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Music Media

Where Music Will Come From 196

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-said-piece dept.
em.a18 writes "There is a good article in the NYTimes about how we use music and how it changes after Napster. The article even suggests some good business models. Nicely done!" Yeah you need a free registration to read it, but it's a good piece. I like the quote 'With digitization, music went from being a noun, to a verb, once again. '
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Where Music Will Come From More

Where Music Will Come From

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  • Who needs registration... (Score:4, Informative)

    by MadFarmAnimalz ( 460972 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @03:05PM (#3173908) Homepage
    ... when you can just go here [yahoo.com]?

  • I was disappointed by the list of business models. There were no back of the envelope calculations to suggest whether a musician could earn his living, or whether he would have to keep his day job.

    • Re:No numbers in business models (Score:4, Interesting)

      by rlk ( 1089 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @03:36PM (#3174033)
      Well of course no one knows how any of these business models would do! Nobody has tried them yet. Until they're tried (i. e. until the RIAA's monopoly is broken to the degree that any of this could be done without it getting sued out of existence), it's impossible to determine how they would work.

      Furthermore, what's wrong with a musician working another job?

      • Re:No numbers in business models (Score:4, Insightful)

        by jejones ( 115979 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @07:23PM (#3174938) Journal
        Well...in one way, nothing at all. Certainly Charles Ives had a lot to say about composers and other jobs, though one could claim he was rationalizing.

        OTOH, let's suppose a musician has the proverbial "day job." Wasn't it Rubenstein who said something to the effect of "If I don't practice for a day, I notice it. If I don't practice for two days, my family notices it. If I don't practice for three days, everybody notices it"? Would Vai or Satriani or [fill in your favorite virtuoso here] have the time to keep their skills honed if they had to have a day job?

        Specialization has its benefits. What would you say if we substituted "programmer" for "musician" in your question?

    • Remember, very few musicians make enough money to earn a living off of selling copies of music now. It's possible that one of these new things will turn out to make playing music a good way to pay the rent, but even if none of them do, musicians won't be worse off. The people who would benefit from most of the ideas the author sets forth are listeners.

      Oh, and middlemen... we'll get a whole new set of middlemen providing the catalogs, lyrics, running the live webcasts, etc, and they'll make out like bandits. One way or another, faceless corporate goons will suck up ninety percent of your music-listening dollar.
      • The numbers are a crytal ball. If you can see them and read
        them, they tell you the future.

        Back in the dot com boom there was a fashion for
        internet grocers who delivered by van. I read a newspaper
        article that told me that it cost twenty pounds an hour to
        run a van, and vans could do 3 or 4 deliveries an hour in a
        busy city. Internet grocers were charging five pounds
        delivery. There was nothing left to pay the stock pickers.
        Sure enough internet grocers have faded from the scene.

        Could musicians cut out the middle man and sell CD's in
        cooperatively owned record shops at two pounds each? That
        cures the copyright infringement problem. CD's are pretty,
        shiny things that are nice to collect, and have much better
        sound quality than mp3 at the usual bit rates.

        Usually the wholesale price is half the retail price. I
        guess half the price is split equally between shop wages and
        shop overheads. So of the ten pounds you pay for a CD 2
        pound 50 goes to the wages of the shopkeeper. Assuming a
        wage of five pounds an hour, that is a sale every half
        hour. That sounds low for Saturday afternoon, high for
        Monday morning. The trouble is I'm talking out of my arse
        here. I am dying to hear the real figures from somebody in
        the business.

        Continuing my guess work: if you plan to solve the
        copyright infringement problem by selling CD's for two
        pounds each, you need a different kind of record shop, which
        makes a sale every six minutes. That is
        possible. News-agents sell magazines at those rates and
        prices. Imagine lots (say 200) independent labels, each with
        50 bands, each bringing out a CD every year. Each week you
        the latest CD from your favourite record label, just like
        you buy a weekly magazine. If you are going on a journey,
        you stop at the station bookstall and pay two pounds for a
        magazine to read to pass the time or two pounds for a CD to
        listen to. Perhaps both. You discard them at the end of your
        journey! If ten million persons buy into that model of music
        buying the total revenue is a billion a year, with 10000
        bands to support, say a 50000 a year per band. Its a living.
        If only a million persons buy into that model of music
        buying then most of the musicians can only be
        semi-professional, much like it is now.

        See what a difference some numbers make. Suddenly I'm
        telling a story that opens up real possibilities. If I was
        in the business and had some accurate numbers at my finger
        tips, well...

  • No Registration Required (Score:4, Informative)

    by DarkZero ( 516460 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @03:06PM (#3173910)

    The story, no registration required. [nytimes.com]

    You can all find this yourselves by going to this page [asahi.com] and looking for the same headline. They have all of the NYT articles without any registration required.

    • Abuser galore (Score:1, Insightful)

      by October_30th ( 531777 )
      And just why are you abusing the free NYT service this way?

      Is it really so "lame" to register for a great service that you'd rather abuse it than use it?

      • If it is free, then how is it being abused? NYT aren't losing anything
      • Your impression that free is equivalent to no money required is almost rediculously narrow.
      • Please take a look at the link before attacking it. The link listed is from a partnership that the New York Times has with Asahi Shimbun. Because Asahi puts its advertising on the top of that NYT article, you do not have to register for it. You are, in effect, "paying" through viewing additional advertising, instead of paying through a free registration. Apparently, the New York Times and Asahi Shimbun think it's an even trade, because they set the whole thing up themselves and I didn't have to mess with any URLs or anything to get to it.

        And yes, it really is lame and annoying to make an exception in my cookie block list for the New York Times and let them track my browsing when they themselves present a perfectly suitable alternative on their advertising partner's website. Why choose to register when they don't really care if you do or not?
  • Very insightful article. I wrote this for MSNBC.COM.

    =========

    The record industry should stop blaming its customers for decreased sales. Had the industry cut a deal with Napster, it might have avoided the ungovernable chaos of decentralized peer-to-peer services now taking over the Internet, writes Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian, media scholar and author of a book on copyrights.

    http://www.msnbc.com/modules/exports/ct_email.as p? /news/720946.asp

  • Utter nonsense.

    This article on online music has these lines "In the industrial age, copies often were more valuable than the original. (Who wanted the ''original'' prototype refrigerator that the one in your kitchen was based on?) Most people wanted a perfect working clone. The more common the clone, the more desirable, since it would then come with a brand name respected by others and a network of service and repair outlets." it's better not read.

    The article is patheticly written. Freeness and copyness properties of music!!!

    • I agree totally. It's almost like this article could have been commissioned by the RIAA itself. I mean:

      "In the end, an awful lot of music will be sold in the territory of the free because it will be easier to buy music you really like than to find it for free."

      Right....
  • Forget all this RIAA crap. What I'm really interested in is seeing true digital music; that is, music composed and generated by algorithms, or better yet, by artifical intelligence. Already there has been some progress made in this field. Will the musicians of tomorrow be particularly adept programmers collaborating with computers to produce a new breed of euphony? I find the prospect titillating. Not in a dirty way.

    • Re:music generation (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That would suck.
      If you were a musician (and no, not some loser who makes their own techno shit) you would realize music requires the creativity and spontanaety only possible with humans.
      • I'm a musician. *Lyrics* require creativity and spontanaety only possibly with humans (for now). Most chord progressions, melodies, harmonies, beats, and even ornamentation follow rules. "New" sounds that break old rules - that probably takes the human touch - but well-defined genres such as jazz, rock, and the various world traditionals aren't as complicated as you think.
    • By the feel of the article, this is only another way to make money based on fluidity. Instead of trading in clips, tracks, etc. You could sell an open modular Music Operating System. Then you could pay for algorithms and plugins that either compose or download and combine music to fit your style and mood.

      Instead of paying a musician you would pay a programmer.

      Try the flip side of the coin - Instead of buying, renting or creating and algorithm you could hire a band to send you a personalized stream in the style you like. Sounds pretty similar to me.

      One question - Why do you want to replace human intelligence with artificial intelligence. Won't it be cheaper to have a constant stream of amateur techno (possibly filtered by a 3rd party for a small fee) than try to write an algorithm that that doesn't occasionally produce stuff that just sounds bad?

      Could you write an algoritm that, given 5 streams of music of a similar style could select the "best" based on your specified cirteria?

      How much could you sell the program for? Could you obfuscate the code, and charge people to customize the criteria?

      I know that this is very closed source minded, but the point of the article was that we need to accept Napster and find Value Added ways to mix, customize, and personalize music IN ORDER to make money. The idea of free program doesn't preclude the existence of a proprietary one for the same reason that the Gimp doesn't preclude the existence of Photoshop.
    • I like and respect digital and electronic music, but while there are many similarities between programming and music, there are some big differences that ensure that (acoustic) musicians are really a different breed.

      There have actually been documented differences in the brain structure of great professional musicians that seems to indicate that they process acoustic information with more and different parts of the brain than normal people do. This can even mean a possible mild deficit in other types of function. In any case, much of the musical sensibility seems to rely on nonconscious cognitive activity, while the sense of structure in programming is always very explicit, and mostly conscious. Also, programming may have a certain sense of rhythm to it in some cases, but musical performance in real time emerges from internal rhythm in a unique way.

      I see programming as resembling composition more than musical performance, in any case.

  • Too often, users on sites like these believe that they are doing all they can to "stick it to the man," by leeching files from Gnutella and AudioGalaxy instead of buying CDs. These users believe that their actions cause damage to the music industry and will eventually help one day to overthrow their viselike grip on the production of music in this country. Although this assumption is partially correct, there are other things that will help expedite the death of the music giants and create a freer market in which quality music [dmband.com] will prosper and no-talent hacks [britneyspears.com] will not. Here I will outline some of the steps you can take:
    • Never buy music. Ever. Every dollar that you pump into the RIAA is 50 cents spent suppressing free speech on the net, and 50 cents spent promoting the latest boy band. If you want to support an artist, send them money directly.
    • Share all of your music. Most users on today's peer-to-peer networks take a lot, but don't want to give back to the community. This is a selfish and rude attitude to take toward the people who save you from having to pay for music. I even go as far as to download music I don't even listen to, just so that I can share it with everyone else. At work, I have access to an OC-192, and am proud to say that at any given time there are at least 75+ clients downloading from my song library. Share, and you will be rewarded tenfold.
    • Encourage others to join the networks. Not only does this assist the PTP networks in achieving financial solvency, but it increases the selection of music on the networks and makes it easier on large servers like mine. ^_^ When I worked as a PC tech a few years back, I made a point of installing Napster on every single Windows client machine I serviced and making it load on startup. The clients loved me for it, and I felt great for helping the cause.
    • Support the EFF. The EFF diligently defends the rights of the average citizen to make full use of the materials in his possession. Without the EFF on our side, large companies would have no problem installing DRM on all of our new PCs and making it almost impossible to share music that we have the fundamental right to listen to.
    This is a good start; if anyone has any other ideas on helping the Revolution, please post them here.

    Cd.

    • Share, and you will be rewarded tenfold.
      I have to disagree with this. Every time that I have made a deal with someone on Kazaa to stay online and let them finish downloading a large file, and in return they would stay online and let me download something large, they burn me. As soon as their download is done, they disconnect leaving me with half a video or half of an album. Maybe in your ideal world, people will repay you tenfold, but in my experience it goes more like "Share, and you will be rewarded one-tenth fold".

      adam
      • Well the good thing about several p2p programs is the ability to resume a download. I have no problem with being cut-off, or cutting-off a download. So Share, and you will be, well at least, rewarded is true.
      • Every time that I have made a deal with someone on Kazaa to stay online and let them finish downloading a large file, and in return they would stay online and let me download something large, they burn me.


        The rewards come on a larger scale than that. You share your stuff, which attracts more users. Those users (sooner or later) share the stuff they have, and thus there are more goodies for you to enjoy later on. It's not quid pro quo, but more a fuzzy sort of karma thing...

    • I hope you are shairing only music you have written and produced yourself, or have the direct authorization to do so by the copywright owner. Sharing stuff not released for sharing could be considered theft. With the rant out of the way, I think a pool of freely traded public domain music is a fantastic idea. Unfortunately I like most other downloaders, haven't the talent to release anything worthwhile. My schooling is in a technical field, not a music field. I do enjoy good music even if I am unable to produce anything better than a 5 year olds piano lesson.
    • I'm personally trying to help by supporting one of my favorite independent bands, The Shizit (www.shizit.net). We worked together to produce a Blender game demo for promotional purposes. We had released the alpha to the Blender community a few days ago and it was getting very positive responses before NaN went down (anyone who is interested can still get the demo at shizit.net, or if you want to talk Blender we've put up a forum at http://shizit.vectorstar.net/forum
      .)

      So that's my answer, contributing my own unique skills to help support my favorite independent band.

    • Share all your music

      Trust me, if everyone with a 56k connection that dropped out every 15 minutes shared, it'd cause more problems than it solves. That's why I enable my share only after I've finished downloading, I think I'm doing a favour by sparing people the frustration of the bandwidth of half a dial-up, I'd just end up wasting someone's time and slowing the search algorithm down as the user searches again for someone with a better connection.

    • Re:How to do your part and support the revolution (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Chris Johnson ( 580 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @11:54PM (#3175767) Homepage Journal
      Never buy music? Ever? While I sympathise with your sentiment, I do have to say what the FSCK are you doing assuming that there is no music other than that controlled by the RIAA?

      Speaking as a guy who has just finished remastering CDs for MONTHS, working until past dawn on the remixing and wordlength reduction and getting an ISRC code (for which US indies are forced to go to the RIAA even though it is an INTERNATIONAL STANDARD! hello?!) and getting CD burning software (Jam) that can burn Red Book properly and redoing all the artwork and buying special archival Mitsui CDRs for the masters to be sent, I gotta say what the hell do you think you're doing?

      I mean, sure, down with the man, support the EFF, in fact YES share your music, use P2P, you're talking to a guy here who has his indie distributor print "Please copy this CD for your friends" on ALL his CDs, so let's not get snippy about me being mercenary. I think not. But I'm serious: what, exactly, are you trying to accomplish by telling people to "never buy music. Ever."? Do you somehow not realise that you can support people who are NOT the RIAA? People who in some cases (not all) will even support YOUR right to share and trade copies of THEIR music online?

      I like your enthusiasm, guy. I _really_ like your determination to go against the RIAA's deeply entrenched hegemony. But you know what?

      If you really want to help the revolution in music, MAKE YOUR OWN.

      Right now, you're so hung up on hurting the monopoly distribution channel that you don't even see that there is an underground out there- and the more people who say "Never buy music. Ever", the more that starves the underground as well as the RIAA.

      I'm with O'Reilly- who, I believe, said in a conference once that if the Internet and copying truly did mean that he couldn't sell books because they were immediately copied, and if he really had no choice and either the Net or his book selling had to go, he'd go with the Net and give up trying to sell books. I'm with him on that.

      But let's not jump to conclusions, please?

  • P2P, Music as availible...........albeit semi-legally................

  • where music came from (Score:5, Insightful)

    by perdida ( 251676 ) <thethreatprojectNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Saturday March 16, 2002 @03:27PM (#3174002) Homepage Journal
    I see a good and a bad to the computer music developments.

    I was just listening to some old Smithsonian recordings at work. They are old blues, country and mountain music from the Depression-era recorders who went around with huge trunk sized machines to rcord the music of people without radios who made music on their porches.

    Now, we can make music together on a virtual porch. We can sample and produce music easily, and our tastes are, perhaps, less likely to be influenced by the hit machine. Unfortunately, though, most music as of yet from the Net has been derivative..

    Perhaps there is still a solitary nature to music made remotely, designed for Napster-style release only, not for performance. Musicmaking, for me, takes a real audience into account. I couldn't make music without a real crowd in mind when I make it.

    • Unfortunately, though, most music as of yet from the Net has been derivative. Unfortunately, too, making statements out of thin air does not make it true.

      Making music on the porch, making music for a real crowd - you are contradicting yourself!!!

    • Re:where music comes from (Score:3, Informative)

      by d5w ( 513456 )
      I was thinking about this while reading the article. Much of the music I actually listen to these days comes from another setting with different rules: social dance bands. (I'm thinking of contra dance here, but if someone tells me the same applies to other types of social dance I'll believe it.) The primary setting for these bands is at a dance, interacting directly with a floor full of dancers. What's valued in a good dance band is not just the quality of music but the ability to work with the crowd. A recording is an unacceptable substitute in this setting, however perfect.

      All the focus on recordings misses the settings where music and recordings still don't mix easily. I buy the recordings of my favorite dance bands, and I'll listen to them as background or to learn tunes, but it's the participatory setting that makes this kind of music worthwhile, and not even a DJ can produce that kind of effect at a contra dance.

      • The Dead were fundamentally a dance band, though rather more drugged-out than your average contra-dance band. Their interaction with the crowd was one of the things that made them great - sometimes not so good, but other times just totally magic. Listening to recordings of their stuff can be good too, and David Gans's Grateful Dead Hour on the radio provides an interesting mix of selected songs by the band, interviews with people in the scene, source material that influenced their music, material that was influenced by them, etc.

        On a different track related to your message, there's a ~bimonthly ballroom dance in Oakland www.gaskellball.com/ [gaskellball.com]
        with live music played by The Brassworks [brassworksband.com]. As with your contra dances, the live band makes the experience much different than canned music.

    • That's a LOT of mp3's! Where do you find the time?
    • The RIAA should just understand the fact that they will never stop all illegal music downloading because there will always be new programs. The RIAA should go with the download sites and just have more banners or pop-up adds, to make up for their lost revenue.

  • music is a verb? (Score:4, Funny)

    by americanFatCat ( 550598 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @03:28PM (#3174004)
    I'LL MUSIC YOU!

  • Desirable packaging? Not far out at all (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DaveJay ( 133437 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @03:51PM (#3174085)
    Regarding this portion of the article:

    "Or to release music in such wonderful packaging that it is cheaper to buy it than to copy it?"

    I still hold fond memories of Infocom's games, especially The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The whole package came with a ridiculous assortment of paraphernalia, including "peril-sensing sunglasses", a "subatomic space fleet" (which was too small to see and came in a small clear plastic bag) and, of course, "no towel".

    I recently downloaded a copy of THGTTG to play using a Frotz emulator, and I must admit...it was OK, but I missed the physical objects that accompanied the game. I have to wonder what an original boxed version of the game, with all original items, would go for on e-bay.

    In light of this, it does not seem unreasonable to expect that packaging tangible items with a CD could make that CD worth paying for over and above the (nonexistent) cost of downloading the songs over the Internet.
    • Absolutely.

      I'm just finishing the last stages of a massive remastering spree- taking TEN albums, pretty much my entire catalog, and bringing them up to that standard for selling on Ampcast [ampcast.com]. Sometimes that's a lot of work.

      I'm a vinyl record freak myself- I don't intrinsically like CD sound, much less mp3. I have written dithering software to MAKE my CDs sound good enough that I think they represent what the master tape was. I've gone in and done spectral noise gating on certain masters originally from tape, or with hissing guitar preamps present. I've built from scratch a binary-coded passive attentuation mixing console to sum the tracks with unlimited resolution, and bought expensive audiophile input caps (Hovland Musicaps) for the inputs of my A/D converter, a modded Lexicon.

      That only gets you so far- after all, my CDs do literally say on them "Please copy this CD for your friends" so obviously, while I accept what will happen anyway, I must also figure out what MORE to do. Beyond 'respect' or 'loyalty'. What can I give people that's cooler even than that?

      And so I turn to packaging. I've been wrestling with Ampcast, persuading them to allow me to specify the total form of every piece of artwork on the CD case. I want it to be like when you have a record and you put the cover where you can see it while listening to the record. I want there to be no dotcom banners and small print all over the fucking album cover. I want classic album art purity- and since I'm dealing with an indie and not the RIAA, and since I'm willing to trade off being in Tower Records for producing my artwork RIGHT (NO bar codes!), I may get it- and I'm proceeding as if I can have total artistic freedom.

      The most extreme case so far has been my "Postcards From Tehigue" [ampcast.com] CD. The music is up as mp3s (128K VBR) and the CD is full 44.1/16 dithered with fancy techniques from hi-res masters, but it's funny because it's a wonderfully hi-res capturing of the sound of an antique Apple IIgs making really strange proto-electronic music- done back in 1986 or so. The actual music is pretty well represented by the mp3s, though you miss out on a bit of antique electronic SKRONK that way- so what is to be done with the packaging to match the goofy coolness of this bizarre music?

      Answer: I scanned the actual motherboard of a IIgs at pretty high resolution (had to reduce to 1425x1425 for the cover- I used free software from Helmut Dersch, "Panorama Tools", to do the reduction with 256x256 sinc interpolation for REALLY SHARP reduction- again, taking effort to do stuff as 'right' as possible), and I made the tray liner so that the spines are no more or less than the END of the circuit board- some jacks and stuff, metal bits, also scanned with great clarity. No logos. No listings of the producer's girlfriend and dog (separately or, um, overloaded ;) ), no pointless enumeration of the street address of the recording company- no names or numbers on the spine, either! The package looks as much as possible like a small circuit board stuck in with your CDs, with ONE exception I couldn't resist- on the CPU chip, I used Photoshop (cloning and several overlay modes) to copy the exact appearance of the printing on other chips, down to the color and the texturing of the surface of the chip, to write as if it'd been printed there:

      POSTCARDS FROM TEHIGUE
      CHRIS JOHNSON

      ...so small that you can't possibly see it in the cover art [ampcast.com].

      I really think that if you are trying to make ART (of whatever sort- even if it's kind of weird) there is always a way to keep following that out to where you're producing something that DOES have a value of uniqueness- even in a world of Star Trek Replicators where NOTHING can be 'unique'. In that world, what you end up doing is producing something so iconoclastic that you end up with just a few people totally floored by it- who're ready to pick up your version of it simply because, well, it's not that much more expensive than copying every detail, and it's YOUR version- the closest they can get to what you actually touched and did.

      If you could buy a beautiful painting with a bar code, and download jpgs of the beautiful painting with its bar code, etc. and you had a chance at getting a copy WITHOUT the bar code- would you do it? If you could get a clone without bar code, versus a print that the artist had produced with his own hands (rather like Andy Warhol's screen printing experiments), how much is that worth to you? How much is it worth to a rabid fan of the artist? How much is it worth, if the art is so idiosyncratic that nobody else will make it for you the way you like?

  • What I seemed to find interesting was that while sales of records from "major lables" were not nearly as high they were in the zenith of Napster - many small independent lables, saw the best sales of their recrods since their inceptions. Would anyone else be willing to take the posistion that this trend could have to do simply with better music coming from other outlet other than major labels?

    i won't even bring up a certain artist getting paid millions to - well ... not sign anymore.

  • .. Is this biggest problem with reguards to Mp3 file Sharing. I live in a rural area and 56k is the fastest connection I can get (without buying a Satellite) and in Urban areas a lot of people who are online don't exploit DSL or cable (or T1) because of whatever reasons. Otherwise I (and a lot of other people) would gladly download album after album of our favorite arists (Still, I don't buy from RIAA, their actions disgust me and I sit long downloads out). In the future Peoples' bandwidth is only going to increase as uptake of faster connections increases and becomes available in more areas, so the end of RIAA's stranglehold on music is in sight.
  • The varieties of musical styles explode. They increase faster than we can name them, so a musical Dewey Decimal System is applied to each work to aid in categorizing it.

    There are already more musical styles than we could possibly name.

    For a small fee, the producers of your favorite musician will tweak her performance to exquisitely match the acoustics of your living room.

    It would have to be a very small fee, as there is no reason this shouldn't be done by the playback equipment (it already is, but is still expensive).
    • What about tweaking the performance for the preference of the listener -- changing the tempo, phrasing, instrumental balance, and so forth?

  • "liquid music" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by d5w ( 513456 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @03:57PM (#3174114)
    The most interesting (if not original) point in the article for me was summed up in the future possibility:
    So many amateur remixed versions of a hit tune are circulating on the Net that it's worth $5 to you to buy an authenticated official version.
    While I don't think this is likely any time soon -- it's so much easier to make a clean copy than a warped one -- I like the idea of the tools for music manipulation and analysis reaching the point where this is a possibility. The tools out there allow an awful lot of audio manipulation, but they don't make it easy to "X-ray the guts of music and outline its structure, and then alter it". They let you do gross cut-and-paste maneuvers, but that's about it.

    I've seen various research projects and half-completed products for dissecting music -- finding the chords, pulling out the melodies, profiling the rhythmic structures -- but imagine if the sort of "music processor" implied by this work was as ubiquitous as vi, Emacs or Wordpad. Then we'd really see some remarkable (and remarkably awful) music variations floating around.

    Then I might be willing to pay just to get someone's digital certificate of authenticity. But I'd still be looking for the best comic variations on everything, of course.

  • One of the things the article says is that music, once digitized, becomes malleable (''liquid''). This isn't yet true, except in the crudest sense.

    The current music formats (mp3, ogg, wma, etc.) are finished products. You can't add your own lyrics to an mp3, or do karaoke to a rip of (say) B.Spears latest.

    If there was a digital format that was multi-tracked, i.e. the form in which the producer mixes music, then you'd see people take the lyrics of one tune, the bass from another, etc., and create something other. But we don't have that, and what's more, the way things are going, we probably never will.

    • Ack! I missed ''commonly used and openly available'' before ''digital format'' in <p>. /. buttons are different from k5's :-)

      I also meant to say that even if there were such a format, none of the big 5 would use it for publishing music.
  • It seems like most of the suggestions of possible business models given by the author boil down to paying attention to the cutomers and treating them like they matter. I agree with this approach. I (and surely others) would be most willing to pay for products and services that are designed to fit my specific wants/needs.

  • This guy fails to grasp that most of the stuff he suggests for alternative revenue can be just as free as the music itself. The instant any of these extra materials are sold they'll be passed on for free also. "Convenience" is rarely sufficient for a determined user, especially when the only slightly more difficult alternatives are free.
  • in your own home via hologram projectors :)

  • Most ppl don't give a shit about the "meta" information. They don't want to remix from 24 tracks. Free is all that matters. I don't care about the other crap. I've paid for Abbey Road 5 times and I'm owed some free music.

  • Not likely to happen (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tetrad69 ( 526053 ) <tetrad@gmail.com> on Saturday March 16, 2002 @04:28PM (#3174257)
    The article makes some nice points, and a lot of them I agree with. Personally, I think they should have brought up the monetary concerns a bit more, namely the fact that studio time costs a pretty penny, as well as does the distribution process for CDs, but that's forgivable.

    The main problem I see with this pseudo-utopia of free information is the copyrights. Or rather, that the artists don't own them.

    Copyrights, as far as I know, seemed to originate so as to promote creative and scientific work. Namely, being able to reap the rewards of coming up with something that people would want to buy. Now with the media moguls, the only thing promoting new work is that it's usually specifically stated in the artist's contract. "Make more or we'll sue", or something along those lines.

    Now as far as I know, the bands still make most of their money from concerts and going on tour (as they should). With the digital age and the prospect of infinte supply, the media companies' business models are doomed to fail.

    How about this for an idea: Force the distributors to give up the copyrights and give them back to the artist. Tear up all the old contracts. Now, instead of the monopolistic practices that they're using now, they may actually have to fight one another. Come up with new ways of making money from the distribution process that doesn't involve shafting both the consumer and the artist.

    I'm sure everybody would be surprized at how quickly and effeciently the companies would change their business model if they knew they had to fight with one another to get contracts. And they would have to stay competitive or the artist could just pick up and leave.

    I'm sure some of you more monetarily gifted than me can figure out a way to make money without actually holding the contracts. A percentage of sales, perhaps? Or maybe the artist paying the company to provide a service? There will still be the problem of who has the last say when it comes to media exposure, but I think that's what agents are for anyway. Take that job away from the Universals as well.

    An idealized notion, I'm sure, but from my understanding of the situation, that's the key problem at this point in time...

    • Studio costs (Score:3, Interesting)

      by richieb ( 3277 )
      [...] namely the fact that studio time costs a pretty penny, as well as does the distribution process for CDs, but that's forgivable.

      Actually studio equipment is pretty cheap. The same issue of NYT magazine about Moby and his at home studio. He produces all his music at home.

      It probably costs few thousand dollars to set up really nicely equiped studio in your basement. I have a four track recorder that cost $300 when I bought it. Today you can use a $1000 PC as a multitrack recorder.

      So studio costs are not a real factor.

      Distribution over the net is free - if you use P2P systems and avoid centralized servers. Let the listeners make their own CDs.

      • Some of the equipment to do good mastering is cheap but for a really high quality set-up it is going to cost a pretty penny. The talent for doing recording work isn't exactly cheap either. I could buy 100,000$ worth of equipment but it won't make me a better recording engineer. However if I'm a great engineer I can charge beaucoup cash to anyone wanting my services. This comes back to the record company business model actually, the smaller number of people with equipment and talent to do work musicians don't have the equipment or talent (sometimes) to do themselves can base their business around provider services to said musicians. Moby does his recording and whatnot at home but he's a pretty damn talented guy and isn't exactly using a Playskool My First Sound Studio to do his recording.

        • Re:Studio costs (Score:3, Informative)

          by richieb ( 3277 )
          If I'm just playing a guitar and singing, there is no need for $100,000 studio or many expensive engineers.

          All I'm saying that you don't need all that expensive stuff to produce good music. In fact just take a look at the record that won the Grammies - plain acoustic stuff.

          I get the feeling that listeners are getting tired of overproduced music and are looking for more authentic stuff.

          • It isn't about overproduced its just if you're just singing and playing guitar, shitty equipment is going to make it sound like you've got your nuts in a vice. You don't NEED 100,000 equipment, Alanis Morisette's Jagged Little Pill was produced on a 50,000$ set-up was pretty well acclaimed. Then of course 50 grand isn't exactly chump change to a dude wanting to make an album.
      • Crappy studio equipment is cheap. The weird part is, with digital there's less and less of a difference between that and the posh pro stuff. The latest, 192K "Pro Tools" DAW system costs the earth but sounds (according to a reputable sound engineer I know) slightly treble-harsh and lacking in the bottom octave. The correlation between glossy sonics and major-label budgets has NEVER been weaker- compare to the cassette portastudio era, or the vinyl record era.

        Because digital and computer software are more akin to IDEAS than physical artifacts or precision devices, this will only continue.

        There are people right now developing "Pro Tools" clones in open source. I develop mastering software in open source. People develop synthesis, DSP, hunt down the flaws of existing gear- it's like the internet 'security' community, the 'open' camp are farther along than the proprietary guys, move faster, cooperate better. The best horn PA bassbin out there is being designed by a bunch of amateur, semipro, and pro speaker hackers on the internet- I've been designing speakers for more than ten years and some of their docs leave ME staring at the level of technical expertise.

        Oh, and you can have an indie company distribute, host and make your CDs for you (duplication rather than replication- SO far) and even that will only cost the buyer $6-12 or so. I price mine at $11.99 and that's because I put months of work into them and it's STILL half what the record industry charges...

        • Hey, do you have samples (MP3s) somewhere? I'm always looking for new music to listen too...

          ...richie

          • eek, on the one post out of six that I _don't_ hype my URL to the moon? ;)

            Yeah. Go to www.ampcast.com/chrisj [ampcast.com] and go nuts, I have a LOT of samples up. What I do at this point is I put all but one track up on each album "officially", and have no gripe if anyone fills in by putting up the missing tracks later. Gotta get the CDs out first tho, or there's nothing to rip from. I also have weirder stuff [ampcast.com], and some pop/rock type music [ampcast.com] that's fairly old though I need to be coming out with some new songs-with-actual-words-in. Lastly, my mastering software (Mac, but GPLed anyhow) is at www.airwindows.com/dithering [airwindows.com].

            Try not to be too freaked out by the variety of music on my ampcast pages :) I like a LOT of different stuff. I've done brutal instrumental rock, sorta sedated trancey retro stuff, demented lowfi electronic goofiness, touching melodic pop, stagnant atonal droney ambience, seriously challenging polymetric electronica, stomping country-rock and the best freaking Noise (in the hardcore uncompromising sense) out there :D however, there is no living human who likes ALL that stuff but me, so be warned. God knows what I'll do next. Easy listening, maybe. Oh, I forgot the fretless guitar Frippertronics soundscapes, silly ME. ;)

            Cheers. I think you can stream stuff if Ampcast bugs you about registering. They only want to keep people from cheating as THEY, not you, pay me a royalty on downloads. I hope to bring them in some money with my CDs when I get them all up there- we have to start doing actual business and selling CDs if they're going to continue the royalty-paying. Oh, and you can 'rate' stuff if you make a myAmp account: there's charts of a sort, pretty decent really, you can rate stuff up or down and it affects the chart.

  • Interesting, but not well thought out. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jonesvery ( 121897 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @04:32PM (#3174273) Homepage Journal

    An interesting article, but parts of it really don't seem well thought out. For example, the proposed business model of "charging for things that are difficult to copy:"

    In the domain of the plentifully free, music will do the only thing it can do: charge for things that can't be copied easily. A friend of a friend may eventually pass on to you the concert recording of a band you like, but if you pay, the band itself will e-mail it to you seconds after the performance.

    Ignoring the fact that current technology makes this specific example infeasible. (Send 90 minutes of audio data to thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of people by email seconds after the recording is completed? No.) That said, this business model is "people will pay to get something immediately rather than getting it for free by waiting a couple of days." On a very limited scale this holds true, but it's not a scalable idea. Hardcore fans who must have recordings as soon as they're available are only a relatively small percentage of record sales.

    Sure, you can find a copy of that hit dance track, but if you want the mix approved by the legendary D.J., then you'll want to pay for it.

    What does "approved" mean in this context? If that specific mix is made available to the public, then it is possible for the public to share that recording. Why would one be able to find one version of the track but not another?

    Anyone can grab a free copy of Beethoven's Ninth, but if you want it customized for the audio parameters of your room or car, you'll pay for it.

    This too, is likely a very limited market...customized audio for your car or living room? Are you going to tell me where to place my $20 audiovox speakers for the best sound, as well? The bigger problem with this idea is that it's an extremely cost-intensive service model. You'll have to hire a lot of people who know audio and audio technology very well to produce all of those custom mixes; each one of those expensive people had better produce a lot of $10 custom mixes every single day to keep the business afloat.

    You may have downloaded that Cuban-Chinese rock band from the Morpheus site without paying, but the only way to get all that cool meta-information about each track, which lets you search for chords and lyrics, is to establish a relationship with the band by paying.

    This example might be referred to as "the situation that we already have." If I download MP3s of an album I don't get the lyric sheet that is included with the CD, nor any non-audio content that they might choose to put on one of those "enhanced CD jobs." I can live with that. Apparently a lot of other people can as well, which is what started this whole discussion.

    As I said, this is an interesting peice, but it hasn't really been thought out. Most of the "business models" that the poster referred to amount to something like "maybe people will buy stuff if it's easier to buy it than to find it for free." This is true. This is also, I suspect, why record companies still post significant profits...if you want an entire album, it is still (for the moment) easier to go buy the CD than to find all of the tracks (ripped with reasonable sound quality) online.

    Basically, the author seems to be at the same place as everyone else right now: we know that business has to change to reflect changes in technology, but we have absolutely no idea what form that change should or will take.

    • Ignoring the fact that current technology makes this specific example infeasible. (Send 90 minutes of audio data to thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of people by email seconds after the recording is completed? No.) That said, this business model is "people will pay to get something immediately rather than getting it for free by waiting a couple of days." On a very limited scale this holds true, but it's not a scalable idea. Hardcore fans who must have recordings as soon as they're available are only a relatively small percentage of record sales.

      P2P with key selection (eg. freenet): the scalability problem is solved. The more popular a key is, the more peers have it. Fight scalability with scalability. The age of big pipes is ending. In "their" model big pipes are necessary. "Their" model is not what the article is advocating.

      Some of the other points, that you have not mentioned, in the article seem very insightful, in particular the analogy to evolutionary models, and the economic caste metaphor that provides demand: when the poor had candles, the rich had light bulbs, but now it is considered posh to have candles, given that everyone has light bulbs. I cannot reproduce the idea as well as it was written, but I do believe it to have been well thought out, and worthy of publishing.

      The idea of the next stage of musical-society presence: liquidity, as well, is an inventive instrument of explanation. It is a speculative article, as you have pointed out, but the weak points of the article are moot in comparison to the overall themes.

      • P2P with key selection (eg. freenet): the scalability problem is solved. The more popular a key is, the more peers have it. Fight scalability with scalability. The age of big pipes is ending. In "their" model big pipes are necessary. "Their" model is not what the article is advocating.

        It atcually wasn't the scalability of the technology that I was referring to, but the scalability of the business idea: there is a limited number of people who will see value in having something before everyone else has it. Most will continue to wait for the two days that it takes for the concert recording to become available for free.

        Some of the other points, that you have not mentioned, in the article seem very insightful, in particular the analogy to evolutionary models, and the economic caste metaphor that provides demand: when the poor had candles, the rich had light bulbs, but now it is considered posh to have candles, given that everyone has light bulbs.

        I'm not entirely convinced that there's a strong parallel there. From a sociological perspective burning candles just because you can, as a sign of being cultured, it interesting; this logic seems to explain why we continue to have people obsessed with vinyl records (you're part of an elite, self-defined group).

        As far as providing a basis for thinking about how record companies might do business in the future, however, the electricity/candle example is actually really depressing for big content. Think about it this way: prior to the effective implementation of electric light, candlemakers were the electric company -- you wanted light, you talked to them. Now there are quite a few candle companies left around these days, but if you compare combined revenues of power companies against those of candle makers, I think it's clear that you want to be on the electricity side of that balance sheet.

        It is all interesting, though. The writer starts from a pretty commonly accepted economic principle: for any commodity, value tends to decline as availability increases. From that basis, he's arguing that content in its current form (a recording of a song, for example) has become so easily available that it no longer holds significant value.

        To counteract that decline in value, he (it seems to me) is saying that producers should simply come up with some sort of content that "can't be copied" and therefore holds its economic value. That's a perfectly reasonable position, but it's basically the same approach that record companies have taken by trying to create copy-protected CDs.

        I guess what strikes me is that bulleted list of "things me might see" at the end of the piece. Looking at them from the perspective of a record company, I don't see anything that hasn't already failed to make money. (Touring bands give away CDs as advertising? Exactly how much do they charge per ticket to balance that out? How long do they have to stay on the road?)

        Just to repeat myself yet again, I do think that the article is interesting, but I'm just not struck by any exciting new ideas coming out of it.

        • What makes something posh is it's uniqueness - a print of a pretty picture looks good, but there were another 500,000 identical copies produced at the same time, so it's just not particularly classy. The original is a one-of-a-kind, and derives it's value from that.

          In music, any given /performance/ is unique - recordings are all identical. So imagine a world where the rich pay bands to perform for them, or create their own personal edition of their work, or something like that . . . The value to the person requesting the piece is it's uniqueness, and the uniqueness comes from it being a specific, unique, performance.

          It's an extension of the value of live performances, and I think it's probably quite viable - perform live to get money to eat, record stuff and give it away so people get to hear about you, and top it off by selling individual performances to those who are willing to pay.

          Ignore record companies and so forth - they likely won't have anything much to do with this. Big companies are great for selling commodities, but generally not so good for selling uniqueness. That type of transaction is generally more personal, if only as a way to guarantee that the result is unique.

          Hmmmm . . . I'm not being very coherent . . . I need coffee . . .

          himi
        • (Touring bands give away CDs as advertising? Exactly how much do they charge per ticket to balance that out? How long do they have to stay on the road?)


          I think the truth is that barring any ingenious socio/technological inventions or draconian laws (SSSCA?), that it will simply not be possible to make large amounts of money by selling recorded content anymore. And frankly, that's okay with me. We'd be better off with many amateur/semi-pro bands making small amounts of money touring, then in our current situation of huge media corporations trying to maximize their own profits by pushing a few mediocre mega-sensations on the world.

    • Why would one be able to find one version of the track but not another?

      For the same reason that I can't find some specific version of some obscure 27K library that the latest version of $REALLY_COOL_LINUX_PROGRAM absolutely must have in order to function. Happens all the time.

      is likely a very limited market

      All markets are limited. The mass market, mainstream, whatever, is a fiction. No company sells to the "mass market," unless it's laundry detergent.

      each one of those expensive people had better produce a lot of $10 custom mixes every single day to keep the business afloat

      These statements seem overly skeptical, almost as if there is a parallel statement of "HA! HA! We can copy everything and there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING YOU CAN DO to make money ever again!! Ha! Ha!"

      hasn't really been thought out

      The point was not to produce a business plan.

      Most of the "business models" that the poster referred to amount to something like "maybe people will buy stuff if it's easier to buy it than to find it for free."

      ..and they will. That's very simple. I was just commenting to a couple of other "technical people" the other day that if there were a website where I could be 99% sure I could search for and get a quality download of $GREAT_SONG immediately, that would be worth paying for, and I think such a business would make profits in amounts ($millions a week, easily) that would turn the record companies green.
  • What's the big deal about N.Y. Times Registration? Jeez, if it means so much to you, fill out some fake demographic information (oh, boy, that'll fix 'em) and get on your life!
  • I guess so but what the hell does this quote mean?
    I like the quote 'With digitization, music went from being a noun, to a verb, once again. '

    Verb?

    "I just musiced the mutherfuckers!"?

    How the hell would you use it as a verb... well as a verb and not sound like a schwanz? Or is this just some cute language mangling that looks good but is devoid of meaning (ala Annie Proulx [theatlantic.com])?
  • This is from a fellow whose book I will be reviewing in the near future:

    " 'The record industry should stop blaming its customers for decreased sales. Had the industry cut a deal with Napster, it might have avoided the ungovernable chaos of decentralized peer-to-peer services now taking over the Internet,' writes Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian, media scholar and author of a book on copyrights."

    Check the story out over over here [msnbc.com].

  • Baseless argument (Score:3, Insightful)

    by stubear ( 130454 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @05:00PM (#3174361)
    This article missed the main problem altogether. All this extra information is going to distributed digitally as well. Many people who use Morpheus or Napster don't care enough about quality, what makes the author think they care about waiting an extra couple of weeks for the stuff to wind up on the P2P networks? What makes the author think it will take that long to even wind up on the P2P networks? Many movies have made it onto VCD long before the DVD or video is released meaning there are leaks elsewhere in the production chain that need to be addressed. This guy makes far too many assumptions without any data to back up his claims that these methods of consumer distribution will work.

  • premise entirely incorrect (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Karrade ( 137360 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @05:07PM (#3174389)
    I find this article mostly nonsense. Its very premise is flawed:

    The industrial age was driven by analog copies; analog copies are perfect and cheap. The information age is driven by digital copies; digital copies are perfect, fluid and free.

    The problem with the current distribution of "analog" copies is that they are not cheap and they are not perfect.

    The crux of RIAA's problems with Napster comes from the fact that the digital copies are all perfect. No matter how many generations of copies you make each copy is as perfect as the original. Trying making analog copies and after even 4 generations you can hear obvious quality loss. The Recording industry's original purpose was that they owned the originals and could make their reproductions from that. Since digital copies are cheap (not free, computing time, equipment and bandwidth all have costs those close to zero) and perfect their is no need to "go to the source". In other words, they are no longer necessary. Anyone who has any digital copy, can do exactly what the recording companies can do, and cheaply.

    Napster isn't driven by people who want to edit music. Napster is driven by people who want exact same piece of music for a price thats more reasonable than what Recording Industry provides. Making good music is still hard. Making copies is now easy. Napster not a musical revolution, it is a distribution revolution.

    And is it just me, or do all the ideas at the end sound like some kind of dot-com fantasy. The same people who believed in loosing money per unit but making it up in volume.

    Songs are cheap; what's expensive are the indexable, searchable, official lyrics.

    Searching and indexing music is far cheaper than making music! Its also cheaper than distributing music. Indexes take up less space and bandwidth than the material itself.

    On auction sites, music lovers buy and sell active playlists, which arrange hundreds of songs in creative sequences. The lists are templates that reorder songs on your own disc.
    If you can copy music for free, why on earth would you not be able to do the same for playlists?

    The most popular band in the world produces only very good ''jingles,'' just as some of the best directors today produce only very good commercials.

    What does this have to do with anything? If you're not paying for digital music (author's premise) why would you pay for "jingles". And I don't see commercials edging out movies.

    Musicians with the highest status are those who have a 24-hour Net channel devoted to streaming only their music.
    If I stream 24 hours of crap and U2 streams 10 minutes of Joshua Tree, who do you think is going to get the most hits and have the most "status".

    Despite the fact that with some effort you can freely download the song you think you want in a format you think will work for your system, most people choose to go to a reliable retailer online and use the retailer's wonderful search tools and expert testimonials to purchase what they want because it is simply easier and a better experience all around.

    This I think is makes sense. BUT, would you pay $20 for 8 tracks? That is why are willing to sit on their 56k and search for songs. Because $20/cd is too expensive! And the retailer does not want you to use your music on any system. If you want to use it in your car and home, they want you to buy another copy! Too bad if its inconvient and expensive for you. If they have no competition they can do whatever you want.

    I think the best analogy I heard about Napster is this: Imagine if we had a duplicator. So lets say we could duplicate apples from one original apple. Farmer's would be out business. Would we stamp out such technology on the basis that we are pirating apples and destroying a farmer's ability to make an income?

    If farmer's took a cue from the software industry they would probably include a EULA to the effect that they are licensing use of the apple to us for eating purposes, but we would not actually own what we eat!

    • If you're not paying for digital music (author's premise) why would you pay for "jingles".

      Then try not buying any products. For every dollar of any product you buy, a few cents goes to marketing, and some percent of that to the poor fellow who wrote the jingle for the commercial.

      And I don't see commercials edging out movies.

      Ever gone to a movie and seen 15 minutes of trailers? Ever tried pressing fast-forward on a DVD, only to find that the publisher has blocked that action?

    • Searching and indexing music is far cheaper than making music!

      Really? What is the URL for the comprehensive index of all music? Indexing music is very hard work and very time-consuming, especially if adding something above what the CD Player lists as artist, title, album and time.

    • So lets say we could duplicate apples from one original apple.

      We can. It's called a seed.

  • Let's face facts (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Beliskner ( 566513 )

    Put flame jacket on... Let's face facts, people. The fairest way for these moviemakers and musicians to get their royalties IS through levies on blank CD-R, CD-RW and DVD-R [slashdot.org]. I know for a fact that when the majority of people go out and buy a CD recorder, they're thinking "I need a place to put my pron, warez, music and video-CDs" NOT "I need 650Megs to make a backup of my system files because hard disks have a finite MTBF, viruses, etc.".

    My computer repair consultant friend was telling me the vast majority of his clients have 50 CDRs of music, vid, pron but no backups of their data whatsoever. I'd guesstimate that 80% of all CD-Rs are used solely to store copyrighted music and vids. Come on people, the media is real cheap compared to tape streamers [onstream.com]. Levy exemption can be given to schools, charities.

    If levies aren't applied, then the industry will push for SSSCA on CPUs, RAM, Apps (maybe by implementing .NET-DRM by installing RIAA libraries that use encryption, and in Java (import java.DRM.memoryencryptedandprotectedMP3)) just off the top of my head. If you think this is *magically* not gonna happen then go talk to some lawyers and hear them drool on about "artist's property"... property this... property that, some lawyers that are my friends have been hostile to me for even suggesting that music isn't the artist's property they're not gonna change their minds on this. I think we all know that if DRM/SSSCA happens we'll be seeing performance drops by a factor of 10 on tomshardware, new computer will be slower than old ones for a long while. Plus the following 3 scenarios:

    Badly flawed SSSCA/DRM - Makes computers slow and crash, and is useless.

    Flawed/difficult-to-crack SSSCA/DRM - a hostile nation's intelligence services will come up with a way to circumvent the protection which will of course be real popular, and probably not open source into which they have implanted their own version of magic lantern [slashdot.org] trojan, ducking antivirus apps [slashdot.org].

    Virtually impossible to crack SSSCA/DRM - Code not our own any more, C and ASM no longer write to the CPU but instead a .NET-like IL or protected RAM areas only. Government can censor us, RIAA, MPAA can censor us, scientology can censor us, (insert your worst nightmare here) can censor us and bin Laden can send messages to his followers DRM-potected so no intelligence service can decrypt it.

    Please people, cut the RIAA/MPAA just a little slack so that they don't bring the DOJ down on our heads, especially now [riaa.com]. If they can take down Microsoft then they can definitely slow us down [theregister.co.uk] or take us down [slashdot.org] as well :-( And if you think Freenet can't be blocked then talk to those Cisco people about what you can really do with layer 4 switching [cisco.com].

    Take flame jacket off arrrrggghhhhhh Ouch! Put flame jacket back on

    • This isn't a flame, but could you please not make up stats to back up your arguments? You're guessing about how many people use CD-R's for illegal downloads, and maybe that's a high percentage, but there are many people who use CD-R's for fair-use mix CDs, homemade recordings, EMusic downloads, etc., who'll get caught up by a levy. Saying that "most" of them are pirates anyway is to give in to the brutal reductionism that Michael Eisner used in stating that PC manufacturers profited from piracy.

      Anyway. While I agree that the SSSCA would be bad (the nightmare scenarios you cite are all legitimate, and I can think of more), I don't like the blackmail aspects of the argument. The RIAA has essentially said, "Give us what we want, or we sue the hell out of you and take it anyway," and advocating a levy is acceding to that demand.

      But the RIAA doesn't have the moral legitimacy to demand this tribute. The biggest players, the five record companies and the Hollywood studios, would get the biggest benefits, essentially corporate handouts that'd all but price indies out of the marketplace, especially if the big companies shift their business models to take advantage of the sin tax. And there's still no guarantee that musicians will get a cent of additional royalties from it.

      I don't want to pay an additional tax to prop up a failing business model, especially if that tax was added because the labels and studios lied about the effects of piracy to get it.

    • Re:Let's face facts (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Chris Johnson ( 580 )
      All very fine except you can't trust the RIAA/MPAA like that. You can't GIVE them slack- not like give anything in return. They are trusts, monopolies, they want to stomp out any other avenues for art. You can't even trust them to be fair to their own possessions- they pay their artists less than a tenth of what I, an indie, get per download, a hundredth of what I get per CD, and they have a hundred thousand times the resources of my indie distributor (Ampcast). What they WILL do is loan money- at terms that would embarrass any self-respecting bank.

      Please don't cut the RIAA any slack. You're arguing like they represent musicians. You're wrong.

      Eating lots of poison may be unhealthy but that doesn't mean the goal is to figure out a MODERATE, REASONABLE amount of poison to eat...

    • I know for a fact that when the majority of people go out and buy a CD recorder, they're thinking "I need a place to put my pron, warez, music and video-CDs"

      Nonsense. The facts I know say that they're thinking of legal remixes, MP3 compilations of already-purchased albums, etc.

      Please people, cut the RIAA/MPAA just a little slack

      Once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.

  • Here's the solution (Score:2, Informative)

    by crosbie ( 446285 )
    A business model that will work even without copyright:

    http://www.cyberspaceengineers.org/tda/tda.html
  • Live shows... even at local pubs. you can make a good living that way.
  • Why are some of you so ready to flush the article because you don't like some of the details? The idea of what this article saying still stands. There are other ways of making money off it. NYT had it right that having tunes alone isn't so valuable. There's too much music out there. It's hard for me to find music I like, so the idea of paying a site for the service of 'find me songs I might like' doesn't sound so bad, provided I can go download found songs on the web. $10 a month tho help me find music on Morpheus that I'd like would be worth it!

    The point of making music 'liquid' was another good point that basically illustrates our desire to have our fair use act back. As an animator, I like being able to download music it and edit it in to my movies so I can make a cool vid to show me friends. I have no interest in making money from it (I can't without licesning the music anyway), but I do like the idea of having fun with my hobby.

    If somebody likes a band well enough, they are willing to pay a small fee to get a hold of the lyrics, or a greater fee to get the 24-track information so they can do their own remix. It doesn't take that many people for it to be profitable. It's certainly a better idea than trying to pass laws that'll make it so digital music isn't possible.

    In any case, listen to the idea instead of nitpicking the details. There's a whole new revenue model for the RIAA out there (Or any other musician) if they realize that the songs themselves may be made free. The RIAA should be ashamed of themselves for not trying to figure that out.
  • Musicians. We're just ordinary people with a hobby--nothing worth making a big fuss over. I do music because I enjoy it, because it's a great feeling to watch other people enjoy the performance, and because it gives the left half of my brain a rest. I could give a care about making any money from my tunes. My daytime job is a primarily Open Source-based freelance software consultant and it pays the bills adequately. Right now, I'm working on setting up some digital recording equipment--half of it built myself with a soldering iron in one hand and a grounded heat-sink utensil in the other. When I'm done, I'll put all my work online in MIDI, OGG and FLAC formats for anyone who cares to enjoy or enhance--using a GPL style license so that it can't be commercialized too much. Just for fun I'll also put the work out on Gnutella and OpenNap servers.

    This sorely-needed article is interesting and well thought. I firmly agree with the notion that the future of music will, above all, be more diverse. I also expect to see the power of labels fall dramatically. When the walls come down and markets are set free, monopolies do not survive. And when enough free music is available, there's no need for a market anyhow--just a culture. Maybe somebody will set up a site where the community can rank their favorite tunes. Who knows. Anything is possible.
  • Until the 20th century, musicians in Western societies were generally held in contempt, their status approximating that of a vagabond. Even the most successful musicians were mistrusted.

    Apparently there is a slight shortage of study in music history here. Composers were widely sought by noble courts and commissioned to produce new music regularly. In Italy, star operatic leads were treated almost as well as royalty for decades, if not centuries.

    A far cry from "general contempt," despite the anecdotal support.

    • On the button. We have lawmakers in congress who would like to throw the author of this article in jail. What are they afraid of? Are they really afraid that the economics of free distribution will render musicians homeless? Or are they afraid that the publishing and distribution business will evaporate and leave them without a juicy corporate sponsor?

      It's clear that everyone on all sides of this discussion values musicians. Everyone has the interest of musicians in mind. That's a good sign. The debate rages over how best to protect their interests. The RIAA and their ilk would have us believe that we should all pay them some protection money to keep musicians from getting mugged. How ironic. I will pay to go to concerts, especially in an inviting venue. I will pay to see a movie in a nice theatre. There is really no need for some crack-head new dot-com business model to see us through this difficult time.

      I think it's time to start compiling a list of who's up for election and where, with a short summary of where the candidates stand w/ respect to DMCA, SSSCA, etc. These issues will hold more sway over my vote than any other.
  • Remember who's writing it. It's not your average stuffy New York Times article - so don't be surprised if the opinions and attitudes are more like what you'd expect to read in Wired :-)

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