The trouble that MP3s impose on an artist is really a two-part issue. The first problem is that people can play your songs without having to pay for them, so you won't receive any direct royalties whenever a consumer receives your song via digital media. The second is that because mp3 distribution isn't tracked (trackable?) the artists and labels can't get an accurate picture of a musician's popularity.
I have no idea how we could address the first issue, but it should be possible to track how popular an artist is at the Napster coordination/search servers. (...and for Gnutella, and via that CuteFTP Napster-clone thing.)
Dynamically accessible, publically searchable shared archives could form a sort of Neilson's rating that would likely be more accuarte (in a certain demographic) than the ridiculously old-school Billboard 100 listings in use now.
There would be significant privacy issues to overcome as well as technical issues in gathering the data, but it seems that if we can't gaurantee payment for a song, maybe we can at least say how popular an artist is. Look at the IPO market. It isn't how much money your company makes, it's how much it could make. From a labels point of view, if an artist is popular on the Internet, they should do well via traditional media as well.
Such a system would also allow the unknown bands a shot at getting a label. If an mp3.com band is trading well, it could be a good source of income to a label that is willing to pick them up. Such a system is similar in some ways to the Nasdaq Index, except that it wouldn't index value via money, it would index it via popularity.
This isn't a perfect solution, but maybe it would be an improvement over the current scheme. Unfortunately, such a system couldn't take into account IRC, ICQ, NNTP, FTP, and Web-based distribution. We'd have to make the assumption that traffic in those un-classifiable areas would be respective and in-line with the dynamic search facilities.
I like SAT, but what if it were something equally definable, but with far more parameters and variables to take into account? For instance, what if GP was used to create a distributed Weather Modeling program? We would have an easily definable goal (Predicted Weather minus Actual Weather = 0) but plenty of fuzzy parameters so it could grow into a project 'worthy' of distributed computing.
What would you think of that? It may be difficult to get the National Weather Center to give up their information, but maybe the SETI Project's success could convince them of the potential value.
I wonder how many CPU cycles it takes to run through a single generation? I suppose, it would depend on the scope of the project and the number of permutable aspects in the code. It would certainly be interesting to see how well a distributed.net project would lend itself to producing a large-scale genetically based application.
It seems that the model could work fairly well because every client would share the same acceptable fitness parameters, and whole squadrons of teams would be able to work on different genetic threads with their most robust solutions mated and re-distributed to all of the clients at the end of every generation or series of generations.
It would certainly be more interesting than another brute-force project. Does anyone know how distributed chooses their projects, or are there any groups already working on distributed GP?
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http://www.point.com
The trouble that MP3s impose on an artist is really a two-part issue. The first problem is that people can play your songs without having to pay for them, so you won't receive any direct royalties whenever a consumer receives your song via digital media. The second is that because mp3 distribution isn't tracked (trackable?) the artists and labels can't get an accurate picture of a musician's popularity.
I have no idea how we could address the first issue, but it should be possible to track how popular an artist is at the Napster coordination/search servers. (...and for Gnutella, and via that CuteFTP Napster-clone thing.)
Dynamically accessible, publically searchable shared archives could form a sort of Neilson's rating that would likely be more accuarte (in a certain demographic) than the ridiculously old-school Billboard 100 listings in use now.
There would be significant privacy issues to overcome as well as technical issues in gathering the data, but it seems that if we can't gaurantee payment for a song, maybe we can at least say how popular an artist is. Look at the IPO market. It isn't how much money your company makes, it's how much it could make. From a labels point of view, if an artist is popular on the Internet, they should do well via traditional media as well.
Such a system would also allow the unknown bands a shot at getting a label. If an mp3.com band is trading well, it could be a good source of income to a label that is willing to pick them up. Such a system is similar in some ways to the Nasdaq Index, except that it wouldn't index value via money, it would index it via popularity.
This isn't a perfect solution, but maybe it would be an improvement over the current scheme. Unfortunately, such a system couldn't take into account IRC, ICQ, NNTP, FTP, and Web-based distribution. We'd have to make the assumption that traffic in those un-classifiable areas would be respective and in-line with the dynamic search facilities.
jb
I like SAT, but what if it were something equally definable, but with far more parameters and variables to take into account? For instance, what if GP was used to create a distributed Weather Modeling program? We would have an easily definable goal (Predicted Weather minus Actual Weather = 0) but plenty of fuzzy parameters so it could grow into a project 'worthy' of distributed computing.
What would you think of that? It may be difficult to get the National Weather Center to give up their information, but maybe the SETI Project's success could convince them of the potential value.
I wonder how many CPU cycles it takes to run through a single generation? I suppose, it would depend on the scope of the project and the number of permutable aspects in the code. It would certainly be interesting to see how well a distributed.net project would lend itself to producing a large-scale genetically based application.
It seems that the model could work fairly well because every client would share the same acceptable fitness parameters, and whole squadrons of teams would be able to work on different genetic threads with their most robust solutions mated and re-distributed to all of the clients at the end of every generation or series of generations.
It would certainly be more interesting than another brute-force project. Does anyone know how distributed chooses their projects, or are there any groups already working on distributed GP?