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Mp3 Albums and Players Supported by Stars
Plinth writes "The BBC are running an article on MP3, and how it's being taken up by big rock stars, such as the ever current Pete Townshend. (CT:still waiting for his new live album to arrive)
The meat of the story, however, is that Bill Wyman (of Rolling Stones fame) has released an album complete with mp3 player, which of course can be used to play other things as well." Its interesting cuz its got its own copyrighting system but afaict it plays straight MP3s
too. I'm curious to learn more about this one.
actually, the current netizen content grab syndrome could benefit artists greatly. if artists were to give away their music and/or sell it at a low price and turn their eyes about copying, they may see a rise in income from peripheral sources: especially touring and merchandise sales.
If the record companies were out of the picture, and an artist could be contacted directly by a club owner or booking person, ticket prices could go down a LOT and the artist could make a lot more money. especially if more people had direct access to their music to find out if they like what they hear.
thedave.
Yeah, hackerish types can play with em, and I reckon we can break the watermarks and have them sound virtually the same or better.
Remember this? Not even experts can tell the diffrence all the time, so how can Joe Public do it?
-- Reverend Vryl
Watermarking, if done properly, is not removable and (in the realm of audio) inaudible. It's the same philosophy as watermarking visual arts - with the right tools you can see it, but you can't remove it without damaging/destroying the piece. It also survives the manipulations MP3/Real/Liquid/WMA/Frizbot encoding does to the piece. Watermark the raw data, burn it onto a CD, rip that and encode it into an MP3, convert that back to raw and put it onto a CD, and the watermarking is still there. Even with an 'interceptor driver' (replacement audio driver that spits the bits out to a separate file/device), the watermarking is still there. But what are you worried about? You _did_ pay for that music, right?
They have the same policy, its a big reason why I like 'em. To take it a step further, there is the Phishcast. streaming live shows 24 hours a day. A number of these type of streams have shown up (led zep, billy joel, weird al, TMBG, etc) although I would assume most are illegal. Recording companies need to realize that MP3 should be used for "promotion" (get 'em addicted, then jack up the price) and not sold as a product. Who do I call when my fictional $500 MP3 collection disappears when my fictional child accidentally wipes my HD? It just no longer exists, why pay for some that can disappear from reality so easily? The business world hasn't learned (nor has the government) to deal with infinite products
+&x
just rent the cd's...
What the music industry wants to be able to do (all of this IMHO) is to limit the amount of music that is out there. Thus they can concentrate their advertising, payola (the growing practice of paying radio to play songs), and cut overall producing costs by making less music. This increases thier return and makes stockholders happy.
Spice Grrls, Ricky Martin, Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, if these are forced down your throat long enough (anybody listen to radio or watch MTV?) then you like them and buy them, repetition works, radio execs know this. Witness the recent CBS/Viacom merger (radio + MTV). This gives one company VAST resources to force millions to listen to the same music. It's not nefarious, it's designed to make money (remember that whole capitalism thing)
Along comes the Inet and smashes their whole game. They are scared of tech they don't understand. They are scared of AOL, IRC, and ICQ where their products (and others, gasp) get huge distrubution without thier compensation. I think this is a good thing, Why? because it's obvious that the record companies wield WAY to much power. Look at the contracts nobodies have to sign to become somebodies. Remember the article on Sony "owning" artists URL's "for life"!
MP3s help promote the Artists, they help promote variety in music, and bring cut throat competition to an industry that makes people think Britney Spears is anything other than a hottie.
$.02 (or $2 if I was getting paid by the hour)
+&x
Thats probably because the artist's will make the money back when the people who got their MP3's come to their concerts, which, BTW, the Record label doesn't profit off of, they make money when its played on the radio, or sold in a music shop, so, an MP3, hurts their sales.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
One of the highlights of the article in question was how the ever illuminating Pete Townshend was releasing his latest live album on the net to be downloaded for free (as in Beer.) This struck me as a "Good Thing (TM)", up until the point that I actually went to download the flaming thing. "*.wma". Feh!
Eye kneed eh Grammer chicken.
Yeah us yanks got them, but unlike you limeys they are old here now and basically giving them away. I got mine free when I bought a new cd burner. Also there are like 50 dollar rebates on them everyday, they are trying to get rid of them to make room for the new diamond mp3 player that you guys might get 2-3 yrs from now.
Proud American!
How hard is it to negotiate a decent recording contract? Very hard. Have most artists been screwed by their labels in the past and wish to screw them back, selling direct to the fans and pocketing as much of the proceeds as possible? Yep.
Direct sales of MP3s (if any cheap 'Net wankers would pay for them rather than pirate everything...), images, etc. would make it easier for musicians, artists, etc. to actually make a living at their first-choice profession of making beautiful and/or interesting works for public consumption. It could help the artists break free of a fairly repressive media system which rewards only a few superstars with mega-wealth for their efforts, and lets the rest languish in both obscurity and relative poverty. Very few performers get rich off their talents, direct Internet distribution COULD help more artists earn at least enough money to keep making their work, IF people were willing to pay rather than expect that everything be free.
Many programmers who release their software for free make money off of consulting or supporting the software, or have other programming jobs. There are much fewer similar options for musicians and artists...
However, the Internet public seems to be showing that they're almost as willing to screw the artist as the major media conglomerates... which is too bad.
o/~ we are pissed, we are pissed, we have to resist... o/~ - ec8or
I do feel that it is a good thing that online music is finally getting recognized and used by artists, but it looks like there is a fair share of improvment to be done.
.wma format.
First of all, despite the article's heavy focus on mp3, the two artists noted for releasing online music (David Bowie and Pete Townshend) didn't even release their albums in that format. As several readers here have pointed out, Bowie released his album in *shudder* liquid audio, and Townshends album was in
But let me get back to mp3's. As of now, I imagine that new album releases are mp3 are likely intended to for use with portable mp3 players. As it seems with the amount of memory available on current players, (32 or 64 on the Rio), mp3 players expect that the user will encode their mp3's in a highly compressed and thus lower quality bitrate, like 96 or 128. Furthermore I havent found a major legal mp3 site which goes into detailed description about how they encode their mp3s (judging by their product support i bet they use *vomit* xing). I also doubt the artists or sites will care enough to encode their tracks at multiple bitrates and such to give consumers a choice. As a person who cares a lot about sound quality, I find this kind of dissapointing. Although I dislike the price of CD's, I do appreciate the control and choice I have in ripping and encoding my own mp3's. And if online downloads with only one choice of mp3 quality become the mainstream, the whole open nature of mp3s will be essentially void. I don't oppose mp3 releases, rather I think it's great to give the RIAA a run for its money, but I just hope the whole practice is given a little more time and quality consideration.
Gee, isn't this the concept that the Dead used for so long?
Allow (even encourage) taping of the concerts. Then, allow free distribution of the tapes. The Dead created a huge demand for their concerts and they charged for them. Most fans didn't mind paying high fees (in reality, they weren't that high) because they had so many tapes and wanted to give something back to the band (and to peruse the drugs of course!).
IMHO, the GD were so successful because they realized this! It is too bad that not every artist realizes this.
Justin
P.S. Which band allows free distribution of MP3s? =)
Mu. P.S. The address you see is real. =)
I used to like CDNow, but now I don't feel that way. According to their Toshiba DVD Player offer, you're supposed to get the player at the same price Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. charge, plus a $50 gift certificate, *almost* enough points for a free CD if you're enrolled in their rewards program, plus about six movies, none of which I care for -- still, it's a good deal, and ultimately a better deal to the tune of ~$100.
That was two weeks ago, and I chose overnight shipping -- they haven't sent it yet. It took them two days to even acknowledge my order, then another two for them to tell me that the item was backordered... Hmm, that's a little strange, because when I visit the website and add it to my cart, it's shown as being: "In Stock Shipping Ctr A".
I understand that they can't ship something if they don't really have it, but they *can* at least correct the information on their website, which I have pointed out via phone and several emails.
Sun likes to mention that they "dot-commed" CDNow -- did CDNow forget to put the *thought* in "dot-com", or have I been "dot-conned"?
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E2 IN2 IE?
If the greedy record companies could find a method to secure the data on, say, a UDF formatted CD-ROM, why not distribute albums in the form MP3s? If you want to release a normal length album, just use one of the 3.5" CDs (yes, they exist) which should easily hold an hours worth of music. That would cut costs even more, thus satisfying greed.
Another thought: Complete Discographies on one CD. I've already done this with my Pink Floyd, Simon and Garfunkle, Beatles, etc... I just think it would really be cool to have it all on one CD from the record label. (For the packaging, you know!)
I must say I do support the right of the artist to maintain control and profit from their music and works--as it is now, I think the record industry takes more money from the artists than pirated MP3sever could. Why not abolish the labels entirely, give the artists control of their music, and allow the artists to hire the labels mainly as promotional and manufacturing devices?
Just a thought...
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Here are some thoughts on MP3 and the music biz, which I sent to Nua's Trendmuncher list a while back, which may be of interest.
I saw a strategy report about the "information superhighway" and its impact on the major labels which fell off the back of an ad agency a friend worked for. It basically discussed disintermediation and the opportunity for artists to go direct once they'd gained exposure via the labels. Labels have very little brand equity - the consumer doesn't care whether their favourite band is on Sony or PolyGram. The report recommended that labels take ownership of the musical brand, and to increase creation of "talent-independent brands", which I thought was pretty amusing.
What happens to talent in this scenario? Niche markets are getting bigger, sure. These niche, virtual markets have always existed in some sense. The various forms of dance music take this to a new level, relying on home-recording and word-of-mouth marketing, and they're building new musical economies which operate outside the record industry distribution systems.
But I don't think the labels are shaking in their boots around MP3. Sure, a large part of their business model is based on controlling distribution, and MP3 doesn't allow that. But neither does audio cassette tape. There's a lot of music in the world, and the labels have a powerful, vertically-integrated infrastructure (label-publishing-magazine-TV-Radio-retail-games-e tc.) for defining a consensus musical reality around a small part of that world of music. Working in music retail taught me that most music consumers do not want to filter through everything that's there to work out what they like, any more than they want to configure their computer operating systems or customise their car. Another factor is that music consumption is often a social experience - you want to be able to talk to your friends about the music you like, especially if you're a young person using music as one of your forms of subcultural differentiation. That requires consensus reality.
Labels don't "discover talent" and release it. They supply well-defined and segmented markets with a measured stream of product. Sometimes talent exists with that product half-there, requiring only a bit of tidying up. Other times it's easier to sit some pretty girls down with a songwriter, a producer and a video-maker and generate it that way. Sure, not everything makes money, and occasionally something crashes into another market segment (like Gorecki). But generally the labels have a well worked out procedure for getting people to like and buy stuff, which isn't very "talent-dependent".
I see popular music and MP3 as kind of analagous to cinema and video. The video revolution allowed wider distribution for a lot of new forms of "film-making", and even the opportunity for distribution of pirated home-taped versions of big name movies. But people spend more than ever on the experience of seeing a piece of Hollywood cinema when it comes out.
The major labels and other big media companies understand that experience. They may not understand the Internet very well, but then neither does your average music consumer. Even if the labels take a year to get SDMI (or something like it) working, they've got enough mass properties locked up in tight contracts to make consumers want to pay for the experience of their product.
My dad's fond of the expression "there's little in the world which can't be overcome by brute force and ignorance." The labels still have the brute force (global brand creation). They're starting to lose their ignorance.
Danny
Internet Commerce -- http://aerial.icvp.com
SDMI only prevents people from making legal copies of their music - pirates will have it cracked within a day, just like they did with Microsoft's format.
This isn't offtopic - Rob himself makes mention of waiting for his CD (presumably from CDNow, since some of us are supporting his "Who habit"). Oops, I guess that makes this something of a rip on a /. sponsor. I didn't start it, tho'...
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E2 IN2 IE?
The problem is that the players only support one type of media.. sound. If x11amp and winamp were to adopt a system which allowed the inclusion of diffrent content into the MP3 (like art, advertising, or links to additonal things to buy) and a few big name artists released MP3s with addiotnal information that people actually want (like lyrics or art), then everyone would start using a player which supports the addional content and artists could just give away music to get people's attention.. The artists could make lots of money this way.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Actually, from what I have heard SDMI watermarks will be audible, ie people with good equipment and hearing will take note. The point is that overwriting them will make an even larger degridation of the sound (of course, if you overright watermarked frames with a high degree interpolation it should make it sound better, but I don't know exactly how it works).
And remember, these watermarks are not only going on downloadable music, but on all future CDs as well. If I was a Hi-Fi nut, I would be worried sick about this.
Hardware devices will probably (at the very least) require that songs are signed by the RCIAA key (of course, SDMI has to be exportable from the USA, so we can just put distributed.net to cracking that
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There's already a way to make money off MP3s: charge for them. In the situation you described, it sounds like the problem had nothing to do with money, and everything to do with the contract that Mr. Petty signed concerning distribution rights.
So I'de say this: MP3s will not be commercially viable until artists decide to increase their profits, instead of donating most of their profits to mass media companies.
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Have a Sloppy day!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Check out the album, Long Tall Weekend, and radio station at:
TMBG on emusic.com
If they cleaned up their press releases, then "journalists" would be out of a job. Everyone knows that the job of journalists, these days, is to clean up and republish press-releases.
My guess is that the errors are intentional, mandated by some sort of contract with a journalist union/guild. Job security.
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Have a Sloppy day!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Their web site has Kanji characters on it...
I saw a commercial during south park tonight that advertised downloadable music online that has "mp3's of all your favorite music ..."
looks like mp3 has gained enough momentum to steamroll the competing formats. The only remaining obstacle to squish is MS. I hope they lose their case with DOJ, or you'll soon see even more problems playing non-MS audio on your win* pc. Look at what a pain in the ass it was to get decent java and quicktime on windows. If the average joe can play windows audio, but not mp3, guess which format the commercial sites will use to sell music?
-earl
The player looks nice...it's about time that record comapnies and musicians in other countries stop worrying about piracy.
Their US counterparts, however, are so worried about losing revenue that none of them are willing to release their music (legally) on MP3.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
As the subject says, I remember when Tom Petty released some of his songs on MP3, but his record company forced him to retract the MP3s.
Overall, in the music industry, I believe that the artists do not feel threatened by MP3s (in fact, most probably love the concept), but it is the record companies that are scared to death of them.
MP3s will not be commercially viable until someone can come up with a way to make money off of them. Until then, they will remain the currency of the underground.
Justin
Mu. P.S. The address you see is real. =)
Check out the specifications and press release
- Seth Finkelstein
Even this article talks about using encryption to safegaurd against piracy. Since when can encryption safegaurd against piracy? Encryption can keep a secret between to parties
that WANT to keep it, the nature of piracy is that one of the parties wants to spread the
information.
Right. So what if we have the "record-company" as one party, and "the hardware-mp3-player" as the other.
If you embed a private-PGP-key into every player, you can make digital pirating almost impossible: you can only play the purchased MP3s on the one targetted MP3player.
Now if that key is in the flash on a CPU in the device, which is programmed "not to give out the key", it can be pretty hard (i.e. not possible for people without an Electronic force microscope) to read out the key.
This "security" creates some "hassle". Suppose I have two of those mp3players. Now I'd like to be able to play my paid-for albums on both. Problem.
Maybe they encode it with one "generic" key. That however breaks down as soon as someone somewhere manages to find that key. Pretty weak. But it has been done before....
Of course, you can still digitize the earphone output....
Roger.
As nice as this device seems to be (damn it looks cool) I simply don't believe that we will ever again see a good, free, mp3 player on hardware. Because hardware can only be designed and manufactured by companies (read litigation targets) and sold by distributors and outlets worried about retaliation from the sdmi bunch, it is doomed to all for their awful ideas of apropriation of information.
Even this article talks about using encryption to safegaurd against piracy. Since when can encryption safegaurd against piracy? Encryption can keep a secret between to parties that WANT to keep it, the nature of piracy is that one of the parties wants to spread the information.
What you can do through digital signatures and watermarks is mark WHO the original party spreading the information was. But from there you have to go the legal route...
So, more laws, more lawyers, more easy ways for kids to commit serious crimes, more arguments for infringing on our freedom, and more kids going to jail.
Don't fight with Mathematics. Its a really bad idea...
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I hate to be argumentative, OK so I don't but here goes. Most of the general populous does not give one shit about what happens to the artist or how much control they have over their music. The Backstreet Boys, Mariah Carey, and Spice Girls are proof of this. It is a very limited number of people who care about anything more than maybe requesting the latest Spice Girls song on the radio. The record companies will always be around, they will find a way to absorb MP3 and still keep the atrists under their thumb. Hate to break it to you, the artists themsleves are at fault for signing the contracts, the companies would not be in the position they are if the artists didn't play dumb when contracts came around.
MP3 could completely revolutionize the way things work with music right now. I would love to see MP3 be the reason that record labels were abolished, or at least cut down. It, in the end, gives more power to the artist. It is what people want. With the record labels gone, music could be exactly that, music; without all the crap the labels add to it. I would love to see that happen. MP3 is going to make that happen.
Artists are already doing this sort of thing with conventional media. All you're really describing is the multisession CD concept. That's just packaging and it's been done before, targeting PCs as well as the mundane audio CD player.
As nice as this device seems to be (damn it looks cool) I simply don't believe that we will ever again see a good, free, mp3 player on hardware.
This is why the lawsuit over the Rio was such a big deal. They already established that it wasn't the hardware's fault about how it is used.
I submitted a C|Net article about how the partners in SDMI couldn't move as fast as the market and consumers don't want to wait for privacy protection (because it isn't in their interest), they want their MP3. Either way if somebody release one that limits what files you can play, and somebody else release one that doesn't (and is cheaper because it doesn't have extra layers), which would you buy?
+&x
- http://www.macnn.com/features/ orbit99/orbit99b.shtml
- http://www.macnn.com/features/ orbit99/orbit99c.shtml
Tiny MP3 player with Sony's memory sticks. They don't seem too worried about MP3!Unfortunately, David Bowie goes and releases his new album online using Liquid Audio Pitty...
-kaputnik
Yes, we have them here too, but they came out about a year ago, and only cost $150 or so (around 80 or 90 pounds).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
First, this player may have a copyright system based on watermarking---the only really effective way to do it, so this may just be another attempt by the music industry to leverage SDMI. The whole idea of a watermarking system is to play mp3s which came from older CDs without the watermark and not play the ones that come from newer CDs. I will feal much better about this when we have reliable ways to break whatever copyprotection they install.
Second, the real solution to making money off of MP3s is the allow the artist to add aditional content, i.e. allow them to place a small web page or something in the front of the MP3. If the players would have a feature to interpret a tarball in the header and pass it to a browser. Needless to say the open source players would all have a way to turn this off, but many people would want to see the art, lyrics, and ads that came with the songs. The artists will make money directly off the advertising (click here to visit our sponser) and will have a hotline to merchendising (click here to buy shirts, CDs, and other MP3 version of this song).. no radio stations.. no labels. Maybe someone will add this stuff when they improve the file formats.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
There is a device on the market called the Rio portable mp3 player. We have it here in britain but i dont know about you yanks ;) It costs about £150 pounds (sterling) so its about 250bucks i guess
=========== Paul Knight ===========
Maybe I have failed to understand the nature of watermarking and other forms of protection, but isn't the whole idea a little flawed, in that at some point in whatever hardware you have, that carefully protected digital audio gets DAC'd into a lovely clean analogue source. At which point, it can be re-recorded without the protection. Also, given the skill, enthusiasm and perseverance of the cracker community (bless 'em), whatever system of protection gets used *will* be 'unfucked' within days. I'd be interested to see what the ratio of profit : royalty is in the music industry; I suspect the music buying public would feel comfortable with the morality of some degree of what the industry like to call piracy. I think they have to radically change their business model so that consumers don't feel justified in copying their product. By which I mean, charge a fair price, don't be so greedy (some CDs cost £15 UK) and we wont mind paying. Carry on ripping us off and it's hard to see who are the real 'pirates'
As written in Specifications:
Continuous play time Approximately 4.5 hours
Even a walkman can do much better...
Umm, did you read the article?
I am more than happy artists are releasing their music in MP3, for obvious reasons, but the article states that the music will have copyright and piracy protection built in.
They will be using the "if I give it a password it must be safe" security model which we all know is a bunch of BS.(Liquid Audio, MSAudio, etc...)
The Really cool thing is that they are making players cheap enough to do this, and they will only get cheaper.
The new players are seriously sweet, and some of the new ones like the Lyra have support for those IBM MicroDrives.....lots of space for lots of music.
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.