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EMI Says Online File Storage Is Illegal
WiglyWorm writes "MP3tunes CEO Michael Robertson sent out an email to all users of the online music backup and place-shifting service MP3tunes.com, asking them to help publicize EMI's ridiculous and ignorant lawsuit against the company. EMI believes that consumers aren't allowed to store their music files online, and that MP3tunes is violating copyright law by providing a backup service."
> As a record store owner, My business faces ruin.
Tough. The pervasive use of automotive vehicles has put a lot of blacksmiths out of business. But would the world really be a better place if we had stuck to using horse drawn carts?
Can't you trolls at least be a little original? That astroturf has been posted here so many times, it's a joke in itself.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Sadly, in some markets, he's probably correct. I can't speak for America, though I'd assume the Fair Use doctrine would apply, but in the UK I'm fairly certain that it's still, albeit perhaps only technically, illegal (sorry, I couldn't find a more authoritative source) to copy CDs for any purpose, whether for transfer to an iPod for practical purposes or simply as an archival backup.
I'd hazard a guess, insofar as I'd want to try and infer reason in the minds of music executives, that online storage is probably perceived as being equal to distribution via p2p. I hope that, some day, a music company might at least try to employ someone familiar with IT. Presumably it'd save them a little time and money.
Yes; exactly.
Man, you can't even trust the trolls on /. anymoe... this post is a dupe!
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2005, @11:49AM
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Oh where are my mod points when I need them?! Well done. You really sound like a christian rock record store owner dick. 'It's nothing to do with the economy'. Brilliant!
While I'll simplify it down some, here are the two most important things you need to know about copyright.
Making copies of works that you didn't create is illegal unless you are doing it for personal use (fair use, there's a whole set up things that fall in this catagory).
Making copies of works you didn't create for the purposes earning money is illegal unless you have the copyright holders permission.
The problem is run into in the nature of the service being offered. This isn't merely storage, they are distributing the works. The way it seems to run, this isn't a common carrier thing that is being run in good faith, like say any random hosting company, this is a company that is advertising that it will distribute copies of music that you bought from someone else to you on any device you want. That changes the rules, they can't do that without a license, even if you have 5000 copies at home.
You do have the right to store it, they don't have the right to actively distribute it, especially, if my impression is correct, their goal is to make money doing this.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I haven't seen it before, and after I realised it wasn't serious, it is kinda funny. I was horrified when I thought it was someone who actually believed what he was saying :s I'm a christian and I find most 'christian rock' extremely bland.. kind of like Nickelback, but with less panties.
which is totally what she said
An oldie, but a goodie.
>>>"People aren't buying half as many CDs as they did just a year ago."
Well then, supplement your CDs with sales of MP3 singles. The singles market is going through the roof, and if you provided your customers with a place to buy and download MP3 singles, you'd probably be a popular stop for the teen and 20-something market.
ADJUST to the needs of your customers.
If they are demanding singles, don't hand them CDs.
Give them singles; give them what they want.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Blacksmiths, buggy whip makers and all the other usual old time jobs that Slashdotters trot out each and every time they wish to denigrate a business case did not face competition from their own product being hawked with no requirement for any return on investment.
I submit that the most siginficant aspect of this story is that it demonstrates now the artificial market interference of the "anti-piracy" enforcers is already being used to arbitrarily restrict user freedoms in areas that are only incidentally related to the purpose of copyrights.
This kind of rippling ramification will become ever more common as the legacy duplication and distribution industries get ever more desperate in protecting their obsolote business model from technological progress.
...from EMI, or any of their ilk? They have to take this stance, no matter how inane in and of itself in this particular situation, because anything which remotely gives the consumer the overt or even tacit appearance of 'control' over music is anathema to their desire to re-vision their 'IP' as a 'pay-per-play' resource.
"Get off the cross - we need the wood" - Tori Amos
>>>"People would be encouraged to give the names of suspected pirates to a hotline, similar to TIPS. The police have fought the War on Drugs with skill, so why not the War on Piracy?"
TIPs didn't stop videogame piracy in the 80s or 90s, and it won't stop music piracy now.
As for the police, I assume you were joking when you said they fought the War on Drugs with skill. They LOST the war on drugs, same way they lost they War on Alcohol in the 20s and 30s. The politicians/police are just too dumb to realize it.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I don't even understand how they can say this. If there isn't a copyright infringement going on here (I'd understand that), then what's the problem? By saying this, they're illegalizing the entire online music business? Some holding EMI's own music, like iTunes.
Or is this about some obscure difference between online storage and online storage?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I can't find anything in the woefully short article or the summary that supports the claim of the title.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
and, all of them are legal files - video depos and pleadings.
The file-format boy to shove it.
Your analogy doesn't hold.
While I don't care if record stores go out of business, since it's clear that online downloads has won as the successor to the CD format, I do care about copyright. Online distribution without compensating the copyright holder will cause the arts to suffer. Yes, artists are getting ripped off by music companies, that will change as online downloads dramatically decreases the cost of distributing the work to the people. There are already companies that will list you on iTunes while leaving the copyright in your possession. The artists still get compensated in a way they find meaningful. Just because you don't like how they are treated doesn't mean you have the right to give their works away for free, thus removing all revenue they would generate for the work. An artist who finds a way to give their works away for free while still earning money on those works is making the choice, which is well within their rights, but it is NOT within your rights to make that choice for them.
Copyright serves a purpose, yes it's misused, yes the way works is sent out to the masses can be improved, but artists need to know they can earn a living worthy enough to create works. Yes, they can earn a great deal of money playing live shows, but do you honestly realize how hard it is on a person to tour? People have left bands that were earning them millions of dollars because they missed their wives! These are human beings, not some commodity to be used at your discretion.
Burn Hollywood Burn
what is the name of your store? I want to blacklist companies that try to criminalize sharing.
Seems troll-feeders are still thriving. Seriously, have you never seen this one before?
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
As a record store owner, My business faces ruin. CD sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as many CDs as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My store has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
The product has become dangerous. We used to buy 12 inch LP's, cut tapes for the car, play them with slides, etc. They have gotten the word out that most of these activities are now a legal liability that can cost you thousands of dollars. My peak piracy days 30 years ago was my peak purchasing days. The average then for the population was 2 LP purchases / year per capita in the USA.
My kids have grown up with iPods and the like. The music prices haven't changed. They have 30 Gig players and you still charge dribble prices for content. If the petrolium industry sold gas like you sell music, we would be arriving with empty 16 gallon tanks and finding the stuff in pretty packages that will fit nicely in your shirt pocket. Alternative fuel is the order of the day just like alternative distribution. The players have changed. The product value has changed. Back catalog is sold at full retail. There is no exchange or upgrade path for worn media. Care to exchange some 8 track tapes and Compact Cassette tapes? I have the full license to play them, but you don't back the license to ensure I am able to enjoy it.
Why is no one buying CDs?
That one is simple. I'm supprised you had to ask, but in no paticular order...
1 The loudness war
2 High prices for little content
3 Competition for the entertainment dollar (pay TV, satelite radio, cell phones, computer games, MP3 players, and others that had no or little presense 30 years ago.)
4 Retaliation for the industry's nukes on student's finances.
5 DRM on CD's makes them incompatible and dangerous to use. I don't keep a list of safe to play CD's. The lack of the Philip's Compact Disc logo on the good bad and ugly makes shopping by the cover very difficult.
6 Free music online (not piracy)
7 Piracy (fueled by all of the above)
8 Restrictions on use... Can't leagaly do the Carson Williams light show legaly unless you buy one of the approved for use licenses from Lights-o-Rama or play it in public at a reception, etc. No weekend DJ'ing for me.
8 ?? did I miss anything?
In summary, the product is compressed, possibly won't be transferrable to the kids iPod, can't be used with a Power Point Slideshow for a wedding, can't be used for the reception dance, super expensive to keep a current library for the above, and is a very expensive legal liability if your kids post it. The product is expensive, may be defective with no recourse, and a legal liability.
"When the kids went to bed, my wife asked me, "Will we be able to keep the house, David?""
I used to work in the VCR and TV repair business. When 20 inch color TV's were $400 and VHS VCR's were $600, people would pay the rate for a couple hours it took to repair them. Now purchase prices are near what a repair used to cost. I kept my house, but found a new line of work. Your field isn't the only one hit by distribution channels providing a cheaper product.
As long as your supplier is stuck on dribbling out product and sitting on back catalog and fighting hard to keep the ASP high, the demand in going to be small. Get used to it.
If your supplier was smart, they could sell compilation CD's of high quality MP3's of back catalog. They would be iPod, Zen, Zune ready, high quality and affordable. I would pay good money for high quality collections of Chicago, Pink Floyd, Styx, Led Zepplin, etc. Toss the restrictions on use and sell collections of 50's, 60's, & 70's dance music with permission to DJ the stuff may sell a bunch more. Many DJ consoles now play MP3's instead of CD's. Make loading the MP3's on the device hard drive legal instead of a legal liability.
See any trend here. Piracy i
The truth shall set you free!
The world changes. The market's demand shifts. And you, and people like you, continue to blame the customer base for wanting the product how they want it.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
The music industry continues to endear itself to everyone.
EMI wants to gain access to copies of files that users have on their MP3tunes accounts. Now, I'm assuming that you can't just go in and browse the list of files that a user has, otherwise they'd have shot themselves in the foot by arguing on privacy grounds.
So I'm assuming that EMI came along and said, "We want all the MP3s stored in user X's account." As it's unlikely that any user has an account filled 100% with EMI music, EMI would be given access to a significant amount of music from other labels, without the consent of the copyright holders. Which seems very hypocritical, even if it's legitimised by a court order.
Cars were a complete alternative, P2P is not. It lacks an adequate production arm.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Do. Not. Feed. The. Trolls.
C'mon, you're aren't new here. You must have seen this one copy 'n pasted on every MP3 story?
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
If piracy is bad for music, it's probably only bad for top-40 artists. For the rest of the musicians it is exposure that helps them escaping from the obscurity that big media gives them by not broadcasting their material. Fortunately, sites like cdbaby.com allow us to preview excellent non-top-40 records, and to get them for excellent prices. Additionally, they give a large share (IIRC 90%) to the artists. So, I prefer buying there than records that went through the whole chain, and give only little back to the artist.
Additionally, it is probably iTunes at al that are killing your business. I can feel your pain, but digitally, it's much easier to browse and "preview" CDs. They are usually cheaper, and you get them instantly.
This may be all bad for the labels, middlemen, and record stores. But it is good for the artists and consumers. Time has changed and will change the market, and as an entrepeneur you have to stay current.
BTW. the music stores over here that primarily in more obscure music are doing well compared to all mainstream stores (who have switched to selling DVD movies, and games, markets that will die as well within a few years, given enough broadband capacity).
It's getting too expensive to find materials. We use only 100% hand-rubbed foreskin.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Do noooot feed the troooooollls! Sheesh, this troll is older than me. There: I did my best =P
---
As a table dance club owner, My business faces ruin. table dance sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as table dances as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My club has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
I bought the club about 12 years ago. It was one of those clubs that play obscure, independent releases that no-one listens to, not even the people that buy them. I decided that to grow the business I'd need to aim for a different demographic, the family market. My table dance club specialized in family music - stuff that the whole family could listen to. I don't play sick stuff like Marilyn Manson or cop-killer rap, and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of.
The business strategy worked. People flocked table dance club, knowing that they (and their children) could safely purchase table dances without profanity or violent lyrics. Over the years I expanded the business and took on more clean-cut and friendly employees. It took hard work and long hours but I had achieved my dream - owning a profitable business that I had built with my own hands, from the ground up. But now, this dream is turning into a nightmare.
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer table dances. Why is no one buying table dances? Are people not interested in lust? Do people prefer to watch TV, see porn films, read erotic books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame. The statistics speak for themselves - one in three geek world wide is watches porn. On The Internet, you can find and download hundreds of dollars worth of porn in just minutes. It has the potential to destroy the table dance industry, from dancers, to Djs to table dance club owners my own. Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the book store just across from my store is doing great business. Unlike porn, it's harder to copy books over The Internet.
A week ago, an unpleasant experience with pirates gave me an idea. In my store, I overheard a teenage patron talking to his friend.
"Dude, I'm going to put this table dance in the Internet right away."
"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of respect."
I was fuming. So they were out to destroy the table dance industry from right under my nose? Fat chance. When they came to the counter to make their purchase (they ticket for the table dance), I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "So...you're going to copy this to your friends over The Internet, punk?" I asked him in my best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my club - and don't come back." I barked. Cravenly, they complied and scampered off.
So that's my idea - a national blacklist of pirates. If somebody cannot obey the basic rules of society, then they should be excluded from society. If pirates want to steal from the table dance club industry, then the table dance club industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable table dance club will allow you to buy another CD. If the pirates can't buy the table dance tickets to begin with, then they won't be able to watch them over The Internet, will they? It's no different to doctors blacklisting drug dealers from buying prescription medicine.
I have just written a letter to the TIAA outlining my proposal. Suing pirates one by one isn't going far enough. Not to mention pirates use the fact that they're being sued to unfairly portray themselves as victims. A national register of pirates would make the problem far easier to deal with. People would be encouraged to give the names of suspected pirates to
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Now at one point, it was well accepted that your rural blacksmith would be well versed as a farrier (made sense from a bussiness standpoint). However as horses became more rare, fewer blacksmiths picked up the trade. The two trades are more or less completely divergent now.
Now to say that both farriers and blacksmiths are out of bussiness is nonsense as well. There are many artisan blacksmiths out there creating wrought iron decorative pieces, collectable swords etc. Although many shoe thier own horses, there are still many professional farriers out there (servicing some rodeos, polo teams, riding stables etc).
If you insist on using the analogy though, lets talk about the pervasive use of the automobile putting wainwrights and used buggy salesmen out of bussiness.
have you tried putting a sign in the window saying "music piracy is a sin. buy from us and save your ticket to heaven." ?
Since 95% of new music is crap, that probably isn't such a bad thing as you make it out to be.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
and where is your music shoppe? in the kingdom of fairyland?? have you ever though of writing a blog?
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22As+a+record+store+owner,+My+business+faces+ruin%22&num=100&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:official&hs=hic&filter=0
It's not a perfect analogy - there really is no such thing as a perfect analogy - but you can quite easily say a similar situation is occuring in the music business. If we sidestep piracy/theft/whateveryouwanttocallit for a moment, there once was an old music sales model revolving around a storage device called the record. The record was mostly overtaken by the compact disc for music storage and delivery because it has various advantages which make a record "obselete" to the general consumer, though not totally, and it can still thrive in a more specialist market (just like the horse and cart, funnily enough). Now the CD is being overtaken by downloads, because its a more appealing and easier point of sale for the consumer, or it's becoming as such at least.
CDs aren't surviving so much though because they're the same data as that which is being sold via downloads. Specialists (or, most specialists) will want records for (supposedly? I don't know, I've never looked into it) better quality sound and so on, which CDs don't provide. The only thing a CD does which a downloaded MP3 doesn't do is provide a more "real-world" method of storing the data out of the box, but with CD writers people can backup their own music if they want to.
There really seems to be a less caring attitude about the ability to listen to recorded music too. If someone is interested enough, listening to that music live is more appealing usually - the same applies for movies. Of course, if someone can't they'll usually be quite happy to buy it anyway if they like it enough, but right now they don't need to go to a record store to buy it...they can just pay for a download. It's cheaper, quicker, less travelling, less physical world clutter and easier portability between devices.
From this point, to looking at piracy, we could go anywhere. There are too many factors to really determine what the cause and effect of piracy is (at least as far as I'm concerned - I'm sure many people will happily claim to know more about the situation, even if they don't have a clue), but that last point is something record companies (look, I'm going to call them publishers from now on, because that's what they are) keep wanting to take away from people, not really caring about the objections or the unintended effects of their actions. Will taking away device restrictions and letting people use their paid-for music how they want (even if its not in a way you like) really have an effect? Allow me to bounce out of the music discussion for a moment and to a little anecdote from the games industry...: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1311
There's text in that link, and some people wont bother, so here's the abbreviated version:
Or, in shorter for the people that seem to have trouble reading
actually, lately i am seeing more and more new music created. authors place it for free download, because, well, they want people to hear it. as a result, people tend to go more to gigs and so on. :)
i'm not interested in those sweet boybands that some old producer with weird sexual preferences creates one after another, as those can't adapt to such an environment. so, if we get less "music" like that and more of 'underground' one... hey, go for it
Rich
Why on earth would that happen?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I thought it was familiar. And there was me thinking dupes belonged only in the headlines... ;-)
bang goes my karma... again...
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
And what about people working very hard at off-shore oil platforms? Can we use them? I'm pretty sure that their wage is somewhat lower than the average artist on tour, but they have to do it anyway.
Not to mention the military, far from home months on end. And don't get me started on the average wage here.
So poor artists with their luxury hotel rooms, first-class plane seats, 50 foot long limousines and multi million dollar contracts can't stand tour pressure? Too bad. Makes me cry.
Live music and self publishers.
The cost of releasing a track has dropped to almost nothing. With an $800 Boss solid-state recording deck and a laptop, we have tools that are an order of magnitude better than whole recording studios from a decade ago.
If the majors had reduced their prices to match the drop in costs, they might have kept a place in the market. As it is, their greed and stupidity means they deserve to die.
Oddly enough though, our band still produces CDs for local fans to buy at gigs, and they sell well despite the tracks being freely available on the web. A little goodwill goes a long way, I suspect.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
You must be new here.
Circumcision is child abuse.
The buggy whip makers came out alright - they changed markets to the S&M/B&D crowds.
Ironically, the parent post seems to have been ripped from the diary of "Dr Michael Hfuhruhurr" on Kuro5hin, from more than 4 years ago.
See original on Kuro5hin
CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
They are going elsewhere.
The only point at which piracy would go away is when the original product is 100% free of any cost to the consumer.
And your point is what?
The record store owner and the content owners also seem to have a sense of entitlement. There are those that disagree with that notion, too.Anyway, it's completely disingenuous and completely false that you know all of the commercial music out there, and that out of all of it, non-commercial music would be better than all of it. Basically, it suggests an irrational prejudice against commercial music. I actually don't mean any offence about this; god knows I have a number of irrational prejudices of my own, but bear it in mind: not all commercial music fits that mould.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Yes, making music yourself is easier than ever, and the results better quality than ever. But claiming your cheap digital multitrack produces better results than studio productions of a decade ago is frankly foolish.
Home sewing is killing fashion! Ban home sewing machines now!
Don't judge a book just by the cover
Unless you cover just another
And blind acceptance is a sign
Of stupid fools who stand in line
Like
E.M.I
E.M.I
E.M.I --Sex Pistols
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
As a lamp oil store owner, My business faces ruin. Lamp oil sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as much lamp oil as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My store has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
So all this time I have been committing a crime?
My mp3's are on my lap top which is connected to the internet.
So my online storage of my MP3's is a violation
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
Obviously, it doesn't. But the point is that you CAN produce a CD for 800$. Which could not be done 10 years ago. The skill still has to be there, just as 10 years ago. But the basic tools can be purchased for much less, giving you way more tools than what was available a while ago. A good sound engineer will give you more quality with a cheap Rode mic, a cheap m-audio interface Garageband and a few plugins, than with a 4 track tape recorder, a Neumann U87 and an actual plate reverb. And it will cost you 1/1000 of the original price.
Tis women makes us love, Tis Love that makes us sad, Tis sadness makes us drink, And drinking makes us mad.
well, 'commercial music' should be defined precisely then ;)
if music is created with intent to sell it but fails - is that commercial music ?
if music is created without commercial intent but becomes widely successful commercially - is that commercial music ?
i don't think current 'commercial music' would completely die off - just as with other niches, new business models can and will work. the market will only reshape, and then become more robust (there have been several showcases lately - nin, radiohead etc).
also, one side is the motivation to create, which can adapt, and then there's the insane length of copyright. i think that current piracy is only fueled by the copyright length, as re-selling of the same product for decades only damages its perception (in this case - perceived value of the music) in the eyes of the general public.
Rich
They don't use a lot of imported oil, but a horse eats like, well, a horse!
Even a Winnebago does more miles to the dollar, if you don't happen to own a farm, but then, if you owned an oil well...
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Yeah, skilled sound engineers who must in the end overcompress the music so that it's loud enough and who rectify bad singers' tones. So let's forget about the "good sounding" and "fidelity" parts.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
Their own product?
Oh how many musicians sell their own music out of their own store?
Please. Music store owners don't make the music they sell; they are a retailer of another person's product.
The smart ones diversify or change to a different product.
How many butchers went out of business when the ability for frozen pre-cut meat came on the market?
Seriously. Look at the number of butchers in your town and then figure out the numbers there were years ago before refrigeration.
People want to listen to the music and are willing to pay for their own copy of that music. The only fact that has changed is that we no longer need the bits of plastic to physically carry the copy.
Communist countries? Well, Cuba and North Corea, but do you think those could be considered as threats like the former Soviet Union? And don't come up with China now please, China has given up a communistic economical system already some time ago.
What I really wonder about btw is that so many people take the first post seriously; I mean, ok, there are people with believes hard to understand/justify/whatever, but in my opinion, the first post should be considered as +5 Funny.
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
Ha! Self publishers? Live music? Is this what people are sharing these days?
The fact is you don't know what'd happen if the majors died. You could probably assume that their millions of customers would be disappointed. You could probably also assume, we'd lose a huge part of music distribution system and choice in music. What you can't assume is that there will be a flock of dedicated people waiting to give up all their free time for free to fill the music gap (even for the modest $800 price tag). You most certainly can't assume that your tastes represent the whole, or even if they do, that they should be the only taste in music available.
I don't even know why we are discussing this, because the market should (and is) making clear what it wants, and what it can provide. The biggest inhibitor right now is the market cannibalising itself in the form of piracy.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
And what about people working very hard at off-shore oil platforms? Can we use them? I'm pretty sure that their wage is somewhat lower than the average artist on tour, but they have to do it anyway.
Not to mention the military, far from home months on end. And don't get me started on the average wage here.
So poor artists with their luxury hotel rooms, first-class plane seats, 50 foot long limousines and multi million dollar contracts can't stand tour pressure? Too bad. Makes me cry. Luxury hotel rooms? I take your point, but you are apparently unaware of what the Average touring groups income is. There are far, far, more groups out there touring than the Mettalicas, Boy Bands, and Hillary Duff, after all.... Just grab your local events magazine and look to see who is playing local bars and small venues... You will see a large percentage of touring musicians, and I assure you that it is very rare for any of them to afford luxury hotel rooms, travel in luxury tour buses or limos and have a million-dollar contract in their back pocket.
So, although the Elite touring groups do have all that cool pampered luxury, the bar for the average touring musician or group is quite a bit below that level.
That doesn't negate your main point, which seems to be "Other fields make sacrifices for the job too, and there is no reason to single out Artists" which I agree with, I might add.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
You should consider buying a congressman or two - they are very cheap, and could pass a bill requiring everyone to burn a real oil lamp so that the terrorists can see who they are killing.... oh, wait...
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Wow, I was reading your post and I blacked out.
I don't think the original post was intended to be the definitive history of the blacksmith, but rather a statement on new technology is always replacing old technology.
When times were good, you were entitled to the profits. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, you own the losses as well.
Do you deserve any more consideration than a gas station owner? Competition is fierce; people switch stations to save a penny per gallon. Rising wholesale prices cut into margins, "pay at the pump" delivers most of the profit directly to credit card middlemen. As prices go up, people WILL start to buy less. When alternative energy goes online, maybe they fuel up at home!
When the prices of CDs went UP at a time when the cost of most other content (videos, etc.) went DOWN, that was a strategic blunder made on your behalf by the buffoons at the music companies.
I spend very little on music. The latest music does not appeal to me, and at these prices they can keep it.
You might have found a wannabe pirate in your store and thought you discovered the problem. The invisible problem is the customer who shops at Walmart or Amazon instead of your place. Come back and tell us about the evils of piracy when Walmart closes their CD department due to lack of sales.
Walmart killed off many local merchants, and then we discovered Walmart was frequently out of stock or didn't carry what I wanted anyway. I call it "EmptyMart". I buy a lot of things online via Amazon that I used to buy locally. But like I said, I seldom buy CDs at all.
I doubt piracy alone is causing the problem, or even a significant part of it. Walmart is probably killing you on price and Amazon is killing you on convenience. I don't have the answers, but if you wipe out piracy tomorrow, don't expect the business to get much better. The wholesale price of CDs would probably go up AGAIN, killing off whatever remained of the market.
The music industry is your business partner, and they are just not that bright. I suggest you consider re-evaluating the local market and your efforts to serve it. Just don't open a gas station. If all else fails, start a doughnut shop next to the police department.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
This is no different from any other online backup service that will copy the file contents of your hard drive (or flash drive, DVD-rom, pretty much whatever you point it at) for retrieval later. And they're all 100% legal.
Your simple Gooogle url is easily the most relevant post on this thread. Seems to me someone is posting repetitive drivel to try and drive sympathy for their ailing business?
Nice job pointing that out.
If I were coding this site, complete with online backup of purchased tunes, there's no way I'd actually keep 89,227 copies of Britney Spears' latest toxic waste on my servers at 4MB (give or take) per copy. No, I'd keep a DB table of links to one master copy of the file, possibly replicated across multiple servers depending on traffic levels. This would likely be the same file that would be downloaded in the event of a purchase. Call me an old fashioned developer but despite 20 cent per gig storage, I still refuse to waste it on unneeded duplication of files.
So, almost certainly their backup service is a massive shared folder that all their backup service users have access to. Large shared folder? Multi-user access? Starting to sound a bit more like the loathed P2P the record labels love to hate, isn't it?
Funny note: CAPTCHA word for this post was "AVARICE".
I download lots of music put up for free download by small bands. After downloading I listen to the tracks and make a personal choice on if the band is worth listening to. If they are I'm likely to buy a hole range of things including
-Gig tickets
-T-shirts
-physical CDs with artwork and books and all that stuff
so there are people who will pirate entire albums but i think theres lots of people like me who would never here of bands without free downloads. If I never here of a band i wont buy anything!
Most Damage is done by people who are AWAKE
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
What is actually being supplied is the ability to listen to nice noises. The transport layer is irrelevant.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I haven't bought a new CD in years. Is it because I'm "pirating"? Nope, I don't even download music anymore.
The reason: I already OWN all the good music that I want. There is NOTHING out there new that I want.
If the RIAA wants people like me to buy new music, they need to produce new music that I want. Which isn't manufactured teeny pop and whiney emo "rock". Sorry, but the days of being able to cater to teens and have them drive the adults into buying that crap are over. The US population is getting older, and if you want anyone over the age of 30 to buy your crap, you are going to have to (gasp) maybe consider releasing content that we LIKE?
Corporatism != Free Market
I whole heartedly agree with you. I find it somewhat disturbing that some in the Anti-DRM crowd are essentially turning this issue into an anti-Copyright issue, which would be a very bad thing for us if Copyright just disappeared, along with all of its rights and protections.
People seem to forget that without some form of Copyright law, a lot (not all) of these artists would just not contribute to culture and community, drastically affecting the way we as a whole evolve and create.
If you worked hard and created music that took a lot of time, money, and effort, wouldn't you want to be compensated in some form by people enjoying the fruits of your labor? I would imagine so. Before you even started working on your music, if you were told that when you were done, there would be no guarantee that you would ever be compensated because there are not laws in place to help you get compensated for this form of art, would you even do it in the first place? If this was your primary way of making a living, I doubt that you would consent, and wouldn't bother putting the effort in in the first place. This is what original Copyright law strives to ensure for these artists.
Unfortunately, I honestly do believe that the vast majority of people would blatantly steal if they had the chance. Does that mean that the music is frivolous because people would rather pay nothing for it? Of course not, people would steal food for free, even if they had the means to pay for it, and I highly doubt food would be considered a frivolous commodity. The psyche of humans, however, is not the point of this comment, so I'll leave that for another time.
You can say all you want about the current regime. I agree, it sucks. I hate the extension acts, I hate the DMCA, and several of the other newer provisions, but that doesn't mean I hate the concept of Copyright, or of Intellectual Property law in general. Folks that do claim to profess hatred for these areas, IMO, really don't understand what they would lose if they're gone.
ask Trent Reznor or the guys from Radiohead.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
And, of course, many of the early car repair and servicing [places (and the early cars needed a lot of repairs) were the blacksmiths, because repairing a car was basically a matter of metalwork. Into the '70 s a lot of small village garages in the UK were recognisably descended from the village blacksmith. The farrier, however, did lose out.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Actually, the problem with that is that it assumes that everyone labels their music the same. Even with iTunes over a network, you can still see people label the same tracks differently. it also doesn't take in to account track quality
Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home!
It is hard on a person to tour, most small bands lose money touring and you talk about bands that make millions and how hard it is on them....... but the argument is about RECORD COMPANIES.
You admit that copyright is misused, you must also know record companies have been known to take advantage of artists, that the cost of producing/distributing music is a fraction of the cost it used to be and the artists haven't benefited from that, with the track record of these companies, what makes you think it will change (interesting how the money they are getting from law suits are not being given to the artists....)? - how about sorting out those injustices first as they would be a lot easier to sort out than holding out your hands to stop the tide.
We are entering a new phase and having people try to break it and dismantle it because it affects their bottom line is the real crime, no backups, no downloads, can't play it on the pc, can't play it without a key.... these all conflict with fair use. I want quality music with quality reproduction (I prefer flac), I want to know the artists are making money and not being abused. I do buy music (not Sony and am quite happy to hear them get some of their own back) - especially at concerts and small venues where I know they are self produced, happy to buy several albums which is a sign of how disaffected I am with the record labels.
Oh and how about some sympathy for the lesser known artists as well as the millionaires?
BM3
If you buy music, you can make all the copies you want for your own use, and store them any where you want. Duh!
I will not be supprised when I see an article like, "EMI claims breathing air without paying them is illegal".
the greed of the movie and music industry, and their twisting and lying about copyright laws is just over the top.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Mixing and mastering engineers seem to be working in the "just saturate every frequency and let's go grab a beer" mode lately.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I hate to break it to you, but U87s aren't that good. Also, it's a bloody microphone. It doesn't matter what you sing into if you can't sing or if you can sing but you choose to sing the mind-numbing drivel that the majors seem to want to put out.
Personally I can't *wait* until the majors go out of business. I'm going to pirate my socks off until all the record companies disappear up their own arseholes. Maybe then there will be a reduction in the saccharine pap that invades our eardrums.
That must be the nth time I've seen that post (where n is a large whole number)
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
The record companies just don't like progress. They are stuck in the stone ages and can't get out. It's like any other "new invention" it will eventually cause someone to lose their jobs because of services no longer needed. But on the other hand it creates new jobs too. It's just a matter of adapting to the new way of doing things.
Tech Alpha Computer Forums
>We use only 100% hand-rubbed foreskin
On the plus side, a little goes a long way once you've rubbed it for a bit.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I own a cassette tape store. Cassette tape sales has drastically dropped and I'm getting this sinking feeling that the major labels aren't producing this format much anymore since they keep trying to push me to try a newer format, CD. I don't want to adapt because I think tapes will make a come back even with the problem of people making each other mixed tapes.People would be encouraged to give the names of suspected pirates to a hotline, similar to TIPS. Once we know the size of the problem, the police and other law enforcement agencies will be forced to take piracy seriously. They have fought the War on Drugs with skill, so why not the War on Piracy?
Can I bum a sig?
Did you know, incidentally, that today is World Book and Copyright Day? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Book_and_Copyright_Day)
The same guy who started this service was also behind MP3.com which did pretty much what you describe. I think he lost out legally on that because that actually was distribution.
I want to shoot the messenger!
Oh come on, this troll was posted (and bittten) last year. As trolls go it isn't bad but gees, your troll was copyrighted last year when its original author trolled with it. You are in violation of copyright law, you filthy pirate!
Our lawyers will be coming for you and your grandmother and your handicapped son shortly. I believe we MIGHT be able to settle for $3,000 but if you force us to take you to court it's going to be a HUNDRED GRAND.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
In a related development, the U.S. FDIC has ruled that it is illegal to keep dollar bills of any denomination in banks. Details to follow....
If people no longer feel the need to shop at brick-and-mortar record stores because they want MP3s rather than CDs (which often force them to buy songs they don't want along with the ones they do), then brick-and-mortar record stores will find staying in business difficult. That doesn't mean you can't make money selling music, just that you have to change your business model -- sell MP3 singles instead of CD albums.
How's iTunes doing? Are they struggling to stay afloat as well, or is business doing fine?
"...I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of."
Your problem is obvious.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
Considering they've been posting the same for years and under different aliases... either their 'ailing' business went under years ago or they're talking BS. I know what I'd bet.
Record shops I've seen are in fact doing well - they often specialise in vinyl amd/or rare recordings, but lower sales at higher margins works just as well as the cheap/low margin stuff they were doing 10 years ago. The bigger shops have diversified and do PC games, books, T shirts, etc. as well.
Then not only are you an old-fashioned developer, you're a lousy old-fashioned developer with no knowledge of the wider world your software is operating within. Security and legal concerns (especially legal concerns) trump the $0.00078 savings, by your estimated storage price, per copy of "Toxic". This is especially true when the architecture you're discussing would cost more time and money to implement than the safer version, what with the necessity of acoustic fingerprinting or some other technology to make sure that User1's "Britney Spears - Toxic.mp3" is the same as User2's "Toxic - Britney Spears (ub3r h0t ch1ck).mp3" is the same as User3's "251 - BS - TOXIC.mp3".
Please, by all that's holy, tell me you're just over-simplifying for the masses. Actually, don't tell me that, because there's only two options here:
- 1. You're over simplifying a complicated technology, just like the idiots at EMI/SonyBMG/ do to confuse the non-technical people judging a case, or
- 2. You're not even a developer (or are someone who's written a half-dozen PHP scripts for their buddy's website and thinks they're a developer) and are just blowing smoke on this topic.
Either way, this absurd and technically inappropriate answer isn't doing anything except to muddy the waters. Please leave that to the professionals at EMI.CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
So you would rather waste developer's time, which costs actual money, to create a system where people would get back the same music, with the same ID3 tags and the same name, and where those files were somehow created from a digital library of music and a db of what the file looked like when the user uploaded it?
Yeah, great idea. Call me old-fashioned, but complex solutions to non-problems are bad. Storage is so cheap now that it's practicaly free. Think of it as free, and stop wasting resources that are actually scarce to save space.
Mister Crowley, What went on in your head? Oh, Mister Crowley, Did you talk to the dead?
Your life style to me seemed so tragic With the thrill of it all. You fooled all the people with magic, Yeah, you waited on satan's door.
Mr. Charming, Did you think you were pure? Mr. Alarming, in nocturnal rapport; Uncovering things that were sacred Manifest on this Earth, Conceived in the eye of a secret And they scattered the afterbirth
Mr. Crowley, Won't you ride my white horse? Mr. Crowley, It's symbolic, of course. Approaching a time that is classic I hear that maiden's call. Approaching a time that is drastic, Standing with their backs to the wall.
Was it polemically sent? l want to know what you meant. I want to know, I want to know what you meant. Yeah!!!
(Lyrics by Ozzie Ozbourne. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" is the self-styled "Beast of the Revelation" Alesteir Crowley's creed.)
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The "average" touring group is lucky to get a hotel at all, let alone a luxury one.
Well, there's a precedent for what these douchebags are saying. Let's not forget that they've already sued a company like that out of existence - mp3.com.
- I'd like to see them justify why they should get any period of protection under copyright law when they have deliberately and maliciously encoded it like a trade secret, so that it can't be used in the public domain at the end of their protection period. IP law exists to get trade secrets into the public domain, and out of obscure encodings & protection mechanisms.
- I'd like to see a nuisance case where one of their customers sue them for breach of their license for personal use.
- I'd like to see them get bitch slapped solidly by the WTO or some such for their pitiful attempts to disguise regional price fixing behind copyright licensing
I'd like to see them explain why they get to ignore the rules completely, but expect the most deluded and onerous interpretation of their customers obligations to be taken seriously. That I would like to see.thx e
That sounds like an awful lot of work to save a few cents on storage. And besides, how do you decide whether two files are the same? Compare checksums? You'll still end up with a separate copy of the same song for every bit rate your users have selected and each encoder or download source your customers use. On top of that, for each of those you'll end up with separate copies of each song for each variation on the file's metadata (e.g., if somebody uploads a file by "Britny Spears" you can't very well return them one by "Britney Spears"). I don't know about you, but I frequently edit my tracks' metadata and I'd be pretty irritated if a service that is just supposed to store my files were to purposely alter them. I suppose you could strip the metadata out, store it in another DB table, and reinsert it when the user demands, but then you're doing even more work, not to mention that with many files any such alteration might constitute a clear violation of the DMCA.
I find that extremely unlikely.
And how is one to legally provide those MP3s? Hell, I'd love to run a store where I could dump the entire CD collection to a server in flac format, and let people then burn their own custom CD from that and pay me, without me having to pay upstream because I only bought one copy. I don't think it would work that way though.
That would actually be a nice model if you could get the *AA onboard.
Innovate or die, it's the #1 rule of business.
You post a "why me" post and expect to get sympathy, when you've obviously failed at the most basic principles of running a business?
When you saw that digital downloads (not Internet piracy) were the way the music industry was going you didn't take the que and get out?
When you saw your profit going down you didn't see the red flag and say to yourself "I need to do something to change this, or shut it down"?
Take some responsibility for your situation and stop blaming others. You are the only one in control of your business and the only one that can make it better. If you don't have a product the consumers want, change your product to one they do. We don't want your "1984" big brother controls, we value our freedom to choose.
Blaming piracy is just an excuse for bad management.
Plus the smart buggy whip maker/blacksmith went into automotive repair as well. They adjusted to the market and for a while benefited from both markets. The stupid ones who refused to adjust to market demands went out of business. The analogy still holds.
The whole idea of copyright supplying perpetual profits is the true entitlement program. The idea that the public domain is worthless as spread by the industry is absurd. Again I ask, who is looking out for the real intent of copyright....The public domain!
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Man, this is old. One thing the original author of the story completely fails to take into account is that the store owner would probably be affected very little if at all by such piracy, unless the youth specifically targeted other potential music buyers in his geographical area. I seriously doubt he would believe that somebody several thousand miles away is downloading the CD for free and think it would impact his business.
This story is a good example, however, of just how poorly the music industry understood the way the internet works, even just a few years ago.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
I'm about the same on "Christian Rock", and actually most modern "Christian" music.
:).
I don't go to Church much these days (ok: honestly I haven't been in probably 3 years), but I grew up in a very traditional rural church where we sang old hymns with nothing but our little piano lady (who didn't really play all that well) in the background. The songs had meaning.
The new churches I go to though, seem to feel the need to "update" this. Instead of the classics, you get these oddball songs. Now personally people can listen to whatever they want (I listen to everything from country, to rap, to hard rock IRL), but I just find it funny when I hear a tune that with any other words these people would be declaring to be "of da debil!", but throw in a few "God is good"'s here and there and they're raising their hands up as if they're catching the Holy Ghost. I just find it hypocritical.
There was a great South Park episode on this a while back
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The real root issue is that our justice system is chronically uninformed and attempting to deal with issues that require education in a wide variety of subjects. Think about it. A judge could be asked to hear arguments on copyright issues that include technical knowledge on everything from CD recorders to MP3 compression and storage.
The problem is that this issue is not easily fixable and is inherent in the justice system because of how it is designed to function. Most judges are older people. This is a GOOD thing. The average age of the supreme court justices is 66. According to wikipedia, the average age of US state supreme courts is 53. And therein lies the paradox. My Dad is 47. And while I think he would make a good judge, he knows virtually nothing about computers or technology. In my experience, this is typical of middle aged people and older people.
In 15-20 years, this problem will have solved itself as a new generation of judges who are more tech savvy will have replaced or begun to replace the older generation and media companies will hopefully not be able to get away with the things they do now. But once that happens, a new set of issues will be presented that relate to new technology and that the new generation of judges will know nothing about.
Do you realize that he just re-posted something else he had pre-prepared on this subject to hijack the thread as an AC? Because if he was actually who he said he was, he wouldn't need to post anonymously. Also, its obviously a fake sob story, with more pandering to emotions than actual facts or market trends that someone in that position would actually have.
Do you really think it's that lucrative to play a 90 minute set at a smoky club in Knoxville at 10:00 on a Tuesday night? It's not. The "average artist on tour" is often lucky to make enough to pay for that night's hotel room, frequently crashes on the floors or couches of fans, and prays that nothing happens to the van so they don't have to cancel gigs and blow a week's worth income on a mechanic. This on top of taking a break from or quitting their day jobs and, in many cases, leaving family behind to tour. Even so, they generally still make more money this way than from selling CDs. People working at off-shore oil platforms, on the other hand, are paid very well and get large chunks of time off. For many on the rig it's a far more physically demanding job than that of a touring musician, but I'm not convinced it's more emotionally demanding. It is a hell of a lot more lucrative than touring is for the "average artist on tour".
That describes the life of the "average artist on tour" about as well as it describes the life of the average IT professional.
Wait, you expect to pay for one copy and one copy only? Are you insane? I mean, it's one thing to say that the MAFIAA are money grubbing bastards, but to expect them to sell one copy of a song to a shop, and only one, that really will bankrupt them instead of just having them talk about it.
That would be a riding crop, buggy whips are different. There may be a few buggy whips being used out there, but certainly not pervasive enough to say they're common.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Aye. I recently took Guitar Hero to my uncle's house and he switched it off because my aunt "doesn't like that kind of music on a Sunday", having been brought up in a very traditional little island community on the west coast of Scotland. The stupid thing is that the other games they were playing had rock music in the background. Very hypocritical and nonsensical.. it's things like that that depress me and I've been going to church less too, though usually I still go to the evening service on a sunday. It was actually my first gf that hurt my faith most though just because of her actions when we broke up, and I was like "how could a Christian do that?", but we're all fallable I suppose, and I was being quite the jerk myself back then..
which is totally what she said
If you want to whine about someone killing your business, whine at the labels
for trying to kill the single format. They did this on purpose. They go greedy
and decided they wanted to soak everyone for the whole album price of ablums
not worth buying.
In the end, singles resurrected themselves because that's what the market wanted.
It just so happens that the form that singles resurrected themselves in aren't
suitable for your business model.
You should write a nice thank you note to EMI.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
www.jamendo.com
www.magnatune.com
www.itunes.com
And many others.
Music ain't dying. Music business as it's being run today is obsolete. Evolve or die.
Your head a splode
I think you'll find the average oil platform worker makes a damn good salary and far more than the "average" artist on tour. Certainly they make far less than the super-star artists on tour, but those are not the "average" artist on tour.
Now, I agree with your sentiment, and your post, but your facts are somewhat skewed as to what an "average" artist makes.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
This isn't about "piracy".
This is about the customer wanting old time singles and the people that
print out the plastic and vinyl disks not being willing to provide those.
iTunes is just the resurrection of the single where you could cheaply
buy the music you wanted without out being forced to buy the rest of the
dreck on some one-hit-wonder's album.
iTunes isn't something new. It's a throwback. It's the resurrection of a
product format the industry tried to KILL.
Now brick and mortar vendors are paying for that greed.
They find themselves out of the loop due to how the market fixed itself.
Your supplier's avarice is putting you out of business, not "entitled" teenagers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
My optimism comes from the fact that we do not run a music business based on 1960's rules, and that 90% of the music I consume is either free or very cheap. Which leaves me money to go to gigs. Buy t-shirts at them. Bands get more money from me than ever. It's just the middle man going down the sink.
Your head a splode
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
without me having to pay upstream because I only bought one copy
This is the falling down point. Otherwise, there's little other than expense and preference to prevent such a system you're talking about from being used. I think it's even been tried.
I think it's even been tried. Licensing fees are the usual sticking point, not so much because you need the server to keep track of what songs sold, which is easy, but because most of the labels wanted as much per track as they'd get per CD. So their being greedy killed the business.
So it would work, just you'd have a fairly large monthly check to send to each of the recording labels, depending on the usage of the machine. In today's MP3 age, you might even be able to get them to bend on the pricing part now.
I don't read AC A human right
You describe a vanishingly small number of artists. Most music piracy is like stealing money from a busker's cap. The pirate begrudges the artist his pennies.
This is the same Michael Robertson who founded MP3.com, a company whose death knell was sounded by a lawsuit from UMG over similar issues of online file storage and intellectual property. Robertson has a long history of run-ins with the recording industry; it'll be interesting to see how this one pans out.
> Yes, they can earn a great deal of money playing live shows, but do you honestly realize how hard it is on a person to tour?
You know, when I have a job and it sucks, I look around for something else. I might even go into a different line of work altogether! I'm flexible like that.
> People seem to forget that without some form of Copyright law, a lot (not all) of these artists
> would just not contribute to culture and community, drastically affecting the way we as a whole
> evolve and create.
You are suffering under the false notion that the vast majority of these
posers are contributing to culture and community as things are now.
If we got rid of most of the dreck and the people who aren't really artists
that would not be such a bad thing.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
True arists have created masterworks that justify our continued existence
as a species without that sort of equipment. It's no more needed today than
it was then.
The music industry is a bunch of junkies of various kinds.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Yeah, at the expense of the people who brought the band to you, who organised the tour, and who got them where they are today. Besides, if all you pay artists to do is to sell t-shirts and play live gigs every once in a blue moon, then that's all they'll do. If you like recording as I and so many others do (Remember them? They're those things that confirmed the band was any good in the first place?), then I suggest you start paying for them. That also goes for anyone who cares about their P2P file-sharing rights, because, mark my words, if it keeps being used for illegitimate purposes, it will be made illegal. This is not just the **AA's power talking, it's the fact that particularly short-sighted people are currently abusing it for personal gain at the expense of the copyright owners.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I don't even know why we are discussing this, because the market should (and is) making clear what it wants, and what it can provide. The biggest inhibitor right now is the market cannibalising itself in the form of piracy.
You sure about that? I've read before that something like 90% of the pirates wouldn't have bought the stuff in the first place. Thus, no lost sale.
The very success of iTunes indicates that the pirates can be, if not beat, at least ignored as there are plenty of people willing to pony up the money if the music industry can produce a product they want.
What you can't assume is that there will be a flock of dedicated people waiting to give up all their free time for free to fill the music gap (even for the modest $800 price tag).
Why not? Music is like sports - for every professional there are hundreds of 'wanted to bes'. People not quite good or lucky enough to make it. Besides, it doesn't take many today, especially with the internet. Figure $1k to create the Album, another $1k or so will get you a thousand professionally pressed CDs. Let's say you sell them at small concerts, bar appearances, etc... If you can sell them at $10@ea, that's a 5 to 1 return, assuming the gigs pay for themselves otherwise. At 10 CDs a gig, 2 gigs a week, the supply will be gone in less than a year.
At the same time, you put your music up on some of the small artist friendly sites.
$8k a year isn't much, but add it on to the profits from the gigs themselves, the clever tshirts, etc...
For a more 'full time' bandbe
$8k - Gig CD sales
$16k - online CD sales
$10k - T-shirt/poster/etc... sales
$200k - concert tickets.(100 gigs/year, 100 people a gig, $20 profit per person)
Total: $244k, over 4 members, $61k each.
I'd call that a living wage. Wild guesses all, of course, and a lot of it depends. For example, I know that there are many people who make a living merely singing in clubs. So it can be done.
I don't read AC A human right
> you need to get out more, to meet up with those of lower IQ or
> physical ability through no fault of their own
You mean I should go back home, hang out in my old neighborhood,
hang out with my school chums and my white trash kinfolk?
Take your white liberal guilt somewhere else.
While many of us were lucky to be born somewhere that we could
find a market for our natural abilities, you are far too quick
to trivialize personal responsibility.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Should be "EMI Says Online Music File Storage Is Illegal".
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
The usual job I hear that analogy used for is the buggy whip maker instead of blacksmiths.
;)
Yeah, for the GP, there are still buggy whip makers. There's just a lot fewer of them now.
Blacksmiths, for the most part, I think have transitioned to 'machinists'.
I don't read AC A human right
Hey, it's you again, spouting similar self-serving nonsense.
What makes you think the music industry is obsolete? Is it because they're not using modern technology to full advantage? Nope, it can't be that. They're using iTunes, which, coincidentally, you happen to mention on your list of "modern" solutions to music distribution. Is it because they're not making any money? Nope, it can't be that either (unless they've declared themselves bankrupt in the last couple of hours). Is it because information wants to be free? Could be. It seems a fairly lofty and impractical view of the situation, certainly no position for calling for scrapping of multi-million dollar industries, especially one that brings so much entertainment to the world.
What's your problem with copyright anyway? What's it doing to you? It need only affect the people who involve themselves with it. You don't have to buy it. You don't have to dictate to the world what they want. They will choose for themselves whether or not they want the RIAA, or any or all of the music styles they produce. If you like your information to be free, then take only information that is free, legitimately. I know it's painful giving up all that RIAA crap that you claim the world doesn't need, but that's the price of free. Good things come at a cost, and if they don't, why are you wasting your time with inferior and illegal products? Stick it to the RIAA, and download legit!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I see your point, but I think it's not realistic of what's currently going on.
Recording is changing. If you do electronic music, you don't need anything else than a computer and creativity. You don't need to pay a producer if you don't want to, you don't need to pay for time at a recording studio, you don't need to pay those engineers.
If you don't do electronic, home recording equipment is getting cheaper and cheaper, and gaining in quality and ease of use. The people that organise tours etc still get paid, the same way they are doing now.
Perhaps artists have less of a chance of getting multimillionaire? Yes. No huge marketing campaigns to force music down people's throats will have that effect, no doubt in my mind. On the other end, you will see smaller bands gaining in popularity as other forms of promotion (releasing albums on private torrent trackers comes to mind) take shape. It's evening out.
And you've got it all wrong. I pay for music when I buy an album off Magnatune. I donate to artists on Jamendo whenever I like their music. I pay for a subscription at Last.fm. I download music that wasn't meant to be distributed for free, too. Then I go to gigs. All in all I still listen to high quality music and spend a similar amount of money. More artists get money from me, instead of just a handful. I enjoy music twofold, as I can go to the gigs too. Who loses out on this deal? The record companies, of course. The CD manufacturers too. Record shops. Distributors. Millionaire bands. So what? These are middle men that are not needed anymore. It's called progress. Those people will get employment elsewhere, as they've done in the past. It's not morally justifiable to hold back progress when its benefits are huge.
Your head a splode
This sounds like a wonderful product. Who manufactures them, and where could I find some more information, testimonials etc. on Congressmen?
sssshhhhh. if people realise that, they can't keep rationalising stealing music. You must be new...
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
So rather than trying to get music from musicians to the public in the best and most efficient way, self-righteous, self-serving little middlemen like you would rather force the system to go through you, even when you're obsolete, because you refuse to adapt. The music industry doesn't exist for your personal gain. If you're no longer providing a service that people need, it's time to change what you're doing. Jerk.
What's the name of your record store? You're on my blacklist.
Personally, what I think that IP product* companies and people need to concentrate less on surpressing piracy and more on attracting customers and profit.
.5% we'd have to institute 100% bag checking. This will cost X hours of employee labor at Y rate, plus cost us Z business as people stop shopping here. It's not worth that 50% reduction.
Just like a storefront business doesn't perform the measures necessary to stop 100% of shoplifting, music companies shouldn't either. Why? Because the draconian measures necessary piss of the paying customers, ultimately costing sales. So a store will go: In order to drop our shrink rate from 1% to
I suggest the music industry concentrate less on trying to stop piracy, especially with draconian DRM, and start trying to please customers. Offer me a good, convienent deal, and I'll take it.
Over 50% of my media problems have been traced to DRM. Software refusing to run, having to enter key codes, tracking down key codes to install. Media refusing I legitimately paid for refusing to play until I crack the DRM.
You might not be able to beat the pirate's price, but you can beat their quality and convenience. People are willing to pay for that.
*Such as music, movies, books, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
Mr Crowley liked it, but I believe it is generic Satanism (not too sure, I'm no expert on sub-sets of Christianity). I've also read "An thou dost no harm, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" which seems a little more reasonable.
* Things that come at a cost are not quality-guaranteed. I wouldn't define Britney Spears as quality.
* Things that are free are not inferior either. I could've got latest Radiohead's for free (the fact that I paid a bit for it is besides the point). I'm writing this from a computer I never paid for (recycled) running Linux.
Your head a splode
Please define online.
If I buy a CD and I put it in my PC, I will be able to access it through ssh and thus it is online. So even though nobody else can access it, it is a CD I bought I am not able to put the CD in my machine, because it is connected to the Interwebs.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Any album worth buying is available used, and that way it's cheaper and the RIAA gets nothing from the sale.
Boycott the RIAA - buy your music legally.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I own a Shure KSM 44, and we've used other gear on occasion, including a hired U87. The rest of the gear varies a bit - there's probably a few thousand dollars worth in the whole collection, but certainly less than ten grand.
You can recoup that sort of investment pretty quickly if you're keeping your fans' money instead of giving it to a label.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
"I bought the store about 12 years ago." That's like starting a buggy whip company AFTER Ford shipped the Model T. What were you thinking?
I was going to ask how you knew this and then decided that I didn't want to know.
"Seek first to understand." - Socrates
How? Will the internet shut down, thus preventing artists from distributing their music?
I read it in his "autohagiography but unfortunately it was three decades ago and my memory is short, and I was smoking Thai stick at the time.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Repeat after me:
Would you like fries with that? How about an apple pie?
While i'm sure your little scenario actually went down as you said [engage snicker], the reality is that if i can get cds and mp3s from amazon or any of the other alternate music sources your business is lost anyway, i don't have to leave my house and go to your crappy little analog store.
Get busy moving onto your new career.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Wow. This is good material. Maybe the RIAA will make an anti-piracy clip out of this.
I don't even know why we are discussing this, because the market should (and is) making clear what it wants, and what it can provide. The biggest inhibitor right now is the market cannibalising itself in the form of piracy. Music GENRES exist solely because of copying the ideas of others. You only have different rock and roll band DIVERSITY because they copy musical chord and progression ideas of others. You only have LYRICS in music because singers copy words created by others. So, far from being an inhibitor, so-called "piracy" is the sole liberator of fleshing out musical ideas and interpretations, and stumbling into slight differences of output they have more in common (read: copied) with the output of other musicians than they don't have in common with the output of other musicians.
Every musician alive learned to play music precisely by COPYING. They did not reinvent the wheel, and discover rhythm, notes, musical instruments, musical theory, etc. They "cannibalized" the ideas of those who lived before them, and that's the sole reason they are able to produce any music whatsoever at all.
And the cheaper all music becomes (including FREE), the more musical knowledge everyone can possess. People can now process and inter-relate iPods with 5,000 songs at more times during the day and night rather than trying to inter-relate a few albums now and then on a weekend evening that had massively inefficient amounts of hyper marketing pushing crapola.
And the market knowledge of consumers has advanced greatly to discover 90% of these so-called "artists" are just ripping off the ideas of each other, with some cheap heavy producer mixing gloss lipstick covering the same old pig whilst pretending it's new "talent".
Talk about a "great" band like Led Zeppelin. 90% + of their output was unoriginal "piracy" of the ideas of blues musicians. Boo-hoo-hoo if some hack's copycat band can't gouge the market like they used to for their hack copy-cat "pirated" product. These artists are as much of a middleman on musical ideas as the record companies are middlemen, and all looking for welfare subsidization in the form of copyright protection, which only causes artificial scarcity and the stagnation of musical innovation. The whole 20th century musical catalog from mainstream payola to indie is mostly a pile of pirated musical ideas remixed to shit. And if it wasn't for artist "piracy" they wouldn't have even had *that*.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
Now that we're in the full blown digital age, I'd say that I buy about at the same rate. However, I like many others have a much larger music collection. Friends share music that they enjoy that I never would have bought and sometimes, on a lark, I'll download genre's of music I'd never have purchased just to "check it out".
One example would be classical music. I've never been one to sit around the house and listen to classical all day. However, over the years I've decided to check out various classical artists. . . and discovered I do enjoy it quite a bit on some level. Music always sounds better live, so I began purchasing tickets to the symphony and found that although it's not my cup of tea when sitting around the house I truly enjoy it live.
As a result, I still don't buy classical (nothing changed here) but I do buy tickets to concerts. Due to the easy availability of downloaded music, the market has experienced net gain in sales....though not directly in the form of media purchased.
Other's stories may be quite different. But the math is not a guaranteed one-to-one of "every song downloaded is a sale lost".
Didn't they have something like that years ago? But instead of music, it was computer games and software.
Actually, a lot of new artists that have the equipment but can't get a record label deal, publish their work and put it up at places like iTunes. Since mastering a CD doesn't take a big studio anymore, more individual artists and new bands can get their work out to the public easier than ever before. If you don't belive me, check out AudioBody for one example of this.
Completely OT, and responding to Anna Merikin's journal, you have misunderstood DNA quite a bit. Comparison of human to chimp is not based on books containing mostly the same words. Genes are higher level than words; they either encode proteins (equivalent, say, to a class in OO), or they regulate (equivalent perhaps to a functional specification in a functional language.)
If we found that two programs had 98.5% of their classes almost indistinguishably similar, and 98.5% of their functions had the same behaviour and signature, any change in the order, or which classes occurred in which files, would not be a strong argument that they were different programs.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
NO MP3s on there.
Case closed.
You're NOT distributing it and they have no access until they can furnish the long passage of a book that you used for a key. (Complete with your own personal version of l33t-spelling.)
As far as anyone knows, the drives I use for backups, on-site and off, are mine and mine alone. Their contents are mine and mine alone. Anybody doesn't like it can go suck an egg.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Maybe I'm just a naive developer, but wouldn't they just calculate the hash of each file uploaded, and if it matches that of one already on disk, avoid a second copy?
Anyway, it is undeniable that certain forms of art, music especially, is becoming easier to produce, and thanks to the internet, anyone can distribute. However, as easy as it is to create, creativity (and time honing it) is still a commodity that people will pay for. It's not just equipment cost and distribution costs that gives the product value. If it were, then everyone would be creating their own music; they wouldn't need to even bother downloading free content. The fact is that music has value, and while it continues to have value, I see no problem with facilitating a market for it. Thanks to information's undying wish to become worthless, it has taken legislative measures to make sure music (and other art forms) don't become obsolete, and that their inherent value can be properly used to encourage creation, and give artists compensation for their efforts (proportional to demand, of course).(non-millionaire bands as well, don't forget)
Whatever labels signed the signed artists that you are listening to, they bought the copyrights off the artists, who's income relies on the initial evaluation of the copyright's worth. That copyright's worth is based on the demand for the music, and consequently how much control it affords over the work (since the latter partially controls the former). By not paying for certain pieces of music, you are devaluing the copyrights for your own personal gain. It affects the artists you're trying to support, it affects the middlemen, and it affects any artist to come who wishes to be signed. Of course, your small part in this fiasco is probably small, but it adds up when you look at so many people.
I know you probably couldn't care less if another artist isn't signed again, but you can't assume that such works would have existed if everyone had ignored copyrights prior to their creation. For all you know, the profit motive, the possibility of making a career to put food on the table out of music may have played an invaluable part. The only way to safely find out for sure is to legitimately stop sucking on the RIAA's teat. Show them it's not your desire for free (as in beer) stuff driving you, rather a desire for free (as in speech) stuff, and for the freedom to share. If people followed suit, it would indeed prove the labels are obsolete (but I don't think they are).
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I disagree, I started buying music again when Amazon started offering MP3s. It's still a bit of a pita compared to itunes, but close enough to my ideal to get me to use it.
There's a way to coax people back to purchasing, they're just doing it totally wrong.
If Pandora started a one-click purchase system (implementation here is key, it must integrate seemlessly with popular media management software), with proper marketing they could easily become the #1 music seller, AND get more people to actually buy music again.
Itunes is close to the perfect model except for the DRM aspect, it's extremely easy to find and buy music you like. Pandora could take that a step further by finding it for you.
Retrospect works exactly like that. It uses a hash of the file to determine if it is already backed up, irrespective of the path name and other normal attributes. Then it just keeps a record of "this hash key goes to this path with these attributes".
Which is handy when you copy a bunch of stuff from one node to another; you don't choke your backup server with copies, but you can still re-create each machine from a Snapshot.
Obviously, users with different ID3 tags in what started out as the same file will still result in multiple copies....
Right. Working pretty well sucks. Making money is usually very difficult, taking a lot of work and personal sacrifice. Most of us have to work all day sitting in a small cubical under fluorescent lights, being abused by morons. If you're lucky enough to make a living by sitting in a nice club in front of cheering fans, consider yourself lucky.
Without even looking at the possibility of pirating, what possible motive could I possibly have for walking into a music store and buying a CD?
except in once-in-several-years case of a truely excellent CD, of which I like almost all of the songs on it a lot, and they're not all available for purchase in MP3 form. This has happend to me exactly once in the last five years-- and I couldn't even get the CD in the US, either via a local record store or via Amazon or such. Had to order it directly from the overseas producer. S&H cost more than the darned CD-- but I don't regret it. It's a phenomenal piece of work. Gotta love internet radio-- I'd have never even ever heard of the band if I were limited to traditional chanels.
The other exception is that I'll occationally buy a CD from a local band when they're hawking them at their shows.
But even though I don't pirate, and I love music, why in the world would I want to drop a yuppy-food-stamp on a CD of widely available music?
Your business may face ruin, but I highly doubt that priacy is a major factor in that.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Correction: new music (my bad). The old stuff will be cycled and recycled until everyone gives up and goes home. Ah, but now that you mention it, perhaps it will come to that if people keep on screwing Big Copyright and laughing in their faces. Could you really blame them?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
9. People have better means to sample all music these days, and no longer need to deafly buy music they think maybe they might like, but actually do not like (once they play it). So now they buy only what they know they like.
I first bought music in the vinyl LP era. I could not sample the music. I had to read what was on the album to figure out if maybe I might like it. Radio played only a limited set. The record stores would not open albums to play them in the store (because they could not sell that one as new). I ended up with about 60% that I really would not have purchased had I heard it in advance. But it was the norm of the times to actually have a lot music you didn't like. That, or sell them at a used record store (which the music industry wanted to shut down because they knew that much of their sales revenue model depended on people buying music they didn't like). When CDs came along, it actually got worse because less was printed on the smaller cover.
Now I there are plenty of ways to sample the music in advance. Yup, that file sharing thing lets you do that. I'm sure many people cheat and keep their samples. But those of us that actually buy music believing it somehow supports the artists are not buying the music we decide we do not like so much.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
some businesses SHOULD fail.
purging the world of outdated tech sometimes can be a Good Thing(tm).
I'm a software guy and I'm being told to train a replacement that works in another country for a fraction of my wage. they are not better coders or designers but simply CHEAPER. I can't win this fight. soon, much of the IP (thinkers) in the US will be outsourced.
I can't stop my field from being destroyed. and NO ONE cares except those of us in this situation.
you think I care ONE TINY BIT for the music industry and anyone in it?
oh please! the world is full of business models going sour. my job is one of them. if the music guys also feel the pain of downsizing (so to speak), I guess its all called 'shared pain' then, isn't it?
yes, there is bitterness. and just wait until the kids today try to find 'thinking jobs'. in 5-10 yrs, their best thinking will be used to decide if you wanted lettuce on your burger or not.
we have other more pressing (heh) issues to worry about. music millionaires losing their millions is WAY far down on my list of things to lose sleep over.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
First and foremost EMI/RIAA/etc, we are not CONSUMERS , we are CUSTOMERS . Please correct your spelling.
We do not "consume" music, we do not "consume" goods. We are not an organism that feeds on these digital goods like a virus.
Second, once you start treating us like customers, we will then begin behaving like them.
Since the discussion seems to regard "Piracy" and DRM, rather than EMI's ridiculous and ignorant lawsuit, I'd like to chime in here. I don't choose to steal software or music. (i.e. I think I have like four old full licenses of Win98 around here somewhere.) I do believe most of my neighbors would like to buy their software from a blanket on the sidewalk. OTOH, I REALLY (RLY RLY) HATE keying in 25 digits, and having WGA phone home. I hate DRM disabling my files from legitimate use. These are my issues, oh , and making legitimate use illegal, like this EMI issue, or pretty much the whole DMCA.
Hopefully when ATX-compatible computers go obsolete FOSS will still be legal. Then I'll stick it to the man. (Got that, Bill?) I think the social issues should have social solutions. (Economic sanctions for illegal publishing of copyrighted works eh? And wottabout laws to protect artists from those tricky middlemen?)
I think most people would like to see some legitimate copyright reform. Just like the patent fiasco- Same thing, really. We sold the "Democracy" so vox populi doesn't get the new laws written. I don't know about NY, but here in the People's Republic of California, recalling judges seems to have been co-opted by the moneyed interests as well, so a bad decision in this case just might be in (someone's) best interest. Who knows?
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
That is a bit naive. ;) Google around for "acoustic fingerprint", and you'll probably find an explanation of why it's necessary to use something other than a bitwise comparison (which is what a hash or checksum would basically boil down to in this example) when comparing audio files. An actual explanation of it would get me slapped down quick for offtopicness. :D
I would imagine it's the new music that the artists would be distributing, since the RIAA owns the copyright to their old music.
Now having said that, it's true that convenience and cost have higher importance to most consumers; but there are still some good butchers around and have very loyal customer bases.
i'd think that record shop owners would be in a similar situation. For instance, i would LOVE to have a local record shop that carried European metal like Luca Turilli or Nightwish. And there may be other clever ways of leveraging knowledge of expertise as well as the benefits of having a brick and mortar place to entice clients. But, yes, i will agree that it is a VERY dangerous time for record shop owners and that most will vanish in the next few years (but didn't that trend already start many years ago with the Big Boxes?)
I'm curious as to your use of '[sic]'.
Supposedly this was an overheard dialogue (therefore, verbal, not written). So, when you type it out, all spelling is done by you, the third party who heard the conversation. Misspellings could not occur due to the first-party since they didn't write or type anything. So, how in the world are you using [sic] after "lete?" I know this is a troll because its a foolish post, but I don't even understand the foolish use of '[sic]'. Is it a troll post for grammar nazis as well?
Plenty of armchair capitalists shrug off large corporations' merciless tactics that make upstart ventures go belly up, by calling it "survival of the fittest". Well as it happens, in the music and MP3 arena, "the fittest" is what the consumer wants, so call the waaahmbulance!
It's been nine years since Napster, and the recording industry continues to drag its' ass for years on end over percentage points in the digital realm. "When we're good and ready, we'll tell you what you want and how you want it" - at least this freak child of capitalism has been exposed through this debacle. And still this perspective is defended by a chunk of consumers, who probably grew up never questioning the motives of GM, or Disney for that matter. Good, docile little consumers.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
Your business faces ruin? I wonder why?
ron lussier / lenscraft / fine art giclee prints/ sausalito / ca
The reason: I already OWN all the good music that I want. There is NOTHING out there new that I want.
On the other hand there are lots of us who have an album or two of artists we like and didn't buy the rest because of the price 30 years ago. We would still like to complete the collections but can't justify the package price. Get a clue. Much of the stuff on BT is the oldies but goodies. The kids are downloading the pop junk and the oldies as they find the good stuff. I have 2 teens at home. I have backed up their 30 Gig players. About half of their stuff is over 15 years old. They have everything from rap, metal, screamers, and techno to Queen, Louis Armstrong and Chubby Checker.
Not a single radio station in our area even considers playing that variety.
The truth shall set you free!
Surely there wouldn't be that many encoder combinations people would use. If there are 10000 copies of the same song uploaded, I'd think you'd find several groups of files that were identical, each group corresponding to a different encoder/settings combination. Using acoustic fingerprinting seems like it would bring more legal issues, since that would be closer to redistribution, as the file served back to the user might not match what he sent; in fact, he could upload a lower quality copy (perhaps obtained from a P2P network), then get back a higher quality version.
"If we got rid of most of the dreck and the people who aren't really artists
that would not be such a bad thing."
Piracy is nothing compared to the damage THAT would do to the Labels.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
The free media is more than adequate. I have to go out of my way to buy physical media or 'legal' downloads. The 'legal' alternatives are no higher quality, cost money, and are harder to find. You generally can't preview them either.
So why do I buy 'legal' media? I want to support the artists, the recording engineers, etc. I wish there was a better way to do it, but at the moment there isnt.
:x
They don't hear or don't care about DRM, about the RIAA, or about the loudness war.
True, these are the people voting against me in my boycott of anything DRM. It's the only reason Apple sells any DRM music. It's just not bad enough to be totally broken. It is incompatible enough to severly slow sales, which is why they have the higher quality DRM free stuff, with a higher price. The higher price is to slow the sales to prevent killing all DRM sales. They need to keep DRM revelant to keep single vendor lock-in going. They are not letting DRM free tunes undercut the incompatible DRM interoperability with non-iPod players. Use our players and you can have the music at a discount.. Um not discount, but you don't need the higher priced music.
The truth shall set you free!
Don't hold your breathe waiting. That saccharine pap isn't entirely a music industry conspiracy. Sadly enough, a lot of people actually like that drivel. As long as somebody is willing to buy it, somebody will make it. It'll just be independent saccharine pap.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
>I'm pretty sure that their wage is somewhat lower than the average artist on tour, but they have to do it anyway.
The two rock bands that stay in my basement when they're in town, because not having to pay for a hotel almost doubles their profits, would *love* to make the sort of money that oil workers make. One band's drummer just quit because he got a job installing cable TV lines. He didn't want to, but he has a kid to support. The guitarist is married to a woman in Spain so he can get health care when they're touring in Europe because he can't afford doctors here.
Small bands are working on shoestring budgets, often well below minimum wage, because they *want* to play (and because they're hoping for a big break.)
I'm not disagreeing with your post, I'm just saying there's no money at all in music unless you're in the top 0.1% of all performers.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
That would actually be a nice model if you could get the *AA onboard. Other than the obvious pay once, resell many times model that would never work - It occurs to me that this basic new business model is in place already - at every online tunes store. I'm reasonably certain they don't have a ton of copies of all those music Files floating around.
So, the question is, why isn't there a kiosk married to Itunes or Rhapsody or whatever in the wild? Seems like a no-brainer.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Please, could we stop using the word "artist" in such careless way? What about: musician, singer, entertainer, entepreneur, showman, composer, dancer, performer, etc, etc.
Let's reserve artist for the likes of Michelangelo, Leonardo da vinci, Beethoven, Cervantes, even Bob Dylan, but to call britney spears "an artist" abusing the word.
You talk to the Universal or Sony Music salesman that visits your store once a month, and ask for permission to sell MP3s at your store. They supply the files, and you supply the sales outlet. Remember to stress that having shoppers in the store will also encourage people to buy "hard goods" like CDs, posters, headphones, and so on, and therefore it's a worthwhile method of distribution to pursue.
Don't just roll-over and say, "Woe is me, CD sales are down." Fight back. Adjust to the changing market and offer Singles to your customers, because that's what they are demanding.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
His name is TheVelvetFlamebait.
>>>"Blacksmiths, buggy whip makers and all the other usual old time jobs that Slashdotters trot out each and every time they wish to denigrate a business case did not face competition from their own product being hawked with no requirement for any return on investment"
I don't think that was the point. The point was progress pushed people out of old jobs. Wagon wheelers were replaced by mass-produced steel wheels. Builders of wagons were replaced by builders of automobiles (which eventually became factories). Steam train engineers got laid-off because diesel trains are much, much easier to operate (flip a switch & it starts-up).
And on and on.
Now we see record stores becoming irrelevant because Singles are not sold on records anymore. They are sold via phone lines or cable lines fed directly to the home. Oh well. That's progress.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
>>>"That is where the buggy whip maker comparison breaks down, because they did not have to compete against their own product which has a zero cost factor."
First off, MP3s are not zero cost. They are very, very low cost but not zero.
Second, the buggy whip maker also had to compete against a low-cost item: the electric starter. In the past to make your wagon move, you used a whip. Today, we use an electric starter - much cheaper for the consumer. ----- That's progress.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I don't pretend to know how you do it, but I usually put the B&D before the S&M, it's more fun that way.
Tower Records had something similar to this idea back in the late 80s / early 90s where you could make custom tapes in store. The selection of songs wasn't exceedingly great, but I wondered back then how they got buy in from the record companies. Now days I wouldn't think there would be much call for a brick and mortar operation when it's so easy to buy single MP3s and burn your own CDs. I know it's not FLAC, but the majority of the mass market doesn't care much about quality anyway (perception largely based on what's popular). I prefer CDs because I like the quality, and to me they're versitile enough. I can rip a CD and put it into my MP3 player, and still come home to a high quality copy to listen to on the sound system. I haven't used a brick and mortar for years though. At first (late 90s) I was buying from online vendors like Amazon, but now I'm pulling from E-Bay almost exclusively and I'm paying on average about $8 for a CD including shipping. In this way the RIAA makes nothing off of me, as I'm typically buying used. However I still own a legal copy of the disc. When I want a custom disc I rip the tracks I want and burn it. If I want to rip everything I have and store it on a hard drive to take with me on vacation I can do that too. I like it that way. I don't think I'll ever give up the ability to have a physical copy, or accept any form of DRM. Even if it's lossless. But like I said before I know I'm not the average music consumer.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
But... those businesses, along with buggy makers, liveries, etc., were faced with competition from a different form of the same industry. The buggy maker competed against cars. They are both transportation, and the other businesses were support systems for the outdated method of transportation.
Now, the music companies are competing with a new form of the music market and they are fighting it rather than adjusting to it. They are like the buggy makers who had money and influence who got laws passed that required a car going through town to be preceded by a person on foot with a flag - they tried to make it too hard to use a car so they would go back to the horse and buggy. It didn't work then, and it isn't working now.
CD stores are the modern day equivalent to the blacksmith, buggy whip makers, or more directly, the dealers that sold buggy's. When the business you are supporting goes under, you're going to go under with it. It's sad, but that is the way it is.
The music companies in many cases fed the piracy movement. By disallowing the ability to purchase only the songs someone wanted, they encouraged people to find other ways of getting that song. Why spend $20 on an entire CD when your friends are telling you that there are only one or two good songs on it? Or, you've listened to it and only like a couple of songs?
I've been a computer consultant for 20 years. My business today is far different than when I started because I had to change and adapt with the times. When I started out, most of my money was made by building PC's and selling them locally. At the time, I could sell if to double my cost and they would save almost half of what an IBM would coat. Now, Costco sells the whole system with monitor for less than what my cost of the parts would be. So... I adapted my business to survive. Other consultant's I know just complained about Costco and are now working for them, or Best Buy.
Quit whining and figure out how to adapt your business or accept the sad truth that you'll have to shut down and do something else. That is the way it has always been in a capitalist system, and that's the way it will always be.
I'm sorry about your business - I truly am - but putting your head in the sand and blaming everyone else isn't going to bring customers back in. Advertise theme nights where you play CD's from certain types of music, mixed in with the popular bands so people will hear music they didn't know about and buy the CD. Sponsor dance parties at a local club and set up a place to sell CD's with that genre of music there. Hire a good marketing person to give you ideas if you can't think of them yourself.
Good luck, I hope it works out for you. Nobody likes to hear of a family losing their livelihood and home.
What I meant was a way to pay them per copy sold, not that you'd sell without sending money back their way. Oops :-)
Much in the same way as the music bigwigs think P2P = infringement (it is a file distribution protocol, and nothing else), all mp3 files are not necessarily infringing. I could make mp3 files of my own music, sound effects I've created (or royalty-free sfx), perhaps a personal audio diary, etc., etc. Unless the file names are blatantly obvious, how would anyone know their content without downloading and listening to every one? So now they want mp3 files to be banned from remote online storage because they might be (or even probably are) copyrighted material? Where does that stop? That's like saying that since most child porn images are in JPG format, therefore storing JPGs online is illegal.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
No, no, you're right. I'm pretty sure Mr. C used the short form.
Obvious fake. Try harder next time.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
As long as somebody is willing to buy it, somebody will make it. It'll just be independent saccharine pap.
See, that I don't have a problem with. If people want it enough that other people will go out and make it, that's fine. It's record labels teaming up with TV companies to produce shite like Pop Idol, producing saccharine pap, and then demanding it gets played continuously while they tell everyone that really they do like saccharine pap that annoys me.
"And what about people working very hard at off-shore oil platforms? Can we use them? I'm pretty sure that their wage is somewhat lower than the average artist on tour, but they have to do it anyway."
The average person working very hardon an off-shore oil platform makes decent money. The average artist on tour is making nothing, or close to it.
"So poor artists with their luxury hotel rooms, first-class plane seats, 50 foot long limousines and multi million dollar contracts can't stand tour pressure? Too bad. Makes me cry."
Do you get your information about the arts from MTV Cribs? Very few "artists" live this sort of lifestyle.
Oh no you wouldn't like those butchers back.
If you don't like quality now, you'd hate it w/o refrigeration and plastic packaging (the two techs that really puts butchers out of business).
> As a record store owner, My business faces ruin.
This same article was posted to Slashdot Aug 2005 and Nov 2006. The style and phrasing reminds me of those email forwards I'm always getting from clueless relatives. (Nobody writes like that in real life.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Run an md5sum on the file when it's uploaded to see if it's already in the system. If so just point your DB record to the original entry into the system. Store the filename so that it comes back to the user exactly the same.
You -might- be looking at 16 hours of development time there, probably closer to 8. Pretty much nothing in the scope of total development costs for the system.
It'd be interesting to see just how many of those md5sums would match up.
Yes, I'm a big pop music fan. No, that doesn't make my opinion less valid than yours. Be careful not to conflate what you subjectively dislike with what is objectively bad. There is good and bad home-recorded music, good and bad indie-label music, and good and bad big-label manufactured music. This Slashdot-favourite idea that any music other than The Who or a singer/songwriter fingerpicking an acoustic into his portastudio must be shit is both arrogant and narrow-minded.
Cuba no. Castro may be an asshole but he's not really dangerous at this point. North Korea on the other hand is ruled by an insane person with small dog syndrome and nukes. I'm sure if he ever launched nukes at a NATO protected country then the rest of the world would turn his entire country into a flat piece of molten glass but this doesn't mean he's not a threat. He might not be crazy enough yet to wage war on the rest of the planet but it would only take the right push for that to happen. I do agree that the first post guy was an idiot though. Christian rock? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that piracy has nothing to do with the downfall of his business. He's trying to sell music that nobody will buy in the first place. It's a capitalist world, and although it is sad to say religion has no place in it. The only people I know who survive as a salesman this day and age are also the most dishonest people I know.
The Gospel according to lolcat
Well, I wouldn't want to get an inferior copy of an mp3 I bought because it matched another's "acoustic fingerprint". Using hashes is a much better way to make sure that everyone is getting the file they bought, even though it wastes more space.
eg, if I bought a 192kbit mp3 from Site X, and someone else bought a 128kbit mp3 from Site Y, and they matched by some other means, I'd hate for the 128kbit one to get stored as the 'definitive' version of that song. (Note that it'd be in the parent site's interests to store the lower bitrate version too - less storage and less bandwidth fees!)
I agree with you that piracy is a huge problem. But, the RIAA is partly to blame. I never copied music and I have never downloaded music from the internet. However, in recent years, the German equivalent of the RIAA (Gema) has imposed a tax on virtually anything that could in any way be used to reproduce or store music. This included not just media (CD's, tapes, etc), but also computers, hard-drives, modems, paper, etc.
I don't copy music or distribute it but I'm forced to pay Gema for my computer, my fax machine, my internet connection and so on.
This kind of policy doesn't exactly endear the music industry to law-abiding citizens. Not to mention riduculous lawsuits in the 100's of thousands of dollars for downloading a few songs.
In addition to that, the copywrite on music is now 120 years. Our local kindergarten created a CD of their music (the kids singing, not copies of music from other sources). The Gema was there in short notice exacting a fee for each CD, since White Christmas or something similar which they were singing was copywrited.
I feel sorry for you and you business. You are an honest example of what makes America great. And I don't support piracy either, but part of the blame lies in the hands of the RIAA and similar organizations.
I am so sick of this whole entire issue. These days I just don't listen to anything if it isn't free of copyright or on the radio. There's a good variety of free music out there and I live in a large enough metropolitan area to have a good variety of radio available. My wife occasionally buys music but I haven't bought anything in at least several years. I used to have a decent music collection on LP, and then cassette. Of that music, I probably only upgraded around two dozen of my absolute favorite albums to CD and that was long ago. Am I missing out on anything? Not that I'm aware of, and if I'm not aware of it, then I'm obviously not missing it.
I've taken the same philosophy to my computer. I don't purchase OS or software although I do donate in some cases. When my wife's VAIO laptop gets replaced in a year or two, she'll be going Ubuntu and OpenOffice too.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
[quote]Most music piracy is like stealing money from a busker's cap. The pirate begrudges the artist his pennies.[/quote]Uh, I don't know who [i]you[/i] hang out with, but the people that I know that pirate don't pirate independent music. It's much easier to get that directly from the artist. What they pirate are Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash, The John Lennon, etc. Even if Johnny Cash could get checks delivered to Henderson Memory Gardens, I'm not sure he would have much use for them. I'm not sure there's a minibar in heaven or that what he received would be more than a drop in the bucket to what he has.
Grammar Nazi
Grammar Nazi
The thing is, the economies are growing in the other countries, so sooner or later the jobs will come back to the Western World, as it is simply more efficient to have your workers close to you.
For example, a good Indian programmer costs about a quarter to a third of a good Australian programmer. The Indian economy is growing at a rate of 10% per annum. So at some point in the future it will no longer make sense to send everything overseas.
Not to mention the massively increased project failure rate.
Don't point that gun at him, he's an unpaid intern!
How dare you. You may think you're being clever, green, perhaps even resourceful. But the fact is, every time you use recycled equipment you're stealing from the pockets of the hard-working, starving engineers at Intel!
Who do you think created the "intellectual property" inside your machine? Intel, I presume, have invested a lot of time and money into designing that chip you're running, and you've never paid them a dime for their effort. Thief! Just imagine if everybody behaved as you do - nobody would make computers anymore!
CPUs want to be free. Intel want to be paid. You just want to be cheap.
--Gareth
If distributing meat becomes trivially easy then butchers will go out of business. But meat only benefits the person in physical possession of it when it is consumed. Meat producers can charge that person for meat and hence derive a profit from producing meat.
Not the case with songs. When a song is released into the world it benefits anyone who can get a copy and chooses to play it. That's already anyone motivated and in a western country, and it's just going to get more universal. But a song producer can't charge the whole world for their song. So it's not clear how they can make a profit. If they go out of business we can expect a drying-up of new song production.
There are a few ways out of this.
But none of these is an easy fix.
----- DavidWill Young has released great tracks
No, Will Young's producers have released great tracks. Will Young just sung on them, badly, and was cleaned up in post.
both the UK and USA seem to love Leona Lewis
No, Leona Lewis is on heavy rotation in the UK and USA, with a huge PR machine firing stories into the press every second day to keep the buzz going.
Some of the output has been pure shite, of course - Michelle "sympathy vote" McManus springs to mind.
She's not bad for a karaoke singer. Nice enough person, too.
If its a private backup service ie password etc whats the problem. I anyone really going to give their user and pass out as the RIIA could delete all the files stored. In Australia AFAIK, unless the law has changed, again. Once you bought a CD you can make a backup copy, ie any format, as long as you still hold in your the original CD, BUT, ARIA ( Aust version of RIAA) has made a law that if you play music publicly not only do you have to pay a public performance license but also a media format transfer license as well for every song you have ripped/copied etc. When will these guys stop, (when everyone stopa buying music because they sure everyone who has a original copy and a backup)
...some people are interested in music (and other art forms) that are created under copyright.
In the U.S., everything which falls under the category of "music and other arts forms" is copyrighted by default at the moment of creation. Underground music is no less copyrighted than mainstream music.
Basically, it suggests an irrational prejudice against commercial music.
In the "old days," the commercial stuff went on Top 40 and was played to death until you never wanted to hear the song again. It was called "AM radio." The underground stuff was on FM.
The music on FM was always more diverse, more adventurous, and sometimes songs were longer than 3 minutes. The teenyboppers listed to AM. Then Clear Channel came along and turned FM into AM Top 40, which now seems to be the only option.
Last year's best selling album (in the U.S) moved 4.8 million copies, putting it in the hands of roughly 1.6% of the population. The other 98.4% of us passed on it.
Prejudice against commercial music is not irrational. Believing it is somehow superior seems to to be the bigger leap.
Look at the title of this page.
Piracy is not a valid argument against EMI's behavior in this instance. The blacksmiths and buggy whip makers didn't take their own product, make it more difficult to use, limit the number of horses the buggy whips could be used on, tell you where you could and could not store it and then sue you if you manage to access it successfully without taking the buggy whip back for verification every time.
Edison tried something like that with the moving picture business, which promptly moved 3000 miles west to get away from him.
The idea that making a copy of a work should be regulated to ensure compensation of the artist worked rather well in the 1600 and 1700s, when copies were difficult to make, cost a lot and required specialized equipment. I'd go as far as saying it was an excellent kludge to ensure payment of the artist. It does not belong in an era where copies can be made in seconds at no effort with commonly available equipment, and when the majority of an artist's income is usually then diverted to large greedy companies that add little or no value. It doesn't help the artists, it helps the leeches. Copyright is badly broken and needs to go. Replacing it will be hard, but at this stage given how little artists actually get, if their compensation is your concern good will and donations, as poor as they are, would fare better than the existing system for the vast majority of artists.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Certainly UK lawmakers are not so ignorant or unimaginative. There is no way to play a CD unless you copy the music off of the CD, decode the digital signal, then eventually pipe it out analogue speakers or earphones. You can't play the CD by just looking at it -- by their nature, they are a digital source that needs to be read off by some digital reader and converted before they are useful.
CD players vary by complexity, but even portable walkman-type devices from 20 years ago had buffers that had different capacities and different abilities to keep playing after the CD had spun down. To allow copying of the CD into its computer memory would forbid features like "Skip protection", and spin-down features to save battery life and batteries. This entails less battery use and less toxic garbage to dispose of.
In fact, it might be better to only run the loading of the buffer from the CD when on house current ("the Mains"), then you could not waste battery life on running a CD motor, but could allow preserving battery power for essential operations like amplifying the music through headphones when you are away from the house. Of course, to be useful, with a small device, and rechargeable batteries you can probably get up to 10-12 hours of playback from an entirely solid state device, so you'd want to be able to buffer at least that much CD-music in the device so you could just carry it. If it's rechargeable, you might want even more CD-buffering capacity. I'd expect a computer to facilitate management of the buffer would be useful. Conceivably, with today's storage and portable power solutions, its easy to see how that buffer could hold literally 1000's of CD's.
I'm told that buffer space in a portable player can be optimized by throwing out parts of the audio signal that most people wouldn't hear on a portable player anyway. This can really optimize power consumption, since you can play the same song with as little as 10% of its normal memory-transfer requirements and still have it sound 'fine' for a portable player. These extra bits would waste more power being transferred around, and while its a very small amount, over megabytes and gigabytes of music playing, your' talking moving 10k/minute vs. 1k/minute.
Going from the most basic player, and adding energy-saving features you still need to copy the music off the CD -- I don't know of anyone who can listen to a CD by holding it against their ear or nor any blind person who can read off the vibes by touch. Just doesn't work that way. So where would they draw the line?
What players don't copy the digital CD data off in order to have it eventually turned into sound in some earbuds or speakers?
?
I am well aware that Will didn't write "Leave right now", and that Girls Aloud didn't write "The Show". However, I'm also aware that Eg White and Brian Higgins are great songwriters, while the aforementioned singers are great performers/vocalists. Higgins even pointed out that as he is a terrible singer, what exactly should he be doing other than writing songs for other people? If you've got a great songwriter and a great singer, what's wrong with pairing them up?
Don't give me the whole pitch correction spiel either - that's an issue with modern production pretty much everywhere, just like the loudness wars. Also, the genesis of these acts means that we have a rather unique record of exactly how they sound uncorrected and they are good singers. No, they're not as technically good as many classical singers, but they are good pop singers which is a quite different beast (side note: Charlotte Church was at best an OK pop singer).
I'm sure Michelle is just lovely, and she has a reasonable voice, but can you honestly say she had any star potential? Obviously her debut track was just dross, but I really can't see her having fared any better if she'd been given Bleeding Love.
Perhaps you might be more productive in your comments than slinging around ad hominem attacks on people. And perhaps before you definitively state that security and legal concerns trump my $0.00078 savings you had best have a CISSP and a law degree under your belt. Oh, and the savings are a bit more than $0.00078: if we assume we'll need to scale to 500,000 users (0.2% of the adult US population) with an average of 100 tracks each (many will have more) at an average 4MB, then suddenly we are at 200TB of storage. As you are likely aware, building and maintaining a 200TB storage facility is a bit more costly than .078 cents. I would estimate the cost at $175,000 - more than 20 cents per gig due to all the support hardware and software licensing for the SAN.
Now, perhaps "shared folder" was a poor term to use. Would you prefer "shared storage area network"? Either way you still have a large chunk of storage which multiple people are accessing for the purpose of uploading and downloading mp3 files. I guess one distinction I should have made is that while we know that users will only have restricted access to the files in their own account the record companies will do their best to obfuscate this issue and imply that that is not the case - that everyone can get to everything.
Personally, I would not shed a tear if the xxAA and record labels all went bankrupt tomorrow. This whole thing is not about getting the artists what they deserve, it's about squeezing every last dollar out of their precious "IP" and feathering their own beds. If this were not the case, they wouldn't be constantly seeking to have royalty rates for artists lowered, and they would have distributed some of the proceeds from their extortion^W lawsuits to the people they allege were harmed.
I'm sure Michelle is just lovely, and she has a reasonable voice, but can you honestly say she had any star potential? Obviously her debut track was just dross, but I really can't see her having fared any better if she'd been given Bleeding Love.
None of them have any "star potential". They're all equally forgettable, replaceable people who are only famous because you allow yourself to be told they're famous.
A best site to download mp3 music http://www.lavamus.com/ http://mp3royal.com/
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
"I think the world probably would be better if we had stuck with horse-drawn carts, from a purely environmental perspective."
So go for it. The Amish do welcome people into their community if they're willing to convert. What's that? You'd miss the convenience of modern life?
Or do you mean blacksmiths had less iron-shod wheels to fix? AFAIK that would typically be a fairly minor part of a smith's business, and buggies were becoming rubber-shod even without automobiles. BTW, I have a friend who's a farrier and he makes about double what I do (I'm a software developer) - but I don't usually get bruises from where a PC kicked me or stepped on my foot...
I doubt the police are that naive. The truth is, the war on drugs employs quite a few people. As for politicians, saving your children from scary drugs makes a great talking point.
So, almost certainly their backup service is a massive shared folder that all their backup service users have access to. Large shared folder? Multi-user access? Starting to sound a bit more like the loathed P2P the record labels love to hate, isn't it?
No, it sounds like compression with very large variable-length codebooks and hash-based lookup tables. What's wrong with a compressed filesystem?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Actually I like dry aged meats, and there is no reason that the butchers couldn't use refrigeration and plastic now its just that the qaulity of the mass produced items are much lower then if I goto a butcher or meat locker now. As I spent most of my life eaither in Iowa or on the border its been easy to get really good local beef, so I may be spoiled.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
Or, maybe, just maybe, the poster calling himself "gazbo" actually likes their music, and you just do not.
Radical idea.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
I thought this looked familiar.
Have you driven a fnord... lately?
You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later.
It's too bad the parent poster was anonymous... He might not see this reply
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer CDs. Why is no one buying CDs? Are people not interested in music? Do people prefer to watch TV, see films, read books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blameI no longer use CDs. My ~400 CD collection is stored safely in boxes, in my closet.
In my car, I use an iPod. It allows me to access my large music collection in the palm of my hand, without carrying CDs from home or worrying about damaging or loosing them.
I have my entire music collection copied to my computer at work. This allows me to access any music without carrying CDs and worrying about loosing or damaging them.
About a year ago, when I upgraded my laptop, I hooked my old laptop up to my "good" stereo. This was the day that I stopped handling CDs. After this day, when I would purchase a CD, it would be inserted into a computer once, ripped, and then placed on a shelf to collect dust.
Today, all of my music purchases are downloads. There's no point in buying a CD if all it's going to do is collect dust and take up space. No one patronizes your business because it's easier to buy music from iTunes or Amazon.
No, I will not work for your startup
A best site to download mp3 music http://www.lavamus.com/ http://all-of-lyrics.com/