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Record Labels Change Minds About Sharing MP3s
Mass Defect writes "While the RIAA continues to sue people for p2p file sharing, the record labels have made an about-face and given their blessing to users sharing MP3s via the social networking site imeem.com. In May this year the site was being sued by Warner for allowing users to upload photos, videos, and music to share. However to everyone's amazement, instead of being flattened, imeem.com managed to convince the label that this free promotion was a good thing. In July imeem.com signed a deal with the label. Since then the site has added Sony, BMG, EMI, and now the biggest fish of them all, Universal. Imeem now has the royal flush of record labels supporting its media-sharing service, each getting a cut of the advertising revenues generated by their catalog. Finally someone has figured out a way to do 'YouTube for MP3s' without getting sued out of existence."
Imeem's missing the point. One of the biggest positive points of P2P is that the record companies, radio conglomerates, have absolutely no say over the selection and presentation of content.
What we're seeing here is the Record Companies trying to appeal to our better judgement, while making one last effort to maintain an iron grip over their content. And it's just not going to work.
You see.... last year was arguably one of the best years on record for independent artists and labels for this very reason. The amount of *great* content being released by small labels was staggering to say the least, and I'd be pretty certain that more than a few of these artists got their "big break" via P2P.
Meanwhile, the talent on the major labels was.... crap... to say the least, and it has nothing to do with the inevitable backlash that occurs between generations. Most of the "Top-40" artists are untalented, formulaic, and absolute rubbish.
The crackdown on P2P, and the agreement with Imeem is at least in part trying to mask the fact that the RIAA's members have completely lost the ability to identify and sign new talent. On the other hand, the indie labels have gotten quite good at it.
The days of rock stars with million dollar salaries are over. The labels need to accept the fact that music is going to become increasingly diverse over the next several years, and that their old strategy of promoting a very small number number of superstar artists just isn't going to work any more.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
gee... i wonder why they agreed to drop legal action against imeem.
What I wondered is how much it costs an advertiser per page view. A bunch of kids that never buy anything could prove to be expensive to an advertiser. Remember the free Net Zero? I expect the content providers to squeeze the middle pretty hard. They overcharge for any use of their product. This will be no exception. Advertisers payments will go directly to the record companies and the website will go broke. Nobody providing RIAA content is making a lot of money and negotiations often bread down. Look at the fees they were trying to charge webcasters and the higher fees they were trying to push on iTunes. This outfit is next in line for the squeeze. They will be squeezed to the point they have to raise advertising rates to the point the advertisers demand more in your face exposure for the money or they go bye bye.
The truth shall set you free!
There are quite a few comparisons out there of lossy audio quality across multiple music types and listeners. LAME encoding MP3 usually comes out on top for higher bitrate lossy compression, followed by Vorbis. Vorbis comes out better at lower compression rates, but AAC is close.
Vorbis is an excellent compressor, but LAME often beats it, mainly because it's a very mature codebase and it's psychoacoustic model has been tweaked to near perfection. Vorbis can get there - but it'll take time. What's really hurting Vorbis is the lack of support in iTunes/iPods - the most popular players out there. If Vorbis was available on this platform, you'd see a lot more interest in development, I think.
I've ripped all of my CDs to FLAC, then transcode to MP3 as needed for our iPods.
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