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NYT Opinion Piece on DRM And P2P
bsartist writes "The NYT is running an opinion piece written by a working musician who has a pretty healthy dislike of copy protection and DRM. From the article: 'As for musicians, we are left to wonder how many more people could be listening to our music if it weren't such a hassle, and how many more iPods might have our albums on them if our labels hadn't sabotaged our releases with cumbersome software.'"
I wish some of the entertainment industry execs would click that link and get a fucking clue.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
"As for musicians, we are left to wonder how many more people could be listening to our music if it weren't such a hassle"
Ok, go here: http://www.okgo.net/music_music.asp
Best of luck to the band!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
" Um, we are listening to your music. We're just not paying. That's the point. "
No, that's not the point. The point is that the less net-savvy people are not listening to the music, since they can't download it to their iPod due to copy protection.
Did you read TFA, or are you just spouting garbage because you feel so proud of yourself for getting songs for free?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
From the article:
Luckily, my band's recently released album, "Oh No," escaped copy control, but only narrowly. When our album came out, our label's parent company, EMI, was testing protective software and thought we were a good candidate for it. Record company executives reasoned that because we appeal to college students who have the high-bandwidth connections necessary for getting access to peer-to-peer networks, we're the kind of band that gets traded instead of bought.
You know what? It was hearing "A Million Ways" on NPR, then a P-2-P download of the song, that CAUSED me to purchase the entire album! If I had not been able to dig the whole song a couple of times, I would have never have purchased it. "Oh No" was the first CD I've bought in 2 years. (I just haven't found a lot of music lately that appeals to me.)
So the very avenue that the record companies fear, generated a sale. How many others has it generated?
I returned the latest Santana CD to Borders Bookstore, where I bought it, after discovering it installed crap without my permission on my company-issued laptop. I was direct with the manager about the problem and they accepted the return with very little hassle.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Why? The human ear is not going to improve in its ability to discern nuances in sound in the near future.
We've pretty much maxed out on providing lossless sound already (as far as the human ear can tell) with current non-DRM formats.
When you're already at the 99.9% level of hearing the sound on playback as it sounded live, there really isn't anything that can improve on it.
Sure.. some suckers will buy a "new" format that claims to be more lossless, and they will insist to everyone that they can really "hear" the difference. But the truth is, unless they have some canine in their ancestry, they won't be able to hear the difference.
We've damn near maxed out on improving sound quality in file formats, as far as any human ear can tell.
DRM is dead. If you can hear it coming through your speakers.. you can record it. At 0.001% loss.
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
New York Times
December 6, 2005
Op-Ed Contributor
Buy, Play, Trade, Repeat
By DAMIAN KULASH Jr.
Los Angeles
THE record company Sony BMG recently got in trouble after attempting to stem piracy by encoding its CD's with software meant to limit how many copies can be made of the discs. It turned out that the copy-protection software exposed consumers' computers to Internet viruses, forcing Sony BMG to recall the CD's.
This technological disaster aside, though, Sony BMG and the other major labels need to face reality: copy-protection software is bad for everyone, consumers, musicians and labels alike. It's much better to have copies of albums on lots of iPods, even if only half of them have been paid for, than to have a few CD's sitting on a shelf and not being played.
The Sony BMG debacle revealed the privacy issues and security risks tied to the spyware that many copy-protection programs install on users' computers. But even if these problems are solved, copy protection is guaranteed to fail because it's a house of cards. No matter how sophisticated the software, it takes only one person to break it, once, and the music is free to roam and multiply on the peer-to-peer file-trading networks.
Meanwhile, music lovers get pushed away. Tech-savvy fans won't go to the trouble of buying a strings-attached record when they can get a better version free. Less Net-knowledgeable fans (those who don't know the simple tricks to get around the copy-protection software or don't use peer-to-peer networks) are punished by discs that often won't load onto their MP3 players (the copy-protection programs are incompatible with Apple's iPods, for example) and sometimes won't even play in their computers.
Conscientious fans, who buy music legally because it's the right thing to do, just get insulted. They've made the choice not to steal their music, and the labels thank them by giving them an inferior product hampered by software that's at best a nuisance, and at worst a security threat.
As for musicians, we are left to wonder how many more people could be listening to our music if it weren't such a hassle, and how many more iPods might have our albums on them if our labels hadn't sabotaged our releases with cumbersome software.
The truth is that the more a record gets listened to, the more successful it is. This is not just our megalomania, it's Marketing 101: the more times a song gets played, the more of a chance it has to catch the ear of someone new. It doesn't do us much good if people buy our records and promptly shelve them; we need them to fall in love with our songs and listen to them over and over. A record that you can't transfer to your iPod is a record you're less likely to listen to, less likely to get obsessed with and less likely to tell your friends about.
Luckily, my band's recently released album, "Oh No," escaped copy control, but only narrowly. When our album came out, our label's parent company, EMI, was testing protective software and thought we were a good candidate for it. Record company executives reasoned that because we appeal to college students who have the high-bandwidth connections necessary for getting access to peer-to-peer networks, we're the kind of band that gets traded instead of bought.
That may be true, but we are also the sort of band that hasn't yet gotten the full attention of MTV and major commercial radio stations, so those college students are our only window onto the world. They are our best chance for success, and we desperately need them to be listening to us, talking about us, coming to our shows and yes, trading us.
To be clear, I certainly don't encourage people to pirate our music. I have poured my life into my band, and after two major label records, our accountants can tell you that we're not real rock stars yet. But before a million people can buy our record, a million people have to hear our music and like it enough to go looking for it. That won'
Damian had a harsher version of this article on music industry blog coolfer.com. Read it here. Looks like he was forced to tone it down for the ny times...