1. Radio stations pay royalties to play imperfectly transmitted songs. CD resellers on the web pay royalties to play short, low quality excerpts as previews on their sites. Napster does not pay any royalty (or get any permission) to play exact duplicates of an entire work (not just an excerpt!) See the difference?
2. Irrelevant. If you can't afford the item, you should refrain from buying it, instead of illegally stealing it. Especially for luxury items such as recorded music.
It would be trivial for Napster to prevent transferring illegally stolen music: simply prevent transferring any file with a valid MP3 header. This would give a few false positives, of course, but I think that's Judge Patel's (and the RIAA's) point: Napster created a monster (Patel's words), and now it is their burden to control it. If there is no effective way to filter out the illegaly stolen music (as there isn't with today's technology), then the only way Napster would not be guilty of contributory copyright infringement is to pull the plug on the services all together.
This is ludicrous. Businesses do not have any intrinsic or legal right to make money. If customers are "destroying your business model" then your business model sucks and deserves to fail.
Interestingly, though, this was Napster's defense against the preliminary injunction. Their argument boiled down to, "If our music service is cut-off we will have to layoff employees and go out of business" (how they make money off people downloading music is anybody's guess, though).
Why do you have a double standard? Why do you think it is OK for Napster to make this argument, but not for the record companies to make it?
I wonder what Touretzky would do if I printed up t-shirt's with all his credit card numbers, addresses, social security numbers and then sold them. By his argument it would be legal (and right) to do so, because he incorrectly believes that anything which can be printed on a t-shirt (regardless of how the information was gathered) can be freely given to the world without consequence.
Ah, yes, Good old Tom Pabst. Intel lover at large. Let's go back to the old archives and pull out a gem: "By this time next year, AMD will have captured the lead in all relevant desktop microprocessor markets and will be seen as the acknowledged technology leader. Within two years, Intel, citing eroding margins, will effectively withdraw from this market except in the production of proprietary multi-processor Web servers based on the McKinley (the Itanium's successor) and consumer-oriented devices based around StrongARM derivatives." - www.tomshardware.com, 6-Feb-2000
OK, not a year has passed, but it's time for a bit of a mid-year update on Tom's predictions. Since Tom uttered these foolish words, the following has happened:
o Intel's marketshare has increased from 81% (at the beginning of the year) to 82% (as of Q2)
o Intel announced record quarterly revenue in Q200, its traditionally weakest quarter
So where is all of this switch to AMD that we were supposed to see? Are you going to post a midyear update to admit to everyone you were completely, and utterly, wrong?
Sigh... this technology is not encryption but is an ID device. Think of it as a "serial number". Copy it all you want but the serial number, traceable to you, is still there.
The idea is that the decode device puts an inaudible unquie watermark in each instance of the song, which is traceable to you (the owner of the decode device). So put all sorts of Y-cables, filter through all sorts of microphones held up to your spearker, keep converting from analog to digital and back, but as long as that signal is there (which will exist as long as the audio is reasonably high quality... and when it's not, it's not worth copying), it is traceable to you.
The responsibility is not on Freenet or Gnutella. That's the point. This technology does not matter how it is distributed, but who originated the copy. The responsibility is on the person who originally violated copyright and gave it someone else.
All they need to do is track the number of copies on Freenet (or whatever swapping channel is used) which originated from you, then multiply by the price, and then sue the pants off you for that amount, since it is trivial to show you did that much financial damage.
I will remind you that this very technology has been used to track and prosecute people who have illegally pirated pornographic images from web sites and put them on other sites.
The real problem of introducing a secure music -- not even to question whether it is technically feasible -- is that there is 100+ years of unprotected media in wide circulation. Secure music would help in the long term (20+ years), but definitely not in the short term. A wholesale media change from CD to secure digital format would take at a minimum 10 years, as the sheer penetration of CD's was so successful.
I like CD's a lot, and vinyl also, but I do welcome the advent of a new technology, as long as it is technically superior (MP3 is far inferior to either). Of course, the people who develop this standard realize that they will have to make the product substantially better to make up for the lack of convenience, so I don't anticipate this being a problem.
The problem is that as time goes on, online music will be thought to be a replacement for CD's. This is the RIAA's real fear.
Right now, MP3's are of much lower quality than CD's (IMHO, completely unlistenable at anything less that 192kbps, and at that frequency still much worse than CD's), and do not have the "value added" features such as liner notes, graphics, extra content, and so forth. As soon as the technology develops so people can package everything that a CD has with as high quality content, and transfer over the network in seconds, then the record companies have a real problem.
The whole notion of "people will buy the CD, because it's better" is an inherently dated argument. That is true TODAY, but won't be in five years. Courtney Love thinks the only people who should fear MP3 piracy are people who have filler on their albums; but in a few years it will be feasible to transfer a whole album quickly.
In addition to this, there is the psychological aspect. There are some kiddies who have never bought CD's and only use online delivery, and as more and more people grow up into this model, more people will adopt it.
In summary, the argument that "people will pay for the CD", is a bad argument, because it is based on current technology, in which current online music technology (MP3 format, plus the internet infrastructure) does not technically compete with CD's; however in two years this argument will be completely moot.
If you look at the request for the injunction, it lists a dozen cases of person-to-person stealing, where it was declared illegal (how is an individual operating a web site serving individuals not person-to-person stealing?
Another interesting feature of "fair use", is that there has never been a case where copying the entire work (as music pirates do), has been declared acceptable when used for non-personal use. Fair use has been around forever, and mostly pertains to using excerpts of works for review, etc. The chance of being granted fair use is inversely proportional to the amount of the work which is copied.
You expect others to figure out how to make money off of their art online, but you can't figure out how to make money off of your writing, except by selling dead trees, even though your book would be completely amenable to distribution online.
Instead of sitting in your pearly white ivory tower on slashdot, and instead of preaching to the world about how things should be, why don't you actually act on it and show the world it can be done?
It's awfully easy to sit up in your little nest, and tell other people what they should and should not be doing, but it's a lot harder to actually take action on your words, and change the world. If you expect anybody who has graduated junior high to even consider what you write about the "new media", "free culture", "corporatism", blah, blah, blah, then you need to get off your high horse and actually demonstrate that it can be done.
You are in a perfect position to do this. I dare you to. Of course, it's a moot point now, because you have already garned several million dollars at obscenely high margins, so it wouldn't hurt too much to stop that income. The only solution is to write a new book, and publish it online. You believe it would work. Why don't you do it?
The thing aoubt production of music (#2) is that technoloical advances make it easy/cheap, i.e. if more people buying home studios then home studios become cheaper.
I see no evidence yet that amateur musicians using consumer grade recording equipment can produce music that compares with professionally produced music. To be sure, the amateur produced music on MP3.com is unlistenable (solely in terms of recording quality), while most professionally produced music is of extremely high recording quality. Barring exceptional and unforseen changes in recording equipment quality, this will continue.
Also, development of artist (#1) should really be the job of the artist anywho since the record companies do should a crappy job (ala Britney Spears)
The very fact that you have heard of Britney Spears proves that they are doing a good job developing her. As a challenge, name one single artist you have heard of who has been completely self-promoted (without the benefit of an agent promoting him). To go further, name somebody whose music was compelling enough to self 12 million copies of a single album, entirely through self promotion.
Anyway, we can now see that #1 and #2 should be done by the artist while #3 can be done by the fans and the artist.
MP3.com has existed for 4 years, and has yet to develop a compelling new artist of international acclaim. In that time, the record companies, both independent and major, have developed hundreds of such artists. Now you are saying that not only do artists not need the services of the agent (MP3.com), but they can do it by themselves. Well, there is just no evidence to support your claim. Until you can show me an artist who comes to prominence without the benefit of a record company, I cannot validate your claim.
Finally, copyrights were created to force record companies to compensate artists, but fans supporting artists is a non-issue.. let me repeat that "fans supporting artists is a non-issue." Why? It's pretty fucking simple, no artists == no music, so the fans of Joe Artists will need to pay Joe or Joe will get a day job and the fans will not get much new stuff by Joe. Now, Joe needs to be a savy buisness man to make shure that it's easy for his fans to pay him, but that's not really that difficult.
The very fact that artists now need to become businessmen is greatly detrimental to the art. In the current system, artists simply need to produce music which people like in order to be popular. The record companies took care of promotion, and selling themselves. And, I repeat: no recorded music artist has ever become popular without the aid of record company promotion. Now, in the new system, only the artists who now how to sell themselves will be heard, and the time, enegery, and stress which they have to do business will eat into their music creation processes. How many of them will just hire agents to do the work? How many music agent companies will emerge as a result? How will these new entities be any different (or any better) than the current record companies?
1)How much money per album/single do bands get? 2)How much does it cost to record an album? 3)How much do record companies make from an album/single?
The answers to the above questions are not publically documented, but one thing we do know is that the break even point for a CD is 500,000 copies. This leaves open two variables (the cost, and the price the record company gets), and has interesting implications:
If the cost to record is $500,000, then the record company nets $1 per copy. If the record company nets $5 per copy, then the cost to record is $2,500,000.
4) What, in fact, are record companies for?
To develop artists. See below.
OK, now picture a new scenario. I record my songs for £1000 (US$1500).
You cannot record an album for that little, unless your music is lo-fi pop. Professional recording studio time costs something like $300/hour, and most rock albums take several months to record. The role of the record companies is to give the money required to produce the album up front. It's a risk, because 90% of artists fail to make money.
I sign up to an online distributer. They sell my songs for download for 35p (50c). I get 90% of that, £3.80 (US$5.40 ) for a 12-track album. I'm richer, the service is richer, the consumer is richer, the record company loses.
How are people going to hear about you, and who is going to pay for music, when there are hundreds of thouands of people trying to do the same thing? The record company would try to promote you, but you have bypassed that.
Have you ever heard of market saturation?
One of the things which the music industry is absoltely ingenious about, is controlling the quantity of music which is in the market at one time. If you look at something like the transition from LP to CD, and look at the rate of reissues in genres such as jazz and classical, they have been paced out perfectly, as to not overwhelm the consumer. They figure the consumer's budget, the number they want, and release the quantity to fill that. They also do this with pop acts - there are only a few new stars per year.
If a zillion new musicians saturate the market at once, everybody loses. The consumer is overwhelmed because he will be confused about what music he should buy. The radio stations will have one hell of a task figuring out what to play. The artists will lose because they will get a much smaller piece of the same pie (remember, consumer's music income is constant).
Yes. I do indeed believe that the purpose of this would be in order to pay the artists and the companies to produce the music.
However, I do not understand why it would be advantageous to do this in a peer-to-peer fashion, whose only real role is to decentralize the operation so it is more difficult to prosecute pirates. Once the record companies legitimize online delivery, I would rather download from their servers instead of some college kiddie's Win98 machine, so I can be assured it is complete, authentic, etc.
From what I understand, advertising based revenue models on the internet have basically been declared obsolete, because money could not be recouped from them. I bet this would be much more true for music, than for general services. It costs a heck of a lot more to record and produce a modern rock album or a symphony, than it does to deliver an online greeting card.
Furthermore, it is potentially extremely dangerous to mix advertising with music, because the music itself may become commercialized. If there is a commercial when I download the music, what's next? Will the artists start singing jingles and put advertising into their music? Will orchestras start playing the theme jingles for products in between movemnts of a symphony? Let's just pay with it and be done, so the music does not become further diluted.
The RIAA does NOT pay radio stations to play their music. The radio stations pay royalities to the copyright holders to play music.
You would probably be very surprised at the extent of royalties to copyright holders in the music industry. They also get royalties from online samples which places like Amazon.com have, and from jukebox play. They get royalties every time a song is played on TV or in a movie ("Happy Birthday" was copyrighted for a very long time, which is why they always songs "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" in TV's/movies).
There was a big lawsuit about this in the 1920's, which is surprisingly relevant today. The record companies sued the radio stations because they were playing their music for free, and not giving any money to the producers of the music. The radio stations argued that radio play actually increased sales because it acted as free promotion for the music (sound familiar?)
The radio stations lost.
As a result, commercial radio stations have had to pay a royalty every time they play a song on the radio.
Indeed. One of the things that most people forget is that the record companies are in several different business at once:
1. Development of artists
2. Production of music
3. Distribution of music
Napster, and this new service, only purports to do #3, and MP3.com purports to do #1 and #3 (and I would argue that it does #1 poorly, as no artist it has developed has reached internation acclaim). Most of the expense in making a record are in #1 and #2 (which most online services don't do at all). The online services think that because they do #3, that they deserve all of the revenue for the item, even though that is merely the final step in the process (i.e. they depend on outsiders to do the difficult and costly part, yet apparently give them no benefits).
My prediction for the advent of mainstream commercial online delivery is that the industry will become more horizontally integrated rather than vertical integrated, and that they record companies will contract with online delivery companies (such as MP3.com, and whatever ends up with Napster) to actually delivery the music, but they themselves will continue to develop and produce music (something which they are very good at, and which no online distribution company has yet demonstrated competence in).
NONE of the online music services have classical music.
Napster has an EXTREMELY thin selection of classical music. Exactly none of the selections list the performer of the piece. Only people who are extremely new to music, or extremely casual about music, do not care who the performer was. The serious music fan needs to know the performer, the conductor, and all of the soloists. On the MP3's on Napster none of this info is available. For all the downloader knows, the selections are ripped from the 50 CD's for $25 that they sell in metal boxes in drug stores, instead of the world class performers.
MP3.com has a very poor selection of classical music. It has, basically, no orchestral music, save for some guys who have conducted a MIDI orchestra of a piece (yeesh!). I have downloaded instrumentalist selections from MP3.com, and the sound quality is just AWFUL! Basically, my experience confirms my original fear about classical music: it is too expensive and difficult for amateurs to record, so it either comes out sounding like crap (solo stuff), or just isn't recorded because the results would be astoundingly bad (orchestral stuff).
There are technical limitations as well, why classical is not successful on line. A classical peice usually consists of several "tracks" on a CD, and for some inane reason, people who put the stuff online make a separate file for each movement of the piece. This makes it almost impossible to track down a whole piece of music (Napster is chocked full of "Beethoven Sym. #5, mvmnt 1", but often you cannot find movements 2-4).
Most classical music demands a good acoustic environment, and when your hard drive is spinning, and your fans in the computer are throbbing it is not possible to listen to anything except loud, throbbing pop music.
The MP3 format is designed for pop music; its only ID fields are "artist", "album", and "song". Classical music does not have "albums", and "songs", and has at least two artists per recording. It also needs more specialized fields such as "conductor", "soloists", "orchestra", "opus number", and the like.
Classical music is much too long to download over the internet. The typical symphony is 40-70 minutes in length, and the typical opera is much longer. The only music amenable to download are five minute pop songs, not longer pieces of music.
Classical music is in serious danger of being left behind as the world moves to online delivery. It demands to be left in CD format, until the technology catches up with its demands (which are considerably higher than pop music). However, if pop music moves away from CD into the online world, classical music will also die (whether or not it makes online), because the classical CD business depends on the pop CD business for the infrastructure.
Classical music being one of western civilization's two or three greatest achievements, this would be an extremely tragic event of mammoth proportions. And nobody seems to care!
You indeed have a point. I would love to see a Multic's like OS (or any PDP-10 OS) ported to the PC. Heck, I'd like to see VMS ported to the PC! Yes, this technology has been around forever, but was displaced by a certain evil operating system.
Buffer exploits can be be solved by more liberal use of segments. You can have one segment for VM from 0-2G, which is Ex/Re, and another for VM from 2-4G, which is Re/Wr. The problem is that OS'es like Windows and Linux are very primitive, and just use four segments, code and data flat selectors for each privilege level. If this scheme was used, buffer overflow exploits would be literally impossible, but it requires advanced OS'es which have not been developed yet.
It is also the fault of the language. For its first 10 years (when it did not have C), there was literally never a buffer overflow bug on any program in VMS. For example, the internet worm exploited only Unix hosts, and couldn't do anything to VMS hosts. However, in the last 10 years, VMS has adopted more C programs, and the number of buffer overflow exploits has risen from 0 to a siliar amount on Unix. The string and array methodologies under C are incredibly fragile and primitive (as well as very low performance - you need to access byte at a time, which is VERY SLOW on modern architectures), and more advanced languages have much more high performance and more secure methodologies of dealing with data.
The third side has existed for a very long time (you are very out of touch), and is sort of what I advocate (I tend to be between the third side and the RIAA side).
Michael Robertson, the CEO of MP3.com, is the main proponent of the third side and he is against Napster (he is a witness against Napster in this case), and he is also against the RIAA (note the RIAA vs. MP3.com case).
And the law could very well be interpreted to say that an online distro method like Napster is legal, too.
Not it can't. The home recording act is about copying, not distribution, and limits the property to be shared with a small circle of friends, which anybody with a clue at all, knows does not mean 20 million strangers.
Would anyone here pay $5 a month to use napster if that allowed you to download any and as many songs as you want as well as letting you share and and as many songs as you like?
How much do you charge for symphonies? The only music based on "songs" is pop teeny-bopper top forty music, and anybody who is older than junior high age doesn't listen to "songs". Is that all you carry (just like Napster), or are you going to carry more serious music?
Slashdot Mirror
1. Radio stations pay royalties to play imperfectly transmitted songs. CD resellers on the web pay royalties to play short, low quality excerpts as previews on their sites. Napster does not pay any royalty (or get any permission) to play exact duplicates of an entire work (not just an excerpt!) See the difference?
2. Irrelevant. If you can't afford the item, you should refrain from buying it, instead of illegally stealing it. Especially for luxury items such as recorded music.
It would be trivial for Napster to prevent transferring illegally stolen music: simply prevent transferring any file with a valid MP3 header. This would give a few false positives, of course, but I think that's Judge Patel's (and the RIAA's) point: Napster created a monster (Patel's words), and now it is their burden to control it. If there is no effective way to filter out the illegaly stolen music (as there isn't with today's technology), then the only way Napster would not be guilty of contributory copyright infringement is to pull the plug on the services all together.
This is ludicrous. Businesses do not have any intrinsic or legal right to make money. If customers are "destroying your business model" then your business model sucks and deserves to fail.
Interestingly, though, this was Napster's defense against the preliminary injunction. Their argument boiled down to, "If our music service is cut-off we will have to layoff employees and go out of business" (how they make money off people downloading music is anybody's guess, though).
Why do you have a double standard? Why do you think it is OK for Napster to make this argument, but not for the record companies to make it?
I wonder what Touretzky would do if I printed up t-shirt's with all his credit card numbers, addresses, social security numbers and then sold them. By his argument it would be legal (and right) to do so, because he incorrectly believes that anything which can be printed on a t-shirt (regardless of how the information was gathered) can be freely given to the world without consequence.
Ah, yes, Good old Tom Pabst. Intel lover at large. Let's go back to the old archives and pull out a gem: "By this time next year, AMD will have captured the lead in all relevant desktop microprocessor markets and will be seen as the acknowledged technology leader. Within two years, Intel, citing eroding margins, will effectively withdraw from this market except in the production of proprietary multi-processor Web servers based on the McKinley (the Itanium's successor) and consumer-oriented devices based around StrongARM derivatives." - www.tomshardware.com, 6-Feb-2000
OK, not a year has passed, but it's time for a bit of a mid-year update on Tom's predictions. Since Tom uttered these foolish words, the following has happened:
o Intel's marketshare has increased from 81% (at the beginning of the year) to 82% (as of Q2)
o Intel announced record quarterly revenue in Q200, its traditionally weakest quarter
So where is all of this switch to AMD that we were supposed to see? Are you going to post a midyear update to admit to everyone you were completely, and utterly, wrong?
Sigh ... this technology is not encryption but is an ID device. Think of it as a "serial number". Copy it all you want but the serial number, traceable to you, is still there.
The idea is that the decode device puts an inaudible unquie watermark in each instance of the song, which is traceable to you (the owner of the decode device). So put all sorts of Y-cables, filter through all sorts of microphones held up to your spearker, keep converting from analog to digital and back, but as long as that signal is there (which will exist as long as the audio is reasonably high quality ... and when it's not, it's not worth copying), it is traceable to you.
The responsibility is not on Freenet or Gnutella. That's the point. This technology does not matter how it is distributed, but who originated the copy. The responsibility is on the person who originally violated copyright and gave it someone else.
All they need to do is track the number of copies on Freenet (or whatever swapping channel is used) which originated from you, then multiply by the price, and then sue the pants off you for that amount, since it is trivial to show you did that much financial damage.
I will remind you that this very technology has been used to track and prosecute people who have illegally pirated pornographic images from web sites and put them on other sites.
The real problem of introducing a secure music -- not even to question whether it is technically feasible -- is that there is 100+ years of unprotected media in wide circulation. Secure music would help in the long term (20+ years), but definitely not in the short term. A wholesale media change from CD to secure digital format would take at a minimum 10 years, as the sheer penetration of CD's was so successful.
I like CD's a lot, and vinyl also, but I do welcome the advent of a new technology, as long as it is technically superior (MP3 is far inferior to either). Of course, the people who develop this standard realize that they will have to make the product substantially better to make up for the lack of convenience, so I don't anticipate this being a problem.
The problem is that as time goes on, online music will be thought to be a replacement for CD's. This is the RIAA's real fear.
Right now, MP3's are of much lower quality than CD's (IMHO, completely unlistenable at anything less that 192kbps, and at that frequency still much worse than CD's), and do not have the "value added" features such as liner notes, graphics, extra content, and so forth. As soon as the technology develops so people can package everything that a CD has with as high quality content, and transfer over the network in seconds, then the record companies have a real problem.
The whole notion of "people will buy the CD, because it's better" is an inherently dated argument. That is true TODAY, but won't be in five years. Courtney Love thinks the only people who should fear MP3 piracy are people who have filler on their albums; but in a few years it will be feasible to transfer a whole album quickly.
In addition to this, there is the psychological aspect. There are some kiddies who have never bought CD's and only use online delivery, and as more and more people grow up into this model, more people will adopt it.
In summary, the argument that "people will pay for the CD", is a bad argument, because it is based on current technology, in which current online music technology (MP3 format, plus the internet infrastructure) does not technically compete with CD's; however in two years this argument will be completely moot.
If you look at the request for the injunction, it lists a dozen cases of person-to-person stealing, where it was declared illegal (how is an individual operating a web site serving individuals not person-to-person stealing?
Another interesting feature of "fair use", is that there has never been a case where copying the entire work (as music pirates do), has been declared acceptable when used for non-personal use. Fair use has been around forever, and mostly pertains to using excerpts of works for review, etc. The chance of being granted fair use is inversely proportional to the amount of the work which is copied.
You expect others to figure out how to make money off of their art online, but you can't figure out how to make money off of your writing, except by selling dead trees, even though your book would be completely amenable to distribution online.
Instead of sitting in your pearly white ivory tower on slashdot, and instead of preaching to the world about how things should be, why don't you actually act on it and show the world it can be done?
It's awfully easy to sit up in your little nest, and tell other people what they should and should not be doing, but it's a lot harder to actually take action on your words, and change the world. If you expect anybody who has graduated junior high to even consider what you write about the "new media", "free culture", "corporatism", blah, blah, blah, then you need to get off your high horse and actually demonstrate that it can be done.
You are in a perfect position to do this. I dare you to. Of course, it's a moot point now, because you have already garned several million dollars at obscenely high margins, so it wouldn't hurt too much to stop that income. The only solution is to write a new book, and publish it online. You believe it would work. Why don't you do it?
The thing aoubt production of music (#2) is that technoloical advances make it easy/cheap, i.e. if more people buying home studios then home studios become cheaper.
I see no evidence yet that amateur musicians using consumer grade recording equipment can produce music that compares with professionally produced music. To be sure, the amateur produced music on MP3.com is unlistenable (solely in terms of recording quality), while most professionally produced music is of extremely high recording quality. Barring exceptional and unforseen changes in recording equipment quality, this will continue.
Also, development of artist (#1) should really be the job of the artist anywho since the record companies do should a crappy job (ala Britney Spears)
The very fact that you have heard of Britney Spears proves that they are doing a good job developing her. As a challenge, name one single artist you have heard of who has been completely self-promoted (without the benefit of an agent promoting him). To go further, name somebody whose music was compelling enough to self 12 million copies of a single album, entirely through self promotion.
Anyway, we can now see that #1 and #2 should be done by the artist while #3 can be done by the fans and the artist.
MP3.com has existed for 4 years, and has yet to develop a compelling new artist of international acclaim. In that time, the record companies, both independent and major, have developed hundreds of such artists. Now you are saying that not only do artists not need the services of the agent (MP3.com), but they can do it by themselves. Well, there is just no evidence to support your claim. Until you can show me an artist who comes to prominence without the benefit of a record company, I cannot validate your claim.
Finally, copyrights were created to force record companies to compensate artists, but fans supporting artists is a non-issue.. let me repeat that "fans supporting artists is a non-issue." Why? It's pretty fucking simple, no artists == no music, so the fans of Joe Artists will need to pay Joe or Joe will get a day job and the fans will not get much new stuff by Joe. Now, Joe needs to be a savy buisness man to make shure that it's easy for his fans to pay him, but that's not really that difficult.
The very fact that artists now need to become businessmen is greatly detrimental to the art. In the current system, artists simply need to produce music which people like in order to be popular. The record companies took care of promotion, and selling themselves. And, I repeat: no recorded music artist has ever become popular without the aid of record company promotion. Now, in the new system, only the artists who now how to sell themselves will be heard, and the time, enegery, and stress which they have to do business will eat into their music creation processes. How many of them will just hire agents to do the work? How many music agent companies will emerge as a result? How will these new entities be any different (or any better) than the current record companies?
That's because you weren't a commercial radio station. Read the post before you reply. Sheesh!
1)How much money per album/single do bands get?
2)How much does it cost to record an album?
3)How much do record companies make from an album/single?
The answers to the above questions are not publically documented, but one thing we do know is that the break even point for a CD is 500,000 copies. This leaves open two variables (the cost, and the price the record company gets), and has interesting implications:
If the cost to record is $500,000, then the record company nets $1 per copy. If the record company nets $5 per copy, then the cost to record is $2,500,000.
4) What, in fact, are record companies for?
To develop artists. See below.
OK, now picture a new scenario. I record my songs for £1000 (US$1500).
You cannot record an album for that little, unless your music is lo-fi pop. Professional recording studio time costs something like $300/hour, and most rock albums take several months to record. The role of the record companies is to give the money required to produce the album up front. It's a risk, because 90% of artists fail to make money.
I sign up to an online distributer. They sell my songs for download for 35p (50c). I get 90% of that, £3.80 (US$5.40 ) for a 12-track album. I'm richer, the service is richer, the consumer is richer, the record company loses.
How are people going to hear about you, and who is going to pay for music, when there are hundreds of thouands of people trying to do the same thing? The record company would try to promote you, but you have bypassed that.
Have you ever heard of market saturation?
One of the things which the music industry is absoltely ingenious about, is controlling the quantity of music which is in the market at one time. If you look at something like the transition from LP to CD, and look at the rate of reissues in genres such as jazz and classical, they have been paced out perfectly, as to not overwhelm the consumer. They figure the consumer's budget, the number they want, and release the quantity to fill that. They also do this with pop acts - there are only a few new stars per year.
If a zillion new musicians saturate the market at once, everybody loses. The consumer is overwhelmed because he will be confused about what music he should buy. The radio stations will have one hell of a task figuring out what to play. The artists will lose because they will get a much smaller piece of the same pie (remember, consumer's music income is constant).
Yes. I do indeed believe that the purpose of this would be in order to pay the artists and the companies to produce the music.
However, I do not understand why it would be advantageous to do this in a peer-to-peer fashion, whose only real role is to decentralize the operation so it is more difficult to prosecute pirates. Once the record companies legitimize online delivery, I would rather download from their servers instead of some college kiddie's Win98 machine, so I can be assured it is complete, authentic, etc.
From what I understand, advertising based revenue models on the internet have basically been declared obsolete, because money could not be recouped from them. I bet this would be much more true for music, than for general services. It costs a heck of a lot more to record and produce a modern rock album or a symphony, than it does to deliver an online greeting card.
Furthermore, it is potentially extremely dangerous to mix advertising with music, because the music itself may become commercialized. If there is a commercial when I download the music, what's next? Will the artists start singing jingles and put advertising into their music? Will orchestras start playing the theme jingles for products in between movemnts of a symphony? Let's just pay with it and be done, so the music does not become further diluted.
The RIAA does NOT pay radio stations to play their music. The radio stations pay royalities to the copyright holders to play music.
You would probably be very surprised at the extent of royalties to copyright holders in the music industry. They also get royalties from online samples which places like Amazon.com have, and from jukebox play. They get royalties every time a song is played on TV or in a movie ("Happy Birthday" was copyrighted for a very long time, which is why they always songs "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" in TV's/movies).
There was a big lawsuit about this in the 1920's, which is surprisingly relevant today. The record companies sued the radio stations because they were playing their music for free, and not giving any money to the producers of the music. The radio stations argued that radio play actually increased sales because it acted as free promotion for the music (sound familiar?)
The radio stations lost.
As a result, commercial radio stations have had to pay a royalty every time they play a song on the radio.
Indeed. One of the things that most people forget is that the record companies are in several different business at once:
Napster, and this new service, only purports to do #3, and MP3.com purports to do #1 and #3 (and I would argue that it does #1 poorly, as no artist it has developed has reached internation acclaim). Most of the expense in making a record are in #1 and #2 (which most online services don't do at all). The online services think that because they do #3, that they deserve all of the revenue for the item, even though that is merely the final step in the process (i.e. they depend on outsiders to do the difficult and costly part, yet apparently give them no benefits).
My prediction for the advent of mainstream commercial online delivery is that the industry will become more horizontally integrated rather than vertical integrated, and that they record companies will contract with online delivery companies (such as MP3.com, and whatever ends up with Napster) to actually delivery the music, but they themselves will continue to develop and produce music (something which they are very good at, and which no online distribution company has yet demonstrated competence in).
NONE of the online music services have classical music.
Napster has an EXTREMELY thin selection of classical music. Exactly none of the selections list the performer of the piece. Only people who are extremely new to music, or extremely casual about music, do not care who the performer was. The serious music fan needs to know the performer, the conductor, and all of the soloists. On the MP3's on Napster none of this info is available. For all the downloader knows, the selections are ripped from the 50 CD's for $25 that they sell in metal boxes in drug stores, instead of the world class performers.
MP3.com has a very poor selection of classical music. It has, basically, no orchestral music, save for some guys who have conducted a MIDI orchestra of a piece (yeesh!). I have downloaded instrumentalist selections from MP3.com, and the sound quality is just AWFUL! Basically, my experience confirms my original fear about classical music: it is too expensive and difficult for amateurs to record, so it either comes out sounding like crap (solo stuff), or just isn't recorded because the results would be astoundingly bad (orchestral stuff).
There are technical limitations as well, why classical is not successful on line. A classical peice usually consists of several "tracks" on a CD, and for some inane reason, people who put the stuff online make a separate file for each movement of the piece. This makes it almost impossible to track down a whole piece of music (Napster is chocked full of "Beethoven Sym. #5, mvmnt 1", but often you cannot find movements 2-4).
Most classical music demands a good acoustic environment, and when your hard drive is spinning, and your fans in the computer are throbbing it is not possible to listen to anything except loud, throbbing pop music.
The MP3 format is designed for pop music; its only ID fields are "artist", "album", and "song". Classical music does not have "albums", and "songs", and has at least two artists per recording. It also needs more specialized fields such as "conductor", "soloists", "orchestra", "opus number", and the like.
Classical music is much too long to download over the internet. The typical symphony is 40-70 minutes in length, and the typical opera is much longer. The only music amenable to download are five minute pop songs, not longer pieces of music.
Classical music is in serious danger of being left behind as the world moves to online delivery. It demands to be left in CD format, until the technology catches up with its demands (which are considerably higher than pop music). However, if pop music moves away from CD into the online world, classical music will also die (whether or not it makes online), because the classical CD business depends on the pop CD business for the infrastructure.
Classical music being one of western civilization's two or three greatest achievements, this would be an extremely tragic event of mammoth proportions. And nobody seems to care!
You indeed have a point. I would love to see a Multic's like OS (or any PDP-10 OS) ported to the PC. Heck, I'd like to see VMS ported to the PC! Yes, this technology has been around forever, but was displaced by a certain evil operating system.
Buffer exploits can be be solved by more liberal use of segments. You can have one segment for VM from 0-2G, which is Ex/Re, and another for VM from 2-4G, which is Re/Wr. The problem is that OS'es like Windows and Linux are very primitive, and just use four segments, code and data flat selectors for each privilege level. If this scheme was used, buffer overflow exploits would be literally impossible, but it requires advanced OS'es which have not been developed yet.
It is also the fault of the language. For its first 10 years (when it did not have C), there was literally never a buffer overflow bug on any program in VMS. For example, the internet worm exploited only Unix hosts, and couldn't do anything to VMS hosts. However, in the last 10 years, VMS has adopted more C programs, and the number of buffer overflow exploits has risen from 0 to a siliar amount on Unix. The string and array methodologies under C are incredibly fragile and primitive (as well as very low performance - you need to access byte at a time, which is VERY SLOW on modern architectures), and more advanced languages have much more high performance and more secure methodologies of dealing with data.
Whenever people are using Napster, there is an RIAA boycott by default.
The third side has existed for a very long time (you are very out of touch), and is sort of what I advocate (I tend to be between the third side and the RIAA side).
Michael Robertson, the CEO of MP3.com, is the main proponent of the third side and he is against Napster (he is a witness against Napster in this case), and he is also against the RIAA (note the RIAA vs. MP3.com case).
And the law could very well be interpreted to say that an online distro method like Napster is legal, too.
Not it can't. The home recording act is about copying, not distribution, and limits the property to be shared with a small circle of friends, which anybody with a clue at all, knows does not mean 20 million strangers.
Would anyone here pay $5 a month to use napster if that allowed you to download any and as many songs as you want as well as letting you share and and as many songs as you like?
How much do you charge for symphonies? The only music based on "songs" is pop teeny-bopper top forty music, and anybody who is older than junior high age doesn't listen to "songs". Is that all you carry (just like Napster), or are you going to carry more serious music?