> Yes indeed, the day and age of free music for all is over,
Far from it. As far as this person knows, mp3s is when presumably "free" music originated. Let's see, before MP3 was wildly known about, there was WAV, midi, s3m, mod, it... you name it. Sure there may not have been the singing voices in CD quality, but it was something. In fact, before MP3, I just set a program to record all out-going audio to a WAV file. The file was usually beyond 40 megs, but hey---a pretty nice copy of a song.
>I'm willing to fork over a little bit of cash every month
More power to ya. However, you need to realize that there are alternatives out there.
>I would have never heard of the Dave Matthews Band. Never would I have been amazed by the sensational pop stylings of Britney Spears
Ok. This signals a joker flag here. Can you possibly not have heard of these groups because you lived a very, very sheltered life?! Do you know what a radio is?! This post really got me laughing when he writes about "underground" music. Heh, I don't think you can get much more underground than that of the most popular mainstream artists around...
>there was a time when you COULDN'T trade music over the Internet. You had to settle for lyrics and tablature, and hum the melodies.
The ability to trad music over the internet wasn't massively publicly known about until Napster, that's a granted. However, file transfer occured the moment what you call the "internet" occured. These files were ascii or binary. With binary, music files. They may not have been mp3, but you can bet there was music files going back and forth. In pre-napster days, there was IRC, FTP searches, heck even some HTTP servers out there had archives of MP3s.
As far as "settling" with tablatures and crap... that's just hog-wash. Again, refer to my arguements for wav, midi, s3m, mod, it... etc. Just because you never knew about them, or cared to find them, didn't mean they didn't exist.
To sum this up, I can conclude that this guy is either someone joking (if so, that was pretty funny), someone without a clue (quite possibly), or some drudge drone worker for someone like the RIAA or some other organization thinking their market will collapse because of people like us. Who knows, maybe this person is a combination of some/all of the above.
I use to work in Tech Support. A possible reason why the sharp incline in the companies that never responded to their email is probably because the email they sent was ignored completely. Why? Lemme tell ya, if the email queue had more than 2 or 3 (which it always was of course) in it, then seeing the words "survey" or "take a minute and...", etc, were deleted like most other spam messages that are usually triggered by such keywords. I was usually, and actually, too busy to respond to such things anyways--even if I had read the entire thing. If it wasn't a legit question or concern from a client or potential client, then out it went.
I was also an hourly employee on call for the weekends with no compensation (other than the logged hours on the phone, which we did get paid normal wages for). Like what you are probably experiencing is the fact that you HAVE to stay available for calls. You can't leave town and you can't be social, lest you be interrupted by the leash... err phone. The worst part was that you had to make yourself somewhat available 24 hours a day. I particularily hated those calls that came in at 2am when I was trying to sleep. Not only did I sound grumpy and tired on the phone to the customer, but I'm sure I gave terrible solutions over the phone and in a very hazey manner.
Though, the worst part was when a system fell offline, or some other situation that required you to have to go into the office. We were'nt being compensated for the travel or anything... just the time spent on the phone.
At any rate, I realized that this was a terrible deal and management kept giving me the "Deal with it" look... so I did deal with it; I left. I returned to my previous employer with newfound IT skills and I am getting paid a lot more now. Best of all, no cell phone!
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> Yes indeed, the day and age of free music for all is over,
Far from it. As far as this person knows, mp3s is when presumably "free" music originated. Let's see, before MP3 was wildly known about, there was WAV, midi, s3m, mod, it... you name it. Sure there may not have been the singing voices in CD quality, but it was something. In fact, before MP3, I just set a program to record all out-going audio to a WAV file. The file was usually beyond 40 megs, but hey---a pretty nice copy of a song.
>I'm willing to fork over a little bit of cash every month
More power to ya. However, you need to realize that there are alternatives out there.
>I would have never heard of the Dave Matthews Band. Never would I have been amazed by the sensational pop stylings of Britney Spears
Ok. This signals a joker flag here. Can you possibly not have heard of these groups because you lived a very, very sheltered life?! Do you know what a radio is?! This post really got me laughing when he writes about "underground" music. Heh, I don't think you can get much more underground than that of the most popular mainstream artists around...
>there was a time when you COULDN'T trade music over the Internet. You had to settle for lyrics and tablature, and hum the melodies.
The ability to trad music over the internet wasn't massively publicly known about until Napster, that's a granted. However, file transfer occured the moment what you call the "internet" occured. These files were ascii or binary. With binary, music files. They may not have been mp3, but you can bet there was music files going back and forth. In pre-napster days, there was IRC, FTP searches, heck even some HTTP servers out there had archives of MP3s.
As far as "settling" with tablatures and crap... that's just hog-wash. Again, refer to my arguements for wav, midi, s3m, mod, it... etc. Just because you never knew about them, or cared to find them, didn't mean they didn't exist.
To sum this up, I can conclude that this guy is either someone joking (if so, that was pretty funny), someone without a clue (quite possibly), or some drudge drone worker for someone like the RIAA or some other organization thinking their market will collapse because of people like us. Who knows, maybe this person is a combination of some/all of the above.
Kudos if you're joking.
I use to work in Tech Support. A possible reason why the sharp incline in the companies that never responded to their email is probably because the email they sent was ignored completely. Why? Lemme tell ya, if the email queue had more than 2 or 3 (which it always was of course) in it, then seeing the words "survey" or "take a minute and...", etc, were deleted like most other spam messages that are usually triggered by such keywords. I was usually, and actually, too busy to respond to such things anyways--even if I had read the entire thing. If it wasn't a legit question or concern from a client or potential client, then out it went.
Here's where I came from:
I was also an hourly employee on call for the weekends with no compensation (other than the logged hours on the phone, which we did get paid normal wages for). Like what you are probably experiencing is the fact that you HAVE to stay available for calls. You can't leave town and you can't be social, lest you be interrupted by the leash... err phone. The worst part was that you had to make yourself somewhat available 24 hours a day. I particularily hated those calls that came in at 2am when I was trying to sleep. Not only did I sound grumpy and tired on the phone to the customer, but I'm sure I gave terrible solutions over the phone and in a very hazey manner.
Though, the worst part was when a system fell offline, or some other situation that required you to have to go into the office. We were'nt being compensated for the travel or anything... just the time spent on the phone.
At any rate, I realized that this was a terrible deal and management kept giving me the "Deal with it" look... so I did deal with it; I left. I returned to my previous employer with newfound IT skills and I am getting paid a lot more now. Best of all, no cell phone!