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Digital Media Winners and Losers of 2006
An anonymous reader writes "MP3 Newswire released its annual list of winners and losers in digital media for 2006. Winners include Azureus, the Pirate Bay, and YouTube. The losers list includes Streamcast, Captain Copyright (and his sidekick Lieutenant Lame), and the Online Guitar Archive. At the bottom of the post are links to past year's winners and losers lists."
Seems that they've picked up on how dumb their idea was.
I can understand asking for more text books, smaller classes or new equipment
I'm sure they do. But I'm not seeing why any of them would list it as something to spend money on teaching it to kids.
To me, it sounds like their "independent consultant" wasn't as independent as was advertised. Particularly since Access Copyright
http://www.accesscopyright.ca/
was involved in the production.
...DRM wasn't #1 Loser?!
No-DRM == winner!
DRM == looser!
If you like coffee-table electro then visit bleep.com. Non-DRM'd, MP3'd, cool music from Warp Records and associates. If you like the Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Plaid or that kind of stuff, then consider that link a Christmas present from the Gods!
Merry Christmas all!
DRM'd music? I'd rather feed their bones to pigs...
Try 01.23, Christmas morning.
God, I hate Christmas.
What the fuck is "coffee-table electro"? The division of genres is out of control.
I'll throw in a shameless plug for DivX Stage6. It's in alpha, but you can publish DivX and XVID video files in their original quality all the way up to 1080p with 5.1 MP3 Surround. Stage6 also allows you to easily download the videos directly with no DRM (so long as the publisher permits it), and it's focused around building high-quality content communities.
A couple of example channels launched recently:
http://stage6.divx.com/BT
http://stage6.divx.com/Witness
DivX Web Player is required for in-browser playback on Windows and Mac (supporting all common browsers on each), and Linux users should be able to play most files in VLC or the like pending direct support for the platform.
Sad to see OLGA in this list. It was a great site, but you go there now and you get all kinds of OCILLA notices. If you play guitar and need to quickly cheat and get the chord progression for a song, that was the place to go. Sad part is, it was just a bunch of people contributing .txt files of songs as they had figured them out. It's not like it was mp3's or anything. Jeez.
blah blah blah
Of course, the Zune might singlehandedly kill off DRM due to piss-poor execution, so we all get to be the winners.
blah blah blah
..I think that means the music is so bad, you pull a ballmer variation and pick up your coffee table and smash your speakers with it in a pure self-defense reflex mode.
Give 'em a break, will ya!
What's the harm in calling a spade a spade? Or is somebody astroturfing here?
Chat with other atheists http://secularchat.org
It's too bad that the music publishers hound dedicated fans and hobbyists and stop them from sharing these resources when they are unwilling or unable to offer well-formatted songs piecemiel in a similar way to how they could be obtained on the net. Most of enthusiasts are reverse engineering songs they like with their ears and not directly copying the copyrighted materials of the publisher.
OF course, when it gets to the web it is 'published' -and therein lies the rub....
AS someone who plays cover songs with my friends and likes to throw them a few new songs every week I write my own charts because even if I could get that one song individually from a sheet music publisher it would be written piano/vocal style on about 6 pages with 12 bars or so per page. If you wanted a song that was not 'published' as a $5 single, you had to buy the songbook for the whole album for as much or more than the CD cost. Or hope that you could get it on a 'best rock of the '90s'-type collection and hope there might be another decent song or two that you could use.
I need a one sheet lyric and chord with optional vocal melody fakebook-type representation. The music publishers only make those available through 'fakebooks' which are limited to the most popular songs of a given era -for about $50 per book of 200-500 songs. I can't buy 'fakebook' versions of say, the Pretenders or Radiohead's Greatest Hits -I either have to buy their long sheets and write them 'by hand' to a one page format -or grab the lyrics off the net and chart them by ear if I can't find a good tab. I am sure that there are many other musicians like me in this respect.
I also appreciated the painstaking degree of accuracy that some of the OLGA enthusists acheived in their transcriptions of complicated multi-guitar arrangements. On the other hand I remember absolutely wretched transcriptions of pop and rock songs in the early '70s in my sister's songbooks where the chords were completely off -like they had been made by some classical or jazz intern with no comprehension of Rock. Admittedly, most of the charts I have seen in the past 10 years have been a lot better.
Just as with music sales and licensing, music publishers have long dominated this area and would rather legislate than compete fairly in the new media and in the new information economy by offering people what they want and are willing to pay for in a format we can use.
-I'm just sayin'
DRM's victories this year:
Xbox live gold has proven that a DRM'ed box can sell a lot of DRM'ed content, a concept that is pushing forth in the beta and release versions of Windows Vista.
Apple's online store may be faltering, but still the strongest in the space. Sales of DRM'ed TV shows online are up.
Cellphone unlocking was ruled legal, but cellular providers still have a lock on the content space of your phone.
The HDMI standard really started to become standard on HDTV's this year, finally allowing people to re-buy their electronics ONE MORE TIME if they want high-resolution video output. This has been pushed forward by the popularity of consoles, themselves DRM'ed to heck.
The "universally compatible" DRM initiative by Microsoft, called "plays anywhere," was scrapped by them in favor of a newer, more proprietary DRM for their Zune portable. Apparently the last one wasn't evil enough.
The ______ Agenda