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NY Times Article On MP3
TreyHarris writes "The New York Times has an article about how MP3 is changing the experience of listening to music. Most other articles have been hung up on how it changes the experience of purchasing music, which misses the point, so this is a nice change of pace. Pretty simplistic, but good for your clueless friends. Requires free registration. "
I agree. Instead of B-sides with riskier music, we'll just be downloading remixes of the same one-hit wonders.
I seem to have the hardest time finding the music that I want. I was wondering what if there is an easier way then using the big search engines with broken/ratio links. Or if there is a search engine that works well?
1 Go to a server on Undernet.
2 Go to a channel with mp3 in the title.
3 Type @find Gamb (replace Gamb with part of song or artist name)
4 If the bots servicing the channel have hits they will msg you with their results in this format.. !bob Kenny Rogers - The Gambler
5 Copy that string back in the channel, you are now in bob's que to recieve that file
6 When bob's ready he'll send the file
7 Save file and enjoy
IRC is a good way to find mp3s, but I think we need a less interactive way of doing things too. I was thinking specifically about an ``anonymous network'' where you computer talks to your friends computers who talk to their friends and so on. Their are unfortuantly problems with the design of such a network. I was thinking about maybe using PGP keyservers with fake names for authentication and using email as a transport mechanism (so we don't need to worry about firewalls and such). Everyone would broadcast their list to the whole network and requests for specific songs would work their way back through the network, but the actual song transfer would be machine to macine to keep the network load down. We need a good non-interactive way to obtain mp3s and this could do it.
Another idea is to just extend the players to allow people to talk to each other.. your system shows it's playlist to visitors and lets them share songs with you and once it trusts them it lets them see it's browse list.
On the contrary, since online distribution costs virtually nothing, unpopular music may benefit the most. Music that would not be commercially viable through traditional distribution channels can be economically distributed through the network. That music you say will disappear in fact can only be distributed now because it is bundled with a popular piece. With network distribution, the music could be distributed with or without the popular piece.
Here is a subscriptionless mirror of the story.
For that to occur, we will have to see dramatic increases in the amount of bandwidth being delievered to the homes of general populace. while it is fairly trivial to download one 3 MB file for the song that you like, is America (and the rest of the world for our non-USA-centric readers) going to invest time downloading all of the rest of the albumn? I doubt it, especially for artists that they haven't grown to love anyway. For certain artists that I love and have cds of at the moment, yes, I probably would make the investment of time but for some fresh-faced band or singer of which i have only heard one song, probably not. This means that as the distribution gets more and more digital and the older bands that I have grown to love stop producing, we will only be left with bands that began after the transition period. Bands without histories. Bands that with one hit.
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
Don't forget xDSL and cable modems.
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
As the online distribution of music proliferates, I, unfortunately, see more and more artists becoming "one-hit wonders". There will be few incentives to generate the other music which is often just considered filler on the cd anyway. Personally, some of my favorite songs are the ones that never received airtime and would never be considered hits. But in a distribution method where people pick and choose what they want, all the other tunes will be lost by the wayside. There won't be these decisions how to arrange songs together. There won't be a 70 minute concept record. Only individual songs without connection to each other.
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
Why does it take so long for the general media to pick up on this kind of thing? MP3s have been around for.. mmmm. 4 years? And only within the past few months have they been getting any exposure.
The RIAA has been trying to maintain a stranglehold on music.. well... longer than I've been around. Yet strangely enough, that's not an often-discussed topic. Now, it's been cast into the limelight.
Seriously now, I'd like to hear from journalists who work at newspapers - why can slashdot have a story up within a few hours of it becoming known, yet it takes weeks for a regular newspaper to "pick up" on the story?
I don't think non-internet means of communication are so slow that it takes that long for stories to reach newspaper offices...
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I actually see the EXACT OPPOSITE.
Nowadays, I don't really buy one-hit wonders, but I DO buy concept albums or just generally good albums.
Why? Because such albums are often a good mix of music that sounds good together.
Maybe what you say could be true for the long term, but in the short term, I see MORE concept albums being created because those are the ones that people who use online music will actually be willing to buy.
heh.. I've always wondered what word to use to describe myself.. "I'm a utopian".. that oughta starve off any conversations at them boring dinner parties.
How we know is more important than what we know.
cypherpunks/cypherpunks. You know the drill...
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
What do we need hits for anyways? If you have a network of friends, a few websites and other sources to get listening recommendations from, hit singles become nothing more than curiosities.
sw