My favorite beers are made in England, Germany, Denmark and Belgium (Ok, I admit I like beer a lot...), while my girlfriend is addicted to Swiss and Belgian chocolates.
What, no Ireland (Kilkenny, Guinness) nor Czech Republic (Staropramen, Pilsner Urquell, Kozel) on the favorite beer list!?
As to chocolates... Any chocolate connoisseur owes it to herself to check out Finnish Fazer Blue chocolate. It's legendary.
It provides tools to aggregate disparate and far-flung audio into a single playlist, and lets users judge. It's pretty cool, actually, because it solves (or tries to solve) a big problem with online free music, which is that nobody wants to weed through the crap to find the good stuff.
Can this ever work? Everyone I know listens to different kinds of music. I like "obscure" rock bands, my best friend is into classical and new age, another good friend listens to folk, King Tubby and such, my wife like artists such as Scooter and Phil Collins, and the people at work are into metal. I wouldn't want ANYTHING on any of their playlists, it's enough that I'm made listen to it at parties.
It's the message that is disturbing, because it implies that cheeks are so dumb they'll jump on anyone using ubuntu, just because he's using ubuntu.
What cave did you just crawl out of? It's the women who are the Ubuntu users, I don't what the attractive looking guy is doing there, he certainly doesn't represent any Linux geek I've ever met.
Your label is clearly not standard as most big labels DO NOT pay the artists $2 per CD. Nowhere NEAR that. Half that AT BEST. And the recording studio fees are usually paid from the artist's cut.
There are really only 3 biggies left at the moment and thousands of small ones like us. Pretty much all the small ones split the profit 50 - 50 between the artist and the label, but this normally means the artist has chipped in during the production phase. We run our own studio, so we're a bit different from some of the others.
Services like paying radio stations to play music, "promoting" albums, distribution to stores. None of those things are actually required for online distribution to work, and yet you're saying "nobody's forcing you to buy." Those services are being bundled in, and you don't have a choice to opt out of it if you want to buy music.
Again, no one is forcing you to buy music that is promoted or played on radio stations. Of course, it is very difficult to find music that isn't, because it's not (ahem) promoted, or played on radio stations.
...and send a couple of bucks to the artist via paypal.
If you really think people are that honest, you are very naive. I mean, a lot of people would probably say to themselves "oh, I'll donate money next week, I can't now because I need to pay for my foobar bill". Voluntary payments don't work. If they did, everything would be that way, because clerks are expensive.
Ddo you think voluntary payments would work in, say, Russia?
Exactly. Lots of hard-working individuals there aren't even dreaming of becoming millionnaires and thus wouldn't mind if their cds were 5x cheaper.
I probably shouldn't respond to such an obvious flamebait, but I will anyway.
I meant the millions of people working for record companies, music stores, department stores and such around the world. You know, clerks, secretaries, runners, agents, truck drivers etc are all part of the industry. Almost all record companies (even the majors) are knee-deep in debt. If they lowered their prices, they'd go the way of the dinosaur. Most indies only stay in business because the majors distribute their CD's, so they'd get to go, too. Apart from a few specialty stores, that would wipe away a whole lot of jobs.
The price of any product is determined by the law of supply and demand. Unless you are forced to buy, there is nothing wrong with that. You don't feel a product is worth its price, you leave it on the shelf, simple as that. Large-scale piracy, and lately P2P, are distorting this system, however. But of course, you'll fail to see anything wrong with it, because you want your music for free. Anonymous Coward.
Yet we see people all the time, who think that abolishing copyrights would cause the end of mankind...
No it wouldn't, but it would pretty much put an end to a whole lot of businesses from recording studios to publishers, distributors, pressing plants and music shops. Which is probably not what most people want. It would also kill all but the biggest software companies. I don't think movie industry nor book publishing would hurt much, though.
And people charging insane prices (relative to the income/country) is moral?
And who gets do decide what's insane and what's not?
Does britney really deserve those millions of dollars while people are barely getting by?
Probably not, but she repsresents less than 0.000001 % of the people working in the music industry. All the britnies and justins combined don't come close to being 0.000001 %. There is a huge amount hard-working individuals there who aren't even dreaming of becoming millionnaires.
those godless communist bastards are preying on our innocent capitalism aryan heros like 50 cent, eminem, and britney... think of the children!!!
Actually, even though the artists you mention are being sold in Russia, a lot of the bootlegs are artists from the European countries; Finland, Sweden, Norway etc. These are artists who wouldn't sell a hundredth of a percent of what britneys and eminems sell anyway, but they are good business because tourists have much more money than Russians.
While it's kind of a stretch, it's basically the same as "it's okay to steal a loaf of bread if you're hungry." (With the vendors being the thieves).
In Russia, piracy is widespread organized crime. There are thousands of pirate shops there, and the people working in them are abused, beaten, hardly paid etc. It's pretty self-evident, if you go there and see it for yourself. It's not about them eating, it's about the mafia lords buying luxury cars, drugs etc.
And even if it weren't about Russia; music is luxury. No person on this planet would die if all music just went poof.
I believe what music labels should do is sell localized versions of their music in these countries. What I mean by that is, companies need to sell their music at "localized" rates, so that instead of making no money from these sales, at least they could make some money. Just my two cents.
The going price for a pirated CD (or DVD, for that matter) in Russia is about $1. The quality is mostly very bad, there is no booklet, just a photocopied slip, and the CD's are the cheapest CD-R's you can buy in bulk, they don't even bother printing a label, so you can even see what brand they are. Often times, the music on the CD isn't what the cover says, but people don't care because they're so cheap.
I run (or rather work for) a recording studio and a small label. I know for a fact that even if you make an effort to keep the costs down, it's very difficult to keep the cost of one CD below about $4 with typical pressings (99 % of CD's don't sell "Britney Spears" or "Justin Timberlake" number of units) And because I and all my coworkers sorta like bread, butter and potatoes, we like to ask for $7 - $8 from retailers, and still we hardly make profit after all the expenses. There's no way any legitimate business could ever compete with pirates.
How about when the *Soundtrack* for the movie costs $16?? (and as the parent poster stated, the DVD is $15)
Artists / record labels often licence their music to films for a fixed fee. Even if the film becomes a super duper huge mega hit, the artists are left with almost nothing.
It all comes down to different business models and of course supply and demand. The film creates demand for the music. That demand may or may not be enough to justify making a soundtrack CD.
while a CD, often with already-released songs, and requiring only a singer, guitarist, drummer, etc., and a sound technician, costs the same amount. *What is up with that?!*
What's different with movies is they are first released to theaters. They have often already recouped when they are released to video.
The artists are just a small bit of the cost of making a CD. There is a huge amount of costs between the recording studio and the bookshelf - agents, managers, cover designers, photographers, hairstylists, make-up artists, secretaries, marketing, storage, security, truck drivers, store clerks, etc. etc. All this needs to be paid by someone.
Use the minimum number of keywords in the language as possible. For example, all loops (for, while, do) can all be handled by a simple if and goto statement.
Strangely enough, I've always felt that
loop: ... if(!done) goto loop;
is easier to understand than
do { ... } while(!done);
But of course, we've all been brainwashed to think that "goto" is evil and should not be used. That's probably true in the wrong hands, but it can actually make code more effient, I've seen a lot of programs that look like this:
You aren't a security expert, are you? Now, your first lesson in computer security is, write this a hundred times: *crashing* on malicious code is *GOOD*, while *running* malicious code is *BAD*.
I think you are confusing two different things.
It's generally a good practice not to write a program to try to "best-guess" impossible situations such as malformed input. For example, if you've got a low-level function that returns legit data when it's called with invalid data, you are effectively covering a programming error somewhere else in your program. So it's better to return an invalid data flag than try to "best-guess" in that situation.
A program should never ever crash, however. A crash means that something that wasn't supposed to be executed got executed, which is always bad.
"applications will get sucked off the desktop onto the Internet, and that's what will undo Microsoft,"
The desktop is going nowhere anytime soon. Internet won't be reliable enough to replace it in the foreseeable future, and I can't imagine using an Office package on a handheld anytime soon, either.
A lot of Micro$oft's core business is such that it won't translate easily or at all to the web nor a handheld, most notably desktop OS's (duh) and office software. And I think we'll see them going more towards handhelds in terms of games and OS's too, but I don't think that's what Christensen was after.
To me, this seems a bit like saying that Hollywood should start making more Spanish films, because films made in Spain are getting more and more popular.
I have to admit I expected something more...
A lot of the "stuff" strikes me as fun physics experiments and excercises in robotics. Not that I am an expert or anything, but it seemed to me like there was a shortage of novelty in the video. More "smaller and better" than "innovative". Still, some fun geek stuff.
I also completely missed what the head on the screen was. Some sort of virtual prototype?
I work for a small indie record company and we normally sell at 7 - 8 bucks to retailers (when we deal with them directly). They normally charge 18.99 for our stuff, but sometimes even more. We make much, much less for one CD than the retailers. I think the average profit is less than $4 bucks per CD for us. And our recording budgets are very small and we don't give bands advances.
i don't know.. why don't you travel over to louvre and try it out? come in every day to raise some alarms?
(Note: I am not the OP). Louvre would be about the last place I'd want to try that in. It's HUGE and all the cool stuff is far away from any exit. Even if you manage to get past the Japanese photographers to Mona Lisa and cause an alarm, it will take you at least ten minutes to get to an exit queue, and that's if you are running...
The person who has nothing but downloaded MP3s and CD-Rs burned from downloaded MP3s was NOT going to buy the album in the first place.
That's just silly. A person who has a 1000 downloaded albums clearly loves music and would have VERY PROBABLY bought at least a few of them if that was the only way to get them. And when the users of P2P are calculated in millions, that amounts to a HUGE amount of albums, even if there are some who indeed wouldn't have bought any.
IMO, downloading MP3s is no different than when we used to trade tapes at the skating rink or youth center. These tapes were often made from the radio (remember sitting with your finger on the PAUSE button?)
You don't see a difference between a degraded one-off versus hundreds of millions of 1:1 digital copies?
The facts are that MP3s are LOW quality (completely horrid, as far as I am concerned,)
320 kbps MP3's are completely acceptable, in my opinion.
What really needs to happen is that someone with an extensive music collection, and the desire to fight this, needs to leave various P2P applications open 24/7 with access to their vast, legal music collection, so that someone will notice.
What exactly would you achieve with that? I fail to see what's insightful about this.
People who share files are breaking copyright law. No matter how much you'd like your music for free, it ain't gonna happen before that law goes away, which isn't anytime soon.
This is all to common a theme these days. People are unwilling to stand up against tyranny, which is exactly what this legal campaign is
No, they're just doing their job. If you aren't happy with their ways, stop buying music. That's the ticket. Soon they'll be bankrupt and the world will be a much better place.
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My favorite beers are made in England, Germany, Denmark and Belgium (Ok, I admit I like beer a lot...), while my girlfriend is addicted to Swiss and Belgian chocolates.
What, no Ireland (Kilkenny, Guinness) nor Czech Republic (Staropramen, Pilsner Urquell, Kozel) on the favorite beer list!?
As to chocolates... Any chocolate connoisseur owes it to herself to check out Finnish Fazer Blue chocolate. It's legendary.
Can this ever work? Everyone I know listens to different kinds of music. I like "obscure" rock bands, my best friend is into classical and new age, another good friend listens to folk, King Tubby and such, my wife like artists such as Scooter and Phil Collins, and the people at work are into metal. I wouldn't want ANYTHING on any of their playlists, it's enough that I'm made listen to it at parties.
What cave did you just crawl out of? It's the women who are the Ubuntu users, I don't what the attractive looking guy is doing there, he certainly doesn't represent any Linux geek I've ever met.
There are really only 3 biggies left at the moment and thousands of small ones like us. Pretty much all the small ones split the profit 50 - 50 between the artist and the label, but this normally means the artist has chipped in during the production phase. We run our own studio, so we're a bit different from some of the others.
Again, no one is forcing you to buy music that is promoted or played on radio stations. Of course, it is very difficult to find music that isn't, because it's not (ahem) promoted, or played on radio stations.
If you really think people are that honest, you are very naive. I mean, a lot of people would probably say to themselves "oh, I'll donate money next week, I can't now because I need to pay for my foobar bill". Voluntary payments don't work. If they did, everything would be that way, because clerks are expensive.
Ddo you think voluntary payments would work in, say, Russia?
I probably shouldn't respond to such an obvious flamebait, but I will anyway.
I meant the millions of people working for record companies, music stores, department stores and such around the world. You know, clerks, secretaries, runners, agents, truck drivers etc are all part of the industry. Almost all record companies (even the majors) are knee-deep in debt. If they lowered their prices, they'd go the way of the dinosaur. Most indies only stay in business because the majors distribute their CD's, so they'd get to go, too. Apart from a few specialty stores, that would wipe away a whole lot of jobs.
The price of any product is determined by the law of supply and demand. Unless you are forced to buy, there is nothing wrong with that. You don't feel a product is worth its price, you leave it on the shelf, simple as that. Large-scale piracy, and lately P2P, are distorting this system, however. But of course, you'll fail to see anything wrong with it, because you want your music for free. Anonymous Coward.
That's rubbish. Here's a typical breakdown from the CD's I sell from our label (very rough and changes a lot from CD to CD).
- $0.50- recording studio
- $0.30- cover design
- $1.00- pressing
- $2.20+ marketing
- $2.00+ label
- $2.00+ musicians
- $10.99 retailer & freight
The sums marked with a '-' go down as more CD's are sold and the ones marked with a '+' go up.No it wouldn't, but it would pretty much put an end to a whole lot of businesses from recording studios to publishers, distributors, pressing plants and music shops. Which is probably not what most people want. It would also kill all but the biggest software companies. I don't think movie industry nor book publishing would hurt much, though.
And who gets do decide what's insane and what's not?
Does britney really deserve those millions of dollars while people are barely getting by?
Probably not, but she repsresents less than 0.000001 % of the people working in the music industry. All the britnies and justins combined don't come close to being 0.000001 %. There is a huge amount hard-working individuals there who aren't even dreaming of becoming millionnaires.
Actually, even though the artists you mention are being sold in Russia, a lot of the bootlegs are artists from the European countries; Finland, Sweden, Norway etc. These are artists who wouldn't sell a hundredth of a percent of what britneys and eminems sell anyway, but they are good business because tourists have much more money than Russians.
In Russia, piracy is widespread organized crime. There are thousands of pirate shops there, and the people working in them are abused, beaten, hardly paid etc. It's pretty self-evident, if you go there and see it for yourself. It's not about them eating, it's about the mafia lords buying luxury cars, drugs etc.
And even if it weren't about Russia; music is luxury. No person on this planet would die if all music just went poof.
The going price for a pirated CD (or DVD, for that matter) in Russia is about $1. The quality is mostly very bad, there is no booklet, just a photocopied slip, and the CD's are the cheapest CD-R's you can buy in bulk, they don't even bother printing a label, so you can even see what brand they are. Often times, the music on the CD isn't what the cover says, but people don't care because they're so cheap.
I run (or rather work for) a recording studio and a small label. I know for a fact that even if you make an effort to keep the costs down, it's very difficult to keep the cost of one CD below about $4 with typical pressings (99 % of CD's don't sell "Britney Spears" or "Justin Timberlake" number of units) And because I and all my coworkers sorta like bread, butter and potatoes, we like to ask for $7 - $8 from retailers, and still we hardly make profit after all the expenses. There's no way any legitimate business could ever compete with pirates.
Artists / record labels often licence their music to films for a fixed fee. Even if the film becomes a super duper huge mega hit, the artists are left with almost nothing.
It all comes down to different business models and of course supply and demand. The film creates demand for the music. That demand may or may not be enough to justify making a soundtrack CD.
What's different with movies is they are first released to theaters. They have often already recouped when they are released to video.
The artists are just a small bit of the cost of making a CD. There is a huge amount of costs between the recording studio and the bookshelf - agents, managers, cover designers, photographers, hairstylists, make-up artists, secretaries, marketing, storage, security, truck drivers, store clerks, etc. etc. All this needs to be paid by someone.
Strangely enough, I've always felt that
is easier to understand thanBut of course, we've all been brainwashed to think that "goto" is evil and should not be used. That's probably true in the wrong hands, but it can actually make code more effient, I've seen a lot of programs that look like this:I'm really tempted to write it like this:But of course, I won't because it would result in a lot of grief from anyone who ever reads my code. *sigh*I think you are confusing two different things.
It's generally a good practice not to write a program to try to "best-guess" impossible situations such as malformed input. For example, if you've got a low-level function that returns legit data when it's called with invalid data, you are effectively covering a programming error somewhere else in your program. So it's better to return an invalid data flag than try to "best-guess" in that situation.
A program should never ever crash, however. A crash means that something that wasn't supposed to be executed got executed, which is always bad.
The desktop is going nowhere anytime soon. Internet won't be reliable enough to replace it in the foreseeable future, and I can't imagine using an Office package on a handheld anytime soon, either.
A lot of Micro$oft's core business is such that it won't translate easily or at all to the web nor a handheld, most notably desktop OS's (duh) and office software. And I think we'll see them going more towards handhelds in terms of games and OS's too, but I don't think that's what Christensen was after.
To me, this seems a bit like saying that Hollywood should start making more Spanish films, because films made in Spain are getting more and more popular.
I also completely missed what the head on the screen was. Some sort of virtual prototype?
I work for a small indie record company and we normally sell at 7 - 8 bucks to retailers (when we deal with them directly). They normally charge 18.99 for our stuff, but sometimes even more. We make much, much less for one CD than the retailers. I think the average profit is less than $4 bucks per CD for us. And our recording budgets are very small and we don't give bands advances.
At a gunpoint, possibly...
(Note: I am not the OP). Louvre would be about the last place I'd want to try that in. It's HUGE and all the cool stuff is far away from any exit. Even if you manage to get past the Japanese photographers to Mona Lisa and cause an alarm, it will take you at least ten minutes to get to an exit queue, and that's if you are running...
Expensive paintings are always locked to the wall and difficult to take down without proper tools.
That's just silly. A person who has a 1000 downloaded albums clearly loves music and would have VERY PROBABLY bought at least a few of them if that was the only way to get them. And when the users of P2P are calculated in millions, that amounts to a HUGE amount of albums, even if there are some who indeed wouldn't have bought any.
IMO, downloading MP3s is no different than when we used to trade tapes at the skating rink or youth center. These tapes were often made from the radio (remember sitting with your finger on the PAUSE button?)
You don't see a difference between a degraded one-off versus hundreds of millions of 1:1 digital copies?
The facts are that MP3s are LOW quality (completely horrid, as far as I am concerned,)
320 kbps MP3's are completely acceptable, in my opinion.
What exactly would you achieve with that? I fail to see what's insightful about this.
People who share files are breaking copyright law. No matter how much you'd like your music for free, it ain't gonna happen before that law goes away, which isn't anytime soon.
No, they're just doing their job. If you aren't happy with their ways, stop buying music. That's the ticket. Soon they'll be bankrupt and the world will be a much better place.