Oops, my mistake. I was unaware of the Unix component, because all the unix people I know who ended up at Epic seem to spend their time writing windows printer drivers.:)
Still. VB on Win front-end, fairly proprietary Cache backend...seems like a scalability problem waiting to happen.
The Epic stuff uses "Cache" which is what MUMPS became. They call it a "post-relational database."
Which always seems a little iffy to me. I mean, you're likely to find people with RDBMS experience. You might find people with MUMPS experience. Bit finding people who know both Cache and VB6 is well-nigh impossible, and regardless of how much internal training you give them somebody's gunna make newbie mistakes.
And I'm guessing that writing a VB6 app that bolts on to a windows version of a VAX DB probably isn't the most graceful and well-integrated of systems.
from what I know of these systems, 1) they're hideously complex 2) they're hideously customized 3) they're hideously customized on essentially a per-site or per-specialty basis. 4) each install needs to be custom-managed, then 5) data transfer among customized systems needs to be custom-managed 6) all data needs to be mega-super-double-secret.
It basically means you're paying a software company to develop a few doze (or possibly hundred) large-scale systems for you, and then paying someone to install and maintain each one. It adds up FAST.
Som of B5's talent was quite good - Katsulas, for example, was world-class.
Some of it was *awful*, low-end soap-opera country.
ST's was consistantly mediocre. Not great, but not terrible.
Both kind of balanced out, except for one thing - JMS wrote some of the most terrible dialogue ever. The guy had vision, yeah, and he had a great story arc plotted, but his dialogue was often stilted and very comic-book-ish. Often, the dialogue was way too expository, which meant that the characters had to basically explain to each other the episode plots - and while a good actor can pull that off, a bad actor will make that either seem really flat or seem like scenery-chewing. In the few non-JMS-penned eps, like the oft-cited, Gaiman-penned "Day of the Dead", we actually had dialogue with some subtext and implication instead, and it brought out better performances in most of the characters. In that case, it was sort of a goofy plot, but the writing was good enough that the episode didn't fall on its face.
The various treks had the advantage of a rotating cast of writers, so it didn't have the problem of one writer's flaws becoming the whole show's flaws.
This is (one of) the problem with the RIAA. They represent the bulk of the money in the world of music...but not the bulk of the artists. Consequently there's a real image problem for musicians. People think that the music industry is just guys in suits sitting in LA living off every single musician in the US. And while that may be true for the big 3-4 labels, there are hundreds if not thousands of musicians in every city in the US who will never and have never had any interaction with an RIAA-affiliated label. These people are selling direct, selling at shows, fronting their own money or the money of a very small shoestring-op label. (And contrary to popular belief, it does take a bit of an investment to make an album. Cheaper than it used to be, sure, but it's still a few grand to do it by yourself.)
Yet they all get the PR fallout from the RIAA, and they all get screwed by a place like allofmp3. Caught in the middle.
This has been my biggest complaint about allofmp3 and their predecessors. They rose to their prominence on the backs of indie musicians who couldn't afford to challenge them, and built a following who beleived that using these services was stickin' it to the man. Eventually, it may have become a man-sticking operation, as they shed their low-ROI indie artists for bigger names once they had a vocal following, but...the way they started out was pretty sleazy and did nothing to help the actual artists.
Ever try recording an album? Even an album of other people's songs? It's not easy. Oh sure, it might be easy for someone like Paris Hilton, who barely even needs to show up for her vanity album, but for the other millions of musicians out there - singers, guitarists, keyboardists, drummers, whatever - it's a lot. of hard. frakkin. work. And for the most part, the only reward you ever see are $50 worth of royalties every year and the occasional good review on a belgian webzine. That's what being a recording artists is for the vast majority of us.
...and lets not forget the fact that, regardless of copyright law, AllOfMp3.com is in the business of screwing the artist and to a lesser extent the consumer. It's slightly legal in Russia, maybe, but it's still kind of slimy.
First, they don't generally pay artist royalties, thanks to the loopholes in the ROMS stuff. They don't have to unless you have some agreement with them. I know a lot of people are of the "stick it to the man" school, thinking that a dollar not paid means a dollar less in the RIAA's coffers. Well, that may be true in some cases, but not others. There are a lot of indie labels that have nothing to do with the RIAA, that run on a fairly tight budget...and here's a russian site selling their goods real cheap and not paying the people who made the music one red cent. Oh sure, it is *possible*, supposedly, to set up royalty payment agreements but having tried, it's not especially easy if you're not a russian lawyer. Actually getting a hold of them is difficult enough. (In the end, we convinced them to take our stuff down, just because it was easier and they weren't making much money from us anyway)
(okay, I'm waiting for the standard "expecting payment for your art is unethical" argument. I say to that - whatever. Different argument for a different time.)
Second, for all the vaunted arguments about quality encoding people make regarding these guys...they're not. For a brief period, one of my band's EPs was available for sale on the site...except it was not a real EP, it was distributed as a bunch of free mp3's. So, you could buy a high quality wav file from AllOfmp3 whose source was only a free mp3. No matter what upsampling software you use, you're not getting the quality back. And it proved my suspicion that these guys were at least occasionally trolling the net for their source material, not ripping shiny new CDs or whatnot. I would be entirely unsurprised to find out that a lot of their music was just ganked from torrent sites or whatever in the first place.
I don't argue that there's something very wrong with the Big Music Industry, and that CDs, downloads, etc are just way to friggin expensive. Nor do I contest the notion that the music industry is hopelessly stuck in a past model that's been invalidated by changes in demographics and technology. Nevertheless, this constant championing of a rather questionable and artist-unfriendly web-business isn't really the way to change things.
It works, more reliably than IR, but not perfectly. The Moto boxes (or possibly my S2 Tivo) have really slow serial ports. It sometimes freaks out when trying to change from a very low channel (like, 8) to a higher one (like, 120) and gets it all wrong, and I end up on channel 28 or something weird. At first I thought it was a problem with the cable tuner, but this is the second of the boxes they brought me and it has the same problem. Could be the tivo.
Nah they wouldn't. They'd be sued if they performed it in front of a paying audience without paying royalties, or recorded it without mechanical license (and they did do a lot of covers in the early days), or if they transcribed licensed music and sold it or gave it away. But just learning to play it would not have gotten them sued.
And most of these laws in some form or another predate the DMCA by decades. John and Paul woulda been sued back then the same as they would be now for most of that stuff (although the plaintiffs were not as litigious in those days).
Yes, THANK you. I was waiting for somebody to point that out.
The RIAA doesn't give a crap what happens to sheet music. The MPA does, since they're representing people who publish the sheet music. And since OLGA strikes a direct blow against their licensed music sites (places like Musicnotes.com and others) it's fairly unsurprising that they're not happy with it.
B5 was good, but it coulda been great save for one thing: the dialogue. JMS could not write natural dialogue to save his life. The best dialogue in the series was in "Day of The Dead" which was written by someone else. Instead of conversations with subtext, we had very comic-booky "Exposition? Exposition!" - style dialogues and monolgoues, and any ambiguity was left to riddle-talking aliens.
I actually do play live, and it's awesome to do, but I don't agree with your argument.
It's also rather odd... Ever released an album? It's a *ton* of frickin work. The hours spent in the studio composing and recording, the tweaking, the mastering, the production, the wrangling of cranky band members, the late-night rehearsals, the promotional work...sure, if you're one of the top-selling bands on earth, you can hire people to do some of this for you. For the other 99.9999% of us, we have to do it ourselves. Right down to designing the cover art and licking the stamps when filling orders. To say we "sit back and relax" afterwards...well, anyone who does that ain't sellin any albums, let me tell you.
Then there's the additional problem that certain kinds of music just don't sound good live, or are utterly impractical for an indie musician to pull off because he can't afford to rent the orchestra (or fit them into the tiny smoky clubs people like us play).
Settle down, chief. It is neither obtuseness nor stupidity.
It may be shorthand for you, but 1) I'd wager, just based on my discussions with ordinary consumers, thatnot everybody knows that RIAA and "labels" are not one and the same; 2) certainly not everybody realizes that most labels are not RIAA members; 3) non-RIAA members can share opinions with RIAA on a subject like allofmp3, and not necessarily represent the views of the RIAA.
So when I say "gosh I wish people would buy my stuff instead of pirating it" I am not speaking as an RIAA pawn. When I get a royalty check, the RIAA doesn't give a rat's ass because my label isn't an RIAA member. So in fact I *can* entirely talk about profit and sales without the RIAA being a topic.
And I find this more important than just semantic hairsplitting because these topics - piracy, DRM, etc - affect me as an indie artist too. People wholesale advocating an allofmp3-style solution on the grounds of "sticking it to the man" don't always realize that "the man" may be a guy running a label out of his garage. People have a lot of weird conceptions about the music biz, and one of them is that every single label and distribution outlet has some ties to big fatcat lawyers in LA. Percentagewise, somebody buying an album from allofmp3 (who then doesn't pay the artist or label) affects indies a lot more than it does the big 3. And there's a good chance that nary a single cent of that purchase price would've seen an RIAA coffer.
That kinda bypasses the point, though. Sure, it's convenient, but they're still asking you to pay a significantly higher price to download a "superior quality product" that is, in all liklihood, not a superior quality product.
Convenient or not, it's still shady. Yes, in my particular case with the free mp3's, it saves some googling, but I'm using that as an example of the quality-scam because it's fairly indicative that you're not necessarily getting what you're paying for.
I wouldn't call it anything other than profiteering.
Advertising puts your name out to other people so they may purchase things.
Unless you knew what to look for on allofmp3, you wouldn't find our stuff. So I'm not reaching new fans, only people who already knew who we were.
And even if I was, they wouldn't be getting any controlled info - website address, liner notes, credits, lyrics, production notes, etc (except for what we shove in the ID3 tags nobody reads). Plus, I get no hard stats on what's selling and what isn't. Advertising is a whole lot more than just putting your name out there, and it's pretty pointless unless you get something useful out of it.
First, I make my living as a developer, music is only a hobby.
Second, I do it for the love of music, not for profit.
Third, *my* business model started with internet promo. My band had a frickin website back in 94. That part hasn't fallen through.
No, what pisses me off is that people are taking my stuff, selling it, and not crediting me, either financially or otherwise. No, I don't have to live off of it, but on principle, if someone is selling something I worked very hard on for their own personal gain, with little or no regard for me, I think I have every right to be pissed.
Don't get sucked in on the quality thing. I can guarantee that at least some of their content is just mp3's trolled from places and upsampled, not encoded from master recordings. You pay extra for a wav that came from a lower-quality mp3, not the other way around.
BPI/RIAA/IMFI don't necessarily get anything from the sale of a record. They have no vesting in individual artists.
Individual labels pay membership dues to the RIAA or BPI to act as a trade/lobbying group in their interest.
Most labels (which does not account for most sales, since 3 labels account for the bulk of all albums sold, but that's another matter) are not RIAA members.
So it's incorrect to assume that recording sales profits are just going to the RIAA.
There was a period when most of our albums were on allofmp3.
So you might think I'm just bitter. Well, it goes beyond that.
They had two EPs of ours available for sale. Interestingly enough, we actually *give* those EPs away free on the internet - internet promotion, viral advertising, all that crap. These EPs were also mp3-only - high quality digital masters do not exist outside my studio.
So how, exactly, does a consumer paying a premium to download a wav file that was merely upsampled from a free mp3 benefit them?
When my band's album sells, you know how much money from the sale goes to the RIAA?
Absolutely nothing.
The label I'm on is not an RIAA member. In fact, the vast bulk of indie labels aren't. For every CD sold, we get $2.50. That's a pretty awesome deal. Granted, we don't get a studio advance, and we don't sell thousands of albums, but...still.
So it pains me that allofmp3 sells my stuff and gives me, or the label that works so hard to promote my music, nary a red cent. It pains me even more that people repeatedly justify buying from such a place with statements as "the artists wouldn't see any of it anyway" or "it's the RIAA's fault."
Hey, I don't get much from my recordings, period. We don't sell that many. We do own the recordings, though, which is quite common with indie labels. But still, we so far haven't made much from iTunes......But that $35 check beats the hell out of a russian selling my stuff and not giving me anything.
This is absurdly common in front-level tech support. Places like this - from GeekSquads to corporate Help Desks - just can't afford to hire fully-trained people for what are essentially their entry-level jobs. So they hire people or school kids with maybe a little familiarity, put them through some basic training and set 'em loose. Their job is, ideally, to weed out the "that's not a cup holder" calls and charge for those, and then let the more expensive second tier people deal with more complicated problems.
It of course falls apart when the minimally-trained front-line people come across the "bigger" stuff themselves - because of their minimal training, they don't get the diagnosis right. It's lose/lose - the customer gets a misdiagnosis 4 out of 5 times, and the support source doesn't get to charge their level-2 prices.
This outsourced-support model is rather intrinsically flawed. Triage-style support requires that everyone have a high-enough level of competance to get the first diagnosis right, but in these sort of "consumer-grade" support situations, it's not economically feasible to give everyone that level of training.
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Oops, my mistake. I was unaware of the Unix component, because all the unix people I know who ended up at Epic seem to spend their time writing windows printer drivers. :)
Still. VB on Win front-end, fairly proprietary Cache backend...seems like a scalability problem waiting to happen.
It's not MUMPS anymore, though.
The Epic stuff uses "Cache" which is what MUMPS became. They call it a "post-relational database."
Which always seems a little iffy to me. I mean, you're likely to find people with RDBMS experience. You might find people with MUMPS experience. Bit finding people who know both Cache and VB6 is well-nigh impossible, and regardless of how much internal training you give them somebody's gunna make newbie mistakes.
And I'm guessing that writing a VB6 app that bolts on to a windows version of a VAX DB probably isn't the most graceful and well-integrated of systems.
from what I know of these systems,
1) they're hideously complex
2) they're hideously customized
3) they're hideously customized on essentially a per-site or per-specialty basis.
4) each install needs to be custom-managed, then
5) data transfer among customized systems needs to be custom-managed
6) all data needs to be mega-super-double-secret.
It basically means you're paying a software company to develop a few doze (or possibly hundred) large-scale systems for you, and then paying someone to install and maintain each one. It adds up FAST.
Som of B5's talent was quite good - Katsulas, for example, was world-class.
Some of it was *awful*, low-end soap-opera country.
ST's was consistantly mediocre. Not great, but not terrible.
Both kind of balanced out, except for one thing - JMS wrote some of the most terrible dialogue ever. The guy had vision, yeah, and he had a great story arc plotted, but his dialogue was often stilted and very comic-book-ish. Often, the dialogue was way too expository, which meant that the characters had to basically explain to each other the episode plots - and while a good actor can pull that off, a bad actor will make that either seem really flat or seem like scenery-chewing. In the few non-JMS-penned eps, like the oft-cited, Gaiman-penned "Day of the Dead", we actually had dialogue with some subtext and implication instead, and it brought out better performances in most of the characters. In that case, it was sort of a goofy plot, but the writing was good enough that the episode didn't fall on its face.
The various treks had the advantage of a rotating cast of writers, so it didn't have the problem of one writer's flaws becoming the whole show's flaws.
This is (one of) the problem with the RIAA. They represent the bulk of the money in the world of music...but not the bulk of the artists. Consequently there's a real image problem for musicians. People think that the music industry is just guys in suits sitting in LA living off every single musician in the US. And while that may be true for the big 3-4 labels, there are hundreds if not thousands of musicians in every city in the US who will never and have never had any interaction with an RIAA-affiliated label. These people are selling direct, selling at shows, fronting their own money or the money of a very small shoestring-op label. (And contrary to popular belief, it does take a bit of an investment to make an album. Cheaper than it used to be, sure, but it's still a few grand to do it by yourself.)
Yet they all get the PR fallout from the RIAA, and they all get screwed by a place like allofmp3. Caught in the middle.
This has been my biggest complaint about allofmp3 and their predecessors. They rose to their prominence on the backs of indie musicians who couldn't afford to challenge them, and built a following who beleived that using these services was stickin' it to the man. Eventually, it may have become a man-sticking operation, as they shed their low-ROI indie artists for bigger names once they had a vocal following, but...the way they started out was pretty sleazy and did nothing to help the actual artists.
Spoken like someone who doesn't actually do it.
Ever try recording an album? Even an album of other people's songs? It's not easy. Oh sure, it might be easy for someone like Paris Hilton, who barely even needs to show up for her vanity album, but for the other millions of musicians out there - singers, guitarists, keyboardists, drummers, whatever - it's a lot. of hard. frakkin. work. And for the most part, the only reward you ever see are $50 worth of royalties every year and the occasional good review on a belgian webzine. That's what being a recording artists is for the vast majority of us.
...and lets not forget the fact that, regardless of copyright law, AllOfMp3.com is in the business of screwing the artist and to a lesser extent the consumer. It's slightly legal in Russia, maybe, but it's still kind of slimy.
First, they don't generally pay artist royalties, thanks to the loopholes in the ROMS stuff. They don't have to unless you have some agreement with them. I know a lot of people are of the "stick it to the man" school, thinking that a dollar not paid means a dollar less in the RIAA's coffers. Well, that may be true in some cases, but not others. There are a lot of indie labels that have nothing to do with the RIAA, that run on a fairly tight budget...and here's a russian site selling their goods real cheap and not paying the people who made the music one red cent. Oh sure, it is *possible*, supposedly, to set up royalty payment agreements but having tried, it's not especially easy if you're not a russian lawyer. Actually getting a hold of them is difficult enough. (In the end, we convinced them to take our stuff down, just because it was easier and they weren't making much money from us anyway)
(okay, I'm waiting for the standard "expecting payment for your art is unethical" argument. I say to that - whatever. Different argument for a different time.)
Second, for all the vaunted arguments about quality encoding people make regarding these guys...they're not. For a brief period, one of my band's EPs was available for sale on the site...except it was not a real EP, it was distributed as a bunch of free mp3's. So, you could buy a high quality wav file from AllOfmp3 whose source was only a free mp3. No matter what upsampling software you use, you're not getting the quality back. And it proved my suspicion that these guys were at least occasionally trolling the net for their source material, not ripping shiny new CDs or whatnot. I would be entirely unsurprised to find out that a lot of their music was just ganked from torrent sites or whatever in the first place.
I don't argue that there's something very wrong with the Big Music Industry, and that CDs, downloads, etc are just way to friggin expensive. Nor do I contest the notion that the music industry is hopelessly stuck in a past model that's been invalidated by changes in demographics and technology. Nevertheless, this constant championing of a rather questionable and artist-unfriendly web-business isn't really the way to change things.
Nicely put. As a musician, I thank you.
It works, more reliably than IR, but not perfectly. The Moto boxes (or possibly my S2 Tivo) have really slow serial ports. It sometimes freaks out when trying to change from a very low channel (like, 8) to a higher one (like, 120) and gets it all wrong, and I end up on channel 28 or something weird. At first I thought it was a problem with the cable tuner, but this is the second of the boxes they brought me and it has the same problem. Could be the tivo.
MPA. Not RIAA. Different bunch of lawsuit-obsessed music industry lawyers.
Nah they wouldn't. They'd be sued if they performed it in front of a paying audience without paying royalties, or recorded it without mechanical license (and they did do a lot of covers in the early days), or if they transcribed licensed music and sold it or gave it away. But just learning to play it would not have gotten them sued.
And most of these laws in some form or another predate the DMCA by decades. John and Paul woulda been sued back then the same as they would be now for most of that stuff (although the plaintiffs were not as litigious in those days).
Yes, THANK you. I was waiting for somebody to point that out.
The RIAA doesn't give a crap what happens to sheet music. The MPA does, since they're representing people who publish the sheet music. And since OLGA strikes a direct blow against their licensed music sites (places like Musicnotes.com and others) it's fairly unsurprising that they're not happy with it.
B5 was good, but it coulda been great save for one thing: the dialogue. JMS could not write natural dialogue to save his life. The best dialogue in the series was in "Day of The Dead" which was written by someone else. Instead of conversations with subtext, we had very comic-booky "Exposition? Exposition!" - style dialogues and monolgoues, and any ambiguity was left to riddle-talking aliens.
It was this close to being *great*...
I actually do play live, and it's awesome to do, but I don't agree with your argument.
It's also rather odd... Ever released an album? It's a *ton* of frickin work. The hours spent in the studio composing and recording, the tweaking, the mastering, the production, the wrangling of cranky band members, the late-night rehearsals, the promotional work...sure, if you're one of the top-selling bands on earth, you can hire people to do some of this for you. For the other 99.9999% of us, we have to do it ourselves. Right down to designing the cover art and licking the stamps when filling orders. To say we "sit back and relax" afterwards...well, anyone who does that ain't sellin any albums, let me tell you.
Then there's the additional problem that certain kinds of music just don't sound good live, or are utterly impractical for an indie musician to pull off because he can't afford to rent the orchestra (or fit them into the tiny smoky clubs people like us play).
Settle down, chief. It is neither obtuseness nor stupidity.
It may be shorthand for you, but
1) I'd wager, just based on my discussions with ordinary consumers, thatnot everybody knows that RIAA and "labels" are not one and the same;
2) certainly not everybody realizes that most labels are not RIAA members;
3) non-RIAA members can share opinions with RIAA on a subject like allofmp3, and not necessarily represent the views of the RIAA.
So when I say "gosh I wish people would buy my stuff instead of pirating it" I am not speaking as an RIAA pawn. When I get a royalty check, the RIAA doesn't give a rat's ass because my label isn't an RIAA member. So in fact I *can* entirely talk about profit and sales without the RIAA being a topic.
And I find this more important than just semantic hairsplitting because these topics - piracy, DRM, etc - affect me as an indie artist too. People wholesale advocating an allofmp3-style solution on the grounds of "sticking it to the man" don't always realize that "the man" may be a guy running a label out of his garage. People have a lot of weird conceptions about the music biz, and one of them is that every single label and distribution outlet has some ties to big fatcat lawyers in LA. Percentagewise, somebody buying an album from allofmp3 (who then doesn't pay the artist or label) affects indies a lot more than it does the big 3. And there's a good chance that nary a single cent of that purchase price would've seen an RIAA coffer.
That kinda bypasses the point, though. Sure, it's convenient, but they're still asking you to pay a significantly higher price to download a "superior quality product" that is, in all liklihood, not a superior quality product.
Convenient or not, it's still shady. Yes, in my particular case with the free mp3's, it saves some googling, but I'm using that as an example of the quality-scam because it's fairly indicative that you're not necessarily getting what you're paying for.
I wouldn't call it anything other than profiteering.
Advertising puts your name out to other people so they may purchase things.
Unless you knew what to look for on allofmp3, you wouldn't find our stuff. So I'm not reaching new fans, only people who already knew who we were.
And even if I was, they wouldn't be getting any controlled info - website address, liner notes, credits, lyrics, production notes, etc (except for what we shove in the ID3 tags nobody reads). Plus, I get no hard stats on what's selling and what isn't. Advertising is a whole lot more than just putting your name out there, and it's pretty pointless unless you get something useful out of it.
Yawn.
First, I make my living as a developer, music is only a hobby.
Second, I do it for the love of music, not for profit.
Third, *my* business model started with internet promo. My band had a frickin website back in 94. That part hasn't fallen through.
No, what pisses me off is that people are taking my stuff, selling it, and not crediting me, either financially or otherwise. No, I don't have to live off of it, but on principle, if someone is selling something I worked very hard on for their own personal gain, with little or no regard for me, I think I have every right to be pissed.
So...having a russian mp3 site lift even my *free* stuff from the internet, sell it, and not give me any money is...better?
I fail to see the logic.
Don't get sucked in on the quality thing. I can guarantee that at least some of their content is just mp3's trolled from places and upsampled, not encoded from master recordings. You pay extra for a wav that came from a lower-quality mp3, not the other way around.
BPI/RIAA/IMFI don't necessarily get anything from the sale of a record. They have no vesting in individual artists.
Individual labels pay membership dues to the RIAA or BPI to act as a trade/lobbying group in their interest.
Most labels (which does not account for most sales, since 3 labels account for the bulk of all albums sold, but that's another matter) are not RIAA members.
So it's incorrect to assume that recording sales profits are just going to the RIAA.
AllofMp3 is not the consumer's friend.
There was a period when most of our albums were on allofmp3.
So you might think I'm just bitter. Well, it goes beyond that.
They had two EPs of ours available for sale. Interestingly enough, we actually *give* those EPs away free on the internet - internet promotion, viral advertising, all that crap. These EPs were also mp3-only - high quality digital masters do not exist outside my studio.
So how, exactly, does a consumer paying a premium to download a wav file that was merely upsampled from a free mp3 benefit them?
Seems like kind of a ripoff to me.
Thanks for pointing that out.
When my band's album sells, you know how much money from the sale goes to the RIAA?
Absolutely nothing.
The label I'm on is not an RIAA member. In fact, the vast bulk of indie labels aren't. For every CD sold, we get $2.50. That's a pretty awesome deal. Granted, we don't get a studio advance, and we don't sell thousands of albums, but...still.
So it pains me that allofmp3 sells my stuff and gives me, or the label that works so hard to promote my music, nary a red cent. It pains me even more that people repeatedly justify buying from such a place with statements as "the artists wouldn't see any of it anyway" or "it's the RIAA's fault."
Hey, I don't get much from my recordings, period. We don't sell that many. We do own the recordings, though, which is quite common with indie labels. But still, we so far haven't made much from iTunes... ...But that $35 check beats the hell out of a russian selling my stuff and not giving me anything.
This is absurdly common in front-level tech support. Places like this - from GeekSquads to corporate Help Desks - just can't afford to hire fully-trained people for what are essentially their entry-level jobs. So they hire people or school kids with maybe a little familiarity, put them through some basic training and set 'em loose. Their job is, ideally, to weed out the "that's not a cup holder" calls and charge for those, and then let the more expensive second tier people deal with more complicated problems.
It of course falls apart when the minimally-trained front-line people come across the "bigger" stuff themselves - because of their minimal training, they don't get the diagnosis right. It's lose/lose - the customer gets a misdiagnosis 4 out of 5 times, and the support source doesn't get to charge their level-2 prices.
This outsourced-support model is rather intrinsically flawed. Triage-style support requires that everyone have a high-enough level of competance to get the first diagnosis right, but in these sort of "consumer-grade" support situations, it's not economically feasible to give everyone that level of training.