Since about 1997, Linux has become extremely, extremely mass mainstream, and has had write-ups in all major mass-cultural media outlets, including magazines they sell on news stands in grocecry stores, major metropolatin newspapers, and prime time news programming on television. Every second of press it gets is overwhelmingly netagtive. Every single major computer corporation, including IBM, Intel, Sun, HP, and Compaq have embraced Linux and sell primarily Linux products. Every PHM stepped on the bandwagon years and years ago, and practically every Windows and Unix installation has been ripped out and replaced by Linux. Linux IPO's have been extremely successful, and the market caps on Linux companies, as awell as Linux entrepeneurs, rivals that of any major multinational corporation. Practically every comuter user is using Linux including grandmothers, blue collar workers, and third world residents. Linux is THE buzz word of the last few years, and by far the trendiest and most fashionable new thing for the masses to latch on to.
Yet, people think it's still oppressed, and feel the need to defend it further. What are you defending against? Linux has no detractors, except perhaps competition such as Microsoft, but only just, and that represents a tiny portion of the marketplace.
The articles reads like it was written in 1995. Windows only cooperatively multitasks? WTF? This was trendy to discuss in 1994, but since the release of Windows 95 (not to mention NT, and 2000!) the issue has long since been resolved. The author needs to pull his head of the sand, fly back to earth, and check out everything that happened in the last five years, which he has missed.
Yes. Actually, it's a little-known fact that Intel's marketshare has actually increased since the beginning of the year (from 81% to 82%), and that Athlon's share has actually decreased from when it was first released (from a peak of about 5% late last year to now about 3%). Neither AMD or Transmeta are going to cut into Intel's share soon, and as the PC cycle starts to slow, Intel is at least somewhat diversified with networking, embedded, home products, and, most of all, capital investment. When that tide turns, AMD will be extremely hard hit, since they have nothing besides PC processors and flash. AMD will have a hard time cutting into Intel's server market, and to my knowledge, no OEM is planning a server based system, or even has business systems based on Athlon. I do believe that AMD is an excellent buy, though, and quite undervalued compared to Intel. They arguably have more growth potential but they will gain the market more as the industry grows, than at the expense of Intel (which, contrary to popular belief, is not happening).
Patel's decision was not at all unprecedented; I don't know of a single legal type who was surprised by the decision, or who is not wondering what Boies thinks he is doing. There are several cases which Patel refers in which people are guilty are contributory copyright infringement. She makes a very careful distinction between tools, and services (note for example, her treatment of Diamond RIO). There is a very well defined distinction between a general purpose tool (e.g. a car or film) and a service targeted toward a specific activity, and Patel points to other services which were geared toward copyright infringement which were shut down. You do not understand the distinction, since you are a moron, but fortunately the lawyers and judges who make the decisions do. Another key point is that Napster as a service can only allow legal files to be transferred, but they choose to transfer illegal files also.
Since you're new, you'd better read the judges decision before you expose your further ignorance on the site. The phone company is a general purpose telecomunnications medium, and the ISP is a general purpose packet switching medium. Napster is specifically for indexing music, and for connecting thieves to each other. You need to learn a thing about scale: Napster is like a service which puts together all of the parts to build a nuclear bomb, but Microsoft supplies just the switches used to ignite the bomb, and the phone company supplies the water needed in production, and the ISP the electricity. If you cannot see the difference between these roles, I recommend you seek an alternate line of work!
Dunno how involved you are on this level, but I've made upwards of $400 on mp3.com, where most of 'my competition' struggles to make $40 or $4, and I've told people how to do that and now some of the people I've told make more than me. I would love to think that people would do it your way but I am obliged to share the information of how to really do it with slashdotters, as I've seen other slashdotten musicians:)
Congratulations, you are making the average per-capita income of a farmer living in the Democratic Rebublic of Congo. Do you plan to quit you day job?
Free stuff beats restricted stuff for mindshre.
Britney Spears records have grossed approximately $300,000,000 and sold 20,000,000 units. Who knows how much tours have grossed. She is the epitome of the $17.99 mall CD, yet she has more mindshare than almost any person on the planet. How do you explain this? Only a couple of dozen people are knocking on the door to download your stuff for free, yet at least 12,000,000 different people have shelled out cash for Britney Spears albums. What gives?
You should read the Judge Patel's judgement which will answer all of your questions, and why the Napster napster service is guilty of contributory copyright infringement, but http and so forth are not.
Please get your facts straight. Microsoft runs no service which allows children to illegally pirate copryrighted music. That's Napster's job. Moreover Microsoft does not run a service for people to ilegally distribute programs which violate trade secrets. Napster and 2600 provide services; Microsoft provides products. Microsoft cannot get sued because they sell tools, but the defendants involved provide services, not tools. That's why they got sued and lost (or will lose) in court.
How come no one out there is working feverishly on a new micropayment system, since none of the others were ever adopted?
Um,what's wrong with EMUS? Or even MPPP? How do they not fit your criteria?
Or has Napster already spoiled it, by allowing people to download their music for free, will it increasingly be an expectation of consumers that whatever they want to download from the internet should always be free?
This is definitely a risk for the long term (2-3 years), but I believe that there is still a window of opportunity for pay services to succeed. EMUS certainly has a consderably higher quality service than Napster does.
The P6 bus does only about 1 GB/s, but the Willamette bus does 3.2 GB/s. SDRAM can only do about 1 GB/s, while RDRAM can do 2.1 GB/s (I think that's right...), so RDRAM will be much faster on Willamette than on P6 (which is limited by the bus, not the RAM). The limitation today is the bus, but for the Pentium 4 the limitation will be the RAM. RAM speed is overrated; an L2 miss only comes along once every several million cycles!
I agree it takes a lot of time to wade through mp3.com's music. I've really tried and only found a few nice songs after hours of searching. mp3.com could really benefit from hiring people to rank the songs(as far as I've seen, the download ranking does not work well) or even have columns featuring some good songs. Ranking the groups would also help.
Me too, yes, and yes. Music review is going to be extremely importany in the post-record company music world, since basically you are going to have 100x as many artists as there are today, all without any promotion or reputation, vying to be listened to. Today, many casual music fans can get away without reading reviews (and instead depend on radio and/or friend's advice for recommendations), but I predict that reviews will be an integral part of the music experience.
MP3.com's current system of ranking is pathetic. The most downloaded songs get the most exposure, so what song is most likely to be downloaded next? Usually the most downloaded songs are not the best (hopefully!) but instead the most recognizable songs. If MP3.com had review columns, it would have serious potential. I do not envy the job of the reviewer however!
If that's the sort of thing you want to hear, the current system works.
12 million people bought Britney Spear's debut album. Music like that is what most people want. Are you going to tell 12 million teenage girls that from now on in order to find the best music they will have to wade through web sites of songs containg old men singing around the campfire in order to locate the music they like? They have more important things to worry about -- like algebra, boys, and passing the driving test, and want things as spoon-fed as possible. Like it or not, Britney Spears's fan's money (12,000,000 @ $15) counts a lot more than the money of people who listen to non-mainstream music, and artists such as her will lead the industry into whatever direction it will go in.
Now consider this. If you go over to MP3.com, you can listen to whatever songs are posted. These songs come from artists who are able to put together their music on their own, without a record company behind them, and obviously it didn't take them $500,000 to put it together.
Yes, and little of the music on MP3.com is good. And the little which is good was sponsored by record companies. All of the self-produced MP3.com artists which I have listened to sound like garbage (both artistically and production-wise). I have mostly downloaded their classical offerings, and they don't compare to the CD issues. They are done by amateurs, not world-class professionals.
If you think something is crap, you simply move on to another artist.
That's not practical. See, when a company puts out a CD, they risk two things. First, since production/distribution is so expensive, they can't afford to put out bad music which nobody will buy. Second, their reputation rests on the quality of the music. MP3.com will accept any artist, and has no "reputation". It costs nearly nothing to host music, so they will take anything. A reputable record label -- such as Rounder or Harmonia Mundi -- will not admit fluff to their labels, and the name alone guarantees that it will be quality. With self-produced music, anything will be admitted, the market will be saturated, and you will have to wade through hundreds of hours of Glenn Gould wannabee's in order to locate a decent performance of the Goldberg Variations. How is this supposed to be better?
How much was that again? You mean you can get an album for less than $10, and the artist gets more per CD than they would have from a record company?
Proof please? MP3.com lists the amount of money artists have earned and almost all of them are in the 2-3 digits. Please prove that they receive more money this way than with a record company.
And horror of horrors, there's noone preventing you from listening to the music, for free, as much as you like before the purchase?
You can preview music on web sites such as amazon.com, cdnow, and emusic for free. Furthermore you can listen to the CD in many stores. What's the problem?
Well, actually, there will also be 0.15 um, which is what AMD is going to do with the next Athlon shrink. They claim they will be able to do it faster than 0.13 um, so they will be quicker to market. Who really knows...
A recent search from one Napster server returned more than 20 unique songs from Atom and His Package, more songs than I cared to count for Aphex Twin, most of the Reverend Horton Heat's song catalog, about ten Fig Dish songs, and nearly every Over the Rhine song. None of these bands have had a significant amount of top 40 airplay (I'm fairly certain that Atom & His Package has never had commercial radio airplay). While the bands listed represent a small variety of genres and sub-genres, none of these bands are teenybop top 40 style music. Also, these were the first bands I searched for, so they probably are not anomolous quirks. You could do your own searches for the likes of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Mazarin(truly obscure), etc.
Apparently, you do not understand what "top 40" music is. It is any music which is distributed primarily by record, which is not composed prior to performance, and which has a large following of people who are college kiddies or younger. Most of the above aren't even fathomably remotely obscure at all; e.g. I have never been to a record store, which didn't have a huge bin dedicated to Aphex Twin.
Also just because you did find one obscure top 40 act, does not mean that all obscure music is on there. It just means that one is. A while ago I got a copy of a book on modern recorded classical music, which reviewed 75 recorded composers, and searched for them on Napster, and only got hits for the 2 or 3 extremely well known ones (e.g. Shostakvoich). No remotely obscure composers were listed.
My theory: The reason for the availability of band X on Napster and the unavailability of others is the natural intersection of the group of people who use the Internet with the group of people who like band X. Hence the flood of They Might Be Giants on Napster, and the unavailability of newer jazz recordings.
Bzzt. Completely wrong. If you got to rec.music.classical.recordings you'll find tons of people who drool over Wilhelm Kempff but you won't find his music on Napster. On rec.music.bluenote you'll find tons of Charles Gayle fans, but you won't find his music on Napster.
The problem is that people who like serious music (unlike college/high-school kiddies who listen to top 40 techno pop punk music) are less interested in illegally ripping off the musicians who make the music they love, and the companies who produce the music they love.
How does the artist eat while he is busy "building his reputation"? Where does he get the $500,000 advance required to record an album? These are preciesely the functions which record companies perform today you know.
live shows, these ten be even more pricely than CDs and you have top pay for every one you go.
There is much more of a shortage of physical venues than shelf space; I live in a major US city and there are perhaps 50 shows in the metro area per weekend night, but 50,000 different CD titles available on local store shelves. In other words, there are not enough venues to support the current crop of recorded musicians.
Many musicians are old and physically incapicated, and do not have the energy to tour
Many musicians are dead. Nirvana can't tour because Cobain is dead, but can't the others still profit?
Many musicians do not tour, as the record has long ago surpassed live music as the medium of choice for artistic expression. For example, the Beatles didn't tour for the last several years of the group.
Most live shows are ritualistic and not interesting
Artist could have sponors, just like some some sports players have now. (and this do not mean selling his music to them, just using their logos in public apperances)
In other words, you want music to be even more commercial. Not content with their music being distributed as a physical commodity, you want the Boston Symphony Orchestra to change their name to the Verizon Philharmonic, and you want the orchestra to play cellular phone jingles between symphonic movements? You want Metallica to change their name to the Qualcomm Quartet, and sing songs about cell phone technology? How would this make music better
Seling their image. comercial are a very lucrative for celebritys.
Ah, yes. You want musicians to be turned into a brand name, with their logo plastered across people's chests, with a dot-com web site. And this will make the music better how?
Creating music "for hire" to movies or comercial. Off course not every music would like to do this, but it can done right?
Your only remotely sensible alternative (musicians able to make money off of music - the horror!), and indeed the way many musicians made money prior to the advent of recorded music (through commissions).
Lately people have been putting up some rather obscure stuff. I downloaded some tracks by a band called Camel (Heard of 'em?, didn't think so...), and while listening, I heard some faint noise in the background. Vinyl scratches!
People think Camel is obscure now? Wow. They are definitely one of the most popular 10 or 15 British progressive bands of the 1970's, and aren't anything even remotely close to obscure. I find it extremely odd that you would consider Camel obscure. I own almost every Camel album on the original vinyl, and a couple on CD, both of which are readily available in any independent store in the US. Some of their music is OK, but nothing to fight over. Some of my favorite progressive bands are ones like Echolyn, Anglagard, Anekdoten, Museo Rosenbach, PFM, and a bunch of others. I wouldn't consider any of those obscure, but only a couple have any presence at all on Napster!
Every serious music lover I have ever met loathes the selection of music on Napster, because it is just teeny bop top 40 type music. Try to find classical (the main embarrasment of Napster!), folk (no selection except a couple of tracks for the most mainstream artists), African pop (no tracks whatsoever), or jazz (OK selection for the biggest old names, but poor for newer and more obscure artists).
I think the problem is that people who are relatively new to music find somebody who isn't played on the biggest top 40 stations, and finds it on Napster, then declares that Napster has obscure music. When you try anything remotely obscure, something that doesn't have a huge following amoung junior high school students, you get no hits at all.
The cost of putting together an album is actually quite inexpensive, unless it is the recording companies (as opposed to individual bands) doing it, in which case the prices are artifically inflated by orders of magnitude.
Proof please? The average classical album costs between $100,000 and $500,000 to record (and sells 2,000-3,000 copies in its lifetime). Rock albums take much longer to record. I do not have figure on the cost to produce rock albums, but I suspect that an album which took six months to record, in a world class recording studio, with top name recording engineers, top name producers, and the most talented musicians is extremely expnesive to record. It is intuitively obvious that this is expensive to record, so please provide proof that it is "inexpensive" to record music at the same quality that the most expensively recorded music today.
Napster, GNUtella, and FreeNet have all already addressed (and solved) this issue. Bandwidth is paid by the end user (ISP fees). Servers and clients are peer to peer -- each user is paying for storage of the art, both for their personal use and for the use of others (as "servers") who wish to download said art from their local drives.
The person-to-person stealing technologies are stop-gap measures whose main goal is decetralization for criminal prosecution. The technology cannot scale to widespread music distribution, because it is primitive and fragile. Have you actually ever used Napster? The average success rate from picking a file in the search window, to successfully downloading it, is about 50%, at absolute best. The other problem is authenticity. How do I know the song is the real thing? If I download it from emusic or MP3.com, I know it is real, but if I download it from some college kiddie's dorm room in Kalamazoo, who knows what it is? The final issue is availability: the selection on Napster is dependent on the time you log in. If I log in, and nobody happens to be offering the song I want for download, I'm out of luck. With centralized severs dedicated to offering music, it is always available.
Much music is and will be free. You do not pay for music you hear on the radio, do you? No. You pay for the radio itself, and that is the end of it. When I was growing up, that was my sole source of music. It did not cost me a penny, it was free.
You definitely pay for music on the radio. Every song played on the radio gets pennies put into the copyright owner's pockets. Radio stations pay royalties for playing music, you know. You pay by permitting the mega-corporations play their jingles and sales pitches in your home. Or for college radio you pay with your tuition, public radio you pay with taxes, and community radio you pay with donations.
With digital products, where there is no scarcity whatsoever
Yes, but there is a massive scarcity of the means to professionally produce music, talented songwriters, talented musicians, and (most of all) the time required to produce the music. Look, to me "no scarcity" implies that you want to get a junior high orchestra, record them on your $400.00 Compaq with the mono speaker, and put the file on the internet for everybody to be disgusted with. With the democritization of the music business as you propose, where anybody regardless of talent or skills, can produce, record, and distribute music, the market is going to be so ridiculously saturated with just absolute crap. In some cases barriers to entry are good! As a consumer, how am I supposed to find the best music when I need to wade through five hundred files of old men singing in the shower to find one good track? Even in the current system, with scarcity I am overwhelmed - there are tens of thousands of CD's produced each year that I would like to buy, but only have money and time for a couple of hundred. When anybody can produce music, and when, moreoever, there is no distinction between amateur and professional music, it will be impossible to locate the best music.
if the RIAA wants to make money honestly off music, it should buy stock in the music hardware companies... but for all I know, they've probably already done that.
Wow. You are really, really confused. The RIAA is a non-profit organization and does not make money off of anything, music or music hardware, or anything else. You may have noticed that it is a dot-org?
Assuming you irresponsibly meant "the large record companies", at least two of the major five (soon to be four) record companies are deeply steeped in the hardware business: Sony (which owns Sony Music Entertainment, and a plethora of consumer hardware products), and EMI (by far the largest record company, and owns Philips/Maganvox). They make money if you buy the CD, or illegally pirate it, since they own much of the hardware infrastructure. Their bases are covered whether or not illegal piracy succeeds.
The people who will be most hurt in your scenario are the independent record companies, who put out the best music, but own no part of any music hardware business. All of those profits from CD-R's, and mobile MP3 players will be re-invested back to develop Britney Spears, N*Sync, and Backstreet Boys, while the most talented musicians, who are on independent labels, will wallow in poverty.
"Killing the RIAA" will not only not decrease the amoung of teen pop music produced, but it will significantly increase the amount of teen pop music produced. Here's why: when artists start selling direct, they get to keep ALL of their profits, instead of having most of the money skimmed off in order to pay for unprofitable artists. Britney Spears sold 12 million copies of her first album, but probably got very little royalties from it (probably less than $10 million). If she sold direct, she could have $120,000,000.00 or maybe even more. She could re-invest this money into promoting herself even further, and become even more pervasive. Today only 10% of artists make money, but they are subsidized by the profitable artists (through the record company). When the record companies disappear, so will 90% of artists, the artists who can't make money.
There are various other reasons why teen music will be so successful: artists will be forced to impress listeners with short, catchy snippets, and teen pop music is the only kind of music which is catchy. Moreover, in "online distribution" there is much more emphasis on hit singles (which is the realm of the top 40 teen singer), instead of actual albums. All of this tells me that top 40 teen music will be extremely successful after the record companies go out of business, and that almost nothing else will be produced.
You are confused. The 0.13 shrink is Tualatin which will be marketed as the Pentium III (i.e. it doesn not "require a new number"). Willamette is 0.18 (same as Coppermine), but is a 100% new microarchitecture (and has new instructions and features), so it has a new name.
You are VERY confused. The copyright on "Happy Birthday" has absolutely nothing to do with the "recording industry", but with the music publishing industry (ASCAP). This has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with RIAA, big record companies, recording industry, etc., etc., etc.
CDs are already the greatest price-gouging scam in the history of the world: what other industry found a way to dramatically reduce their costs (plastic vs. vinyl) and increase prices by 50-100% at the same time. Since then, every year or two they ratchet up the wholesale price by another buck for no particular reason.
This is incorrect. The real price of CD's has decreased by 50% in the last 15 years.
so... i have around 400 cds. by my calculations, the riaa owes me $1200.
You are extremely confused. If you buy CD's, you are not a customer of the RIAA; you are a customer of the record companies. The only customers of the RIAA are the record companies themselves.
CD's have been around for almost 20 years. When they first came out, they cost about $20. Compounded inflation since 1985 has been about 50%, so if CD prices held steady with inflation, they would cost about $30 today. And of course, the first CD's sounded horrible. They were not digitally remastered, they had no bonus tracks or new material, and they suffered from bit rot. Despite the unprecedented increase in quality, the huge number of value-added features CD's come with today over when they first debuted, their price has fallen, in real money, by 50%.
And the price of music has always fallen. At the turn of the century, it cost most than a week's salary to buy a double sided acetate record, which was extremely low fidelity, was fragile, and was 6 minutes in length. At the dawn of the hi-fi era, it took more than a day's salary to buy the new LP's, which were still not good as today's CD's. Now with the CD, we pay a tiny fraction of hourly hourly wages, for something which has much more music, last longer, and sounds better, and people still complain.
Slashdot Mirror
Since about 1997, Linux has become extremely, extremely mass mainstream, and has had write-ups in all major mass-cultural media outlets, including magazines they sell on news stands in grocecry stores, major metropolatin newspapers, and prime time news programming on television. Every second of press it gets is overwhelmingly netagtive. Every single major computer corporation, including IBM, Intel, Sun, HP, and Compaq have embraced Linux and sell primarily Linux products. Every PHM stepped on the bandwagon years and years ago, and practically every Windows and Unix installation has been ripped out and replaced by Linux. Linux IPO's have been extremely successful, and the market caps on Linux companies, as awell as Linux entrepeneurs, rivals that of any major multinational corporation. Practically every comuter user is using Linux including grandmothers, blue collar workers, and third world residents. Linux is THE buzz word of the last few years, and by far the trendiest and most fashionable new thing for the masses to latch on to.
Yet, people think it's still oppressed, and feel the need to defend it further. What are you defending against? Linux has no detractors, except perhaps competition such as Microsoft, but only just, and that represents a tiny portion of the marketplace.
The articles reads like it was written in 1995. Windows only cooperatively multitasks? WTF? This was trendy to discuss in 1994, but since the release of Windows 95 (not to mention NT, and 2000!) the issue has long since been resolved. The author needs to pull his head of the sand, fly back to earth, and check out everything that happened in the last five years, which he has missed.
Yes. Actually, it's a little-known fact that Intel's marketshare has actually increased since the beginning of the year (from 81% to 82%), and that Athlon's share has actually decreased from when it was first released (from a peak of about 5% late last year to now about 3%). Neither AMD or Transmeta are going to cut into Intel's share soon, and as the PC cycle starts to slow, Intel is at least somewhat diversified with networking, embedded, home products, and, most of all, capital investment. When that tide turns, AMD will be extremely hard hit, since they have nothing besides PC processors and flash. AMD will have a hard time cutting into Intel's server market, and to my knowledge, no OEM is planning a server based system, or even has business systems based on Athlon. I do believe that AMD is an excellent buy, though, and quite undervalued compared to Intel. They arguably have more growth potential but they will gain the market more as the industry grows, than at the expense of Intel (which, contrary to popular belief, is not happening).
Patel's decision was not at all unprecedented; I don't know of a single legal type who was surprised by the decision, or who is not wondering what Boies thinks he is doing. There are several cases which Patel refers in which people are guilty are contributory copyright infringement. She makes a very careful distinction between tools, and services (note for example, her treatment of Diamond RIO). There is a very well defined distinction between a general purpose tool (e.g. a car or film) and a service targeted toward a specific activity, and Patel points to other services which were geared toward copyright infringement which were shut down. You do not understand the distinction, since you are a moron, but fortunately the lawyers and judges who make the decisions do. Another key point is that Napster as a service can only allow legal files to be transferred, but they choose to transfer illegal files also.
Since you're new, you'd better read the judges decision before you expose your further ignorance on the site. The phone company is a general purpose telecomunnications medium, and the ISP is a general purpose packet switching medium. Napster is specifically for indexing music, and for connecting thieves to each other. You need to learn a thing about scale: Napster is like a service which puts together all of the parts to build a nuclear bomb, but Microsoft supplies just the switches used to ignite the bomb, and the phone company supplies the water needed in production, and the ISP the electricity. If you cannot see the difference between these roles, I recommend you seek an alternate line of work!
Dunno how involved you are on this level, but I've made upwards of $400 on mp3.com, where most of 'my competition' struggles to make $40 or $4, and I've told people how to do that and now some of the people I've told make more than me. I would love to think that people would do it your way but I am obliged to share the information of how to really do it with slashdotters, as I've seen other slashdotten musicians :)
Congratulations, you are making the average per-capita income of a farmer living in the Democratic Rebublic of Congo. Do you plan to quit you day job?
Free stuff beats restricted stuff for mindshre.
Britney Spears records have grossed approximately $300,000,000 and sold 20,000,000 units. Who knows how much tours have grossed. She is the epitome of the $17.99 mall CD, yet she has more mindshare than almost any person on the planet. How do you explain this? Only a couple of dozen people are knocking on the door to download your stuff for free, yet at least 12,000,000 different people have shelled out cash for Britney Spears albums. What gives?
You should read the Judge Patel's judgement which will answer all of your questions, and why the Napster napster service is guilty of contributory copyright infringement, but http and so forth are not.
Please get your facts straight. Microsoft runs no service which allows children to illegally pirate copryrighted music. That's Napster's job. Moreover Microsoft does not run a service for people to ilegally distribute programs which violate trade secrets. Napster and 2600 provide services; Microsoft provides products. Microsoft cannot get sued because they sell tools, but the defendants involved provide services, not tools. That's why they got sued and lost (or will lose) in court.
You missed one: I want to be able to share my CDs with my friends in exactly the same sense I share my cdplayer.
You consider 70 million strangers spread out around the world to be your friends?
How come no one out there is working feverishly on a new micropayment system, since none of the others were ever adopted?
Um,what's wrong with EMUS? Or even MPPP? How do they not fit your criteria?
Or has Napster already spoiled it, by allowing people to download their music for free, will it increasingly be an expectation of consumers that whatever they want to download from the internet should always be free?
This is definitely a risk for the long term (2-3 years), but I believe that there is still a window of opportunity for pay services to succeed. EMUS certainly has a consderably higher quality service than Napster does.
The P6 bus does only about 1 GB/s, but the Willamette bus does 3.2 GB/s. SDRAM can only do about 1 GB/s, while RDRAM can do 2.1 GB/s (I think that's right...), so RDRAM will be much faster on Willamette than on P6 (which is limited by the bus, not the RAM). The limitation today is the bus, but for the Pentium 4 the limitation will be the RAM. RAM speed is overrated; an L2 miss only comes along once every several million cycles!
I agree it takes a lot of time to wade through mp3.com's music. I've really tried and only found a few nice songs after hours of searching. mp3.com could really benefit from hiring people to rank the songs(as far as I've seen, the download ranking does not work well) or even have columns featuring some good songs. Ranking the groups would also help.
Me too, yes, and yes. Music review is going to be extremely importany in the post-record company music world, since basically you are going to have 100x as many artists as there are today, all without any promotion or reputation, vying to be listened to. Today, many casual music fans can get away without reading reviews (and instead depend on radio and/or friend's advice for recommendations), but I predict that reviews will be an integral part of the music experience.
MP3.com's current system of ranking is pathetic. The most downloaded songs get the most exposure, so what song is most likely to be downloaded next? Usually the most downloaded songs are not the best (hopefully!) but instead the most recognizable songs. If MP3.com had review columns, it would have serious potential. I do not envy the job of the reviewer however!
If that's the sort of thing you want to hear, the current system works.
12 million people bought Britney Spear's debut album. Music like that is what most people want. Are you going to tell 12 million teenage girls that from now on in order to find the best music they will have to wade through web sites of songs containg old men singing around the campfire in order to locate the music they like? They have more important things to worry about -- like algebra, boys, and passing the driving test, and want things as spoon-fed as possible. Like it or not, Britney Spears's fan's money (12,000,000 @ $15) counts a lot more than the money of people who listen to non-mainstream music, and artists such as her will lead the industry into whatever direction it will go in.
Now consider this. If you go over to MP3.com, you can listen to whatever songs are posted. These songs come from artists who are able to put together their music on their own, without a record company behind them, and obviously it didn't take them $500,000 to put it together.
Yes, and little of the music on MP3.com is good. And the little which is good was sponsored by record companies. All of the self-produced MP3.com artists which I have listened to sound like garbage (both artistically and production-wise). I have mostly downloaded their classical offerings, and they don't compare to the CD issues. They are done by amateurs, not world-class professionals.
If you think something is crap, you simply move on to another artist.
That's not practical. See, when a company puts out a CD, they risk two things. First, since production/distribution is so expensive, they can't afford to put out bad music which nobody will buy. Second, their reputation rests on the quality of the music. MP3.com will accept any artist, and has no "reputation". It costs nearly nothing to host music, so they will take anything. A reputable record label -- such as Rounder or Harmonia Mundi -- will not admit fluff to their labels, and the name alone guarantees that it will be quality. With self-produced music, anything will be admitted, the market will be saturated, and you will have to wade through hundreds of hours of Glenn Gould wannabee's in order to locate a decent performance of the Goldberg Variations. How is this supposed to be better?
How much was that again? You mean you can get an album for less than $10, and the artist gets more per CD than they would have from a record company?
Proof please? MP3.com lists the amount of money artists have earned and almost all of them are in the 2-3 digits. Please prove that they receive more money this way than with a record company.
And horror of horrors, there's noone preventing you from listening to the music, for free, as much as you like before the purchase?
You can preview music on web sites such as amazon.com, cdnow, and emusic for free. Furthermore you can listen to the CD in many stores. What's the problem?
Well, actually, there will also be 0.15 um, which is what AMD is going to do with the next Athlon shrink. They claim they will be able to do it faster than 0.13 um, so they will be quicker to market. Who really knows ...
A recent search from one Napster server returned more than 20 unique songs from Atom and His Package, more songs than I cared to count for Aphex Twin, most of the Reverend Horton Heat's song catalog, about ten Fig Dish songs, and nearly every Over the Rhine song. None of these bands have had a significant amount of top 40 airplay (I'm fairly certain that Atom & His Package has never had commercial radio airplay). While the bands listed represent a small variety of genres and sub-genres, none of these bands are teenybop top 40 style music. Also, these were the first bands I searched for, so they probably are not anomolous quirks. You could do your own searches for the likes of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Mazarin(truly obscure), etc.
Apparently, you do not understand what "top 40" music is. It is any music which is distributed primarily by record, which is not composed prior to performance, and which has a large following of people who are college kiddies or younger. Most of the above aren't even fathomably remotely obscure at all; e.g. I have never been to a record store, which didn't have a huge bin dedicated to Aphex Twin.
Also just because you did find one obscure top 40 act, does not mean that all obscure music is on there. It just means that one is. A while ago I got a copy of a book on modern recorded classical music, which reviewed 75 recorded composers, and searched for them on Napster, and only got hits for the 2 or 3 extremely well known ones (e.g. Shostakvoich). No remotely obscure composers were listed.
My theory: The reason for the availability of band X on Napster and the unavailability of others is the natural intersection of the group of people who use the Internet with the group of people who like band X. Hence the flood of They Might Be Giants on Napster, and the unavailability of newer jazz recordings.
Bzzt. Completely wrong. If you got to rec.music.classical.recordings you'll find tons of people who drool over Wilhelm Kempff but you won't find his music on Napster. On rec.music.bluenote you'll find tons of Charles Gayle fans, but you won't find his music on Napster.
The problem is that people who like serious music (unlike college/high-school kiddies who listen to top 40 techno pop punk music) are less interested in illegally ripping off the musicians who make the music they love, and the companies who produce the music they love.
How does the artist eat while he is busy "building his reputation"? Where does he get the $500,000 advance required to record an album? These are preciesely the functions which record companies perform today you know.
live shows, these ten be even more pricely than CDs and you have top pay for every one you go.
Artist could have sponors, just like some some sports players have now. (and this do not mean selling his music to them, just using their logos in public apperances)
In other words, you want music to be even more commercial . Not content with their music being distributed as a physical commodity, you want the Boston Symphony Orchestra to change their name to the Verizon Philharmonic, and you want the orchestra to play cellular phone jingles between symphonic movements? You want Metallica to change their name to the Qualcomm Quartet, and sing songs about cell phone technology? How would this make music better
Seling their image. comercial are a very lucrative for celebritys.
Ah, yes. You want musicians to be turned into a brand name, with their logo plastered across people's chests, with a dot-com web site. And this will make the music better how?
Creating music "for hire" to movies or comercial. Off course not every music would like to do this, but it can done right?
Your only remotely sensible alternative (musicians able to make money off of music - the horror!), and indeed the way many musicians made money prior to the advent of recorded music (through commissions).
Napster isn't just the latest crap on the radio.
Yes it is.
Lately people have been putting up some rather obscure stuff. I downloaded some tracks by a band called Camel (Heard of 'em?, didn't think so...), and while listening, I heard some faint noise in the background. Vinyl scratches!
People think Camel is obscure now? Wow. They are definitely one of the most popular 10 or 15 British progressive bands of the 1970's, and aren't anything even remotely close to obscure. I find it extremely odd that you would consider Camel obscure. I own almost every Camel album on the original vinyl, and a couple on CD, both of which are readily available in any independent store in the US. Some of their music is OK, but nothing to fight over. Some of my favorite progressive bands are ones like Echolyn, Anglagard, Anekdoten, Museo Rosenbach, PFM, and a bunch of others. I wouldn't consider any of those obscure, but only a couple have any presence at all on Napster!
Every serious music lover I have ever met loathes the selection of music on Napster, because it is just teeny bop top 40 type music. Try to find classical (the main embarrasment of Napster!), folk (no selection except a couple of tracks for the most mainstream artists), African pop (no tracks whatsoever), or jazz (OK selection for the biggest old names, but poor for newer and more obscure artists).
I think the problem is that people who are relatively new to music find somebody who isn't played on the biggest top 40 stations, and finds it on Napster, then declares that Napster has obscure music. When you try anything remotely obscure, something that doesn't have a huge following amoung junior high school students, you get no hits at all.
The cost of putting together an album is actually quite inexpensive, unless it is the recording companies (as opposed to individual bands) doing it, in which case the prices are artifically inflated by orders of magnitude.
Proof please? The average classical album costs between $100,000 and $500,000 to record (and sells 2,000-3,000 copies in its lifetime). Rock albums take much longer to record. I do not have figure on the cost to produce rock albums, but I suspect that an album which took six months to record, in a world class recording studio, with top name recording engineers, top name producers, and the most talented musicians is extremely expnesive to record. It is intuitively obvious that this is expensive to record, so please provide proof that it is "inexpensive" to record music at the same quality that the most expensively recorded music today.
Napster, GNUtella, and FreeNet have all already addressed (and solved) this issue. Bandwidth is paid by the end user (ISP fees). Servers and clients are peer to peer -- each user is paying for storage of the art, both for their personal use and for the use of others (as "servers") who wish to download said art from their local drives.
The person-to-person stealing technologies are stop-gap measures whose main goal is decetralization for criminal prosecution. The technology cannot scale to widespread music distribution, because it is primitive and fragile. Have you actually ever used Napster? The average success rate from picking a file in the search window, to successfully downloading it, is about 50%, at absolute best. The other problem is authenticity. How do I know the song is the real thing? If I download it from emusic or MP3.com, I know it is real, but if I download it from some college kiddie's dorm room in Kalamazoo, who knows what it is? The final issue is availability: the selection on Napster is dependent on the time you log in. If I log in, and nobody happens to be offering the song I want for download, I'm out of luck. With centralized severs dedicated to offering music, it is always available.
Much music is and will be free. You do not pay for music you hear on the radio, do you? No. You pay for the radio itself, and that is the end of it. When I was growing up, that was my sole source of music. It did not cost me a penny, it was free.
You definitely pay for music on the radio. Every song played on the radio gets pennies put into the copyright owner's pockets. Radio stations pay royalties for playing music, you know. You pay by permitting the mega-corporations play their jingles and sales pitches in your home. Or for college radio you pay with your tuition, public radio you pay with taxes, and community radio you pay with donations.
With digital products, where there is no scarcity whatsoever
Yes, but there is a massive scarcity of the means to professionally produce music, talented songwriters, talented musicians, and (most of all) the time required to produce the music. Look, to me "no scarcity" implies that you want to get a junior high orchestra, record them on your $400.00 Compaq with the mono speaker, and put the file on the internet for everybody to be disgusted with. With the democritization of the music business as you propose, where anybody regardless of talent or skills, can produce, record, and distribute music, the market is going to be so ridiculously saturated with just absolute crap. In some cases barriers to entry are good! As a consumer, how am I supposed to find the best music when I need to wade through five hundred files of old men singing in the shower to find one good track? Even in the current system, with scarcity I am overwhelmed - there are tens of thousands of CD's produced each year that I would like to buy, but only have money and time for a couple of hundred. When anybody can produce music, and when, moreoever, there is no distinction between amateur and professional music, it will be impossible to locate the best music.
if the RIAA wants to make money honestly off music, it should buy stock in the music hardware companies... but for all I know, they've probably already done that.
Wow. You are really, really confused. The RIAA is a non-profit organization and does not make money off of anything, music or music hardware, or anything else. You may have noticed that it is a dot-org?
Assuming you irresponsibly meant "the large record companies", at least two of the major five (soon to be four) record companies are deeply steeped in the hardware business: Sony (which owns Sony Music Entertainment, and a plethora of consumer hardware products), and EMI (by far the largest record company, and owns Philips/Maganvox). They make money if you buy the CD, or illegally pirate it, since they own much of the hardware infrastructure. Their bases are covered whether or not illegal piracy succeeds.
The people who will be most hurt in your scenario are the independent record companies, who put out the best music, but own no part of any music hardware business. All of those profits from CD-R's, and mobile MP3 players will be re-invested back to develop Britney Spears, N*Sync, and Backstreet Boys, while the most talented musicians, who are on independent labels, will wallow in poverty.
"Killing the RIAA" will not only not decrease the amoung of teen pop music produced, but it will significantly increase the amount of teen pop music produced. Here's why: when artists start selling direct, they get to keep ALL of their profits, instead of having most of the money skimmed off in order to pay for unprofitable artists. Britney Spears sold 12 million copies of her first album, but probably got very little royalties from it (probably less than $10 million). If she sold direct, she could have $120,000,000.00 or maybe even more. She could re-invest this money into promoting herself even further, and become even more pervasive. Today only 10% of artists make money, but they are subsidized by the profitable artists (through the record company). When the record companies disappear, so will 90% of artists, the artists who can't make money.
There are various other reasons why teen music will be so successful: artists will be forced to impress listeners with short, catchy snippets, and teen pop music is the only kind of music which is catchy. Moreover, in "online distribution" there is much more emphasis on hit singles (which is the realm of the top 40 teen singer), instead of actual albums. All of this tells me that top 40 teen music will be extremely successful after the record companies go out of business, and that almost nothing else will be produced.
You are confused. The 0.13 shrink is Tualatin which will be marketed as the Pentium III (i.e. it doesn not "require a new number"). Willamette is 0.18 (same as Coppermine), but is a 100% new microarchitecture (and has new instructions and features), so it has a new name.
You are VERY confused. The copyright on "Happy Birthday" has absolutely nothing to do with the "recording industry", but with the music publishing industry (ASCAP). This has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with RIAA, big record companies, recording industry, etc., etc., etc.
CDs are already the greatest price-gouging scam in the history of the world: what other industry found a way to dramatically reduce their costs (plastic vs. vinyl) and increase prices by 50-100% at the same time. Since then, every year or two they ratchet up the wholesale price by another buck for no particular reason.
This is incorrect. The real price of CD's has decreased by 50% in the last 15 years.
so... i have around 400 cds. by my calculations, the riaa owes me $1200.
You are extremely confused. If you buy CD's, you are not a customer of the RIAA; you are a customer of the record companies. The only customers of the RIAA are the record companies themselves.
CD's have been around for almost 20 years. When they first came out, they cost about $20. Compounded inflation since 1985 has been about 50%, so if CD prices held steady with inflation, they would cost about $30 today. And of course, the first CD's sounded horrible. They were not digitally remastered, they had no bonus tracks or new material, and they suffered from bit rot. Despite the unprecedented increase in quality, the huge number of value-added features CD's come with today over when they first debuted, their price has fallen, in real money, by 50%.
And the price of music has always fallen. At the turn of the century, it cost most than a week's salary to buy a double sided acetate record, which was extremely low fidelity, was fragile, and was 6 minutes in length. At the dawn of the hi-fi era, it took more than a day's salary to buy the new LP's, which were still not good as today's CD's. Now with the CD, we pay a tiny fraction of hourly hourly wages, for something which has much more music, last longer, and sounds better, and people still complain.