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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."
The biggest difficulties I see it facing are:
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
While I'm disappointed that they're distributing DRM'ed WMA files (non-Windows users will certainly be out of luck), I don't want to be too quick to dismiss this. Any distribution channel that gives the artist 50% of the sale is already better than almost anything else out there.
Can anyone think of a better system that gives the artist this much or more of the sale?
Can anybody show me something in the U.S. Code, the Code of Federal Regulations, or interstate commerce case law that makes multi-level marketing unlawful in general across the United States? For instance, AllAdvantage.com's payouts used a pyramid structure. It died not because of its MLM structure or because of any FTC action relating to its structure but merely because the bottom fell out of the banner market, which in turned happened once advertisers realized the effects of banner blindness.
In a pyramid scheme after the style of Ponzi, on the other hand, participants get little for their investments, and they make money only when somebody else has signed up under them. Once saturation has set in, nobody signs up anymore, and the bottom rung of the pyramid gets shafted. But in this pyramid scheme, every participant at every rung receives at least a license to listen to a Sir Mix-A-Lot recording. Therefore, it's legitimate MLM and not a Ponzi scheme.
"If you do purchase it... ...then I get the song in a lossless format..."
You know this arguement always pisses me off.
What makes MP3s any less lossless than CDA. Its another format and thats it. As a musician (and more to the point, an engineer and tech for real musicians), I don't think I've recorded anything in the last 2 years where the master wasn't at 24bit 96Khz...that means any CD ya listen to is VERY lossy.
Then again, most of the musicians I've worked with ask me to burn it down to MP3 so they can listen to it on their pods and don't care about the difference -- and neither do it...its not like I'm sitting around a listening room smoking a pipe pontificating about the clean lows and the crisp upper range of the latest f'n Sir Mix-A-Lot cd...
I would like to see digital music come with liner notes though (cover art bores me...the liner is where its at).
That's actually an interesting point. There is a german hiphop band called "Die fantastischen Vier" wich use excessive samples from StarWars IV: "A new hope" on their first album ("Jetzt geht's ab") from 1988. If they recorded the album today they would have to pay a huge amount of money to George Lucas. It really isn't easy to determine where exactly an original work of art begins. After all we are all standing on the shoulders of giants (see also SCOs-Copyright trouble).
;-)
Personally I feel that while things get more and more restrictive less of original ideas arise (same with TV shows, Movies, and so on...).
Or is this just me gettnig old?
What makes MP3s any less lossless than CDA.
It's inferior sound quality.
Its another format and thats it.
It's a different kind of format. CD audio is not a lossy compression scheme, it's a way of storing samples. But you knew that.
Look, it costs a couple cents to transmit a 650MB CD across the internet - half that if it's losslessly compressed. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm paying $$ for the songs, I should get them in the best possible format within accepted standards. I.e. I wouldn't expect 96KHz/24bit, but I wouldn't complain.
How can this be less expensive as a means of distribution than simply setting up a server and sell direct, like Apple did ? I mean, don't think about only bandwidth costs but:
1) Costs of paying people down the pyramid
2) Fraud Management
3) "CRM" with the huge mass of "distribution partners"
Unless they have some brilliant marketing concept hidden in there, which I may have missed, it seems like just a more expensive way of doing the same thing Itunes does.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
V.90 dial-up, cable modems, and DSL are patented, having been invented within the last 20 years. How do you get your Internet access?
Yes, CDs are lossy. However, MP3's are much more so. CDs use 16bit/44.1KHz audio, but so do MP3's (I'm aware it's possible to use other datarates, but it's very rare). When the MP3 is made from the (already lossy) CD, it discards 9/10 of the data. That's what makes MP3's lossier (is that a word?) than CDs.
I want lossless formats for my music not for quality purposes (I can't distinguish between CD, 192kbps MP3, and 128kpbs AAC/Vorbis), but for freedom purposes. If you recieve music as a WMA (DRM'd or not), and you want to put in on an iPod, you have to transcode it to MP3. That's quality loss. If you burn it to an audio CD and then later rerip and reencode that CD (say you lost the original file), then that reencoding is a quality loss. The losses from reencoding/transcoding can be quite noticable, especially with more than one generation. A lossless original gives you the freedom to do what you want with the music you bought.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Sir Mix-a-lot first brought us Buttermilk Biscuits, Square Dance Rap>, Baby Got Back and Put 'em On The Glass. If he's distributing those, I'm buying, or downloading, or perhaps just popping in my old Swass casette.
I don't think you understand what "lossless" means.
Using lossless compression, any digital audio file can be duplicated for infinite generations and still be a perfect copy of the original. If you make a FLAC copy of an APE copy of a CDA file (all lossless compression methods), the 3rd generation is identical to the first. No audio information is removed. If you make an MP3 of an OGG of a WMA (lossy methods), the file will change and the sound quality will deteriorate with each successive generation, as more information is irretrievably tossed out each time.
First of all, I wouldn't call P. Diddy (or whatever his name of the week is) or 50 cent pioneers of hip hop. And hip hop has NOT always been based on that. Sugarhill Gang was really the first to do it and they did it rather well, so much so that Rapper's Delight was a VERY different song from Good Times. And I dare you to find anybody who isn't a Run DMC afficianado realize that It's Tricky borrowed guitar lines from My Sharona.
Hip Hop evolved off the streets with what instruments they had, namely records and their voices. So they'd write poetry, and "rap" it overtop their favourite beats. Funk was big in Black culture, as well as useful for rapping as it was a lot of bassline and not so much lyrics, in the 70s and as such was used frequently. And eventually the DJs started manipulating their turntables to do little tricks, like varying the electrical input to change pitch and using their hands to backspin and play with little samples of music, known as "scratching".
Now, I'm not disagreeing with you that most modern hip hop is blatant plagiarism of other people's work, regardless of whether or not it's authorized. But to outright disclaim the entire genre just because of some people who achieve market prominence in the last 10 years who happen to be talentless hacks seems about as silly as to say that Punk is stupid because you dislike Sum 41. Or that Rock sucks because you dislike Linkin Park.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
This is silly, and the AC is actually not too far from the truth.
By rejecting the so-called "pay-for-copy scheme," you're denying the musician to make any money off of his recordings. Real recording (not basement stuff, which will never approach studio quality) is still expensive, and resource-intensive. If a musician can't at least recoup his or her costs on it in direct sales, then they won't have any incentive or ability (i.e. money) to make those recordings.
Now even if they could make them for free, or had the finances to be able to call it part of an advertising budget, there's another problem with free downloads: It doesn't give any value to the art itself.
Free music downloads amounts to exactly the same thing as a painter being forced to sell every work he does at materials cost alone. You could go out and buy a Picasso, a Dali, or a 'local craft sale artist' painting for the same price of rougly $50. You can argue that it's an original instead of a infinitely copyable item, but that makes no difference--the value is in the art, and by not paying for the art, you're convincing the artists to quit producing.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Legally, I don't know. Morally, you paid for the music, so it's your right to enjoy in any form you please.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.