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Oxfam Launches Music Download Service
rahaydenuk writes "The BBC reports that Oxfam is backing the Big Noise Music website, which launches on Wednesday and will offer 300,000 songs for download. 10p of the 75p or 99p charge to download the songs will go to Oxfam and the service will be available across Europe."
The real question is what formats do they support, and what kind(s) of DRM are used.
Y'know, you blow up one sun and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water.
Blame the RIAA monopoly for the bands getting screwed.
Do you even know what Oxfam is you illiterate fuckwad? Mod this idiot down for being a jackass please.
Tracks will cost between 75p and 99p, with 10p going to Oxfam. Acts featured include Coldplay and George Michael.
"Artists will see their music help some of the poorest people in the world," Oxfam's Adrian Lovett said.
10p for the poor, a large portion of 75p to 99p to the record companies, a itty bit of the rest to Big Noise and the artists.
In short, helping the poor helps the record companies. Just give 10p to the poors in your area, or to the local charity, you'll feel better...
Funny. I don't have an ipod. I don't even have a mac. I buy music with iTunes, and burn to cd's to play in my old fashioned "cd player".
10p each track to charity is all well and good if the songs were say 20-30p each, but 75p to 1 quid? I don't think so. I may as well just go into Oxfam and buy a couple of quids worth of old cloths or whatnot, then all the money goes to Oxfam.
Until a digital music service offers me MP3s at a reasonable price all my money is going to the Russians
MODS ON CRACK
How is the parent a troll post. The post does not attempt to condone music piracy or discourage donation to charity. It is merely a follow up on the grand parent topic which is expressing the disgust at the fact that companies use the promise of charity to maximise profits while the charities receive minimal amounts.
It's the same for us geeks who write software. Information is a commodity like sugar. It's the 21st century, I guess you'll just have to deal with it.
Most people who labor in a "service" market leave no mark. Most of the software I have written in my life doesn't or will not have any hardware to run it on any more.
If you get paid for your work and not copies of your work you will be better off in the long run, since, (to paraphrase), in the long run, we are all dead anyhow.
Enjoy what you do. Make a living at it if you are lucky, get wealthy at it if you are absurdly lucky.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The grandparent's argument is quite sound; WMA, despite being proprietary and Microsoft, is still the more open choice for most consumers, ironically.
Unless the WMA you happend to buy forbade copying to a portable device, or burning CD's. Or until the service goes belly-up - taking ou tthe licence server, and leaving you a month or two to discover this fact and somehow save your music into some other format before the licence expires...
With iTunes and ITMS, I can use PlayFair (renamed to something I can't remember offhand) to have no DRM at all and convert to MP3 at will if I were silly enough to own a lump of plastic player music and was not an iPod. Can you do that with your WMA?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I am a software programmer. Always have been.
Make programs. Review other peoples ones. etc.
I support OSS, but I am starting to feel like some kind of object. Everything I make will probably end up in some kind of big discount sale. A few more years and it will be commonplace to get media with a thousand programs on it. Probably as a free gift along with your petrol.
It makes programs seem like the free coupons you get when you buy the right brand of detergant.
[wait! It already does that! Guess what? The solution is to charge for services. So play your music, charge recordings, make concerts, etc and make a living out of it. See the nice effect, more people will listen to your music.]
Sneak teach kids Algebra using a game