Slashdot Mirror
The Chumbawamba Factor
putko writes "Chris Dahlen has written about BigChampagne, a company that looks at peer-to-peer downloading to provide marketing data to record companies. By analyzing what folks are downloading, when and where, BigChampagne can tell the record companies what people like, what other records they like and other information critical to deciding how to allocate marketing dollars. As mentioned in the article, record companies started using this information (secretly) even as they were trying to stop filesharing via the courts."
First off, for those of you who have no idea, or only a vague memory; "Chumbawamba are a band from the UK who use their music to promote anarchist ideas."
So the RIAA et al are trying to put an end to P2P, while hypocritically using P2P stats to know what's hot; they have crossed the threshold from tyranny into absurdity. What judge, knowing this, will still side with the RIAA in the future? Does this not set a precedent that the RIAA sees value in P2P?
The RIAA is reacting to a market change; P2P. They are learning that P2P has value to them, perhaps more value than loss, in that they can get a real consensus on what people want. Furthermore, the RIAA can no longer deem P2P as an immoral behaviour that corrupts society, because the fruit from the tree has poisoned their self-professed purity.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Right. If they were really interested in what people were listening to, they'd invest more time in AudioScrobbler.
-mkb
Lets see.
First No. they have no music servers.
Second No. They download nothing.
Finially they delete nothign because they download nothing.
Their program is actually nothign more then a statistics analasys program that harvets data from result sets returned by P2P searches.
It is complicated as fuck, don't get me wrong. But no music data ever trades hands.
I'm pretty sure I got this link from slashdot:
e .html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.10/fileshar
The companies that licence anime in america do roughly the same thing. They watch the fan sub community for what is popular, then licence it and sell it.
Remeber folks before it was band Chumbawamba was a drink..
it is a cider drink..
it is lager drink..
it is a whisky drink...
6oz hard cider
6oz lager beer
1oz whisky
mix in a pint glass, with no ice.
It tastes better than it sounds
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Some fine choices, sir!
Chumbawamba make a huge collection of back catalogue stuff and oddities available for free download. If you liked Tumbthumping you probably won't find much of interest ;-) Likewise, mainstream politicos may be offended by what's on offer here. <voice type="outraged">these guys are like... anarchists!</voice>
This is where the serious fun begins.
ahhhhg this just proves I'm sick in the head, by remembering this crap from 2 years ago!!!
2 2&tid=141&tid=187&tid=98
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/10/15412
Sig
"Chumbawamba were a one hit wonder"
How very dare you! I spent many a happy evening as an indie student dancing to "Timebomb", "Enough Is Enough" and "Homophobia".
Seriously though, whilst they may be in the one-hit-wonder category in the USA, in the UK they had a string of indie-chart (roughly synonymous with the US "Alternative Chart") hits in the early 90's (throughout which I remained a member of the Young Conservatives, so obviously their political aims were significantly less effective than their indie-chart abilities). I would have thought that all of their releases from about 1991-1995 would have been in the UK Indie Top 20.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
http://www.last.fm/charts/
a
There's some crossover there, (e.g. Green Day) but no Mariah Carey.
The poster of the previous comment above mentions Audioscrobbler, and this reply was really prompted by that.
If you're not familiar with either - Audioscrobbler works out links between different artists based on what people play (via music player plugins) and last.fm is an online radio station that uses that information.
As an example:
http://www.last.fm/explore/?artistname=chumbawamb
1) So, if they're distributing crap, then why are you filling up your iPod with it?
2) You only think you know the costs. Somebody is maintaining a large and expensive web site. Somebody is maintaining a bank of servers. Somebody is paying for bandwidth. Somebody is paying the credit card company 20-30 cents per transaction. Somebody is paying for the music. And Apple and the record companies and the artists are all (god forbid) making a profit.
3) Most of the content on my iPods, and my friends, for that matter, come from ripped CDs we already owned. The rest comes from iTunes and Audible. The "most is illegal" assumption strikes me as the standard "everyone else must be doing it" rationalization. Somebody bought 500,000,000 songs off iTunes.
4) "Copying to tape" has been sanctioned almost since the reel-to-reel was invented. I know you enjoyed feeling like a rebel, but your sanctity in that regard is safe.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.