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Sir Mix-A-Lot Using Weed To Distribute Music
An anonymous reader writes "Hip-hop musician Sir Mix-A-Lot has made his new CD Daddy's Home available for download using Weed technology. Weed is a relatively new file sharing system based principles of shareware and referrals. You download the DRM WMA weed file and can listen to it 3 times on any computer before deciding to purchase it or not. If you do purchase it (at a price set by the artist), you will receive referral fees (20%, 10%, 5%) for the next 3 generations of people that purchase your copy. The artist always receives 50% of the price. Certainly an interesting approach to distributing music in a world of p2p and iTunes."
About the only thing "Weed" has going for it as a music distribution system as far as I can tell is the pyramid scheme payment system. Kinda cool that if you get friends to try and buy a new song you get rewarded with a small cut, but I'm not sure how much of a factor that would be for most casual users.
Even with Weed, the record industry still stands a very good chance of taking half the profits, unless the song was never released on a major label.
Well there is magnatune. Not a p2p system, but a nice idea. They are a recording company that sells all music online and splits the price of the sale 50/50 with the artists.
Technically, a Ponzi scheme is any scheme where you promise a bunch of people a huge return on an investment, and use later investors' money to pay off earlier investors.
Ponzi schemes aren't always pyramidal, though the two techniques often overlap. Ponzi schemes may or may not involve an actual product, but are most definitely illegal.
If I recall, it is possible for a MLM to have a product and still be classified as an illegal pyramid scheme. However, I don't remember the criteria.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
As a DJ, I'd have to agree with the original poster. The quality lost by MP3s make them completely useless to me. The parts that you lose in converting music to MP3 are some of the most important ones when you're playing it through a 30.000 watt sound system.
Of course, I haven't bought anything aside from vinyl for the past three years, so I guess I don't really care about digital anyway.
The term weed has frequently been used in live music trading circles to refer to a method of distributing your favorite phish/dead/moe./sci show quickly. Out of generosity on person seeds the show to two people absolutely free, no blanks, no postage, etc. The only string attached are that each recipient in turn gives it to two more people for free. And so on, like rabbits. peace.
Shameless self promotion: .ca, thus you may have guessed we're talking canadian dollars).
www.hearsaymusic.ca, canadian independent artists
artists get 45cents for each dollar song (oh, notice the
There currently is an huge selection of 3 artists :-), with a forth coming in a few hours... we are always looking for more independent artists.
cheerswarren
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
Daniel
http://people.cinn.ca/daniel/
I don't understand sure why an audio engineer would propagate this myth.
The highest frequency the human ear can hear at 20-22 KHz. According to Nyquist, you would then need 40-44 KHz to digitally encode sound losslessly.
48 KHz is certainly enough. CDs carry "lossless" sound, meaning that it is indistinguishable to the original to a human.
Now, there's certainly a reason you record at high freqency and bitrate. This reason is not because you can hear any difference, but because more information will be retained as you mix the sound, put it through filters, and do whatever else you audio engineers do. If you wanted to use CDs for mixing and filtering audio samples, then perhaps you could say that CDs are lossy, but if you're just listening to CDs, they provide 100% authentic sound reproduction.
If what I'm saying "pisses you off" (as you say), I suggest a course in information theory.
It's only possible to have a lossy transfer, not format.
The transfer from 24kbit/96kHz to 16kbit/44.1kHz is lossy. The transfer from analog to digital is lossy (unless you have such high resolution digital that you're measuring the motions of individual atoms). The transfer of 16kbit/44.1kHz CD Audio to 16kbit/44.1kHz MP3 is lossy. However, in theory, transfer from one MP3 to another of exactly the same bitrate is lossless as long as you do it right.
No format is either lossy or lossless (unless the file decays each time you play it), only the transfer into the format can have loss.
The compression can be described as lossy, meaning that it throws away some data in order to get better compression, however, the compression being lossy does not make the format lossy. The correct way to say what you seem to be trying to say would be "MP3 uses lossy compression, whereas CD Audio does not, therefore, MP3 is lossy on two levels as opposed to CDA being lossy on one".
>you mean you can't encode files in Apple's AAC format or whatever it is that the iPod plays? You can only get files in that format from the iTunes store?
No, and you could have found this out very easily...
Google search for: itunes encode aac
The first hit is http://www.apple.com/itunes/encode.html which says:
"Unlike some applications that limit the number of songs you can import in the MP3 format, iTunes lets you import as many songs as you want in either AAC or MP3 formats."
Sugar Hill Gang are certainly old school, but they weren't innovators. That's not to say I don't appreciate them.