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Colleges Secretly Test Music-Industry Project
An anonymous reader writes "The music industry is still pushing Choruss, a controversial blanket-licensing scheme, but it is far less innovative than first described. Six colleges are setting it up now, but they refuse to have their names released because the issue is a political landmine — and who wants to be associated with the recording industry?"
The Canadians have their blank CD tax ostensibly because blank CDs are used to copy music. Great. But is it then legal to copy music in Canada? No. How does that even work?!
Doing this other blanket licensing stuff will enjoy similar respect in that anything acquired will be decidedly illegal until proven otherwise and even with proof, there is little doubt in my mind the recording industry will respect it as legal.
How's this for an idea. A band signs with a college instead of a record label. The college pays the band, everyone at the college gets their music for free.
Yeah, probably not the greatest of plans, but much better than a college handing it's own students over to the RIAA.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
Won't most of the students get sued the day after graduation, when they are no longer associated with the college and haven't deleted their music collections?
...the people who don't listen to music, or don't want to financially support the RIAA, or have any other reason to not want to pay for this license? Is there an opt-out option? A quick glance through TFA didn't say so either way.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
Fair price is a misleading question. The real question is whether they are pricing their product in the best way to maximise profits and I strongly suspect that they are not. I pay about the cost of an album every month to a company that lets me rent DVDs (two at once, as fast as I can watch them and post them back) and stream an unlimited number of TV shows and films. In comparison with this, an album seems stupidly expensive. According to iTunes, I haven't listened to any of my albums more than 128 times and very few more than 30 times. There aren't any that I've been listening to with 100% of my attention, so in terms of money per time spent entertained, music is much more expensive than video.
At the current prices, I'll buy 2-6 albums per year. If you priced an album at $1-2 then it would be an impulse purchase. If I heard a song I liked on Radio Paradise, then I'd buy the rest of the album to see if I liked it. Perhaps I'm unusual, but I suspect that I'm no. The cost of producing music has dropped a lot in the last few decades, but the cost of buying it has not. Meanwhile, the cost of other forms of entertainment has dropped a lot and music seems proportionally much more expensive. I've read a couple of studies indicating that around 5-15/track is the optimum price for maximising profit when selling music but the music industry seems to think that 99/track is the right price (which is fine) and that they should expect the same number of sales that they'd get with 5/track (which is completely unreasonable) and then blame piracy for their failure to adapt.
Coincidentally, Ars published quite a nice round up on this subject today.
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Whether they have some kind of intrusive metering software or not, what I'm wondering is how they think they can pull off paying out per-play royalties to artists from a flat-fee, unlimited-download subscription model. The maths, they don't add up.
If we had a free market and sane copyright terms I would agree with you. The way I usually end any argument about "artists rights" and the *.A.As is this-
Steamboat Willie is STILL under copyright. The man has been worm food (or a Popsicle, depending on whom you believe) for going on half a century but one of his FIRST works, one made when airplanes were made out of cloth and antibiotics were still but a dream, is STILL under copyright.
If we hadn't had the public domain stolen from us thanks to treasonous bribery we all could go to a nice public domain website and download all the music up to the mid 70s for absolutely free. Artists could use that material to create new and exciting works by remixing, sampling, and using snippets in their original compositions. Instead thanks to treasonous bribery in all likelihood your grandchildren, if they are very lucky and live to be VERY old, might actually one day see the music of Jimi Hendrix and the Stones make it into the public domain. That is of course if that damned mouse doesn't cause copyrights to simply be extended forever, again thanks to bribery.
So while I haven't heard shit from an RIAA artist I would bother even stealing, I say if you like it please steal the fuckers. After all they have stolen from you, me, our children, our families, by robbing our public domain from us to fill their greedy pockets. The copyright system was a CONTRACT nothing more. In return for a LIMITED copyright We, The People, got a richer public domain. But the contract has been broken, and until We, The People, are again allowed a place at the bargaining table all rights granted by that contract should be ignored. Considering they are ignoring our end of the contract, why shouldn't we do the same?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
What's retarded is that is secret? Why is this secret? Why is the copyright treaty secret? The only conclusion I can come up with is that they're up to no good.
Six colleges are setting it up now, but they refuse to have their names released
The music industry says there are six colleges, but the six won't let their names out? How are they supposed to keep a service used by all their students secret?
I call bullshit on these lying bastards. Everything the RIAA labels do is based on a lie, starting with the lie that P2P costs sales when every study says "pirates" spend more on music than anybody. Well, P2P does cost RIAA labels sales; if you buy two or three indie CDs, that's money you don't have to buy an RIAA CD.
And thank you, reverendbeer, for pointing out that these lying bastards DON'T own rights to all music. They don't. We need to call these lying sociopaths out at every opportunity.
Free Martian Whores!
What do I want from them?
a) No suing or prosecuting of non-commercial pirates.
b) No DRM, No laws forbidding circumvention tools.
c) Copyright terms that last no more than 30 years.
d) Don't attempt to shakedown or otherwise control radio in any form (terrestrial, sat or net).
Don't give me the impression that I am building my own gallows if I give them my money.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.