This, to me, is just plain stupid. To me, it implies the following:
* I have to pay royalties if I let someone listen to a song on my iPod (this is essentially the same as a sharing a song on YouTube)
* If I create a five-second tune with three words as the lyrics I can force Google to pay whenever someone listens to my "song".
And what kind of message is this sending to the young and new artists, which the website claims to help? Many of the artists that will be around in a few years I predict will be teenagers who loved listening to songs on YouTube and getting music for free (be it legal or not). If they catch wind about this and want to share their music through YouTube and such, they aren't going to trust record companies and as a result publish the songs independently with PayPal and ads as their way of getting money. The concept of "record companies" is going to crumble eventually, this would just speed up the process.
You can't stop the inevitable. There will always be that underground website with pirated music for download. There will always be that BitTorrent site with all the music you could want and more. And most importantly, there will always be a geek with no life who breaks the latest anti-piracy (a.k.a. DRM) methods. I predict that 10 years down the road we will not have "record companies". We won't have CD's. We'll just have an iPod and our favorite music download client.
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This, to me, is just plain stupid. To me, it implies the following:
* I have to pay royalties if I let someone listen to a song on my iPod (this is essentially the same as a sharing a song on YouTube)
* If I create a five-second tune with three words as the lyrics I can force Google to pay whenever someone listens to my "song".
And what kind of message is this sending to the young and new artists, which the website claims to help? Many of the artists that will be around in a few years I predict will be teenagers who loved listening to songs on YouTube and getting music for free (be it legal or not). If they catch wind about this and want to share their music through YouTube and such, they aren't going to trust record companies and as a result publish the songs independently with PayPal and ads as their way of getting money. The concept of "record companies" is going to crumble eventually, this would just speed up the process.
You can't stop the inevitable. There will always be that underground website with pirated music for download. There will always be that BitTorrent site with all the music you could want and more. And most importantly, there will always be a geek with no life who breaks the latest anti-piracy (a.k.a. DRM) methods. I predict that 10 years down the road we will not have "record companies". We won't have CD's. We'll just have an iPod and our favorite music download client.