i am sure it is a waste of time now, but it would be pretty cool if there was a simple way that people published media on wifi networks. Fast forward to the very near future and listen to songs on your wifi iPod that are being streamed by that other guy with the wifi iPod on the bus, or in the car next to you in a traffic jam, or your neighbor or that guy that works two floors above you that has the amazing collection of jimi hendrix bootlegs. The only thing really standing in the way of that would be wifi being a power hog and having a standard to do it with.
That is more or less what I think a good model is. Pay a monthly subscription for access to so much good music & related bits that piracy becomes significantly inferior compared to what you can get by supporting musicians. Of course, their implementation isn't perfect but they have made a strong push towards the right direction and hopefully it will be successful enough to encourage further exploration & industry support.
Oh my god, I didn't realize at the time that you were the same lunatic as before. Of course, it all makes sense now. Keep dreaming of a world where everything revolves around your selfish whims and your pipe dream pop economics. As for the rest of the world, we'll continue to chuckle.
it's hiphop/turntabism. It was produced for a radio segment for BBC Radio 1. Unlike a lot of turtablism it's not a huge scratch fest, it mostly qualifies in that genre because of the thousands of samples used in the production of it. The record is almost all other people's songs but very diverse (maybe 60% hiphop, 40% other styles including indian, swing, drum & bass, and others). If you're not familiar with the genre it is based on the idea that painstakingly combining so many sources together to make a song or album creates an honest new piece of music. Aka found music, similar to the idea of found art that repurposes things we see every day into something new.
Steinski can be seen in the movie scratch talking about his contributions to the DJ movement back in the early & mid 80's including his very influential "lessons 1 & 2" which could be said inspired a whole generation of dj's. Kind of funny, he's a white guy in his 50's but he sure knows hiphop and beatmixing.
The album is called Nothing to fear: a Rough Mix and isn't widely avaible as it is being sold illegally because the samples aren't cleared and payed for. But that link sells it i think and it has portions of some of the songs you can check out.
I think that having that outlook is the best way to make it successful. A flop is entirely relative after all, if you spend an appropriate amount of time on something compared to the demand anything can be a success. Good luck on your project! I think contributing to the success of independant music and working class musicians is a great way to both have a business and contribute to society through art.
just curious where you draw the line at full quality? CD quality is lower than studio didgital, yet nearly everyone seems to agree that it's high enough.
I agree that i don't listen to low bitrate mp3's like at 128kbit because I don't like the lower quality music that i can hear artifacts in.
But once it gets to 160k/192k with a high quality encoder I'll be damned if I can hear the difference... Even after trying really hard to. I worked on a subscription based product where quality was a #1 factor and no one in the office of many musicians/audio techs and hardcore music fans had complaints with those bitrates (depending on format, mp3 still had artifacts at 160k to some ears).
Now, I will concede that perhaps you could hear artifacts at 192k, but you must concede that at some bitrate that is below PCM you probably wont be able to tell the difference no matter what ears and what equipment you have to use.
Keep in mind that DVD's which are by far the highest quality format films are available in for the consumer are lossy compressions.. Just high enough bitrate that no one minds.
maybe too quick an answer. I wanted to add that the album i mentioned I most likely never would have heard of if i hadnt read a review of it. Now I own it and love it... I don't love it because the critic said it was good, I simply got the opportunity to buy it and decide for myself.
i think the quickest answer is that critics have the opportunity to sample a much larger body of work than most people do who don't do it for a living or as a serious hobby, and therefore may get to hear things that you otherwise might have missed.
If 20 years ago the entertainment industry had the luxury of a crystal ball to see the future of huge high speed digital network and the piracy that came with it, would they have ever made the leap into the digital world?
If you think about it dvd and cd formats were driven by consumer electronics companies and not the public. While we were watching videotape or listening to music on casettes, no one was really complaining about the quality... sure it could be better but it was obviously good enough that the world accepted them as good entertainment. The entertainment industry saw an opportunity to resell copies of albums or movies that the consumer may have already owned in a (now) inferior format but the opportunity was transient and has mostly played out by now. They may have very well shot themselves in the foot.
Sure piracy happened with analog formats, but due to the nature of them they took a fixed amount of time to produce (no ripping at 52x allowed) and the copy was always of a lower quality than the original.
While you can digitize analog media and pirate it online often the result seems substandard. You can see this with scene released movie screeners that come from videotape, the result almost always looks much worse than even a VHS copy would look. And when put in amateur hands the results can be very ugly... you will notice that no one makes their own vhs ripped copies of out of print movies on peer to peer networks, really the only people who do these are the "piracy pros" that spend a lot of time on it.
Degenerative copies also serve a real market use. Sure you may have gotten a copy of star wars copied from your friend (copied from his friend) back in the day but if you really liked it you knew that it would look a lot better if you bought the real copy from the store. That kind of incentive against piracy has all but disappeared with music, and while it is still true today with net vcds/svcds the future obviously points towards people downloading full dvd-r's (many people already do) which leave you with no justification other than morals to buy the legitimate product.
I think there is a strong case that they would have been better off never letting the cat out of the bag, so to speak, of the digital era.
really, why do you pst so many times on a topic you know so little about? You have claimed that the only viable business model is a yearly subscription, while the truth is anything but that... album sales are time tested, you can't even give one example of someone who has had success with this business model you have more or less dreamed up
second, you have no concept of what the standard roster of an indie music label will consist of in terms of sales. Many records will sell less than 10,000 copies total in a year. You cannot expect half of their sales to come from an online venue.
With many "indie labels" sales of 100,000 for a single record would a break-out hit. Labels on this scale would be lucky to have one of those a year, many will not have one this year (or next year). And yet thats what you'd need to get 5,000 online subscribers, figuring about a 5% conversion rate which is being overly generous.
You seem to confuse total album sales with subscribers for your pet service over and over. You would do well to realize that many fans of a band will buy the record at a live concert or store, never go to the website, and wouldnt care less about what you're trying to sell there.
Lastly, if you are going to run around saying "if you can't sell 20,000 records your music must really suck bad" or whatever it is you said, you should really re-evaluate they way you judge and appreciayte art. One of my favorite CD's of last year "A rough mix..." by steinski sold only a few thousand as i understand it but it has been critically aclaimed and is without question both thoroughly enjoyable and pushing the genre. Also if you are going to run around saying things like album sales == suck/not suck in a way that claims that a huge amount of indie artists must suck, I'd like to request that you play us some of your own music. Get my point... shut the fuck up about it.
It sounds to me like you may have developed some OK musical taste lately and have gone to see a few unsigned bands but your head is still stuck thinking that music is mass market and that indie means only having one video on mtv2. A vast majority of the world's music is made on a relatively small scale.
In summary: Please stop posting 100 times trying to act like you know a lot about the music industry when you actually know very little. You don't have to be an expert at everything. Take a deep breath and listen to folks instead of trying to tell everyone how it is just because you know someone who knows someone who's in a band.
i worked in the digital music industry for a number of years, including what ended up becoming rhapsody. Here are a few of the things i picked up:
* people will buy mp3's, but not very many people will. Use this knowledge when planning, consider not spending much or any money on putting it together, at least at first, to gauge interest.
* The band's hardest core fans will end up being the ones most likely to buy something from you. However they already own the albums. They may very well be convinced to buy the albums again if you include enough extras. Great extras being unreleased material, live tracks, stuff that didn't make the album, rough tracks from the upcomming album, remixes, instrumental tracks etc.
* This is important: People are (rightly) afraid of losing the mp3's they buy and being SOL. Make sure people who bought the album are allowed to download it again whenever they need it. Some folks may end up overusing this feature in your mind but the good will will go a long way into making people comfortable buying the medium.
* When you buy a cd you get the chance to rip at various bitrates. Make sure you provide a high enough bitrate for high fidelity listening (160k or 192k) but also consider providing a 96kbit or 128kbit set for portable players or other uses. Let them download either or both for one price. (and come back later to get the other one when they need it for free like the last point)
* Provide at least one sample mp3 encoded at the high fidelity bitrate so that people considering a purchase will know exactly what the quality of the encoding is (many bands only provide lower bitrate samples and people may assume the purchased music will sound the same)
* Consider watermarking if you want to be able to tell if the purchased mp3's are being made available on newsgroups/p2p etc or if it is people ripping the album themselves. This can be helpful if a band discovers their music on kazaa and is upset and makes a logical leap to blame the online mp3 sales... Likely they will have ripped it themselves and you'd be able to prove that rather than just speculating.
* (point #1 again) Remember, not many people buy mp3's online. Don't plan to order new computers, bandwidth, software services, spend a ton of time programming, doing art, adding extrasm or marketing until you get a chance to get your feet wet and gauge people's interest.
are you sure about that? did you read the article? SO now you are saying that the filesystem will need code to handle every multimedia format differently? Sounds like more of a nightmare
i am skeptical as well, the only reasonable answer seems to be that it would get lost. Especially if you are transfering between platforms. Why would you want to use a metadata system that you can't count on anyone else using? It seems to me that current packaged in file metadata systems are much more practical for transfer, multi-platform use, streaming, etc.
Other things mentioned in the article like the/etc/passwd manipulation just seem like gimmicks. How many files like that would you by hand support before you ended up deciding it was a bad idea to start it in the first place.
If these are the things they are coming up with to add to filesystems now, they must be pretty much figured out & done.
i have seen several/20's for sale on ebay this year, also i believe there are a few ISP focused mailing lists that people buy/sell gear that also regularly have portable numbers for sale. I think you are looking at $4k or higher for that many ips. And you need to pay a yearly fee. Some allocationds are grandfathered and you don't need to pay yearly fees on those.
Like the article mentions the concept of finger printing music using a beats and tones method is nothing new.
The concept of using it to enforce p2p transactions quickly falls down though. It is obviously impractical to design any sort of p2p system that would require the content to be uploaded to a central server for authentication and beat matching. Any system that relied on client trust for the content matching could be easily circumvented, and would be by a community that has been built on the desire to pirate this music in the first place.
Why someone would want to use an application like kazaa to buy thier music in the first place is beyond me anyway. Who wants to pay a record company for a song that's been encoded by an unknown party, often at lower bitrates and without quality encoding software. And to be sure, people do not use current p2p systems because they find them to be the best designed, or best UI, or easiest. They do it to pirate the music.
The future of pay for download systems rests firmly in the professionally produced content, delivered from server to client such as iTunes and Rhapsody. You can always include peer bandwidth augmentation of official downloads, though i would expect thats not really nescesary.
Sure you say that now, but you'll be crying when china has all of the lucrative exclusive extra terrestrial trade deals worked out and we're still trying to sell cars to canada.
Not really any step closer. The examples you use are really just more of a symptom of hollywood being eager to latch on to anything that has an existing brand... like games or old sitcoms, or remakes, or what have you.
I don't think the article is being very realistic asking if hollywood's turf is being invaded. ILM doing storyboards with a game engine? Great didn't they used to do story boards with pencil and paper? More like animators turf being invaded.
Once you develop a game system to the point where you have so much character control and facial expression that it rivals cgi films I think you've probably made a CGI development environment and not a game engine.
I understand that this laptop mentioned doesnt require active cooling, but as it seems everyone is focusing on wow an $800 linux laptop I went to go see what $800 could buy you at dell..
2ghz celeron 20gb hd 256mb ram 14" screen... for $749
While i haven't ever owned one of these i've not had a problem getting linux on dell laptops in the past. If you are looking for an inexpensive laptop to run linux it seems to me you could do a lot better than a very underpowered core processor such as the via.
well, you can find dvd-r media for us $0.85 or less in several brands. That holds 4.7gb. I usually pay $15/50 for 700mb cd-r's, which comes out to us $0.30 or us $1.80 for 4.2gb which doesnt make dvd-r's seem like a bad deal at all
Slashdot Mirror
i am sure it is a waste of time now, but it would be pretty cool if there was a simple way that people published media on wifi networks. Fast forward to the very near future and listen to songs on your wifi iPod that are being streamed by that other guy with the wifi iPod on the bus, or in the car next to you in a traffic jam, or your neighbor or that guy that works two floors above you that has the amazing collection of jimi hendrix bootlegs. The only thing really standing in the way of that would be wifi being a power hog and having a standard to do it with.
http://www.listen.com/
That is more or less what I think a good model is. Pay a monthly subscription for access to so much good music & related bits that piracy becomes significantly inferior compared to what you can get by supporting musicians. Of course, their implementation isn't perfect but they have made a strong push towards the right direction and hopefully it will be successful enough to encourage further exploration & industry support.
so this article seems to legitimize the approach of
1. make sure your wap is public at home
2. download whatever you like
3. say it must have been someone else but you don't keep logs
no?
sorry for OT question but where can you buy a prepaid debit card that works like a visa/etc with any supplied name? - honest Q
Oh my god, I didn't realize at the time that you were the same lunatic as before. Of course, it all makes sense now. Keep dreaming of a world where everything revolves around your selfish whims and your pipe dream pop economics. As for the rest of the world, we'll continue to chuckle.
it's hiphop/turntabism. It was produced for a radio segment for BBC Radio 1. Unlike a lot of turtablism it's not a huge scratch fest, it mostly qualifies in that genre because of the thousands of samples used in the production of it. The record is almost all other people's songs but very diverse (maybe 60% hiphop, 40% other styles including indian, swing, drum & bass, and others). If you're not familiar with the genre it is based on the idea that painstakingly combining so many sources together to make a song or album creates an honest new piece of music. Aka found music, similar to the idea of found art that repurposes things we see every day into something new.
Steinski can be seen in the movie scratch talking about his contributions to the DJ movement back in the early & mid 80's including his very influential "lessons 1 & 2" which could be said inspired a whole generation of dj's. Kind of funny, he's a white guy in his 50's but he sure knows hiphop and beatmixing.
The album is called Nothing to fear: a Rough Mix and isn't widely avaible as it is being sold illegally because the samples aren't cleared and payed for. But that link sells it i think and it has portions of some of the songs you can check out.
I think that having that outlook is the best way to make it successful. A flop is entirely relative after all, if you spend an appropriate amount of time on something compared to the demand anything can be a success. Good luck on your project! I think contributing to the success of independant music and working class musicians is a great way to both have a business and contribute to society through art.
just curious where you draw the line at full quality? CD quality is lower than studio didgital, yet nearly everyone seems to agree that it's high enough.
I agree that i don't listen to low bitrate mp3's like at 128kbit because I don't like the lower quality music that i can hear artifacts in.
But once it gets to 160k/192k with a high quality encoder I'll be damned if I can hear the difference... Even after trying really hard to. I worked on a subscription based product where quality was a #1 factor and no one in the office of many musicians/audio techs and hardcore music fans had complaints with those bitrates (depending on format, mp3 still had artifacts at 160k to some ears).
Now, I will concede that perhaps you could hear artifacts at 192k, but you must concede that at some bitrate that is below PCM you probably wont be able to tell the difference no matter what ears and what equipment you have to use.
Keep in mind that DVD's which are by far the highest quality format films are available in for the consumer are lossy compressions.. Just high enough bitrate that no one minds.
if they want to download it again just send them an email with a new "auth code" embedded in a clickable url
maybe too quick an answer. I wanted to add that the album i mentioned I most likely never would have heard of if i hadnt read a review of it. Now I own it and love it... I don't love it because the critic said it was good, I simply got the opportunity to buy it and decide for myself.
i think the quickest answer is that critics have the opportunity to sample a much larger body of work than most people do who don't do it for a living or as a serious hobby, and therefore may get to hear things that you otherwise might have missed.
I have been wondering about this lately.
If 20 years ago the entertainment industry had the luxury of a crystal ball to see the future of huge high speed digital network and the piracy that came with it, would they have ever made the leap into the digital world?
If you think about it dvd and cd formats were driven by consumer electronics companies and not the public. While we were watching videotape or listening to music on casettes, no one was really complaining about the quality... sure it could be better but it was obviously good enough that the world accepted them as good entertainment. The entertainment industry saw an opportunity to resell copies of albums or movies that the consumer may have already owned in a (now) inferior format but the opportunity was transient and has mostly played out by now. They may have very well shot themselves in the foot.
Sure piracy happened with analog formats, but due to the nature of them they took a fixed amount of time to produce (no ripping at 52x allowed) and the copy was always of a lower quality than the original.
While you can digitize analog media and pirate it online often the result seems substandard. You can see this with scene released movie screeners that come from videotape, the result almost always looks much worse than even a VHS copy would look. And when put in amateur hands the results can be very ugly... you will notice that no one makes their own vhs ripped copies of out of print movies on peer to peer networks, really the only people who do these are the "piracy pros" that spend a lot of time on it.
Degenerative copies also serve a real market use. Sure you may have gotten a copy of star wars copied from your friend (copied from his friend) back in the day but if you really liked it you knew that it would look a lot better if you bought the real copy from the store. That kind of incentive against piracy has all but disappeared with music, and while it is still true today with net vcds/svcds the future obviously points towards people downloading full dvd-r's (many people already do) which leave you with no justification other than morals to buy the legitimate product.
I think there is a strong case that they would have been better off never letting the cat out of the bag, so to speak, of the digital era.
really, why do you pst so many times on a topic you know so little about? You have claimed that the only viable business model is a yearly subscription, while the truth is anything but that... album sales are time tested, you can't even give one example of someone who has had success with this business model you have more or less dreamed up
second, you have no concept of what the standard roster of an indie music label will consist of in terms of sales. Many records will sell less than 10,000 copies total in a year. You cannot expect half of their sales to come from an online venue.
With many "indie labels" sales of 100,000 for a single record would a break-out hit. Labels on this scale would be lucky to have one of those a year, many will not have one this year (or next year). And yet thats what you'd need to get 5,000 online subscribers, figuring about a 5% conversion rate which is being overly generous.
You seem to confuse total album sales with subscribers for your pet service over and over. You would do well to realize that many fans of a band will buy the record at a live concert or store, never go to the website, and wouldnt care less about what you're trying to sell there.
Lastly, if you are going to run around saying "if you can't sell 20,000 records your music must really suck bad" or whatever it is you said, you should really re-evaluate they way you judge and appreciayte art. One of my favorite CD's of last year "A rough mix..." by steinski sold only a few thousand as i understand it but it has been critically aclaimed and is without question both thoroughly enjoyable and pushing the genre. Also if you are going to run around saying things like album sales == suck/not suck in a way that claims that a huge amount of indie artists must suck, I'd like to request that you play us some of your own music. Get my point... shut the fuck up about it.
It sounds to me like you may have developed some OK musical taste lately and have gone to see a few unsigned bands but your head is still stuck thinking that music is mass market and that indie means only having one video on mtv2. A vast majority of the world's music is made on a relatively small scale.
In summary: Please stop posting 100 times trying to act like you know a lot about the music industry when you actually know very little. You don't have to be an expert at everything. Take a deep breath and listen to folks instead of trying to tell everyone how it is just because you know someone who knows someone who's in a band.
i worked in the digital music industry for a number of years, including what ended up becoming rhapsody. Here are a few of the things i picked up:
* people will buy mp3's, but not very many people will. Use this knowledge when planning, consider not spending much or any money on putting it together, at least at first, to gauge interest.
* The band's hardest core fans will end up being the ones most likely to buy something from you. However they already own the albums. They may very well be convinced to buy the albums again if you include enough extras. Great extras being unreleased material, live tracks, stuff that didn't make the album, rough tracks from the upcomming album, remixes, instrumental tracks etc.
* This is important: People are (rightly) afraid of losing the mp3's they buy and being SOL. Make sure people who bought the album are allowed to download it again whenever they need it. Some folks may end up overusing this feature in your mind but the good will will go a long way into making people comfortable buying the medium.
* When you buy a cd you get the chance to rip at various bitrates. Make sure you provide a high enough bitrate for high fidelity listening (160k or 192k) but also consider providing a 96kbit or 128kbit set for portable players or other uses. Let them download either or both for one price. (and come back later to get the other one when they need it for free like the last point)
* Provide at least one sample mp3 encoded at the high fidelity bitrate so that people considering a purchase will know exactly what the quality of the encoding is (many bands only provide lower bitrate samples and people may assume the purchased music will sound the same)
* Consider watermarking if you want to be able to tell if the purchased mp3's are being made available on newsgroups/p2p etc or if it is people ripping the album themselves. This can be helpful if a band discovers their music on kazaa and is upset and makes a logical leap to blame the online mp3 sales... Likely they will have ripped it themselves and you'd be able to prove that rather than just speculating.
* (point #1 again) Remember, not many people buy mp3's online. Don't plan to order new computers, bandwidth, software services, spend a ton of time programming, doing art, adding extrasm or marketing until you get a chance to get your feet wet and gauge people's interest.
are you sure about that? did you read the article? SO now you are saying that the filesystem will need code to handle every multimedia format differently? Sounds like more of a nightmare
i am skeptical as well, the only reasonable answer seems to be that it would get lost. Especially if you are transfering between platforms. Why would you want to use a metadata system that you can't count on anyone else using? It seems to me that current packaged in file metadata systems are much more practical for transfer, multi-platform use, streaming, etc.
/etc/passwd manipulation just seem like gimmicks. How many files like that would you by hand support before you ended up deciding it was a bad idea to start it in the first place.
Other things mentioned in the article like the
If these are the things they are coming up with to add to filesystems now, they must be pretty much figured out & done.
i have seen several /20's for sale on ebay this year, also i believe there are a few ISP focused mailing lists that people buy/sell gear that also regularly have portable numbers for sale. I think you are looking at $4k or higher for that many ips. And you need to pay a yearly fee. Some allocationds are grandfathered and you don't need to pay yearly fees on those.
Like the article mentions the concept of finger printing music using a beats and tones method is nothing new.
The concept of using it to enforce p2p transactions quickly falls down though. It is obviously impractical to design any sort of p2p system that would require the content to be uploaded to a central server for authentication and beat matching. Any system that relied on client trust for the content matching could be easily circumvented, and would be by a community that has been built on the desire to pirate this music in the first place.
Why someone would want to use an application like kazaa to buy thier music in the first place is beyond me anyway. Who wants to pay a record company for a song that's been encoded by an unknown party, often at lower bitrates and without quality encoding software. And to be sure, people do not use current p2p systems because they find them to be the best designed, or best UI, or easiest. They do it to pirate the music.
The future of pay for download systems rests firmly in the professionally produced content, delivered from server to client such as iTunes and Rhapsody. You can always include peer bandwidth augmentation of official downloads, though i would expect thats not really nescesary.
Trying to monetize p2p is a red herring.
Holy shit US $5 billion, thats a lot of bread. Well I am sure the government bean counters know what they're doing. At least this likely created a lot of jobs for american companies struggling in todays economy. I for one feel better knowing that we are following through in our plans to adjust the size of our carrier fleet, as it should help us with future nescessary military plans.
Holy shit US $5 billion, thats a lot of bread. Well I am sure the government bean counters know what they're doing. At least this likely created a lot of jobs for american companies struggling in todays economy. I for one feel better knowing that we are following through in our plans to adjust the size of our carrier fleet, as it should help us with future nescessary military plans.
Sure you say that now, but you'll be crying when china has all of the lucrative exclusive extra terrestrial trade deals worked out and we're still trying to sell cars to canada.
Not really any step closer. The examples you use are really just more of a symptom of hollywood being eager to latch on to anything that has an existing brand... like games or old sitcoms, or remakes, or what have you.
I don't think the article is being very realistic asking if hollywood's turf is being invaded. ILM doing storyboards with a game engine? Great didn't they used to do story boards with pencil and paper? More like animators turf being invaded.
Once you develop a game system to the point where you have so much character control and facial expression that it rivals cgi films I think you've probably made a CGI development environment and not a game engine.
I understand that this laptop mentioned doesnt require active cooling, but as it seems everyone is focusing on wow an $800 linux laptop I went to go see what $800 could buy you at dell..
2ghz celeron 20gb hd 256mb ram 14" screen... for $749
While i haven't ever owned one of these i've not had a problem getting linux on dell laptops in the past. If you are looking for an inexpensive laptop to run linux it seems to me you could do a lot better than a very underpowered core processor such as the via.
no the incident had nothing to do with rot13
you can read about it here
well, you can find dvd-r media for us $0.85 or less in several brands. That holds 4.7gb. I usually pay $15/50 for 700mb cd-r's, which comes out to us $0.30 or us $1.80 for 4.2gb which doesnt make dvd-r's seem like a bad deal at all