But with the cut that the actual artist themselves are making off of each sale its more like: you owe Metallica 15 cents, Vanilla Ice 2 cents, Britney Spears 12 cents.....
this was in a slashdotted article the other day:
"So call me an extremist, but you know, I think business logic may be on my side. I think there's big money to be made in online music, but not until someone has the cojones to route around the the record labels. To disintermediate, to focus on the artists and the listeners instead of the extremely-fat cats currently addicted to selling 25-cent plastic disks for $20 and doling out a few pennies to the musicians, and trying to protect that franchise by suing their customers."
-TBray
Someday we can hope that this will happen. Not only is this business model harmful concerning its actions with the RIAA, its is extremely harmful on the quality of the music that is pushed thru mass media, which is pretty evident whenever you turn on the radio. Record lables dream of finding the next Britney Spears or 50 Cent, low grade horse shit that 13 year old girls will eat up. These kinds of artists take a minimal investment and have the largest returns. Which means that they do not like to nurture new artists who take more than a couple albums of investment in, to start seeing returns. This is why the indie lable market is so important because it creates a space for emerging artists to develop their art. The problem is that the RIAA has such a strangle-hold on mass media, (in conjucntion with clear channel and the like)that these indie artist are not able to find exposure, and people are not able to find the music they want through normal channels. What we have is an industry catering exlusively to 14 year olds. Un-established artists that do not appeal to that sales demographic, are basically left hung out to dry if they are not an istant sales success with the lables. We have a lot of good musicians in this world making really good music. Unfortunatley due to the recording industries current business model, it becomes very hard for people to find the music they are truly looking for. It is hard to see an industry built upon so many problems lasting for too much longer without serious changes in the way it opperates. This should be about THE MUSIC! making beautiful works of art! You should be able to make some decent money at it too. But suing the shit out of people who don't have the ability to fight your legal jugernaut? Thats about as far from the beauty of music as I can imagine.
Does anyone else realize that if this law where in effect 10-15 years ago, arcades as we knew them would never had existed? Games like street fighter and mortal kombat would have been illegal for kids to play, thus making arcades in general equivalent to a place for minors to gather and view porn!? The whole arcade industry survived off the popularity of fighting games for a while. Its hard to see these games as ever have existing if this law were in effect then. Thats truely a scary thought.
I like how Fox spent 500 million to buy out myspace and the site is still a buggy as can be. myspace's login system only works about 40% of the time. You'd think with a 500 million cash infusion they could get their site functioning at a decent level.
to hell with ebay. its all about craigslist.org now. I can buy and sell a game in a snap and craigslist is all free! plus since i'm just dealing with people in my city, (sf) there's no shipping or scam artists to worry about. I don't know what people do where there is no local craigslist yet, I use it for everything.
I just have to say here that I hate how little these stores give you in store credit for good used games. You can sell them back any popular, good condition game for store credit, and they will give you about 5 bucks for it. Then they turn around and sell the used game for $45, only $5 off the retail price. So they screw you at both ends. I wouldn't mind if they charged this much for the used games if they gave you a more fair trade in value and vice verca. I stopped shopping there years ago because I didn't like supporting such a greedy company.
I find this un-suprising given the lack of a decent game library at the present time. The driving force behind any successful gamming device launch is of course, great games, which the PSP sorely lacks at the moment. I'm more suprised that sony execs. thought that the UMD movie sales would somehow make up for this. I think if the PSP can improve the quality of its available games by christmas, it should be ok. What it needs right now is a big hit of a game, thats unavailable anywhere else.
So there's a jail in FFXI huh? Interesting. Just the fact that the game has a jail that your character can be sent to makes the game sound more intriguing. Sounds like it might be a good place to meet like minded criminals. You could plan your next big heist from inside!
How long will it be till we see virtual police NPC's walking the beat and investigating crimes? I could see a 911 chat channel where you could contact the local authorities. "Help, my character is being mugged!"
I must've been about 5 years old or so when I first started watching Voltron on TV. I remember it because it was the first cartoon I ever saw that actually featured bloody battle action, and I think it really scared me at first. Later of course, I thought it was really cool.
I think that a lot of the chest thumping battle cries by politicians against sexual content in video games comes from the archaic view that video games are something just for kids. It's hard to belive that these people would be so far behind the times as to belive this, but it seems to be true...
i'm not sure i belive their info. they list themselves as #5, above amazon.com that seem like bs to me. ask about anyone and they'll tell you who amazon is. netcraft...uh who's that?
i've been a myspace user since it started and there's no spam involved. its just a good way of communicating with people you normally don't see. its also a nice way to keep track of bands as they tour if you become 'friends' with them. also nice if your a band to be able to send out bulletins to all the people your 'friends' with.
This guy is one of those idealistic dreamers who has the misguided notion that you can employee people, treat them well, encourage them to be creative and non-comformist and original and not ditch them for the lowest bidder and somehow run a successful company in the long term.
"Somehow run a successful company"??? Did you not read the article? "And in 2004, the company enjoyed its 28th straight year of revenue growth, with revenues topping $1.5 billion" This is not just a theory obviously, this is working. I bet they are sure glad your not running their company.
"when you're outsourcing for one tenth the salary, do you really expect any of the outsourced people you're managing to be "creative"?"
It seems that you missed the whole point of the article. The article is about how to create and maintain creative capital. Jobs that are being outsourced are far and away mostly industrial labor jobs and service sector like call centers. Your idea of "Put{ing} the fear of outsourcing into your subordinates or you're going to end up on the garbage heap" only works if the customers of this kind of software would rather pay overseas companies for a lower level product with lower levels of innovation. Look at the numbers: "The governments and global corporations that rely on SAS's sophisticated business-intelligence software are overwhelmingly satisfied: The subscription renewal rate is an astounding 98%." The reason the United States still has the edge is that this is where almost all of the innovation takes place that creates the industries we are seeing go overseas. The worst thing that could happen to our economy would be for us to lose this creative capital, because no matter how smart the kids are in China, they will not be able to compete with us on an innovative level so long as our society provides the best environment for creative types to excell in. Also, salary is all relative. One tenth of your salary in India may be very motivating when most other people in the economy are surviving off of much less than that. The reason that companies like Dell have moved all of their call center operations overseas, is because you can either: 1)Pay tech support or sales people here in the USA $15 an hour (low wage) for a job that is considered by our society undesirable, resulting in un-motivated employees with a high turnover rate. or you can 2) Pay tech support or sales people in India 2 dollars an hour (high wage for them) in a society that highly values these jobs resulting in motivated, happy workers.
So...if the sperm does better in zero gravity, will this lead to a whole new business segment for fertility clinics? I can see whole fleets of 747's diving in the air to simulate zero gravity, while couples desperately seeking children try it on the 'sperm comet'. That might be fun, even if your not trying to conceive...
I was merely trying to point out that the name Doom doesn't carry the weight it once did, and that rational would seem to be relevant for a movie, that with an R rating or not, will find most of its draw with teenage kids. And I'm sorry, but are you trying to relate the popularity of Doom when it came out the Watergate scandle and Nixon in terms of popular recognition? I get your point but the analogy is a bit much.
Would it really be worth it to watch the same music video's over and over again? Especially since I'm sure these new ipods will cost a bundle. Now if they made it so you could connect and digital video camera, that would be cool. If they don't do that, I don't see many people waiting in line to upgrage.
It seems to me that the guys making this into a movie missed their mark by about ten years or so. I remember back in 94' there was talk about making this movie, which at the time made a lot more sense. Doom was all over the front of every video game mag, and a lot more hype surrounded the name. Most young kids today couldn't care less about doom because a lot of them weren't around when the game was actually cool. Doom 3 didn't exactly get anybodys attention, even with the nice graphics.
why didn't they just call it IS 11172-3? It just rolls off the tounge doesn't it? Then we could be all saying: "So how many IS 11172-3's do you have on your ipod?" That would be much easier.
What exactly would the FBI be able to do with their 'wiretap' to stop a terrorist that is already onboard the plane. If the FBI is concerned enough to ask the courts for an in flight wiretap of a specific passenger, it begs the question: Why didn't the FBI do something to prevent the passenger from boarding the plane in the first place? One of the senarios that was suggested was that the terrorist might use his laptop to remotely detonate a bomb on board the plane. If the FBI were able to distrupt this activity in time, wouldn't the terrorist probably resort to a more dirastic method of destorying the plane? It seems like abuse of authority is more likey than actaully terrorism prevention.
I remember when this was supposed to be the next big thing for portable video games. Probably around the same time that the whole 'virtual reality' thing was big.
I feel that if the game is fun and innovative enough, and appeals well to the fans of its genre, then if its long, it can be time well spent. Having a huge amount of content isn't gonna matter if the content itself isn't what the player was looking for in purchasing that title. For example, I've always enjoyed the final fantasy series, but it seems that with the last few titles, the people over at square are adding more and more of these annoying little mini-games that look like they would appeal more to a 7 year old kid, than they would a more mature RPG fan. Time playing these mini-games for me is time I would rather be doing something else, and decreases the replay factor for me as well. It begs the question: did square add all these puzzle style mini-games because they thought the FF fans truly would enjoy playing them, or to quench the demands of RPG fans that want a never ending amount of content? It would seem to me that most RPG fans, and fans of FF in particular are playing these games for the fantasy element, the mythical storytelling, and the satisfaction they get from developing their characters. It also seems to be the general concensus that these little puzzle games are nothing more than annoyances that must be done in order to advance the storylines. So sure, longer can be better if its the right kind of content thats making the game longer. But game developers should never try to add content that might be of questionable appeal for the sake of lengthening the game.
It's interesting that he failed to mention the undeniable influence of the birth of hip-hop culture on everything artistic. Early Hip Hop DJ's from the Bronx first started bringing together elements of pre-recorded music from already established genre's and were fusing them together to create something completely new. The discovery that two turntables and a mixer could create something entirely new, has left its imprint on popular culture forever. Remixing is now considered a legit way to make music, and the public in general has embraced this concept. The reason that I'm pointing this out, is that is seems like such a obvious influence. You can actually hear the sparse electronic beats being played on top of samples from original Phillips Classics albums.
Slashdot Mirror
But with the cut that the actual artist themselves are making off of each sale its more like: you owe Metallica 15 cents, Vanilla Ice 2 cents, Britney Spears 12 cents.....
this was in a slashdotted article the other day: "So call me an extremist, but you know, I think business logic may be on my side. I think there's big money to be made in online music, but not until someone has the cojones to route around the the record labels. To disintermediate, to focus on the artists and the listeners instead of the extremely-fat cats currently addicted to selling 25-cent plastic disks for $20 and doling out a few pennies to the musicians, and trying to protect that franchise by suing their customers." -TBray Someday we can hope that this will happen. Not only is this business model harmful concerning its actions with the RIAA, its is extremely harmful on the quality of the music that is pushed thru mass media, which is pretty evident whenever you turn on the radio. Record lables dream of finding the next Britney Spears or 50 Cent, low grade horse shit that 13 year old girls will eat up. These kinds of artists take a minimal investment and have the largest returns. Which means that they do not like to nurture new artists who take more than a couple albums of investment in, to start seeing returns. This is why the indie lable market is so important because it creates a space for emerging artists to develop their art. The problem is that the RIAA has such a strangle-hold on mass media, (in conjucntion with clear channel and the like)that these indie artist are not able to find exposure, and people are not able to find the music they want through normal channels. What we have is an industry catering exlusively to 14 year olds. Un-established artists that do not appeal to that sales demographic, are basically left hung out to dry if they are not an istant sales success with the lables. We have a lot of good musicians in this world making really good music. Unfortunatley due to the recording industries current business model, it becomes very hard for people to find the music they are truly looking for. It is hard to see an industry built upon so many problems lasting for too much longer without serious changes in the way it opperates. This should be about THE MUSIC! making beautiful works of art! You should be able to make some decent money at it too. But suing the shit out of people who don't have the ability to fight your legal jugernaut? Thats about as far from the beauty of music as I can imagine.
Does anyone else realize that if this law where in effect 10-15 years ago, arcades as we knew them would never had existed? Games like street fighter and mortal kombat would have been illegal for kids to play, thus making arcades in general equivalent to a place for minors to gather and view porn!? The whole arcade industry survived off the popularity of fighting games for a while. Its hard to see these games as ever have existing if this law were in effect then. Thats truely a scary thought.
I tend to pray each night before I go to bed, and at the windows login screen that my network will stay secure. So far no problems!
I like how Fox spent 500 million to buy out myspace and the site is still a buggy as can be. myspace's login system only works about 40% of the time. You'd think with a 500 million cash infusion they could get their site functioning at a decent level.
to hell with ebay. its all about craigslist.org now. I can buy and sell a game in a snap and craigslist is all free! plus since i'm just dealing with people in my city, (sf) there's no shipping or scam artists to worry about. I don't know what people do where there is no local craigslist yet, I use it for everything.
I just have to say here that I hate how little these stores give you in store credit for good used games. You can sell them back any popular, good condition game for store credit, and they will give you about 5 bucks for it. Then they turn around and sell the used game for $45, only $5 off the retail price. So they screw you at both ends. I wouldn't mind if they charged this much for the used games if they gave you a more fair trade in value and vice verca. I stopped shopping there years ago because I didn't like supporting such a greedy company.
is kind of telling isn't it. Is that some kind of new record?
I find this un-suprising given the lack of a decent game library at the present time. The driving force behind any successful gamming device launch is of course, great games, which the PSP sorely lacks at the moment. I'm more suprised that sony execs. thought that the UMD movie sales would somehow make up for this. I think if the PSP can improve the quality of its available games by christmas, it should be ok. What it needs right now is a big hit of a game, thats unavailable anywhere else.
So there's a jail in FFXI huh? Interesting. Just the fact that the game has a jail that your character can be sent to makes the game sound more intriguing. Sounds like it might be a good place to meet like minded criminals. You could plan your next big heist from inside!
How long will it be till we see virtual police NPC's walking the beat and investigating crimes? I could see a 911 chat channel where you could contact the local authorities. "Help, my character is being mugged!"
I must've been about 5 years old or so when I first started watching Voltron on TV. I remember it because it was the first cartoon I ever saw that actually featured bloody battle action, and I think it really scared me at first. Later of course, I thought it was really cool.
I think that a lot of the chest thumping battle cries by politicians against sexual content in video games comes from the archaic view that video games are something just for kids. It's hard to belive that these people would be so far behind the times as to belive this, but it seems to be true...
i'm not sure i belive their info. they list themselves as #5, above amazon.com that seem like bs to me. ask about anyone and they'll tell you who amazon is. netcraft...uh who's that?
i've been a myspace user since it started and there's no spam involved. its just a good way of communicating with people you normally don't see. its also a nice way to keep track of bands as they tour if you become 'friends' with them. also nice if your a band to be able to send out bulletins to all the people your 'friends' with.
This guy is one of those idealistic dreamers who has the misguided notion that you can employee people, treat them well, encourage them to be creative and non-comformist and original and not ditch them for the lowest bidder and somehow run a successful company in the long term. "Somehow run a successful company"??? Did you not read the article? "And in 2004, the company enjoyed its 28th straight year of revenue growth, with revenues topping $1.5 billion" This is not just a theory obviously, this is working. I bet they are sure glad your not running their company. "when you're outsourcing for one tenth the salary, do you really expect any of the outsourced people you're managing to be "creative"?" It seems that you missed the whole point of the article. The article is about how to create and maintain creative capital. Jobs that are being outsourced are far and away mostly industrial labor jobs and service sector like call centers. Your idea of "Put{ing} the fear of outsourcing into your subordinates or you're going to end up on the garbage heap" only works if the customers of this kind of software would rather pay overseas companies for a lower level product with lower levels of innovation. Look at the numbers: "The governments and global corporations that rely on SAS's sophisticated business-intelligence software are overwhelmingly satisfied: The subscription renewal rate is an astounding 98%." The reason the United States still has the edge is that this is where almost all of the innovation takes place that creates the industries we are seeing go overseas. The worst thing that could happen to our economy would be for us to lose this creative capital, because no matter how smart the kids are in China, they will not be able to compete with us on an innovative level so long as our society provides the best environment for creative types to excell in. Also, salary is all relative. One tenth of your salary in India may be very motivating when most other people in the economy are surviving off of much less than that. The reason that companies like Dell have moved all of their call center operations overseas, is because you can either: 1)Pay tech support or sales people here in the USA $15 an hour (low wage) for a job that is considered by our society undesirable, resulting in un-motivated employees with a high turnover rate. or you can 2) Pay tech support or sales people in India 2 dollars an hour (high wage for them) in a society that highly values these jobs resulting in motivated, happy workers.
So...if the sperm does better in zero gravity, will this lead to a whole new business segment for fertility clinics? I can see whole fleets of 747's diving in the air to simulate zero gravity, while couples desperately seeking children try it on the 'sperm comet'. That might be fun, even if your not trying to conceive...
I was merely trying to point out that the name Doom doesn't carry the weight it once did, and that rational would seem to be relevant for a movie, that with an R rating or not, will find most of its draw with teenage kids. And I'm sorry, but are you trying to relate the popularity of Doom when it came out the Watergate scandle and Nixon in terms of popular recognition? I get your point but the analogy is a bit much.
Would it really be worth it to watch the same music video's over and over again? Especially since I'm sure these new ipods will cost a bundle. Now if they made it so you could connect and digital video camera, that would be cool. If they don't do that, I don't see many people waiting in line to upgrage.
It seems to me that the guys making this into a movie missed their mark by about ten years or so. I remember back in 94' there was talk about making this movie, which at the time made a lot more sense. Doom was all over the front of every video game mag, and a lot more hype surrounded the name. Most young kids today couldn't care less about doom because a lot of them weren't around when the game was actually cool. Doom 3 didn't exactly get anybodys attention, even with the nice graphics.
why didn't they just call it IS 11172-3? It just rolls off the tounge doesn't it? Then we could be all saying: "So how many IS 11172-3's do you have on your ipod?" That would be much easier.
What exactly would the FBI be able to do with their 'wiretap' to stop a terrorist that is already onboard the plane. If the FBI is concerned enough to ask the courts for an in flight wiretap of a specific passenger, it begs the question: Why didn't the FBI do something to prevent the passenger from boarding the plane in the first place? One of the senarios that was suggested was that the terrorist might use his laptop to remotely detonate a bomb on board the plane. If the FBI were able to distrupt this activity in time, wouldn't the terrorist probably resort to a more dirastic method of destorying the plane? It seems like abuse of authority is more likey than actaully terrorism prevention.
I remember when this was supposed to be the next big thing for portable video games. Probably around the same time that the whole 'virtual reality' thing was big.
I feel that if the game is fun and innovative enough, and appeals well to the fans of its genre, then if its long, it can be time well spent. Having a huge amount of content isn't gonna matter if the content itself isn't what the player was looking for in purchasing that title. For example, I've always enjoyed the final fantasy series, but it seems that with the last few titles, the people over at square are adding more and more of these annoying little mini-games that look like they would appeal more to a 7 year old kid, than they would a more mature RPG fan. Time playing these mini-games for me is time I would rather be doing something else, and decreases the replay factor for me as well. It begs the question: did square add all these puzzle style mini-games because they thought the FF fans truly would enjoy playing them, or to quench the demands of RPG fans that want a never ending amount of content? It would seem to me that most RPG fans, and fans of FF in particular are playing these games for the fantasy element, the mythical storytelling, and the satisfaction they get from developing their characters. It also seems to be the general concensus that these little puzzle games are nothing more than annoyances that must be done in order to advance the storylines. So sure, longer can be better if its the right kind of content thats making the game longer. But game developers should never try to add content that might be of questionable appeal for the sake of lengthening the game.
It's interesting that he failed to mention the undeniable influence of the birth of hip-hop culture on everything artistic. Early Hip Hop DJ's from the Bronx first started bringing together elements of pre-recorded music from already established genre's and were fusing them together to create something completely new. The discovery that two turntables and a mixer could create something entirely new, has left its imprint on popular culture forever. Remixing is now considered a legit way to make music, and the public in general has embraced this concept. The reason that I'm pointing this out, is that is seems like such a obvious influence. You can actually hear the sparse electronic beats being played on top of samples from original Phillips Classics albums.