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Recording Industry's Unexpected Benefit from P2P
Matthew Schultheis writes: "Yahoo / AP is reporting that the record industry is using the files traded on Kazza et al. to track where music is popular. It turns out that they even pay for this information. 'It's the most vast and scalable sample audience that the world has ever seen'" Now if they could only use this data to somehow put out better music...
So they are sueing us for downloading but yet useing the stats of our downloads? Sounds hypocritical to me.. This really goes to show you that corperations and selfish organizations will stop at nothing to make a profit.
-Here we are now, Entertain us.
So they treat it like it's a child porn network in their PR statements and then turn around and find a way to make money off it.
That's big business for you.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
P2P is just like radio, only the people actually listen to music they _like_ instead of shit that the stations are payed to pimp out as top 40? Fucking amazing. These guys are geniuses.
I mean...profiting from illegal actions, right?
Blar.
Naah. They'll use it to reduce the quality of the music down to the 'most efficient level', whereby the quality of the music is just above the level at which it stops selling.
You are mistaken in one thing though--we DO use the information the nazis gleaned from their experimentation. Sorry to bust your bubble, but they made vast advances in the medical fields with their very unethical methods that would take us much longer today.
DON'T get me wrong, though. I AM IN NO WAY ADVOCATING, CONDONING OR APPROVING OF, what the nazis did, their methods, or of utilizing such procedures. It is one of the most dispicable acts in the history of mankind. Nevertheless, it is a fact that society uses the information they obtained through these methods.
This is not an uncommon situation. In psychology there are a LOT of classic expirements that would not be performed now due to ethical concerns. That in NO WAY limits the usefulness of that information or the fact that is has been used as the basis for a lot of theoretical framework. An example would be the researcher at John Hopkins Medical Center who conditioned a young child to be very phobic of anything that was white and fluffy. Such experiments are not ethical, but much of what we know about phobias and treating them is a result of his research.
Flame me if you wish, but we DO use information gathered in an unethical manner frequently--as long as it is regarded as accurate, which the data gathered by the nazis is. They were, if nothing else good can be said, very methodical in their research.
Once again, I DO NOT CONDONE WHAT THEY DID.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
trying to prove that P2P had no substantial no infringing use. Case closed.
But then there's also the first part of the above sentence -- the world as it is now features p2p and music sharing. Even if this isn't the world as they want it, they need to figure out how to exploit it as best they can. Hence, makethe most of (from their perspective) a bad situation, and mine p2p for some useful data.
They're trying to maximize their profits. If there's money to be made scouring p2p data then they'll buy the research, but just because they are scavenging some benefit out of it doesn't make it hypocritical for them to want it to go away .. it just makes them pragmatic.
"When someone plops down 99 cents to buy a single, that shows a higher level of interest than just getting it for free," Welt said.
As any 1st year marketing major could tell you, this data will not be as useful as one might imagine. Knowing who wants a product (in this case, a CD) in no way relates to knowing who is willing to pay for a product. Some consumers want Ferraris; not all of them will buy one (for reasons of Price). Without a clear way of associating user names with demographic or psychographic data, this will not even help to more clearly define the target audience for an artist. All this data represents is the number of computer literate people who are actively sharing a song; this may or may not be related to whether they actually enjoy the song; this may or may not be related to whether they would/could pay for the song; this may or may not be related to the fake files that are being posted on KaZaa (that song's popular? Shove a couple thousand fakes online; discourage lots of people). Move along people, nothing to see here...
Webmaster Wanted - Entropic Reactions
You hear it all the time - and, most of the time, actually no, it isn't. Hypocritical and/or cynical, more likely.
prof. hojo
If you haven't found out already that the masses are both stupid and like bad music you must be almost as clueless as the RIAA...
Banaaaana!
What? Not piracy? Then why in the world would they want to kill a system that is so beneficial to them?
Because of a problem that they consider bigger than piracy: The growing number of independant artists, many of whom are becoming increasingly popular. Yes, that's right folks. The RIAA doesn't want to protect its poor artists from the piracy that is putting them in the poorhouse. On the contrary, the RIAA is the one putting its poor artists in the poorhouse. No, no, no, folks. The RIAA is doing this to take business away from the artists that the RIAA is incapable of putting in the poorhouse, because it is incapable of stealing their money, because they didn't sign their soul over to the RIAA.
That, my friends, is why the RIAA wants to kill filesharing.
I don't think there's a lack of good music being recorded - I think there's a lack of good music being marketed.
For every John Coltrane or Cibo Matto or Ani DiFranco song being downloaded over P2P, Britney Spears is being downloaded at rates 100 times more. Do you know how difficult it is to find the Seatbelts' (Yoko Kanno's soundtracks for Cowboy Bebop) music over P2P? And Bebop's a relatively popular anime over here. What about music that doesn't have that sort of avenue to market itself? I suspect the "better" music isn't being downloaded.
And the stats the recording companies get show that, which reinforces the audience's "obvious need" to see Britney chasing Madonna around a bedroom in a video. Thus, they continue to market said brand of music, and we continue hearing it and thinking we want it.
If you want to see the market shift to "better" music, then this is a case where you have to get people to not only download things over P2P, but to make sure that they buy the albums they like (yes, I said "buy" because even the little labels and the self-published artists are spending money to record - it's not free (yet)). That will help bring better music to the marketplace, but I doubt we will ever see a truly diverse popular music scene...
making the best of a bad situation.
Yes it's terrible some of these things happened but it would be even more tragic if we refused to gleam some good out of it. They would have been tortured and murdered purly for evil. Many people died in horrific ways but because of the information many more are saved. If I'm going to be tortured I'd certainly hope something good and useful was learned in the process.
I'd roll in my grave if the cure to cancer was found by committing some horrific experiments on me and society refused to take advantage of it. I'd also roll in my grave if those who committed the horrific acts (and those who encouraged them) weren't seriously punished and denied any and all financial reward from their discoveries.
There's nothing hypocritical about it.
I'd be more surprised if the RIAA wasn't trying to get something good out of this situation.
It has exactly zero to do with condoning the rampant piracy.
There's nothing wrong with making the best of a bad situation. There's something seriously wrong with you if something bad happens and you just whine about it and play helpless victim.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
If they want to benefit from it they should make it legitamate
Featured by Wired back in September:
a re .html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.10/filesh
"BigChampagne is Watching You
In fact, they're tracking every download and selling the data to the
music industry. How one company is turning file-sharing networks into
the world's biggest focus group."
That just prooves how useless the recording industry has become, their only purpose in life is to drive arogent rich people to studios and back to their hotels and then to hype what ever they sing, The internet is a million times better at that job, even one big website could handle most major musicians. There would be no middle-man to take profits and anyone that the public actually liked would be spread by word of mouth and would have packed concerts. You could even order the limo online - total job redundancy to the RIAA.
There are afew such websites around i think but no major (as in RIAA mainstream) musicians are involved so its shadowed by the big guns, and because most RIAA musicians are in it #1 for the money (people dont dream of being famous on some website they dream of being on every tv and having shit loads of cash, i know i do). Interesting things have a habit of spreading around the internet quickly (memepool), ie. people are always sending eachother links to the latest flash game that lets you slap bush etc, and interesting things could easily include music so if you did start a band and produced music that everyone liked whats to say you couldnt make it big in afew weeks just through word of mouth and email?
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