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DRM-Free Music Spells Trouble?
digitaldame2 writes "Many opponents of DRM have been overjoyed at recent efforts to free media from its grip. But PC Mag Editor-in-Chief Lance Ulanoff believes the whole world has gone mad. His view is that our digital economy will collapse this way, and it could be followed by countless others. 'The music industry's moves have been terrified reactions to staunch the bleeding of millions of dollars in revenue down the drain. For maybe a year, music companies thought they had the situation under control, but then album sales tumbled. Retailers, musicians, and some music-industry execs thought DRM was the culprit, and they soon joined the chorus of consumers calling for its head. Now consumers are getting their wish, and the music industry will continue to crumble. Giving up control of content and giving it away free are not rational ideas in a market economy, yet everyone's cheering.'" Is the removal of restrictions from our media really that big a deal?
Pirates are still going to pirate with or without DRM, and without it at least normal users will have less of a headache getting music on their favourite MP3 Player.
I don't see what the big deal about removing DRM is, either way the music industry needs to revise their business model, and removing DRM is the first step.
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
Is the removal of restrictions from our media really that big a deal?
Yes. It just won't send the world spinning in the direction they claim.
They're not giving up control - they're accepting that they aren't giving up control.
the underlying assumption is that ppl will quit buying. Some will. Most will still buy. More likely, the albums will disappear. In addition, I am guessing that labels will have trouble. But the bands will still play and will probably do better. They can get their advertisement from on-line.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If the fold there will be a bigger market for the music of anonymous cowards. I will e-mail you my own, high quality, original compositions - all you have to do is send me your credit card details to my address...
:(
Fuck. Now you will know who I am. I lose again
Does anyone really care about PC Mag? I'm not clicking the article to give them the hits. They are trolls in the pockets of Microsoft which has an obvious interest in pushing DRM. Maybe someone with no-ads can paste the article.
Selling content without DRM is not the same as giving content away for free.
Someone who doesn't really get it has a big soapbox. News at eleven.
As a side note, I actually bought my first music online the other day--because it was mp3, and I couldn't find it anywhere else.
They're competing with free, and no amount of hand waving will change that.
Now if they'll just get the prices in line with the value they are providing (I reckon about 4 cents a song), I'll be buying digital music left and right, just like I used to buy cd's.
expandfairuse.org
Back in the day my friends and I made more mixed tapes for each other than we bought. If one friend bought a new tape, within the next few days, all of their friends also had one. This was true until CD's came out, but then again, once burners were introduced it happened again. I've never really downloaded music illegally, almost all of my music was purchased from iTunes or is from my very old CD collection pre-internet. I simply don't buy physical media anymore. But lately my choice to not buy anything at all has been more about the quality of music than anything else. Musicians these days just suck.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
1. Economic crisis in US
2. Album sales drop
3. Blame DRM free music
4. ???
5. Profit
Once, there were horses, and they were the only way to get around town. All the horse-maintainers, the shodders and such, were in business and there was a grand economy.
..
Then, some new technology came to the scene: the automobile. "Oh noes", the shodders cried, "our economy is going to be ruined.."
The moral of this story is: technology. It will force change. Either keep up with it, or remove yourself from the market. Music doesn't have to be paid for - not any more, and no longer will we have to worship the few and provide them economic sustenance, so that they are only able to do it, when the many can do it, themselves.
In short, grow up music-industry people. Your world is changing. All worlds change. Let the people decide what life will be, and quite crying just because you didn't see the writing on the wall.
Yes, this applies to all media/content related markets. The writing is on the wall. The only way to protect your media is to put it in hardware - books are a good example - that makes it pleasant for people to buy it from you. The world needs us all to go digital and stop raping the earth, just so the few can profit from the ignorance of the many. Let the horses back to the fields
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Honestly, if the sale of recorded music is no longer profitable, that's just the way it is and the presence or lack of DRM wouldn't have prevented that. It's just a natural consequence of peer-to-peer file sharing being available. Now, it's more likely that the sale of recorded music isn't as lucrative as it used to be, but even in a free market it's best to let naturally-declining markets decline rather than prop them up artificially (i.e. US Steel, GM)--the long term gains always outweigh the short term turbulence.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
I had an MP3 once on my computer. My computer started to crash/reboot continuously and my dog started to howl. The dog howling caused me sleepness nights. My sleepy-ness caused me to have a car accident with a bus full of nuns. The surviving nuns sued me and the dead nuns are waiting for me in heaven with baseball bats. Because of the lawsuit, I lost my home, my computer, AND my dog... I'm living in the streets and I only go into public libraries to use the washrooms and post on slashdot. I am scared of MP3s. (but not frightened to death because then the nuns & bats will get me)
A brave new world: the music biz at the dawn of 2008
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/state-of-digital-music-2007.ars
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Without DRM, digital music can eaily be played on almost any media player. You now have opened up media rather then just iPods, to generic MP3 players, Windows systems, Linux systems, OS X systems, FreeBSD systems, and more. That is something that hasn't happened yet is a standard non-patented format for storing music, OGG would be likely but with it not being native on most MP3 players and Windows (and OS X too?) and MP3 is patent restricted and therefore rarely playable (legally) on Linux, FreeBSD and other systems. MP3 players also suffer with the patent fee, they could be cheaper without it. All DRM does is make people not want to download "legal" media, the main pro of "piracy" was that you can download it in just about any format you wanted, for free and it would easily work with just about every device that you had while the "legal" ones would not. Digital music will never catch up to CDs if "piracy" is always the better option. I am not advocating suing anyone but seriously, when you iTunes downloads work with you iPod/iTunes and nothing else, the MP3 download from a tracker site is a better deal as it will work on that $25 MP3 player you got, your computer (any OS) along with your iPod and phone, ETC. It isn't just DRM that was killing digital music it was the lack of a standard format. In the CD age (before the Sony rootkits and the like) your CD would work in any computer with a CD drive, any CD player be it the $25 off brand one or your $2000 stereo system. When we get that, digital music will begin selling otherwise, who wants expensive media that works with 1 brand of products and nothing else.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
As a musician in a band about to have their album finished by the engineers and ready for pressing, should we pull that $1k from the pressing, and put it towards eMusic, iTunes and wherever else music is being sold online? Personally, I don't care for DRM'd tracks and don't purchase music online at all. The rest of my band members however, use and buy one iTunes w/out a second thought.
For the past 6 months of reading a barrage of articles painting the ultimate end of the CD and continued surge to online music, why should we NOT jump into the online music pool? DRM or not.........
"The dream is over." John Lennon, God, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_(John_Lennon_song)
We willna be fooled again!
The music industry in general needs to adapt to the changing technology, and DRM is and never was the answer in the digital world. With the extreme low cost of copying bits and bytes, the law of supplies and demands in ECON 101 tells us that the old business model in which the music industry used to operated by is no longer viable. Just like any other type of businesses, they necessarily change with the times.
I do kind of feel bad for the *AA member companies. It would suck to realize that your industry was subject to a disruptive technology that was already well past the tipping point. Having said that, it's their problem and not mine. I've been buying DRM-free music for decades and have absolutely zero interest in giving up control of my possessions.
Did you hear that? Possessions. Not licensed content, not rentals or leases, but things I own. When I buy music, I own that copy no matter how much they wrongly insist otherwise. I will not pay extra to buy restrictions to prevent me from using my possessions they way I want to use them, even if that was is undesirable for its makers. As long as I'm staying within the constraints of the law and not giving copies of it to others, it's none of their business (even if they wish it was).
So sorry, *AA. You had the opportunity to do things differently, but you chose to fight me instead of making me your friend. Your actions have been so scummy that I truly don't care what happens to you now. Justice? Morals? Ethics? As you have long cast those aside, I just can't be bothered to care when people fail to use them with you. Goodbye and good luck. You won't be missed.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
No one has explained to me yet why we need a megalithic music industry and why it is bad that it is collapsing.
Worse yet, if you sign up for a subscription, you're saying that it's okay for the music service to wipe out your music collection if you cancel. Imagine walking into your living room as all your books disappear because you changed libraries, or your DVD collection disappears because you switched from Blockbuster to Netflix.
I cannot help but think he was thinking about the dangers of DRM when he wrote this.
Removing DRM won't cause the music companies to collapse any faster than they would with DRM, because motivated individuals will always find a way to break the secret codes.
The question is, will piracy eventually kill the music industry as we know it today? I think it probably will, because honestly, nobody wants to pay to listen to Brittney Spears, they just want to listen to it because MTV made it look cool.
The music companies are damned if they do and damned if they don't, in my opinion, because people are going to pirate anyway, with or without DRM. Even with the draconian powers the DMCA and like-minded laws give them, it's not feasible to sue every pirate, even if they can convince the FBI to go after the pirates for them.
Honestly, I feel kind of sorry for the big music companies. But only as sorry as I feel for the buggy-whip makers of old. It doesn't help their case that they brought Brittney Spears and such to the masses either. But my point is that a new paradigm always has winners and losers, and you can't expect the losers to feel good, especially when it's their whole livelihood they're losing out on. Of course, you can't just let them break your whole legal system in their death throes, so even though I feel sorry for them, I think the best thing for all of us would be just to shoot them and put them out of their and our misery.
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
The issue was that one could pirate music very easily that just worked and was high quality.
DRM music was a hastle to buy, restricted how you could play it, was a pain to get on alternate computers/media, and was a predetermined quality. Not only that but you had to manage the license files and repurchase the media if it was ever corupted or lost.
Removing the DRM evens the playing field out. If the music is easy to purchase and has all the other benifits that pirated music has, it will work. People dont mind paying. You just have to offer the same product that consumers want.
If they offer a better service and experience than the pirates, they will get people to pay. The pirates would have to put more effort into service and quality. It will cost the pirates more, force them to become more visible and stable, and in the end they will be much easyer to convict and shut down.
As it stand the pirate have set the bar for what the consumer wants. The lables have to raise the bar with out charging too much.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
1) Select (hotly) debated topic.
...
2) Identify current trend or view.
3) Propose opposing view.
Profit
Like many other posters have already mentioned DRM by-and-large simply doesn't work. Which makes any post-epiphany antithesis, well, rhetoric. We aren't going to have another HDMI incident with our audio and people will get it from one market or another (if paying is too restrictive and cumbersome we've already seen the results).
But hey, he got on Slashdot.
Quack, quack.
Music companies are in the business of telling people what to buy. They used to be in the business of recording and distribution. Recording and distribution are not very hard to do these days. Piracy means that they don't get paid for telling people what to buy. However, buying from a record company with DRM is a serious disadvantage to piracy over and above the price. By getting rid of DRM it is easier for people to justify buying music. People will always pirate. Not having DRM means that the record companies are now not at a disadvantage compared to piracy though, except for the price. Before piracy had a better distribution model than non-drmed music (Physical CDs vs Downloads) and had a better price. Now it only has a better price.
Bottom line... I'd much much much rather buy songs without DRM.
People who aren't going to buy aren't going buy and will always find an excuse.
Notice now though how again the labels with provide "amazon" with DRM free tracks but only EMI will provide apple. Using there catalogs as muscle to try and make the online sale more even. Those labels are evil..
The music industry must learn to live with the realities of economics. The price of a good will tend toward the cost of producing one more copy of the product.
Digital media is very inexpensive (nearly free) to reproduce. Therefore we would expect the price to tend toward zero. Trying to increase the cost of reproduction via DRM is very unlikely to work.
The moral of this story is: technology. It will force change. Either keep up with it, or remove yourself from the market. Music doesn't have to be paid for - not any more, and no longer will we have to worship the few and provide them economic sustenance, so that they are only able to do it, when the many can do it, themselves.
Are you talking about content generation or distribution? Even if the RIAA goes away, we would be paying artists directly for the music. Unless this really isn't about DRM, but about getting shit for free.
If content becomes free, this will have an interesting ripple effect.
Since programmers can no longer make big money on apps, programmers will be paid less.
Since there are no big scores in music anymore, musicians will be paid less.
When the Kindle takes off, authors will be paid less.
We've already seen, since indie rock, that many many people can produce music. What happened? The good big acts (Led Zeppelin) got replaced by trendy crap (Amy Winehouse).
Free content means unpaid or underpaid creators, which means people with talent will avoid the field. Our culture has been bad... and now it's getting worse.
"I love how intelligent people think subscription-based music services are the way to go. All you can eat for $15 a month. Talk about devaluing your product. People can download enough songs to fill 100 albums and pay under $20. How does anyone make money this way?"
Yeah. I can't figure out who ANYONE could make MONEY charging people RECURRING fees for CONTENT.
I mean, who would pay good money a month for a stack of dead trees?
Whoops, did I switch "magazine" and "music" again?
How old is your daughter again? Oh yeah, failed to mention that. Let me guess, three tops. Hippie? Dude, you're stuck in the 80's, aren't you? Well, at least you didn't use the C word.
DON'T FEED THE TROLL!
Okay, enough making fun of the naysayer, on with the facts:
1. "Consumers" (I really HATE that word) are willing to consume that which is good. The "digital content" folks are in trouble because their content sucks. Rather than admit their faults, they prefer to point fingers. In one sense, the bonehead is correct, DRM-free won't stop the bleeding, but that's because the bandaid is in the wrong place. Radiohead is a good example, people are willing to pay money to support content they like. Duh!
2. DRM-free has value to Consumers because DRM restricts that which they previously enjoyed.
3. Audio quality isn't the issue, if higher quality is desired the demand will be there. Otherwise, non issue.
Anything is possible given time and money.
there are precious few facts. here they are as I see them...
1) moguls are all about control and big bucks.
2) music moguls are defined by (1), above.
3) analog reproduction was controlled by cheap single-song records in the acetate disk and tape recorder days.
4) industries, for instance radio, were co-opted for promotion purposes.
5) when first the source, and then the distribution, methods changed to digital, all of a sudden all copies were masters. the industry was blissfully unaware of this until somebody's kid told them he could make "greenies". there were no cheap single-song media in circulation. the moguls came unglued, their business model had changed without notice.
6) nothing has changed since. the moguls are unglued, the kids are still finding ways to make "greenies," and even the albums don't have a single song worth buying.
7) clusterfsck. "oh, hey, got an idea. let's attack our customers with badware."
8) no profit.
9) steps 5 though 8 are being repeated at lightning speed every time somebody breathes. the industry is going down the tubes.
10) hey, why NOT try something different? why NOT dump the badware and allow single song sales again? through the distribution network the kids want to use?
oh, that's right, it takes BUSINESSMEN, not moguls, to do that.
folks, buy your own instruments and start learning to play yourselves.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Well, that's the same argument against FOSS, that it will kill economy and that it's not a viable business model. Yet, all the big ones (IBM, Sun, Oracle) are incorporating more and more FOSS in their businesses, and having profit from it.
If you want real innovation on the music industry you have to start breaking the model that treats consumers as if they were cattle. For an example of something really interesting and newsworthy on this area, see the success that Radiohead had by distributing their latest album on the Internet, in a model that the consumer chooses the price he deems right for it.
...in a market where production is cheap, talented artists are plenty and promotion and distribution over the Internet almost free, there's not much money to be made? Little without DRM, less with DRM? I mean there's 8 billion of us, and even if just 0.01% of those got the musical talent, time and interest there's plenty. They're moving very rapidly into the bottled water industry - delivering the same as you get for free, except you're paying for it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
MTV (and radio) was really the big thing that kept people informed about new music to buy during the 80's and 90's. Now, the more people that only listen to the music they already have on their PCs and portable media players, it means less who are listening to potentially new music for them to buy. So in essence what is needed is a better way to listen to new music, online, the FULL song, and then and only then will the person decide to buy the song/album. Oh and one hit wonders and dance songs don't sell albums, mostly singles.
Nothing to see here. When the author either doesn't understand or deliberately obscures the fact that there's a difference between free (as in costs no $$) and DRM free, its time to stop reading. There isn't an educated thought throughout, and the author hasn't done a bit of research. It is disheartening that the chief editor of a successful magazine can get away with spewing such drivel. As an editor, he must not only keep his own pieces at such low quality, but also edit his journalists works to ensure similar (low) standards are met in their works. Sigh!
That's about how long people have been making music (we know this because there are bird-bone flutes that old). http://www.asa3.org/archive/evolution/199611/0045.html Probably even longer. Most of that time people did it for and with their friends for not a dime. Recorded music is only a little older than those now living. People will go right on making music, and earn money playing live, as they have done since time immemorial. We know from Linux that even complex projects will be done by amateurs (i.e. 'those who do it from love') for free. No DRM, no problemo.
The music industry needs to realise that most of us are looking for better music than Britney f'ing Spears or whoever is the current industry-manufactured talentless whiner that needs protools to even sound good that they're pushing on the kids this week.
Maybe if they stopped being so formulaic and decided who gets contracts based musical talent instead of physical appearance and image-marketability then the silent majority might actually be interested enough to buy some. I mean when you're listening to a CD, who gives a crap what the singer looks like?
DRM disapears, Microsoft loses customers to Linux, WGA gets removed from IE7 and XP, video games are moving to the consoles, people want to share their multimedia and software for free (as in price and beer), OOXML is getting dismissed, ogg is now all over the music torrent website's... I see a chance for FLOSS and CC. Many people (even my uncle who is a business man) knows about Linux know and Ubuntu is starting to get attention from the average Joe's. I met some guy who said OO.o was awesome and he knows nothing about computers except for the powerbutton and the Windows start button.
Here be signatures
VHS doesn't have DRM. Normal CDs don't have DRM. Images don't have DRM.
Close down the big sites sharing MP3s and leave the rest of us alone - its a system that has worked for a long time.
...they just need to stick with it for a while. All I've ever wanted were reasonably high quality MP3s at a decent rate and no stupid subscription. Amazon has done that and now they get my money again. That wasn't that hard, now was it. There's simply no reason to download illegally (non-participating labels aside), given most peoples level of music consumption. I don't see how this spells trouble at all. It only spells profit. Something, I've come to believe, corporate America is no longer interested in.
As I understand it most musicians make money at concerts so recorded music's main purpose for muscians is to get folks to come to concerts. So music always will get recorded and be offered to us in some manner. Getting rid of the unnecessary plastic is a good idea as there is so much waste in unbought CDs etc. Therefore we always should have music available to us. In particular I like the idea of being able to buy individual songs so you are not stuck with a bunch of stuff on a CD that you never listen to.
If the music industry crumbles it won't be because it did or did not have DRM, it will be because it failed to offer a product consumers wanted at a price they were willing to pay. No amount of DRM or hand-wringing will change the fact that for some consumers, that means competing with free. Nor will it change the fact that if they produce music that nobody wants, nobody will buy it (even for free). In short, the music industry must either change with the times or go to its grave. That's no different than for any other industry, notwithstanding the industry big-shots who seem to think that consumers owe it to them to keep them afloat.
Isn't removing DRM, its producing content worth purchasing.
DRM is just an irritant at this point. Yes, it can/will grow to be more then just an irritant, but we are talking about the collapse of the music industry here, not the long term ramifications of DRMizing everything that moves.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
YEAH... Markets solve everything.
If thats the case why do we need corporations/companies/institutions... and all the other non-market-organized items in our perfect market economy.
The end of the media corporations is NOT the end of culture.
The big mistake he makes is having a title "DRM-Free Music Spells Trouble", then having all this talk about people giving away music for free. DRM-free music does not equate to giving it away for free.
I think he may be right (but, maybe he isn't) about the Coldplay and Radiohead examples -- I really do not know if bands in general will make enough money selling an album for whatever I want to pay for it (down to $0) would make enough money to be worth it. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't; last I heard Coldplay and Radiohead did not release any hard numbers.
But, that is not what releasing DRM-free music is about. It is simply releasing music without rights restrictions on it. The companies that are doing this are for the most part putting watermarks into the music...
So, the status quo. I want some music. I am not running Windows, so quite simply, the regular online music markets are 100% useless to me. I have 0 interest in CDs -- I'm playing this on the computer, I'm not interested in ripping a "CD" (which possibly isn't a real CD, trying to make ripping difficult). Therefore, I will get the music P2P, even if I had the cash and inclination to pay for it.
The new situation (which the article writer seems to have missed.) I want some music. I go to a site that does not use digital rights restrictions. It's in a MP3 or (unlikely I guess..) OGG Vorbis file, so I can actually use it! I buy it. ----- (The important part to the record company). I can do whatever I want with it. **BUT**, it's probably watermarked, so no, I am not going to just go out copying it far and wide to 1000's of my "nearest and dearest" via P2P --- (the other important part to the record company) -- the watermark would track it back to me and I'd probably be sued.
People argue that the watermarks are removable. Yes, they are. So is any rights restriction system that can possibly be created. But, there's a strong incentive to crack rights restriction systems, as they are restricting the user from using music in ways that are perfectly reasonable (using the same music on desktop and portable player for instance). There's not such a strong incentive for people to crack watermarks -- they don't restrict personal use in any way whatsoever. Someone will crack the watermark system eventually, but I bet there's far less interest in researching it compared to bad DRM systems (for instance, someone like DVDJon cracked DVD CSS and Itunes because they prevented fair use of music.. which watermarks do not.) and I bet the cracks are far less widely distributed. (Compare, for instance, music DRM cracking software compared to software for getting free satellite TV -- it exists but is FAR less widespread, since there's no "legit" use for the satellite TV software.)
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The music industry is obsolete.
Thanks to both broadband and freebie media servers like YouTube, the economy no longer needs a central figurehead controlling who gets to do what with who's music. Instead, consumers can simply deal directly with the performers themselves, rather than a label, since distribution is no longer tied down to a physical medium that requires specialized hardware to reproduce.
The music industry only survived as long as it has because the artists lacked the means to create vinyl records, CDs, 8-tracks and audio cassettes in the massive quantities needed to be heard across the country. That is no longer the case.
The bitter reality here is that no business model can save them, nor would have. The moment everything went digital and networked, they were screwed.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Gimme something tangible to huggle!
So the artist can huggle all the fanthings they want!!!
DRM-free music spells trouble? How about talent-free music? The issue is, and has been for years, that the music industry is putting out crap that few would want to pay for (let alone play). Someone figured this one out awhile ago, that the piracy statistics were inflated and CD sales were going down because there wasn't as much worth buying, but that detail doesn't jibe with the RIAA's wanting to be paid every time a song is played, in any form, anywhere, no matter whether a person owns media in some form with that song on it already. People pay for stuff they like, and as iTunes proves that even applies to music with DRM.
And when it comes right down to it, since music can be recorded with a microphone or line-in to magnetic media or in digital format, the 'rights' thing being harped on doesn't exist. Only the ability to duplicate or play a compact disk or music file does, and those are easily defeated by not using the tool the protection's programmer expects people to use (WMP for example).
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
i dont think DRM was ever the problem. labels are losing money because we now have a pay-per song system, and we as consumers can hedge our costs with quality. i don't need to spend $15 on a cd anymore. i just need to spend $2 for the 2 songs that are good. that is a huge loss. the problem is also the fact that we are getting rid of the ever-so-rich rock icon. it has become harder and harder to become rich just from album sales, and with the advent of the internet, there are more bands out there to choose from than ever. rock stars are making less money, as are the corporate execs who demand the high salaries. musicians are going to have to come to terms with the fact that the glory days are over, and that a $100k salary is good for a musician these days. corporate execs are struggling to keep that huge amount of income that pays for the mansions; look at the copyright extension! i've never had a problem with DRM. i don't download music illegally either. i just pay for what i want and get rid of the rest. that is where they are losing their money. plus, if i lose my cd, i don't have to go out and buy another. i have a backup sitting right next to my computer.
The big name record companies seem to be the loudest complainers of how their 'sales are tumbling' yet you don't hear much about other, smaller labels who don't deal with the mainstream genre's having problems.
Perhaps this decline isn't due to Peer to Peer file sharing, or DRM or any other scapegoat. Perhaps this decline is due to a changing user base, oversaturation and people moving away from the mainstream genres that these labels push.
It is very convenient to go after the P2P crowd, but after the wave of RIAA lawsuits was there a sudden jump in sales as the average consumer was scared back onto the straight and narrow?
I used to buy lots of music as well as downloading it on P2P networks, but when Napster started getting in real hot water I stopped using P2P. Around, I'd guess, 2003 sometime, maybe 2004 (I can't remember exactly), I pretty much stopped buying music, too. Why? I don't listen to CD's in plain album format. I listen to playlists on my computer and burned mix discs in my car. DRM made this more bother than it's worth, and a disc that I can't rip to mp3 is essentially a 'coaster' as far as I'm concerned. On the rare occasion I bought a CD since then, I looked it up on the internet and made damn sure that I wouldn't have to do anything more involved than holding down 'shift' when I put it in the drive to get it to rip with CDEX.
But - and this is important - I now buy music about as much as I did back in the late '90s (1 - 2 albums a month). What's changed? Amazon's mp3 store. Should Amazon's mp3 store fail and no comparable service move to take it's place, my music purchases will go back to essentially zip.
Unpleasantries.
If you want professionals to make music, they need to be paid. People's time is not free. Your analogy is terrible. Reproduction cost is a minimal amount of the cost of a CD. Not much has changed in production cost through downloads. Your comment is not insightful.
Copyright in it's original form already does that: "gives us lots of free music". The only question is the timeframe and whether or not you are going to annoy your paying customers in the meantime.
Amen. And when that term is several human lifetimes, it is clearly benefiting only one entity: the corporations. The rest of you suckers don't get a look in.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Record companies that support the RIAA and/or DRM I boycott. Have been for a long time now. Last album I purchases was an older Dave Matthews album.
As record companies give up on DRM and stop suing people, I can update my music collection which is ridiculously old. No, I have illegally downloaded any music in the meantime - I've just been willing to go without to stand up for what I believe in.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
I am split 50/50 on this subject.
I used to prefer to buy my music on CD - then I could rip it and would still have a copy which couldn't be accidentally deleted, and didn't have the lossless compression until I copied it onto my computer (but this article isn't about music formats). Plus you can read the sleeve notes, look at the lyrics and lend it to your friends.
But then I discovered the new Napster - 15 quid a month and I can download pretty much any music I like - legally... As soon as I stop paying, the songs will no longer work on my mp3 player - because of DRM. I really like this service - I've got a massive music library at my finger tips for the price of 2 CDs a month.
I really like the Napster service - and accept that the DRM must be on the files because of the price that I am paying doesn't reimburse the artist and record companies as much as the traditional media. It also encourages me to try out alternative music, which supports the smaller record labels.
What people forget is that with Napster and itunes you can burn the songs onto a CD anyway - and then copy them around with your friends... so what is the problem?
Well - part of my problem is the closed formats - I have to dual boot Linux and Windows to use Napster - I bet it never works on Linux. And DRM isn't just about music - what about films, books and hardware?
Thinking about hardware DRM for example - having to pay to unlock extra cores in your processor, or being restricted to a certain operating system when you buy a machine. I think that the problem here is that DRM doesn't become copy protection, it becomes hardware restriction. With Napster, I am getting what I paid for - but if I pay 1000 pounds for a PC, I don't want to pay another 1000 pounds to unlock it so that I can run Linux. I can't listen to the tunes I download on Napster on an ipod - so I am restricted to using Windows and certain types of MP3 player...
I just hope that market forces keep the choices open for us consumers...
TFA is plain wrong on so many levels that it hurts my brain.
First, the fact that music is increasingly rid of the DRM pest doesn't mean people stop buying. Witness Amazon and Walmart. Their MP3 downloads represent very juicy sales, thank you. I refuse to buy DRM-infected music, only free formats, for practical and philosophical reasons. I am obviously not the only one.
Second, even if the music studios were somehow wiped off the face of the planet, the US economy would survive (shock! gasp!) and the world would barely notice. Oh, sure, quite a few coke dealers and luxury whores would feel the pinch if they were to lose their affluent clientele of music studio execs, but I am confident they'd somehow manage.
Look at the numbers. The music industry gets about $14 billions a year from CD and online sales. Add the derived rights and you get what, $15 to 20 billions? That's less than half a day of the US GNP, which was about 14000 billions last year. So 12 hours of GNP. Big hoopla. Music might have a large cultural influence, but it's hardly an economic engine. That's true for most forms of art, BTW. (Yes, I agree that some of the music out there can be only called "art" with some far-fetched definitions of art).
Conclusions: It remains to be seen that DRM-free music is bad for the studio. The studios could convulse, die horribly and rot, and their disappearance would not even be a hiccup on the economic scale. And I'm sure quite a few artists and consumers will dance in the street.
So die already, we're eagerly waiting.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
Content companies that indulge DRM to squeeze the maximum possible money from the most lamebrained consumption of their content, instead of doing something else, are doomed. If they rely on DRM to maximize sales of forgettable top 40, and drag out the longest possible revenue streams from reselling "classics" already in demand because of their folk art status, instead of making quality new content, they're stuck.
Because DRM doesn't really protect them, and it gets in the way, sure. But really because they're security corps instead of content corps when they operate that way. If they promoted new content that people like and keep consuming, if they harnessed the energy of their market interacting with their content libraries to make and exchange mashups, if they gave away the content to promote the in-person and material merchandise (posters, toys, clothes, etc) that's easy to control selling, they'd be exploding in value and popularity.
If they were in the business of using tech and other people's interactions by it to make more music, in more people's ears, instead of the failing business of stopping it, they'd be richer and more popular than ever.
The problem isn't so much the DRM. It's that they're relying on DRM to the exclusion of everything else. And with "experts" like PC World (which is in business floating on a sea of "piracy" that sells tons of tech and software) failing to see even these basics, it's no wonder that tech-idiots, music-idiots and business-idiots like the music moguls are doomed.
--
make install -not war
Prior to the commercialisation of the recording industry (which began in the 1910s/20s but only really took off after WW2) the only way the common person understood music was in the context of someone, usually THEMSELF, playing it. On an instrument. That wasn't plugged into an amplifier.
And at the time, there were musicians, and some did very well (Salieri wasn't poor, nor was Handel) but even they had a tiny tiny fraction of the kind of wealth exhibited by the ruling classes at the time. Musicians were still, basically, hired hands. They might be rich hired hands, but not like what we know today. The important point is the context: you knew music as a performance, not as a recording.
Due to the exigencies of technology, music became a commodity, and in classic capitalist fashion, the material costs were reduced to a minimum - finally, they evapourated as data into the interweb thingie. So, now they're trying to put a meter on something that the interwebs have always had a complex and contradictory relationship: data itself. The record companies are not in the business of selling music. They sell CDs. If the CDs had recordings of dogs barking, or were flat out silent, it wouldn't matter to the record companies, as they (in theory) sell what people want.
What people want is music. What people want is something for nothing. What people want is to wish upon a star and get everything they ever dreamed of, and if they can't do that, then they want the music that takes them there....
The music biz started with printing sheet music in the 19th century. It will die trying to sell data. It was an interesting ride. But now the amusement park is closed. Time to go home and make your own music.
Give up on the star system. Make your own, and support the art made by your friends, your family and your neighbours. Give up on this hallucination of Commodity Culture. Learn to play an instrument, and learn to play it well. work with other musicians, and through your own competence and intelligence you will create the hope this world so desperately needs.
and, in the process, go piss on the grave of the music business.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Otherwise, you're pretty much right. The main problem is that the music industry has changed. There is so much content and competitive material (video etc) out there that it is harder to make a biz selling music.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...or maybe what they're selling us just sucks.
The music market is highly fragmented. Genres have redefined themselves. Radio, which used to be the primary vehicle of finding new music, has lost its edge and has fallen back to formulaic content programming where it is more interested in playing what people "expect" rather than breaking any new ground. XM and Sirius were probably the last nail in the coffin when it comes to commercial radio.
MTV and the like are the new AM radio. Even worse. Too much talk. Too much energy spent trying to be "cool".
Where does one go to find new music? For me it was Shoutcast. I think an independent DJ has their ear closer to the ground than any commercial venue ever can. I found new music online and I bought some of the stuff I liked. I am just one example.
The recording industry is so far out of touch with their audience that they've fallen into the same traps I lot of the IT industry is currently suffering from: litigate, don't innovate. They've forgotten one important thing: it's about the MUSIC, not he music INDUSTRY. They act like farmers who have ruined the soil from which a healthy crop comes.
They're outgrown their purpose and, like typesetter's unions, the days are numbered for the current incarnation of the recording industry.
giving it away free I can agree with Lance on this point but it's relevance to the conversation eludes me.
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
Nope. The only things that will collapse are the bloated bureaucracies of the record and movie companies that suck the profits away from the artists.
What, are we all 17 year old students here all of a sudden? Stealing is stealing. Acquiring copyright protected music and video using peer-to-peer filesharing applications, illegal download sites etc., is media piracy - AKA theft. It's really as simple as that.
Yes, the established artists will be less effected since they receive most of their profits from their performances, tours, concerts etc. But it's up-and-coming artists who rely heavily on royalties gained from their music and need every penny they can get from album sales when they are starting off. They are, after all, the future of the industry, n'est pas?
Ultimately, in the long run consumers, record labels, retailers and artists are all negatively effected by illegal distribution of music and vidoes. Whilst the media world is trying to find ways to tackle this issue without unfairly restricting the consumer, it's no surprise that the aforementioned artists are keen to have their copyright protected so they may earn the revenues they deserve.
If you want to deter talented new artists from accross all genres from entering the industry, however, and instead increase the amount of 'pop manufactured junk' that the big record companies will happily produce, promote, control and generally shove down out throats as a substitute, then offering no adequate protection to the artists is definitely the way forward.
"He Who Dares Wins"
Music, and video is right behind it, has entered the post-capitalist realm. Because of advancing technology, the cost of producing high-quality music has been reduced to simply creative effort by the author, and the cost of distribution and replication is essentially zero. There's essentially an infinite amount of music available to be consumed (although not an infinite variety), so demand and thus "market value" are nearly zero. What determines what music people choose to listen to is simply whether they like it, and the artists' compensation will depend solely on the good will of the listener. And perhaps this is how it should be.
DRM is moot point. The guy seems to miss the point that after recording the music/movie, the only cost is on its distribution. There are VERY CHEAP means of distribution out there that are not even bandwidth intesive, BitTorrent comes to mind. Surely, you will be thinking of illegal filesharing, but BitTorrent can be used for other things as well. Also, one person pays $20 for unlimited music downloads. Question is, that "unlimited" will be defined by their Internet Service Provider. Why yes, a person can have unlimited downloads on a 56kbps pipe, while others can have that same unlimited on a 1000Mbps pipe. Needless is to mention some ISPs out there give you funny looks when you begin downloading a lot. So, yeah, after you are done recording, all the price will go to distributions, and what is the cost of a server with unlimited bandwidth and say, a 1Gbps pipe?
Cheers.
(I should get an account on this site)
The price of selling something has nothing to do with the price of producing it when you have a monopoly. You either don't know what you are talking about, or you think piracy is a legitimate competitor to selling music online. The cost of making a CD is under $1. That didn't stop the industry from selling them for over $15. Get a clue.
The music industry's moves have been terrified reactions to staunch the bleeding of millions of dollars in revenue down the drain
"stanch", not "staunch". See http://www.cjr.org/resources/lc/stanch.php
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
>the music industry will continue to crumble
You say that as if it's a bad thing!
The CURRENT music industry will crumble. As it should; It's built on a 100-year-old business model of scarcity and limited distribution which screws both the artists (lousy contracts, "breakage") and the customers (CDs costs pennies to manufacture but cost much more, 30-year-old titles selling for more than new releases, etc.) and frankly the industry just doesn't add any value. Its not efficient, it doesn't discover or develop substantial new talent, etc. The gig is up. The CURRENT industry is turning out bland pop stars and the public is finally tired of the mediocre "product", the lack of value, and are moving on.
However, there's a new music industry that is forming. It doesn't rely on brick stores and (so-called) talent scouts to "sign" and "develop" talent. You might have heard of it. It's called the Internet. The internet allows musicians to reach the public directly, at low cost, and high convenience. IOW, it provides value at a lower cost. The music cartels do not. Capitalism is working here -- it's weeding out inefficiencies. Cartels lose.
Some sort of music industry will exist simply because people enjoy being entertained with music and are willing to pay for that, however the current model is well past being feasable.
and that stands for Piracy! ARRR!
But seriously, they never had control to begin with. Anyone who wanted to copy their music could, whether via the analog hole, the CD hole, cracking the DRM, or just downloading a pirated version online.
They're better off selling the customer what the customer wants, rather than just hoping the customer will buy into whatever restrictions they feel like imposing.
Right, having DRM-free music will ruin the music business, because everyone know that the DRM-free music, such as what we had during Kazaa's heyday back to the beginning of the CD and the DRM-free cassette tapes were copied and distributed so freely that the entire music industry collapsed twenty years ago.
DRM is much newer than P2P file sharing, CDs, and online file transfers. The loss of DRM'd media will mean that normal consumers, like the salaried Western or European worker, will be more likely to grab a CD and rip it for their MP3 player if they won't have to worry about their drive, player, or CD software complaining that the end user cannot be trusted.
If I go and buy a CD in a music shop it'll cost me AUD$25-40 for a new release, AUD$15 for an old one. So each CD is worth $15, and the rest is hype-markup. Say 1/3 markup for the shop, 1/3 in distribution, 1/3 for the artist; that's $5 for the artist over 10 tracks, or 50 cents per track. If I can pick and choose the tracks I'll happily pay 50 cents per track to download them from the artist at a decent data rate. Or even 75 cents per track if the label wants a cut. This gets more complex for movies because production costs are so much higher, but all of the blockbusters make their production costs back in the first week or two on the big screens - because cinema tickets are cheaper than concert tickets, people go and see more films. Basic economics: lower prices, more sales. Works for KMart/WalMart/AMart/Ikea/etc. And why are they still using film when digital cameras make production faster and cheaper? The article forgets that massive costs are incurred at every stage and level of the media industry, so cutting levels out will cut the cost down to the consumer, which will increase sales. Garage-level musicians in Brazil have a regular and adequate income from selling CDs at a few tens of cents a time. The music and film industry superstars require huge infrastructures that don't make economic sense. It's time for the digital media producers to start adapting to the leaner and meaner economics of the new millenium.
From TFA: "Giving up control of content and giving it away free "
Uh...who is giving away free music? Ok, iTunes has some free tracks every week and I am sure there are others but here is the point:
Removing DRM != Giving Away Music For Free.
More from TFA: "So now it's a good idea to give away music in the hope that people will think you're so cool that they'll pay anyway."
Sometimes that works. Again, not many people are doing that. The argument is against DRM.
From TFA: " Sure, we could copy some pages out of a book at the library's photocopy machine, and some people created mix tapes from their favorite albums, and others got in the habit of recording movies from TV to VHS. These were not rampant problems, and no one panicked."
Uh...actually, there was panic. From Wikipedia:
"In the early 1980s, the film companies in the USA fought to suppress the device in the consumer market, citing concerns about copyright violations. In the case Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the device was allowable for private use, thereby guaranteeing market acceptance. In the years following, the film companies found that videorecordings of their products had become a major income source. However, television networks found the widespread use of this device was threatening their advertising business model because viewers then have the ability to either fast forward through television commercials, or pause recording when they are broadcast." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCR
Again, TFA: "The music industry's moves have been terrified reactions to staunch the bleeding of millions of dollars in revenue down the drain." So? What caused the drop in revenue? Crappy product maybe? I dunno. Sounds to me like the industry is already crumbling and it has NOTHING to do with them "giving it away for free".
TFA: "For maybe a year, music companies thought they had the situation under control, but then album sales tumbled. Retailers, musicians, and some music-industry execs thought DRM was the culprit, and they soon joined the chorus of consumers calling for its head. " And what has been the result? We don't know yet. I think it is a good thing. I would rather pay a reasonable price for a single song than be forced to pay an outrageous price for an entire album. "Everyone" likes that. Why does he think iTunes has been such a hit?
Get a clue, Lance.
He projects the end of the music industry and blames it on DRM-free tracks. Sorry, the end of the music industry started well before DRM-Free music.
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
They're looking in the wrong place. The lack of any decent new music to buy is why sales are tumbling. FFS, I heard some song my son said was a new release by some boy fag band and wasn't it good? He was well happy until I actually pointed out that The Who released Pinball Wizard two years before I was born and a lot of the music he's listening to is rehashed 80's stuff.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
He's confusing the difference between "free" (no restrictions on use) and "free" (doesn't cost anything).
Giving up DRM is not making things "no cost", they're removing restrictions that were artificially placed on the listening to music. I'll bet he doesn't understand what it means when you say Linux is "free". I'll bet he doesn't get it a bit.
Further, I don't think he cares. It shows that you don't need critical thinking skills to get a job in media.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
What's with this residuals and stuff? That's getting shit for free. Free money when you had to do bugger all work for it.
What about licensing your lyrics so someone else can sing them? Did you have to redo the lyrics for them? No? Well, that's getting shit for free.
Really, this is all for EVERY side (There are more than two) "getting shit for free".
Consumers want free music and are willing to pay for it (If it isn't being made, we'll pay for new stuff but we don't want to pay much).
The creation industry want free reproduction and are willing to pay for it (digital copying is free if you use P2P).
The middlemen want free money and are willing to pay for it (copyright laws cost money!)
The artists want free money and are willing to pay for it (owning their lyrics to sell on and keep at the same time)
The government want free money and are willing to pay for it (taking you to court costs the IRS)
I know this is off-topic, but /. is the best place I can think of to ask this question:
.aa files off of the thing, boot into Windows, and install iTunes to try to fix my iPod. Now iTunes is telling me to sign in to Audible Audio, even though I don't have an account with them. I never have. I got these files legitimately and legally from my employer, and they played fine on the iPod before I tried copying music onto it. Anyone know if it's possible for me to recover these files? Or do I have to go to the library and check out either the physical (and unabridged) books or the (abridged) audio CD's?
I recently got an iPod Nano from my (future) employer. Included on the iPod are a welcome video and two audio books, using Audible Audio's DRM. When I tried copying some songs over from Rhythmbox to the iPod, nothing showed up in the catalog any more. So I copy the
Removing DRM is a good thing. People who pirate music will always pirate music. DRM never did much to stop that. The claim that they are losing "millions of dollars" is predicated upon the baseless assumption that people would buy all that music if they couldn't download it. Unfortunately, basic economics tells us that as price increases, consumption decreases. So in reality, the vast majority of their claimed losses are complete BS because people would not have bought the music anyway.
Most people who want to defend the music industry in its current form are stuck in the belief that there is no other way for the industry to sustain itself except for the way it's been making money since vinyl records were introduced. Yet, miraculously, many companies have already shown that they can make enormous amounts of money while providing a service that is free to their end customer. For example: Google has made a ridiculous amount of money in recent years, and they don't charge a cent to the end users of their primary services. An even greater example comes in the form of broadcast television, which also rakes in huge sums of money every year despite never charging a cent to their end users. The idea that an industry can not remain profitable without strict post-purchase control over its end product is absurd at best.
It's hard to figure out exactly where the assumption creeps in. He goes from seemingly-solid fact, to seemingly-solid fact, to this:
Wait -- is he actually assuming that DRM-free equals free as in beer?
I hope he never diets. Sugar-free and fat-free products might confuse him.
Well, let's see. First, they're DRM-laden.
Second, did he honestly think that anyone was going to pay for those 100 albums? If there wasn't a rental service, they'd pirate. If there wasn't easy piracy, then they'd just buy less.
Making $N is always a good idea, where N>0, and the alternative is making $0.
And the rentals absolutely should cost less. He seems to be on the brink of understanding this:
Yeah. So they cost less, because they provide less worth. If you buy a physical album, you're paying more, but you can guarantee that you have access to it, forever, on any medium you care to translate it to.
Let's see -- books in my living room, I bought. If I have a bunch of books in my living room that came from a library, well, either I stole them, or I paid enough late fees to buy them several times over. And if they're not actually in my living room, but in the library, then I absolutely expect to lose access to my old library's books when I join a new library.
DVD collection -- same deal. Is this guy stealing DVDs from Blockbuster or Netflix?
In summary, we have a new, Dvorak-level troll on our hands, only so far as I can tell, he's not intentionally trolling, but he actually is that stupid. Didn't the old PC Mag editor-in-chief quit because of Vista? Well, this is what they replaced him with...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
They didn't have control with DRM. They lost control as soon as Napster started. Removing DRM is just giving us another means of getting what we already had, where the selling point is that it's actually legal.
"Giving up control of content and giving it away free are not rational ideas in a market economy..."
Trying to retain control of content isn't workin' out so great either, is it?
The rational thing to do is dump your stocks in the Content Control industry as soon as possible and invest in something else before it's too late. Something like Buggy Whip Manufacturing, or Cat Herding Services, maybe.
Giving up control of content and giving it away free are not rational ideas in a market economy, yet everyone's cheering.
This is precisely a **IA kind of statement. Suggesting removal of DRM from a product is equivalent to giving it away for free is realy quite dumb. There are countles products in the world without limitations on how you use them, where you use them, or who you use them with - yet amazingly, they do still cost money to acquire. Removing limitations on how a product is used does not translate to removing the price of ownership of said product.
No, don't tell me about that "Dread Zepplin" group. Led Zepplin is one of a kind. I should spank you for blasphemy.
You prove his point quite beautifully, retrieving non-DRM'd HTML from www.pcmag.com that suspiciously looks exactly like non-photocopy-protected text from a paper magazine.
Actually, wait.
Back in the days when a copy of WordStar or Microsoft Multiplan cost hundreds of dollars and came on copy-protected floppy disks, Borland International came out with a line of software that was different. Turbo Pascal, Sidekick, and other products came on non-copy-protected disks and cost $50 or $100.
If you believe in the claims of the DRM advocates in our big media organizations, you probably figure that Borland must have lost money horribly. Actually, they didn't; their strategy of selling without copy protection at a fair price was very successful.
The lesson I take away from that is that most people, if you offer them a fair deal, will take the fair deal rather than steal from you. I don't remember anyone ever saying "Borland deserves to have this stuff ripped off."
If you offer me music without DRM at a fair price, I will pay the price and get the music legally. I think most music fans will do the same. (Especially if they believe that their money will mostly go to the band instead of to the record label.)
P.S. The flip side of the coin is that DRM doesn't actually work. There's this thing called the "Internet", see, and if anyone anywhere in the world manages to once break the DRM, then everyone who wants to download the DRM-free version can do so. Thus DRM just hurts the actual paying customers, who then might well feel entitled to steal the next product instead of buying it.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
"Giving up control of content and giving it away free are not rational ideas in a market economy"
There is a very big leap between removing DRM and giving it away free. When there was no Amazon Music Store, and no iTunes Plus there was piracy. Since the introduction of iTune Plus and Amazon's DRM MP3 store there has been piracy.
Since Radiohead sold their album as MP3s online for "whatever you want to pay" they have continued to sell CDs (Infact, In Rainbows has done very well in the US charts as a CD album).
DRM does nothing to halt piracy, the thought that it has any affect at all on piracy is quite ridiculous.
The bigger worry for the music industry is the quality of music being produced. If they continue to try and market music that no one wants, they are not going to sell it. DRM, no DRM, if people don't want to listen to the music, they wont buy it.
The primary problem surrounds the foolishness of mistaking a song for an artifact, of something of fixed value, to be bought and sold akin to furniture, houses and books.
Contrarily a song is not an artifact; it is not the sum of its spectral data, the print it makes on vinyl. A song is something experienced, it propagates by instigating changes in air-pressure as an orchestrated environmental effect felt by our ear-drums and our bones.
Music is something experienced in time, plays with interpretation and memory, and as such should be sold as a time-based service.
This is an old idea: 'The Wireless' (aka radio) did it. Last.fm still does it. Saunas do it, as do golf courses, the hotel and sex industries.
Don't make objects where they don't exist. A recording is a thing that includes the membrane it's recorded on. This innately makes it reproduce-able. Recordings don't 'contain' songs any more than a street contains the memories of those that walked on it.
Don't go the way of selling songs as objects. It was never going to work. It's silly.
what market economy? Surely the RIAA/etc have not been moving pricing of music based on any economic market indicators. It's like the cable industry in a way. They force a whole bunch of stuff together in a package, fix the prices and then say take or go without because you have not other choice. Choice showed up in the music industry and unfortunately for them, the choice( digital music ) was one which had tons of upside for the end users.
The cable industry, well we're already downloading alot of video, have Tivo getting some over the LAN, along with other mechanisms at our fingers( Amazon, Netflix, etc ). They should be watching their down side, if you know what I mean.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Actually the main reason there's been a shift to removing DRM is simply that the music labels realized they were losing control to Apple. With Apple's dominance in selling music on-line and their control of ipods, the use of DRM was a lock in to Apple's distribution network. The labels moved away from DRM so, ironically, they could better control the flow of their music (the same reason they presumably insisted on it in the first place).
The reality is that DRM or not, people who wanted to get music for free could get it and people who wanted to share their music could share it. So long as there existed a high quality non-DRM'd format (CD's) or some ability to remove decryption, then DRM was pointless.
I think there is some truth to your point though about on-line sales increasing. I know that I had been hesitant to buy a lot through iTunes for the risk that I'd not be able to play the music elsewhere (or just the hassle of having to license multiple computers with Apple). Now that I can get high quality DRM free tracks from iTunes and Amazon I am far more willing to buy music.
I don't see any negative effect because it's not like DRM was keeping the music off P2P networks in the first place.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
DRM-Free music may just spell the end of the record industry as we know it, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. When the loom was invented it revolutionized weaving. When the printing press was invented it revolutionized books. Did people lose their jobs? Of course. The loom eliminated a lot of manual labour, as did the press, but the displaced people found jobs in other fields. On the short term the industry will hurt, but the market and business will change with it.
The PC Mag folks need to all take a break from each other for awhile...
No, there's no question about that, it most certainly will.
The real question isn't whether there will be more illegal file sharing, it's whether there will be more legal purchases.
For a long, long time, I've asked a simple thought experiment. If you had your choice of having $500 million in sales with rampant piracy, or $1 billion in sales with twice as much piracy, which would you choose? The music industry has a history of choosing the lesser amount because of the risk of the increase in music piracy. I've contended all along that this is stupidity, that even if music piracy increases, it would be well worth it to increase their bottom line in legal music purchases. To date, they've been operating out of spite instead of common financial sense.
I hope, and I honestly believe, that as DRM-free music becomes the de facto standard in the marketplace, sales will increase as hardware manufacturers gear up to take advantage of it and people are able to listen to what they want, how they want, where they want. It's just a no-brainer to me. And I hope the MPAA is taking note, because the same principle will apply to television shows and movies also.
The question has never been about whether or not there will be piracy. The only way to prevent it is to close your company's doors and declare bankruptcy, never to earn another penny again. The only question is how willing the industry is to cut off its nose to spite its face, to forgo profits to stop something that will never be stopped.
THE Music Industry is a myth
And by that I mean The Myth is that the is one "music industry". Specifically, what I mean when I say "the music industry" is (clearly, obviously) NOT the same thing that THEY (RIAA, etc) of the world mean.
I would suggest that we (the sane and clear thinking intelligent people of the world) understand that there are TWO "Music Industries".
- The Industry of Making Music
- The Industry of Distributing Music
DRM is all about the control of the distribution of music. What we're seeing here is a failure of that control.So what if DRM fails? So what if Music Distribution fails? So what if The Music Distribution Industry (which, basically, in its current invocation is nothing more than a protectionist racket like the MAFIA used to run) fails?
Previously the mechanical complexities involved in the distribution of physical media meant there "was room" (in a business sense) for an entity to "make this happen smoothly" and make money in the process. Now that there's less and less physical distribution, and more electronic distribution, the previous "margin for profit" is rapidly shrinking (ie there's no room for someone to skip BILLIONS of dollars from consumers for no reason).
As living proof that any idiot can make predictions about The Music Industry
- Music Distribution will be SIGNIFICANTLY LESS about physical media and more about content
- Many artists will find this is an opportunity to be more direct with their customers, and thereby collect more of the profits themselves
- Other distributors will be needed, to help shuffle bits (iTunes, Last.FM, etc)
- There will be multiple distribution models (sell bits, rent bits, subscription for bits)
- There will be MUCH MORE of a market for "free stuff" that comes with what you bought (ie "value add")
- There will be MUCH MORE of a market for premium content (ie the ultimate collectors signed-by-the-artist, gold-plated, diamond-encrusted pack)
... because it's now a significant distinguisher, as more of the market is no-longer physical - ....
- Profit???
Basically I could ramble on for a few MEGABYTES, but the main point is this:- The Entire Industry That Revolves Around Music will be much broader, deeper, richer than ever before.
Even though "the current distribution and control models" are no longer valid, nor necessary, nor are they even WANTED anymore.We need not, we should not, mourn their demise. Like a recently deceased aged relative, we've had some good memories, but towards the end it's just been messy and embarrassing.
Hold a funeral, bury the body, enjoy the wake, celebrate the new generation.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
... because the movies coming out are generally either of poor quality or are so niche oriented that most people would rather not watch them. Also, with DVDs and on demand television, people are more apt to wait for the movie to come to them via Netflix or their cable company than go out to wait in line, pay for overpriced concessions, and sit in a seat that may or may not be horrible.
And that's just part of it. The movie-going generation generally skews young, but young people have other things to distract them, including the web and its social networks. Also, before you could perhaps rely on word of mouth from one person and maybe a newspaper rating of a movie before making a decision to go see it. Now you can get hundreds of opinions instantly.
People still go out to see great movies. They just won't put up with crap as much as they used to.
... was it because of DRM or lack thereof ?
I am pretty sure the last line of the article was removed
"Oh and by the way, the sky is falling"
It is such a tolerant regime that it allows idiots such as these to speak out loud without having a bit of knowledge about recent history. Linux was given away 'free', yet it has been able to challenge world's biggest corporation at its own game. I wouldnt even bother to start listing other examples.
the question is, WHO funds idiots like that, and who helps them spurt out their nonsense around ?
Read radical news here
Markets are brutally efficient - you can only charge what the market will bear.
There are ways to manipulate markets, and the most reliable way to manipulate a market is to create scarcity. Many large players try to create scarcity to prop up prices (precious stones, agriculture, energy generation...etc)
Unfortunately for the music industry, music is not scarce at all. As much as the music industry tries to create scarcity, there is just too much content, and too many ways to consume it (radio, TV, satellite, cell phone, internet, coffee houses...etc). If you don't believe me, try to go one day without listening to music anywhere - you probably can't do it.
This lack of scarcity has, in market terms, devalued recorded music. Recorded music is almost worthless in today's music consuming market.
Music PERFORMANCES, however, are very scarce in comparison. I've seen people spend upwards of $300 per ticket to go see certain artists perform live. The market has decided that live performances are scarce and worth MUCH more than recorded music.
And that's the only way the music industry will make money. Give the music away, and hope that people will come out to see the performers play.
Any other strategy is doomed to fail, and the market has already come to that conclusion.
-ted
The writer of that article is an idiot.
Every single song is already on the P2P networks so how can this cause the collapse of anything?
No sig today...
maybe the music industry is going down the drain because all the new music these days SUCKS!! I have not bought an album for years because all the new music completely stinks!
It isn't the DRM free music that's causing loss of revenue, it's the fact that the cost to distribute pirated music is next to zero now. Before you had to dub a copy to tape or burn a CD, these all cost a little bit of money. Now you can share music to your hearts content downloading pirated music at next to no cost. If there was an associated cost to downloading these audio files on the consumer end it would be less convenient. The consumer wants convenience. Right now it's just more convenient to look for an album torrent than to pay $1 a track to get it off iTunes.
They've spent quite a bit of their profits on DRM schemes, too.
No sig today...
Unfortunately, they don't do the Simpson's live. It causes too much strain on the animators wrists.
You can't steal music. You can't steal a movie. It is not wrong to share.
You CAN plagiarise, but that's a whole other matter.
The sooner our laws change to reflect what people feel is fundamentally fair, the better.
Ever consider that there is no point to the music "industry" in this day and age? Perhaps consumers are finally wising up and no longer wish to consume anything that Viacom or Clearchannel tells them to consume? With the plethora of independent artists who have figured out how to create, record, promote, and profit from their art without the big fat overhead of a traditional record company, the truth of the matter is that there is just not any need for the "industry" anymore. The product that the industry has been putting out only caters to the least common denominator of society. Perhaps the world is just realizing that people really aren't as sheep-like as the labels wished they were (at least outside Dumbfuckistan). -W
MP3 will be free long before OGG can make any inroads. It's much better to wait it out....
No sig today...
Not that the other solutions are any better. I love how intelligent people think subscription-based music services are the way to go. All you can eat for $15 a month. Talk about devaluing your product. People can download enough songs to fill 100 albums and pay under $20. How does anyone make money this way?
Worse yet, if you sign up for a subscription, you're saying that it's okay for the music service to wipe out your music collection if you cancel. Imagine walking into your living room as all your books disappear because you changed libraries, or your DVD collection disappears because you switched from Blockbuster to Netflix.
Both giving away content free of charge and taking everything away from consumers if they cancel fly in the face of everything we know about a functioning economy. People will become dissatisfied. Artists will stop making content because they're not getting paid. When there is no content, people will stop buying gadgets to consume that content. In short order, one part of our digital economy will collapse, and it could be followed by countless others.
Of course, if you buy the DRM music, then this problem goes away! Nobody has ever had their media collection "voided" by DRM, right? Oh, wait... Yeah they have.
To say that people will stop buying gadgets to consume that content is shortsighted and even stupid. People haven't even caught on to what DRM will really mean for them in the future, and those who have only have made the connection because of what it did not mean for them in the past. My parents, for example, would consider hd-dvd an upgrade.
Giving away content can be a bad business model, sure. But it can also be an excellent business model. Just ask the guys at Google.
And before I forget to say it, it's worth mentioning that the costs of music are continually falling (to the point where independant musicians can produce records of similar quality to big labels, but in their basements). If the label really needs $650,000 to sign that new artist, then I think something in the money chain is missing. The means to increase production exponentially at virtually zero cost are there. The RIAA simply refuses to take advantage of it. Their approach is to throw huge sacks of money at promoting a small number of "artists" and largely ignore the rest of the crowd.
Creative works are cheaper than ever to produce. Unless you ask any company that makes its money on artificial scarcity.
I previewed this a couple of times before i noticed the biggest problem with this guy's argument: "what if you found your books vanishing because you switched libraries, or your dvds vanishing because you switched from blockbuster to netflix?"
Uh... with either service, you don't own anything. the media belongs to the library (or blockbuster) and the content belongs to the creator or publisher. Wait, that sounds EXACTLY like the sort of thing DRM was designed to do.
He is right on one count, though. If you piss your customers off enough, then they will *evntually* stop paying for your products. But to suppose that people actually *like* or *want* DRM? That's a stretch. Yes, one part of the digital economy will collapse. And I welcome that collapse. Just because it's there today does not mean it's not a malignant tumor. Go away, DRM. I never wanted you. I never will. I never woke up thinking "I wish there were fewer ways I could use the music I paid for."
I know many of you have pointed this out already, but here's my 2p:
The author confuses physical goods with digital goods. No problem, happens all the time. He introduces this concept though:
"So people who made wooden chairs could trade them for, say, rice, fresh fruits, or meat. In time, a monetary system was introduced to generate a larger economy." That's not how it went down. Actually, according to my conspiracy-minded imagination, money was introduced by a bunch of lazy slobs who wanted to own the whole world, by doing the minimum amount of work. They devised a system by which people would trade little beads, bits of paper, shells, whatever, as long as they controlled the supply of said fiat currency. Like the man said "He who controls the spice controls the universe".
Thanks, Lance, for perpetuating the corruption that is money. That's swell. Before, people made whatever and traded whatever. Sure, there were inefficiencies, but people did what they fail to do now: they told people what they had and what they needed. Nowadays, it's all about "How much can I get for it" or "What are you willing to pay me for". So much better, I admit. (BTW, I am a wannabe '60's hippie that Lance is talking about in the article, like you couldn't have guessed) Moving on.
"We access or play an instance of it, but ownership lies really with the creators or, if they signed the rights away, to the media conglomerate that sold the right to consume it--on a limited basis--to you."
Whoa! When did we agree to this? OK, just for the record, let it be known that unlike everything else ever created in the world that is portable, fungible, and transferable, media is different. You don't own it. You have the right to use it. OK, let me get this straight, Lance, so I don't misrepresent you or your media conglomerate sugar daddy.
If I were to purchase a physical paper copy of your magazine, just for fun, let's say...then I gave that copy of your magazine to someone else after I was done reading it, that would be copyright infringement, right? Bear with me Lance...I purchased the "right" to read your sacred text, the words that you received on high by the mighty fortress that is...Microsoft, Ziff-Davis? I forgot who your corporate masters were. Anyway, so I purchased this "right", naively thinking I had purchased a "product" instead. If I then give that holy writ away to someone else, thinking "Hey, geek-boy over there is going to get a kick out of this," have I not infringed upon your sacred copyright? Have I not transferred my right to view your copyrighted work, without your express written consent (and the written consent of ABC, and the National Football League)? Am I in trouble, Lance? Are the cops going to take me away? I want my mommy. Woe is me.
See, this is exactly why a common peasant, unwise in the ways of copyright law, would be tempted to "steal" music. The commoner understands the concept of "buying and selling stuff". We do not understand this concept of "limited transfer of rights". In fact, it appears that yon mega-media company is attempting to rip us off. Is that what's going on? Has this been going on for years? Are the money changers in the temple? Have they been kicked out by the messiah of P2P? Lance, are you actually defending the money-changers? Do you even know what you're up against?
Sharing resources like this always makes me think of the parable of the loaves and the fishes (no I am not a Christian, but I will not hesitate to use Christian literature against them). You see, The Original Hippie split loaves of bread and entire fish. Why he did not bring at least some of the fish back to life, to replenish the stocks in the lake/river/stream/whatever is beyond me. Perhaps his powers were weak, at the time. Anyway, everyone got enough to eat because Beardy basically did this matter transmutation thing with food.
This is essentially what we are doing now, with media. We copy one set of organiz
How 'bout this for a new idea? Why not distribute music that people find unique, creative, artistic and inventive - like groups and individuals did in the '60's and the '70's. Much of that music is now classic. It still sells.
I have a friend who has a son who has moved to LA to pursue the music scene (his dad and I live in Canada). He came home at Christmas and I asked how it was going. He repiled that he was getting sick of being told that he would get recorded if he sounded like someone else.
Sorry, music execs, that is not how you create music!!!
Maybe that is why your industry can't give your shit away!!! 'Cause its no good!!! Clue in!!! People will buy stuff that is different if you give them a chance to hear it! Then maybe your business won't die. Maybe thats why Trent Resnor and Nine Inch Nails are purposely not even coming to you to have you represent them!!! Maybe its because its impossible to make a decent living under one of your contracts.
Would Donovan, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen, hell even the Beach Boys have had a chance in today's climate? No, and only 'cause they each had a unique sound that no exec would have "taken a risk on"!!! Well guess what!!! Music and art is about RISK!! Its about stepping into the unknown!!!
Each of these great artists would probably have been relegated to playing in the odd bar, just like my friend's son.
For those of us old enough to remember the early days of the personal computer market and, more specifically, the IBM PC market, we will remember that the same types of doom and gloom was said about the software industry. Lotus would die if it released 123 without DRM (ok, it was called copy protection back then) or that dBase or a host of other software vendors.
But there were some that realized that two things were going on:
1) Copy protection got in the way of legitimate paying customers so more and more complex methods were invented that did things like put bad data into directory structures on the hard drive to "mark" the machine as valid and other such trick, all of which ended up causing more problems and costing tons in R&D and support efforts.
2) Those people who would not pay for the software still were finding people who had the skills to work around the security measures and still had illegal copies. In fact, some that actually had paid for the software also got these illegal versions as they did not have this other problems.
Along the same time, some smaller vendors released software at the right price and without copy protection "features" and did very well. Slowly the other vendors also stopped doing copy protection and, well, the sky did not fall. They all prospered. Those that failed did not fail due to lack of copy protection or due to too much piracy.
I have seen this cycle actually a number of times. Each time the final analysis ends up showing that more is lost due to trying to "protect" the content than is ever gained by someone maybe paying for the product that might not have done so without the measures.
From the article:
Indeed you might be, which why subscription services remain subscribed. However author's position conveniently ignores the 800lb gorilla in the room. As things stand now, removing the books/CDs/DVDs from your shelf is called theft. By supporting ubiquitous DRM the author is supporting the 'right' of content authors to unilaterally remove all the books/CDs/DVDs from your shelf without you having to switch library and without you having any recourse in the matter. In the author's DRM-laden utopia the concept of theft is twisted to included copyright infringement and exclude the digital equivalent of theft by removing access to paid-for services. This is not a Good Thing.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Is patronage forbidden nowadays or what?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"the music industry will continue to crumble."
... what's the problem, then?
As a composer and musician, I ask: so
The "industry" (think once more about that word, and what it has meant to *music*) was an anomaly built by pimping pop to teenagers with enough money to buy vinyl. It consumed as many lives as it made dollars. The "star" system, the "underground economy", the proliferation of radio stations choosing what is "worthy"
Good riddance. Music never needed the cigars, the usury, the chains or the money. I look forward to new Woody Guthries running amok in the countryside, new Dylans popping up in depression coffeehouses. As for all the people who've made a very good living from the creativity of others: go sell Amway.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
You still don't get it.
You pissed me off. By being such scummy amoral greedy assholes.
listen close. make copies if it will help you get it.....
I WILL NEVER BUY MUSIC AGAIN! EVER!
Get it yet? I dont care what you do. you lost me and many others as customers forever.
I want you to go broke. I dont care if i ever get another new piece of music. And i will keep teaching people how to "STEAL" your content every chance i get.
You rank down there with lawyers, telemarketers, spammers, pedophiles, and the like. You will never EVER see another cent from me. Ever. You treated me. your customer. like a thief. you waged war on digital freedom. you had your chance to cash in big and what did you do. fucked up and sued YOUR OWN CUSTOMERS! You are scum. You had your chances. You failed. Now i want to see you all bankrupt.
theft, enfringement.... call it whatever you want. it doesnt change the fact you will lose in the end.
And i dont feel one damm bit of pity or sympathy for you. Or anyone connected in any way with your industry.
Yes, because it's the "industry"'s only hope.
With DRM: can't play, won't buy, no sale.
Without DRM: can play, might buy, possible sale.
Without DRM: piracy limited to those who want to "steal."
With DRM: piracy includes "thieves" and also people who want interoperability. They might have bought it, but you'll never know BECAUSE YOU DID NOT HAVE A FUCKING PRODUCT THAT WORKS.
I don't know if dropping DRM will save them, but it will at least increase revenue. Bitch all you want about digital media making piracy easier, but DRM makes it necessary. That was the path to death.
BTW, DRM hasn't been dropped. It seems to be going away for music, but it's still very present in movies. I don't buy movies that I can't play. People who want to sell me movies, should keep that in mind.
Im one of the many time poor out there and I catch the train to work. To save time I download podcasts that helps me keep on top of things relating to the field I work in. One thing I have noticed is the lack of "music" in my podcasts over the last couple of years. As most of us know this is because record companies have decided that podcasts should pay exorbitant license fees. Many of the podcasts literally are either a hobby or are on a shoestring budget thus they delete any music played within the podcast (some are live to air recordings). The problem now is Im totally used to not hearing music in podcasts and when I do hear anything it is viewed along the same lines as advertising. Now if you sit back and think about it the record industry has successfully isolated many of is consumer base from its product and any marketing guru would say this is suicide. So am I surprised that sales have dropped, no considering my previous comment.
I guess there are a lot of people who will groan, but I actually really like Rhapsody. I've never been a big purchaser of music. I was strongly discouraged from doing that when I grew up so I got pretty accustomed to listening to the radio. And I liked it that way :).
I also tend to buy a CD and listen to it once whereafter it gets put away in a box. Even for top notch "classics". With pay-to-play I get to listen to whatever floats my boat on that day without cluttering up my house and cars with rarely listened to music.
This also allows me to cheaply experiment with stuff I wouldn't otherwise listen to. I don't get unknown garage bands, but that's not what I'm into anyway. I suspect if I wanted to search for them I'd find them with Google.
This isn't like paying for the air I breath. If it gets too expensive, well, I like silence too.
What we are seeing is the end of the patent / copy write system of information management to a more shared approach. This will take generations. But, once we realize that there is nothing to fear and everything to gain from sharing all information digitally our entire economy will change.
Well, in the last 2 months I've bought more DRM free music (Thanks Amazon!) than I have DRM'd music in my life time. Why? Because DRM music has been a nightmare. I could never get it to play right on my MP3 player, I don't own an iPod (Well I did, but I returned it) so the few songs I bought on iTunes were essentially trapped on my PC. My mom in the past bought music via the DRM'd Walmart store, but had such hassles she never did again. Instead I've stuck to CD's. Nice simple, easy to copy. But with Amazon now offering up huge amounts of DRM free music I've been buying up out of print albums and guest spots some of my favorite artists have done.
As my brother, a musician, tells me, he doesn't make that much money off recordings anyway. Most of his income comes from performances. I can steal the f*cking CDs for all he cares as long as I come to the concerts.
Keep this all in mind when deciding who will be getting screwed by DRM-free music.
Have gnu, will travel.
I went ahead in time and grabbed a history book written in the year 5,000 AD. Here is what it had to say....
"... For 10,000 years musicians earned their money by playing in front of a live audience except for a short 80 year period in the 20th century. Before this period recording has not technically possible and after the period recordings had no commercial value because they could be universally disseminated at no cost...."
hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah
the death of an antiquated business model is NOT the death of music
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The "digital economy" is doomed to collapse unless they realize and accept that it's based on services, not products.
The music industry is going through changes analogous to the ones the publishing industry went through over time.
In the first era, publishing books was a laborious and time consuming process, and only one copy could be made easily. Books cost huge amounts of money, and were hand printed and illustrated. Then when the printing press was invented, it created a second era, which dramatically brought down the price of books due to mass production, and made it possible for countless people to read things they never would have been able to before. It also led to the rise of publishing empires who controlled what and who was published. If you could afford a printing press, you could publish what you wanted, but not many had the resources and wherewithal to become a major publishing machine. And lastly with the rise of the internet era, web sites and blogs, which are essentially free ways to publish and mass-distribute your work, it became possible for anyone to have their writing accessible to all, and to build a following, without the need for a publisher in the middle. Many blogs are now major writing outlets, and don't go through publishers they way they would have needed to in years gone by. Technology has created a whole new market and business model.
The record companies are in the same state the publishing companies were in during the rise of the third era; technology has made it possible to bypass them and they are running scared.
But you don't see blogs as a substitute for publishing books. People still buy books from book publishers. Yet blogs have become a huge global force just as important as books. Newspapers, being in between, have suffered and have been forced to become more like blogs. The difference between blogs and traditional printed media is that blogs are streams. The value people find in blogs is that they are a constant stream of creative content from the writer, i.e. a subscription. People see value in getting the latest thing from the writer, in a timely way, with predictability and quality. So what people see as the value of blogs is access to the talent on an ongoing basis, not an individual item of production. And there still is value in producing and buying books, because they are a different product meeting a different need.
So I see that the music distribution business will change in similar ways. It may become impossible to charge for individual songs, but people will pay for ongoing access to the talent. The musicians will be forced to actually be productive on an ongoing basis, and to create a stream of content, which has subscription value. They will no longer be able to build huge fortunes on a few moments of inspiration, and will have to work for their supper on a continuing basis. But in the end, those who have talent will be able to create that stream of value, though probably not on the scale that musicians get paid today.
And there will still be a market for high-production quality compilations of music, like CD compilations with good editorial judgment, and high-quality artwork and music. But along side them, as important or more so, there will be talent streams.
Things will be different, and talented musicians will be able to make a moderate amount of money, and the people who make fortunes today riding a few creative successes probably won't be able to do that. But is that such a bad thing?
Is the disappearance of the random assortment CDs that most modern pop/whatever people put out. The real artists put out an album which is really a performance (e.g. the pieces/songs flow into one another, they set a mood, tell a story, etc), instead most pop/rock/alternative music albums are just collections of random songs a few of which become catchy and end up on the radio all day long ...
We already have popular performances that are ensembles of an entire theme from start to finish. They're called films. Any film worth watching has a beginning, middle, and an end. Could you imagine a film where it's just collection of random 5 minute scenes with no story connecting them at all?
So what the end of people being forced to buy an entire CDs worth of shit and instead being able to cherry pick the pieces they want is artists will have to start putting together worthy albums so people will want to pay $15 or $20 for a collection instead of $0.99 for a piece.
I have no problem paying $15 for a CD if it contains a good hour of actual enjoyable music. I won't pay $15 for a CD where I have to skip tracks 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 10 because they are utter garbage.
Then let's dump the market economy. It just causes grief for the vast majority of people on the planet anyway.
What?
well then, it must be true.
Should I really bother to read TFA?
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=eben+moglen&hl=en&sitesearch=
Parent ("Crumbling industry? Yes and no") says:
ok... why does parent appear to be replying to (and quoting!) a post other than what it's attached to?
They are acting like they are giving away the original source wav for free.
When really its a compressed version of what they could be selling on CD's.
After all I would rather own the CD, which is closest I am ever going to get to the source material.
Then I'll make my own MP3, Flak, OGG, WMV, at whatever sample rate for whatever portable device I own.
If CD's didn't cost so much then maybe they will be able sell them again.
I suggest they rethink the way they sell CD's.
Make the packaging less expensive.
Make the music selection better.
Include Music Videos
Just make it a better deal.
Maybe no more than 5.99 a CD?
Editors are making up stupid stuff to get their view count up for the month.
Thanks Slashdot, our advertisers all renewed thanks to you!
The previous comments are only true, if no-one says they're wrong.
This person just like the music industry itself has failed to realize that the music industry's interests and consumer's habits are diverging strongly today.
First thing when you buy music you expect to play it on your home theatre/HiFi, on your laptop, on your mobile phone, on your iPod and other devices... No one will pay more than once for one song without feeling like being robed.
Speaking about paying. I believe music consumers are in majority young people whose wallet is not stretchable. When the video media industry introduced DVDs the music industry saw a strong decline in it's CD sales and started screaming in pain... Young people in Europe tend to have 100 to 600 mobile phones at the age of 16, they invest in bluetooth accessories and wireless plans... this money can't be spent twice and it's taken away from some media conglomerates and ends up in the pockets of others. You can not expect 100% growth in one sector without impacting another one.
These music companies did not foresee the changes ahead when mp3 players started appearing, and when the interned was getting all the hype they must have been in a cave, they never heard of it. They failed to adapt in time and utterly ignored the need to create new business models when they were confronted with the problem. Those companies not only failed in front of their consumers... They also failed in front of their share holders by ignoring an extremely popular new medium (the internet!).
The fear of repercussions on the shares and laziness gave the poor americans the RIAA. Their desperate move to vilify the consumers changing habits just created more resent and a new generation of young who now despise them and laughs at the poor adverts "downloading is stealing"... These companies can survive on their current customer base but they already lost the large part of the current youth and continue to make the consumer the enemy. I believe this is already gone too far to be ignored or forgotten.
I don't see Warner or Sony disappear... music is only a part of their business. But they are out of their comfort zone now and will have to start working harder.
Saying that music will die because of the digital age is like saying concerts will die because of the audio tape... that cinema will die because of the TV or that news papers will die because of the internet.
It's just a lack of foresight and effort. It's due to old age and to a tendency to get comfortable in old habits. As soon as some things change you don't want to make the effort to adapt or to innovate you sent lawyers to put thing like they were...
As a consequence people get sued by an old grandpa waving his stick. It also happened to Copernicus... but it's round none the less.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions...
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. Excellent points about the price of production vs. retail price. It's sometimes about perceived value.
>>they see how many people are willing to pay for it at x, y, z and then pick the price that gives them the most money
I don't think they do. Consider this scenario for a moment: You want to buy a shirt. You can buy a $5 shirt, or a $500 shirt. There's an enormous variety of prices and styles available to you. Some are made of cheap materials (cotton, crudely cut & stitched) while others may be of fine silk or linen, hand tailored. Which makes the differences in price at least understandable.
So where's the variety in music pricing? Occasionally I see a $3.00 CD bin in the corner of the music store, but the VAST majority of music is selling for a price that smells like it's set by collusion among the big lablels -- For the most part, you have the $10 CD and the $17 CD and really little else to be found. That doesn't make sense.
When Michael Jackson or Madonna or some other overhyped act spends millions and millions of dollars over a span of years in a studio to produce an album, shouldn't it cost proportionately more than the local garage band/one-hit-wonder that put the whole album together in their basement for $1,000 and is living in a hollowed out 15-seat bus eating ramen noodles between shows? But both act's albums are selling for nearly the same price. That leads me to believe that either the small bands are subsidizing the costs of the big-name "artists", or there's some very disturbing accounting happening at the label. And consider too that based on how most music contracts are structured with fees for "promotion" and "advertising" and "advances" and "management considerations", a small band can tour for a year, selling hundreds of thousands of albums (and making TONS of money for the label!) yet end the day in debt. That's just not right.
I think we can both agree it's a filthy business run by too many layers of less than upstanding characters. Like you said, not smart business men at all.
I don't understand why the record companies just think in terms of the "casual music fan" that buys CD's at Walmart. Many people are devotees of certain artists, and would gladly shell out money for alternative product if the music companies would just consider offering it. For example, take live concert recordings. A fan can generally download a copy from a likn on a fansite. The recording is likely crappily recorded using a wireless phone, yet the fan is willing to invest valuable time in downloading the recording, properly labelling each song and adding some homemade "cover art" to add to their collection - especially for a never-before heard or unique track. Instead, why not offer professionally recorded live recordings, properly labelled and tagged with art from the show, conveniently located on iTunes for a small fee a few days after the show? There's so many ways that the recording industry can compete with free...by offering something outside the single/album format they've been wedded to for the last 60 or so years.
The price of selling something has nothing to do with the price of producing it when you have a monopoly. You either don't know what you are talking about, or you think piracy is a legitimate competitor to selling music online. The cost of making a CD is under $1. That didn't stop the industry from selling them for over $15. Get a clue.
What monopoly? Even in this era of media consolidation there are several major labels and dozens if not hundreds of indies. Some of them use DRM, and some of them don't. There is no monopoly on the production or distribution of music in digital form. Even if your contention is that an oligopoly controls the music business, there is considerable evidence that the major labels have less power to control pricing than ever before.
As for the cost of production, the physical cost of a blank CD may be under $1, but that is the least important factor. Up-front recording costs, marketing costs, and distribution costs add to total cost for the label. They also have to make a profit as well. Whether you think the labels are making an exorbitant profit on each unit sold or not, it is disingenuous to state that it only costs them $1 per CD.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Beethoven was a prime example -- in fact, the first -- of a composer who did not need aristocratic patronage. He paved the way for a self-sustaining business by publishing, selling subscription concerts, and acquiring commissions from wealthy patrons. He did not live or die by a single royal finger, though he did accept individual commissions from them.
Dog is my co-pilot.
basically making music free and destroying the music industry is a good thing...
Cause all those musicians, i.e. high school drop outs that did nothing but smoke drugs and ignore the law will now be worthless. And the prefab no talent, lip-syncing 'musicians' would be worthless. Cause they're not worth the XXX million dollar contracts the labels think they're worth. And we, computer MP3 hackers, will rule the world!
The market (and real musicians) will find another way to make money. Money is not hard to make folks--and a monopoly or complete control of the system is "dead stupid money making"...
GP didn't say that no bands were as good as Led Zeppelin. GP said that a band as good as Led Zeppelin could very well get off the ground and become famous without any help from the record labels at all, just like Led Zeppelin did. Did your personal favs do that? If so, excellent, they are more role models for future bands. If not, then that does not mean that they are not good bands, merely that they became famous with help from the labels that they (maybe) didn't need.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
>> Now consumers are getting their wish, and the music industry will continue to crumble. Giving up control of content and giving it away free are not rational ideas in a market economy, yet everyone's cheering.
Boo hoo. My heart bleeds. Finally an end to a ridiculous monopoly that has lost all sight of musical talent. Hopefully the music and bands that don't just conform to mass-marketing formulas will finally also get some airplay.
Part of the reason for that is the crap that is on the albums. Most of the time, the song or two that are (barely) worth listening to are the only songs that make it onto the radio with the rest being filler.
My Sysadmin Blog
I think maybe you mean "monolithic"? Unless you mean "megalithic" in the stone-age sense...
Now, Radiohead's experiment might be considered to have been "giving it away free", but iTunes Plus, eMusic, and Amazonmp3 are *NOT* "giving it away free".
Giving up some amount of control (releasing DRM-free is not giving up *ALL* control; putting all content on the Pirate Bay would be giving up control,) in exchange for customer happiness is a good business decision.
The music industry is still going downhill because in spite of its embrace of DRM-free digital music, it still operates deep down in a way that stifles musician creativity in favor of high-profit crap.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Somebody tagged this article 'idiot' here at slashdot and I think that's not really fair.
As much as I hate DRM getting in the way of me enjoying my music as I like, I do believe that the music industry is completely screwed without *some* kind of DRM. Why? Because I can buy a song in MP3 format that has no DRM and email it to ALL of my friends. Free. With no penalty and no signal degradation. This is a very different than the old days when:
* Albums were big - who can copy an album?
* Cassettes came out - the cassette copy always suffered generational loss
* CDs were big - you'd still have to buy a cd and burn it and give it to someone.
I don't need to know the person I email some MP3 to. And that person can mail it to all his friends. This is a very very different situation. The barriers to lossless sharing are NULL.
I can't say it upsets me too much to see the horrible beast that is the music industry collapse on itself. On the other hand, what about lost jobs? There are all those CD manufacturing companies and the guys who'll burn 1000 copies of your demo for $1 each. Then there are the stores that sell CDs (R.I.P tower records).
I know - "DRM won't stop pirates." That's not the point. It *will* stop Cindy the Secretary from emailing Britney Spears' latest to all her friends.
I know I know = "But with each new distribution technology the overall money pie has grown". That may still be the case. Personally I applaud the dramatic decrease in the cost of music production technology and the digital distribution possibilities which are many-fold increase in efficiency. It means bands can make music with smaller investments and the consumer can get the music they want much more easily.
HOWEVER, jobs are getting eliminated. Where are the new jobs being created?
He needs to get hit over the head with the internet Clue stick.
Now consumers are getting their wish, and the music industry will continue to crumble.
The sales/downloads of Guitar Hero tracks is making Activision rich. http://www.joystiq.com/2008/01/21/guitar-hero-franchise-passes-the-1b-mark/
Notice that the top downloads do not include todays Pop or Urban Crap (oops) Rap artists.
The RIAA/Studio over priced music model will decline. CD sales suck, not because of the DRM (that sucks too), but because the product (Music) stinks. I want to buy Lordi's CD but can't find a US seller anywhere. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6VzdtmrP6Y
When can Lordi sell me their tracks though Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony? The future will be Music tracks from Band to Fan (Me).
Not the current model of Band, Expensive Studio, Distribution Conglomerate, Store to Fan tracks.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Just keep in mind, I'm buying less music right now because the economy is in the pits and probably about to get worse, NOT because I'm copying stuff, G-darnit. We all know we'll see that reasoning coming up in the next year sometime as to why sales are down and to get DRM back.
There is a used CD market, and all digital distribution can kill it if they stop making CDs. Then they can eliminate music sales that give them nothing. They need to reward people for buying music. I say they reward all mp3 album purchases with a code to get a t-shirt or other band related stuff.
The derivation of a word is not the same as its meaning. For instance, the South African equivalent to "nigger" is "kaffir", an Arabic word roughly akin to "infidel" - yet when Afrikaaners used it, they certainly weren't referring to their darker-skinned countrymen's lack of faith.
Seriously, books could probably exist without user restrictions because they're still too difficult to copy.
And ebooks don't come close to the readability, convenience, and utility of an actual book.
And if you think you're the only reader of books, how do you explain that every mall in American has at least one bookstore, and the internet is filled with book sellers (B&N, Amazon, Caimen, Powells... the list is endless).
I frankly see the TV Network most at risk since they seem to do their best at annoying viewers with endless commercials and taking 1/3 the screen space to remind you of the network name.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Don't worry, you're going to Hell.
Sorry but the music industry has for long wanted to make this into an "us vs. them" deal, they didn't want to care about consumers and now it just wouldn't make sense to expect us to care about them regardless of any "jobs are getting eliminated" extortion . They did not need any artificial copy protection back in the tape era, I am still unable to understand why they need it now, afaik copying a tape was a process faster than downloading a DVD, but hey, that's just me...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
"Your idea of music 'authenticity' (i.e. bands who can play instruments well on stage) is confusing music and sport"
Real music is a living breathing thing. It's people next to other people creating something right in front of you.
I don't mean in a concert hall, either. I'm talking about how most of us musicians got started. Playing in the local bar for $75 for 5 guys for 4 hours. It's about emotion, it's about a moment in time. Music in that setting *moves* people. A person playing Mozart sonatas live is riveting. On a CD, it's... nice. Chicago style polkas make you get up and dance *even if you hate polkas*. A smaltzy singer on the radio... wow... in person, you *get* it.
Yeah, you can make interesting sounds with synth and a sequencer and a recorder, and it's good, and entertaining, but people who just listening to music on CD's or their iPod and missing 3/4's of what music is all about.
Get up and dance. Move around. Laugh and cry with other people, marvel at a group of guys creating right there in front of you.
If you think that's sport, then you've probably never played sports or made music.
Now I understand why my daughter's age group would prefer a DJ to a live band.
So let's say the music industry only sells uncrackable, draconian DRM protected music, such that it's impossible to make copies of it, pass it to your friends etc... This would force me to buy my music from them if I want it in any decent quality. Sure you could put a mic infront of your speakers, but it wouldn't sound good.
Without DRM, I could get high quality copies of the music from friends/bittorrent etc. Why would I then want to pay for the music, when I can get it for free?
If musicians want my money, tour.
Incidentally the whole iTunes-double-charging thing is absurd. It shouldn't be necessary for a consumer to pay extra to get rights that they're legally supposed to have anyway.
Consumer rights provided that are provided for by copyright law are legal rights, not luxuries that are allowed to be charged for. If it's so easy for consumers to assert these rights with DRM content then the DRM-free content shouldn't be in demand for any legal use, in which case Apple is openly assisting copyright infringement, which amounts to breaking the law.
Presumably Apple is not trying to assist people with copyright infringement, which basically means that Apple is forcing people to pay extra money to for the ability to assert their legal rights. Surely this is also illegal, isn't it?
This inane column was published purely to stir up controversy and thus direct tens if not hundreds of thousands of angry geeks to their website, thus increasing their ad revenue. As the old saying goes, "All publicity is good publicity."
From TFA: "Now we're acutely aware that we really do not own any of the content we consume. We access or play an instance of it, but ownership lies really with the creators or, if they signed the rights away, to the media conglomerate that sold the right to consume it--on a limited basis--to you."
The author has it completely backwards. IANAL, but none of the changes made to Copyright in recent times have changed the fundamental ownership of copyrighted materials. You still own every CD, book, and other media that you legally bought. You don't own just the media, but you also own that *one* individual copy of the copyrighted materials that has been encoded on the media. (This should be obvious... some people say that you're only buying the media, but why would anyone pay $10 for a CD if they could simply buy a blank CD for pennies? Clearly there's more to it than owning the media!) And you actually OWN that copy too, not merely some "license" (limited or otherwise) to read/consume/use it. There is nothing in Copyright law that even mentions "licensing" at all. (Licensing is only a recent fiction from the software industry that software is "licensed" and not "sold".) The Doctrine of First Sale clearly states that buying copyrighted materials are sales, not licenses. And Copyright law is also careful to use the word "copyright holder" and not "owner" because they are often two different people: You own your CD and you own the recorded data on the CD, but you may not hold the copyright to the recorded data.
The copyright industry tries to make you assume that they own complete rights to control the media, except for what they explicitly allow you to do under some "license". (i.e. for you, everything is restricted except for a few permissive items)
The truth is that you are free to do anything you want with the things you own, except the limited number of things that the law reserves to the copyright holder. (i.e. for you, everything is allowed, except for a few restricted items)
The only time you need permission from the copyright holder is to do something that Copyright law explicitly reserves for the copyright holder, such as distributing copies, public performances, or making a derivative work. And even then, copyright law doesn't give the copyright holder complete control over these few, reserved actions (see the Doctrine of Fair Use.) For example, privately reading a book or listening to a song isn't something that is reserved for the copyright holder. Remember, its a "copy" right, not a "use" right.
The waters are muddied in the software industry because they have had some success in getting the courts to assume that a click-through EULA is legal assent, but there is no any EULA for most other types of copyrighted works.
The notion that you might "own" something but have some restrictions should not surprise anyone. For example, gambling is heavily regulated in most parts of the USA. Just because you own a home and the piece of land upon which it is built does not give you the right to set up a casino. You could (in some cases) purchase a permit from the state to legally run a casino on your land. But the restriction on gambling is one of several special cases-- you are generally allowed to do anything in your home that doesn't violate the law. A similar situation applies to your ownership of copyrighted materials. There's a very small set of things that you are restricted from doing unless you're the copyright holder. But aside from this small set of items, you are free to use your materials however you wish. And privately reading/viewing/listening/using your legally purchased copyrighted materials is a right YOU have as the owner of those materials, not a right reserved or controlled by the copyright holder.
Please. How many times have we had the DRM discussion. Does Zonk work for the MAFIAA or is he THAT cynical ?
Restated: "Giving up monopolistic rents as the fundamental driver of wealth creation and removing tariffs and subsidies are not rational ideas in a free market economy."
The scary thing is I think he's right. The Western world now has invested far too much of its economy in producing *information* rather than material goods, and outsourced the production of actual goods to artifically cheap regimes with lower worker protection standards.
The Apple iMac has proudly written on its side 'Designed by Apple in California. Manufactured in China.'
But the marginal value of those 'design' and 'branding' services which are now the cornerstones of the US economy is, like music, zero.
This is not sustainable. It's not just the music industry that will crash when reality catches up to the 'information economy'. It will be the entire global market economy.
*Markets* fundamentally only work when you're *trading* goods and services: one rare, excludable product for another. The production of information might be a service; the information itself certainly isn't a good, in any physical sense. Nothing actually 'changes hands' when I 'sell' you a 'license' to a piece of information; the universe does not natively respect or enforce any spatial concept of 'location' or 'possession' of information as it does for physical property. But if I *give* you information, now we both have it; I'm no richer, so I don't make a profit, but neither am I no poorer; but you're richer by the value of the information. I can't make *myself* rich by producing information, but I can make *others* rich.
It's a weird kind of mutated Prisoner's Dilemma, and that's going to play havoc with Economics 101.
The interesting thing is that it's not just information which plays by this weird rule. A whole lot of social goods work like this too - as does the environment. We have to find ways of supporting those creative forces which can't be accounted for by markets, and music is just the start of this change.
We must love one another, or die.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Disintermediation (artist-to-consumer) is one obvious response. Copyright holders should be racing to digitise and commoditise their entire back libraries - more than 90% is either unavailable or low-quality rip. Look at the 'box set' tv pheonomena. People will happily pay for old TV shows but you have to provide value - and it's almost all profit for the owners.
If the labels and studios had any imagination - they'd be trying to flood the market before the opportunity gets swallowed by the coming bandwidth.
Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people!
I have two daughters in their late teens and I'm just hsy of 50. We have at least one thing in common: We don't like most of the music now on offer. So why would be buy it? We have bought fewer records this year than any other BECAUSE we just don't like it. As those baby boombers age and the young folks find little - as a group - that attracts them in large numbers, sales certainly WILL fall. I'm not saying there is no good music. I'm saying that the proportion is so low we / I can't be bothered listening to the radio or wading through the TV music videos to find the few bits we do like. Hip hop? Just another vid with writhing female dancers (better with the sound off) while the men slope around looking stupid and sounding like monosyllabic dolts. Pay for that? Why?
Only boring people are ever bored.
I agree that RIAA's methods suck and that music industry is full of scumbags but that's pretty insular thinking on your part and wrong on several points: 1) It's just plain wrong to suggest that the music biz in its entirety doesn't care about consumers. Without consumers the music biz wouldn't exist in the first place. A more nuanced argument would suggest they don't care for consumers who rampantly share their purchases with friends in lossless format while at the same time loving those idiots who purchase ringtones of any kind. Your assertion that the industry has been itching to screw us sounds pretty paranoid to me.
2) Complaining that "jobs are getting eliminated" is not extortion. Whining? Maybe. But not extortion. It *is* a relevant fact.
3) You reference an earlier era where copies were not IDENTICAL IN EVERY WAY to the original. Generation loss is perhaps a 'natural' form of copy protection but might be cynically deemed planned obsolescence. To argue that they "didn't need" this protection is begging the question in our current discussion. You say there's no need for DRM. I'm arguing that we just might need some level of DRM even if it's just generation loss.
4) The speed of tape vs. dvd downloading copying depends on several factors: tape length, tape copy mechanism, bandwith of network connection, etc. If you have a 100Mbps internet connection like you might at M.I.T or something, you can download 4.7GB in 6 and a half minutes. Copying a VHS tape requires maybe 1/3 of the running length of the movie if you have a high-speed copier and will look *horrible*. Most importantly what you said contributes nothing to the discussion at hand. You hate the music biz? Fine! You won't be upset then when it dries up and all you get is home-made roadhouse blues (or some guy playing pachelbel's canon on guitar) on youtube. The question at hand is "What sort of economic model replaces the existing one in the music industry". Some of us worry that when it's trivial to share music, then everyone gets it for free and no one pays for it and there will be no money made to make more music and what will happen is a general whithering of music in general. Yes the way I just expressed it sounds ridiculous and impossible but what doesn't sound so ridiculous is wondering if EMI and Universal music, etc. are gone, who else can afford to buy or use a Neve 88D? You might argue that the motion picture industry will still need them but movies are facing the same fate as music. It's just a matter of time. Does this mean everything is going to be recorded on some cheap ass tascam hard disk recorder? Who's gonna pay for artists to go in the studio for six months like Pink Floyd did for Dark Side of the Moon? OK fine you hate Dark Side of the Moon? Then go and listen to all those Korn and Linkin' Park ripoffs out there producing their own garbage music and giving it away for free./p I know I sound like a music biz apologist here but I'm not. I just want to see what comes next. Also, I'm sincerely concerned about the demise of an entire industry. I don't even watch TV but the writer's strike here in LA has had an impact on everbody: waiters, actors, web designers, software developers, etc. If the music industry evaporates, then everyone who serves the music industry will be out of work. And after the music industry, it's the movie and TV industries. And after them, it's all digitizable intellectual property. The U.S. manafacturing segment is in decline and we are increasingly a service economy. Let's hope we don't all end up working at Starbucks slinging coffee.
DRM was a waste of talent. Rather than trying to use right management to protect a fossil, it should have been applied to making the content more dynamic and better suited to its venue. It is ironic that the industry has done so much to refine the sound -- tweaking Britney's voice to be on key, acoustically adjusting accompaniments dynamically in live performances - making it sound right wherever it was performed, and now they sit there and let the opportunity to customize every song fade to silence. The future of music is making every performance unique. Do that, and you don't need to protect against copying anymore than groceries worry about selling old bread. And why should a movie play out the same way every time? Not just a different ending, but different perspectives and varying dialog. In the 20th Century, that was damn near impossible to do with film and mag tape. Now it is just more work, but not really any harder than writing this DRM shit. Eventually someone will break new ground by doing this, and a new business model will emerge.
Most of us believe that removing DRM from music is better than any DRM system that could be thought up. We told them how stupid it was when they decided to go with DRM. My opinion of the this is something like this:
Dear RIAA,
We told you not to do it and you did it anyway. It's YOUR baby. It's a teenager now and it's pissed off at the world. You made it, you deal with it.
Sincerely,
Slashdot.org
But I do own an iPod. Before that though I burned cd's with music and ripped them fine, but I forget how long ago that was. It's a marginal convenience at times, but now that I am in Japan it's really nice, the only really annoying thing from an international perspective is that they still attempt regionalization. Don't get me started on video game downloads outside of the US or DVD player regionalization. It's all fucked up.
Call me crazy/naive/unsophisticated but maybe the tanking monolith called the music industry is failing for the simple reason that they are trying to sell shitty music. More and more dollars are going to small indie labels. Most of them don't give their music away for free. They just sell music that people want to hear.
Please, please, please, studios, set up credit card accounts or PayPal accounts where I can send payments for the movies I have viewed. (The same plea would apply to music groups, but I personally don't listen to music too much). Disney/Pixar, please, where I can enter my CC number for Ratatoulle, Fantasia 2000 i have enjoyed, and your other recent films I will probably watch. You can have my $2-$6 per title, or whatever average revenue per viewer the studio expects to get after it has been released on discs and TV. Major Hollywood studios, please, where I can send you payment for the recent flicks I have watched on my computer last year?
I do not need fucking distribution channels, retailers, middlemen, factories, hardware manufacturers, web services. I do not often go to the cinema. I do not want you to deliver me the movie. I can download it myself from peer-to-peer, in the format I want, with the language options I want, whenever I want without a long waiting time, all at my convenience and a couple mouse clicks, sitting in the armchair, using the standard office PC with no special hardware. Your administrative and distribution costs with me as a customer are essentially zero. I just want to pay those who create the movie, OK? You have 10 (ten) minutes of my time after the end of the movie. This is plenty to accept the CC payment. It would be helpful of course if you include the reminder and URL in the closing movie titles, but ultimately I can live without this if the payment place is well known (a single payment-accepting web site administered by the MPAA, perhaps?).
And, while we are at it, stop harassing The Pirate Bay. This is the single best place to find interesting video content and get it, period. It is head and shoulders above all the previous inventions.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Music companies and their associated distribution and publishing corporations have only ever been the middle man. They were born with the advent of the record and now that physical media is no longer needed they should go away too.
Did Mozart, Beethoven or Bach require an agent, publicist and music company? No. They used sponsors (aficionados) to find and fund their music.
Perhaps this is where the digital age is really heading: if you want to make money, you put up a PayPal button on your website, or ask for donations (just like Radiohead did).
Screw DRM.
Some Big-Wigs just don't get it. It's not that their music has been stolen, thereby disappearing the corresponding dollars. It's much more a case of the free/cheap/new/independent sources of music on the internet offering a better cost/benefit ratio than their previous 1-good-apple-in-a-bag-of-twelve deal. They haven't been ripped off - they're becoming irrelevant. Their misfortune is a direct product of their own greed, so shy of a deaf granny or disabled teen-ager here and there, they have no one to sue. Any money fountain attracts nasty people - let 'em cry, let 'em rot.
New Music!
Frankly, you almost lost me right there. Normal people do not rip CDs and put them on the Pirate Bay.
...But I did get one more sentence in before deciding this was a waste of my time.
Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do. How long do you think it will be before we start seeing a glut of applications that will sync up your DRMless iTunes music library with any iPod, whether it's yours or someone else's? Hell, there's probably already something out there. Or an application that will allow you to copy the DRMless files off of your iPod to anyone else's computer and play them?
Hell, with DRMless music, I don't have to go to the Pirate Bay any more. I can just go over to a couple of my buddies' houses, and I'm good to go.
But like I said, I think the net result is that we'll all be buying more music, not less, even if we copy songs from each other.
As for the rest of your message, try to be shorter and more on point next time. I just glanced up and your last sentence—something about DRM being responsible for manufacturing jobs going overseas?—and I don't have time for this foolishness.
And that is in many respects cheap, because I didn't have to go to school. Your average photographer spends an obscene amount of money on gear, usually working around 60 hours a week, trying to make a living at it, and you're suggesting that you strip away the protection which allows these people to actually make a living at this. There's often times travel money involved and money spent making sure that the copyrights are being respected so that there's return on investment. Advertising, accounting, image management and careful study to keep ahead of the competition. It really isn't a glamorous field to be in, and definitely not posh.
It's all well and good to say that copyrights are evil, or that it's an entitlement, but ultimately it's the fans of the work that suffer when the work is no longer available, or it is available in limited quantities due to some hippies wanting to free the media.
The problem with copyright isn't that it exists, the problem is that it typically extends for too long. Allowing an artist to profit from his or her own work for life isn't an unreasonable proposition.
Can anyone honestly say they care what happens to the entire music industry after all the theft they are guilty of? I mean, they have stolen everyone's money by way of charging monopoly rents, swindled tens of thousands of people out of their hard earned life savings (and even called those settlements bargains), consistently claimed that their measly copyright claims are more important than the First Amendment in the US and Free Speech world wide, and even pressured colleges and phone companies to spy on the public.
Who in this world could be hypocritical enough to actually have sympathy for these people? If anything, people should be angry that the business executives that perpetrated all of these crimes will not spend time in prison for all the suffering and injustice they are responsible for.
Hopefully, the MPAA and its sponsors will suffer the same fate. My fingers are certainly crossed.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Forgive me, if this next part is incorrect. I am basing this on my limited understanding of the art world.
You can buy a poster of Van Gogh's "Starry Night" for about $5.00. The original is priceless. There is no real difference between the original and the replication. They still both convey the same idea. The only reason the original is priceless is because of a mythic quality. It is the "original." So, in a nutshell, it is valuable because of its bragging rights. I was going to draw a comparison from the "original" to the concert, but I realized that music is so much more than that.
The "Starry Night" is permanent, Van Gogh is never going to paint it again. A live performance of a song is going to be different every single time. Live music is an art piece that is eternally transient. It is the difference between a butterfly and a butterfly on a pincushion. That reduces the piracy question, for me, to "Is it art or is it a product?"
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
DRM is an annoyance to the casual user, anyone serious about pirating content will find a workaround. This idea that we need DRM protected content is just retarded. The falling sales of music is more due to the fact that wages have been fairly stagnate for a while now, yet cost of living has risen. Many people just do not have the disposable income anymore to be buying luxury items such as music CDs. People also would be more likely to buy a CD if they were cheaper, but for some reason the cost of a CD has not really changed since the format was first introduced, and with DRM you do not have control over how you want to play the content you just spent money on. While piracy does take a bit out of potential sales, I would argue that in general those that pirate music more buy more CDs. These people that think DRM is a solution to the music industry woes are just retarded, because between DRM annoyances, root-kits, and RIAA that seem content with suing those very people that are more likely to spend money on CDs, you have an industry in shambles and the executives at the top shouting to the world that its not their fault... I think that what is really happening is a revolution in that record companies are no longer really necessary, they just want to cling on to life as long as possible...
Insert witty sig here.
As a species maybe we're not ready for digital.
Vinyl is better.
Tube amps are better.
Television was better.
The author of this article is an editor for PC Magazine. If you think about who has benefited most from DRM, it has been the technology and software companies that have identified and attempted to solve the problem of "protecting" copyright through software controls.
What it has done for musicians and the record labels is caused problems for the people who do actually pay them. As for consumers, it has limited their choice in digital music retailers and players. Meanwhile, the technology companies get paid for creating more sophisticated locks and keys (and sometimes get the additional benefit of extending / maintaining their monopolies in other areas of their business). These are the companies that give PC magazine things to write about, and buy advertising. Of course the sky is falling.
Worse yet, if you sign up for a subscription, you're saying that it's okay for the music service to wipe out your music collection if you cancel.eMusic - "the largest subscription-based online music store" offers over 2.5 million songs in mp3 format. They've been in business since 1998, and the labels who offer their music on the site have not gone under yet. But then maybe Lance Ulanoff isn't paying attention. (Don't tell him. His head might explode)
If I have DRM'd music from iTunes, I do, and my brother wants a copy, I can hand him one and authorize his computer. Is that legal? I'm pretty sure it is when my wife and I bother take copies on the iPod, or when I have my music on my laptop/desktop, but I don't know about authorizing his computer.
What if he moves the stuff to his iPhone/iPod then de-authorizes the computer, is that still legal?
If the stuff was not DRM'd, the authorize/deauthorize wouldn't be an issue (it's unclear if you can legally copy the stuff out of your family's world, but the authorization process certainly IMPLIES that it is okay). But maybe I buy a cool song and IM it to him.
That's more "illegal" copying. I'm not going to go trade my iTunes songs on P2P networks, because if I'm an iTunes customer, I probably don't hang out on P2P networks. However, if I kick a song from my Library to a co-worker without screwing around with the DRM, that's "illegal" copying, but maybe introduced them to a new artist whose work they go and buy.
Before they decided to lock things down, that's how people often got introduced to music.
However, DRM-free music is more valuable to me (because of the ability to play a song for someone), so I'll probably buy more. That increases there revenues, but probably increases the "illegal copying." Not in the mass piracy arena, but in the casual copying.
The music divisions forgot that they were in the business of maximizing profits, not preventing piracy. They also forgot that their customers were people that loved music, or liked certain songs. The MP3 collectors, with massive collections, we just computer geeks, not music geeks. Music geeks collect music of interest to them, computer geeks collect data. The Recording Execs got confused and lost sight of their business, which has been in a multiyear decline. Too much focus on fear, and not enough on people wanting music.
As another hippie loon, may I add that the people who don't believe in copyright aren't the fucking thieves here. The media corporations who keep paying off the politicians to extend the copyright period are the fucking thieves!
Look, if you buy something on time, you make monthly payments until the time period is up. Then the thing belongs to you and you don't have to pay any more for it. Copyright works the same way. You pay during the copyright period. After the period is up, you don't pay because the formerly copyrighted item goes into public domain. It's yours because you have finished paying for it. In the case of items in the public domain, it's not only yours, it's everyone's.
When you pay off someone to extend the copyright period right before an item goes into to the public domain, you are stealing the public domain. You are making people pay you for things that they already own. That's fucking theft, not sharing files. Sharing files is what you do to protect the public domain from the fucking thieves that are stealing it!
Each time that the global media corporations extend the copyright period, they are stealing the public domain.
They are the fucking thieves, not us!
By the way, there are no 12-year-olds on Slashdot.
This is really an example of unintended consequences. The music industry has always, since it's inception, re-invented the format to prod sales. With analog formats, it worked and worked well enough that most people ended up buying the same music on more than one format.
... another record year for CD sales) they reacted with measures that accurately reflect their panicked state. So, they try DRM. They would, and will, try anything else they think might work, too. That includes refusing, then embracing, then who-knows-what-ing digital downloads with DRM.
A nice income, if you can get it: replace a perfectly good thing by reselling the exact same product, in a different package, to the same people. The hardware manufacturers played along, as they were playing the same game, from a different place. Both prospered, to a certain extent.
The thing was, though, that this was to a large extent, a side business. The "main" business, selling new music to music lovers, carried on as before. Today's artist has to be released on today's format. It's only when today's artist is old enough to be yesterday's format that you can re-sell his music on the new format. Naturally, yesterday's song can never be as lucrative as today's top 10 artist or song.
So, we have a business model that supplements the main business, and generates tidy profits in the process. Who would not want to keep that cash cow going?
And so, in the late 1970's, the CD managed to become the next incarnation of the format re-sell. By the end of the 1980's it was working as well as it ever did; in other words CDs spurred the greatest sales surge the industry had ever experienced, just like the cassette tape had spurred a similar record sales volume, just like the LP record had before that, just like the 45 single had before that.
From the Labels' perspective, this was deja vu all over again. The model had been re-affirmed, and the next new format was already being developed to run the next incarnation of this very simple, very successful strategy.
It was gravy sales; money that was created out of nothing, since the format push was not really essential to the music push side of it. It was a great business idea that worked, plain and simple.
But, CDs are digital. When those sales records were being broken in the 80's, and when the early 90's brought even greater sales volumes, who would see that the whole business was already doomed, and the day the doom began was a decade earlier?
By the dawn of the 21st century, labels found themselves being derided for being late to realize what ordinary people saw as obvious, but who could blame them? The damn thing was working one day, failing the next. It was supposed to go on forever like it had in the past. What kind of idiot would be even thinking along the lines where this is going to end suddenly?
An analog song can be copied, and copied with very high quality. But, not instantly, and not remotely, and not with massive distribution, and not with a shipping weight that must be measured by physicists rather than spring scales or tonns of ocean displacement. It must be copied in (more or less) real time, and duplicated in (more or less) real time, and physically distributed.
DRM has nothing to do with the problem, and nothing to do with the solution. Because the labels were so taken by surprise (as little as 10 years ago we have
It's not just a few CDs they're panicked about. It's the whole model where the CD was supposed to be replaced by the [whatever] in, on average, every 15-20 years. That's over.
The panic is real. They have to come up with something that can't be. And they (now) know it.
Has the music industry ever done ANYTHING that is worthy of praise? I for one will not cry if the whole music industry collapses, it's nothing but a morally deprived shock machine that will do ANYTHING for money, and that's just Sony/BGM! The music industry quit being about the artist/music a LOOOOOONG time ago. I say let the whole shit bucket go under, it's done nothing to earn a continued existence. Maybe then we can get some decent music.
How much do docs have to spend before they start breaking even? Hmm?
You don't spend big money to make money unless you're making money in the money market (a market that, by rights, shouldn't exist) or the stock market. Even in the stock market, you usually start small.
Unfortunately, every thing you can do to make a living costs a certain amount of money.
And there are no guarantees. A doctor fixes one patient with cancer, and that patient does _not_ have to keep paying the doc forever. Nor does any other patient with cancer have to see that doc.
Lifetime guarantees are not reasonable in any field.
However, the present economy is seriously lacking in traditional ways to find useful and gainful employment, and I think that is the larger problem.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Forgot to say that. One month's wages, more or less. It just feels big when you're starting out or in the wrong field for you.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Some patronage/strong copyright nut will try to introduce legislation to require all sound systems to send their output to self-powered speakers over ethernet or something.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Idol worship has always been a bad idea. It corrupts both the idols and the worshippers.
Big is dead, and that is a good thing.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
High definition is manufacturable. That's why the big companies like it.
Human content is always going to be hit and miss.
It's kind like the drunk looking for his wallet under the lamp post because it's dark over where he dropped it.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Exposure to the real world (as in a day job) produces better, more relevant art, especially in the young artist.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
What killed Mozart was not the inability to force people to buy his music.
(Yeck. I mean, seriously. Think about that. Seriously. Why would a good artist want to force people to buy his or her music? That's, like, forcing people to applaud.)
What killed him was what passed for office politics for that time and place.
He offended somebody. Somebody decided to prevent him from making a living. He died. It was tragic, but it has nothing to do with copyrights.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
convenience - that's the only thing that sells well.
Maybe... maybe if the music industry collapses then it will go back to being about the love and the art of music instead of the industrialization of music. Maybe the industrialization of music was a bubble doomed to pop. Maybe we'll just go back to LPs and stop cutting ourselves off from each other with those @#*($@ ipods.
Don't blame me if no one pays for it if they can get it for free. Then in a years time when all the record companies have gone bust due to lack of income, there will be nothing to pirate. Or listen to for that matter.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
When I was a lad cassette radios were the latest music technology, along with "hi-fi" centres with built in cassette recorders.
The music industry was horrified that people could record their friends LPs onto cassettes instead of buying more LPs. They tried (and failed) to sue the manufactures for selling equipment that specifically designed to allow easy copyright infringement (LP->cassette or cassette->cassette) (OK, the quality went down a little, but most people did not care).
They blasted us with "Home Taping is Killing Music". I, and all my friends, taped and taped, off radio, off friends LPs, off library LPs and: guess what ? Home Taping did not Kill Music. There are *still* some artists making a fortune in the music industry, many are still struggling, Pink Floyd are *still* making money off their back catalogue. The sky has not fallen !!
How much money did George Lucas make off of the Star Wars films directly in comparison to how much he made off of merchandicing and licensing?
I suspect that other than the intial ticket sales money off of the first film, that the grand bulk of it did not come from direct sales of tickets or media copies of the movies.
When did slashdot become a blog for retarded people living in the past? This person needs to bone up on the skism that is rights control vs free use. The US has been waaaay far to the control side for a long time mostly due to recording and movie industries doing a lot of succesful lobbying over the last decade. Now things are starting to swing a bit the other way and this dunce is panicing.
I have spoken'eth.
Plainly put DRM encourages piracy. It will never stop somenone from copying music and distributing it on p2p networks. But it will make people turn to pirated content.
Oh, easy, Mr. Lance Ulanoff choose one of the following:
1:
- lower quality music
- works usually in one player, on one OS
- requires you to install crappy software, with bugs
- one day it might stop working alltogether
- if you change your os/pc/player - than bad luck
- you want to listen to it in your car - yeah right
- high priced
2:
- high quality (up to studio quality on some)
- lots of formats to choose from
- no additional software required
- works on any os/player
- free
- oh, right, the fat bastards selling No. 1 payed for laws which make it illegal.
I am sure you all will choose No. 1 so stupid *idols* and *stars* will keep having drug money and fat ceo's will keep getting richer for doing nothing.
"There is little need for behemoth middle-men like music labels." No, the behemoth middle men are still there. The difference is that they are now the Telcos who provide the internet service. The people who distribute plastic discs are doomed, since the media changed.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
> Is the removal of restrictions from our
> media really that big a deal?
Yes. It is.
DRM is all about giving someone else control over what you can do with your computer.
Both. Its easier and easier to generate content, and its easier and easier to distribute it. Why should there be false scarcities on art, when in fact anyone can make music, and anyone can listen to it?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
"Giving up control of content and giving it away free are not rational ideas in a market economy, yet everyone's cheering." I take offense at this gross oversimplification. What gives things value in capitalism is scarcity. What is scarce about music? It used to be the little vinyl frisbees, but surely not today's bits and bytes. It's the performance that is scarce, so find a way to cash on that, instead of trying to legislate artificial scarcity. Intellectual property is a fantasy.
Stupid political correctness. I find it insane that some people would find 'black person' offensive. Like if I was picking someone out in a crowd I'd use hair colour, skin colour, height, whatever, and yet sometimes find myself scared to say 'black person' because of all this political correctness bullshit. It's crazy.. over here (in the UK) schoolteachers aren't allowed to call blackboards blackboards. I have no problem with marker boards being called whiteboards, so why the big deal about blackboards? If I was black I think I'd find it more offensive that someone has taken it upon themselves to 'protect' black people from this abomination of a word, that I doubt would have been offensive to me in the first place. Anyway, rant over. I wish someone would take out those morons that keep doing the "nigger posts" and spank their asses with flaming hot pokers..
which is totally what she said
I don't really have time to figure out bit torrent for each song. At 89 or 99 cents from Amazon, it's easier to just buy them, even whole albums. And, I don't have these silly restrictions like with itunes.
Let's see if this makes sense...
I'm an extremely heavy consumer of music - I'd guess the top one percent - and I primarily listen to jazz and classical music, though I also buy a lot of old soul and country.
I've belonged to DRM-free eMusic for four years, and since Amazon started offering mp3s I've switched from cd buying (and iTunes) to Amazon for most of my purchases.
Amazon's mp3s do have what amounts to a weak form of drm: the tracks are watermarked with my identity.
It's trivially beatable, but a bit of a PITA.
So when you combine the PITA factor with the fact that I'm invested in the music industry continuing (after all, I want to continue to be able to buy music easily) there is enough to discourage piracy from someone like me, were I so inclined.
And I suspect that I constitute one of the most important groups of music buyers, the 'long tail' part.
Most piracy, at this point, is aimed squarely at popular music/movies/tv, and that piracy is easily generated from cds or dvds or OTA tv. That's unaffected by DRM.
OTOH, I live in a small town and couldn't just run down to my local Borders and buy the Modern Jazz Quartet's anthology, which I did from Amazon the other night. If I had to contend with DRM, I would have been less likely to buy the item online, and might never have bought it at all, because my mood might have changed the next day, or I might decide the $37 I spent on the mp3s was too much, or whatever.
So in my case, losing DRM was a gain for the industry, and it's in the industry's best interest to continue to encourage me and my fellow heavy consumers.
So: the industry can't win (or even play effectively) when it comes to stopping the piracy of very popular music, and it's a win for the industry if they put up as few roadblocks as possible for people like me.
Scott A.
Once upon a time, a large capital investment and a large continuing expense were required to distribute recorded art.
That's simply not the case anymore.
File sharing software and the infrastructure provided by the internet do not "steal from" the **AA.
They are just new and vastly more effecient distribution methods.
In this context, distributing the old way is just wasteful.
As the old distribution system dies, the remaining components of the arts and entertainment industry will reorganize themselves around the new system that's already in place.
No, it's not going to be some utopia where everything costs nothing and the artists all drive Porsches.
It'll be pretty much the same as it was before--a few rock stars make a zillion dollars, most of the artists starve, and the fans wallow in pools of crap with occasional gem here and there.
Only distribution has changed; neither human greed nor the failure of the truly great artist to be recognized in his time.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I don't see the problem. I pay for a product and should have the rights at that point to manipulate it however I wish, port it to whatever devices I want as long as I don't infringe on th ARTISTS work. However owning their cd's and producing copies or shifting it to my media players etc should never be a problem. I should have unlimited access to that media so that whenever I desire it. I can have it regardless of how many devices I own that have the copy of it. I personally don't mind the idea of paying a dollar for a song that is DRM free. As for other media ... its actually a slightly smart move only in the sense that it MIGHT stiffle pirates to actually buy the media. But a majority of pirates just do it because they fan. Free is great. And no matter what security measures you place on the media, there will always been some inquisitive mind to produce something to crack through it. So why waste time trying to secure something you already can't control.
let all the musicians feel the poverty painters have felt for years.
And un like the past hackers and crackers are now smart enough NOT to publish such on say doom9's website. This gives the real pirates a forever leg up and keeps stuff free.
/year , well the model of a net levy brings them around 8bill.
It is like the hacker hacking a webpage to prove security is flawed and then later when say some page goes up thats sick or violates everyones ethical mind. It can't get hacked.
Sept 13th 2001- Taliban news website gets hacked, response form white house "Hackers aren't terrorsts, but could you leave the site alone we want to see what they are up too." - George W. Bush
Now wasn't that intelligent.
All i have to also add is that watermarking and the new buzz word TPM are both DRM forms and watermarking tools have been round a lot longer then the forms of encryption that is called DRM.
I have tons a tools that can dewatermark. I have tons a tools that can crack.
DO you all want these published. NO prolly not. I will however say that kids will be kids and you cannot compete with a hacker whose at it 16 hrs a day versus your 9-5 , 2 breaks and a lunch familly man copper/fed.
The equivilent would be a team of ten per hacker. And there are way more hackers then feds.
Go focus on real crime like sick kiddy porn and gangster/terror activites.
NO they won't do that, look at the SAC proposal to legalise p2p a measly 5$ a month to your net account, no mroe lawsuits, no more hassles and if applied ot the USA form there own words piracy costs them 6bill
brings in 1 bill from canada. Also any artists could say enter this so called public tracker and get proportional revenue. Each net account is allowed one account.
more then half canada is estimated to be p2p users - 2005 study sept 5.4 mill logged in to p2p, march 2006 - 9.8 milion.
look at the increase.
they can try the dmca style law and they better build HUGE jails oh wait, you put half your taxpayers in jail how you going to pay for it?
to those who dont want to pay a levy
WTF do you need a 7 megabit account for surfing webpages , checking meail and chatting.
JUST WHO ARE YOU FOOLING.
and so far two people out of 1000 of i have tallked to like this idea. thats 99.8% in favor
A) DRM only drives sales down as common folk have harder time using complex technology
B) DRM drives sales down cause people knowing its complex just dont buy tech.
C) Culture suffers, yah lets be a rock star so i can sue my fans, or make a movie so we can sue people enjoying the film.
D) if GM/FORD/TOYOTA/CHRYSLER sold me a car and i was not allowed to put my own steroe in it, had to ONLY drive it where they told me and in fact was not allowed to own it and had to in effect rent it only , how quick would sales drop as people just say whats differance between this and a bus?
Oh and all the comforts and ease of use forget it, we make the car like a tin can and uncomfortable and we make it very hard to open as well, requiring you to phone the car company who will open the car by sending a representative form head office- i need groceries...
The economic case for copyright has never actually been made. To present it, you'd need to work out the economic activity that would occur in the world with it, and without it, and compare. There's lots of speculation along the lines of "how would blah be possible without copyright" but nothing approaching actual facts. Plenty of fantastic works were created before copyright, and many will be created after it. The trick is not to get sucked into the mental state of seeing what we have now that would be lost, but ignoring the potential that we would gain were it missing. I think the 'victims' of the removal of copyright would be only those rent seekers who up until now have done so well out of it - music industry middlemen, software monopolists, lawyers, copyright trolls. I've worked as a software developer for ten years, and copyright has not once been leveraged in a meaningful way in the numerous jobs I've been working in (nor has the assumption of it been related to the way we make money or the relationship with have with customers).
Believe with me, my saplings.
The economy was collapsed with the introduction of open source, ha!!
The economy will not collapse with the abolition of DRM and patents in the same way that not collapse with open source
The economy that will collapse with this abolitions will be the economy of fear that reign at this time in the world
http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/ has a good picture about how the world function now, let's break this situation as strong as we begin to fight with the climate change
How is possible that so many people is dieing every day in OUR world? Did you imagine that tomorrow every human in Manhattan die because Los Angeles is spending all the money in a war? This is the actual reality in OUR world
The copyright is the way to have more money not to protect anything and open source is the proof of that
Good luck and good job!!
This is dead-on. Yes, copyright should be limited in scope, and big companies abuse the heck out of it. But if there ever comes a day when nobody pays for digital works, just because they don't have to, then creating digital works will become a non-paying job.
Forget big companies for a moment, and imagine independent films and independent musicians - that's the way things seem to be going anyway. The fact is that it takes a lot of time and skill and people and equipment to make a great movie or album. (Even books take time and skill!) If there's no money in it, even those who create purely for passion will have to start giving the bulk of their time to a job that pays.
This means less content is made and fans suffer. If you like movies and music, and you're able to take them for free, I'd advise you to reconsider and find a way to contribute funds to the creators. Otherwise they won't be able to continue.
They're trying really hard to levy a tax on all communications to replace their CD revenue stream. Let's hope they run out of bribe money before they get what they want out of Congress.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Giving up control of content? Who's doing that?
DRM is(was?) an attempt to *take* control. Control over what you wanted to listen to and where. Before DRM, I could listen to a CD on any player. I could even loan it to a friend (*gasp!*). DRM attempts to limit that to certain machines, and by extension, to certain circumstances. DRM attempts to control your consuming habits.
By no longer using DRM, they are ceasing to attempt to take control in this manner. Things just revert to what they were. It's a return to the normal status, not a loss of control.
Funny how removing DRM equates to giving it away for free. I've been refusing to buy any music sold by the big companies for many years now. While it's been the proverbial cutting off one's nose to spite one's face I've been happier overall. It'll be nice to buy music again, but I still have negative feelings towards the big music companies and the RIAA.
I wholly agree. I think the music industry has dug this hole for themselves.
If music had been available as MP3s from an online store pre-Napster, then a lot of people would probably never have bothered with Napster. Then Napster came along and it was just so convenient. People learned to use it.
The music industry went after Napster, and then started offering their own "online store" where you could buy music you could only play on your computer, and could only transfer to certain digital players, and every now and then your license to play it might get revoked and you might loose all the music you'd paid for. In short, they built a system that was far less convenient than driving to the store and buying a CD. "Piracy" continued to prevail, not because people are bad or don't want to pay for music and support their favorite bands, but because the piracy was still way more convenient than driving to the store.
Events like the Sony rootkit fiasco made it clear that the industry was going to do their best to make even the tried and true act of buying CDs far more complicated. You can steal the music, where there's a slim possibility you'll pick up a virus, or you can buy it, where you definitely will.
Now the music industry is finally starting to see the light, but I fear it's likely too little, too late. Consumers have already been trained to steal the music, and to distrust the offerings from the music industry. The less-than-tech-savvy were fooled by the labels when they didn't understand what DRM was, but now they know, and convincing the masses that "It's OK to buy from iTunes now! Really, our music works with your non-iPod player," is going to be a big challenge.
What do you mean we kemosabe. The record companies may be on the road to ruin but not music, music afficionados, or musicians. As long as the author is going to get all historical on us he should have told his daughter this:
Music and musicians have existed for tens of thousands of years. Music companies about 100. Modern popular music aimed at teenagers has existed about 50. When the first recording devices were created about 100 years ago many musicians were worried. They realized that their ability to make money by performing was in jeapardy. Sure enough, in our present day, musicians are beholden to recording companies to make their money. The ability to perform is secondary to the ability to market, distribute and produce recorded product. Tough shit for them. You can't stop the tech
As a local musician in the 70s and 80s I saw venues for live performance (the bar scene) completely dry up in favour of DJs. With the advent of rap, young folk no longer expected to see real musicians anymore. This was the logical consequence of having businessmen control an artistic endevour. The consolidation/death of the music industry as we know it is a good thing. Hopefully it will open up more venues for local talent to actually make some money without have to pay the toll at the music industry's gate.
It wasn't the consumer's idea to digitize the recordings, create the internet, or put cd drives with ripping software in computers. The scientists and businessmen came up with that. The recording industy is going to have to deal with the realities of our modern world. if they can't deal with it then tough shit for them. You can't stop the tech.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html for the difference between free as in beer vs free as in speech if you're curious.
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
The groups of people: 1. The people that were stealing music because they don't want to pay anything will still continue to steal music. 2. The people that were stealing music because the options stank but were willing to pay for the quality or ability to play on a device of their choosing, will now have an option. 3. The people that bought music legally will continue to buy music legally, they now have What part of this new model forces more people into stealing music (group one) or makes it any more accessible than it already was?
If the music industry collapsed tomorrow, barring the initial shockwave, what harm would it do?
I mean, people would continue to create and perform music, and people would continue to listen to it. "Music" does not need a financial incentive to exist--and let me elaborate on that.
First, it is no longer prohibitively expensive for individuals to produce studio-quality music. Awesome, awesome software can be had for mere hundreds of dollars. People spend thousands on hobbies (hello video games)--what's five hundred bucks to a passionate musician?
Second, with P2P, YouTube, etc., distribution--massive distribution, to a mainstream audience--is free.
Now, if some dude wants to quit his day job and make a living off his musical ability, well that's what touring's for. Performing live is real work, that provides a real service, that people can be expected to pay for. Also, there is money to be made producing soundtracks for movies and games, or jingles for commercials, or the Windows XP startup sound.
"Bands" creating "albums" (or 3-minute, 32-bar "singles"), and retiring off the royalties, is not a natural process. It worked for a while, and congrats to those who caught the wave, but music, and the enjoyment thereof, is a natural process, and it will continue with or without pinstripe suits.
Comments?
Is that all one guy, or did you forget a few commas in there?
The sad truth (for musicians and record companies) is that music is over priced.
When record companies had a collective monopoly on distribution of music, they were able to keep music prices artificially high. Now that the Internet provides a near zero cost distribution system, record companies are hard-pressed to add value (and thus price) to a comodity with a near-zero cost of reproduction.
Expect music prices to adjust radically downward in the next decade.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Hasn't digital art been practically free for at least an entire generation already? It feels like it anyways. So far, artists haven't stopped wanting to create though it would be fair to ensure that they get some recompense. There's no going back to the old days, though.
Let's make sure that we continue to enjoy high quality digital art no matter what happens to the industry. There are many reasons. Copyrights will expire, corporates are rapists, new content always marginalizes old content anyways, etc. I propose that we start open source art content that everyone can contribute to modifying or improving until it's something really good. Someone may be good at one part of making a work, but doesn't have the talent in another part - no problem if different talent can be used to fix it up. Currently, we have some adventurous souls on YouTube, etc. to show that the desire for fame and glory exists with no need for pay. So if some of this energy is channeled into collaborative and edited output, who knows what may result.
The warning about too many cooks must be heeded, but that's what version control is for!
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Trying to make web browsers and traffic load lessening measures illegal by posting an asinine copyright notice in every comment you make? I guarantee you won't get me to stop using Squid quite so easily!
Actually, I LOL'ed. Well played.
Back on topic: I maintain that BD+ will be hacked at some point. After all, at SOME point in the chain the video has to be decrypted; whether someone will find a way to "hack" their TVs, some way past it such as hacking a BD+ software player, breaking HDCP (and stripping out whatever counts for identifying the player's unique number, so it'll not get on the revocation list), analog hole (does anyone pirating movies care about PERFECT quality?), or something as extreme as literally tearing apart a TV and getting to the innards, it'll be done. DRM is just a challenge to some.
I fail to understand how these companies think that DRM is GOOD for business. Every time you have a disk mistakenly show up as pirated, or a customer can't play their purchased music on their portable player because it's not the RIGHT kind of portable player, is just pissing customers off and an open invitation to get past the restriction.
I think Apple had it half-right: leave a hole for people. Burning CDs from iTunes was that hole. I can't think of one purchase I made through iTunes Music Store that I didn't immediately burn to audio CD then rip. I have not, however, made the resulting MP3s public; hey, if you want it, buy it yourself! Most people looking for music are f'in mooches anyway; why would I share?
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=musicindustry
Start with about the fifth paragraph and go down.
Then combine that with the staggering amount of terrible, poorly written, poorly performed "music" out there promoted by the big labels, and there's no longer any mystery surrounding the demise of the industry. If they'd sign some decent artists and not try to rip their customers off, things might be a lot different.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
P.S.:
I intentionally didn't mention money. Money is only one component of cost, and price. Value bears no predictable relation to money.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
An "album" used to be a foreign concept before the late 60's, early 70's. It used to all be singles (main song + a "b side"). The "collection of songs as a complete work" (AKA: the Album) appeared, sold well, and thus the music industry ADAPTED to this new market and provided product people wanted.
Now, the market is again changing, and people don't want albums so much anymore. They want lots of singles. They want variety in individual tracks, and they want to carry them around with them in a "jukebox" format. So guess what Music Industry? You must once again ADAPT rather than lament the losses. You had a clear sign as far back as 1997 of where the market would turn, but you chose to ignore and litigate. You could have built your own online digital stores, but you did not, and instead litigated. When will you wake up?
In the photography industry, sales of 35mm film have gone down. Smart business adapted and entered into new digital photographic markets.
If you just WHINE instead of adapting, you might as well sell off your company now. It's not going to get any better.
Why are people negotiating with the recording industry? The music industry will always be strong as long as people value culture. How that industry exists will always change the way it looks. For a brief period of time, a recording industry was born: A group of non talents that could leech money from talented people by creating distribution methods prohibitively expensive to the average band. As these magicians took all the band, they made you famous by eventually putting you and your art on tv that made them even more money. As it had been mentioned above, the recording industry is taking away the last pieces of profit on music by birthing their own talent and using technology to give the appearance of talent. Now that they have "taped into the source", they don't even need real talent to sell out for them to make big money because they already owned the music before it was created. Further, the junk they spout out can easily become "famous" because they write the news on "What's Hot!".
The recording industry tried and has nearly killed the music industry, an industry that used to be about free speech, expression, enjoying life, and sharing sorrow. The internet is the first chance at getting that integrity back. The internet can and needs to kill the recording industry to allow the music industry to come back. Music industry will be strong when artists can be completely independent and are no longer tempted to buy into the pyramid scheme that has for so long been damaging to our culture. The days of packaging information into virtual units and selling them for money is ending.
ALL music should be free for distribution across the internet and it would be in bands best interest to make it happen. Popularity would rise from real talent, and not what the recording industry tells us is hot. The only fair restrictions should be to protect consumers as trade mark law intended. The only "DRM" that should exist would be one that allows a consumer to authenticate music, the same way RSA is used to authenticate transmissions. Watermark digital content to artists are certain to be recognized for their own work, and not renamed by some DJ or cover band. The demand for live concerts would swarm, just as it has in Brazil where "piracy" has birthed a previously non-existent music industry that is only getting stronger. Music will return to the way it was meant to be with live concerts, and t-shirts. CD's would be sold as a luxury item for $3-5 where all the money goes to the musicians, and you have shown your appreciation for the band. Piracy of these albums and their cover art would make no sense when the music is already freely available.
Free Culture will kill the economy and destroy profits for: No talent hacks, shady middlemen, distribution cartels, lip syncers, talent scouts, concert promoters, music 'stores', or any other person that has made a living exploiting musicians. Oh how will our economy ever survive? Is our economy so dependent on crooks that if we took them out it would collapse? How sick would that be if it were the truth? and if true, I think it is time for that change to take place. Oh god, it would be like... talented artists would be making money from their art... and fans would rejoice in music!
And while it is still only hope, I look forward to seeing the RIAA dying the horrible flaming irritable bowel syndrome death they deserve on March 25 when EMI will do what it should have done years ago.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
At least from the label's point of view. But it's not about stopping piracy, it's about control.
At some point, the record labels realized that it's easier to be profitable by controlling the distribution channels than it is to find sign, and nurture actual talented artists. Oh, and as a side benefit, that way, you can rip off your artists. If you're the only game in town, it doesn't matter if the game is crooked, people will have to sign with you.
This point is the elephant in the room when talking about music and copyright (which IMO is distinctly different from issues around the MPAA and piracy).
Ever notice that (as someone above articulated nicely) it seems like the music labels would prefer 500 million in sales and moderate piracy to 2 billion in sales and rampant piracy? Some might attribute this to incompetence or a lack of understanding of modern technology, but I don't think that's true.
Since they've built their model on control of the distribution channels, if they lose that, then they're not the only game in town anymore.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
I won't consider buying musics that are not drm free lol