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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? ;)
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
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.
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?
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
~jeff
(red team go, red team go)
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.
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!
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...
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.
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.
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.