Facts -- like gravity, and the sphereoid shape of the planet -- exist whether or not people "believe" in them. A leaf doesn't have to believe in photosynthesis to turn green.
Dude, it's even worse than that. Consider the entire region of genetalia. What kind of "intelligent" designer puts a recreational facility next to a waste disposal site?
...And 33% of people polled still think Bush is doing a good job in Iraq.
People wonder why this country lost its lead in manufacturing and, most recently, technological development. Why is a fairy tale -- and an expurgated, badly translated fairy tale at that -- so much more compelling than the tools and concepts that allow you to take control of your own life and environment?
I checked Sonic.net. They seem like nice people, and I've heard positive reports from others. But according to what I could find on their Web site their highest-end service is, "somewhere between 3000-6000 Kbits down." That's rather too vague for me. I'd need to know a lot more about the nuts and bolts of their service before I'd consider subscribing.
My current broadband provider has sold its soul to Satan, and I have no wish to follow them.
I live on the San Francisco peninsula, about half-way between San Francisco and San Jose. I'm 3000 feet from the Pacific Bell ("SBC," my ass) central office, so signal integrity is not a problem.
The provider must offer the following:
No port filtering/blocking,
No server prohibitions,
Static IP,
Netnews server with complete feeds on all groups,
Basic tech support for all major OSes, including Linux and FreeBSD,
Pro-active network monitoring for open relays and compromised machines,
Bandwidth caps sufficiently high in both directions that I will never notice them,
The option to buy additional bandwidth for a reasonable price, should I need it,
At least 99.9% uptime,
Dialup access as an available option (for when I'm away from home).
The ideal provider will offer at least 10000 Kbits down and 2000 Kbits up. The absolute minimum is 6000 down/768 up. The provider may provision as many lines as necessary (link-layer bonding does not scare me). Monthly rate is negotiable.
I do not think what I think it means is what you think I think it means.
I actually considered momentarily before using the term. Microsoft is trying to make Vista appear more popular than it is. In other words, they are trying to spread uncertainty and doubt about Vista's installed base. And they are also trying to spread fear in the ISVs that they may be "betting the wrong way" by holding back on Vista support.
So, yes, I think this announcement qualifies as FUD.
20 million figure includes the backlog of upgrade coupons bundled with XP computers sold since last October.
So Microsoft isn't quoting figures for sales spanning two months, but rather for more than five months, including at least three months of "pre-sales" in the form of coupons which likely may never be redeemed. If the coupon is never redeemed, then it can't be counted as a Vista sale, since Vista was never installed.
More FUD from the masters. Which frankly doesn't surprise me. Without apps irrevocably tied to Vista, there's no impetus to "upgrade," and people will stay with XP. Microsoft is clearly desperate to make Vista appear to have a larger installed base than it does so that ISVs will commit to it.
This looks like the sort of thing a James Bond supervillain would have. And there aren't many of those left...
Clearly, it's for showing off at extravagant parties, not for actual use. I mean, the whole point of a laptop is to be used on a regular basis -- grabbed, opened, closed, typed on. This is a museum piece that will spend most of its time being polished by the help. It's a lovely piece of kit -- so lovely that I would never want to touch it, much less take it out of the house and work on it at the local cafe.
I dunno, maybe the cafes in Beverly Hills or the Cayman Islands have Nerf(R) everywhere to defend against the socialist-leaning ravages of gravity. But, come on, how could even the idle rich make use of this?
Now if it had a prototype SED display, or one of those butane-burning microturbines for a power source, or an ACPI BIOS that actually worked, then it might be worth it.
Are they saying that music sales are down 20% across the board? Or are sales down 20% only for those SKUs they're paying attention to?
Somehow I don't think DJLithium's or Armin Van Buren's or Paul Van Dyk's figures are factored into those. What are they actually tracking? Unit sellthrough on CD albums? Revenue stream from CD albums? iTunes sales? Royalty payments to ASCAP/BMI? The question to ask is, "20 percent of what exactly?"
XBox Live can be accessed both from within the XBox (obviously), and also over the Web. You use the same password for both. It therefore seems most probable that they either obtained some malware that harvested their passwords, or that they got phished. Wipe and reinstall the PCs -- preferably with Linux -- and negotiate with Microsoft to have the passwords changed and reputation restored. After the machine is cleaned, change all passwords on all other sites as well.
It is highly improbable that Microsoft's servers were compromised. Administering their own network is one of the few things they do relatively well.
I don't know Mr. Hollenshead personally, so all I have to go on are his public remarks. And it seems every time I see his name in the press, he's bleating about how much money he's "losing" to unsanctioned copies all over the net.
Let me clue in the business types at id Software on why they "lost" a sale to yours truly.
Doom III was widely anticipated, yes. And it looked like it was going to be a visually amazing piece of work. However, it was also widely reported that, unless you had the absolutely latest and greatest PC hardware at the time, it was going to run very poorly. Well, at the time, I didn't have the latest and greatest PC hardware. All I had was a paltry dual-CPU Pentium-III running at 1GHz (and 100MHz memory bus) with 256MiB of RAM and a GeForce FX5900. It was apparent from the press that Doom III would run like crap on this rig. So I didn't buy it. I didn't buy Quake 4 for the same reason.
It wasn't until last year that I finally bought a completely new machine (AMD Athlon X2 4400+, 2GiB RAM, GeForce 7900GT) which would run Doom III well. But after downloading the free demo and playing it, I decided against it. I just didn't find stumbling around in the dark to be terribly fun, and I'm not really into horror for its own sake.
Quake 4, on the other hand, seemed like it might be fun. However, every time I visited the shelf at Fry's, it either A) wasn't there, or B) was priced at $40.00. So I waited. And waited. Eventually, Fry's started selling them for $20.00 a copy, and that's when I bought it.
So there you have it: id Software "lost" money to me, but somehow it had nothing whatsoever to do with unsanctioned copying (imagine that!). The Executive Summary you should take away from this is, to make good sales, you should release games that are:
reasonably priced, and,
fun to play.
The importance of point #1 cannot be overstated. If you hit #1, you can kind of fudge on #2. I've grabbed all the Serious Sam games, despite their uneven game play, because they're reasonably priced. OTOH, there's absolutely no way I'm going to buy a copy of "Sonic and the Secret Rings" for the XBox 360 until it drops from the preposterously stratospheric $60.00 they're charging for it.
Dude, it's the National Institute of Standards and Technology. These are the guys who keep the reference kilogram for the United States, against which all others are measured. They establish and keep the standards of weights and measures for the country, in cooperation with other international standards organizations. Wanna know exactly how long an inch is? You go to them.
If anyone gets to decree new SI prefix names, they are among one of the handful of organizations in the world that gets to do that.
I just can't believe that the same vendors that would misrepresent the capacity of their disk by redefining a Gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes instead of 1,073,741,824 bytes would misrepresent their MTBF too!
Not that this is actually relevant or anything, but there's been a long-standing schism between the computing community and the scientific community concerning the meaning of the SI prefixes Kilo, Mega, and Giga. Until computers showed up, Kilo, Mega, and Giga referred exclusively to multipliers of exactly 1,000, 1,000,000, and 1,000,000,000, respectively. Then, when computers showed up and people had to start speaking of large storage sizes, the computing guys overloaded the prefixes to mean powers of two which were "close enough." Thus, when one speaks of computer storage, Kilo, Mega, and Giga refer to 2**10, 2**20, and 2**30 bytes, respectively. Kilo, Mega, and Giga, when used in this way, are properly slang, but they've gained traction in the mainstream, causing confusion among members of differing disciplines.
As such, there has been a decree to give the powers of two their own SI prefix names. The following have been established:
2**10: Kibi (abbreviated Ki)
2**20: Mebi (Mi)
2**30: Gibi (Gi)
These new prefixes are gaining traction in some circles. If you have a recent release of Linux handy, type/sbin/ifconfig and look at the RX and TX byte counts. It uses the new prefixes.
Schwab
See? Even Windows Users Benefit from Open Specs
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Once online, Creative's website told me that my sound card was a write-off. No Vista support would be forthcoming.
Interesting! Does this mean that we might start seeing Windows customers agitating for open hardware specs so that interested parties can pick up the ball dropped by the vendor and write their own drivers?
...Just like the Linux guys have been doing for the last <*cough*> years?
Oh, wait. You have to be "certified" by Microsoft to write a usable Vista driver. Never mind...
Copyright is a limited collection of rights; it does not apply to every single thing in connection with a work.
You wouldn't think so, given the massive power-grab going on.
In particular, the right of performance is a part of copyright. But only of public performance. Copyright holders have no right whatsoever to control private performance. Not having that right, they cannot license others.
So there's no compulsory or mechanical license involved? Interesting. That suggests that the blurb appearing at the front of every movie ("This motion picture is licensed for private exhibition only, blablabla...") is misleading, since you say no actual license is involved.
I agree that much of the DMCA is very bad, but I think that it's vital that people understand just how bad, without suffering from any misconceptions, such as yours, in order to get support for copyright laws that we can actually be happy with, if not proud of.
It seems we are in rather closer agreement than was initially apparent. I extend my apologies.
What utter sophistry. If this is the true state of intellectual "property" law in this country, I suggest you change specializations before your soul starts dissolving away.
Playing a movie DVD constitutes a performance of a copyrighted work. A license to perform the work in a private residence is concomitant with the purchase of a copy. There is nothing anywhere that says how you must perform the work. The license is relevant only to the performance, not the performer. You may perform the work either in a super-uber high-end jewel-encrusted DVD player, or in a crufty piece of junk you bought second-hand at Salvation Army.
...Or, in a DVD player program you wrote yourself.
I don't need "permission" to write a program, I don't need "permission" to run a program, and I don't need "permission" to have that program crunch on data in my lawful posession. The End. There is nothing inherent in the statutes or the Uniform Commercial Code that grants copyright holders the right to constrain the method of performance, nor can it be reasonably argued that they should enjoy such a right.
As for the DMCA, well, that needs to be repealed yesterday.
I suppose, if one takes the rubric of, "Defective by Design," at face value (as it happens, I do), then the defective product would naturally be worth less than the one without defects (even though the capital cost of the defective product is higher).
Okay, we'll let that point stand for the moment. How much more money are we talking about? $1.25 a track? $1.50?
OK. One guy takes out a subscription to EMIArtistSearch.com - he's a DJ in a popular club. He finds out what's new and what's cool. Downloads the files. Plays them that night. Everyone at the club hears the new tunes there. They go to Google and get the same files, this time for free.
Statistically insignificant. The number of people who go to a given club over a month is easily dwarfed by the number of people visiting the site. The site's cheaper than a club visit, too, and no tobacco smoke. And remember, you're not selling copies of or access to the music, you're selling access to your recommendations -- kinda like FilePlanet used to do in their early days when they only indexed stuff and thunked all the actual downloads over to CDRom.com. You may miss out on recording the click that downloaded the song, but oh well.
Also, any DJ who did that would be risking their own reputation. If it ever became revealed that his mixes were not his own, but the selections of UniverSony, he would either be branded a RIAA schill or a charlatan, and his popularity would fall.
So, then would it become illegal to tell your friend about a band that you learned about through the RIAA's website?
No; don't be silly. You can tell other people about facts you got out of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. This isn't substantially different.
Could I legally post a list of my favorite bands, even if that list just happened to coincide heavily with the RIAA's?
You're free to post recommendations of as many artists and tunes as you want. What you can't do is wholesale copy the recommendation database, or you run afoul of compilation copyrights. And, depending on how you architect the search and filter engines, copying the "database" may be impossible, anyway. The "database" is the sum total of all tunes on all the P2P networks. The label's site just applies their own sorting algorithm to the data. That algorithm remains on their servers, a trade secret.
As for hosting your own site, you're perfectly welcome to do so. But the labels will start out with more capital and market clout than you. They can buy more bandwidth and more server iron, thereby giving themselves an advantage. This is exactly how they like things, and such an arrangement will likely make them quite happy. And if you happen to tune in to the zeitgeist rather well and garner a sizable following of your own, don't be surprised if the labels come knocking to offer you a stack of cash and merge your Web property into theirs.
Can anyone here at/. come up with a different solution for them?
Reputation management. Which is pretty much what they do today.
They think their business is selling little round plastic discs. It's not. It's selecting and marketing artists, and there will always be a market for that.
See, here's the thing: If we postulate that all music become free for the copying, how do you select what you want to hear? Consider the 500 channels of crap you already have on your cable TV feed -- an embarrassment of riches to be sure, but how much of it do you actually watch? How much can you watch? How do you decide what to watch? The explosion of available content is not going to slow down (absent a global disaster), and you're going to need intermediaries to help you sift through it all.
Consider American Idol. Just one viewing of the early episodes of any given season will reveal to you the true depth of horrifyingly self-deluded suckage out there. And there, through it all, sits Simon Cowell, the show's creator. He sits through the crap so you don't have to. You may argue that what he lets through is still crap but, honestly, the stuff he's pruned out is much, much, much worse.
This is the primary service the RIAA members still provide, and still can. They could position themselves as P2P search engines and filters, picking through songs available on the various P2P networks, and rating music based on their evaluations and your preferences. Note that they're not offering up the tunes themselves. The tunes they're listing are out there somewhere on the Net; Google would find them, too, if you typed in the right filename. All the label's search site would do is present what they warrant to be quality music that you're likely to enjoy. This would, of course, be a subscription service -- say USD$7.95/month. What you'd be paying for is not the music, but the recommendations.
This would leave the RIAA members with the ability to present a "portal" they control, so promotion opportunities for new performers would still be possible. Streaming music would allow the label to feature "celebrity DJs" pushing a mix of their featured tunes -- just like the old payola days, only without the middlemen. And they could also earn money on the back-end by offering "promotional services" to new artists who want to boost their position in the search results. Each label could open multiple "fronts" on the Web, each purporting to specialize in particular music genres, or optimizing for particular aspects you feel are important (and billing for each separately).
...Basically, the philosophical antithesis of Google. Except that everyone would know that going in. You'd know your music filter service would be a heavily biased party, which is why you'd subscribe to two or three of them to try and even things out. This would probably be a really great idea right up to the point ClearChannel took over all of them.
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Schwab
Schwab
People wonder why this country lost its lead in manufacturing and, most recently, technological development. Why is a fairy tale -- and an expurgated, badly translated fairy tale at that -- so much more compelling than the tools and concepts that allow you to take control of your own life and environment?
Schwab
Schwab
I live on the San Francisco peninsula, about half-way between San Francisco and San Jose. I'm 3000 feet from the Pacific Bell ("SBC," my ass) central office, so signal integrity is not a problem.
The provider must offer the following:
The ideal provider will offer at least 10000 Kbits down and 2000 Kbits up. The absolute minimum is 6000 down/768 up. The provider may provision as many lines as necessary (link-layer bonding does not scare me). Monthly rate is negotiable.
Schwab
I actually considered momentarily before using the term. Microsoft is trying to make Vista appear more popular than it is. In other words, they are trying to spread uncertainty and doubt about Vista's installed base. And they are also trying to spread fear in the ISVs that they may be "betting the wrong way" by holding back on Vista support.
So, yes, I think this announcement qualifies as FUD.
Schwab
So Microsoft isn't quoting figures for sales spanning two months, but rather for more than five months, including at least three months of "pre-sales" in the form of coupons which likely may never be redeemed. If the coupon is never redeemed, then it can't be counted as a Vista sale, since Vista was never installed.
More FUD from the masters. Which frankly doesn't surprise me. Without apps irrevocably tied to Vista, there's no impetus to "upgrade," and people will stay with XP. Microsoft is clearly desperate to make Vista appear to have a larger installed base than it does so that ISVs will commit to it.
Schwab
Clearly, it's for showing off at extravagant parties, not for actual use. I mean, the whole point of a laptop is to be used on a regular basis -- grabbed, opened, closed, typed on. This is a museum piece that will spend most of its time being polished by the help. It's a lovely piece of kit -- so lovely that I would never want to touch it, much less take it out of the house and work on it at the local cafe.
I dunno, maybe the cafes in Beverly Hills or the Cayman Islands have Nerf(R) everywhere to defend against the socialist-leaning ravages of gravity. But, come on, how could even the idle rich make use of this?
Now if it had a prototype SED display, or one of those butane-burning microturbines for a power source, or an ACPI BIOS that actually worked, then it might be worth it.
Schwab
Schwab
Somehow I don't think DJLithium's or Armin Van Buren's or Paul Van Dyk's figures are factored into those. What are they actually tracking? Unit sellthrough on CD albums? Revenue stream from CD albums? iTunes sales? Royalty payments to ASCAP/BMI? The question to ask is, "20 percent of what exactly?"
Schwab
It is highly improbable that Microsoft's servers were compromised. Administering their own network is one of the few things they do relatively well.
Schwab
Schwab
I don't know Mr. Hollenshead personally, so all I have to go on are his public remarks. And it seems every time I see his name in the press, he's bleating about how much money he's "losing" to unsanctioned copies all over the net.
Let me clue in the business types at id Software on why they "lost" a sale to yours truly.
Doom III was widely anticipated, yes. And it looked like it was going to be a visually amazing piece of work. However, it was also widely reported that, unless you had the absolutely latest and greatest PC hardware at the time, it was going to run very poorly. Well, at the time, I didn't have the latest and greatest PC hardware. All I had was a paltry dual-CPU Pentium-III running at 1GHz (and 100MHz memory bus) with 256MiB of RAM and a GeForce FX5900. It was apparent from the press that Doom III would run like crap on this rig. So I didn't buy it. I didn't buy Quake 4 for the same reason.
It wasn't until last year that I finally bought a completely new machine (AMD Athlon X2 4400+, 2GiB RAM, GeForce 7900GT) which would run Doom III well. But after downloading the free demo and playing it, I decided against it. I just didn't find stumbling around in the dark to be terribly fun, and I'm not really into horror for its own sake.
Quake 4, on the other hand, seemed like it might be fun. However, every time I visited the shelf at Fry's, it either A) wasn't there, or B) was priced at $40.00. So I waited. And waited. Eventually, Fry's started selling them for $20.00 a copy, and that's when I bought it.
So there you have it: id Software "lost" money to me, but somehow it had nothing whatsoever to do with unsanctioned copying (imagine that!). The Executive Summary you should take away from this is, to make good sales, you should release games that are:
The importance of point #1 cannot be overstated. If you hit #1, you can kind of fudge on #2. I've grabbed all the Serious Sam games, despite their uneven game play, because they're reasonably priced. OTOH, there's absolutely no way I'm going to buy a copy of "Sonic and the Secret Rings" for the XBox 360 until it drops from the preposterously stratospheric $60.00 they're charging for it.
Schwab
Um... Isn't that the very definition of a man-in-the-middle attack?
Er, no. Thank you very much for your kind offer, but I would prefer my encrypted data were not "optimized" in this way.
Schwab
Dude, it's the National Institute of Standards and Technology. These are the guys who keep the reference kilogram for the United States, against which all others are measured. They establish and keep the standards of weights and measures for the country, in cooperation with other international standards organizations. Wanna know exactly how long an inch is? You go to them.
If anyone gets to decree new SI prefix names, they are among one of the handful of organizations in the world that gets to do that.
Schwab
Not that this is actually relevant or anything, but there's been a long-standing schism between the computing community and the scientific community concerning the meaning of the SI prefixes Kilo, Mega, and Giga. Until computers showed up, Kilo, Mega, and Giga referred exclusively to multipliers of exactly 1,000, 1,000,000, and 1,000,000,000, respectively. Then, when computers showed up and people had to start speaking of large storage sizes, the computing guys overloaded the prefixes to mean powers of two which were "close enough." Thus, when one speaks of computer storage, Kilo, Mega, and Giga refer to 2**10, 2**20, and 2**30 bytes, respectively. Kilo, Mega, and Giga, when used in this way, are properly slang, but they've gained traction in the mainstream, causing confusion among members of differing disciplines.
As such, there has been a decree to give the powers of two their own SI prefix names. The following have been established:
These new prefixes are gaining traction in some circles. If you have a recent release of Linux handy, type /sbin/ifconfig and look at the RX and TX byte counts. It uses the new prefixes.
Schwab
Interesting! Does this mean that we might start seeing Windows customers agitating for open hardware specs so that interested parties can pick up the ball dropped by the vendor and write their own drivers?
...Just like the Linux guys have been doing for the last <*cough*> years?
Oh, wait. You have to be "certified" by Microsoft to write a usable Vista driver. Never mind...
Schwab
You wouldn't think so, given the massive power-grab going on.
So there's no compulsory or mechanical license involved? Interesting. That suggests that the blurb appearing at the front of every movie ("This motion picture is licensed for private exhibition only, blablabla...") is misleading, since you say no actual license is involved.
It seems we are in rather closer agreement than was initially apparent. I extend my apologies.
Schwab
Playing a movie DVD constitutes a performance of a copyrighted work. A license to perform the work in a private residence is concomitant with the purchase of a copy. There is nothing anywhere that says how you must perform the work. The license is relevant only to the performance, not the performer. You may perform the work either in a super-uber high-end jewel-encrusted DVD player, or in a crufty piece of junk you bought second-hand at Salvation Army.
...Or, in a DVD player program you wrote yourself.
I don't need "permission" to write a program, I don't need "permission" to run a program, and I don't need "permission" to have that program crunch on data in my lawful posession. The End. There is nothing inherent in the statutes or the Uniform Commercial Code that grants copyright holders the right to constrain the method of performance, nor can it be reasonably argued that they should enjoy such a right.
As for the DMCA, well, that needs to be repealed yesterday.
Schwab
"Section 1201 of Title 17 of the United States Code, in its entirety, is hereby repealed."
Schwab
Does this constitute one of those material changes to the service contract that lets you cancel early without a termination fee?
Schwab
Okay, we'll let that point stand for the moment. How much more money are we talking about? $1.25 a track? $1.50?
Schwab
Statistically insignificant. The number of people who go to a given club over a month is easily dwarfed by the number of people visiting the site. The site's cheaper than a club visit, too, and no tobacco smoke. And remember, you're not selling copies of or access to the music, you're selling access to your recommendations -- kinda like FilePlanet used to do in their early days when they only indexed stuff and thunked all the actual downloads over to CDRom.com. You may miss out on recording the click that downloaded the song, but oh well.
Also, any DJ who did that would be risking their own reputation. If it ever became revealed that his mixes were not his own, but the selections of UniverSony, he would either be branded a RIAA schill or a charlatan, and his popularity would fall.
Schwab
No; don't be silly. You can tell other people about facts you got out of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. This isn't substantially different.
You're free to post recommendations of as many artists and tunes as you want. What you can't do is wholesale copy the recommendation database, or you run afoul of compilation copyrights. And, depending on how you architect the search and filter engines, copying the "database" may be impossible, anyway. The "database" is the sum total of all tunes on all the P2P networks. The label's site just applies their own sorting algorithm to the data. That algorithm remains on their servers, a trade secret.
As for hosting your own site, you're perfectly welcome to do so. But the labels will start out with more capital and market clout than you. They can buy more bandwidth and more server iron, thereby giving themselves an advantage. This is exactly how they like things, and such an arrangement will likely make them quite happy. And if you happen to tune in to the zeitgeist rather well and garner a sizable following of your own, don't be surprised if the labels come knocking to offer you a stack of cash and merge your Web property into theirs.
Schwab
Reputation management. Which is pretty much what they do today.
They think their business is selling little round plastic discs. It's not. It's selecting and marketing artists, and there will always be a market for that.
See, here's the thing: If we postulate that all music become free for the copying, how do you select what you want to hear? Consider the 500 channels of crap you already have on your cable TV feed -- an embarrassment of riches to be sure, but how much of it do you actually watch? How much can you watch? How do you decide what to watch? The explosion of available content is not going to slow down (absent a global disaster), and you're going to need intermediaries to help you sift through it all.
Consider American Idol. Just one viewing of the early episodes of any given season will reveal to you the true depth of horrifyingly self-deluded suckage out there. And there, through it all, sits Simon Cowell, the show's creator. He sits through the crap so you don't have to. You may argue that what he lets through is still crap but, honestly, the stuff he's pruned out is much, much, much worse.
This is the primary service the RIAA members still provide, and still can. They could position themselves as P2P search engines and filters, picking through songs available on the various P2P networks, and rating music based on their evaluations and your preferences. Note that they're not offering up the tunes themselves. The tunes they're listing are out there somewhere on the Net; Google would find them, too, if you typed in the right filename. All the label's search site would do is present what they warrant to be quality music that you're likely to enjoy. This would, of course, be a subscription service -- say USD$7.95/month. What you'd be paying for is not the music, but the recommendations.
This would leave the RIAA members with the ability to present a "portal" they control, so promotion opportunities for new performers would still be possible. Streaming music would allow the label to feature "celebrity DJs" pushing a mix of their featured tunes -- just like the old payola days, only without the middlemen. And they could also earn money on the back-end by offering "promotional services" to new artists who want to boost their position in the search results. Each label could open multiple "fronts" on the Web, each purporting to specialize in particular music genres, or optimizing for particular aspects you feel are important (and billing for each separately).
...Basically, the philosophical antithesis of Google. Except that everyone would know that going in. You'd know your music filter service would be a heavily biased party, which is why you'd subscribe to two or three of them to try and even things out. This would probably be a really great idea right up to the point ClearChannel took over all of them.
Schwab