> STUFF THE MONKEY'S EYES DOWN ITS THROAT AND EMBALM IT
Hehehe. People laugh, but those ads got higher click thru ratios (often 4 times the industry norm) than most other banners.
But shit, thats funny... I wish treeloot.com made an ad like that. Maybe you should go get hired by the agency that handles treeloot's media buys and creatives.:)
How on earth would an OS desktop succeed, given that a significant chunk of the OS using world has an intrinsic dislike of advertising in the first place.
You might as well try and sell an MS desktop that popups a dialog every few minutes that screams, "Capitalism sucks!" Most office workers would rather drop dead than deal with the inherent irony of such a 'feature' every few seconds.
THe next time you see somebody with a shirt without a logo, stop and remember whether you think, "Hey, that guys must hate logos cause he's not wearing any."
Chances are you won't. You cant advertise if there is no message on the creative. Duh.
The more this proliferates, the more people there will be like my friend, who's taken to removing logos from everything he wears - even gifts, etc.
Remember the ying and yang - as this kind of thing becomes more popular, the counter-advertising culture will have to take _their_ campaign to a whole new level. This is what I'm most interested in seeing.
Lets say the flight is 2 hours long. 99.99999% uptime on the software that connects the yoke to the control surface means it would be down for 0.08 of a second on each 2 hour flight, hardly anything that would make me thing things were unsafe.
Now, over a year, bunch it up over every day, and you get 29 seconds. Now thats scary, but if you meet 99.99999% uptime, you're probably not going to bunch all your downtime together in one incident.
Although, I'd say that the article looks like it wasn't written for _really_ critical stuff like this.
But its scary hen you have to argue with your boss about whether you should spend 2 weeks figuring out why your server crashes after 2 weeks up uptime.. whether its a bug in your ASP software, the operating system, the ORB, the tcp/ip stack, or 1 minute adding a cron job to restart the server once every week at 3am when nobody is using the system.. thats when you'd probably want to start earning money from somebody who can manage it a little better.
Yeah, but far and away, the best marketing is word of mouth betwixt people who know each other and trust each other. Its like, a quadrazillion times more effective than keeping your website updated, doing mailing list announcements, etc.
In this respect, it still comes down to good old userbase. Which, when you're *not* advertising, will be a function of.. well, the functionality and usefulness of your product, minus any competative FUD your competiation successfully slings into the heads of your _potential_ user base. Sometimes, if you can get enough of a bootstrapped userbase, youd probably rather do *no* marketing than get people listening to a 'who is technically better' discourse between you and your competitionn, when your competition is held in wider public trust (not by us, of course, but by the general public) and has sh!tloads more money than you.
Consider that companies *pay* people to go into bars and malls to talk their product up... the OSS community *users* really have to realize that the best way the average non-programmer OSS user can repay the programmers for their work is by being loud and vocal about what they use. The user, in the OSS community, is the true marketer (and who best understands the needs of the next potential user than their best friend?) and this is a viewpoint I would like to see encouraged a little more in the OSS world. Dont write docs, dont contribute source - get your neighbour to understand why he needs to make the switch (or run them alongside each other, or.. well, you're the salesperson, you be creative and figure it out.:)
Guess what; I've made money from my music. Even though you can get it for free! I must know some awfully hippy people, huh?! Oh no wait, I forgot, they're humans, and they like to pay people. Not all, but I dont care. Why should I? We all scam the system where we judge it to be okay - the fact that these systems could not exist if we all, one day, scammed the same part of the system is what proves that it can never happen. Doubly so when it comes to culture, which humans will never be without. Demand for culture is intrinsic and eternal.
>I believe that artists have a moral claim on their own creations: but for their energy and vision, the creation would not exist.
Aha, but for not the music art and culture that artist injested (and no artist could *ever* afford all the art and culture they need to be exposed to to gain a sifnificant and useful context from which to create and extend the state of the art), neither would they be an artist. If you think any given musician could afford to pay every single musician for every single piece of music s/he listened to or had on personal media, you are very very very much mistaken.
Take Beethoven. He used to 'steal' (we'd call it that today) 2, 3 straight _bars_, _right_ from other composers songs. Verbatim. He was a genius. He got paid. The composers he 'stole' from got paid. Everyone lived, everyone went home happy-ish. Disney wouldn't have had their masterpieces were it not for public domain works. I've said it a million times: the information should be free. Culture, art, etc experiences absolutely amazing results during the time of the least control mechanisms over published works, and the insurgence of participation in the market that results from this allows the 'semivoluntary' purchasers to support the artists. Again, everyone goes home happy, unless you're a greey jerk who mistakenly claims its his right to make money off every single little incidence in which one's work is used/viewed/listened to/re-interpreted.
I am in fact a 24 yr old moron.:) As stated in one of my other plies, I just wanted to incite, because I wanted to know peoples age, and their opinion. Sorry about that.
> I just think that the decision of whether to give something away, when, what and how should be at the musician's discretion.
I dont, and I'm a musician. I never want to have that control. If I ever fight for it (maybe some record exec will buy my ethics with $$ some day), do whats best for you, I, our neighbours, and fight me from getting it. I dont like this whole 'author should be allowed to be a control freak' thing. Art, culture has *never* benifited from additional control placed on the artist, and almost the opposite - the freer we are in taking, interpreting, borrowing, etc art, the more rich our culture and art becomes.
Now how to artists get paid? Easy. People want to pay them. If the artist is good enough, enough people will want to pay the artist. It's quite simple. We dont believe it, because nobody wants to volounteer their money to McDonalds or Nike. Well, they are comapnies, and they dont touch people's lives in the same way artists do. If you listen to yourself, you're advocating that no gallery charging a cover would ever use glass front windows - cause you and I could just view the art from outside! Suckers!
Seriously, its pathetic - nearly everyone I talk to talks about how they volounteer their dollars to the artists that deserve it; well wake up, people, lets get some self confidence going. The ethical folks far outweigh any serious damage the cheaters could incurr on my viability to make a living. It's the industry, as you pointed out, that needs to be taken out back and shot.
All this control stuff simply arises because technologies allow artsits and distributors to use that technology to tip the scales in terms of selling or pushing this or that. Stop pushing, let people pull, and you'll discover that while we might have less rich Celine Dions, we'll have hundreds more local musicians able to make a living from music.
As countless others have said, social solutions, not technological ones. We might feel the world is packed with cheats, but this is mostly thanks to the commercial success of anti-establishement acts (basically, the subversion of counter-culture by companies).. much of the message that sells is "Fuck this, fuck that, steal this... get whatever you can so long as you dont get caught." It's the message that sells, but it doesn't change the fact that it simply does not gel with the human condition, or we would have cheated each other out of existance centuries ago.
To sum it up: the artist does not, has never, nor ever will/should have technological control over his work. To give the artist this control might *sound* like a good short term solution for a troubled industry (and get the consumers onside with this argument, hook, line and sinker), but it is simply not good for the state of culture and economics. Scientists also need to balance control over their reasearch with an indeptedness to share it. If we let scientists have the sort of control the RIAA is seeking over music, sure, a few scientists would get richer in the short term, but the scenitific progress of the last century would grind to a halt (although the nostradamus in me says that this is exactly what will happen.)
I dropped the age in there precisely to get replies where people who put forth their stance and age.
I dont really believe age has much to do with it (but I believe "clueless twentysomethings that parrot what they hear" is quite possibly right on the money)... I admit, it was an ontopic functional troll designed to get people to discuss their age.
> I'm constantly amazed at how quickly people are willing to sign away
Certain bands have leverage to negotiate their own terms. Some bands don't. Unfortunately, us westerners are uncomfortable in beliving that anybody but the uber-best deserves any fair treatment at all, so those artists that dont have the leverage are usually glibly dismissed as 'sucky' or whatnot.
Of course, thats not the point. Diversity, lots of smaller acts would be good for music and musicians. The more powerful *any* entity becomes, more likely they become the next RIAA or MPAA, so not having the leverage should be dealt with by asking, "Why do the labels seem to have *much* more leverage than most artists." rather than "Why do so many arists sign their life away so quickly."
Remeber, us musicians cant become experts in legalese. If we put too much time into studying what we have to do protecting our interests, we dont have any time left over to write music.
I guess this is where the market is supposed to step in - if the musician camp hunch is right, the music industry will essentially die at some point because labels will only be able to sign the flash-in-the-pan idiot bands to their draconian contracts. Doesn't seem to be happening however; if anything, the western world's addiction to flash over substance appears to be ever increasing.
Sorry for the agism, but so far my collective opinion gathering points to most of the 'there is no room for a grey market' posters come from a more bricks and mortar time.
It wasn't my intent to diss 40 yr olds.. only the ones who insist that filesharing is tantamount to stealing, straight up - was actually kind trolling to see what kind of ages have what opinions.
> I always sample before I buy.
Yeah, thats what most people do! There's a reason nobody buys cheap shoes and has somebody paint on the swoosh - people want the official gear, as Janis pointed out.
Yup, thats their own fault, really. They are responsible for clogging the communicative channels betwixt the labels and the consumers, and they have nobody to blame for the 'barrier to market' than themselves. Its like they're shouting at the top of their lungs, and then turning around and complaining that they have to be loud to sell an artist.
Screw em. I know constraint isn't in the playbook of multinationals, but they should eat their own deserts if they cant control themselves.
.. from all the 40 year old morons who keep reiterating that 'artists have to be compensated for their work, so filesharing is inherently as bad as stealing' and then, to add insult to injury, accuse me (a musician) of cheating musicians.
I said it before, I'll say it again - absolutely nobody is listening to the musicians. For all the lawyer bashing that goes on here, you'd think some of those 'filesharing is the devils work' posters would clue in that the parties with the megaphones in this debate arnt even remotely interested in the welfare of artists - only the lucrativeness of the music industry.
What a great article. It should be required reading if you want to be a music consumer.
As Phil Knight said (president of Nike), "People dont want shoes. They want the swoosh."
To make fun of a logo is wholesomely naive. The prominance of brand economics and logos in our economy is beyond anybody's measure. Heck, logos, official seals predate the 1500s. They give an organization a recognizable and terse symbol with which to endorse certain projects or people.
Sure, OSI isn't Nike (most notably and thankfully because they arnt looking to levereage the brand horizontally), but there's a reason MS, Dell, etc has a little sticker they put on stuff. Hint: it works.
You honestly havnt a clue what you are talking about.
I am angry you really think thats the best way to compensate musicians. Speaking as a musician, it isn't. Go to the show. Buy a tshirt. Whether or not you buy my CD means not so much.
> The moral thing to do
It might be the moral thing to do, but it probably wouldn't be if you understood that those who want you to never listen to music for free, and always to buy the CD happen to be those who will benifit the most from it - not artists, but a bunch of suits. Although, from the sound of it (particularly the dig at college students) you probably _are_ a suit.
more to the point, I lived 18 years with my parents with no AC, no magic temperature sensing house, etc. Who cares? Whats a little tempurature-related adversity in ones life?
All the technology in the world wont bring you back to the womb. Better to be tough and deal with it.
Re:instead of mod'ing your mouse ...
on
Cryogenic Mouse Mod
·
· Score: 2, Funny
instead of spending time insulting somebody, you could:
- go outside - take a shower - switch to diet coke - get the artifical cheese dust out of your facial hair - get a real, living girlfriend. japanese anime (although cool) doesn't count
*crash* goes the sound of your glass house losing its final and fourth wall as your rock careens across the lawn..
Yes, I realize I'm being hyporitical, but at least Im being upfront about it.;)
Slashdot Mirror
even better, check out my sig ;) thank goodness im not in the US.
and hey, good for UK. they've always been on the progressive side of dealing with drug problems; encouraging stuff.
> STUFF THE MONKEY'S EYES DOWN ITS THROAT AND EMBALM IT
... I wish treeloot.com made an ad like that. Maybe you should go get hired by the agency that handles treeloot's media buys and creatives. :)
Hehehe. People laugh, but those ads got higher click thru ratios (often 4 times the industry norm) than most other banners.
But shit, thats funny
How on earth would an OS desktop succeed, given that a significant chunk of the OS using world has an intrinsic dislike of advertising in the first place.
You might as well try and sell an MS desktop that popups a dialog every few minutes that screams, "Capitalism sucks!" Most office workers would rather drop dead than deal with the inherent irony of such a 'feature' every few seconds.
THe next time you see somebody with a shirt without a logo, stop and remember whether you think, "Hey, that guys must hate logos cause he's not wearing any."
Chances are you won't. You cant advertise if there is no message on the creative. Duh.
The more this proliferates, the more people there will be like my friend, who's taken to removing logos from everything he wears - even gifts, etc.
Remember the ying and yang - as this kind of thing becomes more popular, the counter-advertising culture will have to take _their_ campaign to a whole new level. This is what I'm most interested in seeing.
After all, grab the wrong joystick at this kiosk, and you could end up in a very adult situation!
Lets say the flight is 2 hours long. 99.99999% uptime on the software that connects the yoke to the control surface means it would be down for 0.08 of a second on each 2 hour flight, hardly anything that would make me thing things were unsafe.
.. whether its a bug in your ASP software, the operating system, the ORB, the tcp/ip stack, or 1 minute adding a cron job to restart the server once every week at 3am when nobody is using the system .. thats when you'd probably want to start earning money from somebody who can manage it a little better.
Now, over a year, bunch it up over every day, and you get 29 seconds. Now thats scary, but if you meet 99.99999% uptime, you're probably not going to bunch all your downtime together in one incident.
Although, I'd say that the article looks like it wasn't written for _really_ critical stuff like this.
But its scary hen you have to argue with your boss about whether you should spend 2 weeks figuring out why your server crashes after 2 weeks up uptime
Yeah, but far and away, the best marketing is word of mouth betwixt people who know each other and trust each other. Its like, a quadrazillion times more effective than keeping your website updated, doing mailing list announcements, etc.
.. well, the functionality and usefulness of your product, minus any competative FUD your competiation successfully slings into the heads of your _potential_ user base. Sometimes, if you can get enough of a bootstrapped userbase, youd probably rather do *no* marketing than get people listening to a 'who is technically better' discourse between you and your competitionn, when your competition is held in wider public trust (not by us, of course, but by the general public) and has sh!tloads more money than you.
... the OSS community *users* really have to realize that the best way the average non-programmer OSS user can repay the programmers for their work is by being loud and vocal about what they use. The user, in the OSS community, is the true marketer (and who best understands the needs of the next potential user than their best friend?) and this is a viewpoint I would like to see encouraged a little more in the OSS world. Dont write docs, dont contribute source - get your neighbour to understand why he needs to make the switch (or run them alongside each other, or .. well, you're the salesperson, you be creative and figure it out. :)
In this respect, it still comes down to good old userbase. Which, when you're *not* advertising, will be a function of
Consider that companies *pay* people to go into bars and malls to talk their product up
>Don't agree that musicians need some control over their work? Give yours away and prove your point.
I do:
here
Guess what; I've made money from my music. Even though you can get it for free! I must know some awfully hippy people, huh?! Oh no wait, I forgot, they're humans, and they like to pay people. Not all, but I dont care. Why should I? We all scam the system where we judge it to be okay - the fact that these systems could not exist if we all, one day, scammed the same part of the system is what proves that it can never happen. Doubly so when it comes to culture, which humans will never be without. Demand for culture is intrinsic and eternal.
>I believe that artists have a moral claim on their own creations: but for their energy and vision, the creation would not exist.
Aha, but for not the music art and culture that artist injested (and no artist could *ever* afford all the art and culture they need to be exposed to to gain a sifnificant and useful context from which to create and extend the state of the art), neither would they be an artist. If you think any given musician could afford to pay every single musician for every single piece of music s/he listened to or had on personal media, you are very very very much mistaken.
Take Beethoven. He used to 'steal' (we'd call it that today) 2, 3 straight _bars_, _right_ from other composers songs. Verbatim. He was a genius. He got paid. The composers he 'stole' from got paid. Everyone lived, everyone went home happy-ish. Disney wouldn't have had their masterpieces were it not for public domain works. I've said it a million times: the information should be free. Culture, art, etc experiences absolutely amazing results during the time of the least control mechanisms over published works, and the insurgence of participation in the market that results from this allows the 'semivoluntary' purchasers to support the artists. Again, everyone goes home happy, unless you're a greey jerk who mistakenly claims its his right to make money off every single little incidence in which one's work is used/viewed/listened to/re-interpreted.
I am in fact a 24 yr old moron. :) As stated in one of my other plies, I just wanted to incite, because I wanted to know peoples age, and their opinion. Sorry about that.
.. much of the message that sells is "Fuck this, fuck that, steal this ... get whatever you can so long as you dont get caught." It's the message that sells, but it doesn't change the fact that it simply does not gel with the human condition, or we would have cheated each other out of existance centuries ago.
> I just think that the decision of whether to give something away, when, what and how should be at the musician's discretion.
I dont, and I'm a musician. I never want to have that control. If I ever fight for it (maybe some record exec will buy my ethics with $$ some day), do whats best for you, I, our neighbours, and fight me from getting it. I dont like this whole 'author should be allowed to be a control freak' thing. Art, culture has *never* benifited from additional control placed on the artist, and almost the opposite - the freer we are in taking, interpreting, borrowing, etc art, the more rich our culture and art becomes.
Now how to artists get paid? Easy. People want to pay them. If the artist is good enough, enough people will want to pay the artist. It's quite simple. We dont believe it, because nobody wants to volounteer their money to McDonalds or Nike. Well, they are comapnies, and they dont touch people's lives in the same way artists do. If you listen to yourself, you're advocating that no gallery charging a cover would ever use glass front windows - cause you and I could just view the art from outside! Suckers!
Seriously, its pathetic - nearly everyone I talk to talks about how they volounteer their dollars to the artists that deserve it; well wake up, people, lets get some self confidence going. The ethical folks far outweigh any serious damage the cheaters could incurr on my viability to make a living. It's the industry, as you pointed out, that needs to be taken out back and shot.
All this control stuff simply arises because technologies allow artsits and distributors to use that technology to tip the scales in terms of selling or pushing this or that. Stop pushing, let people pull, and you'll discover that while we might have less rich Celine Dions, we'll have hundreds more local musicians able to make a living from music.
As countless others have said, social solutions, not technological ones. We might feel the world is packed with cheats, but this is mostly thanks to the commercial success of anti-establishement acts (basically, the subversion of counter-culture by companies)
To sum it up: the artist does not, has never, nor ever will/should have technological control over his work. To give the artist this control might *sound* like a good short term solution for a troubled industry (and get the consumers onside with this argument, hook, line and sinker), but it is simply not good for the state of culture and economics. Scientists also need to balance control over their reasearch with an indeptedness to share it. If we let scientists have the sort of control the RIAA is seeking over music, sure, a few scientists would get richer in the short term, but the scenitific progress of the last century would grind to a halt (although the nostradamus in me says that this is exactly what will happen.)
Forget that, think of the magic that comes from mixing a rigid tool with a beaver! Collaberation, baby!
> You don't want to pay them anything!
Dont you ever tell me what I want. I know what I want, and I want to pay artists.
I dropped the age in there precisely to get replies where people who put forth their stance and age.
... I admit, it was an ontopic functional troll designed to get people to discuss their age.
I dont really believe age has much to do with it (but I believe "clueless twentysomethings that parrot what they hear" is quite possibly right on the money)
No, Nike buys cheap slavery and has them pain on swooshes. ;)
> I'm constantly amazed at how quickly people are willing to sign away
Certain bands have leverage to negotiate their own terms. Some bands don't. Unfortunately, us westerners are uncomfortable in beliving that anybody but the uber-best deserves any fair treatment at all, so those artists that dont have the leverage are usually glibly dismissed as 'sucky' or whatnot.
Of course, thats not the point. Diversity, lots of smaller acts would be good for music and musicians. The more powerful *any* entity becomes, more likely they become the next RIAA or MPAA, so not having the leverage should be dealt with by asking, "Why do the labels seem to have *much* more leverage than most artists." rather than "Why do so many arists sign their life away so quickly."
Remeber, us musicians cant become experts in legalese. If we put too much time into studying what we have to do protecting our interests, we dont have any time left over to write music.
I guess this is where the market is supposed to step in - if the musician camp hunch is right, the music industry will essentially die at some point because labels will only be able to sign the flash-in-the-pan idiot bands to their draconian contracts. Doesn't seem to be happening however; if anything, the western world's addiction to flash over substance appears to be ever increasing.
Well you're not a 40 yr old moron then. :)
.. only the ones who insist that filesharing is tantamount to stealing, straight up - was actually kind trolling to see what kind of ages have what opinions.
Sorry for the agism, but so far my collective opinion gathering points to most of the 'there is no room for a grey market' posters come from a more bricks and mortar time.
It wasn't my intent to diss 40 yr olds
> I always sample before I buy.
Yeah, thats what most people do! There's a reason nobody buys cheap shoes and has somebody paint on the swoosh - people want the official gear, as Janis pointed out.
> is very expensive.
Yup, thats their own fault, really. They are responsible for clogging the communicative channels betwixt the labels and the consumers, and they have nobody to blame for the 'barrier to market' than themselves. Its like they're shouting at the top of their lungs, and then turning around and complaining that they have to be loud to sell an artist.
Screw em. I know constraint isn't in the playbook of multinationals, but they should eat their own deserts if they cant control themselves.
oh, the sweet sweet irony of hearing an AC call somebody, more or less, an anonymous wacko.
*fffsszzzt* hello, kettle, come in, come in, this is the pot *fffsszzzt*
.. from all the 40 year old morons who keep reiterating that 'artists have to be compensated for their work, so filesharing is inherently as bad as stealing' and then, to add insult to injury, accuse me (a musician) of cheating musicians.
I said it before, I'll say it again - absolutely nobody is listening to the musicians. For all the lawyer bashing that goes on here, you'd think some of those 'filesharing is the devils work' posters would clue in that the parties with the megaphones in this debate arnt even remotely interested in the welfare of artists - only the lucrativeness of the music industry.
What a great article. It should be required reading if you want to be a music consumer.
> A logo. Wow. You all kick ass.
As Phil Knight said (president of Nike), "People dont want shoes. They want the swoosh."
To make fun of a logo is wholesomely naive. The prominance of brand economics and logos in our economy is beyond anybody's measure. Heck, logos, official seals predate the 1500s. They give an organization a recognizable and terse symbol with which to endorse certain projects or people.
Sure, OSI isn't Nike (most notably and thankfully because they arnt looking to levereage the brand horizontally), but there's a reason MS, Dell, etc has a little sticker they put on stuff. Hint: it works.
You honestly havnt a clue what you are talking about.
I am angry you really think thats the best way to compensate musicians. Speaking as a musician, it isn't. Go to the show. Buy a tshirt. Whether or not you buy my CD means not so much.
> The moral thing to do
It might be the moral thing to do, but it probably wouldn't be if you understood that those who want you to never listen to music for free, and always to buy the CD happen to be those who will benifit the most from it - not artists, but a bunch of suits. Although, from the sound of it (particularly the dig at college students) you probably _are_ a suit.
like, duh
Newsflash: private interests dont co-operate for the greater public good, especially wrt protocals and standards. News at 11!
So you can continue into the building killing people sitting at their desks while you drive straight through the office?
I'd rather visit you in the hospital, while you consider your driving skills, thanks.
more to the point, I lived 18 years with my parents with no AC, no magic temperature sensing house, etc. Who cares? Whats a little tempurature-related adversity in ones life?
All the technology in the world wont bring you back to the womb. Better to be tough and deal with it.
instead of spending time insulting somebody, you could:
..
;)
- go outside
- take a shower
- switch to diet coke
- get the artifical cheese dust out of your facial hair
- get a real, living girlfriend. japanese anime (although cool) doesn't count
*crash* goes the sound of your glass house losing its final and fourth wall as your rock careens across the lawn
Yes, I realize I'm being hyporitical, but at least Im being upfront about it.