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Music Industry Tells Advertisers to Boycott "Pirate" Baidu
An anonymous reader points to a story at PC Authority, which begins: "Music industry representatives have warned advertisers to stop supporting Baidu, China's largest search engine, because they believe it is encouraging music piracy. Baidu is the largest source of pirated music in China, according to the representatives, who describe the company as 'incorrigible.' The Chinese firm's music search engine is accessed through what is described as a prominent link on the company's home page."
http://www.google.com/search?q=prince+mp3+%22index+of%22
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
I only see scribbles.
Attitudes make the difference between Space and Time: we want to MAX our temporal, and MIN our spatial extension.
Why would advertisers care? They don't have any music being pirated (or obtained legally, for that matter).
Maybe they should have sent Baidu a DMCA notice instead. </sarcasm>
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
Didn't know about this until today, thanks RIAA! Seems you're doing more to help piracy than hurt it. Bash the (pretty f'ing bad comparably) napster, which lead eventually to the better protocols today, without which wider scale piracy wouldn't even be able to the masses! Then you give these mediums free advertising by screaming about how easy it is to get what you want to hear without dealing with extortion rate pricing. (Yeah yeah news groups, xdcc, etc... but your average joe can handle a torrent a lot easier than that)
Am thoroughly disgusted by the illegal activities of these music companies and their hypocrisy.
Sony infected many computers with a dangerous trojan, which would have sent any hacker to 40 years in Prison, and they escaped conviction or even a fine.
RIAA has been ruled against many times in court and ordered to pay lawyers fees to a poor single mom, and still they are loose: No arrest, no seizure of their equipment, etc.
MediaSentry and other RIAA hackers violate state laws in Montana, California, Texas and a host of states and yet continue to operate even though they are illegal. None has been sued yet and their findings are valid in a court of law: Its like a thief acting as a witness to a houseowner against another thief.
RIAA would be happy if the whole internet shut down tomorrow but they still can produce music at zero cost and sell it for $29.99 an album.
The Baidu search engine should show its middle finger publicly at RIAA and also sue them for defamation.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
OMG, you got t3h first post and you write something relevant and on-topic, not an AC troll?
What a n00b! Next time, make certain your post includes: Something About Goatse (have you seen that film? Cameron Pwndarse is great!), p1st fr05t, or a little ASCII art man with a big willy (reminding us that Slashdot suXx0rz).
Seriously mate, you'd better be careful, the question of trolling Slashdot is the inalienable perogative of your working Anonymous Cowards. What's the use of us sitting up all night, waiting for the next submission. If a member jumps in before you and doesn't even post a troll?
As a member of the Amalgamated Union of Arseholes, Loudmouths, Cowards and Other Trolling Persons I order you to stop getting first posts, and to stop getting first posts NOW.
I searched for my own music on Baidu, and it didn't find it. How can I submit it?
I clicked all the links on the homepage, and hovered my mouse over all the links on the result page, and couldn't find anything that looked like a submission form.
I'd love it if everyone in China were to download my compositions - they are all Creative Commons-licensed.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
AFAIK, artists may be able to earn more money by putting their music to download for free on a website with advertising, than by going through a record company. When will the record companies finally realize they need to adapt?
..it was all Greek to me.
Oh wait...
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The music industry works completely differently in China and everyone knows it. Especially the musicians. They know the only way to make money is through sponsored live performances and product endorsements. No-one expects anyone to pay for recorded music because it's completely impossible to stop piracy.
Yes, yes. Don't feed the trolls. But if the article is a troll in itself, why not?
It's not that simple.
For a start, advertising doesn't really pay big bucks any more. We've had companies flop during the peak of advertising money in the dot-con years with that model, what makes you think it's more viable now?
A quick search says that the Cost Per Click (i.e., what the advertising companies pay) can be as low as 1 cent per click. After the ad provider takes their share, it's even less money for the site carrying the ads. And that's per _click_. So if every single person downloading your music were to actually click a banner per song downloaded (fat chance) and the ad provider gave you the full cent (fat chance), you'd need to sell some thousands of songs per month just to pay for your hosting costs. Probably more, since you use bandwidth too.
Pay per view, even less. If you go really per view, expect it to be small fractions of a cent.
Remember, you're not Penny Arcade or PvP Online as a musician. You're not going to make a new song per day, and serve an ad or two with each one.
The RIAA members also provide one valuable service: they create a scarcity via marketing. There are hundreds of thousands of girls who can sing just as well as Britney Spears, and don't look much worse. But there's only one Britney Spears. And boy band members are even more dime a dozen, and chosen mostly on how well they look (i.e. how wet would they get a 16 year old girl seeing them on stage.) Not on any skills in composing that music or expressing anything profound. There are a few tens of million of young guys who'd be not much worse than, say, Backstreet Boys, and some would probably be only better.
So while it's easy to say "OMG, musician X is only getting a pittance out of the CD sales, and gets all the money out of concerts anyway," the more cruel reality is that musician X would be yet another _nobody_ without the publisher. Maybe a thousand people would know about his music, and maybe a dozen of them could be arsed to show up at a concert.
To put it otherwise, it's an economy of massive overproduction. If left to the free market, you'd be about as able to make a money out of music as you'd make money out of your farm in 1929. When there's 10 times more produced than anyone needs, and the products are perfectly interchangeable, the price doesn't just go 10 times lower. It spirals down to the point where nobody can make a living out of it.
Now I'm not saying it's necessarily the best model for society, but that's how it works.
And the moral of the story is: well, maybe a better model can be found, but it will have to be a better one than, basically, "but I want them to work for me for a tenth of a cent in ads."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Maybe someone can verify that, but I read that in some areas (South America? Africa?) copying is so widespread that artists can't really make a living off their music. So what they do is they make praise songs about some politicians and other celebrities who pay them for the song.
:)
I could see that work, if the song is good. Then again, would you want to see the new smash hit "Bush is great"?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Interesting - in many ways, we're seeing a return to medieval ideas of productivity and "intellectual property". Payment comes from a wealthy patron, not a wider audience. Works are distributed to anyone who has the means to copy them. Anonymity is not uncommon, especially for more controversial writings. Music earns money in performance. Re-working other people's material is not plagiarism, but a means of honouring one's predecessors, learning one's craft and encouraging creativity. I think we could learn a lot from people like Chaucer and Dante.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
In a way isn't that why Google created Google Hack, to show sites, what content is floating out there, so they can secure it or pursue those who let their content sit out there for free.
Can I bum a sig?
Multiple comments here on /. tells the music industry to adapt to the 'new world'. This is like throwing a lobster in boiling water, and telling it to adapt.
The business model for the music industry has always been:
1. Buy expensive recording and vinyl pressing machines.
(The price on this equipment gives them a de facto monopoly on production)
2. Pay musicians a song for their work (maybe this is where the expression comes from?)
3. Sell disks for as much PROFIT as possible
In the 'new world' there is no monopoly and ipso facto no music industry.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Opportunist: in some areas (South America? Africa?) copying is so widespread that artists can't really make a living off their music
It's that way in most of the world, really. I'd bet 99% of all musicians don't make a living off their music; they may look cool when they're playing in their bar band on Saturday night, but they're right back in the cubicle (or fishing boat, depending on your profession) with the rest of us on Monday.
We see and read about the rich musicians at the very top all the time, but they're a miniscule fraction of the entire music playing populace. It's obvious that the organizations responsible for all the copyright bruhaha are interested in protecting those few moneymakers at the top of the pile.
psychodelicacy: Re-working other people's material is not plagiarism, but a means of honouring one's predecessors, learning one's craft and encouraging creativity
This is a good point. The definition of plagiarism is subjective and like all things settled by litigation, usually favors the people with the most expensive lawyers (i.e. the top media/communications companies). It's been that way in pop music forever (a few good examples can be found in the book, Confessions of a Record Producer) -- one only has to look at the R&B (Black) music scene in the 1950s-70s to see how many ideas were illegally swiped and resold by people like Pat Boone.
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
It's not that nobody is willing to pay for recorded music, it's that the product that American record companies tend to offer is crap. 5 minute tracks, usually they aren't all that good, I'll be glad when the current music industry falls so we can focus on the art again.
Music is not a product, it's art. A true masterpiece is priceless and will be paid for. An artist should get paid when CDs are being sold, however when music is shared thats advertising.
People aren't going to buy your albums or go to your concerts if they don't know who you are!
I find myself siding with the music mafia. Not in the "Piracy" sense but in the "boycott" sense.
I'd like nothing better than to boycott Baidu. Their Baidu Spiders arrive in hordes and spend hours crawling my site. They ignore crawl-delays and denies. They're looking for online poker files that were placed there by some illustrious Chinese citizen or other in an attempt to deface my website about two months ago. That lasted about four hours (from the middle of the night, local time, until I woke up next morning and made it go away), but I'm still dealing with the Baidu invasion. They're worse than Genghis Khan. An attempt to contact the email address provided resulted in a bounce stating that my ISP (Comcast) is blocked in China. My next step will probably be simply to block any contact with Baidu at all, and I've been tempted to extend that to the whole of China.
So while I generally deplore the actions of the Music Mafia, my perception is that Baidu has invited the actions by their own behavior, which is by no means above reproach.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
I'll add my own personal experience, for what it's worth - and I agree, it really isn't that simple.
I decided to make an attempt at making some money, and hopefully some day making a living (pipe dream), off of all the music that I write. I, like many, figured the old way of doing things was dead, the net is the future, and what works for others should work for me. I decided to apply the webcomic business model to music. I write a song every month, post it for free, and you can, if you are so inclined, buy some merchandise to support my efforts. The back catalog is all available to anyone, and I make a couple other inconsequential updates between songs to keep the site alive and active more than once every thirty days.
So, a couple years back, I setup my website (shameless self promotion), and I started rolling with the project. What's working in my favor:
* I've got a MySpace page, complete with all the similar musical artists friended.
* I took out some advertising on what I figured would be the most relevant (affordable) website, Questionable Content.
* I do plenty of forum posting (read: free advertising), and had a few friends and some interest in my music before the site was launched due to that.
A couple caveats, to be honest and fair about this:
* I honestly do not write even remotely commercial music; it's instrumental, and it's somewhat experimental. It's not mainstream.
* My T-shirt and web design may or may not be the best; those are not my strengths.
* I don't update absolutely every month. Right now it's working out to about two on, one off, but I've had some longer on streaks.
* I could play the MySpace / LastFM angle harder than I do, I suppose.
* I don't play live. Probably the single biggest dent in this whole thing, and likely by a good margin.
So, no, I'm not poised to take over the internet and become the next Arctic Monkeys, and while I certainly daydreamed about such things, I was mainly hoping to cover costs, and maybe even make enough to purchase another effects pedal or even a new instrument. My total haul from not quite two years of all of this? Not enough to cover the domain name for a single year. Hell, even if the merchandise was completely cost-less to produce and I made 100% profit on it (Cafepress certainly takes plenty), I would still be in the red. Take out items bought by my friends and that would be even more true.
Honestly, a record contract is looking better and better the more I try to go it alone (this isn't my only musical project ever, either).
I'm not saying that because it doesn't work for me, it won't work for anyone, but it's not as simple or as easy as one might think. The net isn't the answer to everything, and the old guard isn't completely irrelevant or without its advantages. Going with a new, cutting edge model of distribution does not equal success, nor does it equal easy or guaranteed money. It doesn't necessarily even equal any money.