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Steve Jobs and the State of Legal Music Downloads
An anonymous reader writes "Rolling Stone has published an interview with Steve Jobs about the current state of the music industry. He is a smart man, that guy. 'When we first went to talk to these record companies -- about eighteen months ago -- we said, "None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.s here who know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content."'"
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
is to make it cool to buy it. Make it something people *want* to spend the $$$ on.
"And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. The way we expressed it to them was: You only have to pick one lock to open every door." I really like this idea, and I think it needs highlighting. The simple truth is that music companies, so stuck to their physical medium, seem to have been, for so long, under the impression that mp3's are much like pieces of physical media; they're copied once, that copy goes somewhere, and then its all over, as if this "copying" thing requires some kind of physical action that each user must complete, much like Xeroxing paper.
"we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content"
=
"I never have to purchase a CD/Movie/Game again!"
I doubt this will matter much though - companies will always try and protect their content as the majority of users will not try to break the protection anyway.
Is it a boat?
Steve Jobs to the RIAA: "We asked 10,000 monkeys, and they don't seem to think that protecting diginal music is possible. However, they gave us this encyclopedia to give to you!"
Yes ladies and gentlement, Steve Jobs does know how to get the answers to the questions that matter the most.
---
The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa.
Is crap.
The EULAs for iTunes and Napster 2 are horrible, more draconion than Microsoft software (which you are already running if you can use iTunes or Napster 2). If I choose to pay for music (and it is a choice these days), stop restricting me, stop invading my privacy and harassing me. It would have been easier to use Kazaa, eDonkey or Piolet to begin with, and there wouldnt have been any restrictions.
Add to that I live in canada, so I can't purchase music with these services (yes I tried).
paul reinheimer
it's just not posible to protect something from millions of hackers... i remember that XP supossed to be "hacker-proof" with the internet activation system... HACKED before even XP was officially released. The SONY protected audio CD's... with a permanent black marker.... it is a utopia to think that no one will try to break the protection... the harder they try to protect something the more challenging to hackers is breakin it.
Putting a windows cd backwards, plays evil messages, but it gets worse, putting it right, installs windows.
I've gt a buddy with a HUGE classic vinyl collection (lots of rare stuff) and the artwork is worth WAY more than the record itself. Maybe there's a parallel these guys can draw to offer something a little more tangible than the bits. Having a scan of artwork isn't the same as having a rip of the music.
Of course for that to work, they'd have to stop pumping out 500 godzillion copies of every single album made, which is a problem for them as well.
But it should common sense .... sell a product and it sell the product the way the people want you will make a ton of money. Thats how capitalism is suppose to work.
Let's be realistic Pudge, Apple would not have been able to get anything off the ground for the Music Store if it had no sharing limits. As with almost everything these days, a compromise is reached that makes the best sense for both parties (or for one, depending on your viewpoint).
I know, I know...this is slashdot, where every editor shows their bias on each story. Perhaps I'm asking too much.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
"It's not possible to protect digital content."
That really isn't that insightful. What he should have said was "people are still going to copy digital content, no matter what you do." Saying that it's not possible to protect digital content is just like saying "it's not possible to protect your home." You can put a lock on the door, but a burglar can break the window. You can put up an alarm, he can cut the power or something. You can create an armored bunker, but if the burglar's got a tank, it's not really going to matter.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Smart guys. If you can play it, you can copy it. Either someone breaks the copy protection (Jon J) or you plug a digital out into a digital in.
Trouble is the record companies know this but still keep trying which just makes it harder and more frustrating for the avarage guy/girl who wants to listen to ligit tracks on a mp3 player.
I personally like the idea of being able to hear a song before I buy it and then just buy the songs I like. That why iTunes is good.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Apple Computer is the maker of the popular Macintosh line of computers. The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called... Darwin! That's right, new Macs are based on Darwinism! While they currently don't advertise this fact to consumers, it is well known among the computer elite, who are mostly Atheists and Pagans. Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an "Open Source" license, which is just another name for Communism. They try to hide all of this under a facade of shiny, "lickable" buttons, but the truth has finally come out: Apple Computers promote Godless Darwinism and Communism.
But is this really such a shock? Lets look for a moment at Apple Computers. Founded by long haired hippies, this company has consistently supported 60's counter-cultural "values". But there are even darker undertones to this company than most are aware of. Consider the name of the company and its logo: an apple with a bite taken out of it. This is clearly a reference to the Fall, when Adam and Eve were tempted with an apple by the serpent. It is now Apple Computers offering us temptation, thereby aligning themselves with the forces of darkness.
This company is well known for its cult-like following. It isn't much of a stretch to say that it is a cult. Consider co-founder and leader Steve Jobs' constant exhortation through advertising (i.e. mind control) that its followers should "think different". We have to ask ourselves: "think different than whom or what?" The disturbing answer is that they want us to think different than our Christian upbringing, to reject all the values that we have been taught and to heed not the message of the Lord Jesus Christ!
Given the now obvious anti-Christian and cultish nature of Apple Computers, is it any wonder that they have decided to base their newest operating system on Darwinism? This just reaffirms the position that Darwinism is an inherently anti-Christian philosophy spread through propaganda and subliminal trickery, not a science as its brainwashed followers would have us believe.
I'd heard of iTunes but I never bothered to look at it before, assuming it was just another music download service.
I love the idea and the way it's implemented... unlimited burning to CD is what I want and that's what you get. It seems America-centric which puts me off a little (I'm not going to be phoning America when my credit card gets charged by accident) but I was very interested in it and my girlfriend agreed with me.
I looked into it with the possibility of getting her a gift certificate for it for Christmas. Well... I would if it would work on ME or 98. Oh well, another good idea down the drain. I ain't paying to upgrade to XP (as well as the associated hassle) just for that one program, when everything else I download runs just fine. Come on Apple, get off your backside and make a 98 version.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
What I found, while wanting to sample a song (before I buy the CD), was when you download a song and play it, they have the first ten seconds of the song play normally, then a high pitched sound screeches designed to destroy speakers. I doubt a 10 year old kid is behind that.
But the good news is that WinMX is not as spammed as Kazaa. Not as many people, but chances are you will not get the mp3's which are clearly designed to destroy speakers.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Actual current numbers for the sub services:
Rhapsody (from Real Networks): 250,000
MusicNet: 175,000
Napster (formerly pressplay): 80,000
MusicMatch MX: 150,000
Total here is over 600,000. These services tend to run about $10 per month, yielding a total revenue of over $6 million per month across all services. iTunes has sold 20 million songs in 7 months, or less than $3 million in revenue. Profit margins on subscriptions are higher as well.
I use Rhapsody and it kicks iTunes ass - there's just no comparison, given my listening habits (I'm almost always online). Looks like there are plenty of people who agree with me.
because for 20 bucks, you would get all the music you want? This would be sound if everyone was at 28.8, but a lot of people have broadband.
10 bucks for a single CD is the breaking point for me. Trough in some good physical content, then A littl more.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
While I don't necessarily believe that they can protect it, I think it's far more interesting that here's yet another group that thinks just because a Ph.D. said something it's gotta be true. Holy crap, when are they going to learn that a Ph.D. doesn't give people complete insight into all things. Hell, most of the time they don't have insight beyond the scope of their own disseration.
Seeing as AAC has already been broken using their own player, I think that point is pretty well proven. It's not possible to protect digital content, if by "protect" you mean preventing copying.
Did you RTFA? Jobs explains how when he first pitched the idea the record companies balked because they wanted to do just that: use a subscription based model. These all failed and the record companies realized that pay per track was a more profitable idea.
I think it shows that there isn't a large enough market for subscription base. Those people are the hardcore music listeners, they are the minority. Most people listen to a song on the radio and say "wooooo that is catchy" and pay and download it and be done.
you can still see his legs, so that makes it shorts.
Incidently, you can convert any pair of shorts into slacks by wearing suitably long socks.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
...at least he certainly gives that impression. His description of the "Kazaa experience" is the most intelligent thing I've heard a big executive say about Kazaa lately. It almost sounds as if he's tried it himself--or, at the very least, isn't six layers removed from someone who has.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Media should be sold like electricity- with people paying a regular fixed fee to a chosen company. That way they can own content in whatever format they like, copy from whoever else has a license, use the media on whatever platform they like, and best of all the media giants could have a steady and predictable source of income.
I will never use anything from Real Player, not anything. I had a PC which I purchased from a store (It was a Sony), and it came with real player installed. Whenever I connected to the internet, real player felt compelled to connect to real networks to tell them what I have been doing. I can just imagine what their pay service is like if their free service is so horrible.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
I haven't seen one "copy protection" scheme that has actually worked yet and I don't expect to see any in the future either. It's trivial to take the songs off an iPod and people are starting to unravel the DRM on the iTunes music store files - give it time ...
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I've pretty much given up on iTunes and Napster 2 and the others for the time being. Only rarely do they have a specific song I am looking for. I also don't think they will ever, of course, carry the rare concert recordings that were easy to get on Napster 1.0 in its heyday (the stuff the RIAA can't whine about: they refuse to take our money for it in any way, anywhere).
If the RIAA wants the legal downloads to flourish, they should get serious about selling the music.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
No matter how much something is regulated (ie copyright), the laws of supply and demand still operate, albeit partially shaken up during the initial regulatory process.
When music is hard to get (low supply) and people want it (demand goes up) the price goes up. Look at live music back in the time of Bach or Beethoven. The average person could not afford it -- so only the rich had the best music. The poor had their "opera houses" that were not very safe and did not sound very good.
When music started to get more accessible (records and then tapes) and cheaper, supply went up, and demand went down, so the price went down.
As music became popularized through more radio productions and later television productions (MTV, etc), the supply went way up, the demand went way up, so the prices stayed consistent. The record labels charged what people were willing to pay. If the people were not willing to pay $18 for a CD, the prices would have come DOWN (supply up, demand down, prices drop).
Now we have the Internet. Supply goes up immensely, and demand to pay $18 a CD goes away. Therefore demand has dropped at that price, so the price has basically dropped. Some people pay $18, some people want it for free. Of course the record labels earn "less" per person per song. But the distribution cycle is so different, therefore you have to really look at the supply and demand issues differently.
If the incentive to produce "good" music goes down (less profit), then "good" music will diminish. As there is less and less "good" music, the supply will go down. Demand for "good" music will go up. People who are taking music for free will have less and less music to take for free. The free market over rides copyright and other bad laws by removing the supply of good music, as the incentive to profit is lost.
This is what will happen over time. Music production houses will find that they can make more money selling their popular tunes to TV commercials, movies soundtracks, nightclubs, and other places. Those songs will eventually be thrown into the virtual "public domain" of the Internet, but the cost to produce the music will be a function of the price of a movie, the cost to enter a nightclub, or the cost of a shampoo or fragrance or whatever it is that uses the song for its background music in a commercial.
You can regulate, you can mandate, you can tax. But you can't run from the rules of supply and demand.
here
Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an "Open Source" license, which is just another name for Communism.
LOL, equating "Open Source" with "Communism" isn't going to win you any converts here Pastor.
Who know what they will do with this data. But it appears they are intent on suing everyone with an MP3 on their hard drive, regardless of where it came from. Maybe this is all the evidence they think they will need for "beyond a resonable doubt". I can just see it: A jury of non-pc people being told be a RIAA "expert" they have tracked it to this pc like a fingerprint.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Yeah, you hear that MS? Don't go copying any of Panther's UI or else we'll bring Scully back and settle with you for an undisclosed sum.
So wait, let me get this straight..
They're horrible, draconian, evil, break into your house, drink all your soda, make out with your girlfriend, run up your long distance bill and pass out on your couch bad.
They're an invasion, a harassment and then you end with:
Add to that I live in canada, so I can't purchase music with these services (yes I tried).
If they are so bad, why try? Obviously you're familiar with the EULA. You must be the kind of person that would invite in Dracula just to see what sucking would feel like.
If you really want that feeling, just stick with Microsoft and Windows Media Player
He changed the computer industry. Now he's after the music business
By Jeff Goodell
When Steve Jobs cruises into the airy reception area on the Apple Computer campus in Cupertino, California, on a recent morning, nobody pays much attention to him, even though he's the company's CEO. He's wearing shorts, a black T-shirt and running shoes. Tall and a little gawky, Jobs has a fast, loping walk, like a wolf in a hurry. These days Jobs seems eager to distance himself from his barefoot youth -- who was that crazy kid who once called the computer "a bicycle for the mind"?-- and driven to prove himself as a clear-thinking Silicon Valley capitalist.
Jobs punches the elevator button to the fourth floor, where his small office is located. For a man who is as responsible as anyone for the wonder and chaos of Silicon Valley, Jobs' view of it all is surprisingly modest: shrubby treetops extending out toward San Francisco Bay, the distant whoosh of the freeway below.
There is nothing modest, however, about Apple's recent accomplishments. In the past few months, Jobs' company has rolled out the PowerMac G5, arguably the fastest desktop computer on the planet; has redesigned the Powerbook and iBook laptops; and introduced Panther, a significant upgrade of the OS X operating system. But Jobs' biggest move, and certainly the one closest to his heart, has been Apple's plunge into the digital-music revolution. It began two years ago, with the introduction of the iPod portable music player, which may be the only piece of Silicon Valley hardware that has ever come close to matching the lust factor of the original Macintosh. Then, in April of this year, Apple introduced its digital jukebox, the iTunes Music Store, first for the Mac, and then, in October, for Windows. The result: 20 million tracks downloaded, close to a million and a half iPods sold, aggressive deals with AOL and Pepsi, and lots of good PR for Apple as the savior of the desperately fucked-up music industry.
Still, Jobs' bet on digital music is a hugely risky move in many ways, not only because powerhouses such as Dell and Wal-Mart are gunning for Apple (and Microsoft will be soon, as well), but because success may depend on how well Jobs, a forty-eight-year-old billionaire, is able to understand and respond to the fickle music-listening habits of eighteen-year-olds in their college dorms.
Do you see any parallel between the music revolution today and the PC revolution in 1984?
Obviously, the biggest difference is that this time we're on Windows. Other than that, I'm not so sure. It's still very early in the music revolution. Remember, there are 10 billion songs that are distributed in the U.S. every year -- legally -- on CDs. So far on iTunes, we've distributed about 16 million [as of October]. So we're at the very beginning of this.
Bringing iTunes to Windows was obviously a bold move. Did you do much hand-wringing over it?
I don't know what hand-wringing is. We did a lot of thinking about it. The biggest risk was that we saw people buying Macs just to get their hands on iPods. Taking iPods to Windows - that was the big decision. We knew once we did that that we were going to go all the way. I'm sure we're losing some Mac sales, but half our sales of iPods are to the Windows world already.
How did the record companies react when you approached them about getting onboard with Apple?
There are a lot of smart people at the music companies. The problem is they're not technology people. The good music companies do an amazing thing. They have people who can pick the person who's gonna be successful out of 5,000 candidates. It's an intuitive process. And the best music companies know how to do that with a reasonably high success rate.
I think that's a good thing. The world needs more smart editorial these days. The problem is that that has nothing to do with technology. When the Internet came along and Napster came alo
Please don't feed the mobiles.
Microsoft has been reasonably successful in forcing a subscription model on their customers, in the form of "Software Assurance". So has the cable TV industry. If you have a monopoly, you can do it.
In order to guarantee revenue from a subscription based method, the service has to insure you'll stay. The only real way to do this is by making your downloaded music tied to your subscription. If your subscription goes away, so does your music. After all, what is to prevent someone with a big pipe from paying for one month and downloading the entire library and leaving? Because of this, these services are MORE restrictive than iTunes.
iTunes' pricing scheme is $1 for a track or $10 for an album. That is cheap. That's what CDs should be priced at. I praise the prices of iTunes because it offers a reasonable price.
Customers don't always have to be ripped off. But the companies don't have to be ripped off either. Your idea doesn't work and there have been many failed services to prove it. What needs to happen is a happy compromise between the record companies and the consumer. The consumers need to get music for a reasonable price, but the record labels and artists need to get a fair profit. I believe iTunes is as close to this happy medium as we'll get.
Currently one of the biggest uses I find for Kazaa is to preview all of the tracks on a cd so that I know which ones I like or not. I am hesitant to switch to a pay-per-download service because I don't want to pay for something that I'm not going to listen to. Same reason I don't like buying CD's. What are some of your experiences with this?
Make something ID10T proof, you'll make a better ID10T.
This service is right in line with my interests and desires. I am happy to download a few tunes a month for 3 bucks or so, which is exactly what I do. I like browsing, and the "featured artist" music videos are great (Just watched Missey Elliott's "Work it").
I think that this model is perfect for the vast majority of people.
There's one hitch that's not often talked about, though. It is that the "share music locally" doesn't work with purchased music. So, the CDs I've bought can be shared on my LAN, but my legally "purchased" music can't (unless I authorize those computers to play my stuff).
I don't think that this makes any sense from any angle, except a bit of buckling to RIAA et. al. If I can share what I bought on physical media, why can't I share what I bought digitally. Of course, one of the things I most want to share is new tunes I've grabbed, and I don't want to go around authorizing/deauthorizing my colleauges' machines. Hopefully, they'll find a way to enable sharing of ITMS purchases in the future.
I would bet all this is leading up to a blitz campaign that will likely debut next year. The campaign will focus on moral intergrity and the new alternative to stealing music. They will have artists recommend using Apple's new iTunes service. People generally want to do the right thing, and when the right thing is so easy and convient to do people do it.
(re: Microsoft's designs on entering the music world)
"And Apple is in a pretty interesting position. Because, as you may know, almost every song and CD is made on a Mac -- it's recorded on a Mac, it's mixed on a Mac, the artwork's done on a Mac. Almost every artist I've met has an iPod, and most of the music execs now have iPods."
And this affects what system the music gets played on in what way? Most american homes are made from Canadian lumber, but that doesn't make me more likely to want to become a Canadian. I suppose it's nice self-back-scratching.
And, of course, most of those top music execs probably got their iPods for free during the negotiations. Heck, if I knew somebody who didn't have a PC or email in 2001, I sure as heck wouldn't try to get them to use a 2 year old Archos jukebox!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
How about movies? Do you see an iTunes movie store?
"We don't think that's what people want. A movie takes forever to download -- there's no instant gratification."
Right now, on a good cable connection, it takes about 30-45 minutes to download a good quality mpeg4 version movie (at 700Kbs). Cable can easily increase its bandwidth over time (not so easy with DSL), so that time interval will be decreasing. As more and more people have access to faster and faster connectivity, Jobs statement will become meaningless (as it already has for the fastest cable users). The quality of the movies will increase as well, to fill the available bandwidth.
The movie studios should NOT make the same mistakes that the music industry did. They should start offering legitimate good quality legal downloads NOW, before too many people start thinking about movies the way they do mp3s.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
"Our position from the beginning has been that eighty percent of the people stealing music online don't really want to be thieves. But that is such a compelling way to get music. It's instant gratification. You don't have to go to the record store; the music's already digitized, so you don't have to rip the CD. It's so compelling that people are willing to become thieves to do it. But to tell them that they should stop being thieves -- without a legal alternative that offers those same benefits -- rings hollow. We said, "We don't see how you convince people to stop being thieves unless you can offer them a carrot -- not just a stick." And the carrot is: We're gonna offer you a better experience . . . and it's only gonna cost you a dollar a song. "
This man Understands.
...the interesting question that Jobs sidesteps here is, "In a world where music is increasingly downloaded, why do we need the traditional record companies at all?"
Why not just have Apple (or any online service) provide recording studio time and some advertising?
Jobs doesn't answer this because there is no answer. He hints at it, by saying that pretty soon the record companies won't be able to offer advances and survive (in which case, they are useless to the artist), but in general the best he can come up with for the record company's purpose is that "they pick winners." Hogwash.
1. He goes on to say that they lose money because they also pick losers, and
2. we all know as their audience that winners are not just picked, they are made. I mean, sure, record companies pick some winners -- because by definition, to be a winner you need a major label. They're serving as gatekeepers on the success of equally talented, but unsigned, artists, due to limits on advertising budgets and the disposable income of the music-buying public. What do they do for their artists? Record companies provide an advance, they provide tons of advertising and payola, and they skim off the top. That's it.
So the key to making iTunes, or any online service, popular with the Napster generation is simply this: guarantee us that the money isn't going to some crap record company, but instead to the artists we appreciate and love (and some to provide expenses and a reasonable profit, maybe 5%, to the new, more effective distribution system). Bottom line. Do that and we'll buy. Until then, screw it.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
On the "Rip, Mix, Burn" campaign, Jobs said:,
The person who assailed us over it was Michael Eisner. But he didn't have any teenage kids living at home, and he didn't have any teenage kids working at Disney whom he talked to, so he thought "rip" meant "rip off." And when somebody actually clued him in to what it meant, he did apologize.
You know, that says so much about Disney and their current state of affairs.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
I say, support the artists you like any way you can. If you like a bunch of songs on an album, buy it. See them live when they come to your town. But don't shed a tear when the labels cry about their profit margins shrinking from 20% to 15%. I also don't think they're going away anytime soon, precisely because of their massive margins (but I don't know what they really are because they've hidden their profits so well). However, I do think there is hope from a new generation of internet-based labels, like CD Baby, who are willing to treat artists fairly (gasp! what a concept!). I'm eager to see how this plays out. I hope Jobs will allow smaller labels (like the one I'd like to start in my bedroom) onto iTunes. This will piss of the majors, but...who gives a fuck about them? They've been screwing over artists and consumers for years. Viva la revolution!
Electric Monkey Pants
Interesting.. umm... Martha Plimpton impression.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Many probably recall the guy who put his I-tunes track on E-bay and will remember that it was cancelled because of an E-Bay policy, not an I-tunes policy.
This is a very important issue here because it blurs the line between Right of First Sale and Fair Use. While it's unlikely that right of First Sale can be sidestepped, how is it going to be possible to convince people who eventually will want to swap their legally purchased products from getting a bit of their money back in a legitimate re-sale. This is a great re-sale market from the buyers perspective because you can be sure the quality is top notch even after many sales. You just have to trust that people won't keep a copy in an open format when they make the sale. I'd say the whole premise is weak.
And yes, I do know that there are people of the opinion that Right of First Sale cannot apply in digital distribution, but if you look at the arguments that have been presented, the weak link is usually the part where they try to define copy and mangle the technical facts of how digital media is played in various digitial devices. There is no blanket defintion of copy that can cover all cases unless you use a naive definition of terms like RAM. That may convince non-technical people, but under closer scrutiny I've never seen a solid definition that worked across serval commonly available digital music players.
Ever heard about iRATE?
Free, legal music downloads... it's even tuned to your taste! And yes, it does run on linux (and on Windows, and on MacOSX).
OK, maybe the interface isn't so sexy as iTune's... but it's still worth a try, imho. It worked great for me :)
My journal. Mainly about freedom.
The winners pay. The winners pay for the losers, and the winners are not seeing rewards commensurate with their success. And they get upset. So what's the remedy? The remedy is to stop paying advances. The remedy is to go to a gross-revenues deal and tell an artist, "We'll give you twenty cents on every dollar we get, but we're not gonna give you an advance. The accounting will be simple: We're gonna pay you not on profits -- we're gonna pay you off revenues. It's very simple: The more successful you are, the more you'll earn. But if you're not successful, you will not earn a dime. We'll go ahead and risk some marketing money on you. But if you're not successful, you'll make no money. If you are, you'll make a lot more money." That's the way out. That's the way the rest of the world works.
So if the record companies aren't paying for advances and the artist foots the bill for everything then what does the record company do again? I understand the want of simplicity but if this situation comes to fruition where does the record company come in? Advertisement? Is that not considered an advance?
What software do you use to play those recordings? iTunes was a music player before the store came out with the same name. iTunes (the player) is the best music organization system I've ever used. I use it to listen to my legal Grateful Dead concert recordings. If you want to find recordings, use google. There are tons of sites that have live recordings for download -- often with the artists' permission.
t'nera semordnilap
There is a huge flaw in your resoning:
... then why would their logo be based on something biblical in nature? If they are true Darwinists, they wouldn't give a rat's ass about your apple reference to "the Fall".
:-)
If Apple promotes Darwinism (fish with legs eating your "natural" fish)
I found your post very humerous and I realize it was in jest, but if your gonna act like a religious zelot, atleast try to make sense looking like one.
..any lock can be picked with a big enough hammer.
Also, as Jobs said, with digital media you only need to pick the lock once and all the doors are open.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
I meant iMusic, not iTunes! My mistake. I'm not sure about Napster, but it appears that iMusic only has downloads in an obscure difficult-to-use format that requires (apparently) burning the files onto a CD and then ripping them from the CD in order to get useful MP3 files. If this is true, that, my friend, is a kludge.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
But just for moderators to mod me up Funny like the parent post.
getSexySig();
Observation: Ever looked in the $5.88 DVD bargain bin at Wal-Mart?
Observation: A DVD of a movie typically sells for about the same price as a CD of the movie's soundtrack.
Explanation: DVD Video titles in general are so cheap because the movies fixed therein have already had a theatrical run. CDs don't have anything analogous.
Explanation 2: CDs are rather expensive because the retail price does not have to compete with rentals thanks to the Record Rental Amendment of 1984, which states that no person shall rent, lease, or lend a phonorecord[1] of a copyrighted sound recording without the consent of both the owner of copyright in the sound recording and the owner of copyright in the underlying musical work. In practice, such copyright owners never grant consent for a shop to rent CDs on the scale that a local DVD rental store rents DVDs.
David Bowie predicted that, because of the Internet and piracy, copyright is going to be dead in ten years. Do you agree?
No. If copyright dies, if patents die, if the protection of intellectual property is eroded, then people will stop investing. That hurts everyone. People need to have the incentive so that if they invest and succeed, they can make a fair profit. Bullshit. Look at the Open Source movement.
> The subscription model of buying music is
c t=release&page=rhap11millstreams070103).
> bankrupt. I think you could make available the
> Second Coming in a subscription model, and it
> might not be successful.
Rhapsody streamed 11 million songs to users in June (http://www.listen.com/about.jsp?sect=press&subse
Here's the thing. I like Rhapsody because I pay $9.95/month and get unlimited streaming to work and home. I don't use portable devices. It doesn't make sense for me to pay 0.99 a song when I can get unlimited music for $9.95/month...I'll never switch to iTunes unless (knock on wood) Rhapsody goes away.
Steve doesn't like it because he has to compete with it. He can talk about it going away, but for a lot of people it makes a LOT more sense than his service.
Plus, his talk of PhDs and protection is complete BS. Rhapsody uses a proprietary codec so I can't access the content w/o using their client...I've googled for hacks, haven't found any. Maybe I could hook my audio out into my audio in and record songs as I stream them, but that's about as easy as...making audio cassettes! Steve just wants to dodge the whole copy protection aspect entirely since under his model, it doesn't really exist once you download the media.
This interview is just Steve marketing his view of internet music...it's more FUD, but from Apple.
...Well, who pays for the ones that are the losers?...
..The winners pay...
Hopefully not. I've never signed a contract that would allow the record label to withhold my earnings until they had made a profit on *all* of their artists. There is usually a clause in the contract that allows them to withhold a 15-20% reserve, which they always do. This reserve is meant to be held against *your* sales gross, not the sales of the entire record company. Most smaller labels track all their numbers on a per artist/per release basis. Bigger labels are dealing with much lower profit margins and lots more money up front, so they probably have a completely different way of doing the books. Artists and their managers need to take a better look at their label's contracts. I would not sign anything that would keep me from earning money because the label was doing badly with other artists. If they did withold it, I would expect to get it back once the label was able to pay it.
TallGreen CMS hosting
The problem is there isn't enough new stuff every month to justify the subscription model. There has to be an incentive for keeping the subscription, else why wouldn't I just burn everything I wanted and cancel, wait six months, subscribe for one month and burn everything, ad infinitum.
I mean, the way the music industry has always solved the lack of content problem is to release a few tracks from each album slowly, over a few weeks, then release some more album tracks from groups in the same genre.
That seems to be the antithesis of the instant gratification model that iTunes offers, which is essentially what the info age is all about. The entertainment industry in general seems to have a ton of people who are very good at doing what has been done, but very few (none at all?) visionaries.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
You can always covert protected AAC(MP4) to WAV and then to MP3 though you will lose some sound quality. If you rip your own CD's you can rip them in plain AAC(Dolby std) which means it will play in any cd player or mp3 player that accepts AAC files. AAC basically allows you have 128k file and make it sound like you ripped it at 192k. Get an iPod because right now all the girls want them atleast all my friends GF's do. Also Pepsi will be giving away 100 million songs away starting in Feb. so if she drinks Pepsi she could then actually use those free songs on here computer and iPod, so it would be like the gift that keeps on giving
I've downloaded a bunch of songs from itunes. The main problem I have with downloading music there, as apposed to downloading off of kazaa or just buying the CD at CDepot or something is the quality that the music is encoded at. If I purchase a CD I can encode it to [favorite format] at [prefered quality] and then later at [lower quality] for my mp3 player. With itunes you seem to be limited to 128k. At least with Kazaa you can search for, say 256k or above, although you might have to download the same song several times to find a copy that sounds good.
On the other hand, itunes has several advantages. Anything you download, though encoded at 128k, is encoded properly and sounds as good as the bitrate allows (with whatever format they use). On top of that, everything is consistant in volume and so on, and it orginizes itself.
I guess what I'm saying here is that buying the CD is just better, but itunes is great for getting music to listen to on your computer at work or on an ipod. If you are cheap, like me, and have a new fashioned mp3 only device, itunes is somewhat lacking. This is because when you convert the music to mp3 you lose alot of quality for obvious reasons.
When they start offering online music encoded in a lossless way I'll be all over it.
Let's look at your house example. Let's say I have to go through a series of steps to break into a house. I figure out these steps and automate it into a script, which can then be applied to any digital content (that script might include something along the lines of "plug speakers into microphone port," but hey, its a step).
Once I've broken into one house, breaking into the other houses is easy.
Breaking into that same house again, and bringing others into that house (giving them my rip of the content) is not just easy, its trivial.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
..."you have to make it cheap and ubiquitous if you want to prevent rampant copying. No one is going to photocopy a 25c newspaper." If you're going to make it playable out speakers, people can copy and share it. Just make it so cheap that the effort isn't worth it. Again the porn industry leads the way. It's really cheap and it's everywhere and still as an industry it probably beats the Music and Movie industries combined.
My house is a Klein bottle. I have to sleep in my car.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
For whatever it's worth, I'd like to throw in my 2 cents worth on the whole concept of downloadable music. I haven't yet seen anyone address the following: At 99 cents US per tune, to make an album of, lets use as an example, 14 songs, it will cost me $14 US = $18 -19 CDN (depending on exchange rate, of course), PLUS I have to supply the time and access to download and burn, PLUS the blank disc and case. How is this a great deal for me, when in fact it is a more expensive and time consuming option? The argument of getting only the songs you want doesn't wash with me. When you start cherry-picking the hits, you start missing a lot of great music from the rest of the album, also removing the incentive for bands/artists to put out a quality album. Could this possibly alter the music industry? Maybe. Perhaps we'll go full-circle back to the days of the old 45's when all artists put out were 'singles'. Personally I feel this whole exercise is just another gimmicky way to separate the consumer from his money.
Here we are ... discussing an article that's published in a magazine, and also available online for free ... yet thousands of people still subscribe to "Rolling Stone". Maybe if the music industry could figure out how both worlds could possibly exist ... a free version and a paid version of the exact same content ... they'd be able to survive in the future.
I tried subscrition based music purchases. And they don't really work that well. Emusic tried to make a go at it, but never managed to get much content that I actually wanted to buy. I found myself downloading crap I only half liked bacause I didn't want my subscription fee for that particular month to go to waste.
The thing I've noticed about iTMS is that I have purchased a lot of music that I actually like. Because I have to pay per song I'm pickier about what I download and I don't feel any preasure to download X number of songs in a month just to feel like I got my monies worth.
Subscription is great if the source has a lot of stuff you like and you don't have much of an established collection.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
buy from those who DO
The problem here is that those who do NOT have a lock on the media of promotion to those people inside moving vehicles and those people inside retail establishments. When was the last time you heard a commercial FM radio station play more than 5 percent of non-major-label music? Not every city has enough free space in its FM band to let the local community college start an FM radio station. (I live in one of the unlucky cities.)
or DO IT YOURSELF
Are you sure this is feasible? Though it's rather easy now for any songwriter to produce a rough recording of his song using Modplug Tracker, most people cannot afford formal training in songwriting.
Considering that the Open Source movement is, itself, based on copyright law, how is it bullshit?
Without copyright law, the GPL has no teeth.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
When Apple set out starting iTunes, their main purpose was not to make money with the server. I remember reading an article when the service came out that had figures similar to this:
1 iTune song - $0.99
Cost to the label - $0.80
Cost for distributing (bandwidth, ect) - $0.10
Other Misc (marketing, R&D, ect) - $0.05
So, using my imaginary, but apporximate, numbers, Apple is only making PENNYS per iTune song sold.
So, this begs the question, why did they even bother? If, for all this effort they're only making pennys per download, was it worth it for Apple?
Of course, because iTunes is a huge marketing scheme to Sell more iPods. These things are cash-cows for Apple. Not to mention, opening up an entire new market that was otherwise un-tapped (Windows Users). As quoted in the article, HALF of the iPods sold have been to Windows users. That means that a new market of people is out there useing Apples product every day, and will most likely consider buying a Mac next time they go to make a computer purchase (which is better than never giving it a second thought).
iTunes is problably one of the most brilliant marketing schemes I've seen - ever. It's generating a buzz about the brand name (look at all the press the past few years) and is opening up new markets to sell hardware, their cash cow.
Brilliant.
No man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft.
Bullshit. Just look at the Open Source movement.
Bullshit. The existence of Open Source is founded in copyright protection: just ask the FSF...
That's not his point. Labels could afford to offer to pay you much more per sale (and competition between labels would force them to do so) if they weren't losing so much money on advances to unsuccessful artists.
From the article:
I was listening to the Mike Reagan show around Thanksgiving time, and apparently the Pilgrims went through the same phase. Their original charter stated that each family would be given a plot of land to farm, from which all crops would be put in a community store. Everyone would get a equal share of crop.
The plan failed misserably. There was no incentive to work hard. Its the same reason the Communism lost the cold war. There's no point in working harder if the fruits of your labor are taken away by the state.
So, the Pilgrims threw away the old charter and wrote a new one. Rather than having to surrender all to the community store, families kept their crops. Those that worked hard during the growing season got to eat during the winter. Those that didn't, died. Incentive spurned the surplus we know as Thanksgiving.
As Steve Jobs has forseen, the record companies can do the same thing. I suppose the losers are the musicians who don't make it. But why should we feel bad for the leetches of society?
"Dying tickles!" -- Ralph Wiggum
Knowing that a good amount of money and time goes into each track recorded, I have no problem at all with the $1 download.
What I do have a problem with, and I'm glad Jobs pointed this out, is paying for a full album, only to find out all of the tunes but one completely blow. About the 5th time that happened to me was when I almost completely stopped paying for whole cd's, at least form major labels.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
DRM prtected AAC files. And no, you can't play them on other MP3 players. Well, that's not 100% true. You can burn the songs to CD and then rip them to MP3 and play them wherever you want. But that might be more work than you want to do.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Some had mentioned how a $1 a track is far too much and wonder why a subscription service for downloads not offered. I've came across two such subscriptions services that I've never seen mentione here on /. One offers $35/month unlimited downloads (plus other deals, just hit music, nights only, weekend only), the other (which I subscribe to is $15/month for 1000 downloads (though limited to 128Kbps generally) or $0.01/MB. The best part being the ability to choose bitrate and format. Though it's worth noting that the files are archived as 384Kbps MP3's, and are transcoded to what ever is specified for download.
http://allofmp3.com (Russian)
http://weblisten.com/ (Spanish)
Both will need to have linked click to switch to English
I RTFA and I think you're buying into Jobs' assertion that subscription has "failed" a little too quickly. It is Jobs' job (har har) to plug his store. However as Jobs himself acknowledges, both subscription and pay-per-download are business models in their absolute infancy. iTMS represents 0.16% of the US music market by Jobs' numbers. This is not success, nor is it failure; it's a start, and that's all.
Apart from anything else, I see absolutely no reason why the two models are incompatible, and indeed on most other services they are combined to some degree. After all, what's one of the most common arguments for file-sharing in the first place? That music needs to be previewed before purchase. Offering subscription + download looks like the commercial equivalent, to me at least.
" Why not offer something for $20/month that lets you download all the music you want"
I'm doing that more or less right now. It's called Rhapsody. I'm paying $10 a month and I can play any of their 300,000 songs whenever I want. For $1, I can burn a song to disc.
There are a few cons to it, though:
- I can't keep the music I download. If I unsubscribe, I cannot play the music anymore.
- It uses a custom client. Linux users need not apply.
- Not every song is available for purchase, but on the plus side at least I can listen to it.
- I *must* be on-line to listen to the music.
- No uploading to your music player, unless ya burn the CD and re-encode it. Ouch.
Those negatives sound bad, right? So why do I do it?
- $10 a month is less than one-album a month. No more CD purchases for me.
- The search engine's great. I'm able to find just about any song that intrigues me, and have it playing within moments. It's pretty good at helping me find other music I might like as well. It has everything neatly cross-referenced. "If you like Prodigy, you might like Chemical Brothers", etc.
- The internet thing kind of sucks (no taking my music on the road), but most of my 16 waking hours are nearby a net connection. I have wireless set up at home so it is not often that I find myself unable to listen to the music.
- Fast fast fast. It's not streaming in the RealPlayer sense. It starts downloading into a cache, and once a few blocks are down it starts playing. Rhapsody, by default, sets up a 1 gig cache to store the music in. So unless you have a LOT of songs on your playlist, they don't disappear. So it's not like you have to have broadband to listen to the music. (Though it helps for the initial download.)
It sounds like this might be the service you're looking for. I can tell you I'm happy with it. If I unsubscribe, I'm really going to miss it. You may find yourself in the same situation. If you go to www.listen.com you can try it free for a week.
Cheers
"Derp de derp."
It seems like in several cases he's dodging the question...or perhaps just doesn't understand it. for instance:
There's always been a legal alternative to stealing music; buying it. This applies whether it's a tape, cdr, or mp3. What IS the difference to the single person? How does this answear the question in any form at all?
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
The winners pay. The winners pay for the losers, and the winners are not seeing rewards commensurate with their success. And they get upset. So what's the remedy? The remedy is to stop paying advances. The remedy is to go to a gross-revenues deal and tell an artist, "We'll give you twenty cents on every dollar we get, but we're not gonna give you an advance. The accounting will be simple: We're gonna pay you not on profits -- we're gonna pay you off revenues. It's very simple: The more successful you are, the more you'll earn. But if you're not successful, you will not earn a dime. We'll go ahead and risk some marketing money on you. But if you're not successful, you'll make no money. If you are, you'll make a lot more money." That's the way out. That's the way the rest of the world works.
So you see the recording industry moving in that direction?
No. I said I think that's the remedy. Whether the patient will swallow the medicine is another question.
How feasible is this? Are production costs reasonable enough that creating a record without an advance is possible?
Maybe they think stealing music is like driving seventy mph on the freeway -- it's over the speed limit, but what's the big deal?
This has got to be the most insightful observation I have heard anyone "in the industry" make about people downloading music/movies/whatever over P2P for free.
Personally, I feel just as bad about downloading songs as I do about going 5 or 10 mph over the limit--not bad at all.
Help find a cure for cancer. Join the [H]orde
Oh, come on moderators...
If I had mod points, I'd mod this parent Funny.
"If copyright dies, if patents die, if the protection of intellectual property is eroded, then people will stop investing. That hurts everyone. People need to have the incentive so that if they invest and succeed, they can make a fair profit. But on another level entirely, it's just wrong to steal. Or let's put it this way: It is corrosive to one's character to steal."
Fair enough. But then, so is making oodles of profit, Mr. Billionaire.
Why not just charge cost? I'd probably buy music again (no, I don't steal it now) if it was just covering costs and not going to make rich people richer. Take it a step further, and work with music companies that only charge cost themselves.
Think Different: Convert Apple to a nonprofit corporation. Start a more substantial moral revolution.
Unless Microsoft is successful with Palladium, *no* encoding scheme will be successful at stopping someone from replacing the audio driver with one that T's the data off to a file.
Even with Palladium, all it takes is for *one* person to hack their hardware to find their encryption keys and it all goes out the window (or Windows :-).
For a bunch of technologists, the Slashdot crowd is suprisingly reactionary when it comes to music. Ever consider that the currently model of buying music permanently isn't the be all and end all?
I can't speak for the "Slashdot crowd", but I can speak for myself.
You're goddamn right I'm reactionary about technology that essentially gives me what I used to have, with less utility. I'm reactionary when other people try to use technology to restrict what I've been able to do in the past.
Usually, people who think of themselves as "technologists" tend to look towards the future, because of this little thing called progress. Ending the ability to be able to permanently own a piece of music, listen to it whenever I damn well feel like it, do with it what I want, on any device, at any time, anywhere...
Sorry, bud. That ain't progress in my book.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
An "all you can eat buffet" works as a business concept, because everybody eats dinner once per evening, and they almost everybody eats 1 - 3 plate loads of food.
Most music consumers are broken into two groups: Those who only buy about one album a month or less, for whom the subscription model is not worth the money, and those who would be downloading music several hours each week, off whom you would not be making a profit.
So, the customers who you do get, you get at a loss, and nobody else will sign up for your service. Not really a situation that lends itself to profit, is it?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I love how it takes a team of top academics to rediscover one of the primary design objectives of a digital computer: To make perfect copies of bits
The other thing we told the record companies was that if you go to Kazaa to download a song, the experience is not very good. You type in a song name, you don't get back a song -- you get a hundred, on a hundred different computers. You try to download one, and, you know, the person has a slow connection, and it craps out. And after two or three have crapped out, you finally download a song, and four seconds are cut off, because it was encoded by a ten-year-old. By the time you get your song, it's taken fifteen minutes. So that means you can download four an hour. Now some people are willing to do that. But a lot of people aren't.
If there is a way to download high-quality stuff quickly, people will use your service. It is that simple. In addition, you have to be able to sample what you are are buying, and be able to download just what you like...the day of the CD with one good song on it is hopefully drawing to a close.
Didn't Apple Records sue Apple Computer all over again for getting involved in the music business?
Rolling Stone asked Jobs if Apple Computer will become a record label itself, and he's acting like it's a possibility.
Am I right in thinking that Apple Records is going to have a conniption over this?
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
I've read various Steve Jobs interviews and articles over the years and from what I gather, he tries to stay pretty current with computer and communication technology in general, not just the products his current companies churns out. He installed a T1 to his house around 1990 not only to link his personal computers to the NeXT network, but also to allow him to exlore the Internet with the sort of bandwidth the average user would have sometime in the future. A recent article mentioned he upgraded his connection towards the end of the 90s to something even more insane (I don't recall if it was a T3 or OC3) so he could experiment with video conferencing, file transfers, and other "next generation" Internet usage.
As far as Kazaa, I'm almost certain he's used it. Jobs is known to have a few PCs sitting around, some for Windows and some for NeXTSTEP/OpenStep.
It's also been said that Safari (Apple's Konq-based web browser for OS X) was originally a direct demand from Jobs when OmniWeb could no longer render the websites he was visiting.
There was an interview a couple years ago in which he talked about shopping around for some sort of crazy new hightech washing machine (a year or so before the Maytag Neptune came out).
Jobs may be an asshole, and he may not be a hardcore analog electrical engineer, but he seems to be quite the techie... a techie with style. NeXT and the Apple of 2003 display this quite well.
Now if only they would make a brushed aluminum version of the 17" widescreen lcd iMac...
We all have a mental list of talented and creative people we wish success to -- singers or bands we think should be recognized, actors we'd like to see in a series or a leading role, authors whose books we eagerly recommend to others and sometimes buy extra copies just to give away. I've given people money to support hopeless film projects because I think they're talented, and bought books no one else will ever read because I want the writer to keep writing.
We used to have formal systems for patronage, which provided financial support and promotion to individuals with talent or potential. What modern systems have taken the place of patronage? Are they better or worse at promoting the people "we wish success to"?
How can technology be used to promote people 'worthy' of patronage? We have various forms of word of mouth (e.g. blogrolling, recommended reading lists, etc.) but that doesn't seem like much help when you see cream that isn't rising to the top.
There should be a word for this.
McMe
In our area, our cable rates are dropping like a lead balloon.
Its 1/2 the speed i was getting just this spring..
Calls to the cable co. go unanswered ' it must be your equipment.'
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Apple is in a pretty interesting position. Because, as you may know, almost every song and CD is made on a Mac -- it's recorded on a Mac, it's mixed on a Mac, the artwork's done on a Mac.
Now I am a mac fan, but other than this coming from Jobs' mouth, can it be substantiated? what are the partnerships? reasons? The DSP effects of the chips? The ease of use?
plus why not mac the iPod a recorder? Not voice at 8kHz, but full bit sampling?
I want to belive
Sounds like Kazaa. Except for all the downsides.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
Now I know how upstanding people will get all fired up how doing something out of mere convenience is immoral. To which I will answer that this is precisely why you are not Steve Jobs. The man see the market for something, and is interested legitimizing the activity. Like it or not, downloading music was, in 1999, morally ambiguous. Steve Jobs acknowledges this, and seeks to make it legally possible in 2003 for this convenience, becuase quite clearly, this is the way forward for a music distribution system.
Does reasoning morally impede the ability to reason with foresight. This is holding you back from improving, or supporting the improvement of the state of the world to one where both the consumer and the producer of the content can be satisfied?
>>>" . . . and it's only gonna cost you a dollar a song. "
...even half-way?
Suppose I have an I-Pod that can hold 10,000 songs.
What compels me to spend a dollar a song to fill it up?
Steve Jobs might make a very believable "Simpsons" character. Think about it.
Actually, I stopped using Kazaa when I got this service. Kazaa is so sluggish and hit-or-miss compared to this service.
"Derp de derp."
Interesting idea... but not too practical.
If you're like most people, your electricity comes from a heavy duty powerplant. Your power is generated along with everyone elses and meets a set of standards. If you live in Berkeley, California, you'll get roughly the same 60 Hz, 115 - 122 volt power in your outlets as someone in Dover, Delaware. The only excitement is when the power is either cut off entirely or surges past specs and blows out your electrical gadgets and gizmos.
I suppose media could be done the same way... especially if you want a stream of generic music churning out 24/7 (think modern teen pop or barry manilow). If your idea of good entertainment is a world controlled by ClearChannel, then such a system may work out quite well for you.
For the rest of us... well, we like choice and are willing to put up with the costs and quirks of such a system.
"The good music companies do an amazing thing. They have people who can pick the person who's gonna be successful out of 5,000 candidates."
I would say that the successes are successful because they were picked.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Barely any worth it. That's why I don't use them. Napster 2 says they have the largest digital collection of music at 500,000 songs. Wow. That's like, what, nothing? It's got to be less than 2% of total music disseminated. I tried out their 3 day trial and I found a grand total 32 two songs that I wanted. I searched for around 200 artists that I was interested in and they delivered two: Five Style and Talk Talk. They didn't have Messiaen, Slint, Merzbow, Captain Beefheart, Xenakis, Steve Reich, Schoenberg, Stravinksy, or, wait for it, John Cage! No fucking John Cage!
I've rarely had trouble getting music at the wide variety of physical music stores(although I do usually have to order in, but they can still get it nonetheless). When the online stores can bring the selection the traditional stores bring(and we'll just forget about the difference in quality too), then I'll put more thought into switching over.
And the carrot is: We're gonna offer you a better experience . . . and it's only gonna cost you a dollar a song.
So: Tom Waits "Rain Dogs" = $19; Bob Dylan "Infidels" = $9; Philip Glass "Music in 12 Parts" (3 CDs) = $12? Where are they going with that bologna? Are the Boredoms or other experimental artists going to sell any of their extra-long tracks or one-track albums for just $1? Are artists going to be forced to ditch the 'album' experience and focus on hovering a saleable image over a bunch of disconnected songs?
Does commercialism or commercial break cause ADHD?
Another funny thing: a lot of the insistance that we pay to share data that appears to be somebody's music is based on the idea of 'intellectual property' and this unproven (untested) theory that 'intellectual property' and 'copyright' are required for the global economy to function.
Meanwhile, they still want to charge top dollar for recordings of compositions that are in the public domain. And, corporations pressure lawmakers to change the meaning of 'copyright' anyways for instance extending the lifetime of copyrights an additional few decades just because an expensive icon is about to become free.
Why the double standards? Could they be reasoning all of this over profits, not their purported ideals? It's possible. I wonder why we allow ourselves to continue to be duped by laws controlling information after seeing time and again that it does information no good.
I just think it's strange that such antisocial tendencies as 'competition' and 'private property' are being pushed on the back of such raging idealism when the idealists aren't even serious about ideology except as packaging and when said ideals are contradictory. The package is being bought despite these logical inconsistencies.
The carrot is their false ideologies and the stick is the truth that the world is ruled by violence and issues of MP3 piracy only matter to a civilization of very comfortable hogs.
Anyways its a fitting analogy; only in agricultural civilization could food become so scarce that a stuck carrot would be so tantalizing to so many.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
The other thing we told the record companies was that if you go to Kazaa to download a song, the experience is not very good. You type in a song name, you don't get back a song -- you get a hundred, on a hundred different computers. You try to download one, and, you know, the person has a slow connection, and it craps out. And after two or three have crapped out, you finally download a song, and four seconds are cut off, because it was encoded by a ten-year-old. By the time you get your song, it's taken fifteen minutes. So that means you can download four an hour. Now some people are willing to do that. But a lot of people aren't.
... those that matter on P2P) do it. Most times they search for a song, get 100 hits. They double click on 3 or 4 that are 'likely' to be good, and then just check them as they hit the HD. The first one that satisfies them stops their other downloads. Many people can get a top 40 song in under a minute with today's sharing apps, and it doesn't require one to be particularly savvy. Hell, I remember showing my father how Napster worked back its infancy, and he seemed to have no problems getting his songs quickly and efficiently (little junk).
Of course, stated like this, anyone would choose the simple, streamlined Apple downloads. But this is not really how people (with broadband
[shrug] I think that Steve Jobs could have posed this much better. He loses some credibility and comes off more like a salesman (which I know he is, save your flames).
DrPascal: Not the language, the mathematician.
Jobs' bet on digital music is a hugely risky move in many ways, not only because powerhouses such as Dell and Wal-Mart are gunning for Apple (and Microsoft will be soon, as well), but because success may depend on how well Jobs, a forty-eight-year-old billionaire, is able to understand and respond to the fickle music-listening habits of eighteen-year-olds in their college dorms.
I have always used the term gunning for meaning in support of, or, in other words, manning a gun in the support of Apple.
However, in this context it implies "shooting at".
Does anyone have support or documentation for either interpretation?
RIAA doesn't want to provide "value". They want to get paid for doing something which is essentially worthless--the act of copying the song to the media and distributing it to us. Hello, RIAA--we've got that one under control. You're fired; your job has been replaced by a computer.
As long as RIAA insists on getting something for nothing, there will be no foldouts, posters, 12" full-color art prints, etc.
I agree that RIAA needs to go back to their old business model. (maybe without the abusive artist contracts). Find something they can produce in quantity for a $3-5 a pop. Something that costs an individual user $20 to produce as a one-off. And charge $10.00 for it.
But in order to do that, they're going to have to let go of the idea that they can just sit back and let the money roll in.
Those days are over. Denial is the issue here. RIAA is going to start having to work for their bread. It's going to take a few bloody noses in the financial department for them to realize that.
Funny thing is--this is exactly the issue that RIAA raises when pointing fingers. "You're stealing. You want something for nothing." Point your finger, RIAA. Now, look at your hand. There's 3 fingers pointing right back at you.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
The future direction Microsoft is pushing is "Service Oriented Architecture", to structure programs in exactly this way - if you don't like how it works now you are going to be really unhappy later.
It's just another example where Apple is already doing something that Microsoft is going to get around to in a few years after Apple shows them how it works.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
See the thing is, you're arguing the difference between streaming and purchasing. iTunes is about purchasing, owning a copy for your use. Rhapsody is about streaming, like on demand, or PPV or XMS. Sure you can burn rhapsody stuff, for an extra 80 cents.
What steve is talking about here is selling music to consumers, giving them a product they can manipulate.
Plus, his talk of PhDs and protection is complete BS. Rhapsody uses a proprietary codec so I can't access the content w/o using their client...I've googled for hacks, haven't found any. Maybe I could hook my audio out into my audio in and record songs as I stream them, but that's about as easy as...making audio cassettes! Steve just wants to dodge the whole copy protection aspect entirely since under his model, it doesn't really exist once you download the media.
How is it bullshit when you just proved his point? He didn't say that the method for cracking had to be easy, he just said it was possible, for anything. Try taking your head out of your ass for a few seconds and exercise some critical reading skills.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
TotalRecorder, eh? :) I'll have to check it out. I thought about seeing if DirectX audio would let me siphon audio data into a file, but...
Remember people have been able to record from tapes and CDs for years. The CD copy protection schemes have been pretty half-hearted so far, and RIAA hasn't sued anybody for burning CDs.
The RIAA started freaking out when people started getting stuff for free w/o any effort whatsoever.
Even if there's a way to record an audio stream, how does it know when a song starts/stops? How does it know the song title? Recording artist? What, I have to type all that crap in?
The difference is with copy protected content like Rhapsody, you have to jump through some interesting hoops to get at the raw content.
Saying copy protection for audio is inherently flawed and therefore will never succeed isn't really true. Just because there are ways to circumvent the protection mechanism doesn't mean everybody will, so the protection will never go away.
If I could friggin' learn how to quote, italicize, and make new paragraphs, this could go alot better, lol...anywho, towards the end of your quote, it mentions taking 15 minutes to download a song, meaning 4 an hour. Perhaps that would be true, IF YOU COULD ONLY DOWNLOAD ONE FILE AT A TIME. But you can download near infinite. I picked up 30 live dj sets last night in about 20-30 minutes. Each of em coming in at several k a sec. And that's one thing that Itunes can't offer either, really. Rare Remixes and live versions of songs...which is a major reason I use kazaa (for songs that normally AREN'T released, such as Overclocked remixes of Final Fantasy)
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
People don't treat music in that way now. Nor do they want to buy a Word Processor that way -- paying MicroSoft a licensing fee to keep using it for another year or whatever.
Seems like a bogus comparison to me.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
There is a little "burn" icon that lets you download and burn the trackf or a discount rate if your really want to keep it.
Otherwise, Rhapsody like any other subscriber service, if it expires your done.
I like the amount of music they have and like others have said, i'm connected at home & at work and even over Sprints 3g network i can play rhapsody on my phone!
Nothing like having something like XM radio but complete control! (and less startup costs.. pc's are getting cheaper then satelite receivers and antennas)
"Suppose I have an I-Pod that can hold 10,000 songs.
...even half-way?"
What compels me to spend a dollar a song to fill it up?
You don't have to. I know people that already have several hundred cds and don't need to spend money downloading music to fill their ipods with mp3s - all they have to do is rip, mix, burn.
One high quality analogue stage doesn't matter, espically in the context of lossy compression. I can take a song, compress it striaght from digital, or send it out my pro card and back in analogue and compress that and unless you have good ears and a good system, you won't hear the difference, espically at high comrpessions.
One thing I like about iTunes is that whoever is choosing the 30 seconds often seems careful to choose a "good" 30 seconds - somewhere in the middle for example, to give you a good idea of the song and chorus. Something represntitive.
That said, I do find sometimes that a sample doesn't appeal to me but later I find I like the song as a whole. I can live with that though as at least I can listen to samples from EVERY song on a CD, and that gives me enough information to know if I want the whole CD (rare) or I should just buy the tracks I know I will like and perhaps add a few more later if it turns out they are good. The failure case is more along the lines of a might miss a song I would like, rather than I bought a song I end up hating. I can live with that.
You have a good point about the "CD as a whole track" issue though, I'm not sure of a good solution - perhaps a "medely" of 30 seconds samples for each five minutes of song. Or of course just P2P it to sample (though I really have found I've stopped doing that altogether now that I'm using iTunes).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
After all, Jobs only has every single person with a car that likes music as a market that Rhapsody can't reach...
And jobs only pays for bandwith once when I listen to a song 500 times.
Really, as the other poster said they are different markets and I don't think sales in one is taking away from the other. I could see plenty of people wiling to subscribe to a service that would also buy from iTunes to have on the road or at a park or jogging.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yet another case of a CEO that doesn't understand the difference between theft and copyright infringment. BBH
You can, but it's not worth the effort. Just suck it up and buy the iPod, which at least will actually get used (all other MP3 players before the iPod were just toys that wound up collecting dust quickly. I've had my iPod for years now and am still happily using it).
Think about it in terms of lifecycle, the iPod will last you much longer than other players so in a way you are not spending as much as you think.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
ya, I know how variable cable data service is, I had planned on sticking with it until the speed drops to about the same as DSL, then ill switch over to something that is at least consistent. ( DSL wasn't even available until this spring anyway ).
Strange thing is that in my area I doubt anyone even knows what a pc is.. let alone want to sign up for data services.... ( bunch of country bumpkins )
It also goes down every time it rains.. but again, *I* get the blame, not the equipment.. Data customers aren't worth their support time yet.. but if your TV goes out.. *poof* they are there..
They still cant tell me why every week during Enterprise the reception goes to pot.. then recovers about 10 mins after the program is over.....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Actually Rhapsody is not a "Trojan." It is a completely separate client which has nothing to do with the RealOne Player. It doesn't install any spyware or try any of the other obnoxious tricks that Real is known for. It was developed by listen.com before they were bought by Real. Real may screw it up yet, or try to merge it into the RealOne Player, in which case I'll almost certainly dump it.
Let's save this quote to see if it comes back to haunt Steve five or ten years from now. Not saying it will, however he really went out on a limb with it -- and that's what makes it fun!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
From the article:
Still, Jobs' bet on digital music is a hugely risky move in many ways, not only because powerhouses such as Dell and Wal-Mart are gunning for Apple (and Microsoft will be soon, as well), but because success may depend on how well Jobs, a forty-eight-year-old billionaire, is able to understand and respond to the fickle music-listening habits of eighteen-year-olds in their college dorms.
I don't think Apple has to worry about fickle music listeners, because there is no such thing. Tastss change to be sure but it's not like Apple is an sll-Ska store, for example.
What Apple has to do is very simple - not piss off the customers. That's it. If a store is appealing and simply does nothing bad to a customer, many many people will keep using that store as long as they do nothing to drive them away. People are more disposed to change through dissatisfaction than being drawn elsewhere.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
To compete with "home theaters," movie houses are now... Well, they're blasting the music in way too loud. Their screens and projectors haven't improved, though at least they've figured out "arena seating" so short people can see them now.
A big part of the reason you go to a movie is the social thing -- it's a date, it's a thing to do with your coworkers, that kind of stuff. The 20 minutes of ads before the movie are now blaring so loudly that the most you can hear is a loud heckler, though, so goodbye chat before it starts. Instead of adding to the experience they're making it more impersonal and generic.
Offhand you can easily think of "bonus" stuff to do for a movie. For a kids' movie, Burger King-level giveaway toys. Collectible tickets would be cool for big releases -- "I saw all three Star Wars movies when they came out" would have played pretty well for me. (All 2 1/2 of the real Star Wars movies, I mean.) Even some sort of "Movietone News" short would break up the commercial feeling. You'd think studios, or theaters, or an independent producer, could sell that as a perk of seeing things in the theater.
But the theater experience is basically generic, with me being shunted down a cattle chute to the individual screen even. And that makes me much more inclined to wait. "Cable Movie" means a mediocre movie I wouldn't bother seeing in a theater, now. Lots of cable movies out there, and nothing special to lure me to the theater experience.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I think the real stumbling block for subscription models lies in their selection and the usability of the downloads. If one could pay $x (10, 15, 20?) per month to the itunes music store and have the ability to download any song from the store and use it in the way one can use itms downloads now (with the exception that downloads only function as long as you're subscribed), I think the service would be very popular.
Of course popular != profitable or possible. Most people would download a lot more than they do from pay per download services - increasing the costs to the provider. Maybe some would download so much that the system would be unworkable. There are many reasons a subscription service that is otherwise similar to the itms might fail.
My point is only that the reason susbcription models don't work is not because people insist on overly fetishistic notions of ownership with respect to music. It's (probably) because the right mix of rights cannot be rented at a subscription price that people can pay.
Boy, have you got me completely wrong. I'm about as far from trendy as you can get. I drive a 1996 Golf. I still use a landline. I have 1000+ CDs, including all of the Beatles albums, plenty of Miles Davis, etc. And Rhapsody is still a great deal.
First of all, your point about listening to 30 days doesn't make sense. I can keep listening to the same music forever, as long as I keep subscribing. And since there's so much music, both new and old, that I want to listen to, and new music being added all the time, I don't foresee cancelling.
Why is it so hard to see that subscribing to a service like this doesn't cut off your other options - you can still buy CD's, you can buy tracks for 79 cents and burn them, etc. It's incredibly presumptious of you to tell me that a subscription service is a "bad deal" for me, when you don't know me or my listening habits, and you don't seem to understand what a subscription service is.
sorry, no choice... commercials it'll be then.
and you can't just show up a bit late to miss them either:
you'll lose out on prime seating!
are there no commercial free outlets anymore?
What I do have a problem with, and I'm glad Jobs pointed this out, is paying for a full album, only to find out all of the tunes but one completely blow.
Yes, that sucks. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn't really have a good way to avoid it either. You can just get the songs you like, but you might be missing out on the other cool tracks. What you need is to be able to decide whether there are more or less than 10 cool tracks on the CD.
Now, you can listen to 30-second previews, but sometimes that's not enough to tell. They ought to let you preview the whole song/album, but use more compression so that no one would bother recording the audio from their sound card to avoid paying. Alternately, they could use their DRM tech to create a downloadable preview that would only play once or twice and couldn't be burned to disc.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
They didn't have Messiaen, Slint, Merzbow, Captain Beefheart, Xenakis, Steve Reich, Schoenberg, Stravinksy, or, wait for it, John Cage! No fucking John Cage!
Unit 706122, please report for entertainment reprogramming. Your circuits have become damaged, and are interfering with your ability to integrate into society. Never fear, you will be listening to Brittney and watching Friends again in no time.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
I haven't turned on the radio in several years.
Do you eat? Yes. Do you buy your food in a retail establishment that plays music over its PA system whenever the announcer doesn't need help in aisle 12? Is there any appreciable difference between retail background music and radio?
Formed networks of people who spread by word of mouth
Problem is that the adolescents who control much of the CD buying in America aren't willing to do this. Rather, they'll get their parents to buy whatever they hear on the school bus's radio, feeding the machine.
(in my case: by helping form and maintain and support alternative methods of distribution and promotion)
I could "support" them with my dollars, but I don't see how I could directly help "form and maintain" them because I can't afford formal training in marketing.
There's more to music than RADIO
Other than radio, what method of promotion works in a moving motor vehicle?
People write good/great music all the time ... And why do you need "formal training" in songwriting? Some of the world's greatest songs and composers didn't have "formal training" in songwriting.
When an idea pops into a would-be songwriter's head, how can he make sure that the idea isn't in fact "substantially similar" to an already published and copyrighted song? George Harrison got in seven-figure trouble for this on his first solo album.
Imagine if Linus had sat around saying "Gee whiz. I can't use anything but Microsoft and Andrew won't let me play with his Minix."
The situation would better resemble that of music had you added "and if I were to write and publish a competing operating system, Microsoft or Andrew would probably sue my ass off for copyright infringement."
The iPod isn't made for someone with a fifty rack cd colection. It's made for the music collector. While I can't consider myself a full out music collector, I am a heavy consumer of music. I'll have spent a handy $7500.00 on my music collection during my life, easily. That's 7500 iTunes purchases. We can see that the numbers begin to add up.
I have 300 cd's. Not an uncommon number for a music afficianado. A co-worker of mine owns twice as much and his Music library will amount to 40-50 gigs.
iPods are not for the casual pop consumer who owns 50 cd's. Compare this to the collector who has 50 Rolling Stones cd's, and the entire pink floyd discography.
Hell I probably have more NIN material than most people have of any music.
__
Thou hast besquirted me, O leotarded one.
I also know people that have several hundred CD's who have ripped, mixed, and burned most of their libraries as I have. Before there were mp3's, we used to exchange "mix tapes". That's a LOT of music, and a rather diverse selection even among the small circle of my close friends. ...and we don't charge each other anything for what other folks are paying (or not paying) a dollar for.
I was under the impression (perhaps mistakenly) that Steve Jobs had anticipated that this sort of thing would happen, and not only with me and folks I know.
CDs have actually dropped in price, by that measure.
So have DVDs, even though production costs have risen. Witness the $200 million blockbusters, which still go on sale at $20 per copy because theatrical exhibition has subsidized such low prices.
Consider what you get for your $15. An hour of digitally-mastered music, which you can listen to in any order
On a typical top-40 CD, four and a half minutes are listenable, and the rest is garbage. Commercial radio doesn't make it easy enough for Joe Sixpack to find bands that produce albums of consistent good quality, and Joe Sixpack doesn't seem dedicated enough to seek out good music by word of mouth.
you can sell it and recoup some of your money
Yeah, about 25 cents, which is all that many pawn shops will pay for a music CD.
And then you go on to compare sale of a copy to three forms of live public performance and the source of cheap DVDs' subsidies. Granted, sale of a copy will usually be cheaper than a live performance.
NHL/NFL/NBA/Any pro sport game: $40
When I see "NBA", "game", and "$40" in one sentence, I think of "NBA Jam" or any other sport simulation video game. Sure, this costs $40 per year if you want updated rosters. If you really want a live performance, try going to a minor-league game.
CDs don't look so bad now, do they. You mean I can listen to it over and over, forever
Would you pay 17.99 USD for one good song and 11 pieces of manure, just to listen to the good four and a half minutes "over and over, forever"?
I was wondering why they did "-1 Troll". My experiance with that company (real media) has been bad. I do not trust them. I was just stating a truthful fact. Same company = Same managment.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Schemes such as Logic Audio's XS Key, which is a usb device that does some super-stealthy encryption and dating of what are essentially security cookies, are near impossible to crack. It doesn't seem to out of the realm of possibility to see similar schemes employed for mp3's and their analogues. Isn't this what MS is trying to do w/ their new systems? Of course with mp3's, any setup that's too complicated will be rejected by music listeners outright . . . But I think a different question is, why should the record industry exist at all? Of course the mass production of CD's is one element, giving recording artists access to studios is another . . . but don't most artists make next to nothing on records, instead relying on touring !?!?!? If the record industry falls, it will become segmented into different industries which are arranged in such a way that artists are able to "freelance" around studios and production, and have more control over the sales of their music. And it will be the industry's own fault, reflecting the illogics of its own structure.
"Mathematics is the language of nature"
I would have thought that previews would be the answer, but it appears that's not the case. I agree, though, that getting any kind of sample before buying is pretty important to sites that would sell single downloads.
The funny thing is the business model is nothing new. You used to be able to walk into a record shop, listen to an album on their player, buy it it you wanted to, or just buy singles. Singles back then were whatever the label decided to put out as one though... now you can buy anything off the album as a single, but don't have the b-side to go with it.
Ok, so it's a little different. I wonder if anyone is going to move to the "buy one hit song and the second of our choice is free" model.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
No they can't; programs like WireTap easily "defeat" their current DRM. I really don't want them crippling the OS to try to prevent tools like that from working.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Coming from someone who has profited greatly, and will continue profiting greatly, from the imbalance in copyright laws, a long string of "moral" claims about providing a "legal alternative" (gee, I wonder which one he means...) to "stealing" rings hollow, to use his words.
Get off the "cult of personality" wagon. Just because someone whose name you recognize says something doesn't mean it's newsworthy.
No Laughing Allowed!
One of their magazines came with an inserted 45-rpm copy of "Camp Grenada" with different endings depending on where you put the needle. I think there were actually 4 endings, but I could be wrong.
-Graham
You're absolutely correct that movies have become a social event: For many people, movies are where you go to sit and talk with your friends, often via cellphone. If theater operators have turned up the sound, it's so the handful of people who actually want to watch the movie can perhaps still do so.
If you don't like the movie-going experience, blame the moviegoers.
-Graham
so where's the money going? Is it inefficiency? Is somebody going to Argentina with suitcases full of hundred-dollar bills?
Well, that might help explain Hillary Rosen's 10-acre villa in Buenos Aires.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
I couldn't agree more. While I only own 180 CDs, I still purchase a lot of music. I'm the type of person who likes a band and then purchases all their albums. In addition to this, I download a lot of music legally through (the now defunct) MP3.com and similar sites. It's not hard to fill up 40GB over time.
Great idea! I propose you lead by example. Go to your employer tomorrow and refuse to accept a penny more than 10,000 a year. That is more than enough to rent a $500 a month studio apartment and another $200 a month on utilities and food. You don't need anything more than that, and you're just unfairly profiting on the backs of people making less money than you do now.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
True, no one is going to buy 10,000 songs to fill their 40 GB iPod, but then again, who has purchased an iPod and owns no CD's??
I myself have 20 GB of music, 95% legal, or higher but I will only put about 60% of that on my iPod, since it multifunctions as a hard drive and now with the accessories, a vessel to download my images from my digital camera.
It's all about choice. Give them the option to put their 10,000 songs in one place, or use it for other reasons or purposes.
"This is you left and that's your left. This is your right and that's your right. You're gonna die!
I don't mean to be some kind of kneejerk anti-Apple freak, here, but what the hell? Does this company ever walk into an existing space without claiming they invented it? First the GUI, then desktop publishing...now, what, by getting into MP3 players late in the game (with a very cool player, to give Apple their props) they somehow invented that space and now, they somehow innovated in pay-per-download music, merely by virtue of beating everybody else to market by a margin of months? (Then again, that's pretty much their real claim to fame with the GUI OS: first to market, so that fits, I guess.)
I must confess, beyond the consistent design esthetic, I do not get the Cult of Apple at all.
Jobs' comment that "a legal alternative to stealing music hadn't been invented until six months ago" takes "arguable" to new heights.
Despite the nose bleed, this article taught me something: the secret of Jobs' marketing genius is to equate instant gratification to a constitutional entitlement.
First he names the company after something you stick in your mouth, and twenty years later he is still trying to compel people to lick the visuals. It's a view of the American constitution through an infant psyche.
*high five*
__
Thou hast besquirted me, O leotarded one.
Why not offer something for $20/month that lets you download all the music you want?
Maybe if you read TFA, you'd notice that there have been a bunch of companies offering subscription services, and they've all failed.
Personally I have no problem paying a buck per song (or $10 per album, fyi). It works for me. I don't have an mp3 player, so I don't give a crap about their m4p format. It let's me burn to a cd for the car...
Most albums I've considered only had a couple songs I liked... so I'd be paying $xx (whatever CDs cost now, I have no idea) for two songs. with itunes I can get those two songs for $2. I'm happy.
8. albums made with sandpaper sleeves so that they would wear away the covers of other albums they were placed next to.
why is it that bill gate steve jobs or any other corporate in the it world wants to describe anything they maek as the best thing ever?
i guess that why i like linux, the head person there is quite realistic in what he is, a engineer:)
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
This from a guy who got started stealing long distance service and reselling it on the Berkeley campus.
You've come a long way, baby.
Da Blog
That's why they have the Apple stores, because Jobs realized exactly that.
It's the same with computers, though you are more likley to be able to see those aorund as people carry laptops with them, so there's a bit less need for a store. But I'm sure it helps a lot for someone new to Apples who is thinking about an Apple but hs not really seen them before and does not know anyone that has one.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> How is it bullshit when you just proved his
> point? He didn't say that the method for
> cracking had to be easy, he just said it was
> possible, for anything.
Ahhh...this is what the story says:
> We have Ph.D.s here who know the stuff cold, and
> we don't believe it's possible to protect
> digital content.
and I'm saying it's possible to protect digital content. I didn't say it's not hackable, in fact I pointed out it's very possible to get at the content.
Why does software copy protection still exist? Even though you can usually get a key or crack, it's still around. There must be enough people out there who buy the original because of some additional value, or because they can't just burn a copy, to make copy protection worth the effort.
> Try taking your head out of your ass for a few
> seconds
Follow your own advice.
Kazaa of course was just code-word for Newsgroups.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
How is overprecision a fallacy? That's just ridiculous. Law is entirely based on precision of language. There is no such thing as overprecsion where the law is concerned.
I don't download music, so I don't need any excuses. Copyright infringment is not theft, that's why it's called "copyright infringement" and not "theft". I'm not sure how much clearer it can be made. The other posters arguments were very plain. It seems you are the one who is in denial here, because you can't, for whatever reason, accept that these crimes are not the same thing. Your empty arguments just add to the FUD.
We don't think that's what people want. A movie takes forever to download -- there's no instant gratification."
WHAT? WHAT?
Damn...
-Miles
Fuzzy
There is this classic struggle going on.
The record company wants to hold on to dear life.
The old paradigm of making CDs and having a record
company hover like an overlord over the consumers and the artists has to give away.
Doesnt this whole issue boil down to just that?
A fight for survival of these companies.
Imagine the possible reduction in the cost of music if all music is sent directly from source to consumer without the record company!!
how small is infinity?
There are 600k+ users. Show me the page containing the hacked codec.
> Besides, you don't have to attack the codec or
> encryption; its easier to jack it just as its
> converted to analog. There are several ways to do
> that, some of them even shareware!
Yes, but they require me to do something! That's pretty much my point...if there is DRM available that just makes it annoying to copy, we'll be at status quo and the RIAA won't care.
> You're paying $120 a year for digital radio that
> you have to use at a computer. Why don't the
> rest of us understand that value equation?
Because you're paying $1/song? For how many songs? I have playlists longer than your collection, and I'm paying $9.95/month. I don't understand your value equation.
> (rolling eyes). You don't understand how
> computers work. That's all.
Enlighten me, oh wise one.
I go see bands locally.
You mean bands that play in bars? How is this possible for U.S. residents under 21? Or do local bands in your geographic area play at venues that admit minors?
That's the best you can come up with? Potential lawsuit?
Just read how much potential there is. Are you claiming that "it's not illegal if you don't get caught"?
I'll bet you don't sing "Happy Birthday" out of fear the RIAA stormtroopers come knocking down your door.
That's different in two ways. First of all, despite what the Warner Bros. may claim, the music to "Happy Birthday" was first published as "Good Morning to All" in 1893 (long before the 1923 cutoff date), and the lyrics probably aren't different enough from the "Good Morning" lyrics. Second, and more importantly, U.S. copyright law does not consider performing "Happy Birthday" in family gatherings a public performance; it's outside the scope of copyright law.
I am sick of the propaganda machine.
/http://www.my31337warezSite.com
Get this junk into court, fight it out, and let the winner write the history book.
In 2 years I will buy the book off of amazon and save the countless hours of time reading it piece by piece on-line.
I have read every comment SCO has made, every rebuttal that XXXX has made, every opinion posted by reader/reviewer/journalist and we all know it amounts to nothing till a judge says how things will be.
Perhaps SCO will win, Perhaps XXXX will win.
In the end it all amounts to nothing, SCO will die.
And if we have to we will just download the latest versions of Linux from
A typical album involves...
...
music:
- musicians (1-25)
- composers
- studio people: mixers, facilitators, the guys who make the master,
- usually some organisers, be it managers, assistants or roadies
album:
- cover artist
- producers
- printers
distribution:
- clear all copyright issues
- promote for shelf-space
- get interviews, reviews, airspace
And I'm forgetting quite a bit here. I'm not talking about over the top marketing campaigns, not even video, this is based upon experience with tiny little releases of about 2000 CD's.
Now all this takes a lot of time, people, organisation, goodwill. The total cost can be between 2000 Euro and 8000 Euro, depending on who you actually have to pay, how fancy your shiny disk and package looks and how much studio time you've taken up.
The catch is: all those people involved actually consume liquids and solids. They breathe air and occasionally have to go to the dentist.
Note how many people need to get paid apart from the musicians. Also note that the fact that you *could* get filthy rich by chance and good craftmanship is the reason musicians are prepared to do two-three jobs and pay off all those helpful souls - or sign into contracts with big labels who then pick up the cheque...
Also note that when we talk about concerts, there are even more people involved. While you *can* make a living touring the modest festivals, it's only the happy few who make a lot. And there's a whole musical universe out there that doesn't really translate well to live work or large podia.
While I don't sympathise with the large labels and distributors - the price of CD's is ridiculous still - I don't think the industry is totally crazy. It involves a lot of clever and honest people who work really really hard. And I really don't think labels are going to go away. Not as long as there is organising and planning involved.
What you'll see is even more specialized organizations, like e.g. CD Baby who now collect indie artists for digital distribution contracts.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I don't know that people would want to burn all of the minutes on a plan just to listen to music... that is good thinking though. I wonder how well it would hold up to travelling in a car?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Darwin was actually a religious man. He never really pitted his theory evolution up against God. He didn't see any reason why the two things ought to be mutually exclusive.
Because it's not radio! I get to choose what I want to listen to, when I want to listen to it, from an enormous collection of music (almost everything I'd want to listen to). It's like having tens of thousands of CD's.
"But there in lies the problem with subscription services, you don't own this music, you loose the music when you are away from the internet, you can't download it to a player."
Yes, I mentioned that as a con. The price is low enough I'm not worried about it ATM.
"Futhermore, ff you don't have broadband it must take a long time to get that 1 gig cache, which means you spend a significant amount of time twiddling your thumbs waiting for your music to begin playing."
That problem doesn't go away with any other service. You really need broadband if you're interested in that.
"Plus, if Rhapsody fails you're doomed. Basically, this is a renters solution."
Doomed? No. There are other services out there. I doubt this type of service will suddenly disappear. As for the renter's solution, yeah I agree with that. It's not perfect, but it really isn't bad either. I remember being miffed about the cons until I used it for the free week. Now it's part of my daily routine.
"Derp de derp."
I'm quite surprised by how smart Steve Jobs is again.
His analysis is straightforward, honest and right on the mark.
Also, his reluctance to argue, while still answering the question was admirable.
A prediction...(hereby archived on Slashdot
until it embarasses me)...
Apple will rise from the embers of what they
once were and reduce Microsoft to a shadow of
its former monopoly.
A million, eh, Mr. Jobs? Too bad I didn't read the article backwards--then I could've stopped at this absurd exaggeration and not had to read his other comments about 'stealing' and 'theft' and 'moral decay' which might as well be translated as: "Hey, I've worked my ass off to get this service going. I'm not about to piss off any of those labels anymore."
I suppose the fact that the RIAA must sustain a bloated infrastructure has nothing to do with expenses? I suppose the fact that the artist ALWAYS pays for everything they do while with a record label has nothing to do with the labels losing money?
He's a smart guy, but really, this is disappointing.
What about people who use P2P file sharing primarily to sample new music before deciding to shell out their hard earn bucks. I can only buy a limited amount of CD's a month and I love being able to sample and know that my money will not be wasted before I buy.
How strange it is to be anything at all
If a person is vaguely interested in your copyrighted data, but either cannot or will not afford to pay for it, then there are two possible outcomes: one where they get it, and one they dont.
In neither case do they have the capability to steal from you, because your bank account will not be reduced, nor would it have been increased in exchange for the copy. In fact, if they do make a copy, there is a chance they will become rabid fans of yours, and positively affect your bank account.
So in fact, by not making a copy of your material, they are in fact stealing from you, by your own (stupid) definition (loss of potential earnings==theft).
Thats right, NON-FILESHARERS ARE THIEVES!
Tips are given in the form of money. Money can be exchanged for goods and services. Need more explanation?
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
This means getting away from the it's-all-about-your-convenience marketing and moving toward marketing that stresses other factors. I want to pay for work I can use in ways mainstream book/movie/music publishers don't allow.
Many socially progressive organizations and copyright holders know how hard this is to do--getting people to ask questions like where those ultra-cheap Wal-Mart t-shirts come from, how much the waitstaff at the local diner get paid, how much migrant farm workers make for an honest day's labor, and other related issues is very tough to do because there is a very well-organized media working to sell you on the idea that nothing matters except your immediate convenience. Questions about copyright and patent law (just to name a couple areas of law) are little different when it comes to establishing a new frame for debate.
Asking questions that step outside large publisher's framing of important issues, starting to talk about important issues from a new perspective is hard. We need more people to ask and talk about what copyright does, whether we are well served by the prejudice in the term "intellectual property" that encourages treating disparate areas of law like property, whether we are making a good trade-off with media we're not allowed to copy, share, or use to base derivative works on.
And I'm not at all convinced that Jobs or Apple is interested in asking these (ultimately more important) social questions.
Digital Citizen
FYI, comparison to Apple's iTunes Music Store:
For $1, I can burn a song to disc.
You have to pay $0.99/song to buy, but there's no extra charge for burning.
I can't keep the music I download. If I unsubscribe, I cannot play the music anymore.
iTMS has no subscription fee; you can keep playing songs you've bought without paying anything. There is DRM, so if Apple were to disappear off the face of the planet, there might be some issues down the road, but since Apple's business model isn't dependant on music sales at all, there's no reason why they should stop supporting their customers.
It uses a custom client. Linux users need not apply.
Ditto. Win2k/XP and Mac OS X.
Not every song is available for purchase, but on the plus side at least I can listen to it.
Every song they have is available for purchase. Of course, they don't have every song, but neither does anybody else.
I *must* be on-line to listen to the music.
As far as I know, the iTMS does not have this requirement. You must go online to "register" your computer, but once that's done, you can stay offline.
No uploading to your music player, unless ya burn the CD and re-encode it. Ouch.
Only the iPod (the most popular player) is currently supported. In theory, it should be possible for other companies to license AAC and FairPlay, but I'm not sure Apple wants this to happen (they'd rather everyone just bought an iPod). Of course you can burn and re-encode for free, but you lose quality.
The search engine's great. I'm able to find just about any song that intrigues me, and have it playing within moments. It's pretty good at helping me find other music I might like as well. It has everything neatly cross-referenced. "If you like Prodigy, you might like Chemical Brothers", etc.
Ditto. Apple's version is "Listeners who bought this album also bought..." They also have Celebrity Playlists - if you like Dave Brubeck's music, you can see that he likes particular songs by Louis Armstrong, Stan Kenton, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and others, and you can read about why.
Fast fast fast. It's not streaming in the RealPlayer sense. It starts downloading into a cache, and once a few blocks are down it starts playing. Rhapsody, by default, sets up a 1 gig cache to store the music in. So unless you have a LOT of songs on your playlist, they don't disappear. So it's not like you have to have broadband to listen to the music. (Though it helps for the initial download.)
Apple and Akami have a hell of a lot of bandwidth; on my DSL line at home, previews start playing about 4 seconds after double-clicking. There's no cache, since you can't listen to more than previews unless you buy the song. If your connection is slower than 128Kbps, you can set it to wait until it finishes downloading before playing.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I don't know Mr. Jobs' motivation for making this comment. It may be that he truly believes this. It may be that he has to make this statement to protect himself. Investment is not solely hinged upon intellectual property, copyrights, patents, et al. It is true that the marketplace would need to alter its practices to accomidate intellectual property, however, commerce shall continue. There is no inherent right for anyone's business model to remain intact. One can argue that certain changes can be catyclismic for the greater society, but for individual businesses their rights do not supercede the rights of any other legal entitiies, public or private. It appears Mr. Jobs suffers from the same myopia that rest of the recording industry has....
What word rhymes with buried alive?
Steve once again proves Ford Prefect's observation that humans have an incredible ability to state the obvious.
oy.
almost everybody eats 1 - 3 plate loads of food
:/
Dont know about the people you go out with, we generally go through half a dozen plates each
I am Monkey, the Great Sage, equal of heaven!
I enjoyed your comments immensely. I'm in a band and it's really amazing what little you have to do to make a decent living as a musician. But you have to DO IT. And you have to practice.
I think there is a rather large open niche for businesses who are willing to offer reasonable help to musicians to help them make money, not the huge bucks but, you know, a living wage.
All the big labels are interested in is raping the artist to move plastic. The end.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
...that if an elderly educated person said that something in his realm of expertise could be done, he was almost always correct. If an elderly educated person said that something in his area of expertise could not be done, he would most likely be wrong.
Wrong again, RIAA!! HA!
If you paid money for a CD, why would you let anybody copy the tracks off you?
Even if it -is- for your friends, wouldn't that be somewhat equivalent to subsidising their music collection?
That's a rather benevolent action if ever I saw one...
I swear, if I see another Slashdot comment with "It will be interesting to see"...
1) the "right" to rent a work, etc. under your terms is not a physical or inherent right as is property (which is explicitly given such status in the US Constitution) - it is a licence, more analogous to software under EULA than land or physical property. Thus your legal position is incorrect. (see other posts on this thread).
2) the fact that you don't like something or feel that it should be more disliked that it currently is does not justify intentional obfuscation. Copyright infringement is not theft, both in the eyes of the law (previous SC decisions and the Constitution) and morally. It is wrong and prosecutable, but nonequivalent. (considering the ransom the RIAA is attempting to extract for copyright infringement versus the potential civil and criminal penalties for the theft of physical CDs, the RIAA doesn't view theft and copyright infringement them as identical, either.)
I could call copyright infringement "mass murder" but that commits two sins at once. One, a word with a precise legal meaning is intentionally confused with another - thus if repeated, neither word means what it did before. Speakers can't be sure what either term means, and so both terms lose the ability to express ideas that is their purpose. Two, the moral implications of mass murder are diluted by conflating it with copyright infringement; legitimate uses of the term lose their moral force in speech where they should possess such force.
Eggs are not chickens, no matter what I call them. Theft and copyright infringement are legal terms with independent legal realities, like a chicken and an egg. Choosing to call one the other doesn't prove that they are the same, only that the speaker either doesn't know or doesn't care about the law. The fact that copyright infringement is wrong and that the potential consequences are bad and likely harmful does not change its legal status.
3) copyright entitles both the users (via rights codified in law or requiring specific denial in law) and the providers. If I purchase a DRM CD, the rights given to me by copyright law are infringed - the terms of the copyrights are violated. In both cases, the users and the artist are deprived of the license to use a work as they see fit, rights in both cases given by law. Respect for copyrights requires that the people whose use them for profit should start by respecting them themselves. Linguisitic legerdemain or name-calling will not change reality - when the industries dispect their customers and the law that protects them while emphasizing and demonizing violations of the law by others and aggrandizing its defense of their actions, people will return the dispect in kind.
Copyright infringement is neither good in and of itself nor a good way of achieving the respect of copyright owners for the rights of their users, but according a moral status (theft) to it which the people who use copyrights are unwilling to accord it themselves (by altering copyright limitations with DRM and other schemes to limit legally given rights to use) is intellectually dishonest and ultimately counterproductive to the rights you hope to preserve.
Wait, whoops.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
I agree that there is such a thing copyright theft. But if you use that term for making illicit copies of copyrighted material, what term would you use for when one party actually takes the legal ownership of a copyright from its true owner immorally?
Sure, you can use the words extortion, legal trickery, blackmail, etc. to describe how it can be done, but what do you call the actual act of depriving someone of their ownership of a copyright if you have already decided that "copyright theft" denotes a different act?
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
"Sounds great....do you work for the company?? Seems like it"
Ah yes, the rarely used "you like something, therefore you must work for that company" debate form.
Grow up.
"Derp de derp."
Why, oh why, does Coca-Cola think that they should be in this music download business (currently available in the UK only, but that could change)?
I think that the music download market can only handle 3-5 players. Any more than that and we'll be looking at another dot-com bust as consumers get confused over which service they should use.
"I mean, to say that Microsoft can just decide to copy it, and copy it in six months D that's a big statement. It may not be so easy. "
Steve for you, using the word "may" in a sentence involving your company is definitely hand-wringing.
...for fear that there lurks among them a copyright snitch.
"Before we sing this song, Betty, please assure us the ASCAP fees are paid up."
"Are you now, or have you ever been a copyright violator?"
"Good morning kids, instead of US History today we're going to watch a video called 'RIAA Duck and Cover' that will help you understand why you must obey the behavioral rules set forth by our wise capitalist overlords or be hunted down as a criminal."
Tonight's headline: The IP structure is breaking down! The once-powerful barons of IP can be seen running for the hills. Only last week former media magnate Rupert Murdoch wrote a frantic email to Ted Turner in which he asks "What if we're not needed anymore? The very idea of IP has begun to piss people off in a world where drug companies must weigh the value of their secrets over a cost of millions of lives each year. There's no bottom line any more, Ted. Men like us were extinct long ago."
This Christmas give the gift of Book Burning. Copyrighted works from all over the country are being gathered in the Nevada desert for a massive burning in protest of the international intellectual keepaway game. The self-appointed "Wise Council" convened last night to give details. "Having lived too long in a world ruled by Power and trampled on by the wars of Power against Power, we have come together to form an alternative power. We make no claims to history, offer no revolutionary means to topple the capitalists. We only suggest there may be another way to live which accomplishes our great aims yet feeds no alienating system. We represent a direct and simple means. You've seen the armies of lawyers beginning to convene. You know what they claim to protect. But the true coin of their realm is something much more precious: It is the will of mankind."
-- thinkyhead software and media
...where do you think Kool-Aid is made these days?
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
> iTunes' pricing scheme is $1 for a track or $10 for an album. That is cheap. That's what CDs should be priced at. I
> praise the prices of iTunes because it offers a reasonable price.
Cheap? Hey, I'm as happy with iTunes as the next guy, but I know that they could easily be selling CDs for $10 each, with all the distribution costs and everything else as well. Easily. And still be making plenty of profit.
$10 per album, downloaded, is not cheap. It's marginally acceptable... that's all.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Apple eventually issued an official statement on the fellow selling his iTune online. It was something along the lines of, 'We believe he has the right to do this; however, it may not be terribly practical.'
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
OK, so back in the day, I was one of those students. You know, one of the ones they always worried about because it seemed that we tended to spend so much time on the system, exploring so much stuff that wasn't involved in a formal class assignment. And I, well, often used IEBGENER to, oh, let's say, browse the contents of various files on the system in locations other than my personal directory.
At some point, the lead hacker-tracker decided to attempt to convince me that this was Wrong. I persisted in my belief that, especially as far as system files belonging to no one person in particular go, IEBGENER'ing them might be "against rules", but it was NOT Wrong, because it caused no harm that I could see. This actually prompted much debate over the course of many months (I think the guy in question had a background in Philosophy, and he was intent on convincing me that his view of the ethics of this was Right).
He finally decided it was a lost cause when I stated simply, "Look. If I could IEBGENER a car, and leave the original right where I found it, I would, because no one's losing ANYTHING they would have had if I hadn't done so. Not the car companies since I wouldn't buy a car anyway, not the person to whom the car belongs because they've still got it. In fact, it'd be GOOD for the economy, because I'd have to buy gas, and have it repaired, and such."
(Yes, Ken, I still remember that I contended to Rikard that I'd IEBGENER a car if it were physically possible to do so. Most amazingly, I lived to tell about it. ;-)
Does the music industry serve to find the 'successes' among the rubbish out there?
The argument holds up, if we ignore one gigantic, gargantuan, glaring fact: the music industry has a monopoly.
So, is it that they find, like so many diamonds in the rough, the better acts, or would the more accurate portrayal be that they, being the only means of distribution, exploit the best talent? The monopoly makes the answer impossible to determine, since there is no free market going on in music.
The same is true of the moral argument around file sharing. People who protect the current system seem to forget that they're protecting an arguably illegal cartel that inarguably price-gouges them. That the music industry has a monopoly and abuses it, again, clouds the whole issue.
Underneath the clouds, I think the real problem the music industry faces is life without a monopoly. Their abuse of the consumer has caused an alternative means of distribution to crop up that seems impervious to the laws that the industry has, in the past, been able to bend to its will. They had a unique thing - a guarantee of revenue. What a business! But now it's evaporating, and they'll have to actually compete for their food, like the rest of us.
Jobs probably doesn't have it wrong; he's just politicing. He has to, now that he's in bed with the music guys.
No they can't; programs like WireTap easily "defeat" their current DRM.
If that doesn't stop them from selling songs, it shouldn't stop them from offering previews. Sure, the hardcore pirate will find a way around it, but their current DRM isn't designed to be impenetrable anyway. It's just like using a lock to keep the honest people out.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
The problem is the record execs must've failed this class in college.
Demand is at an all time low. What do you do? Well, if you're a record exec, you RAISE the price!
The problem is that the price is set artificially high by the monopolistic tactics of the record industry (been proven in court). However, MP3s broke their monopoly, thus leaving them with a price above the market clearing price that would exist if the market were allowed to correct itself.
Ergo, there is a surplus.
Basic friggin' economics.
Way to try to put words in my mouth. That's about the most offensive stawman attack I've seen in a while, so I'll just forgoe with civility in the rest of my reply.
Nowhere do I claim I think that rape is the same as copyright violation. That's the entire point, you ignrant fuck. Go back and read it again. Those are all different categories of legally proscribed acts. I'm not claiming any of them are the same. You and a band of other morons are though: you seem to have some unsupported notion that violation of laws relarding the temporary monopoly of ideas is somehow equivalent to stealing real property. Or you have a notion that flexibilities in the english language extend to appropriate descriptions of illegal acts.
Get this into your thick fucking skull. These are way different things. They are so goddamned different it's not even funny. We need whole different sets of laws to deal with them. We have differnt words to describe them. They have different histories, different protection, different real world effects, different rules for scarcity, etc., etc.
People who use the word "theft" with respect to copyright violation are not using it in some colorful way akin to "stealing her virtue". They either are explicitly trying to elevate the public opinion of something, or just convenient twits like yourself.
If you "steal some girl's virtue". People aren't going to call you a thief. They'll call you a rapist. Similarly, they wouldn't call you a murderer because you "killed her virtual", or "destroyed her innocence" or any other nonsense.
People can say "you stole my idea" all they want. It still doesn't make you a thief or the act theft. What's so inadequate about the current provisions for copyright protection and enforcement that you feel the need to elevate the crime?
XML causes global warming.
When they see gold all three yell "Mine! Mine! Mine!" and procede to lose all their money to people willing to share.
God help the artists if David Bowie isn't right.
People are complaing that record compainies dont give you added bonuses, better cover art, DVD's, posters, etc. When you are buying a CD you are meant to be buying the music, not all this extra stuff. Dont think they should charge $20 for a CD of artist xyz? Good for you, dont buy. Just because you dont think something is worth what is it sold for does not give your the right to commit a crime in this case copyright infringement. If I want to buy a Porsche 911, but I think it is only worth $30,000 yet it is sold for $60,000 I do not have the right to go and steal it. I simply dont buy it and find something that I think is worth the price it is sold for. The same applies for music, dont think its worth $20 BUY A DIFFERENT CD! Dont commit a crime.
> You and a band of other gentlemen are though: you seem to have some unsupported notion that violation of laws
> regarding the temporary monopoly of ideas is somehow equivalent to stealing real property.
Well, no, actually. And I don't think that an object that makes a loud noise when you push on the steering wheel is identical to an object that adorns the top of the head of a goat. But, WHOA, they're both called horns! Likewise, there are a lot of uses of the word 'theft', and not all of them mean identical things.
Mind you, most of them are considered 'bad'. Maybe that's what you're objecting to, having copyright infringement lumped in there with all those other bad things?
> People can say "you stole my idea" all they want. It still doesn't make you a thief or the act theft.
No, actually, that's exactly what determines the definition of a word: usage. It doesn't conform to YOUR idea of what the word 'theft' means, but it clearly conforms to THEIR idea of what the word 'theft' means, or they wouldn't be using it. And if the majority of people use the word that way, then you are the one who is out of step with reality. And I submit to you that most rational people wouldn't react to the phrase 'you stole my idea' with the clearly unthinking hostility to which you react to it, but would instead accept it as a perfectly reasonable statement. (And the definition of 'thief' in my dictionary is 'one who steals, especially by stealth'.)
As I said, you are perfectly welcome to argue that copyright infringement should not be lumped together with the other things that fall under the common-usage definition of the word theft. But arguing that the word doesn't mean what most English-speakers would agree that it means is ridiculous. Language is defined by consensus, and there aren't a whole lot of people who care that you don't agree.
Cheers.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Your sarcasm assumes that's not the case.
Some of their stuff isn't available outside of the US (these are clearly marked). If the stuff on emusic isn't what you've been into, try adjusting your preferences :) [IOW, maybe you should support artists that aren't distributed under such onerus termns]. They have 30-second previews of every song without having to fill out a thing, and I doubt that most people won't be able to find something they like. Also, their service is available on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. The songs are cheaper too.
As I am not above shameless self-promotion, I'll also point out that many of the songs available on emusic can be heard via online college radio stations, and I happen to know of one (wmbc.umbc.edu for those with sigs disabled).
You can also try allmusic.com to see if any emusic-distributed artists are recommended for fans of artists you currently like.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Can't you understand what you read
Let me break it down for you. It's about implication.
What was said:
A wants to imprison B.
Is that right?
A has that right.
(to imprison B)
The last conclusion is implied by the framing of the sentence. Only an Apple fanboy could think otherwise.
Da Blog
Again, you apear to be trying to implicate me. I've never said whether I think copyright violation is bad or not. Similarly I've never said whether I think rape is bad or not. Only a bastard would take those ommissions to mean that I think either one is good. "Lump" is a great word - that's what you want to do - lump everything together, things are bad or good, theft == copyright violation == crime == bad mmmkay. I'm telling you all these things are different in many ways. To threat them interchangeably is an error.
Look, we're talking about legal terms, or at least terms with legal meanings, not about who's the best boy band out there. Even if most people for some reason think that theft == copyright violation (which you assert, but provide no evidence for), this doesn't make the crimes somehow equivalent. I'll admint that the word theft can be acceptable in a vernacular sense when discussing some of these things (stole ideas, eg.) but some uses are clearly inaccurate.
If someone kills another person, that makes them a murderer (ignoring legal defenese). If I kill your spirit or innocence, does that make me a murderer? Maybe in some flowery poetic flexible-english sense, but not in any real sense, and certainly not in any sense with legal bearing.
Word usage is great and all, but when words are used in such a way that implies technical meaning or legal meaning, popularity doesnt't make a whit of difference about how the word is properly used.
This is a very important point: people who use the words thief or theft when describing copyright violation are most certainly implicating wrong doing in the legal sense. Afterall, it's primarily a legal infraction rather than a moral infraction, at least it doesn't carry the same moral weight as theft or murder. So if they're implying legal wrongdoing, they're .....
using the wrong fucking word because they're describing the wrong fucking crime.
Jesus you people are stupid.
XML causes global warming.
There are places that are all-ages, and they have various ID schemes (bracelets, etc.) so that the guy at the door can check your age and that's it.
Some of these places charge more for people under 21; sometimes this is on a per-show basis (show price varies widely anyway).
Some bars keep microwave pizza in the freezer and sell it for $4/slice so that they "serve food" and can admit people under 21 (might have to be 18 though, I forget, but that lets in most college students).
The music scene here (in Baltimore) isn't great compared to some cities, but we certainly get by. If there's nothing like this, or what the parent poster was describing in your city, sorry to hear that. But you can still get music by listening to online college stations (though not all college stations do independent music, most do).
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
he is carefully choosing his words ... he has to play nice with the RIAA
I agree with you, Steve Jobs always carefully chooses his words. But that's because he has to play nice with the idealists of the world. He isn't just selling computers, or sugared water - he's selling the dream that by consuming his product you are somehow entering a niche world of elite aesthetics and awareness. That's the crux of Apple's marketing since its inception.
Da Blog
And I don't think that an object that makes a loud noise when you push on the steering wheel is identical to an object that adorns the top of the head of a goat. But, WHOA, they're both called horns! Likewise, there are a lot of uses of the word 'theft', and not all of them mean identical things.
The problem is that when discussing the legal aspects of copyright, it seems that there are many people out there complaining about people honking their goats.
Learn to love Alaska
To that point, compare the subscription service of the Guitar Port device from line 6. You pay 169.00 for the device and then are forced to use it on a Windows machine. You then pay 7.99 a month for access to "guitar port online". It sounded great when I bought it, but the content isn't diverse enough to justify me paying as little as 8 bucks a month. Not only that, but if you stop your subscription, the tracks "time out" so you have to maintain a subscription to keep those tracks functioning. Needless to say, now that I've had a chance to check out the Digitech GNX-3, I'll be dumping the guitar port and be platform free, since it works without a PC. It's line 6's own fault. Had the content been better, and not pissed me off that tracks I had payed for already failed to work because I let me subscription die, I'd have been loyal. Now, I'll dump it lock stock and barrel instead of throwing good money after bad.
He refers to downloads as stealing, and people as thieves - there is a greater difference than semantics.
He believes that the copyright system gives people "fair" profits.
He believes there is no marked for downloading video.
Keep swimming Jack, you are still far from port.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Your point is valid, and one that I am aware of. The theft is not of the car, but of Toyota's hitherto unquestioned right to profit from their car ideas.
But imagine in this hypothetical world of plenty: what is the goal of enforcing false scarcity? In an extreme case, would it be important to keep hungry people from generating all their own food for the sake of the farmers?
I don't have the answers -- my point is that there are a lot of subtle issues here that are going to come front and center over the next 100 years. And appealing to the current law or current sensibilities is probably not going to be enough.
Cheers.
Let me break it down a bit deeper for you:
A think that B steal something form A;
A wants to imprison B;
C asks D: is that 'imprisoning B' right?
D answers:
1. I hate when somebody steals my property.
2. So, I think that A can try to keep his property from stealing.
Look:
1. D NOT said that it is correct act (imprisoning)
2. D even NOT said that something was stolen.
Really, Jobs not answered question at all.
Got my vision?
Thanks for the tip. I'll try it out.
I never understood how somebody who scratches records would be able to tell if the quality was poor enough to warrant trashing it.
You buy multiple copies, spend stupid amounts of money on expensive cartridges made especially for record sratching and frequently change your stylus, make sure your tonearm is properly balanced and take care of your records.
Besides that... there are records made specifically for scratching. These are called "breaks" or "battle" records. They have many short bits of sound on them for scratching, or beats to scratch/juggle/whatever.
The term "b-boy" or "breakdancer" comes from the fact that the first djs would repeat those drum breaks by repeatedly playing a record break over and over again w/ the same record on two turntables (beat juggling) and they'd dance to it.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
this is a bit stale, but for the sake of history:
Sculley was VP not CEO when Jobs hired him, although he would have become CEO had he stuck around.
Jobs championed the Macintosh, a project to create a cheaper version of the Lisa when he wasn't allowed to run Lisa. Thus he directly went against the Lisa project.
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will! - Antonio Gramsci.
> It's called "fair use," eh.
I believe the correct spelling is "eh?"