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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."
Ain't that what the RIAA uses too? ;)
Download rates... really fast! It's great!
I like DRM and I cannot lie
You other brothers cant deny
When a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist
And p2p in yo face
You get sprung
Wanna pull out ya gun
Cuz the RIAA aint tough
Vonal Declosion
I can't remember the last time a slashdot title made me do a triple-take. Haha.
Have to admit I was a little disappointed as I read on.
why? forty-two.
We had weed back in my day, but I had to *pay* for it. None of this referral paybacks. :)
You download the DRM WMA weed file and can listen to it 3 times on any computer before deciding to purchase
...then I get the song in a lossless format, complete with digitized cover art and free of any DRM, right? Because as a paying customer, I'd expect to get at least the sound quality and format versatility that the pirates are getting.
it or not.
Sure - it's a free tril so I won't complain about the format.
If you do purchase it...
Yes, I did RTFA - the format is no surprise. When the only option for online buying is DRM, it only encourages piracy because regardless of whether you're prepared to pay for the content, it's the only way to get the music without funny restriction.
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
Even more interesting name. I can see the advertisements now. "Weed, the legal alternative to KaZaA"
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pothead DLing weed.
Sig- http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?ayefly
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?
. . . isn't the first time always free?? ;-)
In this case it's the first 3 times, but close enough
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
For the Weed DRM?
Now he just has to find somebody who would actually want his music, or shall I say, jump on it, jump on it, jump on it, jump on it.
I think his best bet to sell music would be inventing a time machine taking him back to the early 1990s.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
So weed has been making music-sharing happen for several decades, at least. Hmph. Internet.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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.
~jeff
(red team go, red team go)
And if the artist and friends buy and buy and buy at the beginning, they can create a false landrush that may influence others to jump in early. "Look at this! This thing is selling like crazy! Better get in now!"
Not a good idea, me thinks...no different than time shares and generic brandingiron futures.
My fri/sat night fun job is doorman for a SJ karaoke bar...
I swear to god if I hear that song being sung by a group of sorority girls screaming into the mics at the top of their lungs one more time i'm going to shoot myself.
Its technically not a Ponzi Scheme. Its more like the red-headed step child of an iPod and Amway.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
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.
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?
You download the DRM WMA weed file
No, no I don't.
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
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.
...but then I got high.
$4.99..................Weed
Deja Vu man. This will be like when I called the hints line at Virgin Interactive. Took forever to explain to my parents that $3.99 to a 900 line called Virgin Entertainment was not a phone sex line.
Honestly though, I wonder if anyone has though about what a tough sell this will be, not to the target demographic, teenagers (they'll love it), but the source of their disposable income, their very uncool parents.
My crystal ball keeps showing me a Chevy Nova.
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?
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.
While, and I quote, "hip hop has always been based on other peoples beats and breaks..." is mostly true, and I can mostly agree with it, when you say "all ripping off..." and "...just to rip off other peoples music" I have to staunchly disagree.
It's one thing if you don't understand or relate to the genre, but please know where fact ends and opinion begins.
Hip hop, and techno, and a plethora of other electronic based (also known as 'groove' based) music uses samples of other peoples works. Does that make their preferred outlet of musical creation any less valid? Are you one of those guys that thinks that unless there is a drummer, bassist, keyboards, guitar, singer, et al making the music that it somehow requires less talent to produce?
As a (self proclaimed) music producer working in the digital realm (with limited analog experience) who has worked with live bands, hip hop, and various forms of techno acts....as well as my own band and experimental electronic productions I have found the strenghts of various forms of expression through production......not only that but the difficulty/challenges inherent to each form.
That being said I believe it to be terribly closed-minded of anyone to think that simply because a beat or rythm was sampled that it somehow degrades the quality or talent required to produce it. Hell, the way I see it doing just that serves as an homage to the original...."I couldn't do that myself or even come close...nothing captures the feeling I'm looking for quite like that...." etc, etc, etc.
Failing that I'd like to see you do it.
To sum this up, it appears to be something you just don't understand. That's fine, but please make it clear when you are speaking (or typing) the difference between fact and your own opinion. To yourself, and those hearing or reading it.
~Dan
Because it's a better player, and there's no reason I shouldn't be able to use the music that I bought with it.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
But then they get very pissed when someone does the same to them.
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
Sir Mix-a-lot is taking some lessons from Cypress Hill...
Heh... They've been using weed to sell their music for years.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
The audio quality is not as good as in the original file but then you can take the WAV file created by Bob and convert that to whatever format you like (MP3, OGG, etc...). This is definitely not legal and the artist loses out on the payment. I wonder if anyone bothers to tell the artists that this huge hole exists in the supposedly "secure" Weed technology.
Mmm... nebulous beeeeeee.
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/
a business prof once pointed out that most music you buy is a license to that particular recording on that particular media....at least, as long as the license states that. I checked a bunch of my cassettes once to find that the record companies had neglected to spell out any of the license terms whatsoever. so my question is, should i accept a best guess (this recording/this media) license, or should i consider that i have an unlimited license due to the fact that there where no limits provided to me?
Their FAQ says they use Paypal, and everyone knows how horrible Paypal is. After reading all the horror stories who's really stupid enough to give Paypal their credit card number anyway? If similar stories were written about a brand of car there would be a massive recall and government investigation, amazing how Paypal still manages to sneak by.
Just like everything else, the people not happy with something are going to be a lot more vocal than the people happy with something. I've used paypal on and off for a few years now, and know several others that have as well, and none of us have had a single problem. Something tells me that paypal has far more satisfied customers than unsatisfied customers.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
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.
Which would you pick?
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Sugar Hill Gang are certainly old school, but they weren't innovators. That's not to say I don't appreciate them.