Most stations won't even open the package. College stations might, but mainstream ones aren't interested.
Get out and PLAY at better venues.
That works locally, but what about the rest of the world?
Get out, play for people, get Cd's in the hands of people that will play it on the air.
I'm not saying that it can't be done, and I certainly don't advocate bands sitting on their asses and expecting to become instant multi-millionaires because they recorded an album. But marketing music is hard, especially in a world that has as many bands as this one has. It takes a lot of effort to stand out and get noticed, and you have to recognize that just because you may be good at writing and playing songs doesn't mean you're magically good at marketing those songs. Most bands need someone with knowledge and experience to handle that for them.
I think people are missing the big picture where you don't have to go to multiple services for your music.
Not only does this put indie bands next to U2, but it even opens the doors for a whole new level of artist "below" the indie artist, because you no longer have to drop a couple grand to press a thousand CDs.
Currently, if you want to sell a professionally made CD (ie. not a CD-R), you pretty much have to order at least 1000 of them. But what about bands who know they're not going to sell that many? Sure, CDBaby will take as few as 5 discs into their inventory if that's all you think you're going to sell, but what do you do with the other 995 you had to manufacture in order to be able to manufacture any at all?
With this service, if 5 is all you're going to sell, then 5 is all that will be produced, and the total cost to you is only $31 -- which, to most artists, is worth it even if they don't make that money back in sales.
I don't know, it ended with some kind of lightning battle with an interdimensional god and a giant Stay Puft marshmallow man on the New York skyline...
Damn it man, can't you preface that with a [Spoiler Alert]?!? It's still in my Netflix queue...
Vader is his dad, Rosebud is his sled, and it's Earth.
I've been a massive fan of CDBaby ordering discs straight from people like Anni Rossi but it has a minimum order those artists have to meet.
I'm just curious how this minimum works. Can you provide some more info, or a link to the details? The reason I ask is I've sold albums through CDBaby and wasn't aware of anything of the sort.
Actually, Wikipedia tells me that "CD Baby has no minimum sales requirement for members; an artist who sells only one CD every 20 years would still remain a part of the company's catalogue."
No one that knows about this service would sign unless they already have major sales...
Unfortunately this still doesn't provide a good alternative to one important service the major record labels provide: promotion.
Just because you put your independent band up on MySpace and SonicBids and your own website and sell your songs on iTunes and your CD on CDBaby doesn't magically make everyone in the world suddenly know you exist and want to buy your stuff. Somehow they still have to stumble across you in the first place, out of the trillions of other bands who have done the same as you.
This Amazon service is awesome, and it's part of a much larger trend that will ultimately make the major labels obsolete, but there's still more work to be done.
What do you think of XBMC on Ubuntu? Is it working for you?
I couldn't get it to work properly (kept freezing up after a few seconds of watching movie), so I switched my Media Center to XP (although installing XBMC on XP was a pain since, at least at the time, the download was missing some DLLs).
The survey is a waste of their time. I'll tell you right now what they're familiar with: Windows, IE (and some Firefox), MS Office. Except for the filmmaker, who's familiar with OS X.
Nine years ago, I thought DNF would arrive someday. By 7 years ago I think I was pretty skeptical, and 5 years ago I figured it was all just a big joke.
What?!?!? You mean to tell me that there is someone in the world who not only actually believed that DNF would be finished someday, but they believe it so strongly that they were willing to invest $12 million into it?!?!?
Where do I meet these people? I can "build" far bigger and better vapourware than DNF for half that price! Please, give me a call.
But you know what? That "stereotype" effectively describes 4 out my 5 last girlfriends, my mother, all my aunts, and a solid majority of female friends I've had over the years.
On the flip side of the anecdote, this stereotype definitely doesn't even come close to describing any of my past girlfriends, or my present one, or any of my female friends. I guess we are attracted to different kinds of women.
Stereotypes often come from somewhere, but that doesn't necessarily mean they represent a majority of people. It only means they represent enough to get noticed.
Make a website for women that's all pink and talks about shopping and dieting, and you will appeal to some women. But thinking that you're appealing to women in general, or even a majority, is just stupid, and is guaranteed to offend and annoy the many women who don't fit the stereotype (and possibly some who do).
Besides, the "percentage of the income they make from it" would essentially be a free license for anyone to reproduce the work as much as they want without any restrictions, as long as they don't do it for profit.
That's exactly the point. CC is intended for content creators who actually want their content to spread around. The problem that Doctorow is addressing is the hesitation that some people have to going with a CC license because they don't want people taking advantage of it to profit off the work without cutting the content creator in on the deal.
This solution is not intended for the major Hollywood studios. This is intended for the content creators who want to reside in the middle ground between absolute free-for-all and totally restricted licensing — and avoid having to hire a lawyer.
A sad day... when parts of the human body can be copyrighted.
They can't. Neither can they be patented (which, by the way, is completely different than copyright).
What can be patented (but not copyrighted) is the process of performing diagnostic tests on a certain gene. To quote the article:
"Myriad's patents give it exclusive right to perform diagnostic tests on the genes -- forcing other researchers to request permission from the company before they can take a look at BRCA1 and BRCA2, the ACLU said. The patents also give the company the rights to future mutations on the BRCA2 gene and the power to exclude others from providing genetic testing."
This is not a good thing, but it does seem to fit within the scope of patents. This is more reason for patent reform.
Worse still - the outcropping only looked like a face from one angle. If you looked at it from another, it just looked like a rock outcropping.
I was wondering about that. I couldn't find any pictures of the "face" from anything other than exactly the same angle. Are there any pictures online of the "face" from a different angle?
Personally, I'd just put up a little panel on the side of the road at what would have been a good spot to view the "face", talking about its history and showing a picture of what was there. Then people can pull over, look at it, go "hmmm, interesting", and get on with their lives.
In IT security we are taught to think like the hacker to better understand attack vectors. In fact, at university we are not only taught how the various hacks work, but how to perform them. This is critical to understanding how to defend against them. In the same sense this exercise would have lead the vast majority of the students to understand how to defend against terrorism threats.
Yeah, but in that case you're in a class specifically to learn IT security.
These aren't people training to be soldiers, or police officers, or part of any kind of security force. This is a high school history class. What, exactly, did this teacher think she was teaching her history students?
Note that, although this is not a good thing, we're not actually talking about the ATC system here. We're talking about administrative web applications that employees can access from home, web sites that provide information about air traffic services to employees and to the public, power monitoring applications, things like that. Some are pretty serious, but most are not that serious. And none of them are the ATC system itself.
The issue is how hot is "hot". If everyone in the world has decided that "hot" means x degrees, but you decide to serve your coffee at x + y, where y is enough to make the coffee significantly more dangerous, you'd better warn people — not warn them that coffee is hot, but warn them that your coffee is exceptionally hot.
There have been similar lawsuits against other restaurants...
And even against this particular restaurant. McDonald's had settled hundreds of similar lawsuits out of court before this one even occurred. The only reason we ever heard about this one is that it was the first to actually go to trial.
The consensus generally seems to be that people buying coffee ought to understand that it is hot enough to burn you right out of the pot, and that caution should be exercised until it has cooled enough to drink.
But how much caution you exercise is proportional to how much danger you perceive to exist. If you're not properly informed of the danger, you will not exercise the appropriate level of caution. I've spilt coffee on myself before, but I didn't require skin grafts (I also don't live in a country where such surgery would cost me tens of thousands of dollars). Clearly my situation was not as dangerous as that of the defendant.
Making it cost even $0.01 would probably reduce the submissions significantly.
I can only speculate, but I strongly suspect that the reason they've had to delay as much as they have is not because of the volume of crappy submissions, but the volume of actually good submissions.
It doesn't take a lot of time or effort to throw out the obviously bad submissions. What does take time and effort is ranking truly good submissions. And it's those submitters who would likely pay a fairly large fee for a crack at $10 million to implement their idea.
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Send CD's to radio stations to get air play.
Most stations won't even open the package. College stations might, but mainstream ones aren't interested.
Get out and PLAY at better venues.
That works locally, but what about the rest of the world?
Get out, play for people, get Cd's in the hands of people that will play it on the air.
I'm not saying that it can't be done, and I certainly don't advocate bands sitting on their asses and expecting to become instant multi-millionaires because they recorded an album. But marketing music is hard, especially in a world that has as many bands as this one has. It takes a lot of effort to stand out and get noticed, and you have to recognize that just because you may be good at writing and playing songs doesn't mean you're magically good at marketing those songs. Most bands need someone with knowledge and experience to handle that for them.
I think people are missing the big picture where you don't have to go to multiple services for your music.
Not only does this put indie bands next to U2, but it even opens the doors for a whole new level of artist "below" the indie artist, because you no longer have to drop a couple grand to press a thousand CDs.
Currently, if you want to sell a professionally made CD (ie. not a CD-R), you pretty much have to order at least 1000 of them. But what about bands who know they're not going to sell that many? Sure, CDBaby will take as few as 5 discs into their inventory if that's all you think you're going to sell, but what do you do with the other 995 you had to manufacture in order to be able to manufacture any at all?
With this service, if 5 is all you're going to sell, then 5 is all that will be produced, and the total cost to you is only $31 -- which, to most artists, is worth it even if they don't make that money back in sales.
Ghostbusters was nothing like that. It was a drama.
Really? The one I watched was a comedy.
I don't know, it ended with some kind of lightning battle with an interdimensional god and a giant Stay Puft marshmallow man on the New York skyline...
Damn it man, can't you preface that with a [Spoiler Alert]?!? It's still in my Netflix queue...
Vader is his dad, Rosebud is his sled, and it's Earth.
Sorry for ruining your whole weekend.
I've been a massive fan of CDBaby ordering discs straight from people like Anni Rossi but it has a minimum order those artists have to meet.
I'm just curious how this minimum works. Can you provide some more info, or a link to the details? The reason I ask is I've sold albums through CDBaby and wasn't aware of anything of the sort.
Actually, Wikipedia tells me that "CD Baby has no minimum sales requirement for members; an artist who sells only one CD every 20 years would still remain a part of the company's catalogue."
No one that knows about this service would sign unless they already have major sales...
Unfortunately this still doesn't provide a good alternative to one important service the major record labels provide: promotion.
Just because you put your independent band up on MySpace and SonicBids and your own website and sell your songs on iTunes and your CD on CDBaby doesn't magically make everyone in the world suddenly know you exist and want to buy your stuff. Somehow they still have to stumble across you in the first place, out of the trillions of other bands who have done the same as you.
This Amazon service is awesome, and it's part of a much larger trend that will ultimately make the major labels obsolete, but there's still more work to be done.
What do you think of XBMC on Ubuntu? Is it working for you?
I couldn't get it to work properly (kept freezing up after a few seconds of watching movie), so I switched my Media Center to XP (although installing XBMC on XP was a pain since, at least at the time, the download was missing some DLLs).
He's obviously got some extra CPU cycles to burn.
What, he couldn't spare a few for SETI@Home?
The survey is a waste of their time. I'll tell you right now what they're familiar with: Windows, IE (and some Firefox), MS Office. Except for the filmmaker, who's familiar with OS X.
Why pay $5? This guy does it for free.
They paid that money 9 years ago.
Ah, good point. I hadn't considered that.
Nine years ago, I thought DNF would arrive someday. By 7 years ago I think I was pretty skeptical, and 5 years ago I figured it was all just a big joke.
What?!?!? You mean to tell me that there is someone in the world who not only actually believed that DNF would be finished someday, but they believe it so strongly that they were willing to invest $12 million into it?!?!?
Where do I meet these people? I can "build" far bigger and better vapourware than DNF for half that price! Please, give me a call.
But you know what? That "stereotype" effectively describes 4 out my 5 last girlfriends, my mother, all my aunts, and a solid majority of female friends I've had over the years.
On the flip side of the anecdote, this stereotype definitely doesn't even come close to describing any of my past girlfriends, or my present one, or any of my female friends. I guess we are attracted to different kinds of women.
Stereotypes often come from somewhere, but that doesn't necessarily mean they represent a majority of people. It only means they represent enough to get noticed.
Make a website for women that's all pink and talks about shopping and dieting, and you will appeal to some women. But thinking that you're appealing to women in general, or even a majority, is just stupid, and is guaranteed to offend and annoy the many women who don't fit the stereotype (and possibly some who do).
How is this better than just dual licensing CC-BY-NC-SA & then selling commercial licenses?
You don't have to go through the hassle of actually selling the commercial licenses, including hiring a lawyer to write up the license.
Your suggestion is also an option, but for those who just want to put it out there and not do any further license negotiation, this is the way to go.
Besides, the "percentage of the income they make from it" would essentially be a free license for anyone to reproduce the work as much as they want without any restrictions, as long as they don't do it for profit.
That's exactly the point. CC is intended for content creators who actually want their content to spread around. The problem that Doctorow is addressing is the hesitation that some people have to going with a CC license because they don't want people taking advantage of it to profit off the work without cutting the content creator in on the deal.
This solution is not intended for the major Hollywood studios. This is intended for the content creators who want to reside in the middle ground between absolute free-for-all and totally restricted licensing — and avoid having to hire a lawyer.
A sad day ... when parts of the human body can be copyrighted.
They can't. Neither can they be patented (which, by the way, is completely different than copyright).
What can be patented (but not copyrighted) is the process of performing diagnostic tests on a certain gene. To quote the article:
"Myriad's patents give it exclusive right to perform diagnostic tests on the genes -- forcing other researchers to request permission from the company before they can take a look at BRCA1 and BRCA2, the ACLU said. The patents also give the company the rights to future mutations on the BRCA2 gene and the power to exclude others from providing genetic testing."
This is not a good thing, but it does seem to fit within the scope of patents. This is more reason for patent reform.
Worse still - the outcropping only looked like a face from one angle. If you looked at it from another, it just looked like a rock outcropping.
I was wondering about that. I couldn't find any pictures of the "face" from anything other than exactly the same angle. Are there any pictures online of the "face" from a different angle?
Personally, I'd just put up a little panel on the side of the road at what would have been a good spot to view the "face", talking about its history and showing a picture of what was there. Then people can pull over, look at it, go "hmmm, interesting", and get on with their lives.
In IT security we are taught to think like the hacker to better understand attack vectors. In fact, at university we are not only taught how the various hacks work, but how to perform them. This is critical to understanding how to defend against them. In the same sense this exercise would have lead the vast majority of the students to understand how to defend against terrorism threats.
Yeah, but in that case you're in a class specifically to learn IT security.
These aren't people training to be soldiers, or police officers, or part of any kind of security force. This is a high school history class. What, exactly, did this teacher think she was teaching her history students?
Sounds vaguely familiar...
Note that, although this is not a good thing, we're not actually talking about the ATC system here. We're talking about administrative web applications that employees can access from home, web sites that provide information about air traffic services to employees and to the public, power monitoring applications, things like that. Some are pretty serious, but most are not that serious. And none of them are the ATC system itself.
...people want their coffee to be served hot...
The issue is how hot is "hot". If everyone in the world has decided that "hot" means x degrees, but you decide to serve your coffee at x + y, where y is enough to make the coffee significantly more dangerous, you'd better warn people — not warn them that coffee is hot, but warn them that your coffee is exceptionally hot.
There have been similar lawsuits against other restaurants...
And even against this particular restaurant. McDonald's had settled hundreds of similar lawsuits out of court before this one even occurred. The only reason we ever heard about this one is that it was the first to actually go to trial.
The consensus generally seems to be that people buying coffee ought to understand that it is hot enough to burn you right out of the pot, and that caution should be exercised until it has cooled enough to drink.
But how much caution you exercise is proportional to how much danger you perceive to exist. If you're not properly informed of the danger, you will not exercise the appropriate level of caution. I've spilt coffee on myself before, but I didn't require skin grafts (I also don't live in a country where such surgery would cost me tens of thousands of dollars). Clearly my situation was not as dangerous as that of the defendant.
I've been using Vista for a year and a half and I didn't even know what its blue screen looked like until I clicked on your link.
I'd say your problem is not Vista, but a third party device driver.
I'm glad the "turbo" trend died. Long live "X-treme"!
I'm not sure what surprised me more when I read this: that Borland still exists, or that Micro Focus still exists.
Sure you could get replugged, but I don't know the success rate for that.
Pretty good, actually.
Making it cost even $0.01 would probably reduce the submissions significantly.
I can only speculate, but I strongly suspect that the reason they've had to delay as much as they have is not because of the volume of crappy submissions, but the volume of actually good submissions.
It doesn't take a lot of time or effort to throw out the obviously bad submissions. What does take time and effort is ranking truly good submissions. And it's those submitters who would likely pay a fairly large fee for a crack at $10 million to implement their idea.