The machines that run the software are taxed as property and valued as assets. (Well, that's a fact here in California, where I'm a Controller for a company.) As for items we lease (as a response to a comment higher up) we either pay the property taxes on behalf of the lessor or reimburse them for property taxes, which is a requirement of the lease agreement.
One can sell things that aren't property. For instance, we sell people our time to make architectural drawings which we deliver to them or their contractor.
I'll take the point about lyrics. But listening to a bit of music and notating it is not copying. Listening to a bit of music and showing your band the chord changes and specific parts (as you might do in a cover band) is neither copying nor copyright infringement.
While school boards may continue to trickle out ID curriculua mandates, this ruling and the trial's record will effectively mean such mandates won't last long once they get to court. It's over as far as the public schools are concerned. I think the next battleground will be the lawsuit against the University of California for not accepting ID-inclusive biologic coursework as valid science coursework for admissions. This is about (essentially) privately educated students who want to go to good public schools and raises different issues, as I think the main summary of the plaintiff's argument is that the UC is discriminating on religious grounds.
Isn't tablature a representation of arrangement and not covered by the songwriter's/music publisher's copyright (which covers only melody and lyric)? Photocopying (or hand copying) a publisher's tablature book is clearly a no-no, but listening to the performance, working out the guitar parts and notating it using a commonly accepted method seems legitimate to this non-lawyer.
Though, having recently read the admonitions on contemporary cds, I expect the legal beagles shortly will get on to adding that, along with public performance and other restrictions, listening in order to learn how to play an instrument will also be an unlicensed use. After all, why would musicians develop new techniques if there weren't publishers who could compensate them for the rights to control those techniques?
Put me firmly in the camp that html is brilliant. It suits exactly its designed purpose: to allow academic papers to be easily shared among colleagues. There are no formatting imperatives in a basic html document, the tagging scheme allows the author to include identifiable hints to be rendered or ignored as the client browser chooses.
Now what you report your web-designing friend as saying sounds a bit like a jumble of the justification for xml, which is a way to tag informational content so that transformational tools can auto-generate multiple views (including html). Html does not provide this capability, but on the other hand, it does not fuse the presentation and content. The content/presentation divide for a classic html page is very simple: presentation hints are inside the angle brackets and content is outside the tags.
Now clearly, over the last decade, there have been hack upon hack and new tag upon new tag created, which suggests that there was something "wrong" with the original html. I argue there wasn't. It's just that the web as a commercial medium was not anticipated. So, html was expanded and we've been suffering with the inconsistencies which arose from back-porting robust typography, dynamic control, and other complexities to the original spec. On other hand, plain vanilla html is easily rendered by all browsers and human-comprehensible if a browser isn't available, which is why no one tossed it once the commercial imperatives were recognized. Plus the main reasons why the web did catch fire were: no one owned it, it was open source (source views were there to show how something was done), and html was and is very easy to use.
Should we discuss how useless a bicycle is because it won't tow a grand piano?
For, what, 70 or 80 years the recording companies have been putting product in stores. Yet, somehow the brilliance of "if it's more popular, one should charge more" has escaped them all these years. I think it's because it makes it look like the less popular stuff is being discounted and not that there's a premium for quality. Classical recordings were always higher priced than pop, and that may have reflected the affluence of the consumers and low, niche demand (when compared to pop recordings). Hmmm. Less popular recordings have a higher price. Sort of dovetails with the comments above.
Now imagine how the type of personality that freaks over the wrong color of M&M's back-stage responds to news that his next single will be 1.09 when the last was 1.19. Hey, were the artist's and composer royalties also going to adjust with the price/demand? I'm channeling "not bloody likely" on that.
Didn't I read that Time Warner lowered its losses on its music operations because it's selling more online? And shouldn't the record companies be lighting incense and making sacrifices to the deities of their choosing because Steve came along and showed them how to banish the days of "Shipped platinum and returned gold?"
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft astroturfers weren't deployed to say positive things at any web site where there might be........ anti-Microsoft... comm..... HEY, wait a doggone moment.
Except. Look in the record stores. Look at how many opportunities for discounting first releases or make-or-break releases from critically acclaimed bands they have and how many times this is used to try and increase demand. Almost never. I think Mr. Spolsky may be on to something, even if I disagree about the song "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" being the hit it was because of payola. About the point that hearing drives demand -- YES!!! But, again, look at all the new releases on sale which have tracks you haven't heard or are from people you don't know. Would a $5.00 price lead you to ignore the unfamiliarity factor and buy the disk? That's the point; it won't.
But I'm still boycotting them until Sony BMG says "never again," about mixing software into audio disks. I have half a mind to head over to Virgin Megastore this afternoon and mention at the counter that I will not be buying Springsteen's Born To Run Retrospective because of this. Even if it turns out, as you suggest, that this goes nowhere, at least I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that my apathy and/or inaction didn't contribute to the problem. And the problem, as I see it, is that Sony and those undiscovered and those waiting in the wings have no business limiting the number of times and the ways I personally use my purchased music.
I got my Real Book in 1984 for a Jazz Combo workshop I was taking through Continuing Eduation at SBCC (Santa Barbara, California): it was a collection of photocopied hand written transcriptions, each one showing a tune's melody with chord changes notated above the staff. The songs were jazz standards and featured heavily the songbooks, if you will, of Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker, and Dizzie Gillespie. The instructor told us what music instrument store to go to and to ask for it at the counter. When I did so, whisk, out came one of the hidden volumes and into a brown paper bag it went. I know there was a vocal version which included lyrics. I think there may have been E-flat, B-flat, and D versions for other instruments which define C differently, in this way, as I made my way playing bass guitar to "Killer Joe," the sax guys would be playing from their Real Book and we'd all be in the same key without one of us having to transpose in our heads. Fake Books were compendia of standards put out by a publisher in the same simplified format (though professionally typeset) representing the standards from their catalog. And, there's no way the publishers got any thing for these Real Books, thus their under the counter nature.
This is kind of tricky, but ASCAP/BMI/SOCAN/SESAC are performance rights societies and are not involved in the publication of sheet music. They collect moneys on behalf of the songwriters for commercial performance of their works and these are paid by the venues where music is performed for commercial exploitation, such a theaters and bars, and also by radio stations and in-store music tapes. When one buys sheet music, the money is collected by the publisher on behalf of themselves and the songwriters, and none goes to performance rights societies, since there is no performance.
About Real Books, I guess I always assumed that if they were found in Santa Barbara, then they were nationwide (or at least near the big cities -- Los Angeles wasn't that far away from Santa Barbara).
Midi files are like player piano rolls, which are publications of performances and copyrightable. (Some of the arcane ways used to delineate the available copyrights for music makes more sense when one realizes that at the time pop music took off, the late 19th century and early 20th, it was the quantity of sheet music and player piano rolls sold which made a song a "hit.")
As for doing transcriptions, fair use allows one to do that for personal use, but xeroxing sheet music or scores and/or selling your transcription infringes on rights held by the publisher for works still in copyright. Remember getting "Real Books," which were sold under the counter to working musicians who needed an inexpensive, publisher agnostic collection of standards for weddings, bar mitzvahs, and casual gigs? There was a reason it was under the counter.
Incorporating significant portions of someone else's midi-transcribed performance would make one's work a derivative work, and licensing of the midi information from its rights holder would be required. Now, doing a live peformance which incorprated a pc playing someone else's midi files -- I would guess that requires a license. But a lot of this stuff is overlooked until someone starts making money from someone else's work. And no, I am not a lawyer.
Someone's got to do something. I"ve set up OpenOffice 2.0 on all the Windows/Linux machines at work and it is a serious PITA that my Mac cannot consume odf (et al) files, since the best I can get is 1.1.2 in X11 or 1.1.4 via NeoOffice/J. In fact, I had to downgrade everyone else's default file formats so odf isn't used, otherwise I'm locked out from other's work... isn't that ironic? I don't know if it's Sun, Apple or both, but someone is getting in the way of my efficiency by gumming up java and OpenOffice.org advancement on OS X.
Any one want to set up a Cocoa OpenDocument application project? Is one under way?
And the follow-up: Flagged Broadcast Denial:
A review has determined this to be an illegal copy of
[x]Dennis the Menace
[ ]Please Don't Eat the Daisies
[ ]The Courtship of Eddie's Father
[ ]Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom
Sorry for the late response -- I usually say my piece and don't look back.
I'm an old guy, late 40s, and while I have all my cds ripped, I feel better knowing that if the hard drive fails, the worst that happens is I re-rip my disks. Now cd's are not as indestructible as it was suggested when they were introduced twenty years ago, but they still seem to outlast vinyl, which would have pops and clicks within a couple of years of manufacturing.
But you know what I really miss while enjoying the advantages of the mp3 generation? Liner notes. Musician credits. Songwriter credits. Because I loved to see and make the connections between the musicians I liked. Pop music seems most fun and interesting when it's easy to get singles into the hands of fans, IMHO. So I think downloadable mp3s are a great thing. But I'm guessing the serious collector and serious fan will still want to have that thing on the shelf. And the packaging of the tangible good has provided an opportunity for brand awareness, like the album jackets for BlueNote or Atlantic records which helped communicate to the fans that here was a new artist from the folks who brought you Jimmy Smith or Ray Charles, so it should be cool. So, since I see advantages for producer and consumer, I expect the tangible collection will continue; the pricing will change as demand varies, of course. Of course, these could be the loony rantings of a child born in the 50s, No?
Affiliates get paid by the networks for running the networks' programming and advertisements. So this may mean that this issue is resolved through a negotiation of higher clearance fees received by the affiliates, with the affiliates making their case for getting more fees. After all, one could argue that there would be no demand for "Lost" except through the fan-base developed via viewers watching affiliates' programming.
On the other hand, ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox own the local stations in the major markets so they already have built-in access to a major portion of the audience. And as affiliates are free to pre-empt network programming, a network may say to an affiliate, "If you don't like that 'Despearate Housewives' will be available in a lower quality format tomorrow, don't clear the top rated program in its time slot on the night with the highest viewership. Please go and buy some other programming to fill the slot. Nice talking with you; say hi to the wife and kids, and don't let the door hit you on your way out." Or, the affiliates jump to another studio-network which doesn't offer downloads (for however long that alternative may last.)
Frankly, this is way too early for the affiliates to be making a ruckus, except as a negotiating play. No one has any idea if this will erode advertising revenues (as the audience numbers for first-runs and re-runs may be lessened, impacting viewership for the local programming and advertising surrounding and interspersed throughout the network blocks) or the reduce studio and producers' revenues from Season N DVD set sales. But, like everything else, nothing happens unless it's a hit, and right now, that is measured by Nielsen families watching tv.
They're even more wrong than that. A search for Paul Simon should give revenues to which label? The current one? The one where he established his fan base? And "Madonna" as a trade-mark, owned by Warners or owned by M.L. Ciccone and/or her management company? I suspect the latter. (Of course right now the lawyers are sharpening their word processors and are probably putting clauses in the contracts that band names and performance names become trade marks of the recording company.)
Every now and then the recording companies mumble something about getting paid when radio stations play recordings and the radio stations call the bluff because airplay sells records. In fact, payola scandals demonstrate that there's an incentive for recording companies to pay the radio stations.
I'm also wondering if there's a point where recording companies ask so much of Apple, satellite radio, internet broadcasters, and ring-tone distributors that they join up in backing a new recording company that signs artists primarily for digital distribution and broadcast. As I think tangible media are important, this company would license the pressing and distribution rights for the cds, or allow the artist the retain the tangible rights, or press and distribute their own discs. By doing the same things that record companies used to do when they were hungry and necessarily agile -- tour support, signing and selling regional artists who can graduate to nationwide, scouting and signing of talent (and not management machines) -- in three to five years, they'll have stars. In ten years, they'll have superstars.
Re:I can see the headlines right now...
on
RIAA Sues a Child
·
· Score: 1
Gallant only buys compact disks and gets one copy for home and another copy to play in Mom's mini-van while being driven to choir practice (where only public domain works are sung).
Goofus rips friends' cds and gets downloads from the world-wide-web, has built a large collection of delta blues musicians, and will be spending future ages in the netherworlds with the nasty person Mr. Johnson met at the cross-roads.
Put my two cents in as to how the article's storyline doesn't quite track. If Mr. Allchin, despite massive institutional inertia, gave the pig winglets and put it back on a track to actually being releasable then we're missing the motive for why he'll leave on Vista D-Day and why the company wouldn't fight to keep him. In some sense, the article is about the story Microsoft wishes to tell, which is we were writing bad code, but we've fixed that now (and look at the bruises: no pain, no gain, right?), which is what the parent posts suspects.
Now I suspect that the interviews took place before the Microsofta est omnis divisa in partes tres announcement, and there was no desire from Microsoft to have Mr. Allchin candidly describe his reasons for retirement (and maybe Mr. Allchin has a book up his sleeve), so off to press with this peek into the hallowed halls of Redmond.
One quibble I would have with article is in its suggestion that Mr. Gates, as Chief Software Architect has two paradoxical duties to reconcile: coming up with innovations and putting down unrealistic projects. A lot of the candid reporting I've seen is that there's a third element that he practices with zeal, which is to grind into a fine powder any idea he believes shakes a stick at the cash cows.
One implication of the story is that in Summer 2004 Bill Gates didn't know that one of the cash cows was flatlining. There's a thought to ponder.
They may hold the copyright to the songs as writers, however, one cannot copyright a performance, one can only copyright the publication of a performance. The contract they signed is about exclusive recording rights for the record company and probably includes provisions to allow the company to own the masters and recoup any recording costs against future artist peformance royalties. The record company is the publisher and holds the copyrights to the recordings.
I have felt for a good many years now that a band's management is the proper one to fight whenever record company policies interfere with the long term career strategies of a band. The essential goal in the early phase of the career is to build as big a fan-base as you can. While having a hit record on a major label works, it isn't going to happen for 95% of the people signed to recording deals.
Switchfoot may never get a song in heavy rotation on radio. And now their record company is attempting to seal off a word of mouth channel, as they've made it difficult for Logan to transfer the mp3 to Jason and Gunther and Bob and make a mix CD for Bethany. Sony doesn't care. In 12 months they'll be seeing if some other band breaks through.
It's the management who has to care. So will the management fight for a client band's career, or take the 10% of the label advance and acquiesce rather than risk any future label deals for another band they manage?
Should anyone from Switchfoot read this, good luck in your efforts to cut the major label Gordian knot (with this extra loop interfering with how fans want to hear your music today).
So. 52.5 million per title. Three years to develop, script, film, post-produce and distribute the first movie. Does it get put in the summer slot? Guess so. Do they all? Maybe if it's a 2/2/3/3 release cycle. Those last 6 may get shutdown (or straight to DVDed) if the first two don't make back their negative costs.
Still it's 10 films released in four years from 2008-2012, or a title every five months if it was spread out.
Today a special effected film seems to cost, what, 110 million. In six years, that will be up to 130 million (maybe more as demand increases for special effects houses). Where does the other 60-80 million come from? The domestic distributor? Overseas pre-sales? Do they hire above-the-line talent or economize and rely on character and story.
If a title doesn't get produced, does some money go back to the investors? And how do the backers get paid? Out of the net? Okay back from laughing. Got a hankering to walk over to Book Soup, stare at the, formerly, Caroloco building and mumble something about the stuff of dreams.
Here's the theory, in perfunctory fashion, because I don't buy it. Broadband uptake in the US is not going as quickly as somebody wants. Aha! the FCC reasons (helped by whispers in the ear), it must be because the owners of phone lines won't upgrade them unless they get the full return of their investment. So if the Baby Bells own and maintain the lines, the Baby Bells are granted full control over how much they charge other information service providers, and, in order to make negotiations between the Baby Bells and indy DSLs more equitable, the Baby Bells can now walk away and say no soup for you, More return on investment means more investment in infrastructure and more supply means more demand. Entry into the brand new beautiful broadband world accelerates.
And some folks at SBC and Verizon get together with their lobbyists and a few of their contacts in Congress and the Executive, and tilt many a glass in honor of these days in the new gilded age.
Slashdot Mirror
The machines that run the software are taxed as property and valued as assets. (Well, that's a fact here in California, where I'm a Controller for a company.) As for items we lease (as a response to a comment higher up) we either pay the property taxes on behalf of the lessor or reimburse them for property taxes, which is a requirement of the lease agreement.
One can sell things that aren't property. For instance, we sell people our time to make architectural drawings which we deliver to them or their contractor.
I'll take the point about lyrics. But listening to a bit of music and notating it is not copying. Listening to a bit of music and showing your band the chord changes and specific parts (as you might do in a cover band) is neither copying nor copyright infringement.
While school boards may continue to trickle out ID curriculua mandates, this ruling and the trial's record will effectively mean such mandates won't last long once they get to court. It's over as far as the public schools are concerned. I think the next battleground will be the lawsuit against the University of California for not accepting ID-inclusive biologic coursework as valid science coursework for admissions. This is about (essentially) privately educated students who want to go to good public schools and raises different issues, as I think the main summary of the plaintiff's argument is that the UC is discriminating on religious grounds.
Isn't tablature a representation of arrangement and not covered by the songwriter's/music publisher's copyright (which covers only melody and lyric)? Photocopying (or hand copying) a publisher's tablature book is clearly a no-no, but listening to the performance, working out the guitar parts and notating it using a commonly accepted method seems legitimate to this non-lawyer.
Though, having recently read the admonitions on contemporary cds, I expect the legal beagles shortly will get on to adding that, along with public performance and other restrictions, listening in order to learn how to play an instrument will also be an unlicensed use. After all, why would musicians develop new techniques if there weren't publishers who could compensate them for the rights to control those techniques?
Put me firmly in the camp that html is brilliant. It suits exactly its designed purpose: to allow academic papers to be easily shared among colleagues. There are no formatting imperatives in a basic html document, the tagging scheme allows the author to include identifiable hints to be rendered or ignored as the client browser chooses.
Now what you report your web-designing friend as saying sounds a bit like a jumble of the justification for xml, which is a way to tag informational content so that transformational tools can auto-generate multiple views (including html). Html does not provide this capability, but on the other hand, it does not fuse the presentation and content. The content/presentation divide for a classic html page is very simple: presentation hints are inside the angle brackets and content is outside the tags.
Now clearly, over the last decade, there have been hack upon hack and new tag upon new tag created, which suggests that there was something "wrong" with the original html. I argue there wasn't. It's just that the web as a commercial medium was not anticipated. So, html was expanded and we've been suffering with the inconsistencies which arose from back-porting robust typography, dynamic control, and other complexities to the original spec. On other hand, plain vanilla html is easily rendered by all browsers and human-comprehensible if a browser isn't available, which is why no one tossed it once the commercial imperatives were recognized. Plus the main reasons why the web did catch fire were: no one owned it, it was open source (source views were there to show how something was done), and html was and is very easy to use.
Should we discuss how useless a bicycle is because it won't tow a grand piano?
For, what, 70 or 80 years the recording companies have been putting product in stores. Yet, somehow the brilliance of "if it's more popular, one should charge more" has escaped them all these years. I think it's because it makes it look like the less popular stuff is being discounted and not that there's a premium for quality. Classical recordings were always higher priced than pop, and that may have reflected the affluence of the consumers and low, niche demand (when compared to pop recordings). Hmmm. Less popular recordings have a higher price. Sort of dovetails with the comments above.
Now imagine how the type of personality that freaks over the wrong color of M&M's back-stage responds to news that his next single will be 1.09 when the last was 1.19. Hey, were the artist's and composer royalties also going to adjust with the price/demand? I'm channeling "not bloody likely" on that.
Didn't I read that Time Warner lowered its losses on its music operations because it's selling more online? And shouldn't the record companies be lighting incense and making sacrifices to the deities of their choosing because Steve came along and showed them how to banish the days of "Shipped platinum and returned gold?"
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft astroturfers weren't deployed to say positive things at any web site where there might be........ anti-Microsoft... comm..... HEY, wait a doggone moment.
Except. Look in the record stores. Look at how many opportunities for discounting first releases or make-or-break releases from critically acclaimed bands they have and how many times this is used to try and increase demand. Almost never. I think Mr. Spolsky may be on to something, even if I disagree about the song "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" being the hit it was because of payola. About the point that hearing drives demand -- YES!!! But, again, look at all the new releases on sale which have tracks you haven't heard or are from people you don't know. Would a $5.00 price lead you to ignore the unfamiliarity factor and buy the disk? That's the point; it won't.
But I'm still boycotting them until Sony BMG says "never again," about mixing software into audio disks. I have half a mind to head over to Virgin Megastore this afternoon and mention at the counter that I will not be buying Springsteen's Born To Run Retrospective because of this. Even if it turns out, as you suggest, that this goes nowhere, at least I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that my apathy and/or inaction didn't contribute to the problem. And the problem, as I see it, is that Sony and those undiscovered and those waiting in the wings have no business limiting the number of times and the ways I personally use my purchased music.
I got my Real Book in 1984 for a Jazz Combo workshop I was taking through Continuing Eduation at SBCC (Santa Barbara, California): it was a collection of photocopied hand written transcriptions, each one showing a tune's melody with chord changes notated above the staff. The songs were jazz standards and featured heavily the songbooks, if you will, of Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker, and Dizzie Gillespie. The instructor told us what music instrument store to go to and to ask for it at the counter. When I did so, whisk, out came one of the hidden volumes and into a brown paper bag it went. I know there was a vocal version which included lyrics. I think there may have been E-flat, B-flat, and D versions for other instruments which define C differently, in this way, as I made my way playing bass guitar to "Killer Joe," the sax guys would be playing from their Real Book and we'd all be in the same key without one of us having to transpose in our heads. Fake Books were compendia of standards put out by a publisher in the same simplified format (though professionally typeset) representing the standards from their catalog. And, there's no way the publishers got any thing for these Real Books, thus their under the counter nature.
This is kind of tricky, but ASCAP/BMI/SOCAN/SESAC are performance rights societies and are not involved in the publication of sheet music. They collect moneys on behalf of the songwriters for commercial performance of their works and these are paid by the venues where music is performed for commercial exploitation, such a theaters and bars, and also by radio stations and in-store music tapes. When one buys sheet music, the money is collected by the publisher on behalf of themselves and the songwriters, and none goes to performance rights societies, since there is no performance.
About Real Books, I guess I always assumed that if they were found in Santa Barbara, then they were nationwide (or at least near the big cities -- Los Angeles wasn't that far away from Santa Barbara).
Midi files are like player piano rolls, which are publications of performances and copyrightable. (Some of the arcane ways used to delineate the available copyrights for music makes more sense when one realizes that at the time pop music took off, the late 19th century and early 20th, it was the quantity of sheet music and player piano rolls sold which made a song a "hit.")
As for doing transcriptions, fair use allows one to do that for personal use, but xeroxing sheet music or scores and/or selling your transcription infringes on rights held by the publisher for works still in copyright. Remember getting "Real Books," which were sold under the counter to working musicians who needed an inexpensive, publisher agnostic collection of standards for weddings, bar mitzvahs, and casual gigs? There was a reason it was under the counter.
Incorporating significant portions of someone else's midi-transcribed performance would make one's work a derivative work, and licensing of the midi information from its rights holder would be required. Now, doing a live peformance which incorprated a pc playing someone else's midi files -- I would guess that requires a license. But a lot of this stuff is overlooked until someone starts making money from someone else's work. And no, I am not a lawyer.
It's Not a SONY.
Someone's got to do something. I"ve set up OpenOffice 2.0 on all the Windows/Linux machines at work and it is a serious PITA that my Mac cannot consume odf (et al) files, since the best I can get is 1.1.2 in X11 or 1.1.4 via NeoOffice/J. In fact, I had to downgrade everyone else's default file formats so odf isn't used, otherwise I'm locked out from other's work... isn't that ironic? I don't know if it's Sun, Apple or both, but someone is getting in the way of my efficiency by gumming up java and OpenOffice.org advancement on OS X.
Any one want to set up a Cocoa OpenDocument application project? Is one under way?
And the follow-up:
Flagged Broadcast Denial:
A review has determined this to be an illegal copy of
[x]Dennis the Menace
[ ]Please Don't Eat the Daisies
[ ]The Courtship of Eddie's Father
[ ]Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom
Sorry for the late response -- I usually say my piece and don't look back.
I'm an old guy, late 40s, and while I have all my cds ripped, I feel better knowing that if the hard drive fails, the worst that happens is I re-rip my disks. Now cd's are not as indestructible as it was suggested when they were introduced twenty years ago, but they still seem to outlast vinyl, which would have pops and clicks within a couple of years of manufacturing.
But you know what I really miss while enjoying the advantages of the mp3 generation? Liner notes. Musician credits. Songwriter credits. Because I loved to see and make the connections between the musicians I liked. Pop music seems most fun and interesting when it's easy to get singles into the hands of fans, IMHO. So I think downloadable mp3s are a great thing. But I'm guessing the serious collector and serious fan will still want to have that thing on the shelf. And the packaging of the tangible good has provided an opportunity for brand awareness, like the album jackets for BlueNote or Atlantic records which helped communicate to the fans that here was a new artist from the folks who brought you Jimmy Smith or Ray Charles, so it should be cool. So, since I see advantages for producer and consumer, I expect the tangible collection will continue; the pricing will change as demand varies, of course. Of course, these could be the loony rantings of a child born in the 50s, No?
Affiliates get paid by the networks for running the networks' programming and advertisements. So this may mean that this issue is resolved through a negotiation of higher clearance fees received by the affiliates, with the affiliates making their case for getting more fees. After all, one could argue that there would be no demand for "Lost" except through the fan-base developed via viewers watching affiliates' programming.
On the other hand, ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox own the local stations in the major markets so they already have built-in access to a major portion of the audience. And as affiliates are free to pre-empt network programming, a network may say to an affiliate, "If you don't like that 'Despearate Housewives' will be available in a lower quality format tomorrow, don't clear the top rated program in its time slot on the night with the highest viewership. Please go and buy some other programming to fill the slot. Nice talking with you; say hi to the wife and kids, and don't let the door hit you on your way out." Or, the affiliates jump to another studio-network which doesn't offer downloads (for however long that alternative may last.)
Frankly, this is way too early for the affiliates to be making a ruckus, except as a negotiating play. No one has any idea if this will erode advertising revenues (as the audience numbers for first-runs and re-runs may be lessened, impacting viewership for the local programming and advertising surrounding and interspersed throughout the network blocks) or the reduce studio and producers' revenues from Season N DVD set sales. But, like everything else, nothing happens unless it's a hit, and right now, that is measured by Nielsen families watching tv.
They're even more wrong than that. A search for Paul Simon should give revenues to which label? The current one? The one where he established his fan base? And "Madonna" as a trade-mark, owned by Warners or owned by M.L. Ciccone and/or her management company? I suspect the latter. (Of course right now the lawyers are sharpening their word processors and are probably putting clauses in the contracts that band names and performance names become trade marks of the recording company.)
Every now and then the recording companies mumble something about getting paid when radio stations play recordings and the radio stations call the bluff because airplay sells records. In fact, payola scandals demonstrate that there's an incentive for recording companies to pay the radio stations.
I'm also wondering if there's a point where recording companies ask so much of Apple, satellite radio, internet broadcasters, and ring-tone distributors that they join up in backing a new recording company that signs artists primarily for digital distribution and broadcast. As I think tangible media are important, this company would license the pressing and distribution rights for the cds, or allow the artist the retain the tangible rights, or press and distribute their own discs. By doing the same things that record companies used to do when they were hungry and necessarily agile -- tour support, signing and selling regional artists who can graduate to nationwide, scouting and signing of talent (and not management machines) -- in three to five years, they'll have stars. In ten years, they'll have superstars.
Gallant only buys compact disks and gets one copy for home and another copy to play in Mom's mini-van while being driven to choir practice (where only public domain works are sung).
Goofus rips friends' cds and gets downloads from the world-wide-web, has built a large collection of delta blues musicians, and will be spending future ages in the netherworlds with the nasty person Mr. Johnson met at the cross-roads.
Put my two cents in as to how the article's storyline doesn't quite track. If Mr. Allchin, despite massive institutional inertia, gave the pig winglets and put it back on a track to actually being releasable then we're missing the motive for why he'll leave on Vista D-Day and why the company wouldn't fight to keep him. In some sense, the article is about the story Microsoft wishes to tell, which is we were writing bad code, but we've fixed that now (and look at the bruises: no pain, no gain, right?), which is what the parent posts suspects.
Now I suspect that the interviews took place before the Microsofta est omnis divisa in partes tres announcement, and there was no desire from Microsoft to have Mr. Allchin candidly describe his reasons for retirement (and maybe Mr. Allchin has a book up his sleeve), so off to press with this peek into the hallowed halls of Redmond.
One quibble I would have with article is in its suggestion that Mr. Gates, as Chief Software Architect has two paradoxical duties to reconcile: coming up with innovations and putting down unrealistic projects. A lot of the candid reporting I've seen is that there's a third element that he practices with zeal, which is to grind into a fine powder any idea he believes shakes a stick at the cash cows.
One implication of the story is that in Summer 2004 Bill Gates didn't know that one of the cash cows was flatlining. There's a thought to ponder.
They may hold the copyright to the songs as writers, however, one cannot copyright a performance, one can only copyright the publication of a performance. The contract they signed is about exclusive recording rights for the record company and probably includes provisions to allow the company to own the masters and recoup any recording costs against future artist peformance royalties. The record company is the publisher and holds the copyrights to the recordings.
I have felt for a good many years now that a band's management is the proper one to fight whenever record company policies interfere with the long term career strategies of a band. The essential goal in the early phase of the career is to build as big a fan-base as you can. While having a hit record on a major label works, it isn't going to happen for 95% of the people signed to recording deals.
Switchfoot may never get a song in heavy rotation on radio. And now their record company is attempting to seal off a word of mouth channel, as they've made it difficult for Logan to transfer the mp3 to Jason and Gunther and Bob and make a mix CD for Bethany. Sony doesn't care. In 12 months they'll be seeing if some other band breaks through.
It's the management who has to care. So will the management fight for a client band's career, or take the 10% of the label advance and acquiesce rather than risk any future label deals for another band they manage?
Should anyone from Switchfoot read this, good luck in your efforts to cut the major label Gordian knot (with this extra loop interfering with how fans want to hear your music today).
So. 52.5 million per title. Three years to develop, script, film, post-produce and distribute the first movie. Does it get put in the summer slot? Guess so. Do they all? Maybe if it's a 2/2/3/3 release cycle. Those last 6 may get shutdown (or straight to DVDed) if the first two don't make back their negative costs.
Still it's 10 films released in four years from 2008-2012, or a title every five months if it was spread out.
Today a special effected film seems to cost, what, 110 million. In six years, that will be up to 130 million (maybe more as demand increases for special effects houses). Where does the other 60-80 million come from? The domestic distributor? Overseas pre-sales? Do they hire above-the-line talent or economize and rely on character and story.
If a title doesn't get produced, does some money go back to the investors? And how do the backers get paid? Out of the net? Okay back from laughing. Got a hankering to walk over to Book Soup, stare at the, formerly, Caroloco building and mumble something about the stuff of dreams.
Apple... IIRC a beleaguered Cupertino company. Didn't NeXT buy them out?
Here's the theory, in perfunctory fashion, because I don't buy it. Broadband uptake in the US is not going as quickly as somebody wants. Aha! the FCC reasons (helped by whispers in the ear), it must be because the owners of phone lines won't upgrade them unless they get the full return of their investment. So if the Baby Bells own and maintain the lines, the Baby Bells are granted full control over how much they charge other information service providers, and, in order to make negotiations between the Baby Bells and indy DSLs more equitable, the Baby Bells can now walk away and say no soup for you, More return on investment means more investment in infrastructure and more supply means more demand. Entry into the brand new beautiful broadband world accelerates.
And some folks at SBC and Verizon get together with their lobbyists and a few of their contacts in Congress and the Executive, and tilt many a glass in honor of these days in the new gilded age.
I wonder where they are going. Top o' the head guess: private sector to write patent applications. OMG The Patent Industrial Complex.