That's why people still care about "The Martian Chronicles", even so far as to make it required reading in some schools. The sense of wonder and the unknown and opportunity that the characters feel really jumps out and makes the reader feel the same wonder, even though we know none of that stuff is really going to happen in the time frame laid out by the book (or maybe ever).
All the aliens and doodads and gizmos and bending universes and lasers and exploding planets in the world don't make up for a shitty story and paper doll characters.
Plus don't forget that Universal/Vivendi also now controls MP3.com - so don't do any music purchasing through that site. Instead, pay the artists directly by whatever means they offer on their own sites, even if it means sticking a check in the mail because their geocities website won't let them take credit cards:).
You could also take it one further by not doing business with MP3.com's sponsors and advertisers, and letting THEM know why.
One of the XM stations is XM unsigned - a station that plays nothing but unsigned indie artists. Every so often they give you info on the bands, including website info and how you can order their CDs.
People in these threads have been asking why they should pay for XM when they get what they need from FM or MP3s for nothing. For me, the answer lies in XM Unsigned - it gives me the opportunity to discover new bands and find out how to support them directly. You hear things you would never have heard otherwise, and you give the RIAA the end around and don't support their overpriced crippled soundalike tripe discs, opting instead to buy CDs directly from indie talent YOU like. This, to me, is worth the $10 a month even if I didn't get ANY other stations.
Has RCN mentioned when/if they will be coming to Medford? AT&T is going to price itself out of my house pretty soon, and it would be nice to have another broadband choice that wasn't AT&T or Verizon.
>>The difference between this and MS is that the Liberty Alliance is made up of many companies and so the data will hopefully be more secure. In >>fact, that's one reason they formed it (so they say).. because they don't trust MS with all that personal info.
Because 33 big corporations with all your personal info is so much better than just one!
Your generalizations about "you Americans" are obviously well thought out and insightful. Every single one of us is fascinated with censorship and control, and we are all about to go invent multiple versions of our own standards. Every man, woman, and child - none of us can rest until the monolithic army known simply as "you Americans" exerts our control over others.
I'm sorry you feel the need to equate the entirety of the American population with a few unscrupulous corporate types. We're really not ALL that bad.
I think there is only one final solution to this: give up on the mass media. Yes, you heard me. No more Hollywood-movies (no great loss). No more Britney Spears (who cares). No more mindboggingly stupid game shows (what a relief!).
In fact, giving up is the final and best solution because it hits the industries the only place it really hurts them - the wallet.
But will enough people be willing to give up on the industries for it to matter? I think that unfortunately a lot of people who don't access forums such as this one which reveal this sort of happening will never find out about it until it is presented to them as making their computer, TV, TiVo, et cetera "safer from hackers" rather than "locked down by the man" or "customized to their tastes and habits" rather than "a conduit for marketing statistics accumulation".
Someone should play the Negativand track "Bite Back" from the Dispepsi CD loud enough for everyone to hear it - the simple solution is to "stop buying what it is they're selling".
I agree with your assessment of My.MP3.com - I can think of no reason to pay for remote access to my CDs when from time to time I will need to have the CD with me anyway, thus defeating the point of remote access.
But as far as Napster is concerned, I have my doubts as to whether it can really be considered primarily "a service that merely provides you access to your own music". Since Napster is not a streaming technology and since it requires the downloading and installation of a proprietary client on each machine that wishes to use it, it doesn't really offer a lot in terms of remote access to your own music. Napster is more about access to music you don't already have.
I agree, though, that Napster is going to have a hard time selling access at this stage of the game. If Napster had started out saying, "Listen, for $5 a month, you can download as much music as your hard drive can hold," people might have thought that was a good idea because in relation to the alternative at the time (buying a CD), that was a great deal. But for someone who has been using Napster for free for months and months now, who has accumulated thousands of MP3 files, there's not a lot to gain. Sooner or later, you just run out of songs or albums you want to download, and probably a lot of people have hit that point by now without paying for it. So for those people, the $5 per month suddenly doesn't seem like such a great deal.
After the privacy policy change which specifically allows Amazon to sell your personal info as an asset in the event Amazon is sold, I tried using the Amazon website to close my account, but I got some sort of failure message which told me to call a toll-free number. So I called. They asked me for the title of a recent purchase and the last 5 numbers of my credit card on file. Well, waaaaaaay back when they announced the 1-Click patent, I had removed my credit card information and so didn't have one on file. This caused problems. Eventually, persistence paid off and I convinced the guy on the phone to pull the plug on me. But then a few days later, I got e-mail from Amazon customer service saying they couldn't close my zShops and Auctions account without the 5 numbers and the recent purchase title. Well, I had never opened any separate "zShops" account! But there it was nonetheless and I couldn't close it. Nor could I log into my now closed "regular" Amazon account to get the information even if it was there. Finally I wrote to every customer service and/or abuse@amazon address I could think of threatening to report their repulsive business practices to the BBB if any and all accounts were not closed by week's end. That got some action - accounts closed. But easy it was certainly not.
This pissed me off so much that I changed my hosts file to point anything at amazon.com back to localhost so no content they serve will ever grace my screen again. They are miserable bastards.
"Thank you for writing. We will now summarily ignore everything you've just said for all time and wait for someone who agrees with our views to write in so we can suck them into our nefarious fold."
I think I'll surf on over to MP3.com and commit a few albums worth of felonies before I mail some checks to the mailboxes of the artists themselves and not the bank accounts of the Hillary Rosens of the world. I don't have children yet, but when I do, no corporate scum-sucking neo-philosophical money grubbing wench is going to tell me how to raise them when her view of right and wrong is solely based on how much her wallet weighs at the end of the day.
Amen. The bottom line is that in the end, you and only you decide what you buy and how much you pay for it. If you agree with the price and terms, buy. If not, don't. If you thought $400 was a fair price, and that $500 isn't, just don't pay it. Simple as that!
You're unlikely to find a lot of well-known artists who are not recording under an RIAA label by some degree of subsidiary separation.
However, there are a lot of very good indie artists out there, and many of them publish and sell their own CDs directly. If you're not into the RIAA, seek out independent artists. You get the double benefit of sticking it to the RIAA and discovering some great unheard talent. CDs from these bands are generally less expensive than major label CDs (many under $10US) and a lot of their sites offer free MP3 downloads to try before you buy.
You can find indie artists in places like MP3.com by entering the name of a band you know and like in the search box and looking for "Similar Artists". You'll likely end up sifting through a lot of misses before you find a hit, but I think it's worth it. And if you find an artist you like, buy the CD! Show the RIAA that you are in fact willing to spend money for a product you enjoy, but you are unwilling to be told how you're allowed to enjoy it. Promote indie artists on your website. Demonstrate to the RIAA that you have alternatives and are more than willing and able to take advantage of them.
But I think that's a different set of circumstances. A studio quality digital recording, whether or not it's committed to CD, does cost money to produce - studio time and equipment, etc. If someone is playing on the street corner, it seems that their intent is to be giving away free music, and whether or not you record it, you're not changing the terms of distribution from what the artist intended in that case.
/* Consider an analogy: I like to build stuff out of Lego. Heck, I think I'm pretty good at it, even. Now, is it valid for me to assume that the world owes me a truckfull of money because I can build cool Lego spaceships? NO! If I happen to come up with some creative way of selling my Lego creations (pay-per-view website, physical copies, lessons, etc.), then kudos to me. I should not, however, get upset when I can't find enough people to pay me for me Lego work */
But take this view: you build your Lego creation, and decide to put it up for sale, without the assumption that the truckload of cash is on its way to you, but with the hope that someone may see, like, and buy your Lego creation. Say you set the price of your Lego creation at $5. What you would then expect is that anyone who wanted your Lego creation would give you $5. So along comes someone who comes up to your Lego stand, takes your Lego creation, and walks away. What that person just did is take the terms you set forth for the sale and distribution of your creation and change them without you agreeing to the change.
What BaptistDeathRay is getting at is that it shouldn't be the consumers setting the rules for the distribution of the artists' creations, it should be the artists. If BaptistDeathRay wants to get 50 cents a song, and no one is willing to pay that, then two things should be true:
1. he doesn't get any money from song sales because he didn't sell any songs. 2. (the one people don't seem to agree with) no one else has the songs but him because he didn't sell any songs.
It doesn't make sense to me that if the artist puts his work up for sale for 50 cents and you decide that you want that work but you want to pay 0 cents for it that you should pay 0 cents for it. You should either pay 50 cents for it or you should not have it, because that's the way the artist wants it. If you don't like the terms, don't agree to them, but don't expect that you have the right to change them at any time to suit your wants.
/* the point is that because people have been spoon-fed crap, when they fire up napster they're going to look for crap no matter how many MP3s that there are that they haven't heard of */
Another reason that Napster as it currently stands is not and ideal promotional tool for indie artists is that you need to know in advance what you're looking for. If you're a Radiohead fan, you can go type "Radiohead" in the search box and come up with more Radiohead tunes than you could ever want. But if you are looking to discover a new indie band, what name do you search for on Napster? Maybe if the indie artist is clever and names his file "My Song by My Band which sounds like Radiohead.mp3", you've got a chance, but by and large, you're out of luck.
At least with things like MP3.com, you can do a "similar artist" search and come back with a list of artists to try out based on artists you know and like.
/* In that case, it is very unlikely that MP3 distribution is going to boost CD sales; they simply don't have the capacity to get disks out to everywhere they need to go. As a result, all they can do is watch their MP3s get Dloaded for free, and hope a few people are kind enough to send cash. Shareware, basically. */ In fact, there was a Rolling Stone article a year or two ago where they mentioned that Lotusland, at the time one of MP3.com's most downloaded artists, had their songs downloaded 70,000 times, but had sold only 93 CDs. That doesn't seem like a very good return.
Re:Check out Vampire Miyu. Far creepier.
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 1
Yeah, I'm actually not a big anime fan at all, but I loved Vampire Princess Miyu. I think compared to the other anime stuff I've seen, the characters are much more deep and interesting and the stories are dark - they don't so much scare you with what you see on screen as they do with the force with which they convey the emotional states of the characters. Top flight stuff.
I dunno, that doesn't seem so strange to me. I'm a pretty big P.E. fan and found Public Enemy and Chuck D to be my ally back in high school. On a specific level, they rap about the injustices and hardships facing the African-American community, but on a general level, anyone who has ever felt that an injustice has been done to them, or who is part of a persecuted minority can relate to the sentiment of their music on some level. And when Chuck D stands up for Napster, he's standing up against a product with legitimate uses being taken away from everyone due to the actions of those who abuse it.
I don't disagree with the idea of what Metallica is doing (though I disagree that you can always tell what's in a file based on a file name) in an attempt to "protect their work", nor do I disagree with Napster for complying and removing users freely distributing copyrighted material (what this should be doing is making the government look long and hard at the outdated copyright law, not at 600k+ people who are branded criminals because of it) because regardless of the fact that the current law is incapable of dealing with today's technology sensibly, it is the law. But I disagree strongly with taking a tool away from everyone when Napster is perfectly willing to block users who violate the law. Because Napster is today's tape trading. Metallica probably figures it doesn't need new fans and so doesn't want people getting its music without paying for it. But Johnny's Whupass Garage Band and such need exposure. Napster can give that to them, and should be allowed to continue if for no other reason than that. If a band does not want its music traded freely on Napster, it should be able to opt-out and not have it there (difficult for Napster to enforce, I realize). But if a band does want its music traded on Napster, Napster should be there for the band to have that choice.
Check out the Terms of Sale - you have to agree to the transfer of your name, address, and phone number to Netpliance AFTER they've already been given your name, address, and phone number by Circuit City. What if you say no? Do they erase your information? Does Circuit City?
Wasn't this exactly what the Apple eMate was going to accomplish a few years ago? Somehow it just never took off, but it was quite a cool little device that seemed to have promise in the educational hardware area.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why people still care about "The Martian Chronicles", even so far as to make it required reading in some schools. The sense of wonder and the unknown and opportunity that the characters feel really jumps out and makes the reader feel the same wonder, even though we know none of that stuff is really going to happen in the time frame laid out by the book (or maybe ever).
All the aliens and doodads and gizmos and bending universes and lasers and exploding planets in the world don't make up for a shitty story and paper doll characters.
Plus don't forget that Universal/Vivendi also now controls MP3.com - so don't do any music purchasing through that site. Instead, pay the artists directly by whatever means they offer on their own sites, even if it means sticking a check in the mail because their geocities website won't let them take credit cards :).
You could also take it one further by not doing business with MP3.com's sponsors and advertisers, and letting THEM know why.
One of the XM stations is XM unsigned - a station that plays nothing but unsigned indie artists. Every so often they give you info on the bands, including website info and how you can order their CDs.
People in these threads have been asking why they should pay for XM when they get what they need from FM or MP3s for nothing. For me, the answer lies in XM Unsigned - it gives me the opportunity to discover new bands and find out how to support them directly. You hear things you would never have heard otherwise, and you give the RIAA the end around and don't support their overpriced crippled soundalike tripe discs, opting instead to buy CDs directly from indie talent YOU like. This, to me, is worth the $10 a month even if I didn't get ANY other stations.
Has RCN mentioned when/if they will be coming to Medford? AT&T is going to price itself out of my house pretty soon, and it would be nice to have another broadband choice that wasn't AT&T or Verizon.
>>The difference between this and MS is that the Liberty Alliance is made up of many companies and so the data will hopefully be more secure. In >>fact, that's one reason they formed it (so they say).. because they don't trust MS with all that personal info.
Because 33 big corporations with all your personal info is so much better than just one!
Your generalizations about "you Americans" are obviously well thought out and insightful. Every single one of us is fascinated with censorship and control, and we are all about to go invent multiple versions of our own standards. Every man, woman, and child - none of us can rest until the monolithic army known simply as "you Americans" exerts our control over others.
I'm sorry you feel the need to equate the entirety of the American population with a few unscrupulous corporate types. We're really not ALL that bad.
If only comments could be modded up to "5, Insightful" automatically, this would be a prime candidate. Because it really, really is that simple.
In fact, giving up is the final and best solution because it hits the industries the only place it really hurts them - the wallet.
But will enough people be willing to give up on the industries for it to matter? I think that unfortunately a lot of people who don't access forums such as this one which reveal this sort of happening will never find out about it until it is presented to them as making their computer, TV, TiVo, et cetera "safer from hackers" rather than "locked down by the man" or "customized to their tastes and habits" rather than "a conduit for marketing statistics accumulation".
Someone should play the Negativand track "Bite Back" from the Dispepsi CD loud enough for everyone to hear it - the simple solution is to "stop buying what it is they're selling".
I agree with your assessment of My.MP3.com - I can think of no reason to pay for remote access to my CDs when from time to time I will need to have the CD with me anyway, thus defeating the point of remote access.
But as far as Napster is concerned, I have my doubts as to whether it can really be considered primarily "a service that merely provides you access to your own music". Since Napster is not a streaming technology and since it requires the downloading and installation of a proprietary client on each machine that wishes to use it, it doesn't really offer a lot in terms of remote access to your own music. Napster is more about access to music you don't already have.
I agree, though, that Napster is going to have a hard time selling access at this stage of the game. If Napster had started out saying, "Listen, for $5 a month, you can download as much music as your hard drive can hold," people might have thought that was a good idea because in relation to the alternative at the time (buying a CD), that was a great deal. But for someone who has been using Napster for free for months and months now, who has accumulated thousands of MP3 files, there's not a lot to gain. Sooner or later, you just run out of songs or albums you want to download, and probably a lot of people have hit that point by now without paying for it. So for those people, the $5 per month suddenly doesn't seem like such a great deal.
After the privacy policy change which specifically allows Amazon to sell your personal info as an asset in the event Amazon is sold, I tried using the Amazon website to close my account, but I got some sort of failure message which told me to call a toll-free number. So I called. They asked me for the title of a recent purchase and the last 5 numbers of my credit card on file. Well, waaaaaaay back when they announced the 1-Click patent, I had removed my credit card information and so didn't have one on file. This caused problems. Eventually, persistence paid off and I convinced the guy on the phone to pull the plug on me. But then a few days later, I got e-mail from Amazon customer service saying they couldn't close my zShops and Auctions account without the 5 numbers and the recent purchase title. Well, I had never opened any separate "zShops" account! But there it was nonetheless and I couldn't close it. Nor could I log into my now closed "regular" Amazon account to get the information even if it was there. Finally I wrote to every customer service and/or abuse@amazon address I could think of threatening to report their repulsive business practices to the BBB if any and all accounts were not closed by week's end. That got some action - accounts closed. But easy it was certainly not.
This pissed me off so much that I changed my hosts file to point anything at amazon.com back to localhost so no content they serve will ever grace my screen again. They are miserable bastards.
At least no one has put up any storyboards yet for "Howard The Duck Episode II: The Phantom Boxoffice" - hate to have THAT get spoiled.
Translation:
"Thank you for writing. We will now summarily ignore everything you've just said for all time and wait for someone who agrees with our views to write in so we can suck them into our nefarious fold."
I think I'll surf on over to MP3.com and commit a few albums worth of felonies before I mail some checks to the mailboxes of the artists themselves and not the bank accounts of the Hillary Rosens of the world. I don't have children yet, but when I do, no corporate scum-sucking neo-philosophical money grubbing wench is going to tell me how to raise them when her view of right and wrong is solely based on how much her wallet weighs at the end of the day.
Amen. The bottom line is that in the end, you and only you decide what you buy and how much you pay for it. If you agree with the price and terms, buy. If not, don't. If you thought $400 was a fair price, and that $500 isn't, just don't pay it. Simple as that!
You're unlikely to find a lot of well-known artists who are not recording under an RIAA label by some degree of subsidiary separation.
However, there are a lot of very good indie artists out there, and many of them publish and sell their own CDs directly. If you're not into the RIAA, seek out independent artists. You get the double benefit of sticking it to the RIAA and discovering some great unheard talent. CDs from these bands are generally less expensive than major label CDs (many under $10US) and a lot of their sites offer free MP3 downloads to try before you buy.
You can find indie artists in places like MP3.com by entering the name of a band you know and like in the search box and looking for "Similar Artists". You'll likely end up sifting through a lot of misses before you find a hit, but I think it's worth it. And if you find an artist you like, buy the CD! Show the RIAA that you are in fact willing to spend money for a product you enjoy, but you are unwilling to be told how you're allowed to enjoy it. Promote indie artists on your website. Demonstrate to the RIAA that you have alternatives and are more than willing and able to take advantage of them.
Chuck.
But I think that's a different set of circumstances. A studio quality digital recording, whether or not it's committed to CD, does cost money to produce - studio time and equipment, etc. If someone is playing on the street corner, it seems that their intent is to be giving away free music, and whether or not you record it, you're not changing the terms of distribution from what the artist intended in that case.
/*
Consider an analogy: I like to build stuff out of Lego. Heck, I think I'm pretty good at it, even. Now, is it valid for me to assume that the world owes me a truckfull of money because I can build cool Lego spaceships? NO! If I happen to come up with some creative way of selling my Lego creations (pay-per-view website, physical copies, lessons, etc.), then kudos to me. I should not, however, get upset when I can't find enough people to pay me for me Lego work
*/
But take this view: you build your Lego creation, and decide to put it up for sale, without the assumption that the truckload of cash is on its way to you, but with the hope that someone may see, like, and buy your Lego creation. Say you set the price of your Lego creation at $5. What you would then expect is that anyone who wanted your Lego creation would give you $5. So along comes someone who comes up to your Lego stand, takes your Lego creation, and walks away. What that person just did is take the terms you set forth for the sale and distribution of your creation and change them without you agreeing to the change.
What BaptistDeathRay is getting at is that it shouldn't be the consumers setting the rules for the distribution of the artists' creations, it should be the artists. If BaptistDeathRay wants to get 50 cents a song, and no one is willing to pay that, then two things should be true:
1. he doesn't get any money from song sales because he didn't sell any songs.
2. (the one people don't seem to agree with) no one else has the songs but him because he didn't sell any songs.
It doesn't make sense to me that if the artist puts his work up for sale for 50 cents and you decide that you want that work but you want to pay 0 cents for it that you should pay 0 cents for it. You should either pay 50 cents for it or you should not have it, because that's the way the artist wants it. If you don't like the terms, don't agree to them, but don't expect that you have the right to change them at any time to suit your wants.
/*
the point is that because people have been spoon-fed crap, when they fire up napster they're going to look for crap no matter how many MP3s that there are that they haven't heard of
*/
Another reason that Napster as it currently stands is not and ideal promotional tool for indie artists is that you need to know in advance what you're looking for. If you're a Radiohead fan, you can go type "Radiohead" in the search box and come up with more Radiohead tunes than you could ever want. But if you are looking to discover a new indie band, what name do you search for on Napster? Maybe if the indie artist is clever and names his file "My Song by My Band which sounds like Radiohead.mp3", you've got a chance, but by and large, you're out of luck.
At least with things like MP3.com, you can do a "similar artist" search and come back with a list of artists to try out based on artists you know and like.
/*
In that case, it is very unlikely that MP3 distribution is going to boost CD sales; they simply don't have the capacity to get disks out to everywhere they need to go. As a result, all they can do is watch their MP3s get Dloaded for free, and hope a few people are kind enough to send cash. Shareware, basically.
*/
In fact, there was a Rolling Stone article a year or two ago where they mentioned that Lotusland, at the time one of MP3.com's most downloaded artists, had their songs downloaded 70,000 times, but had sold only 93 CDs. That doesn't seem like a very good return.
Yeah, I'm actually not a big anime fan at all, but I loved Vampire Princess Miyu. I think compared to the other anime stuff I've seen, the characters are much more deep and interesting and the stories are dark - they don't so much scare you with what you see on screen as they do with the force with which they convey the emotional states of the characters. Top flight stuff.
I dunno, that doesn't seem so strange to me. I'm a pretty big P.E. fan and found Public Enemy and Chuck D to be my ally back in high school. On a specific level, they rap about the injustices and hardships facing the African-American community, but on a general level, anyone who has ever felt that an injustice has been done to them, or who is part of a persecuted minority can relate to the sentiment of their music on some level. And when Chuck D stands up for Napster, he's standing up against a product with legitimate uses being taken away from everyone due to the actions of those who abuse it.
I don't disagree with the idea of what Metallica is doing (though I disagree that you can always tell what's in a file based on a file name) in an attempt to "protect their work", nor do I disagree with Napster for complying and removing users freely distributing copyrighted material (what this should be doing is making the government look long and hard at the outdated copyright law, not at 600k+ people who are branded criminals because of it) because regardless of the fact that the current law is incapable of dealing with today's technology sensibly, it is the law. But I disagree strongly with taking a tool away from everyone when Napster is perfectly willing to block users who violate the law. Because Napster is today's tape trading. Metallica probably figures it doesn't need new fans and so doesn't want people getting its music without paying for it. But Johnny's Whupass Garage Band and such need exposure. Napster can give that to them, and should be allowed to continue if for no other reason than that. If a band does not want its music traded freely on Napster, it should be able to opt-out and not have it there (difficult for Napster to enforce, I realize). But if a band does want its music traded on Napster, Napster should be there for the band to have that choice.
Check out the Terms of Sale - you have to agree to the transfer of your name, address, and phone number to Netpliance AFTER they've already been given your name, address, and phone number by Circuit City. What if you say no? Do they erase your information? Does Circuit City?
Wasn't this exactly what the Apple eMate was going to accomplish a few years ago? Somehow it just never took off, but it was quite a cool little device that seemed to have promise in the educational hardware area.
Think they were talking about Microsystems Software of CyberPatrol fame and not Sun Microsystems.
The movie was based on this teen novel which was published in 1981.