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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...
Razor-sharp irony kills 3, wounds 25.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
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.
We could abuse this: Everyone, start sharing plenty of Polka, 80's pop, and Barney. Now lets talk about targeted marketing!
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
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.
Where have we seen this before?
Doh!
I have absolutely no legal background (that statement goes way beyond IANAL), but I'm sort of thinking that benefitting from a crime must be illegal. If the RIAA considers filetrading (of their copyrighted files) to be illegal, and the legal system agrees, then nobody should be using that data to then profit.
(Just as we do not, for ethical reasons, use information that the Nazis gleaned from their experimentation on the Jews in World War II. Clearly the magnitude is nowhere near the same, but the underlying ethical principle is similar.)
I mean...profiting from illegal actions, right?
Blar.
work on creating a community site where bands can pay $5-$10 a business quarter to be listed with samples that can be streamed, that connects the bands to venues for say..... 5% of the proceeds and that lets users post comments about the band and rate their music? Then said label gets out of the old business of being a content producer and a service company for musicians providing them everything from merchandising to recording studios to instruments to music software? Basically become a service/product Walmart for musicians and fans as opposed to the current model of milking bands for records.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
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.
Be careful how you spell it, Kazza is a recording industry frontend where you fill a form with your name and e-mail address. You probably mean Kazaa.
Goto's should be avoided in programming. So far, it has gotten this story posted 4-5 times already within the last few months.
has been around for a little while . . .
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.10/fileshar
Stop telling us how ironic this is. It's not. It's just fsckin' sad.
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...
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You hear it all the time - and, most of the time, actually no, it isn't. Hypocritical and/or cynical, more likely.
prof. hojo
I've downloaded dozens of songs today alone... to whom do I address my bill for services rendered?
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
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!
Avril Lavigne isn't underage, douche-nuts.
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.
If telephones had never been broken up, would we have ever had cellphones today except maybe in Europe? A powerful media outlet company has even more and broader powers than other sorts of monopolies, because of better access and because they're business is controlling what people want and think. I truly don't think that the music industry is evil, but they're as inertia-bound as any other large incestuously linked series of codependent corporations. If suing customers and softcore porn Britney clones make shareholders happy then thats what we get.
Now there's an idea, we could create a company that indy groups pay to have their songs spike higher in the download charts. Nothing illegal about it (well Kazaa's owners might not like it), since you wouldn't actually download the files. Ahhh, to toy with the minds of the RIAA, it'd be such fun. :)
Also, with these lawsuits going on, isn't that also going to affect the sample pool (by selecting out those computer savvy enough to change their shared folders, and increasing the proportion of people outside the USA)?
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
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
Couldn't they just look at the download logs on their servers serving fake songs?
people who share their entire hard disk on Kazaa, this could result in the production of the Biggest Hit Song of All Times...
The name would be somewhat like explorer.exe...
"Hell hath no fury like a hippo with a machine gun."
I dunno, but I might just be willing to give them all the marketing data/interviews they need if I didn't have to worry about lawsuits or anything like that and got to continue to download all the free music I want.
Oh wait, they can get the marketing data AND sue us, so I guess its more profitable that way.
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There are several companies providing this new service which they refer to as 'online media measurement'. One is BigChampagne . According to DMusic ,the labels pay upwards of $40,000 a month for these services!
The hypocracy of the RIAA to condemn P2P as an illegal activity and then actually use it towards its own gains just further confirms its selfish motives.
I'm not an expert in US law by any means, but can't this be useful in court against the RIAA somehow?
So there you have it. Now you can cut the RIAA out of the loop entirely.
I retract the above post as my friend thought it would be funny to post something stupid because I made the error of stepping away and forgetting to lock my workstation.
gotta marvel at the RIAA's ability to come up with new and innovative ways to shit all over us. just when I though I couldn't possibly be more disgusted with the recording industry, they come up with something new. the funny thing is, though, that the joke is still on them... I haven't bought a single CD in at least four years, and I really don't think that there's anything they can do to stop P2P, much less illegal music sharing in general. Any digital media which you are able to play back using a PC is inherently not copy-proof, and short of storming my home and confiscating my machine and my cable modem, I just don't see how they can actually stop me or anyone else from swapping music with someone else.
- unitzero Who needs sleep, or food, or daylight, or human interaction, when you have a handful of ritalin.
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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A few weeks back I pointed a friend to the creative commons website, so that he could look up information on copyright and see how it was moving forward. He was quite surprised and glad to see that things aren't the way he knew them to be in that area.
The same happens with musicians. They don't tend to know about this. Especially young, talented people who don't necessarily get much chance to get on the internet. I remember as a teenager I would read in all the music magazines about the dream of one day being signed to a major. Nowadays to me that means mostly negative things - problems. Like a big bank loan and surviving on gigs, giving away your rights etc. But to others the dream goes on.
Is there a good URL to point people to so that they can get clear concise guidance on why *not* to sign for one of the RIAA companies? Or even that showed what the options are, and examples of people like Ani DiFranco or companies like magnatunes and how to achieve their musical dreams and still avoid bad business decisions.
The URLs I find are always centred on how bad the RIAA is, or on the consumer side but there isn't to my knowledge a good musician centred site...
Ale
So now the recording associations are going to think that the following is their most popular artist. teen anal cum xxx hot God help the record stores when a kid asks for that!
-- Do not bite the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it.
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