If lossy compression is unnoticeably different from the original, why are they selling us "CD-quality audio"? What about "DVD-A"? If the watermarks on DVD-A cannot be heard by the human ear, why are they selling a new audio system that goes up to 192kHz?
I say "piffle".
One of the strengths of the various P2P networks, and one which the industry seems to ignore entirely, is the ability to find and preserve rare and out of publication media.
:(
If you log into Kazaa, and search for some rather obscure television or radio shows, you'll probably find them. If you were to then go to the original publisher, you may be told that those items are not available, and that it would cost too much to make them available because of low demand.
Guess what? Making them available via the internet costs someone's time to do the initial rip from analogue to digital, and then the pennies of bandwidth to stick it up for the offering. I know I'd pay a few dollars per episode for some TV shows that I never got to see, and that aren't popular enough to make it to the DVD farm. I'd pay more if someone took the time to clean them up.
What I won't pay for:
DVD box sets which artifically inflate the price after the release. The X-Files originally sold for $80/box, then around the release of season 4, they all jumped to $120! No.
CD's which are antique media, are no longer a standard because of copy-protection, are low quality considering that DVD's are usually 5.1 surround, and have some drug-hazed maniacs sitting on the RIAA board of directors deciding to treat everyone as criminals unless they can prove their innocance... maybe if they include some of what they're smoking in the jewel case???
Replacements for damaged media. CD's were billed as "lasting forever". If they wear out through normal use, I should be able to order a replacement for a minimal fee. I currently can order a replacement for $15.
Give two cuts away on your website under an open license as a demo...Sell 'em the rest of the album at five bucks a pop.
This still doesn't answer the question of what happens when KFG (for example, I'm not accusing) pirates this $5 album on the P2P network and no one buys it anymore...
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
Do those thieves think of themselves in the same way you do, or do they view themselves are better than those who are dumb enough to leave valuables in a car (digital camera), not lock up, use decent alarms, etc etc?
Maybe most of them view themselves as we view ourselves... there are just more people using P2P than jacking cars.
And no, I don't believe that it is the same between P2P and robbery. Car jacking, household robbery don't involve physical damage or loss.
However, if you count "professional pirates" they're not much better than common thieves. That guy in the street selling ripped copies of movie X 2 days after (or even before) it was out in theatre? It's organized crime, and while it lacks the smash-and-grab bad image of common thievery, you'd better believe that it still includes some of the less savory parts.
The real problem is that some can't equate the difference between these and common P2P'ers, and throw them in the same basket under the name of "piracy"
Alright, personally i think that yes money should be paid for cds. However, the price of the cd should be proportional to its value. The reason so many people simply download music is because of cd prices now a days. Modern day example, the Linkin Park cd Reanimation costs $20. Is it worth $20? No way in hell. That cd blows, and i say that as an honest to god Linkin Park fan. So why, if something is so craptastic, should we be forced to pay such a high price? There is no good reason, so free downloading seems like the more logical option. However, that doesnt mean we are all "piracy whores" like many people try to say. I am currently sitting in school with 30 cds, and only 5 or 6 of them are burned. Thats right, we "piracy whores" buy cd's too. The difference is, we only pay for cd's worth buying. I'm sorry but i wont pay $20 to listen to 3 songs, its just stupid. And as for the $1 a song offers, that is a load of crap. If i'm going to pay for music, it needs to come free of control. I paid money, i dont need the internet telling me what i can and cant do with the music i purchased. So its simple...if you like the majority of a cd, then go buy it. Yes the RIAA takes more than it deserves, but at least some money does go to the band. But i still stick to my belief that if there is a case where the cd only has 3 or 4 good songs, downloading is fine. If artists are going to release crap, then thats what they deserve it return. Ok i'm done ranting now.
The people who THINK they know everything are rather annoying to those of us who DO know everything.
Thanks!
Mac's iTunes service sold 10 million songs in a four month period. The demand is definetely out there, but the service hasn't been available. I've been anxiously waiting for a company to provide a digital download site for the rest of us (non mac users). The current file sharing programs are great, but I'm tired of not always finding the music when I want; receiving incomplete or corrupted music files, and poor download speeds. And I'm sure there's a lot of other people out there who feel the same way. 10 million+ can't be wrong. I checked out the Mercora site. It's not oprational yet, but they allow you to register in order to receive an early preview of their service. The other sites do that as well. Anyone know of any other future sites?