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DRM Free Music is Everywhere
guisar writes "I continue to endure stories on Slashdot and elsewhere complaining about EMI, itunes and other organizations maybe (or maybe not) releasing material in DRM free format. Well- here's some news there's LOTS of material out there. So instead of complaining, download what you like. There are plenty of artists releasing their material in FLAC and other DRM free format. Just look around. Most artists are doing their part by releasing their music in the hopes they can gain enough exposure to earn a living at what they love. If you're complaining about major labels not releasing material, it's probably too late and you are part of the problem." I think this point is often unfairly ignored: the existence of DRM is a fantastic chance for new distribution to reveal new bands. Unfortunately this music is difficult to find because there is simply so much of it.
As a very very small music producer (basically, I give bands money to record or tour, and I hope to recoup some of that investment in the future), I work very hard to get the bands I finance to repudiate not just DRM but copyright in general. Small bands have no real reason for either -- recording music is just a marketing process to try to get people to come to your shows. Sure, without copyright, some big producer might steal your lyrics and music and have the newest pop boy band re-record it, but this too would just be a great marketing tactic -- the Internet would jump all over it.
Small bands need to give their recorded music away freely online in order to get more people to come to their shows. My brother's band Maps & Atlases just went on a 7 day tour to the East Coast and ended up in a tiny university town called East Stroudsburg, PA. Instead of showing up to no crowd, the venue was packed -- a rarity for the town and venue. Why did this happen? Maps & Atlases released their EP for free online. They sold out of their first EP (2000 copies) during their 2006 tour, and they're coming up fast on selling out their second pressing, even though the music is easily downloaded online. Why do fans pay for albums? They get face time with the band, they get autographs, and they know that buying the merch direct will keep the band writing and touring.
DRM is terrible for any band but the absolute largest, and even for them it is bad because the new fan base wants to have nothing to do with it. I look at it this way: DRM for the adult contemporary crowd just makes life harder for them, DRM for the teen crowd is easily bypassed. But it isn't just DRM that makes things difficult, it is also the fact that copyright really throws fan distribution a curve -- even the fans who openly distribute the music know it is "piracy" but they feel they're helping the band.
I look at the Internet as one big radio station waiting to be harnessed by smaller musicians all over the world. Write music with one purpose: to attract fans to your live shows where you can make your income by continuing to work, rather than hoping to write one hit once and earn royalties for the rest of your life. Who here works a regular job and wishes that they could work a few months in exchange for years of income? Life doesn't work that way -- unless you work with the distribution cartels that are quickly watching their futures slip through their fingers. If you're in a band, tell your fans to copy your music for their friends in hopes that those friends will become the new fans. Viral marketing is key to making a solid income in live music.
Sidenote: If you're in a band and you disagree with me on making a living, it is because you're trying to keep a "steady job" while also trying to tour. You can't do both. My brother's bandmates all quit their jobs (some of them have master's degrees!) to handle a tour schedule that includes typically 20 shows a month. Stop whining and dig in.
I certainly don't have time to listen to 100 bad tunes to find one good one.
I need filtering, or i'm just going to keep on listening to Zeppelin.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
If I have to fight with a balloon to navigate a site then it's not worth my effort.
You must be new here if you expect the 'editors' to actually proofread anything.
I went to the site linked, and found that the only way to select music was by the artist's name. Considering that I didn't recognize a single artist, this left me totally in the dark as to what the musical genre was, and the only way that you could get a sense of the musical genre was to select each artist, one by one, where sometimes a note would tell you - but often not.
I would be more than willing to support a site like this if they make it reasonably easy. Even Wham-a-lart takes the time to sort music by genre so shoppers don't have to weed through all the styles they don't like to find something to listen to.
When they get the genre thing figured out, track preview and sale by track are the next items required to get them up to the bare-bones standards of online music sales.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I've downloaded a fair amount of music from them -- they have some interesting non-mainstream artists. They ask for $8, but they'll take as little as $5. Download in many formats, lossy and lossless.
Dilute! Dilute! OK!
Well duh, it's the easiest to pirate.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Unfortunately this music is difficult to find because there is simply to much of it.
What Taco is implying is that record companies fulfill a purpose in society by promoting music that people will probably like and ignoring the masses upon masses of other music.
Well without DRM how are these companies going to survive? Answer that and you've got an open and shut case for no DRM. Fail to answer it and DRM seems to provide a useful function to society by preserving the status quo in which you can find good music that you like, by going to the major labels.
Sounds like something Yogi Berra would say. As in "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
sulli
RTFJ.
Hear, hear! I couldn't agree more!
This is the reason why big labels are finding themselves to be irrelevant, why should we buy manufactured pop-cruft that's encumbered with DRM when a much better alternative is available?
Let's ditch these money-grabbing middle men by voting with our wallets. The only thing missing is a good online community for upcoming bands. Something like music charts (but better and more community driven), which will show the best bands in each genre.
The next triumph will be when an unsigned artist makes more in royalties than one signed to a major label. That will break their monopolies.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
...have got it right. And they have a good sense of humor too. My fave is currently Whatever.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
C'mon. Seriously. Proofread?
Yes! I expect to find crap grammar like that on a blog, not on a news site.
The DRM free content available to download legitimately, usually is not even worth the time you sift thru them to find the one piece that you can barely tolerate among 100s of trash metal bands (I am speaking of music only here but it can be stretched to cover any art form) who thinks louder they play better it is, or some talentless hack, who thinks whatever he/she plays is instant classic.
On the other hand, we have the metallicas for heavy metal and Beatles for classic pieces, yet they are crippled by DRM and I really do not want to waste my time or my money to be able to listen to them on two different platforms, i.e., on my iPod and on my non-itunes ready computer.
Am I asking too much after paying $1 to a single song ? In what justification can the IP owner can ask me to pay for the same thing twice ?
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
I've been using emusic for months now and though I'm not super big into the indie scene, they always surprise me with some interesting stuff. They also have a pretty aggressive writing team that gives no end to recommendations on what you should check out.
They have free 50 download trials all over the place. Worth checking out and all DRM free mp3s. It's a great service and one we should be supporting.
need... more... coffee...
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Twenty paying shows a month? You're absolutely extraordinary.
I'm serious: I worked with a woman who did your job for a while. She spent the days making phone calls to venues who generally never called back. The band I worked for was extraordinarily talented (download some of their music for free here). They quit their day jobs for over two years. They toured up and down the East coast and as far as Detroit. They had a devoted but small audience.
If they could have booked 20 paying gigs a month, they'd still be in existence. Most venues want cover bands, not original music. The venues have the power and so they get to treat me rudely. I bow before your superior nagging-people-on-the-phone skills.
(It's because of that that the "Hey, give the music away and make it up at the live shows" argument on Slashdot makes me furious. But if you've got the secret for booking venues, please let me know and I'll retract everything I've said about it.)
Most of these are unsigned bands. Bands are unsigned, or signed to an obscure label for any of 3 reasons:
1. They're rubbish.
2. They don't want to sell out.
3. They're too damn original for the major labels to take a risk.
Types 2 and 3 are probably very worthwhile. They're greatly outnumbered by type 1.
OK, this is a plug for Vertical Alignment, a band that I like. http://www.thundersongs.com/ has downloads in FLAC format, as well as MP3 and physical CDs. If you like progressive rock, give them a try.
Obligatory warning: these guys are Christians, and they may occasionally use the "J" word. OTOH, the major theme running throughout the album is hubris. I don't think these guys would offend anybody but Richard Dawkins.
Obligatory disclaimer: I speak for me, and not my employer. Please do not send lawyers or dogs. Or lawyers' dogs.
Sigs are for people with imagination.
The purpose of the DRM free argument that has been made time and time again here is that signed bands do not allow much of what should be considered fair-use. The solution is to eliminate (or restrict) some of the protection to make said music more usable on different devices, not to switch to unsigned bands.
The original generic sig.
I think this point is often unfairly ignored: the existance of DRM is a fantastic chance for new distribution to reveal new bands. Unfortunately this music is difficult to find because there is simply [too] much of it.
And therein we have the function of big record companies. In an age where duplication is almost trivial, it's the last function they do. They have scouts and management and all that so they could find gems.
I find is absurd that the industry hasn't made a push like that. "Gems" to them has been what sells, but maybe "gems" could grow to things that are just legitimately good music. I can see the potential slogan now: "We sit through garbage so you don't have to."
You hear about producers and artists using fame and fortune to make their own record labels to promote the types of music they like. It's not too far-fetched that good stuff that gets filtered out by one company would get picked up by another.
Of course, if the big labels in the RIAA had their way, they'd snuff out unsigned bands and their commie-free-distribution tactics so that every person in the world pulls exclusively from them. I mean, sheesh, Clearchannel has succeeded in making radio sound pretty much the same everywhere in the US.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Once again I praise e-music.com for a really great range of music, great prices, and a pretty good user experience. And no DRM.
You won't find The Eagles or Brittney or other Top 40 stuff, but if you're the least bit adventurous* in your tastes it's well worth a look.
* Johnny Cash, James Brown, African music, Bjork etc...
Three Squirrels
Is someone to create a meta site for DRM-free music, which would allow user reviews and hopefully have some in-house editorials. It would need funding in order to develop a critical mass. As someone who truly loves music I can't understand the mindset but the vast majority of people only listen to what's handed to them.
Sure, I like Rush. I'm assuming that once that 503 error goes away from the link there will be the location I can download Rush without DRM?
Oh wait, you don't mean I'd have to download what I like, as long as what I like is some shit for brains unknown band who can't get a real record contract for a reason?
In today's glossed over vapid music climate artists like Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and many others would not be taken seriously by the majors. I can hear it now.. Not marketable. Too nasally. Screams too much. Won't sell enough product. Not worth our investment.
The RIAA et.al. aren't merely trying to prevent infringement of their own copyrights; they're afraid of open digital distribution channels even when these are used to distribute music whose copyright (or absense thereof) legally permits it. Their bread and butter is in their monopoly control of distribution, and they're acutely aware of this. Even in a world where they have their "perfect DRM" (whatever that is), P2P, BitTorrent, YouTube, and artist-controlled websites would still be a huge threat to them. However, if trafficking in copyrighted materials became less significant they wouldn't have any pretext to continue to attack these channels. Maybe they're realizing this as they loosen their embrace of DRM?
This guy Nifflas makes some pretty sweet music and games that are freely available. Check out the music section of his fanpage.
~= scwizard =~
Drive Thru Records has a pretty neat setup through a company called echospin. They offer DRM-free downloads to your harddrive or media device as well as direct CD burning and even album art printing. They handle all aspects of digital distribution for an artist/label.
I bought the Bare Naked Ladies' new albums on USB key, called Bare Naked on a Stick. The USB memory key is of low quality, but I eventually got it into a port just right that I could copy the MP3s and videos off of it, and saved money over buying the CDs in the store.
I wish more bands used this distribution technique, but they need to use better quality USB sticks.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Wake me when the regular person can download a DRM free song from a major service of some crappy music that is really popular like Justin Timerberlake (dick in a box!). I'm sick of people telling me that I can get OGG Vorbis or FLAC encoded crap for free... yet it is just a bunch of Grateful Dead and Phish shows or worse.. some indie band that has no production or talent.
At least I can listen to the "The Free Software Song" by RMS himself at http://www.revolution-os.com/musicvideo.html
No DRM whatsoever.. No talent either!!!
I can't wait for DRM to completely fade away so bands can proceed to the next step : make available tracks at better than CD quality.
.. ) is capable of outputting better sound sampling than done for the last 25 years.
.. Right now, I can't even found anything above 44-48kHz/16 bits.
Every soundcard worth its name nowadays (think audigy, etc
I wish I could hear my favourite bands in 192kHz/24 bits someday
I just ripped a CD to WMP that I'd burned from iTunes. Actually didn't try playing it cuz had to run to work, but is that not possible?
By this I mean, go on tour.
The Police tour is coming to town, and I am going to be handing over fist-fulls of cash in order to see them play live. But you're not going to see me buying their mp3's, as I already own all of their works. I'll just rip 'em, thank you please.
I really do not buy CD's anymore, partly due to the fact that I no longer wish to directly support the RIAA hedgemony, and partly due to the fact that I live in Canada and pay a levy on blank recording media (Handing money over twice just doesn't do it for me, thanks).
CDs, and music in general, should be viewed as a loss-leader to get people in to see them perform. I honestly feel that the days of rock musicians living like kings are pretty much over, with the exception of top-tier talent. It is not to say that they will not be able to earn a living, it just will be more akin to the professional musicians that you see in the classical and jazz sphere, which if you are any good, is a decent wage. If you're not any good, that's the economy saying, "It's time to get a real job."
Simply stated, I have to work to live, why should someone write songs and do nothing more than live off of royalties? Musicians work should be their ability to perform, not their ability cash royalty cheques. The performance driven model also would have the added effect of cutting out the no-talent publicity-machine generated "stars" who cannot play an instrument, rely upon production tricks to sound good singing, etc.
I pay to see you play. Do a good job, and you too can charge $200+/ticket and I will hand over my money willingly and without complaint.
It's not that hard, people.
The problem isn't that the unsigned unknown music is bad, or that there's too much of it to find the good stuff. It's a sociological thing: I want to hear what my friends are hearing so we can say "do you have the latest XYZ album" or whatever. There's probably a scientific word for it but I'm not a sociologist!
It doesn't really matter how good the major labels' tunes are, whatever gets played on the radio will become a hit. This has been shown many many times, with a few rare exceptions of underground hits that work themselves up to the point where the radio can't not play them any more. And it's not because people just buy what they hear, it's because they buy what everyone else is buying.
You even get the same result in elections: floating voters will often (subconsciously) vote for the party they think is going to win (ie the more popular one), even if they have no idea about policies.
I download live concerts from archive.org
This might reveal that I am a sheep with my OS (I don't have the time to convert archicad to a non-windows system right now), but who cares:
You know, you could just record anything off your sound card through a method as simple as windows sound recorder (although you should use something better than that if you want stereo audio and whatnot). All of a sudden songs encrypted in flash, on youtube and heck, even from streaming radio, seem a lot less...inaccessible.
Of course if you didn't know how to download the videos from youtube and convert those to MP3 you shouldn't be posting here.
Personally if I was a band though, I'd check popular youtube series'. Sounds funny I know, but ask them if you can do a tribute song for them. They'll feature it and bam, 900,000 views (see: Kaj or Yugioh Abridged). But this might just work on fools like me who watch videos to find my music.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
The reason people ignore DRM-free music while simultaneously complaining about DRMed music from EMI isn't that they're ignorant or hypocrites- it's that they want the music EMI is selling. Maybe you're after some classic rock act that signed up to a label before not doing so was even an option. Maybe you actually like music that shows up on the pop charts. You can't just say "listen to this instead" and expect an identical experience. Music isn't a commodity that one can simple switch to a different supplier of on a whim; each band is unique and there's personal taste involved. There are dozens of Led Zeppelin cover bands and hundreds of bands with a similar sound, but there's only one Zep and only one place to legally get it from.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
These guys freaking rock:
...
http://www.cdfreedom.com/bangcamaro/
Just saying
if i like a band - like DMB - i buy the CDs now.
Even itunes has become a PITA when i want to make an MP3 CD for my car. I've decided i'm no longer going to buy from iTunes until i can convert the songs into mp3 in 1 step.
Remember - everything that the lables are telling you is bullshit when it comes to DRM - because they sell ALL of their music RIGHT NOW DRM-Free.... At WalMart, Target, Best Buy, Amazon, etc.
All Steve Jobs asked for was to have the same ability the CD-selling stores have - the ability to sell music DRM-free. Absolutely nothing different.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Prague
Proggy music to wash your brain in DRM-free MPEG-4 AAC playable in iTunes, mplayer, WinAmp, and so on.
I'm thinking of a "listenware" license, if you download it you are obligated to listen to it once all the way through.
Especially Make It Stop is that the perfect name or what?
The open source Audacity was used for various audacious tasks in the production of this music.
I will try to put new music up a few times a year so check back once a season or so.
I will check back here later in the day for comments, suggestions, reviews, and insults.
If you like it tell your friends.
Enjoy!
-Toddhisattva
Prague
ps: no odd meter? WTF? The odd-meter monster is stuck in editing.
If you want the convenience of buying tracks online from major labels then it's coming with DRM. Deal with it. If you don't want DRM, buy the CD and rip it. Problem solved. Loseless music in a format with no DRM. If you don't want to pay full price for a CD, check out your local used CD store or order a used version online from EBay, Amazon or any one of the hundreds of other similar sites.
There are a couple local bands that I like and have seen at free outdoor concerts. I've even bought their CDs twice after already buying a copy previously because I don't mind the money going to the artist. Then pass on the CD to someone who might be interested. With those guys, I would be less likely to rip their music to MP3 and give it to someone because it's more personal. I'd be "stealing" from the guys that I talked to.
There are the arguments that say that data wants to be free. Go to Memphis, Nashville, LA, London, NYC, and find some great lyricists whose copyrights earned them a few bucks for some long and hard work.
I have no problem with the argument that the system is broken, and that Indie bands have little to no chance of success based on the model used by the media megaliths. Yet you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater by arguing that copyrights shouldn't exist. As a writer, I expect to get paid for my work, just like the baker down the street, the cop at the corner, and so on. If all I wrote didn't return any money, I wouldn't write for a living-- there would be no living.
As a musician, I went out on the road, snoring in the band bus, tried to stay sober, and be musically creative and deliver what I was paid for-- good music, sometimes really great music. I knew that the record companies were highly unlikely to buy into us because we were out on the edge. We cut numerous tapes, CDs, and so on. A few adventurous and kind people bought them. But we also knew they weren't for subsistence-- our time on stage was what we were being paid for.
Now that there are distribution channels, we found two bands that took two of our songs and essentially dry-ripped them. We have recourse if we want to sue. They haven't made any money with the songs, either (I'm not surprised, nor is my ego bashed). If they had, we'd be likely to want to stop them for the theft they made of our hard work.
There's the gigs, where we made money. There's the media, where we made money, all outside of the 'system'. If we'd done things differently, we might be working for the devil (I mean Sony/BMG/etc) and expecting much different ends to our work. But realistically, we know that's not possible.
Your single solution set doesn't fit all cases. Copyright has justification. DRM is probably a bad idea, because we might be interested in spreading our music far and wide. It's not necessarily a given that bands need or want to do this. Sure, we'd all like some fame, but we're not narcissistic. We'd rather just live, eat, and create. You place too much emphasis on distribution in the same sense that consumerism is a double-edged sword.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
you're correct. just look at american idol creator, simon cowel, for that. he made a comment that he finds bob dylan to be boring. while dylan isn't a pop artist by any means, his music and songs are certainly far from boring.
the major labels won't even promote someone who's really ugly, even if he/she has an amazing voice, writes perfect songs, and plays awesome guitar. little girls won't scream and cry over someone that ugly. that's how we ended up with john mayer... so-so voice, mediocre song writing skills, and uninteresting guitar playing (yes, even with his blues band).
please me, have no regrets.
For those into The Dead, Phish, WSP, Ratdog, Mule, Little Feat and the likes, there's plenty of music here:
http://stash.nugs.net/stash.asp
Exactly! The cost to manufacture a nice CD, sticker and a T-shirt for a band is around $8 in low quantity. The fan is usually willing to pay up to $25-$30 for the merch. Sell 20 sets a show and do 90 shows a year is about $30k in profit -- not including door entry share, beer share or up front money from promoters. It isn't great money, but it is decent enough to do what you love doing in one of the MOST competitive markets in the US. I know quite a few "professional" touring bands that share 6-figures a year between their 4/5 band members, but they're touring constantly -- and they love doing it.
What about something like pandora for DRM free music? That way users could quickly be steered in the direction of music that they are likely to enjoy...
At Radio Mixtape we let people create personal play lists out of promotional material and then share those play lists freely. And so far it has turned out that music labels are receptive. Our user base has grown to over 2,000 mixtapers already, and we have streamed music over 30,000 times now. It couldn't be easier, we even have the ability to swap mixtapes from a cell phone. 2007 really is shaping up to be the year of the end of DRM! -Jason
You are damn right.
Having DRM-free music to download is nice. But practically all music on so-called "piracy" file-sharing is DRM-free. So what?
What we need is not to find workarounds and be okay with the crumbs that fall from the mouth of **AA. We need instead to stop actively all this "piracy" demonization, and to make sure that the free, non-profit sharing of information (bits) becomes absolutely legal. I hope one day "piracy" will be a word reminescent of a primitive, embarrassing past just like "nigger" is today.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
We had it, it was before DRM existed in any practical sense. I found new good artists, downloaded for free. If I liked it, I payed for it.
Not suprisingly, it was soon crushed by the big record companies.
Slowly they added their craptacular artists sample tracks, artificially inflated their ratings and drowned out the indipendants.
Then when it was so lame and no one used anymore they killed it
Classic embrace, extend, extinguish maneuver.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
It's a process, so you need a patent, not a copyright. :P
the major labels won't even promote someone who's really ugly
That would really pose a problem for Mick Jagger then.
CDs, and music in general, should be viewed as a loss-leader to get people in to see them perform.
Unfortunately, right now most musicians consider live gigs to be a loss-leader in order to get people to buy their CDs. How exactly are they to make money if the CDs are to be a loss-leader too? I'm not The Police, and I'll never be able to command those ticket prices.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I agree with everybody who says the problem with all the DRM-free music by unsigned bands is that most of it is crap. Sturgeon's Law strikes again.
The solution, I've found, is to find an MP3 blog by somebody whose taste you share. That way, they will do the filtering for you. Personally, I'm a big fan of 3Hive. A couple times a week, they post free MP3s made available by bands who want publicity. But they listen to all MP3s before posting them, and only post stuff they think is worth listening to. They have pretty eclectic taste, so you won't like the genre of everything they post--but they have GOOD taste, so everything they post will be among the better stuff within its genre.
Arr! Read The Government Manual for New Pirates!
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Wow..sounds like the 'old' days when I grew up, but, wasn't small bands doing it...all the bands did this. We used to buy their albums, usually a group of us agreeing to each buy different ones, and trade them to make tape copies. But, this basically whetted our appetite to go SEE the bands live. I liked this...a band had to be able to really PLAY their own instruments and sing worth a shit, so they could do it live. If they could play that well, they in turn could make good records. I think the past trends to record only bands, created the 'throw away band'...since most of the bands were picked out for good looks, and their talent was studio tricks.
If DRM has started to force the reverse of the recent trend, and promote bands that have talent and can perform to release their music DRM free...maybe DRM has had a positive side effect.
"I look at the Internet as one big radio station waiting to be harnessed by smaller musicians all over the world."
I guess this is true, and is a by product of major corps owning all the radio stations, and working arm in arm with the record companies. I really find this to be sad. I miss the old days of not having to go out and search for my new music. I was nice to hear a continuous stream of new and good music off the radio. Many of us spend a lot of time in the car...with a radio on. Kids today have the time to hunt down and explore for new good music, but, once you get a "real job"...that time really isn't there, and I hate that I cannot find music by new bands that I like because I just don't have time to go on the internet, and actively hunt and ferret out new music (ok, I prefer and 'old' sound, blues based, guitar driven, etc). I guess another strike against radio, is that music has become SO fragmented, and what radio is out there...is so niche oriented. I remember in the days, that you could hear a VERY diverse mix of music on the same station. In one afternoon you'd hear, Bob Welch, Fleetwood Mac, John Denver, AC/DC, Firefall, Marshal Tucker Band, Orleans, Rupert Holmes, Steely Dan, Cat Stevens...and all the great one hit wonders...all on the same station, all loosely labled at rock or rock/pop. I long for the days of a station that would play such a mix....some old, but, with new bands too mixed in there. It is hard to surf the net on the commute into work.
Anyway...I'm sure I've betrayed my years with my comments so far...but, I really do long to know good rock music again, and GO see bands. I've got LOTS of disposable cash, and I'll pay to go see them, I'll pay to buy CD's or whatever (I'm also old enough to afford a high end stereo system, so I prefer my media in lossless formats)...I just need to find them out.
I also hope that the past years releases of old bands on DVD like Queen: LAW, the Zeppelin DVD, The Who: The Kids are Alright...will find their way into the hands of the next generation of rock bands. I hope they can see what a good rock show is supposed to be...I'm happy so far, that I've actually seen young kids wearing rock tshirts and playing music from bands of my day...so, I feel there is 'hope'.
I wonder if there will ever been another Klaatu tho....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If you're complaining about major labels not releasing material, it's probably too late and you are part of the problem.
We shalt bow beforee thy knees, my master.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
How come nobody mentions Hornet? It's been distributing free songs online since 1987! In addition, there are other free sites:
Kosmic: http://kosmic.org/
The MOD archive: http://modarchive.org/
scene.org: http://scene.org/
Time for the routine plug of Warp Records' music shop Bleep. Warp are a indie label based in Sheffield, England, famed for experimental and avant-garde electronica such as Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. But Bleep also sells from lots of other indie labels, covering a very wide variety of music. It's all DRM-free (mostly high bitrate MP3, but some FLAC).
Hey, while checking my link, I notice that The Undertones' compilation is available on Bleep - MP3 320kbps! 99p a track or £8.99 for the full 32 track double album! Result!
Not really. Services like Last.fm are a quick and easy solution to this problem.\
1. Find other independently minded music listeners with similar tastes to your own
2. join their 'groups'
3. listen to their music
4. kill labels
5. ???
6. Profit!
in the 60's, this didn't happen (hence the original comment about joplin and dylan)... mick also happens to have been with some seriously hot women over the years. i don't think his looks mattered.
please me, have no regrets.
Check out Late Junction, Mixing It, Hear and Now, in particular. Their Jazz is pretty cool too, if you like that kind of thing.
I don't know if they stream outside the UK, but I imagine that they must; Radio 3 is part of an ex-pat's staple diet...
Wikileaks, no DNS
Unfortunately this music is difficult to find because there is simply so much of it.
The problem with Web 2.0 thinking is that they insist having lots of metadata allows for a suitable means of editing -- it does not.
Web 2.0's metadata does help accentuate the positive, but Johnny Mercer's formula for success asks us to eliminate the negative. Right now, all Web 2.0 allows us to do is de-emphasise it, which isn't halfway good enough.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Slashdot is the original blog. And the quality never changed.
I perfer music that doesn't suck. SO let me know when the music I like is DRM free. thxkbye.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Pop rock, rap, Indie scene, punk... No thank you.
I haven't bought music in a long while except used CDs off of ebay. Why? Because there is no such thing as DRM and Classical music. There is NO market for this- and MP3'd material is present poorly at 128kbps instead of 384kbps/vbr. Why would I waste my money (if it was offered) to purchase music that spans the complete tonal and then chop it down to inferior quality?
The Bach Partita #2 is a very-often recorded piece. Amazon lists 657 different 'featured' artists that have CDs with that search term. I own 5 different versions of the same music, on CD,- Jascha Heifetz, Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, and two others I can't recall off the top of my head. You don't have this issue with 'mainstream' music- there aren't 300 different bands trying to record the same music Red Hot Chili Peppers has done- and provide their own artistic interpretations of it.
So I sit and watch the DRM debate with saddened eyes- the music I want will never be offered... and there's nothing I can do about it (Classical Nerds UNITE!... not gonna happen).
Agreed - even without DRM MP3s are so horrible at most bitrates common at the legal download sites. I encourage anyone who buys my music to buy CDs.
Music for coding. Genetic algorithm driven visuals. http://www
Tell the truth and you won't have so much to remember.
DRM is not only imposed by mangling files, it can also be imposed by the vendor. Recently I ran across the problem of territory restrictions on Beatport. Live in the USA? Sorry! You can't purchase this music due to territory restriction. The same occurs on eMusic for certain tracks in other countries, and probably on other services.
This is DRM, but in another form (a server-side check). Online distribution should not be restricted by territory - it makes sense only in the "offline" world where I guess distributors can hold exclusive rights to distribute songs in certain geographic regions. In the online world I should be allowed to buy from any label I want. It is the job of the labels, in fact, to promote their artists. On the Internet, I am likely to buy from the label who has promoted the artist best, and so it clearly makes more sense in terms of benefiting artists to remove all territory restrictions - poor promoters won't be able to compete so well.
If you haven't noticed, my band is called The Schmoejoes. We give everything away, DRM free. Why would we add a obstacle to someone who might be interested in the only indie-pop band in southern Minnesota? There's two kinds of bands concerning DRM, the old school ones which are somehow oblivious to the changing 'biz', and use DRM to protect their songs - and the ones that saw the writing on the wall when they downloaded their first mp3. The days of rock stars are done - when you can taste an album before you buy it, you don't have to take a chance that the 'rest of the songs suck'.
/.ers; people need a filter to find what they are interested in - MySpace is full of crap, and some gems, and it's not like anybody's going to accidentally come to my site, say 'Wow, I love this', and then fly to Mankato, MN to see us. Hell, at this point you need a filter to filter the sites that filter the music.
:)
We're going to be releasing a record by the end of the year (old school), and will be posting most if not all online (new school). I still have reservations, because I grew up the old way, but I'm fighting through them.
One of the issues in all of this is getting the word out. DRM free music lets people email you a tune, "Check this out!" When my pal tried to email a track he bought from the iTunes store to me, I couldn't open it (our first real case of DRM).
He threw it into Protools and got an unprotected version - but notably, he won't do that anymore. It's a pain. So, any other bands he might have turned me or others on to go unheard. But, they 'protected their content', right?
I agree with some
Great music that is DRM free IS everywhere, it's just that it is still harder to find than the tunes Clear Channel wants you to hear - and that is probably the biggest difference between the little indie-pop band and 'Insert Major Label Band here' - marketing. Familiarity is the thing that every band needs, and DRM Doesn't Really Matter when you've got millions of dollars pushing your flavor of the week.
So yeah. Click on my link, listen to the couple songs up there, come to a show. This link-filled post is all the marketing budget I have today.
A friend of mine just linked me to Maps & Atlases yesterday. You clarified this in a reply further down, but some form of talent is required for a band to make it using the plan you've outlined in your post. The guys in your brother's band have it in spades. I was quite impressed with their technical abilities as well as the overall sound. I have a feeling they're going to get a lot bigger.
Your brain is not a computer.
Ah yes, the article about how available the DRM free music takes 10 minutes to load before Slashdot runs up a hundred comments. It nicely illustrates the point: it is not about availability. Every decent sized town in America has a dozen hometown favorites who play out often, go on regular, modest tours, and have a handful of solid, professional CD releases that can stand up to 90% of what's on the Billboard 100 at any given time. They never had the "luck" or were a little too attached to their quirks to make a major label deal, or they decided it wasn't really worth it. They are working musicians supporting their families and local economies and I'd rather give them my money any day of the week than some vacuous, entitled little shit who's ClearChannel's flavor od the month. And they are virtually unknown outside their local community. If you're fan of local shows I bet several names popped into head just from that description. If they're smart you can probably find their music online, either independent or CD Baby, and on eMusic. I bet there are tens of thousands of U.S. bands that fit this profile, probably hundreds of thousands if not millions worldwide. Add to that the "long tail" of hobby, avocation or quirk artists who nonetheless have a few solid tracks a lot of people might pay a nickel or a quarter for, and you've got a catalog no individual could ever tap out. In a way, fixating on trying to transform the distribution model for the tiny population of major label stable pros (getting smaller every year) is laughably the wrong approach.
The problem is filtering. I keep looking at that eMusic trial offer and thinking, man, how much time am I going to have to spend getting my money's worth out of that? If they had a built-in, fast working Pandora plug in so I could simply and accurately calibrate my mainstream preferences to their catalog? I would be on that today.
The problem is payment strategies. A dollar for a song is BS and micropayments have been pretty BS up to now too. Subscriptions make a lot of people skeevy. This should not be as complicated as it is.
The problem is dispersion. There are fifty million little this and that sites. That does not work. Independent artists who want to sell piecemeal tracks and not require people have a subscription to eMusic - desperately need a solution. The technology for delivering bits is not complicated. The technology for accepting money is not complicated. Social networking and community-driven filtering and moderation aren't the future, they are the RIGHT NOW. This is a get-in-on-the-ground-floor Google type opportunity, man.
God, that pie in the sky looks so del.icio.us. Ahem, gotta wipe these starts out of my eyes. Okay, well, if anybody takes up the cause, you know, I'm available for visionary consultation and next gen viral marketeering (not to self: no electronics on bridges)! Call me! (Man, why did I study chemistry instead of computers?)
Oh, and regarding that Nettwerk Store link (once it finally loaded)... You want me to use Real to preview, this is how you make your point? Come the fuck on. My Grandma has a simple, browser-agnostic preview player built into her website. Well, okay, that's not true but still. Bye bye, Hello Love.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Check out AmieStreet. Artists upload their tunes, and the price for each track is a function of how popular it is. All tracks are DRM-free. Many excellent tracks are also free-as-in-beer free (until they get popular, anyway).
Subscription for life? If it sounds too good to be true, then it is just that.
Soundclick... and Pandora...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Dada21, I salute your progressive view of the process of distributing music in order to support live shows, but it sounds to me like little more than an adjustment of the current machinery. Just because you turn the model of live shows supporting record sales on its head doesn't mean that you've solved a problem. You still end up with a factory mentality where the entire goal is little more than to keep an industry running.
I assume you realize that there are recording musicians who do not perform live shows at all, or even care to, yes? I sincerely do commend you for wanting to make the industry more equitable to the artists, but it is possible to go a step further and embrace models even less dependent upon systems that support a corporate view of producing music. I've seen the way the ClearChannels and Sonys have created a juggernaut that uses records/radio/live venues in such a way to destroy creativity, mess up the lives of artists and lower the overall level of joy and wonder in the music, turning everything into an extruded mess that has no taste and no texture. I remember when local promoters in my area were fighting those big corporations a few years back. You only had to listen to underdogs for a few minutes to realize that what really made them mad was that they weren't the ones getting rich. They were all for breaking the monopoly, but only to give themselves a chance at becoming the ones calling the shots and collecting the rewards.
I don't want to see one juggernaut exchanged for another just so a bunch of operators (I mean no offense to you personally) who want to make a living off the creativity of others can make money. Yes, I understand that parasites have to live too, but I've become rather protective of an artform that I love dearly.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you like the electronic music scene, I highly recommend Beatport.com. Music is DRM free, available as MP3 320kbps or WAV and has the very latest releases. Since I started buying there early last year, I've been spending 50+ a month on tunes. Which is more than I spent on music in *total* in the previous 7 years, if you know what I mean...
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
Off the top of my head, I can't see that this would be a completely free site, but it should be pretty cheap. There would have to be an agreement that the band's music would only be available from the one site (or else the site would just be used to rate the tracks and everyone would download elsewhere). Perhaps the site could develop it's ratings from volunteers who agreed to listen to and rate a certain number of new tracks in exchange for free downloads. I can see three possible sources of income:
- The bands, who are already paying for hosting their music somewhere -- and that's just to give it away for free. Better to give the money to someone who offers a chance at return on the investment.
- The users, who are currently either digging through masses of music to find the tracks they like or paying a buck a track. I suspect that five or ten cents a track would be closer to the mark, with the band getting a cut of each download. It's also possible for the site to have a section where users can cook up their own CDs and receive them by mail, complete with cover art. Of course that would be more expensive than the downloads, but it beats the heck out of paying ten bucks for a CD with one decent track.
- Ads. Of course a successful site like this would generate a ton of traffic.
In the end it comes down to whether or not people will be willing to pay the musicians a fair price for their product. The only service the industry is providing at the moment is sorting through all the bad musicians and picking a few of the good musicians (out of many) who can produce decent music. ("Decent music" is here defined as the kind of music people will pay for.) For this service, they are charging the consumers a horrific amount of money while doling out a pathetic amount to those who are actually making the product. If we want to take our business elsewhere, someone needs to make a profitable alternative.===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
It is.
And every I-IV-V (blues riff) that I play goes way back.
When I write lyrics, do my own lead licks, and put it all together, then it's unique. Ok, it doesn't sell like George Thorogood or Clapton or Hendrix, but both the lines and the lyrics have been ripped off. I wrote them, not the band in Cincinnatti that heard them and uses them.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
What if, by some miracle, the RIAA were history and the artists were actually making all of the money off the distribution of their music? Would it still be OK to pirate the music? Say no, and you contradict your above argument that piracy is A-OK (unless you mean it's ok to steal from the RIAA but not the artists, which I can see in sort of an idealistic, Robin Hood sort of way). Say yes, and you don't care about the artists; you just want free music. Unless I am missing something here.
I don't the above scenario is far fetched. There are plenty of independent artists who make money from selling their music (DRM free) on their websites. Why should they not be protected from theft?
As another poster said above, and let me paraphrase...confusing DRM and copyright protection are two different things. DRM = bad, copyright protection* = good. Getting rid of both is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
* not the draconian IP enforcement as found in the US, either. I mean the principle of protecting your ideas from being plagarized. The USPO is another matter entirely.
blah blah blah
they're called gnarls barkley
For drm free (and completely free downloads) see these great sites:
www.archive.org/audio
www.tapers.org
www.thespps.org
FWIW -- I am a total emusic fanboy. And I would recommend taking advantage of their trial offers. You can sign up for their more-or-less genre based newsletters for whatever floats your boat. I receive their country/folk, electronica, jazz, and blues emailings.
The reviews and suggestions are driven equal parts by "professional" music fans and reviewers, as well as user-driven methodologies. The net result is that cream, from any genre, floats to the top. You bet, I've had some misses, but even $10 / month buys you so many tracks you can afford to have a miss here and there. The whole sense of the site is exactly what you talk about "Yes, we know you like X, Y, and Z, and there's a ton of other good stuff out there, too. Some of it's similar, but you might also want to look at this other stuff that's totally different."
I totally 3 it and would suggest you give it a shot. Start out month-to-month, I don't think there's any term obligation unless you want to do the year-length discount plan.
This is an excellent point and it's been bothering me for years. I actually used to listen to dozens of bands to try and find a good one. I've found a lot of gems, but had to wade through a lot of stinkers to do so. (I would download the entire SXSW bittorrent compilation and start wading through. The keeper ratio was approximately 10 (bad) to 1 (good) overall.
What we need is a Digg (or /.-style moderation) for music. On a track-by-track basis. Digg has a music section, but that's for music news, and MySpace has shitloads of bands, but it's not good for aggregating the good tunes from the bad (and it's slow, ugly and full of useless crap). Last.fm is closest to this ideal, but they're still more about tracking listening habits and they haven't added too many ways for unknown bands to get heard. They do have a label/artist signup section and some free downloads, but it's not integrated into the site very well yet. Garageband.com is good for finding cool tunes as well, but writing reviews can be a real chore.
I'm hoping for improvement here, but in the meantime, I'd really like to see a simple, clean site in the style of digg that allows people to vote either yay or nay for songs (which could easily be listened to via a simple Flash interface). Songs could be categorized individually by genre (meaning a band is not restricted to one style) and popular songs make the home page. Popular does not equal good, so people would have the chance to drill down to genres they like, and block songs from bands that they know suck (and vice versa, like a karma bonus for bands that rule).
Anybody want to make this? You'll make millions of dollars. I can't code for shit or I'd do it. It's not even a unique or novel idea. I'm kinda surprised that it hasn't been done yet. Is there a problem I'm not aware of here?
Fuck the majors, this should be a resource for up and coming bands and listeners who want to find good bands without having to listen to all the crappy ones. Oh, and the songs should be downloadable, too. MP3, FLAC or Ogg format. I know that my band would submit our music to such a site in a heartbeat.
Electric Monkey Pants
Ummm, DC is one of the indie capitals of the country. Really? I thought it was the official capital of the country...
Not that it matters... I hate country.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
That's pretty cool.
Does anyone know if there's a directory of venues like that, for other areas? I admit, I haven't really gone to a lot of concerts or live shows recently, although I'm in what I can only assume is a pretty choice demographic (male, professional, no kids = lots of money for hobbies / entertainment, relative to earlier periods in my life). But unless you "follow the scene," and invest a lot of time and effort which I don't really have the freedom to do, it's hard to find shows that you know are going to be worth going to, at venues that aren't going to be unbelievably dodgy. (And I'm not a stranger to somewhat sketchy locales, but I draw the line at places that are obviously hazardous.)
It seems, to a casual observer, that you have on one end, well-known bands at big venues, with very high ticket prices; on the other hand you have a plethora of college bands giving free shows at bars. Not to totally disparage the latter category, because I'm sure there are some awesome college bands out there, but there's a lot of rank amateurs, too. I'm looking for bands somewhere in the middle; groups that are actually into doing it as something like a career, and have CDs and the hope of future music out of them, but not some label-sponsored supergroup.
A place that plays original music with some minimum stanards, with a low ticket price (say under $10), in a venue that didn't make you feel like you needed to go through a hazardous-materials decontamination on walking out of it, would be pretty nice to have around. Particularly if they weren't gouging for the food or beer, I could see myself going to such a place fairly regularly, just as a way of finding new music to listen to and an alternative to the usual bar scene. There are a lot of 20- and 30-somethings looking for things to do as a "night out" that's somewhere in that grey area of cultural edginess north of going to a movie, but south of bad free-verse poetry readings in college coffee shops. This market seems poorly capitalized-on.
An online directory of places like that, perhaps even one that showed what bands would be performing when, would be a great way to develop community and attract fans. (It'd also be nice for people like me who travel; I spend a lot of time going to various cities, and I've always found that it's difficult to figure out what the local scene is like when you're only going to be there a few nights, occasionally to the point where it's like it's being intentionally hidden.) If it doesn't already exist, it seems like it could be a revenue (or at least venture-cap!) generator, for somebody.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
My friend's bands, in alphabetical order, all have songs without DRM to download for free -
http://www.bitchfindergenital.co.uk/
http://www.myspace.com/dagdad
http://www.hundredweight.co.uk/
Enjoy,
Jonathan
First off, as a writer, you must understand that a loaf is still considered a very experimental and unconventional method for delivering quality writing. Tasty as it may be, most people don't think that way and won't quickly adapt to the concept. As distasteful as it may be to approach the problem in such a conventional way, publishing in book form may be more profitable.
Second, the barter system has largely fallen out of use in favor of money exchanges. Better to sell your writing for money, and then use the money to buy bread, than to expect the reader to directly give you bread.
I hope this will be helpful as you continue your career as a writer.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
He's a total lefty "libertarian socialist" (i.e. commie pinko mofo) but his music is really nice. You can download all his ambient electronic stuff HERE.
I've known him a long time. He told me he gives it away because making a living at avant-garde ambient electronic space music is pretty much impossible. clubs won't hire you to play out, and record companies aren't really interested, so after 20 years he figured, "why bother fighting these ass clowns"? He's into that "be the change you want to see" kind of thing (I'm much more mercenary and cynical than he is...) so he wants a world of "Free" so his creative world is "Free".
I'm working with him to process his imaging practice for download.
I also think he's out of his freakin' mind, but I think he also has a good view of the general situation. And I like his music. A lot of it is really nice for "background" ambient sound stuff.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
There's a price for information. Some people donate the cost, others hope for return, like PayPal donations at Groklaw, as an example. If you like mine, don't tip the waitress (actually do, she's poorly paid) and tip me, the hard working blues man.
I built the song, using standard tools (including the I-IV-V progression) and made my own song. Were it successful, I'd like to think someone didn't use my hard work and creativity to their own ends. Do I deserve a share? This is what copyright is about. If I don't deserve a share, then my motivations have to be altruistic and perhaps socialistic-- unless another motivation is the fun of sharing and creativity.
If I write something, you can read it in various places; I'm well-published. Some people hired me, and that's how I'm compensated. If you knew about my website, then you could go there, and read other items for free. You have to, in life, choose your charities.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
With a sign on the door that says "beware of the leopard".
If you read and subscribe to mp3 blogs, good DRM free music isn't hard to find at all. Many of the bands whose music is featured in mp3 blogs have their songs available in DRM free format on sites like zunior.ca, emusic.com, etc.
Mp3 blogs are the way to go. You can use the excellent songbird software to subscribe to most mp3 blogs and automatically download songs from featured artists. I've really expanded my musical horizons doing this, and discovered all kinds of great indie/small label bands along the way.
http://www.songbirdnest.com/ has a great application freely available to do all this.
I just have to astroturf a site I have helped startup recently, since it is very much on topic.
http://www.anytist.com/
It provides an extremely easy way for artists to sell music to their fans witout DRM.
Open Materials Database
Can you share a direct link? I'd like to give them a try.
Think of the children who waste their time ripping albums for everyone else. What are they going to do, play games? :(
While I understand the nervousness, I think that a more performance-centric compensation system would work pretty well. I'm not going to put words in Dada21's mouth, but I don't think that it would just replace the Sonys and EMIs with somebody else. In fact, I don't really see how it could.
If the standard distribution model for music was all about building buzz and promoting live shows, it would be tougher for middlemen to step in between the bands and the consumers. Right now, when a band signs with a label, they basically sign over the right to their recordings, and the label then takes these recordings and sells them (or attempts to, anyway) for great profit. If the band members don't like the arrangement, tough; they are effectively irrelevant, except insofar as they're required to eventually record more music for another CD, and to do promotions in order to sell more copies of the CD. And then they can try to do shows to make money for themselves.
But the point is, this system allows the record company to get between the producers and consumers of the music, and inject themselves, and control the 'supply' of music in order to create a false scarcity and reap large profits.
An alternative model might have most of the revenue coming from shows, and less of it from recordings. Here, bands would record and distribute the recordings, not expecting much of a direct profit (not hard for them, since they themselves don't get much right now from it anyway), but in order to promote live shows. The band themselves, now, are the real revenue generator, and not the recordings of them. This makes it much more difficult for a record label to interject itself and abscond with the profits, because if the band really doesn't like its label/manager/whatever, it can leave -- but then the manager is left with nothing, and the band can continue to tour and make money. In short, the band itself becomes the asset, instead of the band's "intellectual property" being the real thing of value.
By making the bands the real asset, instead of their recordings, you've made it much harder for someone to do in the future what the labels have managed over the past half-century or so. (Plus, the awareness in hindsight of what happened to the music industry the first time around ought to make people more cautious, although that may be assuming an intelligence on the part of a group where it doesn't exist.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Since the end of last summer, I have discovered one new band A DAY just by hopping through the top favorites of different bands and listening to their 4 songs.
Sometimes it takes me 4 bands, sometimes 10 but each day I find one band that makes me want to hear their songs again.
Since september, I have bought one cd per month based on my Myspace discovery and even saw a few bands when they passed through town.
I havent heard Satisfaction in almost a year now, nor Stairway to Heaven and frankly after listening to them for 25 years, I had my fill of the songs of my youth.
That ugly, buggy Myspace is a real goldmine if you like all kinds of music and like to discover new things.
If you feel better hearing the same songs 8 times a day, then good for you but with Myspace and the tons of 24/7 online radio stations, I have no need for Sirius (just like XM, they promised a world of choice and then killed off their world music stations even though they have no ratings, and in their case replace it with Rolling Stones 24/7 which considering how many songs they have must get redundant after 2-3 days.) or testicle radio. The money I could have spent on satellite ends up going to the bands in cds and tickets, so I not only get entertained, I also feel good contributing to the bands coffers.
But it sounds like you are arguing, not against DRM, but for piracy.
I hate the word "piracy", but right, it's what I'm doing.
Say yes, and you don't care about the artists; you just want free music.
Basically yes. The point is not about "free music": is about (note: my own POV following) the free, no-profit redistribution of information as a new, fundamental human right (admittedly a minor one in respect with other basic ones, but still a right). About the artists, well, 1)the poster I replied to clearly made the case for artists thriving without copyright, and even benefiting from it 2)that's not the problem: artists always worked *without* direct monetary compensation. The fact that we think artists just want money to make art is a cultural twist of the latest 150 years, not an obvious fact. Please stop that "thinkoftheartists" whining, it just doesn't make sense anymore.
Why should they not be protected from theft?
Because it is not theft. Theft is when you take something from someone and that someone has no more that thing. Copying doesn't take away anything.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
Which is why, in the fullness of time, they are doomed to fail.
Simon
If one is going to make the "on the shoulders of..." argument. Then one also makes a tact acknowledgement that the content creator adds something to the mix. Otherwise there would be no forward motion. That's the "promotes" part of copyright.
"To have harsh copyright laws is to deny that truth."
Two things:
One depends on how one defines "harsh", and DRM isn't "copyright", nor is DMCA.
Two most of the "illegal copyright violations" that happen fall well within the original copyright term limits* (before the Sony Bono Act, and even the lifetime of the author). So the "harshness" argument doesn't even apply.
*There's even one example of an item was pirated before it was even released to the public.
"Imagine what would have happened to most Disney movies if copyright had existed on Cinderella and other stories they ripped off."
I'll imagine that, if you imagine a world without copyright.
Funny how everyone goes through the same learning experience.
Age 25: Hooray for free music downloads!
Age 30: It's hard to find the good songs with so much noise.
The money you spend on managed content is a reflection of the value of the distribution process. If everyone had the time and effort to find the good songs on their own, they would all be free. The fact is you pay a fee in exchange for a much higher chance of getting a good song. Without the economic filter, the good songs would never get discovered.
Even mp3.com eventually had to start charging money to weed out the noise.
artists always worked *without* direct monetary compensation. The fact that we think artists just want money to make art is a cultural twist of the latest 150 years, not an obvious fact.
What planet are you on?
Artists have been paid for their work as long as there have been artists. The difference is that it was usually a sovereign doing the paying, not a bunch of individual customers.
If you expect that artists will take the time and effort to create when there is neither financial return nor any guarantee of recognition (in a copyright-less system, the best publicizer, not the inventor, will wind up with credit for new ideas), then you're ignoring both basic human nature and all of artistic history.
If we want either art or inventions, we have to find some way to compensate the artists and inventors. It's that simple. Copyright isn't perfect, and the terms these days are ludicrously long, but we can't replace it with your "it's only for the joy of creating!" garbage. If J.S. Bach had had to spend his days farming for a living, he wouldn't have had time to compose a damn thing. It's that simple.
"After you eat the loaf the baker made he doesn't get a cut everytime someone bakes a loaf like it afterward. If he wants to get paid again he has to bake another loaf. Why shouldn't you?"
You might want to think that through before asking again. If every item created was a one-on-one then LoTr would have an audiance of one (don't want anyone to be paid twice now do we?) His music would be just like the "collector" system of yore. Someone pays him ONCE to create and then it goes into the vault, never to be seen again (Kind of defeats the purpose of copyright, now doesn't it?) And last why are you applying "why should you" to the digital domain, if "it isn't theft" can't be applied either?
Check out Pandora. You pick what you like and it presents stuff to you that's similar and you give it a thumbs up/down. I've found a LOT of stuff there that I never would have been exposed to otherwise.
END OF LINE.
It doesn't, however. I end up relinquishing my copyright to the people I write for. They, however, are going to enforce it. Steal what they've paid for to have produced, and they'll likely get mad in a legal way.
Books that I've written, however, paid nice royalties. Someone tried to lift paragraphs wholesale from them. They didn't do the research, I did. Their publishers ended up paying me, no lawyers involved. It was my work, not someone's scanner/OCR, that was protected. I wouldn't have known if it weren't for a plucky reader.
Some bakers guard their recipes, others guard them jealously/zealously. Others don't care, and the value they add is locational convenience or simply good taste at a fair price or any combination of those. There are licensed recipes, too. There's a nearby chain that does this, that is, license their recipes. There goods are delicious and a bit pricey. I pay the price as often as I can afford it because there's an assuredness of quality. In turn, they pay the license. All is good.
Another baker makes fabulous stuff, does it all himself, and charges a mint. I go there only because of the outstanding quality, and not often enough because I could go broke eating there. Then there's the local grocer, where I can buy close imitations at much cheaper prices with consistent quality. They're only distributors of the stuff.
The parallels and analogies still apply. I work to create and the life of the asset of the information is its long term worth. Books I wrote 20 years ago are worthless today except as doorstops. Fine. Back then, however, they were hot property. The copyright and what it represents for those old books don't mean that much to me, and such was the expectation of copyrights in the first place-- that they'd diminish in value over time. In my case, they have. It took real effort to write them, and I was well-rewarded. Today, the same texts are quite useless.
A loaf of bread is a different proposition, but the assets needed to continue to cough loaves isn't. Nor are the other overhead costs associated with baking. I have similar values that I have to spend to retain my ability to deliver cogent paragraphs to my editors. And so on.
I believe your assumptions that copyrights protect publishers more than writers would cause an absolute shit storm among the writers I know. It's the asset value that they deal with in negotiations, unless they're under captive contract to a publisher, and even then, there's still an asset value to the copyright.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I think that a multiprong approach is reasonable - my band (The Franchise) gives away a few songs on our website, sells DRM-free CDs, and then sells songs by track on all of the music stores which CDBaby will support.
So there's a matrix:
No DRM and Free
No DRM and $
DRM and $
(nobody really supports DRM and free, 'cause it's silly).
-David
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
The basic problem with "music" as a generic substance is that ... well, it isn't.
Show me a person that purchases music in unit quantities, either by the minute, kilogram, liter or parsec and I will show you someone that has no sense what music is.
You can try to promote "free music downloads" all you want, but the net effect is that people are interested not in specific categories of music but specific music which happens to belong to a few categories. This should be clear to anyone, but usually isn't.
For example, if someone likes Country Western music, that does not imply to anyone that they like all music belonging to the category Country Western. They like specific music, specific artists that happen to play Country Western. The same can be said for any other music category, except maybe things like electronica. Maybe.
So we have artists that are known and unknown. Sure maybe if you like rap you would be interested in finding out about some new rapper. And then you would find out if you liked that artist. Just saying "you can download rap at site www.abcdef.com" is pointless unless they have rap artists you are interested in.
I suppose if you have unlimited time on your hands it might be interesting and educational to explore random artists with the hope of finding something you like. Some external indexing or hinting - such as someone telling you about a previously-unknown artist - is extremely helpful and reduces the amount of time significantly. The problem is there is just so much out there and most of it is uninteresting badly-formed crap. So much crap that it would probably be easy to come up with a psychological torture based on playing random music freely downloaded on the Internet.
That's 4 shows a week for $30,000 a year... split that 2, 3, 4, 5 ways or more. You'd better not have a house or apartment waiting at home that you need to pay rent/mortgage for. Plus the cost of gas, food, paying your booking agent, paying for places to stay on the rare occasions that you don't have to sleep in your disgusting, noxious van, the cost of repairing your broken equipment and who knows what else you'll break on tour... If you're playing 3 or 4 shows a week I wouldn't expect your band to be playing in the same town which pretty much makes you a touring band, that precludes any kind of job other than part time or seasonal work at the mall. Also, it's great that you think a band can sell 20 of each piece of their merch at a show (I'm not being sarcastic), and on a good night that might be true but much of the time it just doesn't work like that. Especially not if you're a relatively unknown touring band.
It is founded by probably the most amazing guitar musicians of our time.
candyrat.com has a nice interface giving you the ability to preview (albeit at a preview bitrate) the tracks for 30 seconds.
They also offer CD's of some other artists.
It it the only store I have bought music from since the RIAA started they terror campaign.
I am very reluctant to buy any product that has DRM. I won't touch iTunes, bu-ray, hd-dvd, hdmi etc.
It might be hypocritical since I actually worked on products that enforce DRM, however from a marketing sense, I coulc not work if I didn't do so. Whenever I was asked, I told customers that DRM would always be broken because all the components to decipher the content was available at the player. I also said that the value chain breaks down with DRM and interoperability between different products breaks down because corps want their market advantage and so they have no interest in co-operating with DRM and hence interoperability will always fail between the corps. Since at least '99 I was told by others that I was not very helpful in the sales cycle of our products.
Hence the customer to our systems (labels/riaa/mpaa) is always right even if the customer is shooting itself in the foot.
Oh well.
IMHO I think it's simnply the fact that some want to enjoy the fruits of being in a society without paying their dues. To say they want free music is one thing, but to then complain about the "dreck" (as one poster put it) indicates to me that they want someone else to do all the filtering according to their tastes, and then that too should be free.* To put it plainly, one gets out of a society what one puts in.
*AND no ads, or asking for personal information (NYT) or I'll sic adblock/bugmenot on you. Otherwise it wouldn't be "free" now would it?
http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#music
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
As another example of an extended source of "open art", let me share this link with you :
_ user_language=english
http://www.dogmazic.net/index.php?op=edito&choice
It only took 3 opensource warlord to create this site. I know the logo is rather strange, but the content is just amazing...
Their first line speaks for itself :
"795 hours of music available, that's 10144 tracks by 1119 bands and 115 labels under 26 licenses streamed or downloaded 13655539 times in 766 days, peacefully and legally"
hum, of course, as of the peacefull side, it sure all depends on both your picking and the volume level of your loudspeakers...
~mato
This one must have slipped past the filters. Slashdot has become the land of the stupid/whiny with its share of paid-for undercover advertisers and when I least expected it I find an article basically saying 'go out and find yourself good drm-free music and stop being a baby'. Still, it's too obvious, so it's useless as usual. I've been doing it forever.
The museums where their works are displayed charge entrance fees and they won't even let you touch the paintings! Please form a preference for sidewalk chalk artists instead, as their art is freely distributed and far more accessible.
I have burned lots of cds and handed them out for free. Just making it is fun and having people listen is satisfying. IOW, it's a hobby.
There are some recent works-in-progress and one finished song at myspace.com/a4r6.
Yes he did. But suppose a musician is not in a position to tour relentlessly? What if he has a family? What if his health is bad? What if he just doesn't want to? If there is a demand for his music, why should he not be paid for it? So me might not have the right to expect that he make as much as someone who tours and plays 20 shows a month. So what? If his music is in demand, why should he not be paid for it?
That said, I also thing that the OP makes a good point about free music generating interest in a band because I have seen it firsthand. I made a copy of an independent artist's CD that I had purchased from eMusic and gave it to my brother. When the band came to town, he was there, bought a t-shirt, etc. But there is a big difference between making a copy or two and thus getting your friends hip to your latest musical discovery and, on the other hand, freely distributing somone else's music to the anonymous masses (via the internet). Well, if you have some skill that is in demand, why should you not be paid for it? Times are different. In the past, people were enslaved and forced to work without compensation. So does that mean that people who pick cotton for a living shouldn't be paid for it just because in the past people did it for free? Gimme a break! Maybe not to you. I saw your profile where it said you are a PhD student. Suppose I got my hands on an electronic copy of your dissertation, published it, and made lots of money from the sales. According to your definition, I stole nothing, I just copied. Without some kind of protection on your ideas, I can do this legally and you have no recourse except for to grumble about it. Me, I write software for a living. If someone were to take my software, make a copy, and rebrand it as their own and make tons of money from it and in the process ensure that I will never sell my software (because the market is saturated), I'd want a legal recourse.
Again, your whole argument has nothing to do with DRM. It has to do with ethics. If you cannot see the inherent ethical issues with taking someone's work and copying|stealing|whatev you want to call it, then I don't know what else to say. I guess this should suffice: if you belive that *all* information should be free, then give me your credit card number, name, and ssn. Are you cheating on your wife|girlfriend? That should be free information, too. If you want to paint with broad brushes, let's do it.
blah blah blah
just now awakening from a year-long hiatus is the program iRATE radio http://irate.sourceforge.net/ proving that I'm incredibly lazy I will rip this from their page "iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering system for music. You rate the tracks it downloads and the server uses your ratings and other people's to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from websites which allow free and legal downloads of their music." basically use it for a few days and you'll soon have many gigabytes of new music available for your pleasure, the quality ranges from impressively crappy to I wish they played this on my radio.
Sure there's a lot of DRM free music available, I don't think many people will be suprised to hear that. The problem is, music isn't a commodity like, say, gasoline. If I have an issue with the way gas is being sold by many companies, and there's plenty available that's being sold the way I like it, no problem, I just get the gas from the sources I respect. Music isn't simply music. Most people aren't simply interested in obtaining massive amounts of music, they want specific music. They want the music they like. Now, there are a lot of people who prefer looking for new, independant music almost exclusively. They're lucky, lots of independant musicians are releasing their music DRM free. Sometimes entirely free (as in beer). They aren't everyone though. Most people probably get more popular stuff from major labels. I listen to a pretty wide variety of music. So while some of the stuff I'm interested in comes from independant artists who release their music without DRM, I also want to obtain stuff that's released by the big corporations who are really, really, really nervous that I might illegally copy their recordings. Popular music is called "popular" for a reason. Lots of people want to listen to it. I should mention I'm using the term "popular music" in its broadest sense. Not just Britney Spears and the Pussycat Dolls, I'm referring to any music produced by widely recognized musicians. This includes plenty of rock, folk, country, hip hop, classical, blues, r&b. Oh, and, of course, not just recent recordings by living musicians, but all the popular stuff recorded over the years. The vast majority of popular music is released by RIAA-connected major labels, who are, of course, the primary purveyors of DRM. I'm not denying the fact that there's probably as much quality music available out there from independant artists, but people don't tend to want music until they've heard it and enjoyed it. Popular music has a clear advantage there. I think the internet has become a great way for musicians to promote their work, but it still lacks a bit for musicians. People still seem to pay more attention to music they hear on TV or the radio. The internet has been a great way for people like bloggers to become successful, but with music you have to go a little further out of your way to take it in. There have been a number of artists that have successfully promoted themselves with MySpace (and perhaps a few other services), but for the most part, downloading and listening to music requires a few extra steps over reading an article, and people are less likely to go out of their way to try new things unless they have a reason to be interested. Part of the problem is likely the massive amount of available media. If you want to listen to internet radio, you have literally thousands of options, and the listeners get divided amongst the different stations. The online broadcasts of independant music provide such an enormous variety of material that its more difficult for artists to gain widespread popularity. Sure it happens to some extent, but TV and radio still have a much greater ability to give an artist enormous popularity. Personally, I think it would be wonderful to see this create a much more varied music industry. Instead of having a smaller number of extremely succesful and wealthy artists, it would be nice to see a greater number and variety of artists, who were all able to make a reasonable living. The problem is that people want to idolize musicians. It seems unlikely that we'll see teenagers in particular completely abandon having rock star idols. Anyways, I'm getting way off track. My point was basically that while it's nice having DRM free music available, unless I can get whatever music I'd like to listen to, DRM free, it's still a huge problem. People aren't going to hear this news and say "Hey! I didn't realize that! Now I don't have to buy my favorite artist's music, instead I can get this DRM free stuff that I'm completely unfamiliar with!".
while dylan isn't a pop artist by any means, his music and songs are certainly far from boring
Well, while it's true that Dylans *music* is good, his *singing* is horrible. Honestly, if someone *else* sang his stuff, it would be brilliant... the lyrics, the arrangements, all fantastic. But that voice...!
i actually like his voice. it's very suitable to the style he sings.
and a lot of people do sing his stuff... joan baez, the band, jimi hendrix, eric clapton, guns n roses... aside from what the band does (one of my favorite all time bands), i think dylans renditions of his own songs is better than any of the others, with maybe the exception of watchtower.
please me, have no regrets.
Having read your arguments here I still don't understand why you care at all about copyright one way or the other.
The entire point of this submission is that there is plenty of music available without any DRM. There is also plenty from non-RIAA affiliated labels. Some released under Creative Commons licenses. Some of it is even out there with explicitly renounced copy rights.
Yet you still care whether or not I release a piece of music (or in my case, a photograph) with the expectation of some exclusive right of distribution.
Despite the availability of a significant quantity of unencumbered music you seem to still want the RIAA label produced stuff. To me, that indicates that it has value beyond whatever marginal costs is associated with its replication.
How does the logic work here?
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Right. So....what's your solution to the parent?
You never answered the question except to say that the record companies DID do some filtering for him and they missed a bunch of stuff. Great. I am not surprised at all. But it still doesn't solve his predicament.
Who's going to do the filtering/moderating of internet/indie music? Where is a solid "Top 40" or other chart (like Billboard)? Please, tell me. I really do want to know because unless it changes, I whole-heartedly agree with the parent: I just don't have time to wade through shit to get to the 2 good songs I like. I need filtering.
"Also, it's great that you think a band can sell 20 of each piece of their merch at a show (I'm not being sarcastic), and on a good night that might be true but much of the time it just doesn't work like that"
So true. If the band I manage sells 5-10 CDs at a show at $12 each I consider that a good night. T-shirts sell even slower, maybe a couple a night at $10.
"That's 4 shows a week for $30,000 a year... split that 2, 3, 4, 5 ways or more. You'd better not have a house or apartment waiting at home that you need to pay rent/mortgage for. Plus the cost of gas, food, paying your booking agent, paying for places to stay on the rare occasions that you don't have to sleep in your disgusting, noxious van, the cost of repairing your broken equipment and who knows what else you'll break on tour..."
I can tell you have gone on tour a few times before..(lol) Yeah, that is pretty much the reality. If you can break even on your bills, be able to eat and have a few beers, and MAYBE make a few bucks, I would consider that successful. I know plenty of bands that have had to pay to go on tour before, and that sucks.
"But this one goes to 11!"
and Lyle Lovett
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
I work at Goombah, a new service that matches artists with audience. We offer DRM-free promotional tracks that are sourced from labels and artists. These tracks are recommended to members based on their taste profile for them to download and keep. The Goombah Free Music collection is growing, covers many genres, and is updated weekly on Free Music Fridays. Goombah analyzes each member's entire music library and connects them with people who share their taste. Additionally, recommendations of music to sample and purchase are drawn from matching members' libraries. As the promotional tracks are downloaded in member's collections, that artist starts to spread throughout the community. We believe that this model is a benefit to both the artist and their (new) fans and works very efficiently in the digital environment. http://www.goombah.com/
'Nuff Said.
Okay,
Everybody please go listen to the fun, funny, smart, tech-savvy, pop rock of Jim's Big Ego right now. The Boston-based band's lead singer, Jim Infantino, "gets it."
"JBE Radio" is waiting to fill your speakers.
Their song Mix Tape (free download) was written about the music industry's inability to understand that people have always shared their favorite music and will continue to.
Their music is released with a Creative Commons license. "Jim's Big Ego Won't Sue You!"
Listen to previews of the tracks from their album "They're Everywhere" (and other albums.) Buy the album in 192kbps MP3 unrestricted shareable copyable non-DRM format.
Okay, thanks. Back to your regularly scheduled John Mayer and Jack Johnson.
Tom.
you must be an RIAA troll. It's people like you who give the RIAA the justification they need for DRM.
Quick note to those who have seemed to miss this:
Copyrights are a good thing. They keep good song writers from being ripped off by big mega-corps. Without copyright law there wouldn't be a professional music industry like we have and have had for near a century now. Music writting would be a hobby only, because nobody could make a living doing it. Copyrights protect writers and artists against theft of their IP (real theft, not the kind music execs are worried about).
DRM is bad because DRM is not about protecting people, it's about controlling people. Control over the audience and control over the musicians who are dependent on audiences. There is basically nothing good about DRM. There is a lot good about copyrights.
IMO, it's the confusion between copyright and DRM that makes for bad laws and who could be decent politicians (oxymoron?) making really bad choices (DCMA anyone?). Somebody with a voice needs to get out there and point out the difference so that the audiences begin to get pissed and stop thinking DRM in software like iTunes is OK because it protects somebody. People should be really angry about DRM and refuse to use anything associated with it. They're not because they've been spoon fed that DRM is there to protect the artists that people "love".
</rant>- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
Mick's a better businessman than he is a musician... I'm sure he gets on very well with the record labels.
DRM establishes a license to be entertained.
I don't necessarily agree with DRM.
I'm paid for my music when I get royalties from lyrics I've written, and from writing works. You're probably read my writing. You probably have never heard any of my lyrics or songs.
In either case, it was a creative endeavor. We played and payed oodles of royalties to BMI/ASCAP. We paid our union dues, too. At the end of the day, we did kinda ok. When the first baby came along, the royalty checks were pretty handy. That's the system and how it currently works. Vast parts of it are broken and monitored by stooges of the RIAA. Other parts work ok. Indie labels are a good idea and the Internet distribution methodology is vital to their success. Show me the first person to make $100K a year as an Internet Indie, and I'll be heartened. The article implied, and I replied to an Indie producer that has odd expectations of the system, in my opinion.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
If there is so much drm-free quality music around the net, somebody should start a radio station that only plays music available drm-free. This station needs to operate just as any other cool radio station with good DJs and all so it can survive and expand to other major markets.
A radio station is the best way to promote this music and grow the market to a point big labels would have to bend over to get a piece of that cake.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
great advice!
--iggy_mon - www.ananonymouskiller.com - Die Trying -
"...the existence of DRM is a fantastic chance for new distribution to reveal new bands." No, DRM (RESTRICTIONS) do not do anything AT ALL to HELP "reveal new bands". Bands are perfectly capable of, and always have been able to, reveal themselves without DRM.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
I'm sure there must be more huge archives of free music, and genres other than electronic; anybody know of any?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
I'm not a big music buyer - I usually get CDs and rip them (now not legal in the UK, but decriminialized - wow, that's kind of everyone). For me, DRM is like nuclear waste - no use to anyone and you don't want to get any on you.
Anyway, I bought my first piece of music online from Synth Music Direct (google it), a small independent music store who publishes their download albums cheaper than regular CDs, and you can download in FLAC or MP3, DRM free.
The site's a bit primitive, but they have excellent service (I have exchanged email with the proprietor a couple of times), and they have a wide selection of synth-based music for electronic music fans like me.
So, Nemesis, you got your money for at least one copy of "Gigahertz" because it wasn't covered in DRM. Well done.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
http://www.archive.org/details/lf1973-01-01.flacf Enjoy.
Do not climb higher than you wish to fall.
ive been downloading TONS of songs for free, and not only because their free but because i ACTUALLY LIKE THE MUSIC, indie artists/underground artists most deffinetly have a better sound, and don't live with their head shoved up their ass, by the the *big* record labels who were never taught that sharing is caring.. ;)
When looking for a place to find non-DRM'd music, I considered eMusic, but decided against it because their decision to sell unrestricted music was merely a technical business maneuver. I had no indication (at least at a glance) that they wouldn't immediately change that policy if Apple were to license FairPlay, nor did I trust them as a company any more than the RIAA players. The fact that their interface didn't support linux also seemed to be a warning sign.
Then I found Magnatune, and I must say, it truly feels good to be able to do business with a label and not feel like I have to take a shower afterwards. Their policies run much, much deeper than merely distributing music in free formats. As already mentioned, the consumer can select a price for a download or shipped CD after listening to full length decent-quality previews, and the artist gets 50% instead of a fraction of that. But more importantly, I get that warm fuzzy feeling from this company that they're not out there to screw me over.
Their business model relies on exposure rather than limitations. They encourage you to share your purchased music with up to three friends, confident that massive piracy is a non-issue since the mid-quality versions are already available to everyone. (Indeed, you can redistribute those versions yourself if you choose, and if you're like me then you can't even tell the difference.) All their music is put under a Creative Commons (Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike) license, which means derivative works are explicitly encouraged. Licensing accounts for a large portion of their income and is made exceptionally easy through a web interface.
Finally, the website is well designed. They host a number of streams, offer both an embedded flash audio player and plain hyperlinks, and there even exists a plugin for Amarok for purchasing albums. How's that for linux-friendly?
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Magnatune except as a satisfied customer who truly believes in what they are trying to achieve.
I purchased and recommend the following groups in particular: Drop Trio, Thursday Group, Liquid Zen
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
OK... maps&atlases music = cool. maps&atlases website = difficult.
I don't buy much music online, but when I was interested in some drum music I ran across Calabash Music ( http://calabashmusic.com/ ). It was dead simple to sample music; it comes at a reasonable-to-me bitrate as straight MP3s. And the price of songs was in line with what I would expect.
I haven't actually made any purchases, but what I've read makes me think I probably will.
Man, you need to read the back of those liners a bit more carefully.
Hey, you sure are a silent retard. What, have you no responses to the well-worded replies to your gibberish? Debate skills not up to snuff? Can't handle someone using some logic with you?
You are obviously a complete boob. You are probably a PhD student at University of Fenix OnLine. Stupid RIAA troll!
You stupid retard. You mother plays with your little dilly, doesn't she?
Goombah already does this to a certain degree. It finds other people with similar music collections to yourself and recommends songs/artists/albums that you don't already have. It does it by analysing your iTunes library. I've been using it for a little while, and have had some good recommendations already. http://www.goombah.com/
I understand the distaste for DRM (not to mention it's about as feasible as a perpetual-motion machine), but I don't see the logic in dismissing copyright as well. Can't artists copyright a work but still give people the right to copy and distribute their music?
I suppose this logic works for bands, but what about people who write a song but are not performers themselves? Or, perhaps they just wish to record their music in a studio (maybe even a home studio) rather than performing live? Not all music is even suitable for live performance, in fact. In this scenario, you reward any and all performers, but this seems to leave the songwriter (or non-touring performer) out in the cold a bit.
Just throwing out some food for thought. Er, wait... is that wasteful?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
If you like indie music or are looking for new artists there is some great stuff on the bandwagon music site! The music you buy goes to the bands too!
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
One of the (many) nice things about Pandora.com is that they will accept musical submissions from anyone who spends the money to register a Bar code(its not much at all) that they can associate with it. This means that lots of independant bands get played along side the label stuff and its all finely tuned to people's musical tastes. I've discovered tons of great music through pandora.com and much of it has never been published on any CD you could buy in a store.
Of course, the downside is, once you do find a track you like, it can sometimes be nearly impossible to actually find somewhere to buy it or download it . . .
HI We have a site here,
it's been through a few changes but seems solid now:
http://www.projectoverseer.net/
Search for Blueslsd for my band.
Seems self regualting at the mo.
Cheers
Bob
It Seems I've developed an aversion to proprietary software
You might have some fun with Pandora, but you do need decent broadband. Create a channel for each type of music you like, enter the artists you feel represent that channel, and Pandora plays songs by them AND by other artists that share their characteristics. Then you "tune" your channel by thumbs up and thumbs down to the individual songs. I have it playing in the background all day and have discovered a bunch of new artists I would have never heard of, many from small indie labels, from Pandora. Perfect for the person who doesn't have time to ferret.
I'd love to change the world but I can't find the source code.
There are social networking music sites (like MyStrands, Last.FM and Pandora) where they make recommendations based on other people who have similar tastes to you. I'm not sure about the latter 2, but mystrands has a whole indie section at http://www.mystrands.com/indies/.
*sniff* Beautiful, sir. Just beautiful. i've long thought that bands should be paid for doing what WE want them to do... play music. As in, in front of me at a concert. Sell me something REAL something i can't download or record or copy. Sell me an EXPERIENCE. i'll buy tickets and shirts, but paying for data just annoys me when i know bloody well through the law of supply and demand that data is WORTHLESS because the supply is virtually INFINITE.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Pandora lets you set up virtual and customized radio stations. Basically you type in a band you like and they start playing music, some of which is from that band and the rest of which has been human-judged using numerous metrics to be similar to what you like. One of my core bands is Boston so that was my seed band -- I was very impressed with the bands they suggested and I've only stopped listening because it involves constant downloading and I don't want to annoy my ISP.
There are probably other services like this...
I come here for the love
If you expect that artists will take the time and effort to create when there is neither financial return nor any guarantee of recognition (in a copyright-less system, the best publicizer, not the inventor, will wind up with credit for new ideas), then you're ignoring both basic human nature and all of artistic history.
Was Homer being paid for his works? Was Kafka? Was Pessoa? Was Bach? It's you that are ignoring artistic history and human nature. How is that there are tons of people doing something "uncool" like programming open source software for free and in your opinion there should be no one playing music?
And I'm all for giving credit. What I want is that a "CC non commercial-attribution-share alike" kind of redistribution being always turned on for every kind of information.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
Generally speaking, though, if you limit the definition of the word theft to "taking, without permission, the physical property which belongs to someone else", then that means nothing intangible can be stolen.
Yes, right.
In making that statement you are confining the word "stealing" to a definition that is quite limited, and that shows a disregard for modern technology.
I'm confining it to the right definition according to dictionaries and common use. You can always create a new word defining what you mean.
Just as technology has introduced new ways to distribute music, it also introduces new ways to steal things.
This is an absurd non-sequitur like the following: "Just as technology has introduced new ways to do virtualization in hardware, it also introduces new ways to steal things".
Suppose I got my hands on an electronic copy of your dissertation, published it, and made lots of money from the sales. According to your definition, I stole nothing, I just copied.
Right, you are not stealing at all. You are doing profit on something you didn't produce -it's different. However I don't want it to be legal -I want to be legal *non profit* sharing of information. Commercial use should be protected, I agree on this.
I guess this should suffice: if you belive that *all* information should be free, then give me your credit card number, name, and ssn. Are you cheating on your wife|girlfriend? That should be free information, too.
This is involving privacy, not copyright. It's a completely different issue (okay, it is a limit on free information sharing, I agree, but for completely different reasons).
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
Hey, you sure are a silent retard. What, have you no responses to the well-worded replies to your gibberish? Debate skills not up to snuff? Can't handle someone using some logic with you?
I'm just a guy with 1)a life 2)a girlfriend 3)a work, sorry if I didn't reply immediately.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
I respectfully disagree and give you this example: I was sitting at home, bored, surfing iTunes when I came across a free iTunes download by some unknown band. What the hell, its free, I can delete it if it sucks. The song was "Over My Head" by then unheard of The Fray.
My point is that DRM never hurt them and I consider their song being a free iTunes download the #1 factor to their success. I am not downplaying their musical ability at all, as I myself am a musician. I'm sure they've worked hard to get where they are, but the truth is they are just like any thousands of other bands just like mine, but they actually caught the break they needed to make it big. Good for them, and good for iTunes.
So the bottom line is that you don't want people from stealing from you but you gladly steal from others. What a hypocrite.
blah blah blah
Well, I am glad you have "a work" [sic]. Here, I have a good logical counterpart to your ramblings: Machine cows tread the network carpet with beetle food chow mein. Spook rice face plows groupware where the sky falls behind the shimmering stars. Once important third world dictators play with trash while the mice run amok in the field. Hear that? It's the sound of something indistinct in the background foreground but not really. I once steamed some mussels on the beach with a tin hobo named Lucy. As she ate, the whales meandered through the forest and pardoned the orangutans of their massive offspring bubbles. When asking about such tired things, please be sure to include your full mailing address and name so that we can spread butter over all automobiles present. Wondering if it is so won't make it snow, you know, so the show must continue. Predictability is often mistaken for randomness on small circles surrounding your eyes, which are full of swimming goldfish. Muddy, isn't it? Mistaken, you may be but this is a tea tree sort of hype, one that you will never understand or grasp between your incisor and your big toe. Rarities such as this will never be repeated, unless one enjoys a fine repast of stewed crude. Don't think, just smell, and olfactories make the best products. Manufactured foods taste like sawmill output from the stream, but don't ask the horse how to go north because they always lie about such things.
Or as I originally wrote it in Motorola-accented pseudocode about 1980 or so,
$2B | ~$2B = $FF
Code review:-) Why are you promoting the sum of two bytes to a 16-bit quantity? A sum might make at most a 1-bit carry. (A mult of course might need a 16-bit destination.)
Was Homer being paid for his works? Was Kafka? Was Pessoa? Was Bach?
Homer, it's impossible to know for sure, because we don't know who he is. But, in general, poets at that time would have been at least fed and supported (as a slave), if not paid outright (as a contractor). Of course, if some artists were slaves, that's not really a viable argument for failing to pay them today...
Kafka, no. But I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to create in silence with the fragile hope that maybe, if they are really lucky, they will get recognition *after they die.* That drives tormented geniuses, but not the more ordinary artists who are responsible for most of our creative output.
Pessoa and Charles Ives are examples of the very few people who had/have enough energy to create and work a full-time job at the same time. Of course, neither of them had to work nearly as hard as your ordinary worker does today. I know that I am not ready to create consistently after working a full day at any full-time job I've ever had.
You couldn't have picked a worse example than Bach. Bach, like most composers from the beginning of recorded music until Beethoven, was paid by the state or by nobility (depending on the phase of his career). He was expected to generate a certain number of works as a condition of his employment. He did compose on the side as well, but certainly that was much easier for him since he had the apparatus of a professional composer (and church musician) at his disposal.
Composers including and after Beethoven were not state employees (most of the time), but were very responsive to the market. If Beethoven, Wagner, or Verdi had not been able to generate income from their works, because someone else could have just claimed the works as his own, they would have had no ability to continue creating.
Open-source is not a good example either. There are relatively few finished, usable projects; most are waiting for the developers to have more spare time. To the extent things do get done at all, I think that many open-source programmers are motivated at least partially by career rewards that may follow from participation in a project or from name recognition.
Altruism and creation for the sake of creation are pretty ideas, but relying on them to sustain innovation in society is foolhardy. We have discovered that the market is a much better method for meeting our other needs; we need to let creators take advantage of it as well.
I don't understand how your non-commercial but attributive system of distribution will enforce itself. If a thief steals your ideas and distributes them without attribution, but isn't making money off them (only recognition), how are you planning to recover damages (even assuming you can bring some form of legal action)? No lawyer would take your case. It seems to me that, again, you're creating a situation where whoever has the most effective publicity machine will wind up with credit for new ideas.
Um...Yeah. Meanwhile, look at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/steal, particularly definition 2. My goodness. It's sad when you have to break out a flippin' dictionary when talking to a supposed PhD student.
My fault. I'm Italian, in my language "to steal" is usually translated with "rubare", that has the meaning I referred to. You can say "rubare un'idea" - "steal an idea" would be the translation, but it's a metaphor, not an actual meaning.
However OK, you can call it "stealing" if you like, but this doesn't hurt the bottom of my argument -that we can rewrite this way: it is not about "stealing" as in breaking a window and taking a good his previous owner cannot more benefit of, it is about "stealing" as in copying information to another party so that both parties can benefit about it. If you build a car, and someone has some magic wand to copy your car 1:1, would you call it "stealing your car"? Maybe yes, but you agree these are two completely different events.
So the bottom line is that you don't want people from stealing from you but you gladly steal from others. What a hypocrite.
No, no. I am perfectly fine with people "stealing" from me in that sense. If someone gives me attribution and doesn't profit, I'm perfectly OK. That's what I want (I already said it repetitiously, but...): free *non-profit* *with attribution* sharing. If you want to take my ph.d. thesis (when I'll write it, next year) and give it to your friends, provided there is my name on it and you don't sell it, I'm perfectly fine with it, and I'd be glad if you ask a copy (it will be about protein biophysics -wonderful for sleeping, probably).
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
English is not my native language, so sorry for the mistake -is "one work" the correct grammar? As for the pun, well, take your satisfaction from it. I'd love to know the software that built it, anyway. :)
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
Kafka, no. But I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to create in silence with the fragile hope that maybe, if they are really lucky, they will get recognition *after they die.* That drives tormented geniuses, but not the more ordinary artists who are responsible for most of our creative output.
Ehm. Do you care about ordinary artists? I'd care more for talented people that believe in art anyway, not in talent-less crap-makers, thanks. Maybe it would become a good filter.
Of course, neither of them had to work nearly as hard as your ordinary worker does today. I know that I am not ready to create consistently after working a full day at any full-time job I've ever had.
I fully agree. So perhaps what's wrong is the kind of society we have -that drains out our resources until we are unable to do anything else just to be able to survive. Perhaps we should look for a society where this kind of brain-drain is not so hard. It is possible -after all, it was possible for them, so why not for us? I know the feeling, I have a full time job too, and I too feel drained and tired after a full day of work. And this is what is bad, not only for artists, but for everyone.
Bach, like most composers from the beginning of recorded music until Beethoven, was paid by the state or by nobility (depending on the phase of his career). He was expected to generate a certain number of works as a condition of his employment. He did compose on the side as well, but certainly that was much easier for him since he had the apparatus of a professional composer (and church musician) at his disposal.
I had the notion that Bach was paid as an organist, not as a composer, however it seems you are right. Thanks, I'll remember it.
because someone else could have just claimed the works as his own
But I don't want that -I want full attribution. I already stated it more than once, so don't use examples devoid of meaning.
To the extent things do get done at all, I think that many open-source programmers are motivated at least partially by career rewards that may follow from participation in a project or from name recognition.
So, why this shouldn't work anymore?
but relying on them to sustain innovation in society is foolhardy.
Talented people don't create to make money. Talented people just create because they love to, they "need" to inside (I know it when *I* create). Now we have a system that also provides them (a few) money. Fine, but that's just a plus they have. I'm happy they have a plus, but the downside is that this "plus" comes to a cost to us all -the cost not being able to freely share their output. I guess other kinds of marketings could happen -for example, an artist could ask for a fixed amount of money to release a new work. After the release, the work would be released freely for anyone. Not that I'm proposing this specific kind of mechanism, it's just an example that different mechanisms are possible.
I don't understand how your non-commercial but attributive system of distribution will enforce itself. If a thief steals your ideas and distributes them without attribution, but isn't making money off them (only recognition), how are you planning to recover damages (even assuming you can bring some form of legal action)? No lawyer would take your case.
Good point. I tell you how it works in Italy -the concept of "suing" someone works differently than in the USA. Since he/she would be breaking the law anyway -and I agree that attribution would have to be lawfully enforced, if you bring the case to the police, they *have* to proceed about it -you usually don't need a lawyer to actively denounce a law infringment, you need a lawyer only to help you in your defense if you are found suspected for this (the other "lawyer" is a state official, Pubblico ministero in Italian).
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
As a sidenote, patronage and sponsorships wouldn't be bad ways to finance artists. It would surely be no more humiliating than subsiding to the tastes of the public. A good taste patron could decide to support a new Franz Kafka or a new Johnny Cash instead of a new Stephen King and a new Britney Spears. If not an improvement, it wouldn't be worse than now, IMHO.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
>>Jonathan Coulton. The man is a genius, I swear.
Yeah! What he said.
(Seriously, Jonathan Coulton really is that good.)
I don't necessarily agree with you when it comes to copying music, but at least I now understand your perspective, so thanks for making your points more clear to me.
;)
You car analogy is a good one, and makes your point well. I would care if it were my business to manufacture cars, though. When you make a copy of the car, that's one less car I can sell. You could reasonably equate that with theft, since you took the car I made and used a copy of it as a means to effectively put me out of business.
I think musicians should be compensated or their work. As a musician (non-professional) I can appreciate how much work can go into getting a band sounding good, writing songs, and recording them (which is a LOT of work). I still say that if you want to listen to my music, I should get some kind of monetary reward if I ask for it. Me, as an amateur, I play for fun and just want people to enjoy my music. I occasionally make some money, and that's nice, but not the point. I guess you are saying (or at least thinking) that the whole music business is a corruption of what music was originally -- made for artistic expression and enjoyment and not for money. You make a good point. Things always tend to go from informal (street musicians performing for free) to formal (multibillion dollar music industry), and that can (and does) suck the soul right out of the art. (as an aside, I tend to think that way about modern jazz...it has become as formal and rigid as classical music was, which is funny considering it was never meant to be this way) Anyway, this relatively modern invention of the "music industry" is exactly why so much music is now so vapid and unoriginal. If you feel the same, I wholeheartedly agree. On the other hand, if someone has decided to make music professionally, touring doesn't fully satisfy the demand. Right now I am listening to music on my iPod as I sit at work typing this. As much as I hate the music industry, I do enjoy the privelige of being able to listen to music despite the fact I am not at a concert. If you want to enjoy that privelige, you should have to pay for it. It's not the same as freedom of information, it's entertainment. It's a luxury, and luxuries by definition do not come free. Plus, I don't get to many concerts (at least anymore). I enjoy the music, though, so why shouldn't the musicians profit from the work that went into the recording?
Then again, and to your point, really: recorded music is recorded just once, and then copied. So after a certain amount of copies sold, the cost of recording has been totally recouped. So the music industry can make an endless amount of money from a relatively small upfront investment. I think, personally, music is waaaaay overpriced. mp3's could sell for a nickel or a dime per track and still make a lot of money. The fact they are so expensive just shows how greedy the RIAA is; they are by definition a cartel. Just because you can charge what the market will bear doesn't mean you should and that doing so builds goodwill toward you. And this is why I wish we did go back to indie musicians and no music industry. They could charge reasonable amounts and do well. But greed would enter the picture eventually, and someone would charge 11 cents instead of ten, so everyone else would start charging 11. And so on. There is no real solution, I know.
Anyhow, it has been good chatting with you. I wish you the best on your thesis. Sounds like a lot of work
blah blah blah
My friend and I are just starting a new website to pool together new DRM-free music. It's devoted entirely to independent bands and their fans. It's called indiradio. We're looking for artists who are committed to creating good music and potentially making money at the same time without resorting to screwing over their fans. We're looking for fans who realize that the music industry has just gone too far. We're here to help.
Be part of an exciting new community willing to tell the recording industry to SHOVE IT. We don't need the old infrastructure. Bands are recording themselves these days, and fans won't tolerate being told when and where they can play their music. Like another comment said, you may not be able to "easily find downloads" on Pandora, but on a community-focused and fan-oriented site like ours, you sure can. Expect only DRM-free 128-kbit MP3 streams and downloads, with the ability (soon) to purchase full-quality CDs with the money actually going to the artists. Don't settle for less.
Check it out at http://www.myindiradio.com/
So these bands other focus should be attacking recorded music as empty, shallow, crap and if they want the real experience they need to attend a live venue and experience music the way it should be experienced. A real concerted uniform push across the whole indie industry, live music is a living experience and recorded music is cheap, dead, throw away plastic. The publishers really are the enemy of the musician, selling dead music from yesterdays dead bands and manufactured 'superstar' charlatans, all of which just bleeds away opportunities for live performances.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
the major labels won't even promote someone who's really ugly, even if he/she has an amazing voice, writes perfect songs, and plays awesome guitar.
I have often thought this myself. One of my all-time favorite artists, for instance, Meat Loaf, would absolutely never make Top 40 rotation in today's media climate. He's too fat, he's too eclectic, his songs are way too goddamn long. Really, all the success Meat Loaf achieved, he got in spite of a lot of major label resistance. After Bat Out of Hell, his career collapsed, he couldn't sell records, he had to go play bars, little clubs in Europe, anywhere that would take him. And slowly, slowly, he started picking up a new following. The crowds got bigger, the venues got bigger, and finally in the 90s he put out Bat II, and went platinum overnight. One of the greatest rock and roll comeback stories ever, and all with absolutely no help from a label.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
listen to his VH1 story tellers album. he says that part of the problem was that they didn't think an actor could sing.
please me, have no regrets.
Sorry for the shameless self-promotion, but: http://linuxformat.co.uk/makeitwithmono/entries.ph p?entry=177 (voting will start in a bit).
Personally I don't think a new site is the best approach compared to aggregating current sites. Communities are hard things to build, and allowing artists choice in their site will prevent 50+ incompatible systems trying to fulfill a centralised need (the reason Jabber was formed, and why Canonical don't release Launchpad source)