I attended a lecture conducted by Chuck D of Public Enemy and I reckon he may be the coolest human being I have ever met. He's started an online label called slamjamz which allows sharing of music files (all MP3, but I assume he would be down with Ogg) and has a pretty nice method to allow users to pay for downloads and support the artists. You pay for credits which you can then use to purchase tracks, although many are free to download and all are Free to share.
On a shameless side note, my band will be releasing tracks which are available free of charge and Free to share.
"Record companies have been major beneficiaries of new technology (from wax cylinders to vinyl to LPs to CDs)" is something of an understatement. Just look at the way artists were screwed when CDs were becoming popular. Labels took cuts from their earnings to cover "increased production costs" which were dramatically overstated.
Organisations like the RIAA are not out to protect the rights of artists to make music, they want to enhance the ability of labels to make money.
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... I guess that's the end of the rumours about Mac OS X on PC hardware. Good thing too.
On a shameless side note, my band will be releasing tracks which are available free of charge and Free to share.
Does anyone know of any other statistics showing the rise of this trend?
"Record companies have been major beneficiaries of new technology (from wax cylinders to vinyl to LPs to CDs)" is something of an understatement. Just look at the way artists were screwed when CDs were becoming popular. Labels took cuts from their earnings to cover "increased production costs" which were dramatically overstated. Organisations like the RIAA are not out to protect the rights of artists to make music, they want to enhance the ability of labels to make money.