Another idea is that you can use your recordings to promote the real product -- your ability to write, perform, and produce your own music.
That's what I do, anyhow.
If I happen to make a couple of bucks selling the recordings, I usually just put them back into more "marketing" expenses, anyhow.
Re:Blockbuster did this a while back...
on
Rent-a-Game
·
· Score: 2
Blockbuster near me still rents games; however, I've discovered that if I wait a few months, the prices of most of the good games go down enough that it's almost more cost-effective just to buy the game at a discount or grab it on eBay.
Per the NY Times article discussed above, Ashcroft didn't make this decision.
However, you are right to point the finger at Ashcroft in the sense that as the head of the DOJ, he is responsible for decisions made by those to whom he has delegated his authority.
They didn't say "George W. Bush" specifically, but rather "Bush Administration," which is accurate. As the head of the Executive branch of government, Bush is responsible for decisions made by everyone underneath him.
You have to understand something here: As the president, Bush is named responsible for the actions of all those underneath him, whether he made the decision personally or not.
It is quite likely that this same decision would have been made even had Gore or Nader been made president, at which time you'd be reading, "The Nader administration..." and you'd wonder, "What? Nader would NEVER do anything like that."
Of course he wouldn't. But being president means delegating authority to others, who then make the decisions. You then get blamed for their bad decisions.
[Off-topic rant: This is the major reason why I couldn't support Gore. It seemed to me, through various incidents during his campaign, that he had chosen to surround himself with people who were not very competent, no matter how intelligent he himself was. Bush, despite the perception that he's not very intelligent, has a knack for surrounding himself with very intelligent and competent people. Because of the size of the Executive branch of the US gov't., the ability of a man to surround himself with the best and brightest -- people to make him look good -- is far, far more important than that individual's capabilities in itself. In the end, the president becomes an effigy of himself that's then hung, burned, and shat upon by the public at large anyhow; in this way, the position protects the people who do the actual legwork of diplomacy and policy-making. It's a waste of the talents of a talented individual to make him or her president; he or she can do much greater things as a cabinet member. Why do you think Powell hasn't run for President yet? It's because in his current position he can do more to change the world, and he doesn't have a bigass bulls-eye on his back. In other words, in the US Executive branch, it's much better to have a buffoon surrounded by good puppeteers than a brilliant man surrounded by fools.]
The concern with continuity was one of the worst things that they did with the spinoffs (hey, it's a tough list to choose from), which were generally a mix of plot crutches and time loops, with the viewer supposed to (for some inane reason) care about the technical details of proactively levering the synnergies of the quantum flux giga bubble, rahter than the simpple "Scotty somehow fixed it in time!")
Well, continuity was actually a big plus in Babylon 5, and I think the continuity bug caught on in Star Trek in no small part due to that. But it wasn't the continuity itself that worked or didn't work; it was the overall high quality of most of the Bab5 writing, versus the overall low quality of the post-Roddenberry Star Trek series' writing.
I could probably end my post there, and you'd know what I'd have to say, wouldn't you?
The "yeah" is that games are play, and play doesn't have any story to it. It's like building whole civilizations with Fischertechnik/Lego/Erector (see Warcraft), or playing house with dolls (see The Sims), or shooting your buddies and the family cat with water pistols (see Quake), or putting the pieces of a puzzle together (see Tetris).
The "but" part is that I don't think adventure and role-playing games are play in the same sense. They're more like leisure. You're reading a book, but instead of becoming a character and vicariously living his/her adventure in your mind, you actually get to be the character on the screen, one step closer.
So what's happening here is not the mutation of the game into something better but the mutation of the story into something better. Great RPGs, like Binary Systems' Starflight (there's a throwback to the past for ya), give you a universe, and you get to go out and find the story.
I think that's what excites the ivory tower elite the most.
Funny, I think that if someone is the id, this one is Kirk.
Good point...I just re-read something here on the id, superego and ego. I had a degenerate definition of the three in my mind, where Id represented emotion, Superego represented logic, and Ego represented the self, but clearly that's not the case.
But in non-Freudian terms, that breakdown makes sense; McCoy is the right half of the brain (creativity and emotion), Spock is the left half (logic, reason), and Kirk is the one who has to listen to both sides of the brain argue back and forth and figure out what the hell he's going to do.
I'm looking forward to that not just for the action/adventure yadda, but because seeing a NON-utopian alternate humanity that's trying to keep humanity from being the Trekkian utopia lends itself to some interesting moral plays. I can see a lot of great stories being played out over altering humanity's destiny and trying to push for one moral stance over the other.
Oh, certainly. In the end, "It's The Writing, Stupid!" The vehicle only matters in that it allows the good writers to do good work. Having one alternative humanity is okay, but infinite multiple alternative humanities -- a la "Sliders" (a show that took advantage of its premise less often than "Star Trek") -- has possibilities.
Think about it. If one alternative future can come back and mess around with the past...what's to keep any number of alternative futures from trying the same?:)
Well, the "Prime Directive" was only useful in the ways that it was broken; sometimes it proved worthwhile to break it, sometimes it proved worthwhile not to break it, sometimes it was broken and it was a mistake, and sometimes it was not broken and it should have been.
It depended on the author of the script (and the original series had some FABULOUS writing -- and some really BAD writing). The Prime Directive wasn't a philosophy of the series; it was just another device that the writers could use to put forth their own ideas, just like Kirk's Ego, Spock's Superego, and McCoy's Id.
The main character in morality plays actually usually makes the wrong choice, it's not resolved in a beneficial way, and people don't live happily ever after, and THEN the viewer's been taught the difference between right and wrong. Think Greek theater.
The original "Star Trek" series was really the only morality play on TV, with the possible exception of (I'm not kidding here) the "Fat Albert" cartoon and some of the "Sesame Street" skits. "Star Trek" was certainly the only one intended for adults.
The first thing that jumps out at me from this description is that there's no potential for morality plays, which was the basis of the original series and the Next Generation (while Roddenberry lived).
I'm not here to say that this is better or worse, or to whine about things not being the same since Roddenberry died, but rather to discuss what has changed. Whether or not this is a good thing varies depending on your taste.
Star Trek was set up as a mechanism for telling stories, not a story in itself. The characters represented archetypes (or even the id, ego, and superego -- guess which one is which). The Enterprise itself and its mission were just metaphors, and the fantastic nature was intended to give people the freedom to explore a variety of subjects in metaphorical, exaggerated, or "what if" ways. Just like a lot of great sci-fi.
This doesn't deny the new series' potential to be very entertaining and very good. But the new series is clearly different. In the new series, the situation is clearly defined. Aliens are just aliens, not symbols of ourselves in various guises. The new series presents an interesting point of view: Star Trek represented a utopian vision of our future; this series could be a vehicle to explore how we can achieve that particular utopia.
Although that's pretty limited compared to the scope of the original series, where various utopian ideals could be compared and contrasted from show to show, it still could be very fascinating, because many of us would have different ideas for how such a utopia could be reach, and in this age of irony, most of us probably doubt we could achieve it at all.
That can make the ethical question of ownership of those ideas a bit murky: graduate students aren't exactly getting paid a lot, and what they do get paid often doesn't come from MIT funds (but instead from fellowships and government grants). Of course, legally, you can be sure that MIT's lawyers have it all nailed down airtight.
What the graduate students get out of it is that when they get their Ph.D., they are the foremost experts in the world in one subject. From the time of their discovery to the point they publish, they alone know the answer to a problem many people (if they choose their battles wisely) want answered.
The point of academia is fame, not fortune. People who want to make their discoveries and get paid well for them go into industry, or become entrepreneurs. Academia is where you may not get paid for your idea, but everyone considers you an expert, and you get speaking engagements, press interviews, and the like.
Makes you wonder what would have come had he lived twice as long and had the more powerful technology to play with.
The tragedy is compounded by the fact he was essentially persecuted and murdered for being a homosexual. It isn't like he burned out (e.g. Mozart) or brought about his own death through an inability to deal with reality (e.g. any of several dozen great musicians in the past half century). It also wasn't through a tragic accident. It was a deliberate act against a true war hero for being a member of a certain group.
Alan Turing is considered by some to be the father of modern Artificial Intelligence.
He's much more than that. He's as much the father of the modern digital computer as von Neumann. His mathematical theories laid the foundation for what's essentially all of computer science. The btinternet.com link above mentions the Universal Turing Machine, which models what is and is not computable by a machine. And as far as we know, there is nothing that can be computed that cannot be computed by the Universal Turing Machine.
The idea that the Universal Turing Machine models all that is computable by any machine is known as "Church's Thesis," and it is this thesis which represents one of the foundations of modern AI research.
But pretty much all of modern computability and complexity theory got its start with Turing.
Maybe I'm not part of Blizzard's intended audience, but although this looks damn cool, when am I supposed to find the time to play all these great games?
It seems the only worthwhile games on the PC any more are these whiz-bang immersive-world internet-enabled games that require 20 hours a week to enjoy, or 40 if you really want to get the most out of them. Where am I supposed to find the time to play these?
Back in the past, there were dozens of great games that didn't take so much time. They were fast, furious, and you could get a lot of fun out of them in a five-minute coffee break. Like Pac-Man, Galaga, and the like. There aren't many "hop on and have fun for a bit" games like that any more. Nowadays, games need commitment.
So I spend most of my time on the PC playing games like MAME.
Am I the only person who has this problem? Am I the only one here who between job and friends doesn't have all evening to chase down the old man who'll tell him to say "syzygy" to get past the rabid monkey guarding the gate to the blue unicorn?
Boy, you said it. Doesn't this read like, "Things aren't going my way in this game, so I'm going to pick up my ball and go home?" It seems like a childish response.
If he's really concerned, he could spend that money on lobbying efforts and on educating the public. Because that's what the problem is; in a world of too much information, people only see the surface of the issues, and then talk about them as if they're experts. I'm as guilty of this as everyone else is. You'll find that just about everyone has an opinion on stem cell research, but very, very few know anything about it.
Withholding the money strikes me as the worst course of action he could possibly have taken, outside of buying advertising time on the Rush Limbaugh radio show. He should still give that money to Stanford; even if they aren't able to use it for stem cell research directly, they can use it to spearhead educational efforts to help correct popular misconceptions. I don't say that out of love for Stanford (I have none -- my two favorite football teams are UT-Austin and whoever is playing Stanford), but out of more idealistic concerns.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Someone should have told him that.
This slashdot account was created way before my current band was, so that explains the absence of it in my signature (and also, maybe, my really bad sig).
Aaaaah... Well, you can always update your slashdot.sig.:)
Also, www.hornfans.com is a great place for page hits, too, seeing how you're at utexas.edu and all. (How 'bout that Cedric Benson?):)
I could go into a long list of things you could also do but it's probably not on-topic; the short version is -- P4P comes from working to get people to your page, it doesn't just happen magically.
Well, it might happen magically if you put the phrase "anna kournikova nude!" all over it...:)
$3 a month? It took my band 5 months to earn a measly $3.23 from mp3.com.
Yeah? Where's your URL?
I don't mean that in the sense of, "Give me your URL," but in the sense of, "Why aren't you giving everyone and their dog your URL?"
You can't just expect to put your songs on MP3.com and for them to magically make money all by themselves. You've got to put the URL in places where people can click on it, such as, Oh I don't know...your slashdot.sig?:)
If you don't have people trotting over your page to click on the song links, you aren't going to make any money. You should pass out the URL at your gigs. Use MP3.com's DAM CD service to make CD's to sell at gigs. Post flyers with the express URL on it.
The objections to the P4P plan are silly. If you don't make more than $20 per month, YOU DON'T HAVE TO SIGN UP FOR IT! In other words, it's not just a simple redistribution scheme. The money for P4P comes out of a flat amount (originally $1M per month, if I recall correctly).
If you aren't signed up for P4P, you can still track how much P4P you would have made if you were signed up for it. This way, you can spend several months building up traffic to your MP3.com page, getting people to click on it and check it regularly, until you're sure you can make that much.
I signed up for the $20/month "Premium Artist Service" as soon as they started it, and I have yet to have a month where I didn't net a profit...
...and I've done nothing more than put my URL in my Slashdot.sig!
Imagine how much money I'd make if I actually marketed my music?
Caching proxies only ameliorate the problem slightly, and aren't effective for true Video-on-Demand. There are a lot of things you can do for scheduled, live events, but for watching (say) a movie when I want to, multicasting, caching proxies, and even really tiny 28.8kbps video streams don't solve the problem of video-on-demand for millions of users.
The only way to do it is to build a system that's distributed, just like the internet is, such as Gnutella or Napster, where each person who downloads a movie then becomes a distributor for the movie.
A great advantage for a napster-like system aside from the distributed bandwidth is for the people like us who actually watch the movies: Once we get a movie, we own it. We don't have to download it a second time. We can watch it as many times as we want, bandwidth-free.
Slashdot Mirror
Another idea is that you can use your recordings to promote the real product -- your ability to write, perform, and produce your own music.
That's what I do, anyhow.
If I happen to make a couple of bucks selling the recordings, I usually just put them back into more "marketing" expenses, anyhow.
Blockbuster near me still rents games; however, I've discovered that if I wait a few months, the prices of most of the good games go down enough that it's almost more cost-effective just to buy the game at a discount or grab it on eBay.
Per the NY Times article discussed above, Ashcroft didn't make this decision.
However, you are right to point the finger at Ashcroft in the sense that as the head of the DOJ, he is responsible for decisions made by those to whom he has delegated his authority.
They didn't say "George W. Bush" specifically, but rather "Bush Administration," which is accurate. As the head of the Executive branch of government, Bush is responsible for decisions made by everyone underneath him.
You have to understand something here: As the president, Bush is named responsible for the actions of all those underneath him, whether he made the decision personally or not.
It is quite likely that this same decision would have been made even had Gore or Nader been made president, at which time you'd be reading, "The Nader administration..." and you'd wonder, "What? Nader would NEVER do anything like that."
Of course he wouldn't. But being president means delegating authority to others, who then make the decisions. You then get blamed for their bad decisions.
[Off-topic rant: This is the major reason why I couldn't support Gore. It seemed to me, through various incidents during his campaign, that he had chosen to surround himself with people who were not very competent, no matter how intelligent he himself was. Bush, despite the perception that he's not very intelligent, has a knack for surrounding himself with very intelligent and competent people. Because of the size of the Executive branch of the US gov't., the ability of a man to surround himself with the best and brightest -- people to make him look good -- is far, far more important than that individual's capabilities in itself. In the end, the president becomes an effigy of himself that's then hung, burned, and shat upon by the public at large anyhow; in this way, the position protects the people who do the actual legwork of diplomacy and policy-making. It's a waste of the talents of a talented individual to make him or her president; he or she can do much greater things as a cabinet member. Why do you think Powell hasn't run for President yet? It's because in his current position he can do more to change the world, and he doesn't have a bigass bulls-eye on his back. In other words, in the US Executive branch, it's much better to have a buffoon surrounded by good puppeteers than a brilliant man surrounded by fools.]
Yup.
Heard it before, and it may not be the worst joke, but it's the worst one I've ever heard.
That's a pretty good telling of it, though.
Two countries separated by a common tongue.
The concern with continuity was one of the worst things that they did with the spinoffs (hey, it's a tough list to choose from), which were generally a mix of plot crutches and time loops, with the viewer supposed to (for some inane reason) care about the technical details of proactively levering the synnergies of the quantum flux giga bubble, rahter than the simpple "Scotty somehow fixed it in time!")
Well, continuity was actually a big plus in Babylon 5, and I think the continuity bug caught on in Star Trek in no small part due to that. But it wasn't the continuity itself that worked or didn't work; it was the overall high quality of most of the Bab5 writing, versus the overall low quality of the post-Roddenberry Star Trek series' writing.
Yeah, but...
I could probably end my post there, and you'd know what I'd have to say, wouldn't you?
The "yeah" is that games are play, and play doesn't have any story to it. It's like building whole civilizations with Fischertechnik/Lego/Erector (see Warcraft), or playing house with dolls (see The Sims), or shooting your buddies and the family cat with water pistols (see Quake), or putting the pieces of a puzzle together (see Tetris).
The "but" part is that I don't think adventure and role-playing games are play in the same sense. They're more like leisure. You're reading a book, but instead of becoming a character and vicariously living his/her adventure in your mind, you actually get to be the character on the screen, one step closer.
So what's happening here is not the mutation of the game into something better but the mutation of the story into something better. Great RPGs, like Binary Systems' Starflight (there's a throwback to the past for ya), give you a universe, and you get to go out and find the story.
I think that's what excites the ivory tower elite the most.
First off, is being behind in feature creep really that bad of a thing?
The ace in the hole for StarOffice is that it is free. Who cares if it lacks some whiz-bang feature that most people hardly use, if it costs nothing?
That in itself makes it competitive.
Funny, I think that if someone is the id, this one is Kirk.
Good point...I just re-read something here on the id, superego and ego. I had a degenerate definition of the three in my mind, where Id represented emotion, Superego represented logic, and Ego represented the self, but clearly that's not the case.
But in non-Freudian terms, that breakdown makes sense; McCoy is the right half of the brain (creativity and emotion), Spock is the left half (logic, reason), and Kirk is the one who has to listen to both sides of the brain argue back and forth and figure out what the hell he's going to do.
I'm looking forward to that not just for the action/adventure yadda, but because seeing a NON-utopian alternate humanity that's trying to keep humanity from being the Trekkian utopia lends itself to some interesting moral plays. I can see a lot of great stories being played out over altering humanity's destiny and trying to push for one moral stance over the other.
:)
Oh, certainly. In the end, "It's The Writing, Stupid!" The vehicle only matters in that it allows the good writers to do good work. Having one alternative humanity is okay, but infinite multiple alternative humanities -- a la "Sliders" (a show that took advantage of its premise less often than "Star Trek") -- has possibilities.
Think about it. If one alternative future can come back and mess around with the past...what's to keep any number of alternative futures from trying the same?
Well, the "Prime Directive" was only useful in the ways that it was broken; sometimes it proved worthwhile to break it, sometimes it proved worthwhile not to break it, sometimes it was broken and it was a mistake, and sometimes it was not broken and it should have been.
It depended on the author of the script (and the original series had some FABULOUS writing -- and some really BAD writing). The Prime Directive wasn't a philosophy of the series; it was just another device that the writers could use to put forth their own ideas, just like Kirk's Ego, Spock's Superego, and McCoy's Id.
Uhm...that's not what a morality play is, dude.
The main character in morality plays actually usually makes the wrong choice, it's not resolved in a beneficial way, and people don't live happily ever after, and THEN the viewer's been taught the difference between right and wrong. Think Greek theater.
The original "Star Trek" series was really the only morality play on TV, with the possible exception of (I'm not kidding here) the "Fat Albert" cartoon and some of the "Sesame Street" skits. "Star Trek" was certainly the only one intended for adults.
The first thing that jumps out at me from this description is that there's no potential for morality plays, which was the basis of the original series and the Next Generation (while Roddenberry lived).
I'm not here to say that this is better or worse, or to whine about things not being the same since Roddenberry died, but rather to discuss what has changed. Whether or not this is a good thing varies depending on your taste.
Star Trek was set up as a mechanism for telling stories, not a story in itself. The characters represented archetypes (or even the id, ego, and superego -- guess which one is which). The Enterprise itself and its mission were just metaphors, and the fantastic nature was intended to give people the freedom to explore a variety of subjects in metaphorical, exaggerated, or "what if" ways. Just like a lot of great sci-fi.
This doesn't deny the new series' potential to be very entertaining and very good. But the new series is clearly different. In the new series, the situation is clearly defined. Aliens are just aliens, not symbols of ourselves in various guises. The new series presents an interesting point of view: Star Trek represented a utopian vision of our future; this series could be a vehicle to explore how we can achieve that particular utopia.
Although that's pretty limited compared to the scope of the original series, where various utopian ideals could be compared and contrasted from show to show, it still could be very fascinating, because many of us would have different ideas for how such a utopia could be reach, and in this age of irony, most of us probably doubt we could achieve it at all.
What do you see as being the greatest challenge for your work, and what's the one biggest thing that we can do to make that easier?
(Okay, it's really two questions...)
That can make the ethical question of ownership of those ideas a bit murky: graduate students aren't exactly getting paid a lot, and what they do get paid often doesn't come from MIT funds (but instead from fellowships and government grants). Of course, legally, you can be sure that MIT's lawyers have it all nailed down airtight.
What the graduate students get out of it is that when they get their Ph.D., they are the foremost experts in the world in one subject. From the time of their discovery to the point they publish, they alone know the answer to a problem many people (if they choose their battles wisely) want answered.
The point of academia is fame, not fortune. People who want to make their discoveries and get paid well for them go into industry, or become entrepreneurs. Academia is where you may not get paid for your idea, but everyone considers you an expert, and you get speaking engagements, press interviews, and the like.
Makes you wonder what would have come had he lived twice as long and had the more powerful technology to play with.
The tragedy is compounded by the fact he was essentially persecuted and murdered for being a homosexual. It isn't like he burned out (e.g. Mozart) or brought about his own death through an inability to deal with reality (e.g. any of several dozen great musicians in the past half century). It also wasn't through a tragic accident. It was a deliberate act against a true war hero for being a member of a certain group.
Alan Turing is considered by some to be the father of modern Artificial Intelligence.
He's much more than that. He's as much the father of the modern digital computer as von Neumann. His mathematical theories laid the foundation for what's essentially all of computer science. The btinternet.com link above mentions the Universal Turing Machine, which models what is and is not computable by a machine. And as far as we know, there is nothing that can be computed that cannot be computed by the Universal Turing Machine.
The idea that the Universal Turing Machine models all that is computable by any machine is known as "Church's Thesis," and it is this thesis which represents one of the foundations of modern AI research.
But pretty much all of modern computability and complexity theory got its start with Turing.
Maybe I'm not part of Blizzard's intended audience, but although this looks damn cool, when am I supposed to find the time to play all these great games?
It seems the only worthwhile games on the PC any more are these whiz-bang immersive-world internet-enabled games that require 20 hours a week to enjoy, or 40 if you really want to get the most out of them. Where am I supposed to find the time to play these?
Back in the past, there were dozens of great games that didn't take so much time. They were fast, furious, and you could get a lot of fun out of them in a five-minute coffee break. Like Pac-Man, Galaga, and the like. There aren't many "hop on and have fun for a bit" games like that any more. Nowadays, games need commitment.
So I spend most of my time on the PC playing games like MAME.
Am I the only person who has this problem? Am I the only one here who between job and friends doesn't have all evening to chase down the old man who'll tell him to say "syzygy" to get past the rabid monkey guarding the gate to the blue unicorn?
Boy, you said it. Doesn't this read like, "Things aren't going my way in this game, so I'm going to pick up my ball and go home?" It seems like a childish response.
If he's really concerned, he could spend that money on lobbying efforts and on educating the public. Because that's what the problem is; in a world of too much information, people only see the surface of the issues, and then talk about them as if they're experts. I'm as guilty of this as everyone else is. You'll find that just about everyone has an opinion on stem cell research, but very, very few know anything about it.
Withholding the money strikes me as the worst course of action he could possibly have taken, outside of buying advertising time on the Rush Limbaugh radio show. He should still give that money to Stanford; even if they aren't able to use it for stem cell research directly, they can use it to spearhead educational efforts to help correct popular misconceptions. I don't say that out of love for Stanford (I have none -- my two favorite football teams are UT-Austin and whoever is playing Stanford), but out of more idealistic concerns.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Someone should have told him that.
This slashdot account was created way before my current band was, so that explains the absence of it in my signature (and also, maybe, my really bad sig).
.sig. :)
:)
:)
Aaaaah... Well, you can always update your slashdot
Also, www.hornfans.com is a great place for page hits, too, seeing how you're at utexas.edu and all. (How 'bout that Cedric Benson?)
I could go into a long list of things you could also do but it's probably not on-topic; the short version is -- P4P comes from working to get people to your page, it doesn't just happen magically.
Well, it might happen magically if you put the phrase "anna kournikova nude!" all over it...
$3 a month? It took my band 5 months to earn a measly $3.23 from mp3.com.
.sig? :)
Yeah? Where's your URL?
I don't mean that in the sense of, "Give me your URL," but in the sense of, "Why aren't you giving everyone and their dog your URL?"
You can't just expect to put your songs on MP3.com and for them to magically make money all by themselves. You've got to put the URL in places where people can click on it, such as, Oh I don't know...your slashdot
If you don't have people trotting over your page to click on the song links, you aren't going to make any money. You should pass out the URL at your gigs. Use MP3.com's DAM CD service to make CD's to sell at gigs. Post flyers with the express URL on it.
You have to get people to go to your page, first.
The objections to the P4P plan are silly. If you don't make more than $20 per month, YOU DON'T HAVE TO SIGN UP FOR IT! In other words, it's not just a simple redistribution scheme. The money for P4P comes out of a flat amount (originally $1M per month, if I recall correctly).
.sig!
If you aren't signed up for P4P, you can still track how much P4P you would have made if you were signed up for it. This way, you can spend several months building up traffic to your MP3.com page, getting people to click on it and check it regularly, until you're sure you can make that much.
I signed up for the $20/month "Premium Artist Service" as soon as they started it, and I have yet to have a month where I didn't net a profit...
...and I've done nothing more than put my URL in my Slashdot
Imagine how much money I'd make if I actually marketed my music?
Caching proxies only ameliorate the problem slightly, and aren't effective for true Video-on-Demand. There are a lot of things you can do for scheduled, live events, but for watching (say) a movie when I want to, multicasting, caching proxies, and even really tiny 28.8kbps video streams don't solve the problem of video-on-demand for millions of users.
The only way to do it is to build a system that's distributed, just like the internet is, such as Gnutella or Napster, where each person who downloads a movie then becomes a distributor for the movie.
A great advantage for a napster-like system aside from the distributed bandwidth is for the people like us who actually watch the movies: Once we get a movie, we own it. We don't have to download it a second time. We can watch it as many times as we want, bandwidth-free.