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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.
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.
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?
</audiophile>
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?
I'm living in Beijing and, as far as I can find out, there is not much censorship on music (most Chinese can not understand English lyrics anyway).
Unfortunatly the selection of music sold is quite limited. The recent hit parade and old time classics are readily available in the CD shops or on the street. (all are copies, legal CD's are very hard to come by)
But then again, you are able to find just about everything on the internet. Ting (Mandarin chinese for 'to hear') is one of the better MP3 sites, indexing thousands of MP3's in a wide range of styles which can be freely listened to online.
(http://www.ting-mp3.com)
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.
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.
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