This guy's pretty much a crank. He's not representative of Darwin in any way, other than that he put together a version of Darwin that has a bunch of GNU software. If you'd like to find something out about Darwin, check out either of Apple's Darwin site, or the Open Darwin site, which is a site for Darwin developers. Honestly, I think most people think of Michael Love as a troll; I don't know why he's getting play on slashdot.
You don't deal directly with the iTMS, you have to be hooked up with a label that has a deal with the iTMS. My understanding was that CDBaby was going to provide for labels and independent bands to put their stuff for sale there (I'm too lazy to go poking around their site for the information, but I'm sure you can find it, and you can always contact them (they're quite responsive)). That said, I believe Apple's iTMS team is reviewing indie music and only accepting quality recordings, so if you want to try and sell 4-track demo's on iTMS (and you're not Sebadoh), I think you'll get rejected.
Also, you don't need to have money to download iTunes, just to buy music, and you don't have to have money just to browse around the store. Considering the user experience on Windows, for the most part, has been good, I'd suggest just downloading it and checking it out now instead of waiting until you want to buy anything, it's a nifty program.
Hmm, I think I see your point in general: you want something you can download and compile or hack on for your own desktop; you want something that has a direct effect on your own computing life. That's a perfectly reasonable request, if you take the somewhat silly point of view that Apple's primary motivation is just to please any given individual in the general open source community. It looks to me like they're simply trying to be good citizens, taking big pieces of technology like the BSD base of OS X, and returning what they've hacked on plus various other bits that they aren't necessarily using to sell the platform, which is what those desktop apps that you want are doing (of course, that's the obvious argument about why it isn't in Apple's best interests to open up other stuff). Just because they aren't releasing anything that directly affects you doesn't mean they haven't embraced open source. I also pointed out OpenPlay, which is a high-level networking technology originally developed by Apple for gaming; Darwin Streaming Server, a streaming media server that forms the basis of Quicktime Streaming Server. Those two things aren't full-on apps that are relevant to you in your daily life, but they aren't inconsequential bits of PR fluff either. In other words, they aren't trivial pieces of software.
WebCore -- that's safari without the UI (including a Qt adapter library called KWQ)
There's other stuff too, although some of it is Mac OS X specific implementations of various other stuff (GCC, Kerberos, CUPS, etc.). My point is that by looking only at those high-profile projects, you're missing a few other interesting things (particularly, IMHO, the Darwin Streaming Server, a free, open-source streaming server, but then, most desktop users won't need that).
I'd suggest taking the time to actually check their projects' page out before jumping to conclusions about what they offer.
Eh, mastering gear costs a lot of money, and you're much better off paying a few hundred bucks a pop to get someone good to do it. Seriously. Not only does it reduce interpersonal band squabbles, but, as the musicians, you lose objectivity in regards to how the record should sound. Mastering is (or should be) a final polish by a skilled technician with damn good ears. I'm getting the feeling that despite your interest in music that you haven't spent a whole lot of time in the studio. I'm not trying to be an ass, but there's a reason most bands work with producers (yes, even indie bands) and engineers (I'll include the mastering techs in with this) that are separate from themselves: you get too close to your own music, you need outside input to make something good. It's the same reason writers have editors, or actors have directors.
Anyway, I don't think we have any fundamental disagreements, just more about our definitions. Yeah, you can record some individual things cheaply, but not when you branch out to a full band -- you start to add too many layers of complexity. You said you're really into digital music, what I don't know, and maybe you can clear up, is whether you have experience going into a real studio with an entire band. It's a completely different thing than individually recording music for a game, or doing digital work. I mean, you need a room with decent acoustics (that's somewhere you can play *loud*), good mics, a decent mixer, and then you should probably have a decent recording device (ADAT, 1/2 inch tape, whatever). You can combine any number of these devices when recording solo, or eliminate them if you're purely digital.
Also, recording isn't necessarily par for the course when writing songs, and shouldn't be considered part of writing a song in the first place. I mean, some bands are about different things. My band is all about the live show, someone like, um, Nine Inch Nails, is all about recording, which is not to say they don't tour, but you get the point. For those that love playing live, having a recording is simply a way to get more people to come to your show via airplay or reviews. Now, someone who's more interested in the recording aspect of music, as you seem to be, might not care about the whole performance aspect (though it may be part of the equation), and so recording, reproduction, and related costs may then be much more a part of the whole than a band that's primarily interested in playing live. Of course, neither am I trying to suggest that going into the studio is a burden;)
I've gone through this process of recording, mixing, mastering, and duplicating a few times now with various bands. I'm not exaggerating the costs. In 1995, the band I was in put out an EP, and we recording five songs in four hours in an adequate studio with a crappy engineer. That cost us $700, the fact that the songs sounded decent is a testament to the amount of practice time we put in, although there are still some glaring mistakes that should've been fixed with overdubs, but we didn't have enought time to listen critically enough to catch them. The duplication costs were around $1200 to $1500 (I don't remember exactly). That was as low budget as I've seen, and the total cost still came to somewhere around $2000. As the recording quality goes up, so do the costs of recording. Professional duplication costs are a very annoying reality. I don't know how to stress enough that you can't get by selling a CD-R at a rock show. Yeah, maybe as a demo that you sell for $5 a pop, but you often can't get them into stores (especially without a UPC code, although some smaller places are better about this than others), and it doesn't help your image as a professional band. Neither does it help you if you only rely on digital downloads, as a lot of people in the indie rock world buy CDs at shows, and will probably forget the URL by the time they get home. If they really like you, maybe they'll sign your mailing list (not a sure thing), and you can market to them there. I think digital downloads are a decent adjunct to the physical thing, and an indie band (not necessarily someone like you) that's only putting out their stuff on CD-R's probably hasn't spent the time and money to record a high quality album either. I'd like to see that change.
I wasn't trying to bitch about the cost of recording or mastering -- if, as a band, you want to do it, you better fucking do it the right way -- rather, my point was that, essentially, if you want to have a product for sale on CDBaby, there are certain barriers to entry, least of which is reproduction.
As far as a professional reproduction, well a lot of our sales have come through people buying a CD at a show, hell that's how I've bought a lot of mine. You can't really get away selling a CD-R at a show (yes, I've seen ones that are very well-done, but they're still CD-R's, even if they have a nice glossy insert or whatever it is you call the stickers you can put on the CDs themselves, and, I've never seen one sold for more than $4 or $5) for a price that will let you recoup expenses, at least, not if you're going to do it right, and isn't that the whole poitn?
What I'm trying to say is this: you seem to be saying that there's no real barrier to entry, but any hobby, as you call it, that you're serious about, requires, as you say a very real expenditure in the form of time, equipment, and, in this case, studio time and mastering costs. The best band in the world is going to sound like shit if they record in Steve's basement with a cassette-based 8-track recorder. If you want to sound good, and sell records, then you need to spend a big chunk of cash, just like you did with your digital music gear. The real revolution is going to come when I only have to spend somewhere around a grand or two for the gear to set up a viable home studio in which I can record my own band. Audio technology is getting closer, but it's too much of a niche market to really drive down the cost of goods, and to assemble all the correct pieces, I still have to lay a lot of money.
I priced for a thousand CDs because that's generally the minimum number per order you can get pressed (some places, as I mentioned, go down to 500). I had gotten the impression from some of the earlier comments that CDBaby required you to also sell your CDs in their store, which gave me the additionaly mistaken impression that you had to get some made (stupid me for not actually checking), but the fact that you can send in a CD-R doesn't obviate the greater part of my point: producing a quality recording that people will pay for requires a substantial investment, be it studio time (and your equipment), a crapload of digital music gear, or whatever. You can't make a quality record for ultra-cheap. All of that is the barrier to entry, and it's not yet something that can be overcome.
Ever recorded an album, mixed and mastered it, then gotten your cd's pressed? Leaving aside recording and mixing costs (usually taken together), mastering tacks on another few hundred dollars (although, if you're going to distribute in any way, you should be mastering), and then reproduction. Ugh. Usually, you have to get cds in batches of at least 1,000. Some places let you order 500, but raise the cost per CD.
My band is about to go back into the studio to record an EP, and we've worked a deal with the studio we like to use for about $2700 for the recording and mixing, which means we toss in for mastering. If we're lucky, we'll get a (good) friend to do cover art, saving us anything from $500 to $1000. Reproduction is usually somewhere around $1.50 per disc, which comes to $1500 for a batch of $1000. Since CDBaby requires a physical disc to get you into the iTMS, for us, that comes to about $4200. Oh, add in an extra $40 to get us into the iTMS.
That $4200 is the barrier to entry, not CDBaby's set up fees.
Of course, studio expenses vary (we like using a good studio with a good engineer), and you could print off a bunch of CD-R's and inserts on your computer, but no one's going to spend more than a few bucks on it, in fact, most bands I know that have gone that route have just given them away. Most people, including the indie rock crowd, generally prefer a reasonably professional looking CD. When was the last time you bought a CD-R from a local band? I never have, mostly because it screams crap.
Basically, to get real distribution, you need to invest in a real product to get peopel to buy it, and that looks like it's going to continue with regards to digital distribution.
David Boies successfully defended IBM against the government's suit in the 1980's (although that case did lead to a consent decree, I think). He successfully prosecuted Microsoft (hey, they were found guilty, which is all he was responsible for. It's not his fault that the punishment phase of the trial essentially let them off). The Florida thing was fucked up in any number of ways. There's some old information about him here.
Boies is a damn good lawyer.
I went and dug around on the site, and the FAQ states pretty explicitly that you have to already be paying their subscription fee to buy tracks to download. Stated explicitly:
8. Do I have to be subscribed to the All Access subscription plan to burn CDs?
Yes. Only subscribers to the RHAPSODY All Access subscription plan at $9.95 per month, will get the ability to burn tracks for an additional fee per track, on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Plus, what you can buy to burn is a limited subset of what they have available to listen to. Overall, it doesn't sound like a good deal to me. Think about how much you'd have to download to beat Apple's price, you break even at about 50 tracks a month ((50 * $.79) + $10 = $49.5; 50 * $.99 = $49.5), that's a lot of music I'm not going to buy every month. I mean, if you had a bunch of songs you wanted to buy (more than 50), and you could sign up for only a month (I couldn't find a minimum subscription time limitation, but I didn't look particularly hard), then maybe it would be a good thing to use, but it seems like a big hassle to me.
They also offer a $4.95/month plan that only allows you access to the streaming library. But, still, I take CDs I burn into my car, to friend's -- a lot of places where I'm not going to listen to music through my computer, so it's not right for me. Obviously, there'll be some people who'll be satisfied by Real's service, but I'm betting that most will be like me. I guess Apple is, too.
Actually, there is an enormous pattern in Florida by Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris abusing their positions in regards to the voter registration rolls. Bush has been ordered two or three times (can't quite remember) by the FL State Supreme Court to stop being such an ass concerning a certain segment of voters (convicted felons). Harris' actions before, during, and after the 2000 election led to a FL state law that made it illegal for FL to use a private corporation to monitor their voter registration rolls.
Let me put it another way: Bush was ordered to stop requiring convicted felons from applying for reinstatement in FL voter rolls if they had been convicted and served their time in a state that automatically reinstates voting rights (pretty much the majority of states). He ignored the state supreme court several times. Harris contracted a corporation to help purge voter rolls of convicted felons and that only matched last and (partial) first names. I don't know about you, but I would hope that the matches better be pretty damned exact, but they weren't. There were priests (!) that were sent letters telling them they were now off the voter rolls, and if they had been purged in error, go through a painstaking reinstatement process. After the FL law requiring more oversight (and less private corps. in purging voter rolls), Harris went right back out and got a private corp.
Conservative estimates put the number of voters blocked from voting in 2000 around 30,000 to 50,000. In an election that was decided by less than 5,000 votes, I would think that would make a large difference. Regardless of political affiliation, I think there was a major miscarriage of justice, and it disturbs me that it's likely that several laws were broken in the course of the 2000 election while most of the press ended up looking the other way. I don't want the election overturned or anything that radical, rather, I'd like to see a comprehensive investigation and national dialogue on our current system of voting leading to, hopefully, a system that is less susceptible to abuse by any political party.
Re:Not Sun and Sony, but *Apple* and Sony
on
The Faded Sun
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· Score: 1
No offense, but that's just stupid. Sony is too large and stratified to be able to deal with incorporating another company. Where I used to work, we used to deal with Sony from time to time and it took so long to get things done that I began to realize why Sony launched new divisions to get new products (PSX/PS2) to market: because it's almost impossible for the seperate divisions to engage in any meaningful discussion (anecdotally, if you've ever tried to use a Sony camcorder/digicam with a sony computer using sony software, you might understand the frustration--independently, they're all good products, together they suck). So, your vision of Apple tech incorporated across the Sony divisions is pretty unrealistic.
Secondly, Jobs would never sell Apple to another company; he likes being in control too much, and Apple's board is too happy with what he's done since coming back to go over his head. I can just see picture him flying into a fit of apoplectic rage the first time he gets told to do something he doesn't agree with.
Really, it makes no sense for either company--for more reasons than I just mentioned.
Slashdot Mirror
This guy's pretty much a crank. He's not representative of Darwin in any way, other than that he put together a version of Darwin that has a bunch of GNU software. If you'd like to find something out about Darwin, check out either of Apple's Darwin site, or the Open Darwin site, which is a site for Darwin developers. Honestly, I think most people think of Michael Love as a troll; I don't know why he's getting play on slashdot.
Also, you don't need to have money to download iTunes, just to buy music, and you don't have to have money just to browse around the store. Considering the user experience on Windows, for the most part, has been good, I'd suggest just downloading it and checking it out now instead of waiting until you want to buy anything, it's a nifty program.
Hmm, I think I see your point in general: you want something you can download and compile or hack on for your own desktop; you want something that has a direct effect on your own computing life. That's a perfectly reasonable request, if you take the somewhat silly point of view that Apple's primary motivation is just to please any given individual in the general open source community. It looks to me like they're simply trying to be good citizens, taking big pieces of technology like the BSD base of OS X, and returning what they've hacked on plus various other bits that they aren't necessarily using to sell the platform, which is what those desktop apps that you want are doing (of course, that's the obvious argument about why it isn't in Apple's best interests to open up other stuff). Just because they aren't releasing anything that directly affects you doesn't mean they haven't embraced open source. I also pointed out OpenPlay, which is a high-level networking technology originally developed by Apple for gaming; Darwin Streaming Server, a streaming media server that forms the basis of Quicktime Streaming Server. Those two things aren't full-on apps that are relevant to you in your daily life, but they aren't inconsequential bits of PR fluff either. In other words, they aren't trivial pieces of software.
- Darwin Streaming Server
- OpenPlay
- Rendezvous
- WebCore -- that's safari without the UI (including a Qt adapter library called KWQ)
There's other stuff too, although some of it is Mac OS X specific implementations of various other stuff (GCC, Kerberos, CUPS, etc.). My point is that by looking only at those high-profile projects, you're missing a few other interesting things (particularly, IMHO, the Darwin Streaming Server, a free, open-source streaming server, but then, most desktop users won't need that).I'd suggest taking the time to actually check their projects' page out before jumping to conclusions about what they offer.
Anyway, I don't think we have any fundamental disagreements, just more about our definitions. Yeah, you can record some individual things cheaply, but not when you branch out to a full band -- you start to add too many layers of complexity. You said you're really into digital music, what I don't know, and maybe you can clear up, is whether you have experience going into a real studio with an entire band. It's a completely different thing than individually recording music for a game, or doing digital work. I mean, you need a room with decent acoustics (that's somewhere you can play *loud*), good mics, a decent mixer, and then you should probably have a decent recording device (ADAT, 1/2 inch tape, whatever). You can combine any number of these devices when recording solo, or eliminate them if you're purely digital.
Also, recording isn't necessarily par for the course when writing songs, and shouldn't be considered part of writing a song in the first place. I mean, some bands are about different things. My band is all about the live show, someone like, um, Nine Inch Nails, is all about recording, which is not to say they don't tour, but you get the point. For those that love playing live, having a recording is simply a way to get more people to come to your show via airplay or reviews. Now, someone who's more interested in the recording aspect of music, as you seem to be, might not care about the whole performance aspect (though it may be part of the equation), and so recording, reproduction, and related costs may then be much more a part of the whole than a band that's primarily interested in playing live. Of course, neither am I trying to suggest that going into the studio is a burden ;)
I've gone through this process of recording, mixing, mastering, and duplicating a few times now with various bands. I'm not exaggerating the costs. In 1995, the band I was in put out an EP, and we recording five songs in four hours in an adequate studio with a crappy engineer. That cost us $700, the fact that the songs sounded decent is a testament to the amount of practice time we put in, although there are still some glaring mistakes that should've been fixed with overdubs, but we didn't have enought time to listen critically enough to catch them. The duplication costs were around $1200 to $1500 (I don't remember exactly). That was as low budget as I've seen, and the total cost still came to somewhere around $2000. As the recording quality goes up, so do the costs of recording. Professional duplication costs are a very annoying reality. I don't know how to stress enough that you can't get by selling a CD-R at a rock show. Yeah, maybe as a demo that you sell for $5 a pop, but you often can't get them into stores (especially without a UPC code, although some smaller places are better about this than others), and it doesn't help your image as a professional band. Neither does it help you if you only rely on digital downloads, as a lot of people in the indie rock world buy CDs at shows, and will probably forget the URL by the time they get home. If they really like you, maybe they'll sign your mailing list (not a sure thing), and you can market to them there. I think digital downloads are a decent adjunct to the physical thing, and an indie band (not necessarily someone like you) that's only putting out their stuff on CD-R's probably hasn't spent the time and money to record a high quality album either. I'd like to see that change.
As far as a professional reproduction, well a lot of our sales have come through people buying a CD at a show, hell that's how I've bought a lot of mine. You can't really get away selling a CD-R at a show (yes, I've seen ones that are very well-done, but they're still CD-R's, even if they have a nice glossy insert or whatever it is you call the stickers you can put on the CDs themselves, and, I've never seen one sold for more than $4 or $5) for a price that will let you recoup expenses, at least, not if you're going to do it right, and isn't that the whole poitn?
What I'm trying to say is this: you seem to be saying that there's no real barrier to entry, but any hobby, as you call it, that you're serious about, requires, as you say a very real expenditure in the form of time, equipment, and, in this case, studio time and mastering costs. The best band in the world is going to sound like shit if they record in Steve's basement with a cassette-based 8-track recorder. If you want to sound good, and sell records, then you need to spend a big chunk of cash, just like you did with your digital music gear. The real revolution is going to come when I only have to spend somewhere around a grand or two for the gear to set up a viable home studio in which I can record my own band. Audio technology is getting closer, but it's too much of a niche market to really drive down the cost of goods, and to assemble all the correct pieces, I still have to lay a lot of money.
I priced for a thousand CDs because that's generally the minimum number per order you can get pressed (some places, as I mentioned, go down to 500). I had gotten the impression from some of the earlier comments that CDBaby required you to also sell your CDs in their store, which gave me the additionaly mistaken impression that you had to get some made (stupid me for not actually checking), but the fact that you can send in a CD-R doesn't obviate the greater part of my point: producing a quality recording that people will pay for requires a substantial investment, be it studio time (and your equipment), a crapload of digital music gear, or whatever. You can't make a quality record for ultra-cheap. All of that is the barrier to entry, and it's not yet something that can be overcome.
My band is about to go back into the studio to record an EP, and we've worked a deal with the studio we like to use for about $2700 for the recording and mixing, which means we toss in for mastering. If we're lucky, we'll get a (good) friend to do cover art, saving us anything from $500 to $1000. Reproduction is usually somewhere around $1.50 per disc, which comes to $1500 for a batch of $1000. Since CDBaby requires a physical disc to get you into the iTMS, for us, that comes to about $4200. Oh, add in an extra $40 to get us into the iTMS.
That $4200 is the barrier to entry, not CDBaby's set up fees.
Of course, studio expenses vary (we like using a good studio with a good engineer), and you could print off a bunch of CD-R's and inserts on your computer, but no one's going to spend more than a few bucks on it, in fact, most bands I know that have gone that route have just given them away. Most people, including the indie rock crowd, generally prefer a reasonably professional looking CD. When was the last time you bought a CD-R from a local band? I never have, mostly because it screams crap.
Basically, to get real distribution, you need to invest in a real product to get peopel to buy it, and that looks like it's going to continue with regards to digital distribution.
David Boies successfully defended IBM against the government's suit in the 1980's (although that case did lead to a consent decree, I think). He successfully prosecuted Microsoft (hey, they were found guilty, which is all he was responsible for. It's not his fault that the punishment phase of the trial essentially let them off). The Florida thing was fucked up in any number of ways. There's some old information about him here. Boies is a damn good lawyer.
What, you mean for those hundreds of Itanium workstations?
Let me put it another way: Bush was ordered to stop requiring convicted felons from applying for reinstatement in FL voter rolls if they had been convicted and served their time in a state that automatically reinstates voting rights (pretty much the majority of states). He ignored the state supreme court several times. Harris contracted a corporation to help purge voter rolls of convicted felons and that only matched last and (partial) first names. I don't know about you, but I would hope that the matches better be pretty damned exact, but they weren't. There were priests (!) that were sent letters telling them they were now off the voter rolls, and if they had been purged in error, go through a painstaking reinstatement process. After the FL law requiring more oversight (and less private corps. in purging voter rolls), Harris went right back out and got a private corp.
Conservative estimates put the number of voters blocked from voting in 2000 around 30,000 to 50,000. In an election that was decided by less than 5,000 votes, I would think that would make a large difference. Regardless of political affiliation, I think there was a major miscarriage of justice, and it disturbs me that it's likely that several laws were broken in the course of the 2000 election while most of the press ended up looking the other way. I don't want the election overturned or anything that radical, rather, I'd like to see a comprehensive investigation and national dialogue on our current system of voting leading to, hopefully, a system that is less susceptible to abuse by any political party.
Secondly, Jobs would never sell Apple to another company; he likes being in control too much, and Apple's board is too happy with what he's done since coming back to go over his head. I can just see picture him flying into a fit of apoplectic rage the first time he gets told to do something he doesn't agree with.
Really, it makes no sense for either company--for more reasons than I just mentioned.