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."

Comments

Maybe In Certain Circles

[Oculus Habent]

While this has potential in large groups of same-age individuals - schools, universities - I don't see this making significant headway in "the real world". I purchase most of my music, and I occasionally burn CDs for friends.

The biggest difficulties I see it facing are:

• Selection: If there isn't much there, people aren't as likely to use it.
• Price: Artist-set prices could mean big variations. Hopefully it'll be consistent, but who knows.
• Convenience: When three plays are up, how much more difficult is it to download the song on the p2p-network-du-jour?

Baby Got DRM

[linux_user_31337]

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?

Re:People won't pay for DRM in the long run

[clifyt]

"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).

Re:original hip hop ?

[Lispy]

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? ;-)

Re:People won't pay for DRM in the long run

[seanadams.com]

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.

Thinking about the costs of doing it

[rcastro0]

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.

Re:original hip hop ?

[ebbomega]

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.