The RIAA actually served a useful purpose once upon a time. Back when Hilary Rosen was an idealistic little girl. Back before most of you were born... the RIAA standard I refer you to happened in the early 1960s
After the technical standards that they were created to propagate were replaced by ones coming out of the consumer electronics industry, they had to find another role... that of lobbying body and barnacle on the side of technological development.
RIAA's owners would have been better off if RIAA had gone out of business leaving good memories.
Thank you for your explanation of why laser turntables are impossible.
The factors you describe apply to them, too, unless you'd like to explain to us how a laser beam can get information (polarization aside, which doesn't apply here) extracted from any sort of torsion component which you allege is deliberately applied to the recording head in the course of the original recording.
Of course, you haven't quite accounted for the fact that the real high-end turntables tend to be laser based and that serious and rich audiophiles buy them. Perhaps their ears aren't quite as good as yours.
More tired than I thought. If you use the frequency vs. amplitude listing table on the http://www.tanker.se/lidstrom/riaa.htm , use the numbers exactly as you see them. I missed the - sign when I glanced that the table, the numbers presented are correct.
Of course, if you're using DSP, the equation is a better place to start, just remember, it was recorded using treble boost, bass cut, playback is the opposite.
High frequencies (treble) are boosted and bass (low frequences) are cut during the recording process.
Treble is boosted 19.95 DB (by a factor of about 100x) at 20KHz during the recording process. The laser turntables are NOT trying to pick out submicron details.
http://arts.ucsc.edu/ems/music/tech_background/TE- 19/teces_19.html contains basic information on how the LP record works. I think the most important thing for the experimenter is called RIAA equalization, in order to limit the physical motion of the recording stylus that cut the record, bass was reduced and treble increased in a very precise way, in order to reproduce the original sound, the opposite must be done.
The RIAA equalization curve is a plot of amplitude boost/cut vs. frequency. Apply its inverse to the raw analog signal(s) that come out of your signal processing.
Somehow, I didn't think a literary criticism of the post seemed to be in order.
After a listen to the sound sample, it sounds a lot to me like something done by a guy who didn't know to look for things like the basic specs laid out by the RIAA back when it was an engineering standards organization instead of an impediment to technologiical progress... things like the RIAA equalization curve that boosts bass and reduces treble, or physical record dimensions...
Since I do know what these things are, I'm doing a bit of research which I'll be posting to the main thread shortly for the next person who wants to try this.
These numbers are EXTREMELY approximate, I just wanted to see if his claims are possible. They are.
Standard rotational speed = 33 1/3 RPM
12" record
Circumference = pi * D
33.3RPM/60 ~ 0.5 R/second
12" * pi ~ 37" circumference.
0.5 * 37" = 18.5"
18.5 * 600dpi = 11,100 samples per inch, which gives a Nyquist limit of 5550Hz... a 2400 dpi or better might actually give full audio bandwidth, though in this case, the higher the better, since the area available for sampling decreases towards the center of the record, and for really high fidelity sound, more than 2 samples at 20K are necessary.
His model for how the record was encoded is *wrong*. The RIAA method of stereo modulation (back when they were mostly a standards organization) places the amplitude information on each wall of the V-shaped groove. It is intended to be picked up with a stylus connected to a something in the form of an Y , with channel information picked up by coil or magnet or other means attached to each upper leg of the Y.
Fixing his model should result in drastically improved performance if he's extracting stereo information. Cleaning the record would also help a lot.
His project actually *is* worth doing. An optimized algorithm should allow anyone or a museum with a good scanner to turn his vinyl (SPELLED CORRECTLY) collection into decent quality Red Book or MP3 tracks without any further damage to the records. The basic problem is to linearize the relationship between 16-24 bit gray scale information of reflected light and the depth modulation in each groove.
The suggestion of using software to extract 3D information from the grooves posted elsewhere is a good idea, but this is a good start.
There are things that automated response systems do well. Checking bank balances, for instance. That works OK from either the Web or touch-tone menus. Simple problems should have simple, inexpensive solutions. When I do this, I don't want to socialize, I want to get in, get done, get the hell out. I can push buttons just as fast as anybody they can hire to do this for me.
There are things that they do badly.
"My bill is 100x what it should be"... the menus aren't going to help with an automated response to that problem.
Any kind of technical support. If one has a problem that can't be resolved by reading the FAQ and searching the vendor's tech database, a bot that parses one's question and keyword-matches it to another FAQ is very unlikely to provide a remotely appropriate answer.
Altavista used one of those bots a while ago for its customer service, making me an early adopter of alltheweb. It's response e-mails said "hit the link to escalate to a human"... without providing the link.
ICQ's e-mail "customer service"... same thing... the first try or two, one thinks that one might be dealing with a retarded human. Third time, one knows that it's a bot and there is no way to escalate to a human. Unfortunately, the person I contact this way is not technically clued, so switching to a service run by the clued isn't really an option, if I could get overseas to install a better IM client, I wouldn't need one.
But I still don't know why my SMS messages, a service which ICQ promotes actively, never get through to their destination or if the problem can be fixed (it's listed in the Network listing and actually worked a couple of months ago), and it's the service I need most. I don't recommend ICQ a lot to other people.
"Claire" is just a poor, innocent expert system with a problem-solving domain limited to phone service. How can 'she' reasonably be expected to handle things when you ask her for a date?
Don't tell us 'she' came on to you, nobody will believe it.
We all understand about unrequited lust, but is it really fair to respond to it by wanting to take the computer 'she' lives in apart?
Post titles should be succinct summaries of the content of the post that follows. I'd like to be the first one to congratulate you on doing such a good job of characterizing your post. While proper form in posting is only the first step in composing good and useful posts, there may be hope that someday you will become a useful part of the Internet community.
For the RIAA labels, P2P is a way that independent musicians can get around the FM radio monopoly to reach the general public....Where's the room for compromise? They either stop P2P (remember Internet Radio?) or die
All of this rests, a priori, on your presumption that P2P is such an effective alternative to RIAA's marketing and financial backing that it fundamentally threatens RIAA.
No, P2P alone isn't, but P2P and Internet Radio and other Net enabled methods of communication with a low cost of entry *are*.
Merely putting your wares out on a file server is not equivalent to marketing.
I'm glad you've learned something from my posts.
How many albums have been sold by artists using P2P and non-RIAA means exclusively to market? It exists, but it is still very much of a fringe thing.
You state as fact things that can't be any more than opinions from a dubious source which you seem to be going to a good deal of trouble to render more so.
The central US record-keeping organization of the industry that certifies "gold" and "platinum" is the RIAA. Soundscan primarily tracks brick and mortar retail channel (every record sold via POS in the US is tracked on the Soundscan central databass) and is just beginning to track Internet sales including CD-on-demand. The sales charts for records in Billboard and in mass media and RIAA's numbers all are based on SoundScan. Look it up at Google. If this is news to you, you should become informed before expecting anyone to take your opinions seriously.
You cannot even show that these independent artists are any more numerous
Never said that they were. Perhaps in the America you'd like to see, no garage band could exist without registering with the Department of Homeland Security or getting permission from the RIAA to exist. We don't live there yet.
or more successful than they were pre-P2P or internet.
Define success!.
For a record label, an artist who only sold 200K records in a year is a mid-list artist, they'll probably keep her and hope she makes real money someday.
An individual who sold 200K records without the industry has made $1-2M on $3-4M gross saled. Tell that new millionaire that she isn't a success.
For a label, an artist who sold 10K records in a year is getting dropped, and she won't be seeing a dime in royalties, and the A&R man who signed her is getting yelled at by his boss.
That artist selling 10K records on her own has made $50-100K... which is a very decent living.
Here are examples of two bands that have done very well out of MP3 file swapping.
Wilco defies experts as `Foxtrot' gallops
By Greg Kot
Tribune rock critic
Published May 2, 2002
article here
Fair usage quotes:
Though the album was rejected by one major label as uncommercial,
Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" defied record-industry expectations
by selling 55,573 copies in its first week and debuting at No. 13 on
the Billboard album chart--by far exceeding the band's past sales
achievements.
The numbers released Wednesday by Soundscan, which monitors retail
sales, flew in the face of mainstream record-industry thinking,
which held that Wilco could not significantly expand its audience
without commercial radio airplay and that it would hurt its sales by
making its music widely available on the Internet.
[snip]
A similar strategy worked for Radiohead in 2000 and 2001, when
experimental records such as "Kid A" and "Amnesiac" circulated on
MP3 files months before the albums' release, yet the albums debuted
listeners time to live with the music for a while and appreciate
at No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, when released. "It gave our
what we were up to," said Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien.
Tower Records on Clark Street reported first-week "Foxtrot" sales of
299, double the best first-week sales of any album this year.
"People have the record because they downloaded it, but that didn't
affect sales whatsoever," said product manager Von Medler. "It's
been a couple of years since we've had a first week of sales like
this."
*end quote*
This is the cutting edge of band marketing, and by definition, only a few are going to be on the cutting edge.
The musician I am personally working with will be releasing some of her songs as MP3s for the same reason. She knows what the product is. Just like Wilco does and Radiohead does.
Sad that YOU don't quite get it yet, isn't it? Don't worry. Hilary Rosen of RIAA also does. You may assume like everyone else that any public statements she makes at variance with this are fabrications.
Where is the evidence that RIAA's services are any less in demand? Why isn't there any real decline in the # of artists to signing with RIAA?
Strike one. RIAA is a record label industry association. Artists are neither invited nor welcome to join, though if they own their own record labels qualifying according to RIAA criteria, their labels might be welcome to join. They don't provide services to individual artists any more than the BSA provides end-user support. If you don't know this, why should anything else you say be taken seriously?
Why should anyone believe that RIAA's real agenda for attacking P2P is killing alternative distribution/marketing (given how irrelevant it is today)
Care to tell Radiohead and Wilco how irrelevant it is?
Perhaps the RIAA/MPAA, like your pets, look ahead a bit further than you do. Movie piracy in the US via download isn't especially significant. It can't be, the last mile bandwidth to the home isn't in place yet, even broadband DSL/cablemodem isn't really fast enough. MPAA is also helping leading the effort to lock down the Net and personal computers. Perhaps you should tell Jack Valenti that the Internet is irrelevant to movie piracy.
and not for the fact that 99% of the services' traffic is their goods being pirated,
I won't blame you for getting this one wrong, most name musicians believe the same disinformation, and they got it where you did. CDs are the product. 128K MP3s are promotional items used to sell CDs. They are not the same thing. The ones who figure this out, like Wilco and Radiohead have a much better chance of making money in the modern music environment. Any stupid enough to listen to you will be whining about PIRATES.
The reason for this is that as is known to everyone in and out of the industry except you, free MP3 distribution boosts record sales. Record sales dropped immediately after Napster was shut down.
Major labels pay to get their product onto FM radio. The quality is comparable. Why? While you might buy an album you've never heard based on the idea that if an RIAA label makes it, it must be good, nobody else will. The quality of a 128K MP3 is sufficiently different from that of an album that if someone grabs a 128K MP3 for something that the person really likes, he'll buy the actual uncompressed CD. Maybe not on the 1st or the 4th or the 100th listening, but sooner or later, he's going to want to hear every nuance through his multichannel sound system which is telling him there are things on it he wants to hear and can't.
especially when services that do NOT serve piracy so effectively are left alone by and large (e.g., mp3.com et. al)?
Strike two. Which world do you live in? Try googling mp3.com and lawsuit and see how many hits you get. I got 11,600 .
Do you know who owns MP3.com now?
MP3.com isn't an adequate promotional channel for new musicians, and with rare exceptions, anyone who thinks this will find out differently the hard way. In my plans to promote an actual artist I'm working with, MP3.com is fairly low on the list of priorities. I'm going P2P and non-US Internet Radio first.
Why? Too crowded for one, and most important, it doesn't fit the way most people look for new music. Unless one is a self-defined member of a musical subculture, in which case one knows who the bands are and goes directly to their sites and knows where to go to hear the latest buzz about cool new bands, one finds new music by finding music that one likes that's familiar and waiting for similar music from new bands. On a place like mp3.com , for the new user, all the new content is unfamiliar.
I like Internet Radio for this because it offers defined genres. But to some extent, so does the search feature on an MP3 file sharing site.
Internet Radio wasn't serving pirates at all and the RIAA got it closed down, too. They were paying radio-type royalties to ASCAP and BMI
(do you know who ASCAP and BMI are? If you don't, just what are you doing in this discussion?) and were trying to make a deal with RIAA labels to allow them to pay reasonable (i.e. ones that would allow them to stay in business) royalties to them. RIAA wouldn't allow them to stay in business even if they paid royalties to labels.
In fact, one of the people who was involved in negotiating the Yahoo music contract that the CARP copyright deal that got Internet Radio closed down was based on explicitly stated that the yahoo intent was to make sure that only major label music got played on Yahoo, and that the industry wanted to make sure that Yahoo wouldn't let "just anybody" have a chance to get music played there.
If legitimate promotion and distribution of independent artists is really the goal of P2P,
The goal of P2P is file distribution. The content of the files is the business of the users. Why should a file sharing network have any other goals?
then Napster and all of its followers could have served that end, and simultaneously avoid RIAA's harrasment, by only allowing enumerated artists on its network after they sign an agreement stating that they are willing to have their goods traded in such a fashion. That could have been done very easily,
Explain how. Not that it matters, but I want to see you make a fool of yourself in public.
yet it was not and has not yet been done.
If the primary 128K MP3 value is to provide an advance sample of the CD listening experience, just why is this important? People are NOT trading almost CD-quality 256K MP3s to any significant extent. Just let the "Jolly Roger" flag recede into your hallucinations now.
Oh yeah, and why do you assume that RIAA can only do FM radio and multi-platinum artists?
You conflate two entirely different questions. You don't know why RIAA labels can only effectively service artists capable of selling 1M records and above? AND YOU ARE EXPLAINING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY TO US?
Strike 3. You're out!
But for my amusement, I'm going to kick the props out from under the rest of this part of your world view anyway. More to the point, refuting your mistakes are giving me a very few useful and potentially profitable ideas, the most important of which I won't discuss here.
You obviously haven't read Janis Ian's articles, have you? She demonstrated based on her experience that they don't serve their mid-list. As to why they can't, you yourself are providing part of the explanation right here. Don't you read your own posts before hitting "Send"? Why should anybody else read them?
MTV? Product placement in movies? Sports? Major websites? Streaming servers?
Yes, and all of these channels have a limited number of useful slots and the majority are targeted towards certain kinds of music. Pushing Metallica on urban black FM radio stations is a waste of money.
The only artists who can be marketed cost-effectively through those channels are either the ones who are multi-platinum or in the judgement of the label, can become multi-platinum. There really isn't any good economic reason to do otherwise. The other major expense with respect to a marketing model based on brick-and-mortar sales is manufacturing and shipping the physical product to tens of thousands of record stores. If you've shipped a dozen CDs to each of 10K record stores and only 10K CDs sell total, the record label is deep in the hole.
They have a lot of cash, experience, and they specialize in this stuff. They can and will adapt...
All it is going to take is one artist breaking 1M unit CD sales without the aid of a major record label (who cares if the RIAA blesses it via "platinum"? All who know anything about the industry know the numbers come from SoundScan) through the use of Internet promotion and in-person + Internet sales and the word getting around that he made $5-10M off those 1M sales instead of $50K and artists start bailing from their record labels. You obviously haven't read Courtney Love's explanation of a major label record contract and you certainly have never seen one yourself... meaning you've got no business discussing the music business in a public forum. But you may already have figured this out.
ALL the big 5 RIAA labels are in trouble. Due to "piracy"? Only in the imaginations of RIAA publicists and those naive enough to believe them. Care to look in a mirror before you continue to read this?Music sales as a whole dropped right after Napster closed. The difference appears to be lack of promotion via a mass-market P2P channel... say, the equivalent of several Clear Channel FM radio stations in major markets getting blown up.
There are two reasons for the decline in record sales after the impact of Napster's shutdown finally rippled out. "It's the economy, stupid!" is one.
By and large, the labels are owned by very large multinationals. If the label artists start bailing, the stock value of the parent companies suddenly takes a hit grossly disproportionate to the actual impact on asset value. Watch most of the big 5 go on the block at fire sale prices, i.e. for far less than the values of their catalogues and physical assets. Remember the dot.bomb? Many good companies went down with the bad. This will happen sooner than even most of RIAA's worst enemies will believe possible. Most labels won't have time to adapt before they go on the block.
Not to say that all labels will go down, and I'm certain that in the post-RIAA landscape, the competent music specialists currently employed by the labels will make more money than ever before. I think most will work directly for musicians as contractors, but some will work for surviving labels and new ones. The new labels that start out with and the old ones who adapt to to a "everybody has access to Net promotion - WE know what we're doing" based business by drastically cutting expenses, concentrating on artist support, creating fair contracts, publishing them on the Web, and boasting about how good they are in every venue they can buy ads in, spending far less money per new artist by using Internet channels only for promo and distribution unless an artist proves real mass market potential will make more money than anyone believes possible.
The surviving and new labels will be able to make money with an artist that sells 5-10K records... as will the artist. The new successful label model will be hundreds or thousands of 10K-50K selling artists, and a few breakout artists who it'll be worth the trouble to go to traditional brick and mortar distribution for.
From an artist viewpoint, the point behind having a label is to make more money with less non-music hassle than one can without one. If one's worldwide sales potential is 10K records a year with what an individual can do about promo, one has the chance to make a decent living without a label. To make a label contract worthwhile, an artist needs to be convinced that the record label can make life easier for him and increase his income. In the new world, the record labels will have to make that case to a musician inclined to believe otherwise.
even if it's not RIAA as we know them,
Again. YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHO THE MUSIC INDUSTRY PLAYERS ARE AND YOU ARE LECTURING US ABOUT THE INDUSTRY?
there will always be a need for some major backing of this kind. The
reason is simple: it is impossible for everyone to have everyones ear.
Anybody who's selling music and bought access to "everyone's ear" paid way the hell too much.
Your "simple" reason is simply wrong. You really don't know what a record label does for musicians, do you?
Most simply put, it's an interface; a broker between the musician and the part of the public most likely to buy that musician's music. It's gatekeeper function is imposed by economics, if an organization is going to use the mass media as the primary tool to promote a record and brick and mortar distribution as the primary sales channel, very substantial resources must be devoted per musician. Add this to the legendary drastically inflated overhead, and this means extremely substantial resources. With the full knowledge that on the average, most of these investments will be lost. Other label resources are used to help the musician make the record, i.e. studio time, experienced in-house or external music and video producers and directors, etc. Labels constrained this way must make what appear to be the "safest" choices, not the best or most artistically appealing ones.
People are getting bored by the safe choices. That's the other big reason why the major labels and Clear Channel is in big trouble. While you presumably are content with Clear Channel, and I'd guess you to be a 60s-80s "album-oriented-rock" type, listenership is dropping. Are you going to tell us that P2P "piracy" is hitting FM radio as well? Same price and one doesn't have to tie up one's BW downloading, similar quality, and if your assumptions are true (they aren't), same music.
Unless our media fractures into such small niche groups (which it has not and we have no reason to believe it will) there will be a market for the finite mindshare of consumers. That market is necessarily expensive because the demand is so great and the supply is so little.
With respect to the media shattering into small niche groups, the media hasn't. the AUDIENCE has. This ain't "The Summer of Love" anymore. Times have changed since "The San Francisco Sound" or "The English Beat" was what everybody was listening to. There isn't one big sound everyone is listening to anymore, even within music categories like metal or hiphop or "alternative music".
Let's take metal as an example. It has shattered into at least a dozen different niches, some as different as chalk and cheeze. You know the difference between "heavy" metal and "doom" metal? The audience for the less important niches isn't big enough to support a million-selling audience even if EVERYBODY who listened to it bought a particular album. This is happening across the big music categories. I don't know if this will ever get to the point where 1M album sales are simply impossible, but I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen.
I'm probably going to let you have the last word on this, there's a limit on the amount of pro bono time I can spend educating one blockhead, though I hope and believe others have benefited. Not that I expect the last word to do you any good, unless you count further exposure of your ignorance as a good.
I find it hard to believe that you are really as ignorant as your public post indicates. Are you grassroots or astroturf?
For the RIAA labels, P2P is a way that independent musicians can get around the FM radio monopoly to reach the general public.
If a musician can promote to the general public online and sell CDs online, just what does an RIAA label have to sell a musician other than the chance to get really expensive outside investment that if things don't work out, may put him out of business, i.e. the record doesn't sell, the label stops promoting, and he's bound not to make new records for anybody until the contract expires?
Under current circumstances, a musician who has a sound that even a small niche market likes who's willing to work has a very good chance of making a decent living. A musician who sells 5K records via major label makes nothing and will be dropped by the label. A musician who sells 5K CDs off his own Website and at gigs in a year makes $50K or more, i.e. what 1M records would make him with a major label.
The only other thing the RIAA labels can do for an artist is get him into the record stores, which only matters if the musician reasonably believes he's the next multi-platinum superstar.
A musician has same chances of making money off a conventional label contract as he does of winning the lottery, especially since multiplatinum artists are going out of style.
Unless RIAA labels can make it impossible to effectively promote a band without FM radio access, there is no reason for a musician to sign with one.
Where's the room for compromise? They either stop P2P (remember Internet Radio?) or die.
Why don't we hear the artists who aren't Top 20, platinum album, millions in the bank jumping up and down in favor of this?
Why would the media care about them enough to repeat their words? I've heard more of the same and nastier from midlabel and unsigned artists... but if you get your news from TV, you wouldn't know this, would you?
I got interested in this because I'm working on a promotional project for an indie musician right now that depends on the existence of P2P and what's left of Internet Radio to work. One of the headaches with respect to the project is that the targets keep shifting as RIAA closes them down.
I expect to be able to go into active marketing in about 3 weeks. Due to your buddies at RIAA, I have no idea where we'll be uploading our promo MP3 tracks and won't until just before we do.
You are just another RIAA-brainwashed idiot who mistakes a promotional tool (128K MP3) for a product (CD album)... you probably can't hear the difference.
It might be worth it to recharge batteries a lot more often to provide router service in exchange for always on, zero per-minute cost high-bandwidth mobile data access.
From what I'm seeing, the unnecessary death of an established entertainment industry sector due to obvious short-sighted stupidity and greed, i.e. the new entertainment rule seems to be - when profits drop, attack the hard-core fans. . . will be necessary before this stops.
This puts MLB neck and neck with the RIAA labels. Perhaps some enterprising slashdotter ought to set up death watch pools for each of these markets... set up an acceptable definition for industry death (MLB declaring bankruptcy? 3 of the 5 RIAA major labels closing?) either for fun or profit... so we can start entering our guesses as to when these industry segments will crash and burn.
I did a search on a site I run that isn't in any Yahoo directory, therefore must be accessed via actual search engine. I'm looking at a URL starting with http://google.yahoo.com . Check it yourself with a search.
Since your ignorance leaves you in bliss, I see no particular reason to attempt to enlighten you further. Though a mental health professional may help you explain to yourself your desire to protect bad management practices both in terms of physical and computer security.
Perhaps you aspire to become one of those bad managers, more interested in executive perks than earning your pay. Perhaps you are one of those bad managers and you fear public exposure.
Anyone defending the proposition that "security by obscurity" is a good thing has to assume a burden of proof you are obviously incapable of meeting.
Since I'm sure the subject of security in some context will be coming up again on slashdot, I'm sure I'll be encountering you again. Try to come up with better arguments next time.
Your optimism that the "bad guys" don't already know this and that the "secret" isn't simply being kept from the taxpayers in order to protect the jobs of irresponsible managers, is rarely founded.
The reason this needs to be publicized is the same reason that people who find exploits should publicize them. Like your role models at Microshit, organizations and companies rarely correct even obvious problems unless and until they are forced to do so. That "the bad guys" know is rarely motivation enough. Like in the world of computers, there are many targets and the idea that one might actually get off one's ass and perform just because someone says you have a problem seems very remote.
Perhaps if you knew anything about the real world and got your opinions somewhere other than TV news and here, you wouldn't be wasting people's time with crap posts like yours.
You should stop posting on public policy until after you learn something about how government and society works, should you happen to be capable of doing so. While you have a right to your opinion, you have no right to have it respected.
You are the classic example of the useful fool without which no terrorist operation can hope for success.
One would think that here of all places, at least the moderators would know that public belief in 'security by obscurity' is just another crackpot notion, to be taken as seriously as the idea that Microsoft makes secure operating systems. They could have delayed the broadcast, fixed the holes, hired Lamo or a competent security firm to make sure there weren't any more, and publically thanked him for giving them a security wakeup call.
Maybe until the business cycle turns up, maybe permanently. The number of publications going out of business are going up like a Microsoft bug count. Most places I've written for no longer exist. Most people I know in the business are thinking of leaving.
Tech journalism was hit even harder than high tech in general. Remember, dot.bombs don't buy advertising anymore. "Old Economy" companies slowed down ad purchases as they discovered they didn't have metrics to discover their ROI in Net advertising any more than they actually have them for conventional TV/print advertising. The fact that they didn't have them for the Net bothered them. TV and print are part of the way they are used to do business.
Magazines that have drastically reduced revenue streams don't have enough money to pay writers in significant numbers, if the income goes down far enough, the plug is pulled.
We are not saved. Look for RIAA/MPAA to try to cut a deal with the telecoms that gives them enough to cover their asses and leaves the end users out in the cold. However, it's difficult to see this situation as anything but good news.
The 300 pound RIAA/MPAA alliance gorilla just ran into a tank with a crew which would as happily blow them into the weeds as look at them.
RIAA/MPAA have suddenly become the underdogs. The telecomms probably have 5 lobbyists or more to every lobbyist the RIAA/MPAA has and they do contribute in proportion. They have to, as regulated industries, they must buy political influence, if they leave the Feds to their own devices, they won't like the results any more than we did. They are also in the unusual position of having popular support as well as money.
The good news is that any deal that really screws us as users may be very difficult to cut, because the very reason why an ordinary user gets broadband is what Hollywood wants to unplug. The fact that the telecomms favor mandatory licensing (expect minor increases in what we pay for bandwidth and recording media) is a very good sign. This would protect nicely what Hollywood says its real interests are. Can they live without a monopoly on broadcast access to users? They may get to find out.
People aren't going to be buying the products Hollywood would like to see us, pay-per-view movies or CD-quality music tracks from content providers for a very long time, this requires not broadband as we know it but 2nd generation broadband... 10mbps to the curb.
We may have to organize to save our own asses yet if the telecomms and RIAA/MPAA cut a deal we can't live with.
So keep your eyes open and your powder dry. It ain't over until the fat lady sings.
The candidate/spammer the article discussed got his ass kicked. By everybody. People didn't appreciate his "vote for me" any more than they appreciate "herbal viagra" spam.
It brands the politician paying for it as a clueless fuckhead who has no understanding of the population he is addressing or more importantly, of the technological environment that's becoming increasingly necessary to make any national economy above the Third World level work.
In the USA, the odds are about even that any political spam you get was at least partially funded by an RIAA/MPAA member.
It gives you a reason to vote for the opponent of whoever's sending it.
For a politician with a clue (yes, there are a very few), it's also useful. If a political consultant proposes it, he knows to fire the imbecile and hopefully, the consultant will go to work for the opponent. . . sinking the guy's campaign.
So political spam indeed serves a useful purpose. It tells you that the politician it promotes is an idiot without having to do the ordinary work required to get the candidate's position on the issues that matter to you.
A spammer politician is not going to be proposing or voting for a repeal of the DMCA.
FM radio and MP3 in the most commonly distributed format, 128K MP3s are of comparable quality to FM airplay.
The RIAA doesn't get excited if you tape off the radio. The reason is that if you like the song, you'll buy the CD so you can hear every nuance on your stereo system.
MP3s have been shown to be similarly effective promotional tools. (I'm working with an indie artist, and we will be distributing MP3s in as many directions as the RIAA has left to us.
CDs are the product, NOT MP3s and not tracks played on FM Radio.
People will not buy a record without hearing at least some of the songs on it.
People will pay for full quality. For lower quality just good enough to tell if it's worth buying, the MP3 or FM radio song is perfect.
To expect us to pay for either the MP3 or the FM tune is to expect us to pay the musician or label's promotional costs upfront even if we don't know if it's worth buying or not.
The record industry's objection to MP3 as a promotional tool is that anybody can play.
Sony can upload MP3 to a P2P network or an Internet radio station for $0.00, and if people like it, they'll buy it. They have absolutely no problem with this.
I can do the same, and their knowing that is why they're trying to unplug every method of getting music to the public via the Net they don't have monopoly control over.
This isn't about piracy.
Would you pay to hear music on FM radio? Is a 128K MP3 worth the same as an uncompressed CD audio track? Neither will I. Does RIAA really think 128K MP3 audio is a real product they can make money off? If they did, they would have done a far better job with their industry MP3 distribution.
While making money off MP3s isn't impossible, the people who do this must remember that the service is NOT about selling MP3s, it's about selling access to pre-sorted / pre-classified tracks so the user can get a chance to sample the kind of music she likes before buying the album, and without spending hours every day trying to find a band that plays the kind of music she likes.
The best solution to the problem would be to create new law that provides for mandatory licensing of the sort that exists for broadcast radio for MP3s(or OGG or whatever) with quality compable to that of FM radio, with anyone broadcasting it paying the same royalties as is paid for use of FM. What an Internet broadcaster would be paying for is a stock in trade, while each song is without commercial value in and of itself, a collection big enough to make 24/7/365 streaming reasonable means that you can get a listening audience, which is of commercial value. Of course, the major Internet Radio stations were already doing this. The idea here is to provide a legal shelter for broadcasters. Protecting an RIAA label monopoly on access to the public is not a proper objective of public policy to anybody buy the Congress-shitbags 0wn3d by the major labels...
Go to 256K MP3 and one has something almost indistinguishable from the original, which means one is selling a musician's stock in trade, to do that without the owner's consent is piracy.
The whines about MP3 piracy causing losses to major record labels are about using the Feds to enforce a monopoly over what we are allowed to hear.
If YOU join in the whining, you're what Lenin called a "useful idiot", carrying the can for organizations who are neither your friends nor that of musicians.
You and the others who said MP3 quality can be improved past 128K missed my point. As far as I know, Internet Radio and my last look at MP3 uploading to distribution points like MP3.com are generally limited to 128. Certainly, I can rip 256K for my own use and I find ogg rather interesting, that's why I've got a copy of the encoder. But my point was comparing MP3 as a medium for public distribution against FM radio.
While I'm not a musician, I am working with one. That's why I have rather pronounced opinions about these issues. For me, I'm not especially interested in downloading MP3s, I'm a person who is/will be greatly inconvenienced by the demise of US Internet Radio as a place to UPLOAD.
Slashdot Mirror
After the technical standards that they were created to propagate were replaced by ones coming out of the consumer electronics industry, they had to find another role... that of lobbying body and barnacle on the side of technological development.
RIAA's owners would have been better off if RIAA had gone out of business leaving good memories.
The factors you describe apply to them, too, unless you'd like to explain to us how a laser beam can get information (polarization aside, which doesn't apply here) extracted from any sort of torsion component which you allege is deliberately applied to the recording head in the course of the original recording.
Of course, you haven't quite accounted for the fact that the real high-end turntables tend to be laser based and that serious and rich audiophiles buy them. Perhaps their ears aren't quite as good as yours.
Of course, if you're using DSP, the equation is a better place to start, just remember, it was recorded using treble boost, bass cut, playback is the opposite.
High frequencies (treble) are boosted and bass (low frequences) are cut during the recording process.
Treble is boosted 19.95 DB (by a factor of about 100x) at 20KHz during the recording process. The laser turntables are NOT trying to pick out submicron details.
Sorry, it's late and I'm tired. Here's where Part 14 of the rec.audio.* FAQ can be found:http://www.unik.no/~robert/hifi/faq/faq-11.h tml.
http://arts.ucsc.edu/ems/music/tech_background/TE- 19/teces_19.html contains basic information on how the LP record works. I think the most important thing for the experimenter is called RIAA equalization, in order to limit the physical motion of the recording stylus that cut the record, bass was reduced and treble increased in a very precise way, in order to reproduce the original sound, the opposite must be done.
The RIAA equalization curve is a plot of amplitude boost/cut vs. frequency. Apply its inverse to the raw analog signal(s) that come out of your signal processing.
You can find it at http://www.tanker.se/lidstrom/riaa.htm.
Oh, and CLEAN THE RECORD BEFORE DOING THIS. The info in Part 14 of the rec.audio.* FAQ is as good a place to start to find out how as any.
Have fun and feel free to let me know if you get anywhere.
You might also want a look at my other post to this thread.
Since I do know what these things are, I'm doing a bit of research which I'll be posting to the main thread shortly for the next person who wants to try this.
Standard rotational speed = 33 1/3 RPM
12" record
Circumference = pi * D
33.3RPM /60 ~ 0.5 R/second
12" * pi ~ 37" circumference.
0.5 * 37" = 18.5"
18.5 * 600dpi = 11,100 samples per inch, which gives a Nyquist limit of 5550Hz... a 2400 dpi or better might actually give full audio bandwidth, though in this case, the higher the better, since the area available for sampling decreases towards the center of the record, and for really high fidelity sound, more than 2 samples at 20K are necessary.
His model for how the record was encoded is *wrong*. The RIAA method of stereo modulation (back when they were mostly a standards organization) places the amplitude information on each wall of the V-shaped groove. It is intended to be picked up with a stylus connected to a something in the form of an Y , with channel information picked up by coil or magnet or other means attached to each upper leg of the Y.
Fixing his model should result in drastically improved performance if he's extracting stereo information. Cleaning the record would also help a lot.
His project actually *is* worth doing. An optimized algorithm should allow anyone or a museum with a good scanner to turn his vinyl (SPELLED CORRECTLY) collection into decent quality Red Book or MP3 tracks without any further damage to the records. The basic problem is to linearize the relationship between 16-24 bit gray scale information of reflected light and the depth modulation in each groove.
The suggestion of using software to extract 3D information from the grooves posted elsewhere is a good idea, but this is a good start.
Cool hack.
There are things that they do badly.
"My bill is 100x what it should be"... the menus aren't going to help with an automated response to that problem.
Any kind of technical support. If one has a problem that can't be resolved by reading the FAQ and searching the vendor's tech database, a bot that parses one's question and keyword-matches it to another FAQ is very unlikely to provide a remotely appropriate answer.
Altavista used one of those bots a while ago for its customer service, making me an early adopter of alltheweb. It's response e-mails said "hit the link to escalate to a human"... without providing the link.
ICQ's e-mail "customer service" ... same thing... the first try or two, one thinks that one might be dealing with a retarded human. Third time, one knows that it's a bot and there is no way to escalate to a human. Unfortunately, the person I contact this way is not technically clued, so switching to a service run by the clued isn't really an option, if I could get overseas to install a better IM client, I wouldn't need one.
But I still don't know why my SMS messages, a service which ICQ promotes actively, never get through to their destination or if the problem can be fixed (it's listed in the Network listing and actually worked a couple of months ago), and it's the service I need most. I don't recommend ICQ a lot to other people.
Don't tell us 'she' came on to you, nobody will believe it.
We all understand about unrequited lust, but is it really fair to respond to it by wanting to take the computer 'she' lives in apart?
For the RIAA labels, P2P is a way that independent musicians can get around the FM radio monopoly to reach the general public....Where's the room for compromise? They either stop P2P (remember Internet Radio?) or die
All of this rests, a priori, on your presumption that P2P is such an effective alternative to RIAA's marketing and financial backing that it fundamentally threatens RIAA.
No, P2P alone isn't, but P2P and Internet Radio and other Net enabled methods of communication with a low cost of entry *are*.
Merely putting your wares out on a file server is not equivalent to marketing.
I'm glad you've learned something from my posts.
How many albums have been sold by artists using P2P and non-RIAA means exclusively to market? It exists, but it is still very much of a fringe thing.
You state as fact things that can't be any more than opinions from a dubious source which you seem to be going to a good deal of trouble to render more so.
The central US record-keeping organization of the industry that certifies "gold" and "platinum" is the RIAA. Soundscan primarily tracks brick and mortar retail channel (every record sold via POS in the US is tracked on the Soundscan central databass) and is just beginning to track Internet sales including CD-on-demand. The sales charts for records in Billboard and in mass media and RIAA's numbers all are based on SoundScan. Look it up at Google. If this is news to you, you should become informed before expecting anyone to take your opinions seriously.
You cannot even show that these independent artists are any more numerous
Never said that they were. Perhaps in the America you'd like to see, no garage band could exist without registering with the Department of Homeland Security or getting permission from the RIAA to exist. We don't live there yet.
or more successful than they were pre-P2P or internet.
Define success!.
For a record label, an artist who only sold 200K records in a year is a mid-list artist, they'll probably keep her and hope she makes real money someday.
An individual who sold 200K records without the industry has made $1-2M on $3-4M gross saled. Tell that new millionaire that she isn't a success.
For a label, an artist who sold 10K records in a year is getting dropped, and she won't be seeing a dime in royalties, and the A&R man who signed her is getting yelled at by his boss.
That artist selling 10K records on her own has made $50-100K... which is a very decent living.
Here are examples of two bands that have done very well out of MP3 file swapping.
Wilco defies experts as `Foxtrot' gallops
By Greg Kot
Tribune rock critic
Published May 2, 2002
article here
Fair usage quotes:
Though the album was rejected by one major label as uncommercial, Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" defied record-industry expectations by selling 55,573 copies in its first week and debuting at No. 13 on the Billboard album chart--by far exceeding the band's past sales achievements.
The numbers released Wednesday by Soundscan, which monitors retail sales, flew in the face of mainstream record-industry thinking, which held that Wilco could not significantly expand its audience without commercial radio airplay and that it would hurt its sales by making its music widely available on the Internet.
[snip]
A similar strategy worked for Radiohead in 2000 and 2001, when experimental records such as "Kid A" and "Amnesiac" circulated on MP3 files months before the albums' release, yet the albums debuted listeners time to live with the music for a while and appreciate at No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, when released. "It gave our what we were up to," said Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien.
Tower Records on Clark Street reported first-week "Foxtrot" sales of 299, double the best first-week sales of any album this year. "People have the record because they downloaded it, but that didn't affect sales whatsoever," said product manager Von Medler. "It's been a couple of years since we've had a first week of sales like this."
*end quote*
This is the cutting edge of band marketing, and by definition, only a few are going to be on the cutting edge.
The musician I am personally working with will be releasing some of her songs as MP3s for the same reason. She knows what the product is. Just like Wilco does and Radiohead does.
Sad that YOU don't quite get it yet, isn't it? Don't worry. Hilary Rosen of RIAA also does. You may assume like everyone else that any public statements she makes at variance with this are fabrications.
Where is the evidence that RIAA's services are any less in demand? Why isn't there any real decline in the # of artists to signing with RIAA?
Strike one. RIAA is a record label industry association. Artists are neither invited nor welcome to join, though if they own their own record labels qualifying according to RIAA criteria, their labels might be welcome to join. They don't provide services to individual artists any more than the BSA provides end-user support. If you don't know this, why should anything else you say be taken seriously?
Why should anyone believe that RIAA's real agenda for attacking P2P is killing alternative distribution/marketing (given how irrelevant it is today)
Care to tell Radiohead and Wilco how irrelevant it is?
Perhaps the RIAA/MPAA, like your pets, look ahead a bit further than you do. Movie piracy in the US via download isn't especially significant. It can't be, the last mile bandwidth to the home isn't in place yet, even broadband DSL/cablemodem isn't really fast enough. MPAA is also helping leading the effort to lock down the Net and personal computers. Perhaps you should tell Jack Valenti that the Internet is irrelevant to movie piracy.
and not for the fact that 99% of the services' traffic is their goods being pirated,
I won't blame you for getting this one wrong, most name musicians believe the same disinformation, and they got it where you did. CDs are the product. 128K MP3s are promotional items used to sell CDs. They are not the same thing. The ones who figure this out, like Wilco and Radiohead have a much better chance of making money in the modern music environment. Any stupid enough to listen to you will be whining about PIRATES.
The reason for this is that as is known to everyone in and out of the industry except you, free MP3 distribution boosts record sales. Record sales dropped immediately after Napster was shut down.
Major labels pay to get their product onto FM radio. The quality is comparable. Why? While you might buy an album you've never heard based on the idea that if an RIAA label makes it, it must be good, nobody else will. The quality of a 128K MP3 is sufficiently different from that of an album that if someone grabs a 128K MP3 for something that the person really likes, he'll buy the actual uncompressed CD. Maybe not on the 1st or the 4th or the 100th listening, but sooner or later, he's going to want to hear every nuance through his multichannel sound system which is telling him there are things on it he wants to hear and can't.
especially when services that do NOT serve piracy so effectively are left alone by and large (e.g., mp3.com et. al)?
Strike two. Which world do you live in? Try googling mp3.com and lawsuit and see how many hits you get. I got 11,600 .
Do you know who owns MP3.com now?
MP3.com isn't an adequate promotional channel for new musicians, and with rare exceptions, anyone who thinks this will find out differently the hard way. In my plans to promote an actual artist I'm working with, MP3.com is fairly low on the list of priorities. I'm going P2P and non-US Internet Radio first.
Why? Too crowded for one, and most important, it doesn't fit the way most people look for new music. Unless one is a self-defined member of a musical subculture, in which case one knows who the bands are and goes directly to their sites and knows where to go to hear the latest buzz about cool new bands, one finds new music by finding music that one likes that's familiar and waiting for similar music from new bands. On a place like mp3.com , for the new user, all the new content is unfamiliar.
I like Internet Radio for this because it offers defined genres. But to some extent, so does the search feature on an MP3 file sharing site.
Internet Radio wasn't serving pirates at all and the RIAA got it closed down, too. They were paying radio-type royalties to ASCAP and BMI (do you know who ASCAP and BMI are? If you don't, just what are you doing in this discussion?) and were trying to make a deal with RIAA labels to allow them to pay reasonable (i.e. ones that would allow them to stay in business) royalties to them. RIAA wouldn't allow them to stay in business even if they paid royalties to labels.
In fact, one of the people who was involved in negotiating the Yahoo music contract that the CARP copyright deal that got Internet Radio closed down was based on explicitly stated that the yahoo intent was to make sure that only major label music got played on Yahoo, and that the industry wanted to make sure that Yahoo wouldn't let "just anybody" have a chance to get music played there.
If legitimate promotion and distribution of independent artists is really the goal of P2P,
The goal of P2P is file distribution. The content of the files is the business of the users. Why should a file sharing network have any other goals?
then Napster and all of its followers could have served that end, and simultaneously avoid RIAA's harrasment, by only allowing enumerated artists on its network after they sign an agreement stating that they are willing to have their goods traded in such a fashion. That could have been done very easily,
Explain how. Not that it matters, but I want to see you make a fool of yourself in public.
yet it was not and has not yet been done.
If the primary 128K MP3 value is to provide an advance sample of the CD listening experience, just why is this important? People are NOT trading almost CD-quality 256K MP3s to any significant extent. Just let the "Jolly Roger" flag recede into your hallucinations now.
Oh yeah, and why do you assume that RIAA can only do FM radio and multi-platinum artists?
You conflate two entirely different questions. You don't know why RIAA labels can only effectively service artists capable of selling 1M records and above? AND YOU ARE EXPLAINING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY TO US?
Strike 3. You're out!
But for my amusement, I'm going to kick the props out from under the rest of this part of your world view anyway. More to the point, refuting your mistakes are giving me a very few useful and potentially profitable ideas, the most important of which I won't discuss here.
You obviously haven't read Janis Ian's articles, have you? She demonstrated based on her experience that they don't serve their mid-list. As to why they can't, you yourself are providing part of the explanation right here. Don't you read your own posts before hitting "Send"? Why should anybody else read them?
MTV? Product placement in movies? Sports? Major websites? Streaming servers?
Yes, and all of these channels have a limited number of useful slots and the majority are targeted towards certain kinds of music. Pushing Metallica on urban black FM radio stations is a waste of money.
The only artists who can be marketed cost-effectively through those channels are either the ones who are multi-platinum or in the judgement of the label, can become multi-platinum. There really isn't any good economic reason to do otherwise. The other major expense with respect to a marketing model based on brick-and-mortar sales is manufacturing and shipping the physical product to tens of thousands of record stores. If you've shipped a dozen CDs to each of 10K record stores and only 10K CDs sell total, the record label is deep in the hole.
They have a lot of cash, experience, and they specialize in this stuff. They can and will adapt...
All it is going to take is one artist breaking 1M unit CD sales without the aid of a major record label (who cares if the RIAA blesses it via "platinum"? All who know anything about the industry know the numbers come from SoundScan) through the use of Internet promotion and in-person + Internet sales and the word getting around that he made $5-10M off those 1M sales instead of $50K and artists start bailing from their record labels. You obviously haven't read Courtney Love's explanation of a major label record contract and you certainly have never seen one yourself... meaning you've got no business discussing the music business in a public forum. But you may already have figured this out.
ALL the big 5 RIAA labels are in trouble. Due to "piracy"? Only in the imaginations of RIAA publicists and those naive enough to believe them. Care to look in a mirror before you continue to read this?Music sales as a whole dropped right after Napster closed. The difference appears to be lack of promotion via a mass-market P2P channel... say, the equivalent of several Clear Channel FM radio stations in major markets getting blown up.
There are two reasons for the decline in record sales after the impact of Napster's shutdown finally rippled out. "It's the economy, stupid!" is one.
By and large, the labels are owned by very large multinationals. If the label artists start bailing, the stock value of the parent companies suddenly takes a hit grossly disproportionate to the actual impact on asset value. Watch most of the big 5 go on the block at fire sale prices, i.e. for far less than the values of their catalogues and physical assets. Remember the dot.bomb? Many good companies went down with the bad. This will happen sooner than even most of RIAA's worst enemies will believe possible. Most labels won't have time to adapt before they go on the block.
Not to say that all labels will go down, and I'm certain that in the post-RIAA landscape, the competent music specialists currently employed by the labels will make more money than ever before. I think most will work directly for musicians as contractors, but some will work for surviving labels and new ones. The new labels that start out with and the old ones who adapt to to a "everybody has access to Net promotion - WE know what we're doing" based business by drastically cutting expenses, concentrating on artist support, creating fair contracts, publishing them on the Web, and boasting about how good they are in every venue they can buy ads in, spending far less money per new artist by using Internet channels only for promo and distribution unless an artist proves real mass market potential will make more money than anyone believes possible.
The surviving and new labels will be able to make money with an artist that sells 5-10K records... as will the artist. The new successful label model will be hundreds or thousands of 10K-50K selling artists, and a few breakout artists who it'll be worth the trouble to go to traditional brick and mortar distribution for.
From an artist viewpoint, the point behind having a label is to make more money with less non-music hassle than one can without one. If one's worldwide sales potential is 10K records a year with what an individual can do about promo, one has the chance to make a decent living without a label. To make a label contract worthwhile, an artist needs to be convinced that the record label can make life easier for him and increase his income. In the new world, the record labels will have to make that case to a musician inclined to believe otherwise.
even if it's not RIAA as we know them,
Again. YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHO THE MUSIC INDUSTRY PLAYERS ARE AND YOU ARE LECTURING US ABOUT THE INDUSTRY?
there will always be a need for some major backing of this kind. The
reason is simple: it is impossible for everyone to have everyones ear.
Anybody who's selling music and bought access to "everyone's ear" paid way the hell too much.
Your "simple" reason is simply wrong. You really don't know what a record label does for musicians, do you?
Most simply put, it's an interface; a broker between the musician and the part of the public most likely to buy that musician's music. It's gatekeeper function is imposed by economics, if an organization is going to use the mass media as the primary tool to promote a record and brick and mortar distribution as the primary sales channel, very substantial resources must be devoted per musician. Add this to the legendary drastically inflated overhead, and this means extremely substantial resources. With the full knowledge that on the average, most of these investments will be lost. Other label resources are used to help the musician make the record, i.e. studio time, experienced in-house or external music and video producers and directors, etc. Labels constrained this way must make what appear to be the "safest" choices, not the best or most artistically appealing ones.
People are getting bored by the safe choices. That's the other big reason why the major labels and Clear Channel is in big trouble. While you presumably are content with Clear Channel, and I'd guess you to be a 60s-80s "album-oriented-rock" type, listenership is dropping. Are you going to tell us that P2P "piracy" is hitting FM radio as well? Same price and one doesn't have to tie up one's BW downloading, similar quality, and if your assumptions are true (they aren't), same music.
Unless our media fractures into such small niche groups (which it has not and we have no reason to believe it will) there will be a market for the finite mindshare of consumers. That market is necessarily expensive because the demand is so great and the supply is so little.
With respect to the media shattering into small niche groups, the media hasn't. the AUDIENCE has. This ain't "The Summer of Love" anymore. Times have changed since "The San Francisco Sound" or "The English Beat" was what everybody was listening to. There isn't one big sound everyone is listening to anymore, even within music categories like metal or hiphop or "alternative music".
Let's take metal as an example. It has shattered into at least a dozen different niches, some as different as chalk and cheeze. You know the difference between "heavy" metal and "doom" metal? The audience for the less important niches isn't big enough to support a million-selling audience even if EVERYBODY who listened to it bought a particular album. This is happening across the big music categories. I don't know if this will ever get to the point where 1M album sales are simply impossible, but I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen.
I'm probably going to let you have the last word on this, there's a limit on the amount of pro bono time I can spend educating one blockhead, though I hope and believe others have benefited. Not that I expect the last word to do you any good, unless you count further exposure of your ignorance as a good.
I find it hard to believe that you are really as ignorant as your public post indicates. Are you grassroots or astroturf?
If a musician can promote to the general public online and sell CDs online, just what does an RIAA label have to sell a musician other than the chance to get really expensive outside investment that if things don't work out, may put him out of business, i.e. the record doesn't sell, the label stops promoting, and he's bound not to make new records for anybody until the contract expires?
Under current circumstances, a musician who has a sound that even a small niche market likes who's willing to work has a very good chance of making a decent living. A musician who sells 5K records via major label makes nothing and will be dropped by the label. A musician who sells 5K CDs off his own Website and at gigs in a year makes $50K or more, i.e. what 1M records would make him with a major label.
The only other thing the RIAA labels can do for an artist is get him into the record stores, which only matters if the musician reasonably believes he's the next multi-platinum superstar.
A musician has same chances of making money off a conventional label contract as he does of winning the lottery, especially since multiplatinum artists are going out of style.
Unless RIAA labels can make it impossible to effectively promote a band without FM radio access, there is no reason for a musician to sign with one.
Where's the room for compromise? They either stop P2P (remember Internet Radio?) or die.
Why would the media care about them enough to repeat their words? I've heard more of the same and nastier from midlabel and unsigned artists... but if you get your news from TV, you wouldn't know this, would you?
I got interested in this because I'm working on a promotional project for an indie musician right now that depends on the existence of P2P and what's left of Internet Radio to work. One of the headaches with respect to the project is that the targets keep shifting as RIAA closes them down.
I expect to be able to go into active marketing in about 3 weeks. Due to your buddies at RIAA, I have no idea where we'll be uploading our promo MP3 tracks and won't until just before we do.
You are just another RIAA-brainwashed idiot who mistakes a promotional tool (128K MP3) for a product (CD album)... you probably can't hear the difference.
It might be worth it to recharge batteries a lot more often to provide router service in exchange for always on, zero per-minute cost high-bandwidth mobile data access.
This puts MLB neck and neck with the RIAA labels. Perhaps some enterprising slashdotter ought to set up death watch pools for each of these markets... set up an acceptable definition for industry death (MLB declaring bankruptcy? 3 of the 5 RIAA major labels closing?) either for fun or profit... so we can start entering our guesses as to when these industry segments will crash and burn.
I did a search on a site I run that isn't in any Yahoo directory, therefore must be accessed via actual search engine. I'm looking at a URL starting with http://google.yahoo.com . Check it yourself with a search.
Perhaps you aspire to become one of those bad managers, more interested in executive perks than earning your pay. Perhaps you are one of those bad managers and you fear public exposure.
Anyone defending the proposition that "security by obscurity" is a good thing has to assume a burden of proof you are obviously incapable of meeting.
Since I'm sure the subject of security in some context will be coming up again on slashdot, I'm sure I'll be encountering you again. Try to come up with better arguments next time.
The reason this needs to be publicized is the same reason that people who find exploits should publicize them. Like your role models at Microshit, organizations and companies rarely correct even obvious problems unless and until they are forced to do so. That "the bad guys" know is rarely motivation enough. Like in the world of computers, there are many targets and the idea that one might actually get off one's ass and perform just because someone says you have a problem seems very remote.
Perhaps if you knew anything about the real world and got your opinions somewhere other than TV news and here, you wouldn't be wasting people's time with crap posts like yours.
You should stop posting on public policy until after you learn something about how government and society works, should you happen to be capable of doing so. While you have a right to your opinion, you have no right to have it respected.
You are the classic example of the useful fool without which no terrorist operation can hope for success.
One would think that here of all places, at least the moderators would know that public belief in 'security by obscurity' is just another crackpot notion, to be taken as seriously as the idea that Microsoft makes secure operating systems. They could have delayed the broadcast, fixed the holes, hired Lamo or a competent security firm to make sure there weren't any more, and publically thanked him for giving them a security wakeup call.
Tech journalism was hit even harder than high tech in general. Remember, dot.bombs don't buy advertising anymore. "Old Economy" companies slowed down ad purchases as they discovered they didn't have metrics to discover their ROI in Net advertising any more than they actually have them for conventional TV/print advertising. The fact that they didn't have them for the Net bothered them. TV and print are part of the way they are used to do business.
Magazines that have drastically reduced revenue streams don't have enough money to pay writers in significant numbers, if the income goes down far enough, the plug is pulled.
The 300 pound RIAA/MPAA alliance gorilla just ran into a tank with a crew which would as happily blow them into the weeds as look at them.
RIAA/MPAA have suddenly become the underdogs. The telecomms probably have 5 lobbyists or more to every lobbyist the RIAA/MPAA has and they do contribute in proportion. They have to, as regulated industries, they must buy political influence, if they leave the Feds to their own devices, they won't like the results any more than we did. They are also in the unusual position of having popular support as well as money.
The good news is that any deal that really screws us as users may be very difficult to cut, because the very reason why an ordinary user gets broadband is what Hollywood wants to unplug. The fact that the telecomms favor mandatory licensing (expect minor increases in what we pay for bandwidth and recording media) is a very good sign. This would protect nicely what Hollywood says its real interests are. Can they live without a monopoly on broadcast access to users? They may get to find out.
People aren't going to be buying the products Hollywood would like to see us, pay-per-view movies or CD-quality music tracks from content providers for a very long time, this requires not broadband as we know it but 2nd generation broadband... 10mbps to the curb.
We may have to organize to save our own asses yet if the telecomms and RIAA/MPAA cut a deal we can't live with.
So keep your eyes open and your powder dry. It ain't over until the fat lady sings.
The candidate/spammer the article discussed got his ass kicked. By everybody. People didn't appreciate his "vote for me" any more than they appreciate "herbal viagra" spam.
In the USA, the odds are about even that any political spam you get was at least partially funded by an RIAA/MPAA member.
It gives you a reason to vote for the opponent of whoever's sending it.
For a politician with a clue (yes, there are a very few), it's also useful. If a political consultant proposes it, he knows to fire the imbecile and hopefully, the consultant will go to work for the opponent. . . sinking the guy's campaign.
So political spam indeed serves a useful purpose. It tells you that the politician it promotes is an idiot without having to do the ordinary work required to get the candidate's position on the issues that matter to you.
A spammer politician is not going to be proposing or voting for a repeal of the DMCA.
The RIAA doesn't get excited if you tape off the radio. The reason is that if you like the song, you'll buy the CD so you can hear every nuance on your stereo system.
MP3s have been shown to be similarly effective promotional tools. (I'm working with an indie artist, and we will be distributing MP3s in as many directions as the RIAA has left to us.
CDs are the product, NOT MP3s and not tracks played on FM Radio.
People will not buy a record without hearing at least some of the songs on it.
People will pay for full quality. For lower quality just good enough to tell if it's worth buying, the MP3 or FM radio song is perfect.
To expect us to pay for either the MP3 or the FM tune is to expect us to pay the musician or label's promotional costs upfront even if we don't know if it's worth buying or not.
The record industry's objection to MP3 as a promotional tool is that anybody can play.
Sony can upload MP3 to a P2P network or an Internet radio station for $0.00, and if people like it, they'll buy it. They have absolutely no problem with this.
I can do the same, and their knowing that is why they're trying to unplug every method of getting music to the public via the Net they don't have monopoly control over.
This isn't about piracy.
Would you pay to hear music on FM radio? Is a 128K MP3 worth the same as an uncompressed CD audio track? Neither will I. Does RIAA really think 128K MP3 audio is a real product they can make money off? If they did, they would have done a far better job with their industry MP3 distribution.
While making money off MP3s isn't impossible, the people who do this must remember that the service is NOT about selling MP3s, it's about selling access to pre-sorted / pre-classified tracks so the user can get a chance to sample the kind of music she likes before buying the album, and without spending hours every day trying to find a band that plays the kind of music she likes.
The best solution to the problem would be to create new law that provides for mandatory licensing of the sort that exists for broadcast radio for MP3s(or OGG or whatever) with quality compable to that of FM radio, with anyone broadcasting it paying the same royalties as is paid for use of FM. What an Internet broadcaster would be paying for is a stock in trade, while each song is without commercial value in and of itself, a collection big enough to make 24/7/365 streaming reasonable means that you can get a listening audience, which is of commercial value. Of course, the major Internet Radio stations were already doing this. The idea here is to provide a legal shelter for broadcasters. Protecting an RIAA label monopoly on access to the public is not a proper objective of public policy to anybody buy the Congress-shitbags 0wn3d by the major labels...
Go to 256K MP3 and one has something almost indistinguishable from the original, which means one is selling a musician's stock in trade, to do that without the owner's consent is piracy.
The whines about MP3 piracy causing losses to major record labels are about using the Feds to enforce a monopoly over what we are allowed to hear.
If YOU join in the whining, you're what Lenin called a "useful idiot", carrying the can for organizations who are neither your friends nor that of musicians.
While I'm not a musician, I am working with one. That's why I have rather pronounced opinions about these issues. For me, I'm not especially interested in downloading MP3s, I'm a person who is/will be greatly inconvenienced by the demise of US Internet Radio as a place to UPLOAD.