Few hundred dollars? Doing it all yourself? Yes, absolutely, it is possible, but nobody would want to listen that crap which you put out. I can absolutely guarantee that to you with 100% of probability.
I like 100% probability...it's so easy to refute. - Although I don't know for sure, I expect that this setup was around the price tag I'm talking about: In late 2006, Justin Vernon, a musician in Eau Claire, Wis., recorded nine songs while staying at his parents' hunting cabin in northern Wisconsin after a breakup with a girlfriend and his long-time band. He used just a desktop computer with recording software, a three-piece drum set and a guitar. ...and he went on to play sold-out shows within a couple of years, selling over 87,000 copies* (source)
*Now before you panic, I'm going to guess that when he signed with a record company they probably went back to the studio. But that's not the point. The point is that it is quite possible to do initial runs on a very limited budget. Grow your audience and fan base, and if the fans are there, you'll make money and then you can afford to spend more on recording. The point I was trying to make was that once upon a time it took a multimillion dollar studio to get anything at all... now you can record for a few hundred or a few thousand, and this puts the recording price-tag into the realm of feasible for new artists. Logically therefore, it removes this need for the recording industry to exist.
Are Radiohead and NineInchNails big enough?
Oh wait, I know your response: the recording industry made them famous first, so now they don't need them, so they're not valid examples.
Ok, what about this guy or this guy or these guys or the $4.2million guy.
Don't confuse the record labels mass market hits which you've heard of with bands and artists that are doing quite well without them. Just to be clear, I'd never heard of Blake Shelton but that doesn't mean he isn't making gobs of money for the record companies, so don't presume that just because you've never heard of these people that they are not popular, and more importantly that they can't make a living without the recording industry.
The argument that piracy doesn't hurt sales and cost the companies and artists money, is false.
It is not. At most, it hurts an obsolete business model. The "recording industry" is not artists, is not art and is not music: it's publishers. The recording industry is in the business of providing up-front recording costs, promotion costs, production and distribution costs to artists.
With the advent of cheap computers and open-source software you can record yourself for a few thousand (even a few hundred) dollars. up-front recording cost resolution: recording industry no longer required.
With internet sites like myspace, plus the ease and near costlessness of having your own site, it's very possible for artists to do their own promotion. promotion cost resolution: recording industry no longer required.
With the internet an artist no longer has to "produce" a physical product, so "production" costs are zero. If they want to, they can do small-run CD's for relatively small money. production cost resolution: recording industry no longer required.
Still with the internet, If the artist chooses to truly embrace what the internet can do for them, they can distribute via bittorrent, reducing their bandwidth costs substantially. or, if they still want to sell their bits, there are plenty of on-line music retailers that will sell for them. distribution cost resolution: recording industry no longer required.
The final note on this, is that while the recording industry provided these up-front costs, they were 100% recoverable. In other words it was a loan to the band. If the album sold, the record company made it's profit, and the bands profit went to repay the loan. Most bands don't make any money selling albums: they make money on tour.
Bottom line: do not confuse the (very loud) group talking about the end-of-days with artists. There was music before these dinosaurs showed up, and there will be music after they go extinct.
My experience directly contradicts it.
You have not related any relevant personal experience, and if you did/could it would be anecdotal at best.
They are not going to even listen to someone with a single share.
Get enough share holders together and you can force the company to change.
Why would I want to put my good money into a bad business model?
If I want to invest in music I'm going to look for a company that understands the digital age and invest in them as they rise, not in the Old Boys as they fall...
If the new absorbers are smoother than traditional ones, it just means the car can't corner, and rides like a pimp car.
"handling" and "softride" are not a zero-sum game. Suspension can be both better handling and softer than conventional systems. being a good/.-er I did not rtfa, but I assume their suspension is active.
proof?
First off, everything I have read shows a positive correlation between downloads and sales. ie: the most popular downloads also enjoy the most sales.
Secondly, if someone downloads a song/album and likes it, they may talk it up to their friends who then do buy it. It is very possible that downloading causes a net increases in sales.
that still doesn't give people the right to infringe on other people's copyrights
Copyright is something the public granted, and is something the public can take away. It is not a natural right. The copyright monopolies are abusing the rights the public bestowed upon them and what we are seeing is a backlash against an unjust situation. They are unethical, they lie, they use illegal tactics and do little to promote useful arts. They are leeches on society, interested only in prolonging profits they no longer deserve at the expense of society. The harm they inflict on individuals with their frivolous litigation far outweighs any benefit they provide to our society. Companies who destroy people's lives for profit should be put down on general principle. They are dinosaurs that need to go away as they serve no useful purpose in an electronic age.
But there's no reason Apple should have to support MP3.... There will always be a complainer until Apple releases every song ever, including bootlegs, in Ogg, MP3, AAC, Flac...
Well... it seems to me that "MP3" is the consumer standard for music today, and it seems to me that most consumers even call them "mp3-players" so (and I could be wrong here..>) but it seems to me that the consumer wants mp3 format music.
coupl'a points:
When allofmp3 was up, I read a lot of people used it because you could select your format.
Transcoding generally introduces artifacts, so it's not (always) the same thing to transcode yourself as it is for the original to be encoded into two different formats.
If there was actual competition in the recorded music business I guarantee (see allofmp3) that someone would be offering up all the different formats.
Your kind of "the customer should be happy just to get to deal with us" attitude is what's killing plenty of companies. Not listening to what the customer wants is a quick way to close your shop.
Maybe some of the readers here just aren't the iPod's intended audience?
again, no stats to back it up so I could be wrong, but I bet almost everyone who buys from iTunes has an iPod, and since the iPod is the majority of the market, it hasn't really been noticed. As has happened before, and will happen again, Apple's market share will drop over time, and when it does mp3/wmv only player owners won't be shopping at iTunes - they'll got to walmart or amazon or any of the other mp3-format online music retailers...
Couldn't you correlate your purchase record, or lack thereof, to validate or disprove the claims against you in that scenario?
yes... in court, with your multi-thousand-dollar lawyer beside you. It can easily cost $100k to win in court.
Therefore, the attacker has already achieved their goal when the lawsuit is issued.
I gotta call you out on this one. Nothing pisses me off more than the never ending made up welfare cadillac anecdotes. That's right, I'm saying you made that shit up, you never saw Best Buy drop off a Plasma TV to a government subsidized home.
ok, GP might have exaggerated for effect, but every time* I see welfare people being interviewed on TV there's beer and cigarettes within camera view. And there is usually a TV on -- can't say it's a plasma or if it's from best-buy, but based on what's on, I'm sure it gets some form of cable/satellite.
Is it all people on welfare? no
Is it tough to make ends meet in welfare? Depends on your priorities.
so part of the "training" is that financial institutions don't leave a number. They instruct you to look on the back of your card. Just like all banks will tell you they don't send e-mail, and that any e-mail isn't from them, they would start to educate: we don't leave a call-back number.
Part of the problem (imho) is that there isn't enough rea$on for these companies to fix the underlying problems.
Find out your multiplayer match-making service has 400,000+ players regularly... 8. Close down the match-making service because you can't afford to run it at eight times capacity.
It sounds more to me like you're just not a very strong business-person. That's not meant as a slight: the "best" automakers in the USA are busy begging for money 'cause they've screwed up. Lots of smart business people lost money with lousy businesses in the dot-boom. There's plenty of examples where plenty of people can't run a business.
Newsflash: Business is hard. Starting a business is really hard.
Plenty of small business (you are/were a small business) would kill for 400k+ customers. That you were unable to monetize this stream isn't the fault of piracy. In fact, piracy gave you almost 10x the customer base. Lots of artists are waking up to the fact that the biggest threat to their economic viability as an artist isn't piracy: it's obscurity. Someone who has never heard of you is never going to give you any money. Someone who pirates your work might give you some money either directly (concerts, tee's etc) or indirectly, by marketing you to their friends (who then either give money directly or indirectly, rinse, repeat, profit!)
5. Split that 5 ways: $54,000 for two years of work.
Plenty of small business don't make any money at all in the first few years. They need investments to pay the bills. That you were able to make an income that can pay the bills means you had a successful business growing. Sure, you're not going to drive a Porsche on $27k/yr, but you can live on it - I have lived on less. And if you could figure out how to get those 400k people to give you a few bucks every year then you'd have that Porsche by now.
mistakenly identifies my IP because I'm sharing some linux distros or whatever,
You don't even have to be sharing anything, since an IP on a tracker means
nothing: However, the tracker owners are aware of this, and trick these tracking companies by polluting the list of IP-addresses the tracker returns. That is one of the techniques The Pirate Bay uses, just to show how flawed the evidence gathering is.
Your logic is like saying that I am responsible for the murder and torture of Baby P because as a British subject I am responsible for policing my own.
Being responsible for, and policing are not the same thing.
Policing means that you (society) don't tolerate certain actions, and you take legal steps to sanction this behaviour.
Being responsible for the action puts you on the other side of the pointy stick - the pointy side.
as a./-er, I know I don't have to say that I didn't read your link, but I can only assume that this murder and torture isn't going with repercussions to those deemed responsible, so you (Brits) are in fact policing your own, and this still doesn't make you (personally) responsible*.
*uh... unless of course, you're one of the ones being held responsible:)
but since this is a download-tax, it would clearly be based on the number of downloads.
What I can guarantee you is that my works will get downloaded... a lot. Even if I have to write the script to do that myself.
The DRM on my MP3/OGG collection is quite invisible
Re:DRM Music where 'Managing Server' is Gone
on
DMCA Exemption Time
·
· Score: 1
While I agree that this should also be legal, I would like to add a consumer protection act that requires going-concerns to never turn off an authentication server or be 100% liable for the products replacement... this might have slowed companies like walmart who won't go under, but do turn off their servers.
If there was ever a comment-set ( I see you've made similar comments to other posts) that needed a +6 and to be distributed around this is it.
"Terror" is not new. There are countries like Ireland, India, Isreal etc that have been dealing with this without loss of other rights.
But the US has shown that it's not about the war on terror: it's about making a swift grab of personal freedoms. It's only now with this new lesson in governmental control that other countries are changing how they "deal" with terrorism.
It's sad, really that people are so quickly willing to give up their rights for perceived security.
Slashdot Mirror
At least Indiana came to it's senses before legislating the value of pi.
I like 100% probability...it's so easy to refute. - Although I don't know for sure, I expect that this setup was around the price tag I'm talking about:
...and he went on to play sold-out shows within a couple of years, selling over 87,000 copies* (source)
In late 2006, Justin Vernon, a musician in Eau Claire, Wis., recorded nine songs while staying at his parents' hunting cabin in northern Wisconsin after a breakup with a girlfriend and his long-time band. He used just a desktop computer with recording software, a three-piece drum set and a guitar.
*Now before you panic, I'm going to guess that when he signed with a record company they probably went back to the studio. But that's not the point. The point is that it is quite possible to do initial runs on a very limited budget. Grow your audience and fan base, and if the fans are there, you'll make money and then you can afford to spend more on recording. ... now you can record for a few hundred or a few thousand, and this puts the recording price-tag into the realm of feasible for new artists. Logically therefore, it removes this need for the recording industry to exist.
The point I was trying to make was that once upon a time it took a multimillion dollar studio to get anything at all
Are Radiohead and NineInchNails big enough?
Oh wait, I know your response: the recording industry made them famous first, so now they don't need them, so they're not valid examples.
Ok, what about this guy or this guy or these guys or the $4.2million guy.
Don't confuse the record labels mass market hits which you've heard of with bands and artists that are doing quite well without them.
Just to be clear, I'd never heard of Blake Shelton but that doesn't mean he isn't making gobs of money for the record companies, so don't presume that just because you've never heard of these people that they are not popular, and more importantly that they can't make a living without the recording industry.
It is not. At most, it hurts an obsolete business model. The "recording industry" is not artists, is not art and is not music: it's publishers. The recording industry is in the business of providing up-front recording costs, promotion costs, production and distribution costs to artists.
With the advent of cheap computers and open-source software you can record yourself for a few thousand (even a few hundred) dollars. up-front recording cost resolution: recording industry no longer required.
With internet sites like myspace, plus the ease and near costlessness of having your own site, it's very possible for artists to do their own promotion. promotion cost resolution: recording industry no longer required.
With the internet an artist no longer has to "produce" a physical product, so "production" costs are zero. If they want to, they can do small-run CD's for relatively small money. production cost resolution: recording industry no longer required.
Still with the internet, If the artist chooses to truly embrace what the internet can do for them, they can distribute via bittorrent, reducing their bandwidth costs substantially. or, if they still want to sell their bits, there are plenty of on-line music retailers that will sell for them. distribution cost resolution: recording industry no longer required.
The final note on this, is that while the recording industry provided these up-front costs, they were 100% recoverable. In other words it was a loan to the band. If the album sold, the record company made it's profit, and the bands profit went to repay the loan. Most bands don't make any money selling albums: they make money on tour.
Bottom line: do not confuse the (very loud) group talking about the end-of-days with artists. There was music before these dinosaurs showed up, and there will be music after they go extinct.
You have not related any relevant personal experience, and if you did/could it would be anecdotal at best.
They are not going to even listen to someone with a single share.
Why would I want to put my good money into a bad business model?
If I want to invest in music I'm going to look for a company that understands the digital age and invest in them as they rise, not in the Old Boys as they fall...
That's why I drive down the highway with my foot on the brakes ... in the fast lane, for faster-regeneration!
"handling" and "softride" are not a zero-sum game. Suspension can be both better handling and softer than conventional systems. /.-er I did not rtfa, but I assume their suspension is active.
being a good
not knowing who he was, I googled the name ... my first page hit? of course!
proof?
First off, everything I have read shows a positive correlation between downloads and sales. ie: the most popular downloads also enjoy the most sales.
Secondly, if someone downloads a song/album and likes it, they may talk it up to their friends who then do buy it. It is very possible that downloading causes a net increases in sales.
Copyright is something the public granted, and is something the public can take away. It is not a natural right. The copyright monopolies are abusing the rights the public bestowed upon them and what we are seeing is a backlash against an unjust situation. They are unethical, they lie, they use illegal tactics and do little to promote useful arts. They are leeches on society, interested only in prolonging profits they no longer deserve at the expense of society. The harm they inflict on individuals with their frivolous litigation far outweighs any benefit they provide to our society. Companies who destroy people's lives for profit should be put down on general principle. They are dinosaurs that need to go away as they serve no useful purpose in an electronic age.
Well ... it seems to me that "MP3" is the consumer standard for music today, and it seems to me that most consumers even call them "mp3-players" so (and I could be wrong here..>) but it seems to me that the consumer wants mp3 format music.
coupl'a points:
When allofmp3 was up, I read a lot of people used it because you could select your format.
Transcoding generally introduces artifacts, so it's not (always) the same thing to transcode yourself as it is for the original to be encoded into two different formats.
If there was actual competition in the recorded music business I guarantee (see allofmp3) that someone would be offering up all the different formats.
Your kind of "the customer should be happy just to get to deal with us" attitude is what's killing plenty of companies. Not listening to what the customer wants is a quick way to close your shop.
again, no stats to back it up so I could be wrong, but I bet almost everyone who buys from iTunes has an iPod, and since the iPod is the majority of the market, it hasn't really been noticed.
As has happened before, and will happen again, Apple's market share will drop over time, and when it does mp3/wmv only player owners won't be shopping at iTunes - they'll got to walmart or amazon or any of the other mp3-format online music retailers...
yes ... in court, with your multi-thousand-dollar lawyer beside you. It can easily cost $100k to win in court.
Therefore, the attacker has already achieved their goal when the lawsuit is issued.
ok, GP might have exaggerated for effect, but every time* I see welfare people being interviewed on TV there's beer and cigarettes within camera view. And there is usually a TV on -- can't say it's a plasma or if it's from best-buy, but based on what's on, I'm sure it gets some form of cable/satellite.
Is it all people on welfare? no
Is it tough to make ends meet in welfare? Depends on your priorities.
*Possibly exaggerated for effect.
Part of the problem (imho) is that there isn't enough rea$on for these companies to fix the underlying problems.
It sounds more to me like you're just not a very strong business-person. That's not meant as a slight: the "best" automakers in the USA are busy begging for money 'cause they've screwed up. Lots of smart business people lost money with lousy businesses in the dot-boom. There's plenty of examples where plenty of people can't run a business.
Newsflash: Business is hard. Starting a business is really hard.
Plenty of small business (you are/were a small business) would kill for 400k+ customers. That you were unable to monetize this stream isn't the fault of piracy. In fact, piracy gave you almost 10x the customer base.
Lots of artists are waking up to the fact that the biggest threat to their economic viability as an artist isn't piracy: it's obscurity. Someone who has never heard of you is never going to give you any money. Someone who pirates your work might give you some money either directly (concerts, tee's etc) or indirectly, by marketing you to their friends (who then either give money directly or indirectly, rinse, repeat, profit!)
Plenty of small business don't make any money at all in the first few years. They need investments to pay the bills. That you were able to make an income that can pay the bills means you had a successful business growing. Sure, you're not going to drive a Porsche on $27k/yr, but you can live on it - I have lived on less. And if you could figure out how to get those 400k people to give you a few bucks every year then you'd have that Porsche by now.
Stop blaming other people for your problems.
You don't even have to be sharing anything, since an IP on a tracker means nothing:
However, the tracker owners are aware of this, and trick these tracking companies by polluting the list of IP-addresses the tracker returns. That is one of the techniques The Pirate Bay uses, just to show how flawed the evidence gathering is.
Being responsible for, and policing are not the same thing.
Policing means that you (society) don't tolerate certain actions, and you take legal steps to sanction this behaviour.
Being responsible for the action puts you on the other side of the pointy stick - the pointy side.
as a ./-er, I know I don't have to say that I didn't read your link, but I can only assume that this murder and torture isn't going with repercussions to those deemed responsible, so you (Brits) are in fact policing your own, and this still doesn't make you (personally) responsible*.
*uh ... unless of course, you're one of the ones being held responsible :)
but since this is a download-tax, it would clearly be based on the number of downloads. ... a lot. Even if I have to write the script to do that myself.
What I can guarantee you is that my works will get downloaded
-1: Wrong
typing with one hand again I see...
I just wrote about this.
The DRM on my MP3/OGG collection is quite invisible
While I agree that this should also be legal, I would like to add a consumer protection act that requires going-concerns to never turn off an authentication server or be 100% liable for the products replacement ... this might have slowed companies like walmart who won't go under, but do turn off their servers.
I have to side with RMS ... "what you're used to" != "easier to use".
"Terror" is not new. There are countries like Ireland, India, Isreal etc that have been dealing with this without loss of other rights.
But the US has shown that it's not about the war on terror: it's about making a swift grab of personal freedoms. It's only now with this new lesson in governmental control that other countries are changing how they "deal" with terrorism.
It's sad, really that people are so quickly willing to give up their rights for perceived security.