Napster Clone With Pay Per Download 266
Judg3 writes " This story over at Wired.Com talks about a new Napster clone with a twist, pay per download. Yep, thats right. MoJoNation offers a "cross between Napster and eBay," says Jim McCoy, the 30-year-old CEO of Autonomous Zone Industries, the makers of Mojo.
They want to create the first file-sharing economy of agents, servers, and search engines in which senders and receivers can agree on prices for each transaction and use micropayments to get paid.
These payments are called (aptly enough) mojo. Their web page doesnt say much, well ok it says nothing. But theres some activity over at SourceForge. Though not a whole lot." Micropayments are definitely a holy grail for the internet: It could affect web pages too: I'd pay a micro-payment to yank banner ads from websites I frequent. And I'd pay a few cents to download a new track. The last question is how micro is micro enough? A half cent per web page? A Quarter per audio track?
Re:Is this ever missing the point of the new econo (Score:1)
Micropayments for Banner Ads (Score:1)
I think it's interesting that you say this, as most of us have learned to ignore the top part of a page where the banner habitates.
I think I saw an article somewhere (handy, eh?) that went into the problems with banner ads and how people are learning to ignore them. Smart(er) companies are realising this and forgetting the regular banner ads altogether.
It's kind of funny how these banner ads have taken over our web surfing lives, but with all of the marketing that probably goes into making them, no one realises that people often skip them. The cool ones are the ads that aren't in the typical banner ad shape, sometimes taking up the right column of a news page. Even if the text is sideways, I can't help but look at it.
... my 2 cents
rLowe
Re:Slate.com (Score:1)
Just trying to help.
:)
that would make it work (Score:1)
What I meant about the musicians being willing to be paid, is that they may take it as evidence that the person who paid was engaging in unauthorized copying. It might be legally dangerous to send them money this way.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Title spelling error (Score:1)
Mayeb CmdrTaco will loes hsi jbo ovre thsi mistaek.
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:2)
The net.tipping-jar? It's right here! (Score:1)
I won't bore everyone with my rants about trying to contact Courtney Love [holemusic.com].
*sigh* -- Even email saying "go away, and leave me alone!" would be nice.
I can even click
Stephen's tip, as long as the ol' e-gold promotional account holds up!
hard thing is to think in grams instead of dollars (where the Casino [thegoldcasino.com] helps).
JMR
Re:Fairtunes is a ripoff (Score:1)
The break down is like this:
We charge you:
4% per transaction + $0.25
Our cost in terms of Merchant Visa+payment processor:
3.5% per transaction + $0.23
Fairtunes then gets:
0.5% per transaction + $0.02.
With that little bit that we take we use it to pay for servers, computers, lawyers, accountants, banking, stamps, envelopes, cells, faxing, stationary, and labour costs.
We will not make any money on this any time soon!
When we have sufficient volume we will REMOVE ALL SERVICE FEES. If we were sitting on a load of venture capital there would be no services fees but this is not the case. This is a completely independent venture. We are affiliated with no big business.
Sure I would love to accept PayPal but we are Canadian. They do not service Canadians. And it isn't easy for us to open an office in the US. If it was we'd do it.
Be as negative as you want but we are not making money of this. And fact of the matter is, a whole lot more money goes to the artist through us in terms of percentages then when you buy a CD.
One of the co-founders of Fairtunes,
Re:only pay for mp3's if they're PROPERLY encoded (Score:1)
Right now, CDs are the best way to get uncompressed digital audio, and it's going to stay that way for the next couple years. Perhaps the custom CD stores will come to help here.
Anyway, I'm not sure if you are just trying to up the ante in a trollish way, but I agree with the general point. Compressed audio should be sold at a discount relative to the price of CDs.
We don't need digital cash. (Score:2)
Your apparent idea of "digital cash" which doesn't represent a fixed amount of a real-life commodity is absurd. It is to my description above as monopoly money is to bank notes: an amusing toy, possibly mistaken for money by small children, but of no real value.
Internet-available account transfer services (meaning, you contact the service every time you want to send money to someone, and you can contact them to confirm that you've received it) are sufficient, and they are available. E-gold [e-gold.com] is an example (it is also a peer-to-peer system which allows micropayments and works with any SSL-supporting web browser). There are still security risks, but you only need one secure line, instead of establishing a secure line with every person you want to send money to.
What do you mean by "open source" anyway? Neither of these systems necessarily requires special software on the client side, so there's nothing that needs open-sourcing.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Music is now free, and should be (Score:1)
Payper downloads? (Score:1)
Maybe if it's the kind of scrolled payper that those player pianos use, but I can't see jogging around my neighborhood wearing a player piano mechanism...
No More Banner Ads! Ever! (Score:1)
If everyone sends me a quarter, you will never see another banner ad again! I promise!
Closed Source companies DON'T MAKE PRODUCTS (Score:1)
Re:Is this ever missing the point of the new econo (Score:2)
RIAA need no longer grease radiostations, who in turn also collect from advertisers, but can get music in my ears at lower cost to them, so RIAA can vend their services and related IP products. By artbitraging the chain of distribution, the market is helped on both sides. It is true that the poor radio stations will suffer somewhat, for this devalues the amount they can charge for ads, but so what?
Cybergold does this in a slightly different way, yes, but its the same notion -- the net makes it possible to broker our attention, a commidity for which *WE* can now charge, so that relevant product gets into our hands more and more cheaply, and we are compensated for the inconvenience of previewing products in which we have no interest.
Re:the jokes on you (Score:1)
YOU'RE STILL STEALING IT....
YOU IDIOT
this line is inserted to get rid of that bloody lameness filter.....
Re:that would make it work (Score:1)
We are working on these problems around the clock and should have feasible solutions online shortly.
In terms of trusting us:
We're working the problems out and are still looking for alternatives. Speak up if you have suggestions on the trust issue.
In terms of aggregation of donations we'll have an "open" solution up and online within 24hours for you guys to have some fun with.
Matt
co-founder
www.fairtunes.com [fairtunes.com]
(is my sig broken?)
Re:Is this ever missing the point of the new econo (Score:1)
to illustrate with an other example, sometimes companies introduce products that fail to earn a profit, an unpopular CD for example. After lowering the price to stimulate sales, the price they charge does not cover the cost to manufacture (note that I'm using "price" and "cost" accurately, unlike your post). In this case, the investors in the company pay the advertising (and lose money), not the customer. And you are quite right, if they lose money too frequently, there will be no more produced.
To reiterate, "price" is a function of the market at the time of the sale. If it covers costs, there is a profit, if not, there is not. Customers pay for final products and services, not for factors of production.
burning my karma (Score:1)
fox this shit rob..im a lazy drunken bastard and dont know how
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:2)
But we don't have that now. I don't expect the RIAA to give me a new CD when mine gets a skip.
Maybe the micropayment services could compete with one another for your business by offering various guarantees for the replacement of lost media. They could easily recoup the cost of this by selling the list of stuff you bought to some ad people.
Micropayment to remove ads? (Score:1)
http://www.junkbuster.com/ [junkbuster.com]
and
http://www.guidescope.com [guidescope.com]
Both act as a proxy that allows you to enable or disable ad filtering. Banners, ad boxes, etc, just show up as a little broken image icon on your screen. I use Guidescope, and personally, I think it rocks.
Re: (Score:1)
I read it. perhaps you should think about it more (Score:3)
That's no reason to use them now. I don't care what they do might possibly do in the future, or what their hopes and dreams are, I care about the service they are providing now, which basically sucks.
Well give youself a pat on the back for being skeptical, but let me ask you this, oh trusting e-gold user. How do you know that e-gold ACTUALLY backs up your deposits with real metal? Have you seen it? Are they audited by a third party?
With e-gold's old system, anyone was permitted to go see it. With their new system, they are audited by a very well-respected 3rd party. Furthermore, you can have them send you a check for the amount in your account, and you'll usually be communicating with the person you're sending the money to, so you immediately know whether or not the money was transferred. They can only screw you once before you realize it (this is the basis of most trust: if they screw you once, you can sick the cops on them, if that doesn't work, they lose all the future profit from your business anyway).
These fairtunes guys, OTOH, are asking you to trust that they'll send your money through, with no way for you to confirm that they sent it, and no 3rd party observers of any kind.
They could cheat you and the musicians over and over again and probably get away with it.
So why should we trust them?
Right... and all I need to do in that case as the patron is track down each artist's home page, and then manually transfer money from my e-gold account to theirs, not to mention I have to have an e-gold account in the first place. Quite a lot of work for micropayments, no? Ditto with PayPal.
If the musicians were interested in doing this, the best source for their music would be their homepage.
A directory of musician's home pages with free music and e-gold payment forms would be fairly easy to set up and more convenient to use than a Napster/Fairtunes combination. It would also be more trustworthy and provide better MP3 downloads. Filling out the transfer forms would be something to do while you download the files (whether the ones you're donating for, or new ones while you donate for ones you've downloaded in the past).
At any rate, paying through e-gold is simpler than the forms you have to fill out at Fairtunes.
This may come as a shock, but musicians' music is being freely distributed as we speak, without their permission!
Some of them are also trying to sue people who are distributing it. They certainly aren't helping the distribution process, by distributing well-made MP3s. I would rather pay people who don't try to hold a legal stick over my head and who help the free distribution process, to encourage others to do the same.
If you want to know where my sympathies lie, read my essay on the economics of giving products away and asking for donations [boswa.com]. I think it is important to reserve your donation money for people who ask for it. It is also important for them to disclose how much they are getting in this manner, so others can see that what they are doing is profitable and follow their lead.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Re:Instead of paying for our songs and webpages... (Score:1)
Re:The latest ultimate plan to rule Townsville! (Score:1)
Why new payment method? (Score:1)
Micropayments? Bad Idea. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
More on Rob's comments than the service.. (Score:2)
I have a hunch that if it caught on, it would do more to make money for those violating copyright, more than to support actual artists.
As for Rob's comments on micropayments to remove ads, I think that's a step backwards. I, at least, do not want to pay to read cnn.com, slashdot.org, or any of the other web sites. If they wish to place ads, that's fine. My proxy does an excellent jobs of removing them from webpages, and it doesn't cost anything.
If web hits were to cost money, they would quickly accumulate into a ridiculous amount, for anyone that utilizes the web for anything useful.
I can see how people with a vested interest in direct payment for web traffic would support such things, since it would mean a guranteed income of a size greater than ad revenue, for practically every site. Especially given the devaluation of ads by the commodity nature of internet traffic.
For the actual people involved, paying out of the pocket seems less desirable.
Prices of the Web (Score:1)
[Kinda OT] Removing banner ads? (Score:1)
Ummmm, why would you pay to remove banner ads from webpages when you can use the Junkbuster Proxy [junkbusters.com] or Guidescope [junkbusters.com] (among other methods for removing banner ads) for free (in both senses)?
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I meant "ripoff" as in "bad deal" not "cheat" (Score:2)
I'm in on the same side, philosophically, as you guys (don't believe me? read this! [boswa.com]), I just see it as a poor execution of a good idea.
BTW, I'm also Canadian. That's why I offer to take donations on my site with e-gold but not PayPals.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Mojo Payments (Score:2)
Just a thought from an errant economist.
I hate this idea... (Score:2)
Re:Prices of the Web (Score:1)
Re:Great idea - but who benefits? (Score:1)
Anyone remember "Mummer's Dance" a few years back? Loreena McKennit and her self-run recording label Quinlan Road [quinlanroad.com] had some success promoting herself; 3 million copies of "The Book of Secrets" sold (a bit shy of your 12M mark, but still a lot of CDs), music in a couple soundtracks, etc. From interviews, its clear she's accomplished this for the sake of artistic control, but it was a lot of work over a lot years; the aforementioned album was her sixth...
OTOH, this is still pretty rare, and it does require a lot of determination and business sense on the part of the artist, which is too bad; it would be nice if, when all the dust settles from this, someone figures out a way that artists can focus on their art without getting screwed (by their agents, publishers, or their consumers)...
Re:whatever... (Score:1)
Actually, popular music has worked on the Streat Preformer Protocol for most of human existance. Now those musicians didn't make much money, but almost none else made much money either, so that's not a valid comparison.
Formal art music also used the SPP. It was just the few rich people and the church which were donating lots of money instead of lots of poor people donating a little bit of money.
Anywho, there is plenty of historical evidence for the streat preformer protocol. The only remaining qustion is will the anonyimity of the internet kill the "tipping culture." The internet is still too young to really predict the effects of this anonymousness, but the body of music fans which will not contribute to their artists deserves to have it's artists defect to other types of music (or just quit).
BTW> Attaching advertising to mp3s would not be a bad thing if the advertising is attached to the mp3 comment (say an embedded web page) and not to the audio.
The future of Music Distribution (Score:2)
The whole "Shutting down Napster" thing is something of a Red Herring. Allow me to pose a few questions and you will see why.
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?
4) What, in fact, are record companies for?
Bands get very little money per CD sold. Rolayties rarely run to as much as £1 (US$1.50). Recording is expensive, but not prohibitivly so. The biggest bar-to-entry into the music industry is getting signed by a company. Why? Because record labels do the distribution and the promotion. They also get most of the money. If you don't have a label, you have to be <b>very</b> lucky.
OK, now picture a new scenario. I record my songs for £1000 (US$1500). 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.
That is, perhaps, the future of music. The RIAA is scared that it will be cut out as the middleman. If a service come about where performers could sell direct to the public, it is bound to be a hit. I'm sure many of the big-boys would swich to it, were it not for their slave-contracts with the record companies.
The system would require separate uploader (artist)and downloader (customer) registration, but I'm sure it's the way forward. The RIAA know this, and want in on it. That is why they will persue their competitors, like Napster. THey want to be the only companies capable of offereing ths service, to keep tying bands into their contracts at less favourable terms.
Will it work? I think so, unfortunatly. The commercialzation of the Inernat may be inevitable, but we don't have to like it.
Re:Offshore Napster (Score:2)
Great, let's give the UN one more reason to invade...
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Re:micropayments / banner ads (Score:2)
The "knee-jerk" reaction here, is that because you find Slashdot valuable enough to pay a subscription fee, it's alien to you that someone might not want to.
A volunteer system of payment is acceptable for something like slashdot (plus its ads, but I too, like the parent, filter them out...I wouldn't click them anyway.), even if it isn't a viable economic model for information.
Quite frankly Slashdot doesn't provide a service that justifies any payment, in my opinion. Its news model is based upon submissions from readers, which end up linking to other sites, like CNN or ZDNET.
Its comment system provides nothing more than usenet or mailing lists, except that it's centralized around links to articles on these other sites, and mindless editorials constructed to increase ad revenue. Plus you get the added advantage of being for all intents and purposes censored by its elitest moderation system.
So while you may find its storage, or the content worth paying for, please don't attempt to force your values on me. Rob took a hobby, and for all intents and purposes, sold its userbase to a company for millions of dollars, and continued employment.
It is great as a pseudo-free service, but it'd be a cold day in hell that I'd have a credit card, very much used it to pay micropayments to read OOG's adventures. I'd be more apt to pay the author than Rob Malda for OOG's tales.
I'd be more apt to pay CNN for *THEIR* articles, than I would Slashdot. (But news should be free, anyway)
the trust issue (with suggestions) (Score:2)
You'd rather that the Backstreet Boys quietly stuff another $10,000 into their pockets (chump change to them; certainly no reason to call a press conference) than pay off your student loans.
Yeah, right.
You might send it along because you had to, as a matter of ethical and legal obligation, but really given the free choice (someone gave you the money without requiring you to send it someone), I don't believe for a second that you'd donate that large amount of money to a band you don't like. Hence, it is not more valuable to you in their wallets than in yours.
I believe you're probably honest, but you haven't even faced the real temptation of handling that money yet. If you start handling the kind of money that makes pop music superstars take notice, you might find it a lot harder to not skim off a few bucks (or a few tens of thousands) for yourself when nobody's looking.
I see no reason for people to trust you unless you have some competent and trusted auditor looking over your shoulder.
2.If we were stealing your money then why would why charge you a service fee?? Wouldn't we get more money without a service fee?
To make it look as if you're breaking even on donations, rather than the totally unbelievable idea that a couple of university kids are paying 5% of what everybody else does.
If you were running a scam, you would certainly do things like that to make it look like you're honest.
Speak up if you have suggestions on the trust issue.
Fine. Require the musicians in the directory to have a PayPal or e-gold account, and just be a directory to these accounts, never touch the money yourself, or send along real paper checks that you can't cash yourself. That would make you 100% trustworthy.
As for paying for your servers, you have two major choices: advertising, and mass-market busking [boswa.com]. Either would work, though I think people would appreciate you choosing the second option (and you are in a uniquely appropriate situation of having a customer base that understands the benefits of paying without being forced).
Actually, I'm planning to do something similar to this (kind of a cross between this and freshmeat.net) at buskware.com (nothing there yet, nor at buskware.org, which will be an advocacy/discussion site for buskware and mass-market busking). However, it will be aimed primarily at computer programs, and more specialized sites for other things (like music) will serve the donors' needs better than one centralized solution.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Ick. (Score:2)
When that happens, the current trend toward two paragraphs per page on a Web site will suddenly become a trend toward two words per page.
And then we'll be back to the old-fashioned penny-per-word style of writing. If you think Katz is a windbag now, wait until he starts getting paid by the word.
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no, I think YOU should read the FAQ... (Score:2)
4% plus 25 cents is way too expensive. It makes microdonations infeasible.
And straight out of the FAQ:
If you use something like e-gold, you end up losing about a total of 4% in the put-money-in, transfer, get-money-out sequence, regardless of the size and number of transactions. [...] All the musician needs is to create a free e-gold account and list it on their home page.
Right... and all I need to do in that case as the patron is track down each artist's home page, and then manually transfer money from my e-gold account to theirs, not to mention I have to have an e-gold account in the first place. Quite a lot of work for micropayments, no? Ditto with PayPal.
If they were really serious about providing a service, they'd also list other means by which you can pay the artists directly, instead of insisting that all the money go through their own hands.
Other means like what? I suppose they could list the address of the artist, but you could find that out yourself, the way they do.
Also, read the FAQ, they aren't audited by any third party, and their reasoning for why they wouldn't just pocket the money is very unconvincing
Well give youself a pat on the back for being skeptical, but let me ask you this, oh trusting e-gold user. How do you know that e-gold ACTUALLY backs up your deposits with real metal? Have you seen it? Are they audited by a third party?
Besides, the musicians have not said that they are willing to be paid this way. I would much rather give money to musicians who give permission for their music to be freely distributed.
This may come as a shock, but musicians' music is being freely distributed as we speak, without their permission! What can it hurt to have the musicians benefit some from the distribution of their music, given that it's happenning? Even better, we can leave the record companies out of it like we've always wanted to. How nice...
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Re:Napster is a bad model for paid material (Score:2)
Re:Excuse me? (Score:2)
about e-gold... (Score:2)
The potential number of people with e-gold accounts is larger than the number with credit cards, especially in the demographic who is likely to get the idea behind giving money away. It's hard for a young person to get a credit card, but easy to get and fund an e-gold account.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
You aren't being very convincing. (Score:2)
Central Group of Ontario is their 3rd-party escrow agent. They know exactly how much gold there is, and they can't touch it without their say-so.
Also how would we integrate the e-gold system into our site? We'd have to have a person manully verifiying everything. Or write some pretty crazy scripts to interface with their website as it currently stands. There is no nice server to integrate into like I can with visa cards.
Absolutely wrong. [e-gold.com] Didn't you even look into this? It's a payment service! Of course it's designed for automatic verification!
If I wanted to steal money I think there would be a lot better ways of defrauding the public than through our looney scheme of depending on YOUR goodwill.
Hmm, people send you money, without expecting you to do anything that they can check. Sounds like an awfully good scam to me!
Anyway, there's no reason that someone has to be using the best of all possible scams to be running a scam. There's a reason the phrase "criminal mastermind" exists - most criminals aren't.
If you really think we are scamming everyone, we now prominently display how much has been scammed (i mean sent), on our homepage.
...and, of course, you'd record it accurately if you were scamming everybody.
Your whole argument comes down to, "You should trust us because we're telling you to trust us." It doesn't fly.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Bad Mojo (Score:4)
The way I understand this there are two unrelated "payment" systems involved: the first is a reputation-based system with "Mojo" as its currency. It is designed to increase reliability and reduce the amount of junk on the system. People that have unreliable systems or post junk will have bad reputation and won't get much "Mojo". The other payment system is voluntary, it involves real money and it lets people compensate the producers of the original material, while the Mojo system will only let you pay other users of the system for the storage, CPU and bandwidth involved in distributing the data.
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Re:Worse than napster. (Score:2)
Re:Great idea - but who benefits? (Score:2)
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.
Potlatch protocol? (Score:2)
"My suggestion is to use an aggregate payment system tied in to a database which allows registered members to exchange credits or points on the system - In other words, you charge up your account ... and can then distribute "points" to anyone else on the system." (From this thread [editthispage.com] at Hack the Planet [editthispage.com])
Confirmation once again that like causes produce like effects, and that all events are products of their times. And what times? An historical inflection point, year zero [potlatch.net] of a new phase in human society. These ideas are everywhere now, "in everyone's heads". A crucial point: systems like this can only work if they are built on open and non-proprietary foundations, (ie. "platforms without the platform vendors" ie. nobody owns it) So all of these similar initiaves need to become interoperable.
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:2)
---
Mojo isn't just simple pay-to-download (Score:4)
This way, a dorm-kiddie on a T1 can fill up half of his 60Gig drive with MP3s, connect to Mojo, and watch the mojo karma roll in. I guess it could then be sold off, so you can actually MAKE money on this scheme (by hijacking university bandwidth; hmm...).
I think this is in principle a good idea exactly because it really encourages people to post stuff. I think that almost all recent music would quickly be posted on the site by people fishing for suckers. I think this is great. Napster could still run alongside, sort of the "poor man's trading program," but if you need something really rare, you'd log in on Mojo and pay for it, or, stay logged in on Mojo and hope people download from you so that you don't have to pay.
Problems (many already mentioned here; somewhat redundant):
1. Morons and idiots are still using the Xing mp3 encoder and other inferior products. From the filename and size you don't see how well it was encoded--not until you've paid for it. The system would encourage people to encode their MP3s using the fastest encoders available, which also happen to be the ones producing the most horrible results. (benchmarks [r3mix.net]). How would we reward good citizens like me who use only LAME 3.8x -V1 -h (which is what everyone with working ears should be using, by the way...)? Sure, it eats up CPU cycles...
2. Here's a get-rich-quick scheme: make up filenames like "Britney Spears-live rare bootleg Sao Paulo98-Pinball Wizard.mp3" That would earn you some uploads! Of course the file itself would be a recording of you lauging (all the way to the bank). So you would need an E-bay type ratings system for each user, that would show a username in red, for example, if they had bad ratings. But if you get bad ratings just use up any credit left in your account, ditch it and start all over again with a clean one, or get your buddy to write compliments like on Ebay. I just don't see how this would self-regulate.
Shit... need to go .. submit!
Re:LAME@128 is NOT as good as Frau@128 (Score:2)
at 160k and above, lame/blade (the current best free tools) start to excel. but for space savings and overall quality, frau/128 is an ideal compromise.
I'd estimate that I'd have to go to lame@192 (or higher) to equal frau@128. and frankly, mp3 is lossy even at its best; so why not optimize a bit more in the space savings direction; the quality loss is really minimal.
I don't mind the fact that frau is so slow to encode; I only encode once for each song, anyway.
--
Excuse me? (Score:2)
He wanted to give me a dollar for it, and wasn't sure how that could be arranged. He was quite serious, too- although he had very particular tastes, 'Alleycat' hit him so hard that he felt obliged to pay me for it.
I straightened him out pretty quick ;) first of all, the album 'Alleycat' is on is only $5.99. It has a nice attractive cover and includes other worthy tracks (though none of them are Electric Blues but Alleycat). Six bucks is not a huge amount- he could get the CD.
Failing that, I had the option when I uploaded the track to make it 'streaming only'- which is a joke anyway, but theoretically it could be withheld and people prevented from downloading it. I chose to make it freely downloadable on purpose- you simply can't focus entirely on money because as an artist there's an even more important currency, the currency of attention. It may not make sense to everybody, but I WANT my tracks in the hands of people who absolutely love them. I would rather be paid nothing to have my tune in the hands of someone who just loves it than be paid a dollar to have it stuck on some Zip disk somewhere. There's a future in finding the listeners who love what you do- there's no future in being paid money to get filed away as just another musician.
I have a new track up, 'B17 Flying Fortress' (it went live real quick! Gratifying), which illustrates 'what I would do with money': compare the sound of it with the sound of 'DeHavilland Mosquito'. As usual not everybody might like it but some people probably will :) and as usual, it is available for free download with no expectation beyond that. There's no CD for 'Wounded Skies' yet or even cover art, so you can't buy that ;)
My point is that it's up to me to decide these things. If I decide I want to give music away and simply allow people to pick up a CD if they want to encourage my making more music (and at that, pricing the CD as low as I'm allowed to do), well then I'll do that. It's not stupid- I rate in the upper percentiles of money earners on mp3.com, because a lot of people try to squeeze money out of every little bit of music they do, pricing their CDs really high (and they're only mp3.com CDs) and making everything streaming only, and that doesn't follow the rules for internet business- the 'shelf' is too big and there are too many more generous musicians on the 'shelf' next to 'em, and they end up getting hurt.
By the same token, this micropayment Napster clone sounds crazy to me. I know I've asked for my stuff to be shared on Napster, very publically and explicitly: I can also say that certainly nobody from this new Napster clone has contacted me asking for payment information and where to send the 25 cents. I can only assume that for the most part it is 'Napster Clone in which you pay THEM per download' and I would ask, what's the point in that? I certainly do not want people being made to pay 1/4 cent to download my music when they can download it for no 'micropayment charge' at mp3.com/chrisj and will always be able to (if mp3.com drops the ball on this I will simply find another place to host my music- or an additional, recommended place to host my music)
I'm sorry, but mp3s are not a profit model. They are a promotion model. The idea of doing micropayments on them is repugnant- next someone will be selling a winamp which charges $0.0001 per song played. Who gets this money? Certainly not the artist. It seems that in some ways Internet independent music will be "meet the new boss- same as the old boss" (no STR for CmdrTaco ;) ) and as soon as the old RIAA slimeballs are forced into irrelevance, new slimeballs will be revealed as being there all along, behind the new scene. You'll know them by doing the math- when all the little micropayments add up to $30,000 a day, and the artists get $1000 for Britney Spears, $900 for Backstreet Boys, $800 divided up among everybody else, then you'll know who the new slimeballs are.
I refuse to be a part of the RIAA slimeballs, and I'll refuse to be a part of the replacement slimeballs. If that means crippling my 'career' then so be it. Frankly I doubt it- I think in the modern day being a slimeball becomes a handicap because it's too easily uncovered and the information gets around very quickly. I will be very interested to see if I'm right :)
Re:I read it. perhaps you should think about it mo (Score:2)
That's no reason to use them now. I don't care what they do might possibly do in the future, or what their hopes and dreams are, I care about the service they are providing now, which basically sucks.
Surely you can see the circular reasoning going on here. It's going to continue to suck for as long as no one uses it! We have the advantage of dealing with such small amounts of money--The service charges at this point are worth it to me to make a statement against the music industry, and place a small bet on the off-chance that this fairtunes thing goes big and gets press.
They could cheat you and the musicians over and over again and probably get away with it.
So why should we trust them?
Point taken. Personally, I trust them because I see them to be like me, young idealists who are disenchanted with the industry, and want to put enough time and resources into the project to make a company out of it. Naive? Perhaps, but like I said, there's so little money coming out of my pocket I'm willing to take a chance at the opportunity to make a statement.
At any rate, paying through e-gold is simpler than the forms you have to fill out at Fairtunes.
Fairtunes is also brand new, and since its existence is based on this very idea, it can be tailored to make just this kind of transaction painless. They have plans in the works to write plugins for for the major media players that allow you to tip the artist when you play their song. Who else knows what they could come up with?
And any officially sanctioned scheme like you describe would legally have to involve the record company. So by participating in it I don't achieve my goal of excluding the record company.
Some of them are also trying to sue people who are distributing it.
And I certainly would be less likely to tip musicians who had openly declared war on me.
But think about this: how likely are people going to be to try this until they're shown it works? Stephen King can afford to, and isn't bound by a draconian exclusive contract that forbids him from writing books on his own. I see this as the chance to show them it CAN work, and leave them with less reason to try and litigate against me. Of course the leeches at the RIAA will still try, but how will anyone take their rhetoric about it being "for the artist" seriously if the artists don't support their actions?
...reading your essay now, but there'd be no way to finish it and the comment on it before this discussion thread was dead...
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Shoot again, bucko (Score:2)
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This will happen, but not by this company. (Score:2)
Legally, they will get nailed, just as mp3.com already has (for Beam-It) and Napster will be. Quite simply, they don't own any of the licenses for the music they are trafficking in, much less the users who have simply ripped a few tracks from a CD they own. What legal rights does a pirate have for compensation for his pirated works? Nada.
Postulate. The RIAA companies will initiate such a service soon, after Napster and its competitors have been shut down.
The genie is out of the bottle with regards to mp3 files. No amount of interference can stop the illegal trade of mp3 files amongst users. The best the RIAA companies can do is to act as a middleman. People will be willing to pay a premium to have the service of a Napster-like central repository. Anyone who has used both Napster and Gnutella has realized that Napster's central sercer system is the way to go here in terms of speedy searches, and is superior to Gnutella for the trade of mp3 files. People will be willing to pay a small amount for that service.
The inevitable conclusion is that the RIAA companies may eventually act as middleman between users trading mp3 files. However, they will not offer microcharges as small as
Interesting, but... (Score:4)
Also, how would they handle the initial population of files? If I use the software, and offer my collection of mp3's (ripped from discs I own), do the copyright holders receive a cut of money that others pay to get my stuff? Do I get anything like credit towards use of the service?
I admit, I haven't delved too deep into their (really, really thin) page, but does the RIAA give their servers all of the files to offer?
Good idea - definitely more palatable to the monopolists than Napster, but it seems like there are a lot of potential shortfalls.... I'm hopeful, though!
LAME is as good as Frau (Score:2)
any old joe can encode using ... low bit rate blade/lame ... but if I can get Frau. encoded mp3's
Remember, the LAME encoder is thought to be as good as Fraunhofer's and it's Free (but may be illegal [mp3licensing.com] because certain necessary and irreplaceable algorithms for creating MP3 data are patented).
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
Re:whatever... (Score:2)
I think the difference between the Napster debacle and something like alcohol prohibition is that prohibtion took a legal product (alcohol) and made it illegal. The Napster problem focusses on the fact that Napster is accessory to an activity already established to be illegal: unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material. To a musician, making their recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge is tanamount to theft of their livlihood and art. And yes, it's illegal. Whether you go out and buy the CD the next day is completely irrelevant if you were never given permission to copy the work in the first place. Think of it this way: if you steal $50 from someone, and send them a check for $500 the next day, you're still guilty of theft. The law doesn't care if the victim is better off in the end. The law is the law. If you don't like the law, stop whining and do something about it. Organize, demonstrate, and vote.
Napster could have been a very useful tool for music lovers, musicians, and the recording industry, but I think it's gotten out of hand. I agree with Lars wholeheartedly, and I think it is the duty of mega-bands to take a stand, because while Metallica won't feel the pinch of lost CD revenue, less successful musicians will. In the end, Napster users are just whining because they want something for nothing, at the expense of artists. Which, as a musician, I find absolutely disgusting.
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All generalizations are false.
whatever... (Score:3)
Even if Napster were shut down, someone would code a copy that hides itself in SMTP packets or something. I've met too many frightening MP3 addicts to believe that we can ever go back to a pre-Napster world. Pay for music? Yeah, right...
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All generalizations are false.
Micropayments are holy grail of the internet?!? (Score:2)
I'm sorry, this makes me sad, perhaps because on the internet I'm a user, not a publisher.
I live in France where for about 15 years they've had this thingy called the Minitel, which is basically a really dysfunctional Internet where you pay by the minute. It sucks pretty big time.
Please, I know things may happen whether we like them or not, but don't you like the free as in beer Internet? Don't you think it's tainted enough by money and commercialism as it is? Don't you see what a horror having to check your wallet whenever you do anything on the internet will be?
I know the term is "micro"payments. That sounds like your wallet doesn't take a significant hit. But don't be fooled.
Do you like highway tolls? Would you like to pay for every little trip you took in your car, more or less according to the hour or the type of road you drive? That kind of scheme already exists, and it's called taxes, and we pay plenty of those already. You want to pay "micro"taxes whenever you scratch your nose?
This makes me sad.
Great idea - but who benefits? (Score:4)
I prefer a model like the "Street Performer Protocol" [counterpane.com] recently utilized by Stephen King [stephenking.com]. I'm also fond of voluntary contributions to artists and other creators. What I would not like to see is a huge bazaar where Joe Average gets 5 bucks for trading the latest Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling gets nothing for writing it.
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Re:whatever... (Score:3)
So if I make a musician's recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge by playing my new CD for a room of my friends, that's theft?
Or if I make a musician's recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge by making a mix tape (or mix CD-R) out of CD's I own, that's theft?
Well, so maybe that wasn't meant to say. But I bet you think what you meant to say was something like, if I make a musician's recorded, copyrighted work available to others by offering my computer's services to send them a copy of it at no charge, monetary or otherwise, then that's theft. Right? Cause then you said:
And yes, it's illegal.
Well no, it's not.
All three of the above activities were explicitly made legal by Congress with the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act. The last was specifically reaffirmed in the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which had the opportunity to change the rules regarding non-commercial copying of (copyrighted) musical recordings, but instead just chose to redefine "non-commercial" to include any explicit quid pro quo exchange. Notice that that means the sort of activity which goes on on Napster--that is, "making a recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge--is explicitly protected by the law.
I think the difference between the Napster debacle and something like alcohol prohibition is that prohibtion took a legal product (alcohol) and made it illegal.
Is that what you think. The actual fact is that the Napster case...err, "debacle" is precisely akin to suing someone for serving alchohol in the years prior to prohibition. Indeed, just a few weeks ago Congress took what would be the first step towards making the trading which takes place on Napster--which, again, is currently legal pursuant to the AHRA--and making it illegal. They held hearings on the matter, thus giving the RIAA the opportunity to try to buy their 4th (by my count) major anti-constitutional extension of copyright law in the last decade. Happily, current indications are that Congress has decided 3 laws bought and paid for was enough for now. Maybe it's just that even today 20 million constituants are worth more than 20 million dollars.
So, nice try, but no cigar. Of course, your insistance on emphasizing that these aren't just any recordings, but *COPYRIGHTED!!* recordings, should have been the first tipoff that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Guess what: copyright means a great deal less than you must think. And thank god it does, because *every* recorded utterance--whether it's the Post-It note I jot down, my answering machine message, or (heh heh) the playlist I just made in Winamp--is automatically copyrighted. That's right: that time I recorded myself farting into my computer's microphone is afforded exactly the same precious copyright protections as Lars and James' latest post-structuralist masterwork. Even though Metallica's may be a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth and mine might just be loud repetitive ass-noise.
To wit: no one is allowed to **sell** (this means for a charge) either of our recordings without our express permission. That's about the extent of it.
Well, ok, so there's more: but it's all bad for you. So it turns out people actually *can* sell derivatives of Lars' new magnum opus (or of recorded flatulence)--provided the derivations fall within the various allowed "fair uses" of copyrighted material. That means Dr. Dre can sell a record which samples Lars' new drum solo without his permission, so long as the resulting work is more than just a simple repackaging of Lars' peerless musical artistry. It also means academians the world over can include as much of the original as they need to support their insights as they rush out their breathless analyses of James Hatfield's latest lyrical and historical tour-de-force.
Whether you go out and buy the CD the next day is completely irrelevant if you were never given permission to copy the work in the first place. Think of it this way: if you steal $50 from someone, and send them a check for $500 the next day, you're still guilty of theft.
Oh please. The difference, obviously, is that in your ridiculous analogy, the person a) cannot use those $50 until they get a check several days later and b) knows they were stolen from and thus feels less secure in their person/bank account/however the $50 was stolen in the first place. (Well, the difference is that taking money is theft and sharing music isn't, but I digress.) If there were a way to guarantee that the person who got the money "stolen" from them would always have at least their original amount of money any time they checked and/or wanted to buy something, then it's actively doubtful whether such a practice would be illegal or not. Incidentally, the normal operations of both our banking system and stock markets are predicated upon exactly such a system...
In any case, it is established fair use that you can listen to/watch/read/whatever a copyrighted product before you purchase it to see if you want to spend your money on it, so you're entirely wrong in yet another way!!
The law doesn't care if the victim is better off in the end. The law is the law.
Sorry kiddo--you're 0 for...well, how ever many this is. Amazingly, you got this one DOUBLE wrong!!
1) In order to bring a suit in this country you must have some claim of demonstrable harm. This is one of the most basic principles of law.
2) It turns out that copyright law cares even more if the "victim" is better off in the end. Indeed, the copyright law on the books makes a special point of exempting apparent infringements of copyright as fair use if they end up causing no harm to the "victim". So whereas for most "harmless" civil crimes, the law would technically be broken but the "victim" just couldn't legally sue over it, in the case of copyright law, "harmless" infringement is a legal non sequiter.
If you don't like the law, stop whining and do something about it. Organize, demonstrate, and vote.
ROFL!! So I guess you and all the top-level RIAA executives are going to stage your own little 36-man-and-one-woman-march on Washington???
No, I'm betting you'll all just keep whining. Although at least they're spending millions on lobbyists and bribes, which is more than you can say for yourself.
I agree with Lars wholeheartedly, and I think it is the duty of mega-bands to take a stand, because while Metallica won't feel the pinch of lost CD revenue, less successful musicians will.
I'd be rolling on the floor laughing again if the real situation weren't so tragically pitiful. The fact is that "less successful musicians"--by which I mean the bottom 90% of the lucky perhaps 2% who even get signed by a major label in the first place--never ever see a penny in album royalties. The only money they ever make to live on (from their music jobs at least) comes from pre-album advances.
Unfortunately for them, in the extraordinary event that their measly 5% or so royalty is enough to pay off what they "owe" the record label for studio time, producer time, studio supplies, promotion, marketing, "promotional CD's" like those at Columbia House etc. (yep--those come directly out of the artist's pockets. Hope you feel good about yourself for buying from music clubs now...), tour scheduling, tour equipment, tour promotion, etc. (they "owe" the record companies for all this stuff even though the record company gets to divvy up the remaining 95% of the money)...they even need to pay off the amount of their advance before the band can finally make a cent in royalties. And all the debt from previous, less successful albums follows them until they get out of their contract or go bankrupt (a not uncommon occurance).
Metallica, in rather sharp contrast, keeps something like 80% of the profit from their album sales, because they essentially have their own record label. Now guess who's the ones standing up for the $18-for-a-$1-CD and locked-down-monopolistic-distribution-model way of doing things? Err...I mean, uh, standing up for the, um, for the little bands...
In the end, Napster users are just whining because they want something for nothing, at the expense of artists.
No, Napster users aren't whining at all. They're busy sharing perhaps the largest collection of art ever indexed in one place. They're busy using the Internet up to its true promise--to spread art and ideas effortlessly throughout society, against the wishes of those who have profited by keeping ideas bottled up.
In case you hadn't noticed, it's the RIAA which is bitching to the media, suing everyone in sight, lobbying Congress for unreasonable extension of copyright privileges beyond anything envisioned in the Constitution for the 4th time in 9 years, raising the price of CD's even in the face of a free and superior distribution channel, and dragging their feet on providing a way for fans to both get music in a reasonable digital format (which almost certainly will not include support for fair use rights) while still compensating their favorite artists.
And it's you who's whining (quite ignorantly, I might add).
Which, as a musician, I find absolutely disgusting.
Which, as a
Meanwhile, for everyone who wants to help break musicians free of a monopolistic model which steals artistic, promotional and distributional control of their art and steals the profits of their labor, you might want to check out fairtunes.com [fairtunes.com], which will forward your money directly to artists whose work has moved you, rather than lining the pockets of RIAA executives who have done nothing but sue Napster in an effort to stop you from exercising your Constitutional fair use rights. Even if you only contribute $5 for that CD you burned/downloaded, that's approximately 5-7 times as much as the artist would get had you paid $17 for the CD in the store--and plus it's money they can use today, not once their record label "debts" are paid off, if ever.
Mjuice (Score:2)
Meanwhile, there's a lot of nice stuff free at MP3.com - just because it's not from a huge, "popular" artist doesn't mean it's not good.
Is this ever missing the point of the new economy (Score:2)
I expect new market economies to go the other way -- RIAA will have to pay *ME* (as they presently do pay radio stations) to audition streams of their new offerings.
Ultimately, serious market models will have artists (and not big label enterprises) bidding for mindshare, indeed, perhaps paying *US* to listen to samples of their offerings. Those that are great will rise to the top, and then they can charge us for performances, other services and perhaps recordings of that and their later works should we decide we want to hear it upon demand.
Re:micropayments / banner ads (Score:3)
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Ian Peters
Good idea... (Score:4)
Micropayments (Score:2)
So why hasn't Slashdot implemented this? I know I've seen the suggestion brought up before....
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Re:Beg to differ (Score:2)
Go there. The "Artist" has a record label.
Re:whatever... (Score:3)
Yes, it is. The artist receives no payment for that copy of his music.
No, when you bought the audio CDR, part of the money you paid was, by law, placed in a special fund to compensate the major recording labels. You paid actual money, which went to actual artists. Go look up the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA). It's easy to find on the internet.
Well no, it's not.
Yes, it is illegal. That's what I've always been told. When did it change? Haven't you ever read the back of a CD? I have one right here -- "(C)opyright 2000 [artist's name]. All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws in the USA." So when you distribute copies of that music, whether on CD-R or on Napster, you're committing an illegal activity. Everybody does it, but that does not change the fact that you're breaking the law. And if you're telling me that these "applicable laws" provide no such protection, we need harsher laws. Fucking selfish American consumers.
Had it ever occurred to you that the record companies might be overstating their actual rights, because they don't want you to know about yours?
Go back to the Audio Home Recording Act, and read paragraph 1008 if you want to find out what your actual rights are, instead of trusting the record companies to spell them out for you on the back of CDs.
Re:Great idea - but who benefits? (Score:2)
Re:Mojo isn't just simple pay-to-download (Score:2)
There is a seperate payment system for "tipping" content producers. This is for the artist. After you've downloaded something, if you like it you can tip the publisher. Public key cryptography lets you create persistent pseudonyms that cannot be forged. It seperates the payment of the creation of data from the actual delivery of the data. The Mojo Nation people believe this is the type of only artist compensation system that will work; they have to stop worrying about how and where people got the data and provide a way to get compensated after it has been acquired.
There is a reputation system built in. On a low level, your client remembers which block servers provided complete blocks and in a timely manner. At a higher level, your client can remember which content providers make good music, or encode music well...
Metadata and data are seperate. Data is split into lots of redundant chunks spread over many servers. The "map" to reassemble the blocks along with XML metadata describing the file is stored on seperate content trackers. You search the trackers for what you want, or someone sends you the metadata some other way, and then your client finds the blocks and reassembles the original file. With XML metadata you can get much richer fully searchable indexes than simple file names a.la. Gnutella. The metadata can be digitally signed too.
Burris
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:3)
There are two types of payment systems built-in: Mojo and the PayLars system. The payment of the data is seperated from the payment of the delivery of the data. Mojo is a microcurrency economy backed by CPU, Disk, and Bandwidth. Whenever you want to search, upload, or download, or whatever, you pay in Mojo. Mojo is like digital cash, you can give the tokens to other people.... or sell them (on eBay or whatever). You can also earn Mojo by running a content tracker/searcher, a block server, or a relay server.
You download whatever you want, you pay whoever you got it from a little Mojo for their bandwidth and disk space. After the fact, if you liked it a lot, you can leave a "tip" for the artist/publisher (I believe in real money). So if your HD crashes you just download it again from someone.
Data is broken into lots of small redundant chunks. Only half of the available chunks are necessary to recreate the file. So the system is resistant to servers disappearing or hard drives getting cleared. Popular data stays around since the servers earn Mojo for letting people download it. You also put a lot less load on each individual server since you only need a small part of the total amount of data from each one. The client keeps track of which servers offer fast and reliable service.
Mojo Nation is intended to make in inexpensive to serve popular data, with a built-in way to get paid for it. Right now, it costs a lot to serve popular data; you need a fast connection and big servers.
Burris
Re:Great idea - but who benefits? (Score:2)
Searching, uploading, downloading, etc... is payed for with Mojo; a microcurrency that is backed in CPU, Disk, and Bandwidth. When you download something, it costs Mojo (probably not ever going to be worth a whole lot). You earn Mojo by providing serivces like a content tracker/searcher, block server, or relay server.
After you have downloaded something, if you like it, you can leave a "tip" for the producer/artist (they have public keys and digital pseudonym).
Burris
Re:Worse than napster. (Score:3)
Re:Is this ever missing the point of the new econo (Score:2)
MojoNation seperates the payment of the creation of the content from the delivery of the content.
Burris
Re:micropayments / banner ads (Score:2)
I beleive that what Taco is saying is that, since he runs a site [slashdot.org] that draws most if not all of its revenue from advertising, it would be hypocritical of him to use Junkbuster to block ads on other sites, thus depriving them of their revenue.
Personally, I'd support micropayments on /., with the notion that there was a periodic cap of say, $5 or $10 per year. What I gain from reading /. far outstrips that payment.
Fairtunes.com (Score:3)
There's a new organization called Fairtunes.com [fairtunes.com] where you can send a mini-payment ($1, $5, etc.) to the musical artist of your choice. It's an attempt at the "tipping jar" model of artist remuneration.
I think it's worth checking out.
Schwab
Re:whatever... (Score:2)
The implicit assumption was that this way, at least the RIAA wouldn't lose any money on non-commercial copying. (It does, however, blow away any argument you and Lars may have that copyright entitles you to know and control exactly what happens to your music at all times.) The "problem" is that in the digital world, all media are created equal. That is, we no longer need a special medium built just to carry recorded music--anything which accepts 1's and 0's works equally well. Thus, since the RIAA couldn't possibly ask for royalties on hard drive sales, since hard drives can be used to hold anything, including music, then the tradeoff they thought they engineered into the law goes away. IMO, this in no way negates the fact that the law explicitly states that all non-commercial copying of recorded music is fair use, but there are those who would disagree.
So, to answer your question, the law at issue is the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act [cornell.edu]. ( 1008 [cornell.edu] is particularly relevant.) If you asked any Constitutional copyright law expert, they would probably tell you that was not a "change" but in fact a codification of existing copyright law--that if anything, the AHRA was a setback for consumer fair use rights, because of the assuption that non-commercial copying could only be "bought" in exchange for a tariff on blank media, and that it was only legal for recorded music and not all copyrighted materials. Of course, if you asked a corporate copyright attorney they'd probably tell you the opposite.
the fact remains that distribution of someone's art without their permission is wrong. If you believe otherwise, you truly belong in Stallman's academic socialist cults.
Ever been to a public library? Do you think they're morally "wrong"??
You do realize that a public library redistributes the work of thousands of authors without their permission and without compensating them, don't you??
Yes, there is one inherent difference between a library and Napster: when you take a book out of a library, you only get to read it once before you have to return it; with MP3s, you get to choose to keep the recording on your computer for as long as you want. Of course, the way people use books is totally different from the way they use songs--they usually read a book only once; if they do reread a book, they only do so after many years (and you can always check a book out of the library again and reread it later).
The end point is that a library performs exactly the same function as Napster--it allows one person who has purchased a copyrighted work of art to non-commercially donate it so that many people can use it for free in the way that such works of art are traditionally used by those who buy them. For all the same reasons as why libraries have not hurt sales of books, Napster will not and has not hurt sales of CD's. And for all the same reasons as why donating your books to your local library is an good deed and a benefit to your community, ripping CD's and sharing the MP3's on Napster is a good deed and a benefit to the worldwide community of Internet users. (Or is donating a book to the library only a good deal to those of us in "socialist cults"?? Hee hee hee.)
I damn well better have a way of making sure that I'm not losing CD sales to kids on fucking Napster. You may care less if the artists whose work you steal starve,
As I'm sure you've read, numerous studies (here's one [jup.com]) confirm that Napster use has the effect of increasing CD sales. Images of musicians starving in the streets due to MP3 trading [theonion.com] really have no place in this discussion.
ask any professional musician what they think of the idea, and they won't like it.
Why don't you ask the Smashing Pumpkins what they think of it? Or Limp Bizkit? Or Chuck D? Or the Offspring? Or Courtney Love? Or Ben Folds Five? Or Eve 6?
I suppose Neil Young and Radiohead aren't professional musicians??? Nor the Greatful Dead??
All these musicians and more are on the record pledging support for Napster. Of course, many musicians are on the record as being against Napster as well. (Metallica, Dr. Dre, Eminem, Alanis Morrisette, etc.) The point is, just as none of these professional musicians can pretend to speak for each other, you or the RIAA very most certainly cannot. If you ask me, it matters much more what the Constitution and the Supreme Court record say, and it chooses my side over yours; but the point that even professional musicians (who, I might add, might be very reluctant to publically go against the RIAA even if they do support Naptser) are split on the issue ought to tell you something about the recording industry you're so desperately trying to ply as a moral good.
[If you rip a CD and share it on Napster]...you're just a lowly pickpocket.
Well, no. If your analogy made any sense, then to be correct it would be "you're just like Robin Hood"--that is, you're "stealing" something for the purposes of selflessly giving it to others.
Disregarding that, I have trouble believing that you cannot understand the difference between true theft, which involves taking a scarce good which cannot be replaced, and "unauthorized" copying, which involves making more of a non-scarce good without taking anything from anyone. (As for the argument that it takes away "sales", see above.)
To anyone who makes a living from the music industry, Napster is the digital equivalent of the LA riots.
Come on. If by "anyone who makes a living from the music industry" you mean a recording label executive, then I'd say it's the digital equivalent of the Boston Tea Party, if not the Montgomery Bus Boycott. If by "anyone who makes a living from the music industry" you mean a musician, then the suggestion that having your art spread to thousands more people than was otherwise possible is equivalent to having the corner market in which you have invested all your savings and decades of your life looted and burned is patently ridiculous and extremely insulting.
In the meantime, I'm going to go investigate the validity of your statements, and if what you say is true, today is a grim day for The_Messenger.
This is what really bothers me about your approach to this issue: you truly believe that creating something gives you the right to control every possible way that thing is ever used. Luckily, our intellectual property laws are not founded on such a ludicrous and unworkable premise.
And so I ask you: why on earth would such a day be so horribly grim??
From what you've told us about yourself, you're a musician; I'm going to assume, then, that you're also a music lover. Taking each position in turn, then...
As a musician, whose songs might be traded on Napster: Are you signed by a recording label?? If so, my sincere congratulations--only a small fraction of professional musicians are. Even if you are, though, I'm assuming that you're not one of the several-dozen-artists-per-year who is actively promoted to the mainstream public through label-directed radio play. Thus, by having your songs traded via Napster, you gain an incredible free promotional service which was never before available. Indeed, before Napster many up-and-coming artists had to buy copies of their own CD's to give them away in promotional record "clubs" like BMG and Columbia House (yes, the artist, not the label, pays for those copies)--now with Napster many more signed artists can reach many times more people for free! Plus, unlike a record club, someone who downloads your song from Napster and likes it is very likely to buy your entire CD; with a record club, they already have the CD, and usually have no idea that they are taking money from the artist's pocket instead of the other way around.
If you're not signed, then (should your recordings somehow find their way to Napster without your permission) you obviously have nothing to lose. You probably won't make any money off the deal, but you will have the satisfaction of spreading your art to thousands and potentially even more people, which ought to be the main goal of any real artist. Incidentally, in this case you ought to look into putting your music on something like mp3.com--it probably won't make you too much money, but it'll get you some income, expose your music to a huge listener base, and do so without putting you in debt for life to a recording label, which a record contract would most likely do.
As a music lover: Suddenly, you have access to Napster, the world's largest collection of music--perhaps the world's largest collection of art in history. Why don't you try it out? Download the software, fire it up...search for an artist you particularly love. Maybe you'll find live recordings you'd never have heard otherwise. Maybe you'll find out about an album they did that you'd never heard, or find remixes they'd done to others' music/had done to theirs.
Now, click on a user who has one of their songs and add them to your hotlist; then go to your hotlist and browse their shared library. Maybe you'll find songs you'd heard before and maybe even wanted to purchase but had forgotten to. Almost certainly you'll see lots of songs and artists you've never heard of. Download a couple. Try them out. Maybe you'll like them, maybe not.
Maybe you'll discover a new band that will speak to you. Given a few attempts at this, you probably will. Search for more of their stuff. Maybe you'll want to buy their CD, so you can listen to it on a real stereo. If you're a musician and appreciate sound quality, you probably will. Either way, if the music is really good you should ensure that the artist earns some money off of your enjoyment (no, buying the CD does **NOT** do ensure anyone gets any money except the label): donate $5 or $10 to them at fairtunes.com [fairtunes.com].
Suddenly you'll realize that today wasn't a grim day after all: you'll realize that it maybe changed the way you listen to music, maybe opened some new doors. Maybe slightly changed your life for the better.
And then that's when you'll start sharing the music you love with other people on Napster, so that they might search through your music library and find something that speaks to them like it speaks to you. That's when you'll realize that using Napster isn't about greed or whining or rationalizing, but is about sharing art, about finding new artistic experiences.
Let's face it: stealing is easy. If they wanted to, anyone with half a brain could steal (say) a Porsche a lot more easily than they could earn even a portion of the money it costs. The point is, most people don't steal if there's an alternative.
On the other hand, people don't like being taken advantage of. But that's what they are under both the current music-obtaining model, in which they are forced to pay $18 for an album, without getting the chance to listen to it first, even if they only want one song off it (if they want a digital copy of it so they can listen to it in their Rio, or upload it to their computer at work, they have to rip it themselves or they're out of luck), or under any new model which will pass the RIAA's SDMI requirements.
People like to reward things which impact their lives, which is why I think sales of unfettered MP3's for fair prices would take off if they were as convenient and centralized as Napster. And which is why I think fairtunes.com [fairtunes.com] will grow tremendously in the meantime. I know I've already remunerated several artists whose MP3's I've had for a while and really enjoyed, and I plan on giving more soon.
Given the horriffic way artists are treated by the current system, I have a hard time imagining why anyone cognizent of the proven positive impact Napster has on people's willingness to pay for recorded music could view it as anything but a boon to music lovers everywhere. So why don't you explain to me why you're so against it?
Re:Great idea - but who benefits? (Score:2)
A variation of the SPP proposal, but I would still put it under the same umbrella. It's quite clever considering that King came up with the idea all by himself.
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Re:Interesting, but... (Score:2)
Re:micropayments / banner ads (Score:2)
Junkbuster has suffers from the same problems as spam-fighting email filters. You are either going to eliminate non-banner ad content or you are going to still get some banner ads. There are no perfect heuristics which will allow you to determine what is a banner ad and what is not.
Let's make an assumption that there WAS such a hueristic and that the Junkbuster 'solution' was widely used. What are some possible results of that?
I can understand many people's dissatisfaction with the current web advertising model, but subverting the means by which the content you enjoy is created is counter productive.
big difference: subscription vs. micropayments (Score:2)
Now micropayments, on the other hand, are less of a problem. Would I pay $0.01 per day for
-rt-
The real McCoy - not (Score:2)
What this is is some moron seeing ebay, and seeing Napster, and asking himself how he can cash in on this phenomena without having a clue about what is going on. Some clueburgers.
1. The equivalent is available free.
2. He is at more legal risk than Napster.
What is going to happen is that nobody will bother to show up, and even if they did the lawyers would show up right after. And yet another huckster will be left thinking that he would have made it rich had he just had the right idea before someone else did.
*sigh*
Ben
Buzzword-ific!! (Score:2)
*HEAD EXPLODES*
[1]Negroponte is head of the MIT Media lab and use to write a column in the back of Wired that never failed to mention one of these buzzwords.
How stupid is that! (Score:2)
While we're talking about eBay... (Score:2)
Some people would [ebay.com]. God bless eBay.
Napster is a bad model for paid material (Score:4)
By the way, if Napster ever goes off-line, there's a site that provides a browser interface to the Gnutella stuff without your having to run Gnutella itself (take the Napster hassles and multiply by 3 and you have Gnutella). www.gnute.com [gnute.com].
Slate.com (Score:4)
Think of slate.com, for example. Originally a subscription based service, Microsoft gave slate.com's founders (Michael Kinsley-I think??) boatloads of money to get the service up and running and did not require the service to make a profit for several years. However, not enough people came to make it successful and they just recently made the service free.
The only subscription based service that I can think of as doing well is the Motley Fool, which is a finance site. And I think that they offer up to the second info, which makes it so attractive to the stock market set.
Just a final thought if I have to start paying micropayments for content, does that mean I *still* have to pay ISP fees?
Micro Payments & Digital Cash (Score:4)
The first problem is that we need an open-source, reliable and secure digital cash protocol for this to work over the entire net. Mojo doesn't seem to fit this bill, because I would imagine (and I am guessing here) that it's going to be just a bunch of CGI's. I also predict that people will use them to launder credit card numbers etc. through them, but anyway....
Once we have a really good digital cash protocol that everybody accepts and starts using, we need to then work out exchange rates dynamically and properly - if the internet currency is different to real currency then the price you pay today for your content will be different to what you paid yesterday.
There is then the problem of security. Ideally we would want a peer-to-peer system whereby your client pays the site directly. The problem here is how does the site get the money back out of the net economy into his bank, and seeing as all he is actually receiving is a string of bits, what is going to stop people printing (or rather sprintf()'ing) their own money?
Because of these issues, we need to get a broker involved somewhere. The broker is going to need to take his cut, and the broker can probably also fix the exchange rates thereby controlling the value of the currency. If the broker wanted to shut out a given country, he could just fix the exchange rate of that country high, etc. That's a lot of power and one that has traditionally fallen with governments rather than companies attempting to make a profit. There may be a conflict in intrests, so maybe the way to do this is to actually get a government to do this, but then we need to ask which one? All very complicated.
It's only after those issues are addressed that we can really start talking about micropayments en masse. This particular site is cute (legally dubious), but it doesn't scale up outside onto the rest of the net. Maybe one day somebody will actually do something about this and the quality of content might even rise. I'd put more hours into my website if I though I was going to get money from it!
About those banner ads... (Score:2)
The reaction to this statement has been interesting to say the least. Half of the posts I've seen today are responses like "Use junkbuster, stupid", or "Are you too lazy/stupid/ignorant to control what comes down your own connection (that you paid for)?"
Right now, most banners are controlled by some autonomous "advertising service", be it DoubleClick, AdFu (heh), or even some web hosting services (like Yahoo/GeoCities). They're easy to block: they all come from a specific domain; route *.doubleclick.net into oblivion and you're done. Ads have been "tacked on" to sites to increase (or produce) revenue, mainly because its easy for smaller sites to do this than to seek out ad content themselves. All a site owner has to do is sign on with an ad provider, and they're provided with a steady stream of advertisers that wouldn't possibly be interested in them alone.
What if ads were indistinguishable from the regular content, at least in terms of the HTTP semantics? What if slashdot just stuck those Lineo ads in some static content in the front page, pulling lineo.png out of the same directory as a slashdot.png or even that ugly Billy Gates image? Televisions don't change to the "advertising channel" at high noon when the network overlord declares it to be "ad time", why do most websites pull static images from addresses like http://ads.foo.com/annoy-user-with-ad.cgi ?
If ad content was blended seamlessly with a site, then the micropayments idea would make sense, at least to the content provider trying to make a living off of his/her website. The world would get the Slashdot with commercials every ten minutes, while the "subscribers" would see the feature-length HBO version. You're free to ignore the ads, and you're even free to set up a fancy perl script to filter them if you can.
It's the unpredictability of where ads occur that causes them to be viewed, right? I block web ads easily through squid, but I haven't rigged up a device to guess what time television commercials come on to filter those.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
only pay for mp3's if they're PROPERLY encoded (Score:2)
any old joe can encode using crappy xing or low bit rate blade/lame. even the cd rip might be crappy. and don't even talk about improper setting of id3 tags.
but if I can get Frau. encoded mp3's with clean rips and proper id3 tags; sure, I'd pay micropayments for them.
afterall, encoding with Frau. at 128k takes a lot of compute time to encode with this software. yes, its the best. but on my high end k7 system, it still takes hours to encode a whole cd album. running thru all 400+ of my cd's; well, it takes a rip/encode/name farm just to make finite work of it. even with the linux Frau. version (which is command line and batchable), I'd still pay small amounts for "blessed" and clean copies of mp3's.
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Re:Why new payment method? (Score:3)
If you really want to get rid of banner ads, use an agent like Junkbuster [junkbuster.com] (http://www.junkbuster.com/) or Webwasher [webwasher.com] (http://www.webwasher.com/).
eudas
The latest ultimate plan to rule Townsville! (Score:2)
Mojo will rule the formats, for I, Mojo Jojo have created it as the all-powerful format, thereby ensuring that Mojo will rule the formats, which will allow me to carry out my evil scheme!
This is possible because I, Mojo Jojo, created the plan which allowed me to develop the format with which I can conquer Townsville!
(Oh, has anyone got a banana?)
Not the first. (Score:2)
AMIX (American Information Exchange) was the first "market for paid file sharing" I'm aware of, and I think there have been a few others.
AMIX used a centralized file and transaction server and proprietary software for the clients.
(The latter was an error IMHO. They could have saved a lot of time and money by writing for VT-100-emultaing terminal programs to go cross-platform. Their project started before Mosaic came out, launched and died before commercial use of the Internet, the web, and browsers-as-OS-neutral-platforms rose).
They died for lack of promotion to get a critical mass of merchants and customers involved.
Fairtunes is a ripoff (Score:3)
If you use something like e-gold [e-gold.com], you end up losing about a total of 4% in the put-money-in, transfer, get-money-out sequence, regardless of the size and number of transactions. So you easily put $20 in, dole it out to hundreds of musicians in pennies, and over $19 would come through. All the musician needs is to create a free e-gold account and list it on their home page.
If you can use PayPal (i.e. if you're American and the music group is American), you can send money for no transfer cost.
If they were really serious about providing a service, they'd also list other means by which you can pay the artists directly, instead of insisting that all the money go through their own hands. Also, read the FAQ, they aren't audited by any third party, and their reasoning for why they wouldn't just pocket the money is very unconvincing (hmm, thousands of dollars going through your service every day to already-rich musicians, many of which you don't listen to and some of the most profitable you actively dislike, but even given the free choice, you'd rather send it to them than pocket it or redirect it to your own favorite musicians. Yeah, right).
Besides, the musicians have not said that they are willing to be paid this way. I would much rather give money to musicians who give permission for their music to be freely distributed.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
PROPERLY encoded AND RIPPED (Score:2)
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Re:The future of Music Distribution (Score:2)
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).