Web Radio Negotiations Carry Poison Pill 243
Adambomb writes "It seems that the deal that saved Net radio at the 11th hour, the new terms that would limit the maximum fee for multiple-channel Web radio broadcasts, contains a hook. To qualify for the cap, broadcasters must work to ensure that stream-ripping is not feasible. Given that the analog hole will always exist as far as I can imagine in such scenarios, is this even possible?" The article mentions the measures Net stations could easily take but have been reluctant to — lowering bit rates, playing jingles over the music, cross-fading songs. How long before they are backed into using these techniques?
Analog hole and stream ripping (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would anyone stream-rip? (Score:2, Insightful)
But WHY? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the problem here? The money lost must be so very small.
Same with radio station nowadays, do they really need this kind of system longer? How many people care about casette tapes and record from radio?
They need to understand that we just download our illegal music file by file at even higher quality instead of ripping streams
Re:Ummmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Analog hole and stream ripping (Score:3, Insightful)
You listen to web radio basically when you couldn't be bothered turning on a regular radio or you want to listen to a range of music that is no available via regular radio and mots importantly you are really interested in listen to any specific music your just after a musical background.
Expectations about the income web radio can deliver are just totally unrealistic and spending additional money in trying to 'secure' it is pointless. The more hassle every body has with the current media empires the quicker the independent music scene will develop and dominate.
Re:Payola killed the radio star (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, we don't have any indie stations here. There was one once but it got bought out by a big station and now runs the same stuff everyone else is running. You could probably shut down all but one or two stations without decreasing the musical variety at all.
Re:Why would anyone stream-rip? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, that's just what they say they believe. People have been recording FM for years. The truth of the matter is that the RIAA doesn't like online radio because online radio isn't controllable via payola whereas terrestrial radio is. They'd rather bankrupt it than lose their stranglehold on all mass media. If the online radio stations were smart, they'd start accepting tracks from anyone who: a) is not a member of the RIAA and b) is willing to allow their music to be streamed without restrictions. People online would then just get music from artists that are pro-freedom and aren't scared of having to compete quality wise with other artists. I would take this crap as a direct affront if I ran a radio station and would put the question out to the airwaves. There are non-greedy non-RIAA artists available, it's time that supply kicked in online.
This wont work (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Analog hole and stream ripping (Score:3, Insightful)
Or more easily, you could get download the playlist of the show, and search for the songs in your favourite file-sharing program. What the radio-stations really need to keep secret from us pirates, is the names of the songs they are playing.
Exactly.
Maybe I'm a bit ahead of most people, but I no longer want a physical product. What I want, is to download the music from the Internet. Having to physically ship and get hold of a CD, and then rip it and throw it away, is a waste of time and money. And I don't want DRM either. I don't mind paying for my music, as these days I have a lot more money than time, but so far, only the pirates are able to give me what I want. If I pay, I have to go through hoops.
Re:Italian Radio (Score:3, Insightful)
why now? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Italian Radio (Score:2, Insightful)
"In the end, everyone makes money."
I understand the point is that many of the people make _too much_ money, but it should be pointed out that they all do deserver _some_ money for their efforts. I know folks at various record lables, and they put in (easily) sixty hour weeks as a normal thing. I know many touring musicians with good CD sales, and they work tirelessly...practice, travel, shows, recording, promotion...it's non-stop almost year round.
My point is: it's not wrong for labels and artists to want money for their craft. It's only wrong to want exorbitant amounts.
The RIAA asking for better stream ripping technology isn't really so evil. Lawsuits and the ugliness around file sharing is rather despicable, but this is totally reasonable. Their goal here isn't to end "piracy" 100%, it's only to deter the casual listener from totally ripping all streams. They absolutely understand that its just a simple loop-back for analog recording, but the idea is that the CD as a package is still appealing, the quality is a little higher, and that the casual consumer would still be inclined to buy a CD as long as they can't simply download a piece of shareware and rip the streams with a push of a button.
Collectively the RIAA is pretty nasty, so are many software advocacy/anti-piracy groups. That doesn't mean that the people who produce the work that those groups advocate for don't deserve to be paid for their efforts.
Why not give customers what they want? (Score:5, Insightful)
If people want to record the stream, let 'em.
They've been doing it for decades, folks. I remember a guy in college whose nickname was "tapes" because he had a huge collection of tapes of popular music recorded off the air. At 1-7/8 ips on open-reel tapes on an analog tape recorder, which dates me and the period.
People always have been able to do stuff like that.
And it never amounts to a hill of beans, in terms of hurting artists or recording companies or whatever, because it's just too much work organizing the recordings and editing the stream to find the starting and stopping points and labelling the tape boxes. And, these days, either accepting handwritten scribbled labels or futzing some more looking for cover art or pictures of the artist or editing CD labels or formatting LightScribe text.
And it tends to be a lifecycle thing. You do that when you're in college and short on cash. People who are willing to put that much work into it are also people who are deeply committed to listening to music and sooner or later most of them get a job and a salary and suddenly they no longer have six hours to edit and organize recording but they do have a credit card and money to buy CDs or iTunes downloads or whatever.
It's like worrying about the possibility that someone could pay for one newspaper but take two out of the vending box. Does it ever happen? Sure. Does it make it worth building a complicated, more expensive vending box? Obviously not, and the newspaper folks obviously understand the tradeoff.
If the music companies just focussed on pleasing the customer, they'd do a lot better than they're doing now. It almost seems as if they're more concerned about the sheer abstract principle of the thing ("but they're robbing me!") than about dollars and cents. They're certainly not showing any concern for their customers.
Re:Italian Radio (Score:4, Insightful)
That's been going on since the 60's that I remember, and probably longer. It has everything to do with the DJ's sense of self-importance (making a living delivering monologues will do that to you), and the station's need to interject commercial sponsor or promotional messages wherever and whenever possible. Any musical intro to a song would invite a voice over. The tail end of a song, if not cut off altogether would similarly be talked over.
There was a brief respite during the 70s when people started buying LP albums (singles were dismissed), migrated to FM, and drugs became popular. On a given night, it wasn't unusual to hear the entire side of an LP album being played without interruption of any kind.
Things changed over time, of course. Drugs fell out of use, the "album version" was replaced by the single, and the need to make money became paramount. Some stations even resorted to increasing the speed at which songs played. Today, commercial radio is like AM radio was way back when (lots of commercials, interruptions, self-promotion, and a limited but rotating playlist) and AM radio turned into
Re:What the.... fuck... was this? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that the RIAA members are stuck back in the 1980's when everyone used their tape decks to record music over the airwaves. We're not there anymore. Most people care enough about the audio quality that they'll either purchase the song from iTunes (more convenient, less hassle!) or download a copy from P2P that someone else has already pirated. And I can tell you that the "someone else" probably didn't use net radio as a master. He probably went out and purchased a single CD, ripped it, and (if he was enough of a jerk) returned it to the store as defective.
The RIAA and its members need to get their heads out of their rears and get with modern times. Dollars to donuts says that any study on the piracy of net radio would find it to be nearly non-existent. Their worries amount to nothing more than chicken little crying "The sky is falling, the sky is falling!" If by some miraculous event the studies showed that people were stream ripping, then maybe it would be a good time to embrace services like iTunes to their fullest extent?
Offering the product that people want at a price the market will bear is the best thing that any music company can do. The people who would spend the time engaging in stream ripping or P2P piracy aren't going to pay for the music anyway, so you gain very little by spending your time trying to stop them. Having DJs talk over music has never stopped freeloaders in the past, so I don't see why it would stop them now.
Simple... (Score:4, Insightful)
A: ZERO
Does anyone even bother trying to record web radio?
A: No
Hello RIAA. See that bag there. It has no cats in it. It will never have cats in it again. Get over it.
Re:Crossfading songs?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What the.... fuck... was this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Italian Radio (Score:3, Insightful)
The ultimate goal of copyright is to have all of that stuff copied freely and vigorously
and built upon. The real deal is that Lars gets to make money for a time and then make
way for the next generation. He was never supposed to be an eternal zombie vampire.
If you the consumer can not copy or derive from the work then there should be no legal copyright protection on it.
Lars was the consumer once.
So were the members of Motorhead.