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Why Starting a Legal Online Music Vendor Is Tough
Hodejo1 writes "Former MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson offers commentary at The Register saying any attempts to build a sanctioned digital music site today is doomed from the outset. 'The internet companies I talk to don't mind giving some direct benefit to music companies. What torpedoes that possibility is the big financial requests from labels for "past infringement," plus a hefty fee for future usage. Any company agreeing to these demands is signing their own financial death sentence. The root cause is not the labels — chances are if you were running a label you would make the same demands, since the law permits it."
Just because I'm allowed by law to charge someone whatever I wish for the fruits of my business, this doesn't mean I would, or that I should. I would go out of business very rapidly.
However, if I ran a cartel, controlling a monopoly share of a highly desirable resource... then I guess I understand where they're coming from.
But... wait... aren't monopolies illegal for this very reason?
With the success rate of the officially sanctioned sites and plain "not getting it" of the music companies, it's a wonder that the traditional music industry is still in business!
... but I didn't see the word "iTunes" anywhere in that article.
It is possible to build a profitable, long-lasting, and legal online music business, Mr. Robertson. I'm genuinely sorry you failed to do it, but to pretend that the biggest player in the online music world simply doesn't exist is kind of childish.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The root cause is not the labels -- chances are if you were running a label you would make the same demands, since the law permits it.
Irrelevant, whether or not the law "allows" it.
As various legacy-media industries (and I don't mean just the RIAA here) slowly waste away to nothing, they have two choices - Find a way to make their product available on terms we can all agree to (and do so knowing how easily we can choose to simply pirate their content)... Or cease to exist.
The right to "past damages" doesn't matter if you have no future. These industries have a wide assortment of 3rd parties all but begging to solve their current problems for them with various forms of modern online distribution; Only stubbornness, and a near-suicidal insistance on maintaining some mythical "control" they lost over a decade ago, have kept such ventures from any chance of success.
So before you absolve the labels of blame in this matter - Ask yourself, would you, starving in the gutter, turn down a lifetime supply of Big Macs because you think the world "owes" you a home-cooked steak dinner?
in here : "The root cause is not the labels"
if they are making the same demands if the law permits it, they are the root cause.
Read radical news here
Troll post is bad! And has been posted many times before and is just as irrelevant.
If it's real, have the guts to register and login, and defend it. Don't just post the same bullshit over and over again.
First, I'm not sure why you posted as anonymous coward. It is an interesting story and I have deep sympathy for your plight. But I don't think your blacklist will be successful in saving your business. If it is true that piracy is destroying your business, then refusal to sell to pirates only hurts you more. Pirates can find music anywhere. I'm sure you've heard people here explaining that most of the time you can pirate things even before they are released. And as we all know, one copy might as well be a million copies given the internet.
So, your refusal to sell to someone who wanted to buy an album means that you will go out of business faster. It means that you will have less time to find some other way to make your living.
I'm really sorry, but if what you say is true, you are already on borrowed time. Why not use your favorable position as a respected business operator to springboard you into the next venture? If you alienate those around you, will it not be more difficult to create your new business?
I wish you all the best and hope you reconsider your tactics. Life is rarely fair, but sometimes new opportunities are created when old ones fail. This is the essence of being an entrepreneur.
Sounds familiar in many ways.
lol wut?
Are you... joking?
Or are you a RIAA marketing consultant?
This is a stellar piece of propaganda. Even the part about the kids wearing shabby clothing. Priceless.
Of course, if it's true, you need to get out of that business immediately.
I don't give a flying rats ass about piracy. The entire concept of purchasing information that is tied to a small piece of plastic is silly in the digital age, prima facie.
Your grandchildren will look at you funny when you suggest that one day, music could only be purchased on round pieces of plastic. They simply won't understand why something so trivial as "data" had to be purchased by means of a physical medium.
If you want to blame the decline of your business on digital music distribution, you would be accurate, but blaming it on piracy falls somewhere between a straw man and a red herring.
Lets look at reality.
Physical CD sales declined by 88 million from 2006 to 2007. (from 588 million to 500 million)
At the same time (2007), the iTunes music store sold about 1.8 billion tracks. They were thought to have about 60% of the market, indicating that there are about 3 billion tracks sold LEGALLY online.
So, a decline in 88 million plastic thingies sold... however, 3 billion tracks legally sold (for cash-money) online during the same period.
No, it is not really a piracy issue, it's merely a change in the distribution method of music.
You're on the wrong end of it.
Get out now.
Therefore, online distribution replaces their entire core business proposition, so naturally they resist it.
However, the history of every mass technology - transport, the telephone system - is that what began as a monopoly with artificial shortages (stagecoaches, cable) ends up being democratised, and in doing so creates wealth in unexpected ways. The stagecoaches tried to stop the canals and the canals tried to stop the railways, the telephone companies tried to stop the Internet, at least in the UK, and they all failed.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
FTFA: "The root cause is not the labels - chances are if you were running a label you would make the same demands, since the law permits it."
Unless, of course, you didn't. The law also permits playing a guitar exclusively in a soundproof booth in the middle of nowhere so that no one will ever be able to hear your music, much less consider purchasing it, which seems like the business model the major labels are moving towards.
You could, for instance, start your own label specifically to avoid this, avoid DRM, allow anyone to stream your catalog as much as they want, offer a variety of formats and purchase options, etc. I think the law permits that too.
As for viability, it might have some issues, but Magnatune has been doing that for five years now and doesn't seem about to stop.
http://www.magnatune.com/
"The root cause is not the labels â" chances are if you were running a label you would make the same demands, since the law permits it."
The law doesn't permit it, it requires it. If a rights owner doesn't pursue infringements in every case they risk losing them to a later infringer who points out the earlier failure to protect.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The fact that the Law is the only organisation protecting other businesses against this kind of abuse its a clear signal that 1) the music companies have become too mighty for the good of the country (no real supply-and-demand balancing) 2) does not actually want any other company possibly upsetting their distribution-methodology (by effectivily killing any competitors even before they have actually started).
But yes, if living by the Law leads to a certain dead it means that the Law is a very sick puppy (even if its not aware of it).
As most huxsters have worked out, even if they do something illegal or border line illegal for a while and make a killing then, having no moral conscience it pays off. Unfortunately that's what's wrong with the world today. Look at the sub-prime mortgage crisis for example, how many lenders knew they were handing out bad debt? Do they care now? Probably not, they got their commission, as for everyone else, hasta la vista.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
So if it is not strictly forbidden you MUST do it? That is a whole new twist and says more about him as a person then about the people who do it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
(just to put this in perspective)
P.S. I love words which can mean virtually their own opposite, like sanction.
First, I'm not sure why you posted ... without checking on the contents of the post you replied to.
Kind of hard to believe a Slashdot ID as low as yours has never seen that troll post before. Or are you some kind of "second-degree troll" who pretends to believe troll posts? Arrggh! My mind ties itself into pretzels thinking about the boasting conversation at a "fourth-degree troll" convention in the far future....
OTOH, I admit there has been a decided lull (thank the FSM!) in the posting of that particular one, in recent months. Maybe you just have the blessing, in this case, of a short memory. Or got stranded on a desert island for the wrong period.
The article doesn't mention a lot of sites, in fact none of the BIG company backed sites are mentioned. And this makes me wonder, how succesful is iTunes on its own as a business? It has long been rumoured that Apple makes its money from iPods not iTunes. If that is the case, and you accept the same from products launched by the likes of Amazon then there is a 5th category, sites that barely break even thanks to the insane costs, that help keep the online music sales at the level the music industry is comfortable with.
Steve Jobs managed to get the labels to accept the famous 99 cent, but it stalled there. 99 cent is still insanely expensive if you consider the huge cost reduction in distribution.
Apple hasn't been able to drive the price lower nor has it been able to get more music online, like getting the labels to open up their entire catelogue.
I would be very intrested to see any real figures showing that iTunes is turning a profit and enough of a profit for a company whose only product is a music store to keep it alive.
Don't forget that Apple is an awful lot like MS, it can afford to throw money at projects, and internet rumor has it that iTunes is just such a project. Not that Apple minds since the iPod is earning them every dollar spend back tenfold.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Huh??? Honestly, I was replying to something, but the something is gone now....
Seriously... can that happen, or have I just gone batty????
The summary also ignores the fact that the content industries have been gaming the legislative system, to their benefit, for quite a while....
But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame.
It's a common scapegoat, but missing the mark. Percieved value and retail price are an order of magnitude out of place.
Instead of wasting money on a shiney disk with about 45 minutes of stuff along with one good song, I can buy a DVD for half the price.
I can carbonate water at home and add my own flavoring and sugar, but I still purchase fountain drinks for the convience.
CD's are now the oposite of convience for more money. Downloads go right on to an MP3 player. CD's have to be found if still in print, ripped and put on a player.
Online is a-la-carte. CD is a canned package.
Some compainies wanted to make and install in store CD burning kiosks. Guess who killed that in the bud?
For an industry who doesn't listen to their consumers, they sure scream P-P a lot for their lack of adjusting to the market.
If you scream P-P enough, will the death of your scapegoat really fix your root problems?
Some people are offended by my blacklist system.
This would be mostly your best customers. Those who don't listen to music don't buy CD's. Those deeply into music purchases CD's and shares copies of out of print stuff or the one good song on a CD. Blacklisting them is a great way of killing the biggest part of your business. Thanks for providing great evidence the industry doesn't understand the market.
Much of the industry is selling pig in a poke packages. I bought the DC Talk album Supernatural because our church performed Red Letters, and I enjoyed the choir rendition. I hated the album, even the good track. I'm not into acid rock. Needless to say, once burnt, twice shy.
How many times have you bought an album because you only heard one song and then didn't like the rest of the album at all?
P-P expands music horizons. Most of the time when I bought albums, I heard it from friends first. (I quit buying entirely when the industry started dropping the nuke bomb on some unlucky few as a protest.)
My peak buying days was when I was in the military while in my peak piracy days with cassette tapes. The industry doesn't understand their consumers or the market.
The truth shall set you free!
I'm sorry, but just because I'm *permitted* to do something doesn't mean that I would or should.
Hand someone a right (or rather, neglect to disallow them some power) and you most certainly can still blame them for exercising it.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Step back a bit. Why should online vendors be able to profit from someone else's work. Having a record company between the customer and the artist is bad enough, without having to add extra middle men.
What service does the 'Legal Online Music Vendor' supply? If it's selling other peoples music then it is already obsolete.
[Intentionally left blank]
Snatch up all the Apple itunes, Amazon MP3s, Rhapsody, et al before they go out of business. A shame too - Amazon was quite useful. Guess its back to Ebay.
lol: You see no door there!
You say at the end the examples from history about product X trying to stop product Y from replacing it and seem to think this applies to the music industry.
You are wrong, for that to work in media it would have to be theather trying to stop movies, movies trying to stop TV. That indeed does not work.
But what is really the case is that the music industry is not being replaced. There is nothing to take over, it still is the same model that existed since recordable music was invented, X performs for Y who records it who sells it to Z who listens to it. As long as X and Y expect payment from Z, the industry will remain roughly the same. Yes, with advances in tech some X can cut out Y, but this has always been the case. Lots of musicians have in the past created their own labels, in fact most labels were started by musicians out of dissatisfaction by the existing labels, until they became big themselves.
For Z having every X be his own seller is also messy, you don't buy books from writers do you? Hell, you don't even buy them from publishers mostly, you buy them from bookstores. Would you really be comfortable giving your credit card details to every artist asking for 10 cents for their latest album? Not that that would work, the credit card companies want bigger fees. Sure there are some small sites that try to be the go between but there you go already, that site is going to want payment, exactly the same as the labels, and the more they advertise their new sign-ups, the more risks they take, the more they want paid on each song they manage to sell.
The entire problem lies in the recording. In theory, this allows a musician to earn an infinite amount of money from a finite and fixed amount of work, this never works. Play around in virtual economies such as found in games for a while to see why not. Usually, the more you want to earn, the more you got to invest. Imagine a simple chart, X is amount of money invested in a concert, Y is the money earned from tickets. Obviously if you want Y to increase you first need to invest in X by renting a bigger arena.
But with recorded music, this doesn't work, the cost of recording a song is relatively straightforward, rental of studio, salery for techies, but the potential earnings can be anything really. With a piece of recorded music, with every tech advance you are getting closer to a product that has an infinite supply for a finite cost. For, lets say 3000 dollars I can get a song, that I could potentially sell an infinite amount of times and with copyright as it is I got a century to do it in.
This is of course very tempting but it only works if I am the sole supplier of that song. If everybody who has a copy can share that, then all I can count on is to sell 1 copy and at 3000 dollars, finding that first punter is going to be tricky.
The music industry can make enormous profits THANKS to the fact that its product is in infinite supply BUT it can only make those profits if it somehow makes that infinite supply finite.
Live music isn't the answer, is a concert ticket really worth 100 dollars or more if EVERYONE could have a front row seat? Well the answer is TV, everyone has good view and you don't pay 100 dollars for a live concert not even if the camera is on stage!
Live music obeys the normal economic rules, recorded entertainment does not.
What can we do about it?
Very little, you could make a law that stays every recording can only be sold an artificial number of times before it must be re-recorded. This would make it a finite supply product obeying the normal rules of the economy, if you want a specific recording, then just bid for it against other intrested parties. It would solve a lot of problems, but I doubt everyone would agree to it, including the buyers.
You could severely limit the amount of time you could sell a recording. It would have to be severe, a period of maybe a couple of years, this would give popular music a short-time to recoup their costs, give them a change to earn
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Why would anyone want to start a "legit" online radio ?
All of the good stations started out as pirates.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Maybe after being on slashdot since forever (judging from your ID) you should have learnt by now that there is this thing called "moderation" and that articles can be "modded" up or down. You can set a limit so you will not see articles below a certain level. The post you replied to has since been modded down, thus it is now below your threshold, and you are not seeing it.
c++;
Well, I think you have some good points, but the fundamental shift I see is not in how music is distributed, but how it is consumed
The LP album is, essentially, a concert piece. Thirty years ago, singles from an album were what hooked people into buying, but people sat down and listened to a whole album, all of the A side then all the B side. They didn't play one track, hop up and take the needle off, remove the disk and put it in its sleeve, remove another record put it on the platter, then carefully set the needle down on a specific track.
CDs are the same.
With digital music players, they can and do play a jumbled sequence of single tracks. It's a kind of return to the day when wealthy patrons had musician servants that composed short pieces like "Fanfare as Lord So and So Sits Down to Dinner". People use music players to provide that kind of soundtrack to things they do in their lives, like working out on a Stair Master.
The LP or CD is more like a symphony, a longer work that makes sense in the context of middle class people making an evening of going to the concert hall.
If the labels want to sell CDs, then they have to sell CDs that are more than random collections of mediocre songs tied to one or two song that the consumer wants. It's not the mediocrity of the filler material that's the problem, it's that it is filler material in the first place. I happen to like opera, but there a plenty of bits in even the best opera nobody is going to put on their play list unless they're listening to the whole thing through.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yes, he was actually joking. Actually, as people on imageboards tend to say...
"this copy pasta is stale."
Your grandchildren will look at you funny when you suggest that one day, music could only be purchased on round pieces of plastic. They simply won't understand why something so trivial as "data" had to be purchased by means of a physical medium.
Could not agree more. Well put.
On the 'sales decline' tip though I did a small study into the 'decline' of music sales and a little survey with a few dozen people (yeah yeah i know, needs to be bigger to be accurate but i think you'd be surprised) revealed another interesting result... yes a lot of people's music purchasing habits have declined but it's primary because people get sick of music these days. Between commercial radio, commercials themselves and the quantity of popular music in everything from cafe's to bookstores, to movies and advertising, a popular song gets milked for all it's worth and people aren't interested in buying it. A lot of people that previously bought popular music weren't buying the stuff being jammed down their throat.
A somewhat moot point to yours and this article, but relevant to the CD sales argument i feel.
Ummmm.......You DO realize that what you are responding to is a VERY old copy/paste troll,don't you? I mean REALLY old,as in I remember reading that one when the 1x CD burners came out. Everytime someone brings up the cartels somebody copy/pastes that old thing.
As for how we can get away from these cartels,well other than forming an EFF style lobbying group to just buy our own congress critters to pass laws for THE PEOPLE for a change,is with a better way for new bands to be heard. Since I'm sure that most would agree that if you want to see a band firing on all cylinders the best way is live where the crowd can get them pumped up and rocking,why doesn't someone start a live clubnet? The clubs could get free advertising and sell merchandise to folks that would otherwise never get a chance to step foot in their club, the bands would get free publicity and could have links to their homepage where they can sell their own merchandise, and the site could sell MP3s off the bands playing.
I know I would love it if I could go to one site and see live shows from clubs across the country and maybe even across the planet live. Plus there is no better way to get a feel for a band short of being there in person than seeing how they do in front of an audience. And it wouldn't cost the giant bucks like starting up a new record label or having to kiss the cartel booty does. And finally by having it grouped by different styles it would allow us to check out bands we may have never heard of or who haven't toured anywhere near our areas. And they could start small with just a few clubs and build up slowly. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Ha ha! I guess we need a -1 Desert Isle moderation. I really never saw that one before. And as you might notice from my subsequent reply, I'm having a bad day of it...
Oh well... Life goes on...
gimme a break. the root cause is a conglomerate of labels who arguably add nothing of value anymore to music, as online distribution has supplanted them almost entirely.
its not their fault. if you were about to be unceremoniously kicked off your pile of bloodmoney, you'd fight like hell too!
Good people go to bed earlier.
And you can't (generally) buy the same song from different entities.
Lennon/McCartney's licensees would beg to differ, as would anyone else who's ever recorded a cover version. I seem to remember seeing at least a dozen different versions of "Macarena" on the old Napster. If there's no cover version of a given song, that's your cue to record one under whatever mechanical license scheme is in effect in your country.
A conflict that is unlikely to be resolved until monopoly rights are restructured as non-exclusive revenue share rights, which simply is unlikely to happen any time soon.
In the case of songs, it has already been so restructured: recording artists share their revenue with composers.
The article clearly states that it is merely an 'Opinion' note the upper left hand corner tag.
Other than that I would offer another view. There's still plenty of opportunity to grow online music.
When the dust settles, many moons from now, the emerging model will be a hybrid between what Napster was and iTunes is. It will probably emerge outside of the US because the morons on Capitol Hill are too quick to appease the idiots at RIAA. But it will emerge. Think Janis Ian and many more like her.
Of course if by some miraculous turn of events RIAA decides to invest in technology instead of lawyers it may start here, but don't hold your breath. Blinded by greed, crippled by stupidity.
Hope is the currency of fools
I'm amazed he even went to the effort of posting it here, knowing the reaction it would get. I'm a little bit shocked about the hypocrisy in his post though. For some reason a "clean cut and friendly" buisiness is allowed to assault a customer that intends to purchase a CD in his store? No wonder his sales have dropped. I expect the fines/prison time he gets if he assaults every pirate that walks into his store probably dont help with the money issue either...
What would be illegal is for 90% of the record companies to collude in making the mini-disc the only outlet for music
Then why was it not illegal for 90 percent of the movie studios to collude in making DVD-Video the only outlet for copies of films sold to the home market?
"Are you... joking?
Or are you a RIAA marketing consultant?"
And the answer is .... B.
Damn story pops up every time an article is posted that is vaguely connected to music and internet. It's just some PR drone connected to the music industry doing his sorry job.
And you had the bad luck to read it before it was modded into oblivion and took it seriously.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
As for viability, it might have some issues, but Magnatune has been doing that for five years now and doesn't seem about to stop.
Magnatune and other online-only labels appear to fail it in promotion to drivers and passengers in vehicles. I have never once heard a Magnatune artist's song on FM radio in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA.
False: DynaSoar's assertion that estoppel by laches applies as strongly to copyrights and patents as it does to trademarks.
False: Nursie's assertion that laches "certainly does not apply to copyrights or patents."
True: Something in between.
Confusing: The term "intellectual property", which encourages people to draw false analogies among copyrights, patents, and trademarks.
In practice though, that's not yet stopped any of the patent trolls from plying their filthy trade.
Yet. A federal district court severely blue-penciled Jerome Lemelson's machine vision patents on a laches defense.
Nor does it force a company allowing licensed distribution of their works to demand punitive damages for perceived previous violation
But contracts with other distributors that contain an industry-standard "most favored distributor" clause do.
I have seen the same text in previous threads... It seems to be really a trollish piece of work that circulates.
CD? What.CD? I don't understand...
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Let us put that in perspective. At 10-15 songs per album, that is 200-300 million albums. Even at 20 songs per album, this would mean 150 million albums.
Deduct the 88 million less sold is an increase of albums sold of 62 million.
So instead of the decrease in albums sold, of 88 million, there is an actual increase.
I knew you were right. I just wanted to make it less dramatic and not compare oranges with apples.
And we do not even talk about the extra income from ring-tones. Something that did not happen in the past.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Unless, you were the artist that created their own music and decided to sell it from your own website....so lets say I create a website where motley crue decides to set up camp, their own piece of my website becomes theirs (like facebook for artists) from there I offer them my merchant account to process their inventory (music) this allows the artist to make exactly what they want from their music (seeing as they are allowed to sell their music without paying copyrights as per Radiohead)
I would charge them a fee for using my merchant account and voila you have a repository for music that is not your own so you are not selling it, you offer a website for storage(10$ per month for any artist) and you offer a 1$ processing fee for each album sold or a 10 cent fee per mp3 sold.
Nuff said.
The RIAA wants the whole world constantly negotiating with their lawyers.
Maintaining a huge cloud of FUD is the only way they can keep prices artificially high and the artists in their rightful places (artists need to believe that selling music to the public is difficult/expensive/risky).
This is also why they settle P2P lawsuits out of court for less than what it cost them to bring the suit. They don't care about winning, they just want the press to be constantly printing stories about P2P users being sued - keep it in the headlines.
No sig today...
Maybe a lot of people think it's old fashioned but without the album format we'd never have had Pink Floyd's The Wall, Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds or even Iron Maiden's Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. Even apart from concepts, good bands record albums that cohere. The songs are just part of the album, like chapters in a book. Who would read just the most action-packed chapter of a spy thriller, for instance?
I really do think that people who complain about the album format just don't understand rock music. It doesn't suit everything - pop "albums" really are just collections of tracks, most of them bad. But the rock album is one of the world's great inventions. Loving a great song is one thing. Loving a great album is something else altogether.
In this day and age of the all in one home entertainment centers and surround sound, I'm sure many folks are using their cable subscription for their music: not pirating and not buying CDs or downloading.
Everyone needs to realize that's it's not just buy a CD or buy online or pirate.
Some simple facts.
1991 mp3 became a standard ( Wikipedia )
1995 mp3 music hit the net via early file sharing ( Wikipedia )
2001 P2P was ubiquitous ( My observation )
So somewhere between 1995 and 2001 the music industry instead of embracing P2P and enhancing it to support a business model they instead asked the legal department for help. The legal department then got the green light to turn on the cash tap and drain possibly billions of dollars out of the artists pockets. This was the mistake. Instead of applying some creative thinking to the problem they simply turtled under a legal shell.
Even more amazing when online startups like napster and others popped onto the scene with vision, they freaked even more. They didn't even say "Why didn't we think of that?" Instead of using the vast resources at their command to create a product offering people would want they invented the WDM defense which good old Bush later used as well. As we can see the WDM defense does nothing but create more enemies and bad Karma.
Apple has shown them that money from music on the net is not only viable. It's hugely profitable. No packaging, No shelf space, and instant stock creation. But somehow the music execs still don't get it.
This has left the world in a nasty place. The music artist is loosing, the consumer is loosing, and the production companies are spilling cash to lawyers faster than they can make it. I can only see that this is not going to get better for the artist for possible a decade. And subsiquently the consumer.
( Sorry that almost became a full blown rant )
Aren't you afraid you are going to burn in hell? You go to church and brazenly conduct illegal activities, surely you aren't expecting to go heaven?
Monopolies aren't illegal for the very good reason that sometimes monopolies are unavoidable, or at least the best option. Imagine if the single corner store in every little town had to close down shop because they were the only game in town. It'd just be silly, right? Not to mention counter-productive.
Similarly here, we have a situation where monopoly is far better to the alternative. Now we just have to make sure monopolies don't engage in anti-competitive practices.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
"The root cause is not the labels -- chances are if you were running a label you would make the same demands, since the law permits it"
The law doesnt and will never define morality, or ethics. Just because they are allowed to get away with it doesnt make it acceptable.
CEO's dont get a fuckwit chip inserted into them when they accept the job, they are born that way.
I really dont see any excuse for them, or why anyone else would think its not their fault, their industry is dying, they are trying to take as much as they can before they go.
What next slashdot, are we going to have stories saying that Darl McBride was really just misunderstood ?
The way to do it is start a site that enables music sharing , and turn a blind eye to anything illegal for as long a possible.
* When the music industry come down on you make sure you milk the publicity for all its worth.
* Announce you have put some security measures in place (but only implemented half heartedly)
* Do this for as long as you possibly can whilst simultaneously increasing your user base to critical mass.
* At that point your userbase is so big that your actually now a tempting proposition for aquisition / or your in a position to sign licensing deals with labels.
Im looking at you , myspace, youtube and friends...
This concept is not new. Do you think MTV paid for all those videos when they firt started out?
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Past infringement!?
The online seller is the one taking a risk here! He's not going to pay that much. Business ideas are easy enough to come up with. If you're going to pay a huge sum up front, you might as well start selling exotic fruit or something.
And how does holding out like this benefit anyone? You get very few people willing to pay the extortionate amounts asked. If nobody pays then that's 0 x $extortionate amount. What sort of a business are they trying to run!?
I've seen this bullshit story posted again and again for years.
I don't sell 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.
What is "cop-killer rap"?
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You responded to a post that has been repeatedly posted for a number of years on umpteen sites whenever anything mentions the RIAA cartel and their doomed business model. I.e. the poster is a RIAA stooge dude or bored troll. I'm surprised you've never seen it before.
I thought I had read this before so I did a search and came up with this: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/10/2/103735/275 This post was made in 2003 (and references a previous post on Slashdot, so it could easily be older than that.) You are simply reposting a 5 year old story word for word. I somehow doubt that you are the original author (which would, ironically, make that post copyright infringement ;-) ).
That said, there are a couple of big holes in this story.
The author admits to not knowing why people aren't buying CDs, but then immediately jumps to the "inescapable truth" that Internet piracy is to blame. It isn't because the selection isn't to the buying public's taste, or because a Walmart opened down the block with better prices, or because people were buying more DVDs/video games/etc. Nope, it *had* to be Internet Piracy! And why?
Not to overuse a XKCD meme, but: Citation Needed. So I did a Google search and came up with this article: http://www.ifpi.org/content/section_news/20050623.html
Ok, the article is 3 years old, but let's let that slide for a bit. The piracy that the article speaks of is commercial CD pressing. You know, the folks who obtain one CD, burn a hundred copies, and sell them on the street corner for $1.50 each. That is a completely different form of piracy than the guy who clicks "share this folder" in LimeWire/Kazaa/etc.
Yes, the Internet does make piracy (of the P2P sharing kind) easier than it used to be. It does also have the potential to destroy the music industry as we know it now. However, many new technologies are disruptive events. The industry either has to adapt or die. When cars first came out, it was disruptive to the people in the Horse and Buggy Industry. We don't hold technology back simply because one industry doesn't want to change how they operate. For an example of how the music industry might adapt, look to eMusic and Amiee Street. As far as local record stores go, they either find a way to adapt (perhaps kiosks selling personal mix CDs) or they die out. It's just a fact of business life.
In the years since this post was originally written, advances in book piracy have been made.
As for the National Register of Pirates idea, it is quite obviously a bad idea. The original poster of this seemed to be of the opinion that the courts were taking too long so pirates should just be added to a list without a trial. Let's put aside the question of how the RIAA would get the pirates' identities and how it would be enforced for a moment. (Big questions, mind you, but let's assume some process gets put into place.) How will the list be kept focused on pirates and kept clean of the falsely accused? We have only to look at the No Fly List for an example of how a blacklist with no oversight or clear removal process can wind up triggering many false positives. If some other Jason Levine pir
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Back before there were lawns, copyright ran for 14 years. In 1790, it was extended to 28 years. From there, it slowly got extended until 1998 when Congress saw plenty of donations and all of a sudden, it shot up to the author's life plus 70 years.
Revert copyrights to the original 14 years and you'd see all kinds of music and art. Pandora.com (an outstanding music delivery idea) wouldn't be talking about pulling the plug and people would be exposed to so much outstanding music and video that we'd see a resurgence in creativity in this country.
If we had the copyright laws we have today when libraries were first being built there is no way book publishers would allow libraries to exist.
(sarcasm)
I mean places where people can go and check out entire books for free instead of having to buy them is definitely a violation of the rights of book publishers.
(/sarcasm)
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
I agree, and significantly that's why I stopped buying CDs. I am a fan of Pink Floyd, the real Floyd, before Roger Waters left. Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, Wish You Were Here. All of those albums were works of art, designed to be listened to in their entirety. But what happened on CD ? They put audible breaks in between the tracks. Ruined it completely for me, I may as well have recorded each track individually myself and slapped them together to form an album. Strangely enough, I can do that now and I make a better job of it than the official labels do.
This phenomenon is not unique to CDs either. Watching a movie on TV has got to be a pain these days due to the incessant ad breaks. You can't build an atmosphere and immerse the viewer in a situation when the dialogue switches to overly loud irrelevant material every 20 minutes. That's why I record things I want to see and rip the ads out - to restore the natural flow of the original work. I no longer have to keep the remote in my hand so I can rapidly turn the sound down to reasonable levels, I can sit back and absorb. Can you imagine a book where every 20 pages a loudspeaker erupts telling you that you're paying too much for car insurance ?
I am a retired lawyer, but back in the day conscious parallelism used to get you in big trouble. With the recent court, I am not sure how this would hold up now(one of the requirements for elevation to the appeals courts or Supreme Court in recent years seems to be that given a choice between a person and a corporation you must never have ruled in favor of the person).
Its still messed up if the 'Labels' remain the gatekeepers.
What I don't get is that MP3.com, for a long time brokered Indy groups or Garage Bands who sold their CDs directly to thier fans. Why did this stop? How did that stop? Many were VERY good bands, just as good and often better than the manufactured Label stuff. Many groups I liked made lots of money.
Micheal, thats where your money is. Ever think to cross MP3.com with online Radio ??? Then MP3.com becomes the broker and RIAA can eat shit, cause you aren't peddling any mp3s that are Labeled music, i.e. NO FEES to RIAA.
Me, I hate iTunes, its such a clunky UI, and it always wants to dick with my files and folders.
Now it wants to gather all your personal info so it can choose iTunes for you... no thanks.
I have to find a basic mp3 player, or maybe I will just make my own.
They Live, We Sleep
the assumption that a huge retail store is the only way to reach the listener.
It's not as true as it was, but it's not entirely untrue either. Not everybody has a computer and high-speed Internet access or can even get broadband without moving house, especially fans of country music.
You should have done your research on new technology before buying in.
Sucker!
(Careful with that troll, it's an antique!)
Blar.
If you WANT "hot new album" you have to pay what the copyright holder wants to charge.
That you don't have to HAVE "hot new album" means fuck all. Even if you don't have to have it, you still WANT to have it. And if you HAVE to have it, then you STILL *want* it.
What not having to have it is why sales are going down for music. Which is then converted by the alchemy of "wishful thinking" into "piracy".
Whether you HAVE to have it or not is irrelevant and therefore you are wrong in your assertion the GP was wrong.
Mod parent insightful. People must realize that nowadays everyone wants to listen to their particular selection of music. They want to mix songs, play them in whatever order they want, be it in a party, at bedtime, in your PMP or even in a business outlet. CDs, or DRMed discs, or even DRMs tracks that you can download but not copy freely between different devices simply are not suited for this. This is (one of) the real culprits of low CD sales.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
I've bought digital music from all of these, and they don't seem to be fading away or going out of business.
iTunes and Amazon have the resources of an existing large company behind them.
eMusic ignores the big labels and does business with artists and publishers who are willing to play nice.
Magnatune is an online label.
Oh, and none of them started out with the handicap of previous bad court decisions that set them up for "past infringement" fees. What happened to MP3.com was appalling, particularly since they were conspicuously following the intent of the law while Napster, who were deliberately and notoriously targeting what they saw as a loophole, managed to survive. On the other hand the situation is not quite as bad as Michael makes it out to be.
I see there being three kinds of digital music company.
1. The ones who bend over for the labels and do everything the labels want from the start. These are not likely to attract a lot of customers, because what the labels want is mostly against the customer's best interests. About the only one of these that's managed to keep their head above the water is Rhapsody.
2. The ones who play hardball with the labels. There's two ways of going about this... you can be a big company and use that leverage to get a contract you can live with, or you can try and present them with a fait accompli and use that as leverage to get a contract you can live with. Michael's article is all about how the latter route doesn't work. The former route, of course, is Apple and Amazon.
3. The ones who ignore the labels, and build up a user base of people who want good music and don't care if there's a "star" name on the album. That's Magnatune and eMusic and other small operators.
any attempts to build a sanctioned digital music site today is doomed from the outset.
Should be:
any attempts to build a sanctioned digital music site today that sells someone else's music is doomed from the outset.
Bands that want to sell their music online can do so just fine. The problem is that we have cartels that confuse people into thinking that music can only be sold through them, and that they must somehow sanction it. The very concept that I have to get permission from some organization that doesn't actually produce the product, in order to sell that product, is absurd.
The main reason why you see the US and some other big nations really push for more strict copyrights and longer terms and things like software patents is because they have gone way out of their way to trash traditional wealth production. They are trying to replace it with this nebulous "IP" and alleged services as the basis for the economy. It's a big fat and collapsing now mess. All those IP styled paper financial "products" they think up and tried to sell all over the planet are another similar type example. They will cling to this lame business mode alleged thinking to the point of absolute absurdity because they don't have anything else now. The expression is "screwed the pooch".
> This is (one of) the real culprits of low CD sales
Another is the fact that quite a few current pop CDs don't sound a whole lot better than the badly-compressed alternatives you can download for free. Part of the problem is the "loudness war" -- studios want THEIR songs to sound louder than others when played on the radio. Radio stations almost never adjust the source level for different songs. So... producers are now pressured by record companies to mix music with the average volume as high as possible. What usually results is something we all thought was banished from the earth 20 years ago -- clipping. Take a Madonna CD from the late 80s/early 90s, rip a track from it, and view the waveform in SoundForge. Then do the same with any recent CD by someone like Britney Spears, Good Charlotte, Justin Timberlake, or even Madonna. It's not subtle... you'll see the difference INSTANTLY.
It's sad... the music industry has basically forgotten (or abandoned) just about EVERYTHING it learned about producing high-quality recordings during the 80s and 90s.
And don't even get me started on the MECHANICAL quality of modern CDs. I have badly-abused CDs from high school that rip and play better than almost-new CDs subjected to a week in my car. Modern pressed CDs have almost NO scratch-resistance, and are almost as easy to destroy as records were.
Did you vet out the violent ones? I was listening to a Christian metal song, and then ICK! it turned out that the song's narrator was getting murdered by his government, except it wasn't even something quick like lethal injection. His torturous murder just dragged on for hours, in front of a crowd of people who didn't do anything to stop it.
Christian music is sick! There's no way I would expose my kid to a store that sells that, unless I was sure the store filtered out all the Christ-related stuff. Crucifixions, prostitutes, ew!
Charging a new business for past infringement? How is it even possible for someone to suggest such a thing without laughing? If I watned to start a used car dealership, do I have to pay for all the ripoff used car dealers that came before me?
IMHO what we need is a good solid legal answer to a few of the underlying issues .. such as :
1. An act of piracy does not equal a lost sale. It does not equal 50 lost sales. There is no way do create a direct and provable correlation. You could say that each act of piracy costs you $5, $5 million , or $5 billion and still be in ' the ballpark' the way things are going now. This needs to stop. It smacks of the time Mitnick was accused of causing billions of dollars in loss to a specific company, only the company could not prove it - nor did they show the loss to their shareholders. Inflating losses that can not be proven , and then making people pay these imaginary numbers should be a cakewalk for any legal system.
2. The RIAA is acting as a strongarm monopoly. No better/worse than Microsoft , who was eventually called to task for it. Every day when I read about the latest actions of the RIAA their primary piece of proof is " because we said so ". YOu are guilty because they say so , you ow them a specific amount of money because they say so , and you have caused them an amount of damage that they determine by saying so.
Granted fully that there may be illegal activity going on , but calculating the damages and demaning money based on imaginary acts or generalized 'pulled out of my arse ' numbers is not fitting or legal.
3. Restriction of trade .... which is pretty much what this article is telling us is happening.
Just because the law allows something, doesn't mean it'll happen. There's no law against overcharging people either. You are 100% legal to open up a store, and price everything at 10 times what it is worth. The reason you wouldn't do that, of course, is that you'd get no business. But it isn't as though the police would come kicking in your door and arrest you. In fact, there ARE businesses that overcharge. AJ's would be one of them. The open grocers in well off neighborhoods. You discover that many regular items, like vegetable oil, are priced a whole lot more than they are at a regular grocer. However, people pay it because AJ's is conveniently located, and nice to shop at. However most stores don't, not because there's a law against it, but because ti isn't good for business.
The problem is NOT that the law allows it, the problem is that record labels are extremely greedy, and are very stuck in the past about their business model. They hate and fear the online market.
The LP album is, essentially, a concert piece. Thirty years ago, singles from an album were what hooked people into buying, but people sat down and listened to a whole album, all of the A side then all the B side. They didn't play one track, hop up and take the needle off, remove the disk and put it in its sleeve, remove another record put it on the platter, then carefully set the needle down on a specific track. CDs are the same.
You've never heard of mixed tapes? I've been making my own collections of music since cassette tapes so that I could cherry pick the best ones. I've heard the argument that the work needs to be taken in its entirety, artists that won't sell single tracks, and I think it's a mistake. If I make a series of 7 paintings, and you need to see each of them in order to get the experience that I intended, it would be a mistake for me to try to force you to look at them like that. Instead, I would get the information out there that it's better viewed like that, and then let the viewers experience it for themselves and decide. I've listened to albums where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but that doesn't keep the great songs from being better than the mediocre ones, it just means that the mediocre ones are a lot better when listened to in context. Guess what? I take those tracks off the CD and put them in my playlist. I still listen to the album as a whole sometimes, but not as often as I listen to the good ones as part of a playlist.
To sum it up, the artist should let the consumer enjoy their works as best they can and stop trying to force their "artistic vision" on them. People are enjoying your work; quit your bitching and enjoy the profits and the recognition.
Started 3 years ago, working with smaller labels from the outset... No DRM, 2 minute previews, WAV and MP4 files in addition to MP3s (sorry, /.- no Ogg), and a revenue split that's less favorable for the artist than iTunes...
It doesn't have anything to do with past abuses. It has to do with the majors having their heads up their asses about DRM for the first 2 years, and their fear of losing face now...
Warnings and disclaimer: Yeah, it's all in Flash... get over yourselves. I didn't build it, but I am friends with the guy who did. www.beatport.com
I have a plan. Using mainly spoons, we'll tunnel our way out of the city...
Not so much a wonder if you notice their disproportionately high (relative to the size of the industry) lobbying efforts and "campaign contributions" to various representatives and candidates of both major US political parties.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
iTunes doesn't fit any of the categories referenced by MR because it is a loss leader for ancillary profitable products.
Apple brilliantly deduced that online music services were inherently unprofitable. Their strategy was to create all the layers of the cake to support the sale of hardware with defensible margins.
iTunes is setup such that it makes maybe 3 cents per track or looses 3 cents per track and Apple doesn't care because it's not supposed to make any significant revenue.
iTunes and p2p downloads set the bar for online music services. The first is convenient, fully integrated into playback hardware and extraordinarily well marketed. The second is easy, fast, comprehensive and free.
If you do not have an ancillary product on which you can maintain a defensible margin (e.g., Napster formerly Roxio) there is no way you can make a profit given the iTunes business model. You can't compete with someone who is willing and able to take zero margin when your costs are the same or more than iTunes.
No VC in his right mind should invest anything in an online music business. They will loose their money.
Dude, don't waste your time posting facts and using logic. Sheesh!
The troll claimed that the Feds are doing a good job with their so-called "War on Drugs". Claimed he was doing well running a family friendly store selling Christian rock, then he cursed a couple customers and his poor children had to wear ragged clothing and cheap haircuts. There are way more than enough bullshit alarms and contradictions within the post itself to save you from having to do the work of digging up real data.
This is the kind of silly, self-contradictory trash that you'd expect of Bill O'Reilly or Keith Oberman.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The law also permits them to demand a Unicorn, but that doesn't mean it's a reasonable demand.
NO!! Mod parent insightful, because I save 15% on my car insurance...and I'm a caveman.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
IANAL.
As I understand it, it's completely permissible to have a monopoly on one or more industries. It's not permissible to use that monopoly to obtain a monopoly in *another* market.
Antitrust laws are all about preventing, say, the encroachment of Microsoft from a monopoly on operating systems into a monopoly on Internet browsers.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Not so much joking as trolling. I've seen the exact same piece posted word for word on /. before as well as in a few other places over the years. It also takes a few different forms as well as I've seen it changed from a record store to a video game store. It's fairly similar to the "I don't want to start a holy war ..." post that gets thrown up from time to time.
I'm not entirely sure if it originated here or if it's a copy paste job from some other publication. In this case it was pretty much a troll, but the post probably could be used in some context to make it quite funny.
A reference to the fracas around This Song, I beleive
Cut to the chase. Big publishers purchased these bogus laws and are the root cause for all sorts of digital stupidity. Is there anything more anti-social than fighting sharing as a concept? Companies that can't exist in freedom don't deserve to exist.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
On a different note, as I was reading the copyright law, it mentions that derivative works cannot be created without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. As a musician, I do not understand how one determines that a particular composition is a derived work. Musical compositions across genres can have huge commonalities in structure and along a lot of these dimensions. While the goal may be to prevent blatant plagiarism of musical compositions, I think it is virtually impossible to objectively define what is original work vs what is derived work in music.
Vijay
http://diagonalslash.blogspot.com/
>The service just isn't attracting users at all, in spite of the marketing major label WMG has committed to do
They may have "committed" but I've never heard of Lala and I'd be interested in using it. All I can say is that WMG is doing a terrible job marketing this. I have the feeling they *want* it to fail, as a propaganda stunt. It's the only explanation. WMG has bottomless pockets. If they wanted it to succeed they'd be killing everyone in the online music business with their catalog.
In fact in a search for Online music download Lala's not on the first 5 pages. A comparatively small payment to Google would ensure page rank or at least advertising on the results. Not surprisingly an Apple ad (the destination of which shows has a link to iTunes on the landing page) is at the top. They are actually trying.
Nada...
Here's what does show up:
1.
Download music online
Groundbreaking technology like the
new Genius feature. iPod touch.
www.apple.com/ipodtouch
2.
Zune Music Player
Get your ears ready for
the ultimate music experience.
www.Zune.net
3.
Download/Play/Burn Music
Legal Access to 5,000,000+ Songs.
14 Days Free then only $12.99/mo!
www.Rhapsody.com
4.
Napster® Official Site
Listen To 6 Million + Songs
With a Free Trial - Napster®!
Napster.com
5.
Download Music Online
As low as $.27 per song!
25 Free MP3 - No risk 7 day Trial
www.eMusic.com
6.
Top 3 Legal Music Sites
Top 3 Music Download Sites Reviewed
Download All your Favorite Music
www.Real-Music-Reviews.com
7.
Download Online Music
Unlimited Free Music on AOL® Radio
Find Music You Enjoy on One Site!
Radio.AOL.com
8.
Top 5 Music Sites
Top 5 Music Download Sites Reviewed
Download your Favorite Music Now
www.HotMusicDownloader.com
DRM free with lots of options and great music. The only thing killing Lala is WMG. They've got Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Rush, and the White Stripes for crying out loud! Their catalog is unmatched.
I just joined ;) At $.89 per song too. I think the author has a warped sense of what "committed to marketing" means, or didn't bother checking for himself. If I was a WMG executive, I'd have the marketing VP in a meeting finding out what the hell he does 8 hours a day.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
If they would just price their product at a relatively reasonable rate; I would be willing to pay as much as $0.01 per 100 terabytes.
So how do I find friends who 1. live in my town, 2. share my tastes in music, and 3. listen to music under a Free or non-commercial license? Remember that I, in this hypothetical, have dial-up or no Internet access, so I can't easily get music from online friends except through the mail.
It is called "payola" and most of those big distributors should have been broken up by now, put out of business in other words, over it. Not all stations or DJs participate in it, but enough over the *decades* to show it is the main reason you hear the same stuff all the time. When they get caught,they pay a little fine, next day, back to business as usual again.
Aren't you afraid you are going to burn in hell? You go to church and brazenly conduct illegal activities, surely you aren't expecting to go heaven?
Think young military pre-CD's. Piracy days. Later CD's, church. I have never ever used Napster, Kaza, Limewire, etc. I used Bit Torrent for Linux distro's, but Comcast broke that, so I just use mirrors.
My early days do not reflect current activities. Be not quick to judge lest ye be judged. Remember, I bought DC Talk, not pirated it. I wish I hadn't bought it or sampled the original performance before deciding not to buy it. I heard a church choir perform the one track and I enjoyed that. If the church choir released it on CD, it would have been worth the money.
Even in the piracy days, I bought a lot of great albums from artists such as Pink Floyd, Styx, ELO (go ahead and laugh), Tomita, Cornerstone, Mariner, etc. This was stuff not played on the local radio stations. It was from sharing I discovered these artists and bought the albums. Without the military housing environment, I would have bought much less music or the great audiophile stereo to enjoy it on.
Today with the youth, piracy is even cheaper (no need to buy blank tapes and copy them real time) so many people invest nothing in music unlike the older days where there was great pride in a great collection and great equipment to play it on. Much music today is compressed to lower bit rates and played on small cheap speakers or headphones. The studios have entered the loudness wars to work in noisy environments. THD of 1% to .1% is the norm. S/N ratios are not important anymore as the signal is compressed to be always loud. My used 30 year old speakers alone are worth the average price of a new iPod. I looked them up on e-bay.
Recording for a clean natural sound is no longer desirable. For me, modern recordings are undesirable, and the online stuff legal and otherwise is even lower quality.
I don't bother with piracy or purchases anymore.
The truth shall set you free!
I did this with Dark Side of the Moon with Audacity. Ripped it to FLAC, edited out the dead spots carefully matching the waveform tails and saved the result. My Album now has 2 tracks, side A and Side B. Awesome. I need to take the time to do the rest.
Watching a movie on TV has got to be a pain these days due to the incessant ad breaks.
Agreed, which is why I won't miss TV when they switch off analog. I almost never watch it now.
The truth shall set you free!
Someone should take a case of SD cards, copy a bunch of tunes to them, and then stand on the steps of the US Capital passing them out until they have racked up $1B in statutory copyright damages. At $750 a song it doesn't take too many SD cards.
Now let's have a media circus.
$100m in profit.
They make very little...
Seriously. Apple is a $134 billion dollar company who made $4.6 billion is profits last year.
$100 million/qtr is chump change for having 90% of the online music market. (Who knows how big that is?) The market could sustain BILLIONS in profits but the idiots running the record labels still don't get it. After seeing the $100 million number, I would be surprised if the iTunes store is making "piles of money".
I remember when the troll community was creative and vibrant. Trolls were driven, passionate individuals who truly believed in the art of jackassery. Those days are long past, and that saddens me.
The popular trolls you see today are just recycled, remixed versions of the same trolls we've been seeing on mainstream sites for years now. Common, soulless crap served up to an audience that's grown too numb and jaded to recognize it as such.
Personally, I liked this one better when it was about a video game store.
"The root cause is not the labels - chances are if you were running a label you would make the same demands, since the law permits it." ---- This is ridiculous. You are always -legally- able to charge 'what the traffic will bear' but doing so is rarely the best business practice for the long term.
You are such a bullshit propagandist liar, go fuck yourself.
None of that shit ever happened and you know it.
Oh, I understand what you are saying and agree with it, I am just bowing to real politics and macroeconomics on the ground. The fatcats want it, so you'll get it. Peons voting has little to do with any sort of domestic or international policy. The vote (which is now hacked to pieces anyway with blackbox voting) is a political psychodrama sop to keep the "we the people" folks (as opposed to the "we the big transnational corporations) faked out that they are in any way relevant to the process. I still do, but it is only from inertia and so I can bitch about politics.
Experiment: Pick *any* subject at all now, determine what the bulk of the joe sixpacks out there would probably want..now look to see what the law says or what is political reality.
I've followed the historic revision of MP3.com for too long without comment. MP3.com could have been the prime mover for the democratization of artistic opportunity in the music business, rather than the poster child for litigious self destruction. There was an internal war between this idealistic stance and record industry "professionals", brought into the company soon after the initial funding and before the IPO. These people were Hell Bent on opposing any change or granting increased empowerment to the artist. They shorted the stock and backed litigation loving Michael at every ruinous decision that eventually destroyed not only a dream, but betrayed the investors who had no idea of what was really going on. It's been almost 10 years and I am still sick over this... BTW, I was hired in December, 1998 as the 7th employee of MP3.com. I was there for everything until shortly before the BK and liquidation. Formerly 7@mp3.com
The problem is that song isn't rap.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I hope you die.
And anyone that doesn't agree 100% with everything twitter says doesn't deserve to exist either right?
Make SELinux enforcing again!
> Is there anything more anti-social
> than fighting sharing as a concept?
You really do think it's that simple, don't you?
And the facts have stopped the whole "Think of the children" and "Respect Mah Authoritah!" crowds before?
That's why I was trying to get HIM to name the wrong song.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano