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Music Labels Screwed, DRM Is Dead
An anonymous reader writes "Peter Jenner, former manager of bands like Pink Floyd, T.Rex and the Clash, states in an interview with the Register that music label executives have lost faith in DRM and dollar-per-track online music selling isn't working too well as a model. He predicts that in two to three years time, many countries will have moved to a blanket licensing regime." The article goes on at some length, talking about the value of digital music, patterns in the music industry, and some business at the end about 'the tyranny of the playlist' that I'm not hep enough to follow. I'm not sure this rant has any connection whatsoever with reality, but it is something to think about.
I certainly doubt that unless someone does all the work for them, hands it to them on a plate and has a potential market share that can force them into it (like the itunes store back in the day) that the major record labels will continue to resist changes until they die out. Even in the early 90s bands were refering to the record companies as 'Dinosaurs on the way to extinction'. The extinction will be a long time coming but the companies are not known for their ability to adapt which will kill them in the end.
Warhammer forums
...then why think about it at all?
...but it bashes the music industry, so it gets dumped on the front page of Slashdot. Wonderful.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Just looking at the bands he manages - they're mostly washed up, even one of the newer ones - Billy Brag, was "popular" about 20 years ago.
He also further demonstrated his poor grasp on reality when he mentioned rich tenured professors. LOL! Professors rich??? Slave away in academia for 100K a year - that's not rich.
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I really can't believe how much of Slashdot on the weekends is composed of old di*g stories...
I think I've seen that prerequisite before.
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
So Jenner's wonderful idea is a music tax?
Frankly, I'd rather have the DRM.
The "freedom" people are telling us I have to go out and sell more T-shirts - it's an argument I find tremendously insulting.
Nobody cares, Mr Jenner. Nobody cares.
ding dong the witch is dead
Select SigText from Signatures where Len(SigText) > 120 Order By Len(SigText) desc
Whether music labels, musicians, Peter Jenner, you or I like it or not, there's a fundamental problem that everybody seems to understand: as long as lossless copies of music (or movies or photos for that matter) can be made, paying for music is dead.
What I mean is: before computers became widely available, people had the option of sharing bootleg analog copies of something (which was prone to sound degradation during copy, and media aging) or buying a legit copy of the medium with the best possible song. That is, people who wanted good quality music bought the "officially sanctionned" medium it was imprinted on. Now that everybody can copy a file a million times without any quality loss other than the one possibly introduced during sampling, who's to stop people from copying things for free? only two thing: people's sense of morality ("I don't want to steal from artists") and people's fear of the law ("I don't want to be caught with illegal copies on my hard disk"). That's hardly the basis of a healthy business model.
The one-music==one-media confusion that is the basis of the **AA's business model is dead. In reality, record companies sell plastic disks, not music, and people don't need plastic disks anymore, so record companies are now obsolete. If they want to stay alive with their obsolete business model, they have to:
- appeal to people's morality: not likely to generate revenues long-term
- DRM-protect their music: easily circumvented as shown numerous times
- DRM-protect hardware: easily circumvented regardless of the hardware, simply by playing and re-recording the music
- push for harder copyright laws: circumvented by the sheer mass of file-sharers, which effectively means that an individual file-sharer has a next-to-null chance of getting caught
*or*... they could disappear and music bands could turn back into what they once were: live performers, who were paid to play music on a stage.
So in short: Peter Jenner is wrong. Nobody will turn to X, Y or Z licensing scheme. Eventually, people will share music for free, simply because that is the logical technical and legal way it must be, and they will pay musicians directly to give them what no amount of digital files can give them: live performances.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
A blanket licensing system won't work.
It's merely a last-ditch effort by media companies to hold on to their existing business model as much as possible. What Mr Jenner is assuming in this interview is that collection organisations such as PRS and MCPS could have their reach extended further by encompassing not just broadcasters, performance venues, or regular retail, but every citizen that just *might* be using content that the media companies have acquired copyright for.
What Jenner is failing to realise here is that these collection oligarchies are rapidly becoming outmoded. Artists beginning to realise that these mechanisms which collect and distribute money are incredibly unfair, favouring only the larger artists, or at least the ones with the better-negotiated contract. To assume that a panicked extension on the remit of collection organisations would run as the BBC television license is laughable. The BBC is only able to exist on a strong public-service remit - allowing record companies their own secondary taxation would not work with an already jaded public.
Many artists, and smaller labels are realising that the old systems are not the only way to get their music to the public, and to make a living from doing what they love. If Sony BMG, Warner, EMI and Universal wish to continue to sell music, they really need to rethink the way in which they do business.
[Please insert your own ocean liner feng shui metaphor here]
only big label companies and their sponsored software developers believed to be so, maybe, for a short while.
It was stupid right from the start - digital environment, internet is a free medium. freedom is its nature and its result. monopoly, impending 100-year old control schemes for distribution of intellectual property was a 'clueless' idea at best, if not stupid.
Given the big label company ceos, execs are now of a generation that is in their 60-70s, it is no surprise that they have misjudged that we were still in 1950s.
Gramps, you are of a dying generation. you are passing away.
then, instead of trying to screw your label and your shareholders with dinosaur-worthy 'measures', embrace the new digital/internet revolution and leave a good name behind.
or, leave your chairs to younger ones, who are actually able to understand the contemporary times and participate in it.
Read radical news here
Remain? I used to know the Wall by heart 25 years ago, including all the instrumental arrangement, and this is the first time I hear about Peter Jenner. Surely if he were that important to PF sound as, say, Alan Parsons or Clare Torry were, I would probably knew him.
I have read abot Jenner. What does make him relevant to the subject of his interview?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Here you go. Apparently he handmakes fine jewelry.
Yes, I do know about the Clash(I happen to like them a lot) and Pink Floyd, but the Clash broke up 15-20 years ago?
As for Professors, on average they are not typically rolling around in money like your examples are. Go look up the AVERAGE wage for tenured profs
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...I would I believe him. For me, this interview is very informative, thank you very much :)
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
That's great! He sounds like a really fascinating, well-weathered guy who has had a hand in promoting and advertising musicians. I'm sure he has a lot of really cool stories to tell about his experiences as a manager. But has that experience working in a music culture so dramatically different from the present day one given him the ability to intuit anything about DRM, about evolving content delivery systems, about much of anything outside of managing bands? Of course it hasn't. I'd rather hear the opinion of someone who is actually involved in the online music distribution business, someone like...hell, Steve Jobs, as opposed to an aging, disgruntled outsider who has been commissioned to tell us what we want to hear.
Perhaps that's why the only thing he gives us in the interview is sloganeering, platitudes, and empty insights that most of us who have been paying attention are already wise to. DRM is already dying. You don't need to drag out the old Pink Floyd manager and have him give a curse word-laced statement to that effect.
He is one of the most respected music managers in the global music industry, Secretary-General of the International Music Managers Forum (IMMF), the international organisation that represents managers and featured artists, and a member of the board of the UK Music Managers Forum, the UK national managers trade association.
You clearly have no clue as to what a manager's function is, since you make reference as to whether or not Jenner affected PF's sound (you're possibly getting the role confused with a producer, who does affect the sound). A manager is the person who manages the band's business aspects--booking shows, dealing with contracts, setting up licensing, etc. It's very much a behind-the-scenes role, which is why you generally don't hear about them. However, they are very instrumental (ha!) in guiding a band's career.
This guy's the limit!
Washed up as in not current - one CD in 10++ years definitely qualifies as that. . How many people under 30 bought any of that stuff - very few. Yes you will find exceptions, but in general, these bands were popular a while ago.
I guess we're differing on what washed up refers to - you're talking about money, I'm talking about musical relevance. Reunion tours, and album releases every 12 years or so kinda mean they're done.
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He's this guy I think (history of that page goes back a few years, so obviously other people had heard of him, even if you hadn't.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
He also won some olympic gold medals, but I thought he died from lung cancer recently. Guess I was wrong.
My heart stopped for a second there, you shouldn't tease!
"Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system"
Why would I want to participate in the Slashdot moderation system?
I went to school with somebody who later became the MD of Sony Music UK. I met him at a mutual friend's new year's party a couple of years ago and we got talking about how he signed Travis, and bout new bands, and the rise of this Internet thing.
I have a great deal of interest in the copyfight, and earlier that year had attended one of RMS's talks, was reading Laurence Lessig, et. al. Naturally, I wanted to know what he thought of all that stuff. As head of one of the most powerful A&R operations on earth, I assumed he would definitely have an opinion.
But he seemed either completely ignorant of the issues, or completely unconcerned. He said something about how their lawyers are "doing something about it" but other than that had no interest. What about copying music? "Oh, we'll sort that out I'm sure." What about the role of the publisher as gatekeeper to new talent? "Er, what about it? We put a lot of investment into choosing acts that will do well. And they do do well."
Something about rabbits and headlights came to mind, so I asked him about where he went on holiday that year (France, it was really nice, you really *must* visit the Dordogne...)
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
It sounds like a mix of the license fees that retail establishments / bars / etc pay to play music combined with radio.
You could play a flat monthly fee and listen to what you want, the various artists get paid based on what you decide to stream. If enough music was available that way it certainly would be a seismic shift in the way music is bought and sold - not just for iTunes and recored stores; but for services such as satelitte radio and cell phone providers that want to sell you music. If you could pay a flat fee and listen to what you want where you want they would add no value. The one challenge is how do you allow playing away from a streaming signal - perhaps you allow a limited amount of music to be recorded and played at will - sort of like the Blockbuster / Netflix send a DVD model.
Of course, in the end teh battle will be over money - todays and controlling the distribution to maintain a lock on future revenue.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Well put. Keep in mind that those labels used to try to sign bands based on the idea of exposure. The angle was always that they "knew the music business" and could arrange shows, provide space on store shelves for their records/tapes/CD's, and in general make the band more money. But what we're seeing now is a situation in which those labels are less and less capable of trapping new talent, because the bands themselves realize how little added value the old channels offer over self-promotion. Who wants space on a store shelf when traditional music stores are dying all around us? Just ask the latest victim, Tower Records. Hell, ask the record store owner I knew in indie rock hotbed, Chapel Hill, who one day confided in me that if he didn't run an eBay store on the side, he would be out of business.
Depending on the band's budget, direct-to-consumer marketing can be as simple as a band web page with PayPal buttons on it for downloading DRM-free mp3s, or it can consist of television or radio advertising, or anything else you can imagine. If you're a new, unproven band, and you have a good idea of what you're trying to accomplish coupled with the discipline to keep your overhead low, then you really don't need the "help" of a Sony BMG, an Atlantic or a Warner.
Anyone else find the title for this story misleading? I was expecting it to be about some new legislation that was suddenly passed, or some sort of skeleton-crack or something. What it actually should have been was "Some Guy Thinks Music Labels Screwed, DRM Dead".
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
payola n, Illegal promotion of music where record companies pay radio stations to play their songs.
playlist n. Legal promotion of music where record companies pay promoters to pay radio stations to play their songs.
To be fair, the Clash is the only band that matters. If he managed them, he must matter at least a little bit even if we don't know exactly who he is.
This is news? This is the same sh!t we've heard every week for months. http://what-is-what.com/what_is/drm.html/
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I know record companies are unable to adapt to changing technology them but I do feel they are in part to blame for the mess they're in. If you look at the history of the big bands and solo artists, the record companies biggest earners, they had spent 3, 4 years, sometimes more touring, building up a loyal fanbase before they got a record deal. These bands/artists created great singles and more importantly great albums, which is where they and the record companies make the money. Even when the bands were having low points in their careers, money was still pouring in from back cataloges. Nowadays, the record companies manufacture bands and artists through hype and televison programmes. They release a few singles to hype up album sales. These artists have only a shelf life of two or three albums and they're dropped. The problem is that the people who like these artists are not interested in albums, they're interested in the songs. Who wants to spend £15 on an album when they can get the tracks for nothing? There are people who will pay for these downloads but again, they're interested in the song, not the artist and mostly likely won't buy any more of the artists songs. IMHO, the record companies would still have problem if the technology of illegal downloads did not exist. Like the film industry it is a convienant excuse for failed managerial decisions.
old music guy says: "You've got to provide stuff that people can keep, and they don't mind paying you $3 a month for."
....and how does that work? oh yeah, you have to pay $3 a month *FOREVER* and you don't have a choice about paying it if you want music
;-)
unfortunately, this is "brit-think" like the TV Tax. Won't work in America - where taxes are a four-letter word.
Can you imagine americans paying a tax to watch TV? ho! ho!
now we *will* pay unlimited $$$ to watch/not watch cable trash, and then bitch about how much we pay the cable companies - that is the american capitalist way; we prefer our corporate handouts/guarantees not too closely or obviously linked to the government. it allows us to keep up the independent cowboy charade
So the Floyd, with the longest running most successful album ever, don't count?
"people's sense of morality ("I don't want to steal from artists") "
This is about possible copyright infringement, not theft. Morality about stealing is hardly relevant. Not any more so than mentioning that people don't want to rape the artists.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I for one much prefer the "tyranny of the playlist" over having to get up every few minutes to change an LP or CD, and it's certainly easy enough to put together a different playlist if I wish.
Whenever there is a new recording or artist I'd like to check out, this is where I go:
1. eMusic
2. AllOfMp3
3. Bittorrent or other P2P
I'm willingly to pay a small fee to download good quality non-DRM music that I can play anywhere I want just for the convenience of being able to download it with no hassle. Unfortunately eMusic rarely has what I'm looking for, so I go to AllOfMp3 which almost has everything (and for a price cheap enough to download things even if I'm just browsing, and yes, I know the artists don't get anything). If all else fails, there's always the finding/downloading hassle of a P2P application or finding a used copy of an album on Amazon or eBay (fifteen to twenty dollars is a bit much for a new album).
the music industry is dying because of one very good reason: it sucks. new bands are horrible and the old tried and true bands aren't putting out anything.
on top of it all - the RIAA has become nothing more than a bully.
nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
End of the line is that you will have to somehow persuade people to give their money for music. Right now that money is spent on other things as access to music is easy and cheap (even free). DRM doesn't help here.
So the money is now in concerts (live performances) prices of which did rise significantly in recent years.
Flat model? Maybe (like a tax we pay to state TV houses in some countries), but it isn't going to get many people rich and money will again be ripped by clever managers and all those intermediate rats.
Because Peter Jenner is not a musician. But he is someone who makes his money in the music business. This is one of the middlemen standing up and saying, "Hang on a minute, we're all fucked". He doesn't work for a record company, his interest is promoting the band that he is working for so he has a certain amount of leeway in what he says. A record exec is bound by the bottom-line, and owning the distribution channel, and above all *fearing change*. His entire livelyhood is based on preventing change.
Peter Jenner is relevent because he is one of the cogs in the machine that can speak out. His first interest is not preserving the status quo (terrible pun if he did manage them, I hope not...) but in promoting the interest of whichever band he is managing. And if you read what he said in the interview it's startling to hear an industry insider say what he does. "The record companies are fucked, they've raped their own business model to extinction". I've paraphrased him a little, but pg 4 has some interesting stuff.
In particular, his own view of the future that he is selling is not just blanket licensing rights for artists. He is also looking at the supply side - the supply of capital to start bands and promote them to profit. He doesn't use the words, but what he is describing is a stockmarket. Where investors can speculate in talent by buying a share of future profits. This is a really interesting idea for the music industry. A market where return comes directly from popularity.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
The music industry needs to get around the mindset that they are due a monthly stipend. That pricing system rewards mediocrity and lack of creativity, which is all to prevalent in what the music industry calls its product today. There is absolutely no way I will pay any money for a license to listen to music that I may already own or music I wish to own. The fact someone is willing to pay money for a product, whether it's $15 per CD or 99 cents per download is the incentive this industry needs to give the customer what they want, not what the music industry wants. It's been written here so many times before that the reason the industry has lackluster sales is because the product isn't what the customer wants and its delivery method doesn't suit the method the customer wants.
I can't think of too many "kids" who don't like iTunes. My kids and their friends eat up iTunes gift cards downloading the exact music they want without having to pay $15 for a CD that has one or maybe two songs they enjoy. Which heralds back to what I remember as a kid where I could run up to the local drug store, fork over a dollar and get a 45 with the exact music I wanted (yeah, I'm that old). That's what the music industry was built upon before it was turned into a cash machine that ate customer good-will. And that was before the advent of downloadable music; now the music industry is vilified to the point of no return in the eyes of its customers.
"[...]the network is keeping an eye on you to see you don't download any music. And if you do without a license, we'll sue the hell out of you" - from the article As opposed to how it is working right now? (someone keeping an eye on things and sueing) And how would this work in the great many parts of the world where music downloading is very much legal?
If man has no tea in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty
The fact is, you can't outrun supply and demand. Prices don't set S&D, S&D set prices. When the supply is near infinite, the price falls to zero, and there is nothing the State can do to control it. Imagine if they State charged for air.
This means that musicians and ALL artists will have to work just like everyone. They can create live (a show) for a fee. They can produce something unique (a jingle, or a painting) for a fee. They will have to do real jobs doing their thing if they want to make money.
This is a good thing. The free market is a great equalizer, giving power to those who want to continue creating rather than those who want to make-once-and-license. The free market makes sense: a plumber doesn't charge you per flush, he charges you to install the toilet, and then to fix it if it breaks. A musicians is like a plumber (I know, I produce a few of them); they should make their money touring and giving lessons and selling merchandise that is unique and not-easily duplicated (autographed copies makes sense).
DRM is the posterchild of news outlets that rely on fearmongering to produce interest.
But in reality (in 21th century: news != reality) DRM is only a mild "protection". Just like any other copy protection.
It was never alive. There is no DRM that really works.
Let's say I pay a music tax -- how do the ISP in collaboration with the owner of the intellectual property then figure out who should get the money for something I downloaded? Assuming an "popularity/assumption model" is one of their ideas -- I do not want the income be split according to the popularity of artists, as that could give Madonna money for downloading from a far less common artist. And how is the fee adjusted to how much copyrighted music I'd download? Because it is, right, otherwise it's completely unfair.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
to bad we let the corrupt and evil people poison our culture with thier excessive greed
somedays i'm so ashamed to be human
I think it is about time to reconsider patents and intellectual property rights. People complain about the Hollywood crowd and music industry because of how much money they make versus how much work they do but they can't put their finger on it. The real deal is those industries have to use the coersion of the government in order to maintain their market. Before recordings musicians made money like everyone else they had to go do work, ie perform in concert for paying guests. Before movies actors had to perform in theater. They had to play for limited audiences which limited their income. With the invention of recordings and using the force of government they can now perform for limitless audiences while not even being there.
I think this has finally come to an end. Artists will once again have to survive by performing for audiences.
A similar thing exists in my field engineering. A firm can pay me to build a machine for them which I will do. If they want to know all of the information to build additional machines they can either pay me additional for the design or if my price is too high they can reverse engineer it.
The majority of people have no issue with DRM as long as it doesn't seriously inconvenience them in day to day use. The record companies aren't going away as they control the means to shelf space, both at retail and even on the Internet. There simply aren't enough venues to support every band out there, the whole idea that every band will make it's living off live performances is laughable if you actually know anything about the music business.
I think it would be better to describe it using an evolution analogy. Some new contender (like some podcast, music distribution site, or streaming radio station) will come along and find a way to make big bucks while at the same time producing their own content. Sure, they may not be raking in dough hand-over-fist, the way the music industry does now, when a hit song emerges, but the point is that the musicians who previously would have had no choice but to give 95% of their profits to the record pimps at the RIAA, could go somewhere else and get a better deal.
The end result will be that one or two labels will lose money and be bought out by either this new contender or their RIAA competitors, but the rest of the industry will see what they have to do to compete: change their name (because their old name was associated with idiots who tried to rip people off. The new company will be run by the same idiots, but under a different business model), and then adopt whatever marketing scheme worked for their non-RIAA counterparts. In the end, the RIAA will not look the same, but most of them will adapt.
I won't pay for it anymore, well, not much, already spent a decade and a half helping "the industry" get established, now it is, time to evolve some more.. I'll pay a reasonable fee to get software on durable archive quality stamped disks, and possibly a reasonable fee for online updates and patches, but that's it. Same with entertainment. I guess to be very clear, not old school full price, nor do I expect it to be entirely free, digital or not, it still costs to transfer, and the servers cost, etc, etc, that is understandable, but volume sales should brng prices down dramatically, much cheaper than what you see now. there is a lot more room to improve there..
For music, yes, they should make the bulk of their money playing live and selling schwag if they want to, and society can figure out how many artists it can support then doing this-I doubt all of them or even most of them, much as they might wish it so. Just like I don't think society can support millions of people who would like to be profession videogame testers either, although that is probably a lot of peoples dream job.
For software, service only, the patches and upgrades and bugfixes. The basic raw programs though, should be quite cheap or free. You use that as an inducement for your customers to stick with you. I actually think Shuttleworth has a good model there, he took a quite reasonable amount of money as far as a business startup goes, ten million if I recall correctly, and went out and offered free disks in the mail, setup decent websites with easy to use forums for the users, good repositories, etc and now look, two years later he has the number one distro out there, with increasing interest. Mindshare sells, and he has a long view, which is refreshing in business these days. Eventually, one of the major PC makers is going to crack and break free from total MS dominance, and he will be sitting pretty then, ready to offer a pretty full stack of normal user apps all the way to enterprise business apps, for cheap enough to be attractive, useful enough to fill many niches, and practical enough from a functionality standpoint to be..well,practical. That project will start making money then and spread horizontally and make money for a ton of little guys.
You can see roughly similar in other business, take restaurants. The main course is usually around break-even, they make their profit from selling drinks and desserts mostly. Software-make the main course cheap or free, then make your loot on the side dishes and the service.
1) copyright is a monopoly that monopoly should not be tweaked so as to cut off competition from other labels/artists. By payola making radio stations who play only big-label stuff (and not indie/local) more profitable, you squeeze out the other labels from promotion.
a) the only way to get heard widely is to join a RIAA label (and the contract remaing that goes with it)
b) unaligned stations lose out local talent
2) If the labels are paying to distribute their works widely (which can then be recorded losslessly by the listener: check your national laws), why isn't a payment forthcoming to P2P seeders for advertising a lossy format to everyone on the planet (theoretically)? Well, because #1 coercion requires that the radio be the only accepted channel otherwise there IS another channel that they do not control and cannot pay off that indie and artists can use to get heard without according the RIAA their 100lbs of flesh.
i think i have this right...... basically he is calling for a tax on every internet connection (including cell phones etc). that tax going into a giant pot, and some magical piece of software decides what artists deserve what cut of that pot.
he compared it to the licensing schemes for radio etc, but the radio one is kind of based on radio station submitting lists of what songs get spun however many times. if the station drops the ball reporting, or the artist is not registered, then they get nothing.
i am not sure what magic software will know how many times certain songs are downloaded? he didn't call for a central government run P2P site, or something that monitors all net traffic to figure out what songs are being transferred. i could see some small artist with a computer hacker friendly fan base becoming very very profitable if they could make it looks like a lot of people are downloading their songs.
he seems to gloss over the technical difficulties, and the odd fact that, say, my mother, would pay as much as a 16 year old kid with 500 GB of hard disks to fill. i guess that's how blanket taxes work though. great. i don't see a need for world governments to unite and go through all this crap to save the music industry as we know it. even if they wanted to, i bet it would take years and years to hash it out.
The thing I don't understand is why doesn't a big name artist say fuck you to their studio and go out on their own. U2, Madonna, Britney, etc could all do it. Start your own site selling non DRM lossless songs, do individual deals for CD distribution, run a few commercials.
You are right for th emost part about the shift 'back', but people still will want to carry music around with them. And that recorded music wont be 'free'.
Beacuse of that, I dont think 'recorded music' will dissapear, it will just shift to the artists direct control instead of a 'association'. the need (?) for an industry to fund budding artists to get them started is gone.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Really? According to everything else I'm reading, we're discussing how the market for music has changed, and that certain people associated with the industry believe that it is time, by force or by flow, to make a change. And, how the majority of the system doesn't want to.
If you'll read the parent comment to my post, and you didn't so I forgive you, you'll see that someone mentioned a retail music salesman that is complaining about needing an internet business to stay in business.
The allusion that I was trying to draw together here is:
Music industry (Licensing, Marketing, Retail) = Same attitude: The new economy is bad and we want to do it the old way forever.
Now, since you didn't understand the comment the first time, here's the tag I forgot to include -
There is however an immediate positive effect of these discussions - the politicians are beginning to understand that going after file sharers isn't an acceptable solution. The sheer mass of people that are sharing, and the very few lawsuits and convictions make the law basically arbitrary. And that's one thing that the law can't be - random.
In addition the trials so far have been spectacular failures for the music industry as it has been established that you can't get a search warrant on charges of copyright violation. This means that the police have no way of securing evidence against file sharers and the courts have established that IP logging and screen shots are insufficient evidence.
While it is far from over both legally and politically, both the legislative and judicial parts of the government are starting to look at the problem realistically.
I would like to point out that it is a common misconception that bands earn their wages from live concerts. It is quite to the contrary! Most bands play local gigs for free, when they're small because they have to, when they're big because local gigs then become "secret gigs." Move on to much larger venues, yes, they may get paid (after the manager, producer, venue itself, etc. etc.) enough for the drinks they go for after the set, but by no means is this their primary income, merely because it's damned expensive to run a large gig, whether it be at a mainstream venue, and even less likely at a festival as the bands are usually invited and go for the free booze/food/fun/promotion. No, their primary income is from CD sales. Why do you think some bands are trying to ride at the forefront of the digital downloads? Because they feel that that's going to be their cash cow. i.e. they get a bigger commission as they're cutting out people in the middle. Secondly, their money comes from endorsements and advertising. So, these bands earn a living from their CD/Vinyl/Download sales through the pennies that they earn per sale until they gain enough clout to grab the serious cash in advertising. Remember that every rung on the ladder is harder to get to than the previous. Free gigs, CDs start to sell (usually self-produced), larger gigs, CDs sell, but contract bites them in the ass on commission, popularity increases, larger gigs, still don't pay well, but now they can live easily off of their heavy-selling CDs, finally, advertising, and they end up on "MTV Cribs."
http://www.collude.biz - Ignore this, it's for Project Honey Pot.
Bruce Jenner is the Olympic athlete, and is very much alive.
TV broadcaster Peter Jennings died from lung cancer last year.
What's odd is that humanities divisions often run surpluses because it's cheap to teach. All you need is a room, some chairs, and a prof. Where I used to work, the Faculty of Medicine was always in the red (expensive to teach -- all those corpses, chemicals, doctor/profs...). The admins would transfer money from humanities to medicine, which meant no raises for humanities folk.
"This means that musicians and ALL artists will have to work just like everyone. They can create live (a show) for a fee. They can produce something unique (a jingle, or a painting) for a fee. They will have to do real jobs doing their thing if they want to make money."
One of these days, I want to find the person who started this entire myth about what the life of an artist is like and shoot them. Several times.
I've got news for you - the creative artists who get really rich off their work are the tiny minority. Most of the creative artists out there create in their spare time - they keep their day jobs, because that's the only way to support themselves.
That first novel? Well, guess what - you're lucky if when it's all said and done you make minimum wage for the hours you spent on it - and believe me, I know - my first published print book came out to around $800/month for the time I was working on it, and I worked on it full-time. Courtney Love, in a famous speech, pointed out that most recording artists make less in their first year of recording than they would waiting tables. And most actors getting started need a part-time job to keep a roof over their heads. I can't speak for the visual arts, but I haven't heard of too many who make that massive sale to a gallery.
Now, consider this - if the compensation for the creative arts was fair and equitable, you'd be paying a lot more for it, not a lot less. Perhaps instead of talking about us like we're some spoiled children, you should be grateful that we love our craft and our art to the point that despite being short-changed for it, we are still producing work for you to consume. Perhaps you should thank us for tolerating living below poverty lines to create your entertainment. And perhaps, just perhaps, you should do some research before posting, so that you don't offend those of us who actually CREATE.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Because the artists in a position to do this don't need to. If you get to be as big as U2, you have enough bargaining power to get a good deal from the label. It's the little guys that get screwed over by the labels. (No surprise there.)
That said, I still have hope it will happen eventually.
We can have an 'OfRoy' - an office of royalties, or whatever you want to call it.
Did this particular shortening of the name remind anyone else of MiniTrue?
Sorry for being an idiot and not HTMLing that post...
http://www.collude.biz - Ignore this, it's for Project Honey Pot.
In Canada, the government collects a small tax on the sale of each recordable CD. In concept, this money is distributed amongst the artists. When I last looked at the issue a while ago, the government still hadn't figured out how to divide up the money. As such, it was sitting in a government account lost in the "general revenue" pit.
Essentially, no fair way of distributing the money really exists.
It's simply too difficult, without some sort of centralized tracking (such as a DRM download site) to figure out how those fees are distributed between the artist. It'll be a logistical nightmare.
There are simpler solutions - Yes, DRM is a wholesale failure. Nearly every attempt at DRM has failed technically (it gets broken), and by assuming your customers are criminals, many of them will, in fact, make a decision to be criminals, because of the fundamental fact that the P2P networks offer a *better* product at a lower price.
The solution? Stop trying to hawk inferior products. Provide a BETTER product than the P2P networks, and you will find that people are willing to pay for it if it is a better product.
Things the record companies could offer in an official product:
Convenience and selection - I hate trying to hunt around on P2P networks for some obscure non-mainstream track that few people have.
Reccommendations - Stuff like "similar artists", "people who purchased this also purchased Y", and so on.
Lower prices than the current status quo. Maybe 1/4 of what they currently charge (25 cents/track, no per-album pricing), or even something like 10 cents per megabyte. They'll likely find that their per-track profit losses are more than made up for by volume. $1 is a little expensive for an impulse buy of a track you're not sure of. $0.25 per track - At that price I would (and have) buy a full album just because I like one track. (Hey, isn't that what the record companies want us to do?)
Does that all sound familiar? Yes, allofmp3 provided all of those. I've spent more money there in the past 2-3 months (prior to Visa and MC cutting them off) than I have on music in the past 2-3 years. (With most of THAT money being back when PyMusique allowed DRM to be removed from iTMS tracks). If you can't beat em', join them. Rather than combating allofmp3 by busting out the lawyers, the solution would have been to compete with them on merit with a similar service.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It does attempt to grapple with the unique aspects of digital media. It isn't likely that it will lead to other government-sponsored taxes. I don't see a government issued McDonald's coupon book for a free Big Mac/month for paying the McDonald's tax coming any time soon. So the slippery slope argument shouldn't be appropriate.
Is it entirely fair? Well, no. But would it be the worst tax we are paying? I don't think so. Our phone bills already include several dollars of federal tax. Because enough people complained the other year the tax purporting to pay off the frakkin' SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR OF 1898 has been removed though, right?
It would be an _ironic_ tax. As a proud owner of a premiere issue of Revolution magazine I'm both a dedicated Eurotrance listener and someone who is painfully aware that the genre was actively killed like a spreading weed in the U.S. So the government would be collecting a tax from me for music that's hardly played on mass media in the U.S. But I guess it all works out in the end since the music biz is transnationals.
Many bands never play in the larger venues at all. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of smaller venues in this country where some very fine music is performed regularly by bands that will probably never play in a "big stadium", but who do a fine job of keeping their fans by the hundreds (instead of by the tens of thousands) entertained.
100K a year - that's not rich
But it is above the top 20% of all Americans according to tax filing aggregate statistics I have seen. That would put them above the top 10% of the world, as I understand.
Sounds arguably rich.
I know people who are lucky to clear 30k in a year. They consider 100k a year to be filthy-stinking rich.
Do you find that whizzing sound distracting in day to day life?
Do we really care about the fate of overpaid record company execs and overpaid popstars?
To me DRM is about a way to extort as much money out of the consumer than it is about combating piracy. The record companies are defeating piracy by going after the P2P networks.
I agree there is a need to deal with the changing nature of distributing music and how it is listened to but should big record companies deserve a part of the money generated? Are they relevant?
Small independent record companies and individual artists who are closer to their fanbase will be the real winners in the future.
Actually, I think there is a scheme which can leverage basic human psychology to get a workable system. It would go as follows:
Watermark the digital content, with information specific to the person who purchased it. i.e. brand it "owned by John Smith, 123 Fake Street, ... ". This info would be encrypted, and the seller (music label or
artist) would hold the decryption keys exclusively (though it wouldn't
really matter if one got out).
There would be no restrictions whatsoever on where the watermarked copy could be copied, how many times, etc. No hardware or software will have any special recognition of the watermark, other than to keep it from interfering with quality of music playback, etc.
Also the prices would have to be reasonable.
The labels or artists' associations will have bots scanning the file-sharing networks, looking for items known to be produced by the given artist/label, but which either (a) have no watermarking, or (b) each have a watermark bearing ID info that doesn't match the info of the person sharing the file.
Bring in the lawyers -- but don't pick a few people to sue for their life savings ("going nuclear" like that only serves to discredit the lablel/artist); rather, pick thousands to send nasty-grams to. In each, describe the copyright violation for just one or a few songs, and demand remittance of $25 or $50 or whatever.
Most people will likely just fork over the cash, change their behavior, and tell their friends how they got "dinged." That's where the human psychology comes in -- (a) most people will feel that those getting dinged did deserve it in some way, and (b) will take steps to play fair, as they would agree that the system is fair, and after all they want to support the artists.
It's when someone ignores repeated demands for payment that the real lawsuit starts.
It will be relatively few who casually take on the risks of getting the nasty-grams sent to them, or who try to play games by ignoring them. Enough will get hit with real lawsuits that most people will say "I don't want to take that risk," keeping the number of scofflaws low enough (say, 20% of the population or less) that this system should be plenty profitable for the artists.
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
No, because they're annoying prog wankers whereas The Clash was the coolest band in the history of popular music.
Well, if the ISPs were to levy a fee and pass it on to my employer (who is a large solutions vendor, doesn't do a lot of commercial music) so that he could pay my salary, I expect he would be pleased, too.
However, this rather misses the point. Big Four need to produce goods and services that people want to buy, and they need to sell them (as in, employ salesmen to sell, spend money on advertising, and accept the hurt when a prospective purchaser says 'no'). And if you just hand them my money on a plate, then that essential piece of the business process is completely absent.
There's also my mother-in-law. She has Broadband, but is explicit that she does not want to download music; she would willingly trade the complexity of the modern Internet experience (having just had a reinstall becuase Windows Genuine Advantage could not see the holographic sticker on the side of her box and thought she was a pirate), for the simpler days of a decade ago, where email worked, and web sites were for news-and-views rather than marketing-on-steroids.
Would she have an opt-out ?
You can still charge for music and people will pay plenty. What they won't pay is absurd high prices. The cost of producing and distributing music has gotten much cheaper. Distribution companies have the insane idea that none of the savings can be passed on to the consumer without consequences. This isn't new, when CD's came out, they were cheaper to produce than tapes but were priced higher. That price never went down and yet artists didn't get any more money. Get a clue, books were more expensive when monks had to copy them out by hand. If book publishers try sell paperbacks for over a hundred bucks each, many people would photocopy them. At current prices, its not worth it for most people. itunes pricing right now only makes sense for someone wanting to buy a single. It makes no sense to buy entire albums at the same price for a lower quality version. But if costs were on par with allofmp3 almost all pirating would stop. It doesn't take that long to earn ten cents. Why bother wasting time looking for pirated copies and getting unknown quality if the real thing is cheap. At these prices, its worth the effort for those with low salaries.
Take it from someone with very close artist, artist management, and record label contacts: Only long-time artists with large back catalogues and major staying power earn even a noteworthy amount of money from royalties. The remainder tour because it is quite simply the best way of earning an income, historically through the selling of merchandise at said shows but more recently through merchandise sales combined with increased ticket prices. After producing an album, touring is required in order to pay back album production advances, only after which most actual income starts being made. You've surely noticed more and more artists touring a given album multiple times, and that's because it is both a) the single best way for them to get paid now and b) the best way to reduce the sting of advances during production of their next album later. They aren't touring it multiple times just for fun, although your post would suggest that they must be.
It's not just DRM and licensing that's in for a change, it's the entire structure of copyright protection. In this digital age, in order to enjoy it, content must be copied all over the place, from your hard disk, to your RAM, to your router and over the net to other computers and routers, ad infinitum. In the traditional sense of copyright, none of this copying would be allowed, but with the way digital processes work, it cannot be avoided. Inevitably, you get copies without any restrictions being stored and shared by people in an uncontrolled manner, since the demand is clearly there for unrestricted access.
What needs to happen is that we need to shift the focus from the right to copy (since mass-copying is unavoidable in a digital distribution system) to the right to *access* the content. When and artist creates a work for sale, (s)he gets the benefit of accessright protection, which guarantees them income based on who gets access to the content, and the extent of that access.
Levels of access could be in several tiers; Renters, who license access for a fixed time period; Owners, who license access indefinitely at a given sampling resolution (determines the quality of the recording in the case of audio or video content), and can designate a Friend licensee, who can access the content in a restricted form while they are listed as the Friend for that piece of content; and there are the Redistributors, who will pay a per-sale fee for any content redistributed. Optionally, they might designate a Remixer licensee, who, for a smaller per-sale fee, can incorporate the work into the Remixer's own.
The accessright-holder would have to register with a centralized open, global, NGO database (hopefully one that has safeguards in place to ensure privacy), and any content distributor would have to comply with this database, registering any licensees, and forwarding the licensing fees to the appropriate accessright holder.
At this point, DRM is unnecessary for all licensees except Renter and Friend licensees (as long as those can still access the content in a practical manner). It only makes sense to watermark the content with information identifying the licensee, and control distributors to comply with this system. It might not be the free ride some were hoping for, but it's the only system I see that could have a shot at working in this digital distribution age.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
... and left a message: It said it wished you were here! It also said that it fought the law, but unfortunately the law won. After what felt like a 30 minute musical interlude, it went on to say that it's just us and them, and we're going to rock the casbah and watch Emily play. If you don't like that, you can go straight to hell, or shine on, you crazy diamond.
p.s. Is this the dude who asked "which one is Pink?"
A "music tax" isn't going to fly. Most of the population does't download music. Remember, the US has an aging population.
Someone should ask Mick Jagger about this. Before becoming a rock star, he went to the London School of Economics, and his business sense has been sufficient to extend his career by at least two decades beyond when it should have ended.
Stop hyping only a few bands at a time!
When there are millions of users, and you only release a handful of new tracks every month, that means there are going to be tons of people sharing each one. You know how a school of piranhas can eat a cow in 2 minutes? This is what people with internet connections do to newly released content.
If there were about 100 times more artists releasing new songs, then they would only attract a few pirates each--thus making it much less likely that the casual downloader will easily find a copy of any given track. When a fast download isn't found in the first 5 minutes, then a lot of people will click back over to your site and pay the 99 cents or whatever it is...
"Above a VIC-20" like Commodore 64 music, right? But is there a market for chiptunes beyond just Machinae Supremacy fans?
A: The Beatles' label would sue. One of the biggest names in prosumer audio production is Apple Computer, whose name clashes with Apple Corps.
You are not doing it for me. I just benefit from it, so of course I should be very very grateful. But there is no way on earth you'd be doing what you do solely for me. That would be ridiculous.
Most artists I know simply love what they do. Generally they have a very good attitude and when they succeed the tend to keep that positive outlook. Its good to get compensation and validation for the things that you love, and it should be. The world is much more rich for it.
Quack, quack.
It says more that you believe the Sony rep took no stance. He did take a stance, his stance was that other people will take care of whatever the /. poster was bringing up and he needn't worry about it. In other words, he's free to remain ignorant of the details because these issues aren't his problem.
It's also revealing that you believe such behavior is polite. In many countries political talk is expected. To dodge it out of ignorance or a desire to not take a stance on something is impolite because you, not they, are putting the brakes on discussing real issues of the day. In America this is not so because Americans are taught that only popular opinion is polite to repeat. So when the monied interests determine what is popular opinion, business interests dominate conversations and it becomes impolite to talk about anything not in the perceived interest of the wealthy.
Digital Citizen
1. This doesn't work for several reasons.
- a: You can use an N+1 attack against watermarking. Start with 2 copies of the same file from 2 sources presumably watermarked to each. Compare the two files. While there is a difference, destroy the contents of those different bits. If no differences were found, you're done. Otherwise, get another copy of the song with a different watermark. N is the number of people the watermarking system can prove are collaborating. Get that many copies plus 1 to defeat the watermark - and it's easy to figure out N.
- b: As can be seen from the piracy of the strongly-watermarked program "IDA Pro", watermarking can be defeated by stealing someone's copy, or by purchasing the copy through fraudulent means. I have a legitimate copy of IDA at work, but I see ".idb" files (disassembly databases) all the time tagged with the same name of a nonexistent person.
- c: Watermarking audio in such a way that survives compressed->digital->analog->digital->compressed transformation at the same time as being mostly inaudible is considered basically impossible. Video is easier, because our eyes are much less accurate than our ears. They already watermark movies and most people aren't bothered.
2. No objection.
3. Why would they care whether it's watermarked for determining who to sue?
4. People aren't deterred by either small fines (see speeding) or by the remote potential of huge damages (see recent RIAA and MPAA lawsuits).
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I'd like to see someone get it for all that DEPLETED URANIUM shot around the battlefield...
of all the insane things to do, to shoot nuclear garbage around with a half life of thousands of years
WATCH ANARCHY TV
http://anarchy.shellprompt.com/
VOTE TUESDAY NOV 7
It wasn't Sony but Warner Bros. that turned on Prince. But then both Warner (parent of Atlantic Records) and Prince have given the finger to "Weird Al" Yankovic.
I think the solution lies in subscription streaming. Large labels who have lots of artists at their disposal should move towards setting up streams that you can also download but hear the tracks for the first time. This way the precious single can return and carry the weight it once did. Then if you want you can buy the whole album on their website. Per track sales are lame cause I don't want to buy a single song. I want the artist to put together an album, even if it's a digital album. Just something I can download as a whole consistent piece of work.
So I propose:
Subscription to have a bunch of net streams by a specific label or mix of labels. Allow the "singles" that they play to be downloaded.
Then sell the full album online via CD or download. Fuck the DRM.
I buy an album because I like the artists work and would like to support them. I may have downloaded all their work before, but when I go to the store, I'll pick up at least one of their CDs.
The other problem is with credit cards. How do you get the underage market to buy music online when they don't have a credit card. They need to be able to go the Best Buy and buy a 'music card'.
*shrug*
Jenner is dreaming of a universal tax that pays for everyone's music consumption. It's always the musician's dream that everyone would pay to keep them making music. For thousands of years we worked that way, either with everyone making music that we all passed around as folk music and dancing, or priests collecting sacrifices to keep chanting, or kings collecting taxes to commission composers, or any/all of those. The past few centuries we specialized musicians who traded in music, selling composition or performance either per transaction, or on retainer/salary. During that whole time, most people shared music by performing it ourselves, in our homes, at our celebrations, in the shower, whistling while working. Even new, popular songs.
We changed the format when we could record music, first on paper as instructions for playing ("sheet music" for people, then "piano rolls" for machines, eventually "records", "tapes", etc). The distributor of the music, usually a "record label", controlled the trade and made most of the money. Musicians got disconnected from the getting paid directly, and the kind of music people consumed got twisted by the kind of music the distributor wanted to sell.
Now the format has just changed again. It's much more difficult for the record labels to control the distribution than ever before, since the days of wandering musicians and people spreading our own folk songs. So the 20th Century music business has lost its main way to get money to pay its musicians, without finding a new way. Musicians, and people who care about them like Jenner, are pining for the older days when everyone contributed to all the musicians, one way or another.
But that way is gone, too. The closest we have in our society of explicit transaction is government taxes. Everyone hates those, especially when they're "unfair". Like when you don't listen to music much or at all, or you're listening to a tiny fraction of the music that others listen to. Or kids have to pay with money they don't have, or parents have to pay for the whole family. There's no fair way to "blanket" whole large groups with a tax like that. And then how does the collected tax get paid to the "musicians"? Per song? Registered to a copyright office? Per cover version? As much payment for a 30 second "song" that no one but the musician ever heard, as for a huge pop hit, or a lifetime of operas? Who's a "musician"?
There's probably a way to collect money for every online transaction. Per-listen streaming. That won't catch replays, and P2P is unpolicable. The current rates of $0.0007 per listen are way too high, so they might cover the losses from the rest, but eventually the rest will be most everything, without the cost or the extra transaction overhead to pay the royalty.
But that model points at the real way. Musicians and their management can control when big publishers publish copies of their songs, like in commercials. Those can get a big licensing fee to reflect their popularity and the value they generate in the publication of the commercial. Same for movies and TV. With all the other payment transactions disappearing, most media will include more music - and more video and other media, for that matter. The unpaid transactions will increase the value of the bigger transactions that can be tracked, so the higher price of the big licensed events will pay for the smaller unlicensed ones, while using the unlicensed one's generated value.
Meanwhile, musicians will sell what they can control. They will sell T-shirts, admission to live concerts and other personal appearances, along with realtime premieres of recordings. They will sell licenses for relicensing in large transactions. Eventually, giving away the music will be the cheapest promotion for the musician.
And even when they don't get paid, they'll still make music. Because making music is a compulsion, not a business. Musicians are notoriously bad at business, especially the best musicians. Maybe if their lives become more like they were before the business was in charge of the music, the music will be back in charge again.
--
make install -not war
The big difference that the digital age has made is that it's now far easier to track that bootlegging. Just because you can see it doesn't mean that the people that you can now see will suddenly stop buying music. The real threat of P2P music sharing to record companies is that it breaks their deathgrip on the distribution channels -- Musicians may no longer have to bend over just to get their music distributed, and that's what scares the wits out of the record compainis.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
...as someone who used to be Roy Harper's producer (and suggest that he's spent his time smoking the same as Roy) remember that his background pre-Floyd was as an economics lecturer at the LSE following on from an economics degree at Cambridge. They don't just give those away.
What you've described is the definition of DRM. The only way to control what happens when the data is on the computer is to use DRM, and even that isn't very effective.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I think the problem is a simple one... they're making a lot of money now. And they can say that if conditions A, B, and C are met they could make a lot of money. But how do you get there from here and still make money on every step?
I mean, yeah, these guys are greedy, but the truth is they have shareholders to keep happy. And if profits and revenue dip, then they're out of a job and the next guy comes in. The reason is really simple... it is more profitable for the company to slowly go out of business because each guy figures he can ride the gravy train for 10-20 years and then it's the next guy's problems (and if you doubt that happens, look at General Motors... they've been slowly going out of business for the past 35 years, but it wasn't worth it to change the business; they were still making money).
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Preparing a derivative work can itself be an infringement even if the derivative work is not distributed to the public or performed or displayed publicly.
Arguably? When you rely on fair use, you need to have a plan to defend yourself in case you get sued. Please provide an example of a detailed rationale that would justify a finding of fair use in all major English-speaking countries. Is the home movie a criticism of the recording itself? And no, fair use doesn't guarantee convenience (Universal v. Reimerdes). You may have to settle for the guaranteed audio DRM buster solution.
Such a blanket licensing scheme is not in place as of this writing.
T. Rex was HUGE in Great Britain during the 1970s. Lead singer Marc Bolan died in a car crash in 1977, and despite that, he still has a good following.
No, because Owner licensees shouldn't be limited in their use of their content as long as it's personal. If I buy a song or movie, I should be able to convert it to play on any playback device I want, or archive it in any format for backup. If I'm renting, or designated as a 'Friend licensee', there would be a good case for having copy protection on the files. But as an owner licensee, any restrictions to my normal usage is unacceptable. Obviously, redistributors and remixers should have unfettered access as well...
Some control will have to be given up. Obviously, nothing is going to stop unauthorized distribution over the internet. The point is to make a system that's realistic to the needs of the digital age that can be enforced through our standard judicial system, just as a framework for how protected works are to be distributed. It would still be necessary to go after major infractors the old-fashioned way once they become too popular. People will typically stick to services that are easy to use, seem legitimate, and are properly marketed, so those are the distributors that will have to be focused on for compliance with this system.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
It took millions of years.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
That's an entirely separate issue. The DRM you put on files you sell has nothing to do with the unprotected recordings people are sharing on their own. People will always find ways to get an unprotected recording to download or share if they want no matter how much DRM you put on the files you seed. It's really a losing battle trying to protect the content from someone in its possession, while still allowing them to play it. What's needed is a global licensing database for all protected content and licensees, and watermarking with info referencing this database, and at least there will be a much better infrastructure for enforcement to work under. Then, it's just a matter of finding the bigger distributors, and enforcing compliance with this database.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
The question you're asking has a lot to do with the future of economic productivity and compensation in general. My opinion is that a lot of information is going to become smart, in the sense that it will be active and trackable. People won't accept it without benefit however. Think sensors and in recent brain research (as-if circuits), or in bees the feedback loops considering likely reward. This question could be asked about lots of activities. "How do we know who is productive?"
Uh, Floyd has the 4th most successful album and I'm pretty sure some classical music acts have the longevity beat by a few year but that really doesn't matter since you so totally didn't get the reference in the first place.
Lessig has got pretty wealthy telling everyone else to give away their stuff for nothing.
For the rest of us, $3 a month is a small price to pay to get rid of DRM, to consume all the digital music we want, and to fuck the big labels' distribution monopoly for good.
Have fun out there...
When they are instrumental we know about them. We know about Epstein. We know about the wife of Ozzy Osborn...
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Peter Jenner left PF when Syd Barrett left. Inasmuch I respected PF w/ SB and loved their sound (that was many years ago), PF w/ Syd Barrett (though personally I liked PF more w/ him than without) has much less impact on the music and even less impact on the music industry compared to what PF after SB had. So, his influence in the history is about zero.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Now finally a piece of info that is more relevant to the article and worthy putting it into the abstract of ./ in addition to "manager of PF and Clash".
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Most countries (including the US) already have a "music tax"; you pay it on blank media.
Convenience and selection
Reccommendations - Stuff like "similar artists", "people who purchased this also purchased Y", and so on.
Lower prices than the current status quo. Maybe 1/4 of what they currently charge (25 cents/track, no per-album pricing)
Rather than combating allofmp3 by busting out the lawyers, the solution would have been to compete with them on merit with a similar service.
Sounds like emusic is right down your alley. Sure, it isn't allofmp3, but it pretty much meets your description. On top of their huge selection, the recommendation mechanisms on their web site are very useful.A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Most countries (including the US) already have a "music tax"; you pay it on blank media.
You want to elucidate? I'm pretty sure that I didn't pay any music or copyright tax on the spindle of generic CD-RWs sitting next to my computer. The only formats that ever included a 'copyright tax' were the short-lived "Music" formats, that went into standalone home recorders. I've never actually met anyone who owned a machine that used them; the licensing and cost of the media basically doomed them to irrelevance, particularly when computer recorders came out that used untaxed 'data' discs.
Not to mention that a tax on physical media is silly, since it's only going to become less and less relevant: burning CDs might have been the mainstream distribution for home-copied music a few years ago, but with larger computer hard drives and iPods, it's now virtually unnecessary. People can share, listen, and copy music without ever using a piece of blank physical media.
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