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?
What the.... fuck... was this? (Score:3, Informative)
Why is my nose bleeding?
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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.
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Italian Radio (Score:5, Interesting)
It's kind of annoying, but understandable. The RIAA wants to use MTV and radio as an advertisement for CDs and DVDs. The artists want to use the CDs and DVDs as an advertisement for live performances. The radio stations want to use music as a filler between their own advertisements.
In the end, everyone makes money.
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[/blockquote] (Score:3, Funny)
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errrm....
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"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
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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.
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
Already done? (Score:3, Informative)
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1. Grab some nice sound editing software (probably just steal it, you know, because you're a pirate).
2. Record tracks and split them up so that you catch the crossfades at both the beginning and end.
3. Once you have two versions of the same song, with different crossfades, use your new software to find and extract only the waves with "double strength". And subtract half of that from your actual songs until all you have is the add, or another song.
4. N
Payola killed the radio star (Score:5, Interesting)
Today, it is impossible to listen to radio there, not because of all these problems, but because payola there is rampant, and if you are lucky, you get to listen the same 50 songs over and over and over again. Once I recorded 24 hours of radio programming, and I was able to identify a group of 8 songs (I can remember the exact number) that played at least 4 times that particular day, and one that played every 2 hours. That was a special spot on the programming called "the song of the week", played every two hours, every day, for 7 days. The other radios had a similar sport, with variations in the name ("the best of the week, the hit of the week"). It is a mafia, and it is not exclusive on U.S.
Payola killed the radio star, and the internet will kill the payola star. Well, at least one man can dream.
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Re:Payola killed the radio star (Score:4, Interesting)
JJJ is a favourite of mine too (Score:4, Informative)
The geeks will love Dr. Karl [abc.net.au] and the other science shows, like his recent call-in show with Sir Roger Penrose and Dr Kip Thorne (links to mp3) [abc.net.au].
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Wow, that completely sucks. It's like the broadcast stations these days always squishing the credits and playing
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Analog hole and stream ripping (Score:3, Insightful)
Digital hole (Score:5, Interesting)
If you can hear it you can record it digitally.
Even without this there's SP-DIF connectors, etc., no analog conversion needed.
It's all moot though. So long as the RIAA sells CDs in shops then all music will have perfect copies available on P2P, no matter how much DRM they put into the online versions (sorry to break it to you, but your emperor's naked!)
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Even with the sound hardware integrated onto many motherboards these days with the regular VIA, etc., 5.1 audio chipsets, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture pretty much allows you to capture anything the sound card is putting out. So if it can be played on Linux, it can be captured on Linux.
Makes me wonder if they'll preclude open source platforms from listening to Internet radio streams.
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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
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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.
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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.
A major pull for web radio for me is the opportunity to be exposed to different kinds of music. If all I wanted was radio on the computer, the local stations have that and you can tune in to any regular radio station onlin
Stream ripping vs. "stream ripping" (Score:2)
Why would anyone stream-rip? (Score:2, Insightful)
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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 me
Re:Why would anyone stream-rip? (Score:4, Interesting)
One difference is that the RIAA can lurk on filesharing networks, sending you an invoice if they see your IP address, but there is no way that they can know if the radio stream is saved to the harddrive when a user listens to a webcast. It is thus completely safe from a legal standpoint.
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For that matter, who the hell carries camcorders into American theaters to record the movies? Everything is digital now, it's not like you suffer generation loss when making copies. There only has to be one good rip made in the entire world and now the movie is out. If I want a copy of the
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
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It's a convenience thing. Recording stuff to cassette then separating it out to get more or less what you would have bought on CD is/was a pain in the ass and took a lot of time. Stream-ripping might be theoretically equivalent but it's a lot easier - click a few buttons, go to work, come back and you have a ton of MP3s more or less identical to what you could have bought. Yes I know people wouldn't actually buy every track they hear on the radio, but even if you assume the average person might buy 1 in 100
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One of the main radio stations I listen to in the UK has a no-pirating policy:
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Of course no court in the land would prosecute someone for recording a TV programme, so the law is widely ignored, creating a worse situation since nobody gives a crap about it.
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Re:But WHY? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:But WHY? (Score:4, Interesting)
So I use an automatic stream rip to time shift. I know of guys that time shift "Bob and Tom" radio show because they travel 240 miles a day for work and cant stand having to tune in a different station every 60 minutes.
My world has lots of people that stream rip.
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The stream ripping you describe is very different from what SoundExchange et. al. are trying to stop. Copying the entire radio show to CD or a music player to listen to later is pretty much impossible to stop. You will get you the same experience as every other listener, just at a later time. They are targeting people who meticulously rip and cut up tracks off of streaming radio and add them to their music collection. That kind of stream ripping is supposedly a
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I certainly do - and it's my understanding that it's perfectly legal. I've got about 8 gigs of high-quality streams ripped from a favorite Internet radio station. I'm a subscriber to the station, but I must confess that I would cancel my subscription if unable to rip streams. The subscription fee is not worth it to me unless I can rip stuff and play it back later.
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One word (Score:2)
It's a road block. It's a provision webcasters cannot easily adhere to. It's a license to shutdown/strong-arm stations selectively.
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There's nothing better that thinking "wow! this song is awesome, I wish I had it" and then be able to play it back on my laptop/mp3 player.
I remember a conversation concerning streamripper stating that the song info (id3 tags etc) were actually mandated by the DCMA, and that stations that mangled that information in order to make it impossible to separate songs were in violation of it.
Crossfading songs?!? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously though, while crossfading makes separating songs pretty much impossible, that presentation style was so distinctive. It really is a lost art, because it took real finesse for DJ's to get it sounding right with vinyl.
Re:Crossfading songs?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
We pride ourselves on being able to pull off transitions so seamless at times, our listeners have actually had to check our online playlists to tell when we go from one track to the next. I think it shows that we really love what we do. It makes putting together a 3-6 hour show more fun for us, as it isn't simply cuing music, as much as it is an actual performance. and we'd like to think it makes the show more fun and entertaining for the listeners. Our feedback suggests that our listeners do indeed appreciate the extra effort.
Neither of us have ever really had the thought of how this may complicate the process of ripping streams cross our minds. Frankly, I don't see a point, nor do I care much.
It's not as if you can't find the bulk of what we play (unless it's a promo direct from the record label, or some obscure live recording sent to us from the band, or some of our own original material) on BitTorrent or SoulSeek. You have the artist and title, all you need is bloody 30 seconds to run a search, and given a decent connection, two minutes to download the song.
Re:Crossfading songs?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
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When I was DJing, I used seamless segues whenever I could work them out -- it's fun to go from one genre or style to a contrasting genre or style by way of such transitions, and it draws the listener along with you, even when the next cut might not otherwise be to their taste.
But as you say, the automated crossfading is just annoying. It creates several seconds of outright NOISE, in no way related to the music. And it ruins songs that have a special beginning or end.
One of t
Re:Crossfading songs?!? (Score:5, Informative)
-->It's not a lost art at all; djs in clubs do it every night, with much greater technical skill. Many match beats, some even match key, others even use various tricks with the mixer to provide greater range of blending options.
Really, the art is not dead; in fact, it's come a long, long way.
No matter, it still beats normal radio (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone really "record" off internet radio? Sit there for 12 hours like we used to in the pre-internet times in hopes that "your" song comes up and you can hit record? Oh, of course you can today just use software to do that, but still, simply sucking it from some P2P is easier.
Not to mention a "hole" that is more important than the audio hole. It's just like in real estate: Location, location, location. What keeps me from tuning into a station from Genericstan that doesn't care about the mafiaa?
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Simple: knowing that such a beast exists, and the chance of your discovering a streaming site that payola hasn't bought has the RIAA members frightened out of their wits. Why do you think they are working as hard as possible to require that ALL streaming sites pay up, regardless of whether
Get your terms straight (Score:3, Informative)
So the analog hole doesn't mean anything. They want to prevent direct digital ripping of the music on the station.
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Your soundcard doesn't receive the actual stream, it receives decoded PCM sound, the actual stream could be protected. I agree with music just re-recording and recompressing isn't that big a deal, you'll lose some quality but not too much.
With video it becomes more tricky th
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Exactly. Pandora already restricts streamripping. Live365 already restricts streamripping. IIRC, last.fm does, as well. This won't affect anything I listen to.
Unless I'm missing something, neither the linked article nor the article it links suggest analog recording is what's at issue here. It seems to be pure FUD on the part of the submitter.
Sword of Damocles (Score:4, Interesting)
Streaming Radio (Score:2, Interesting)
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Not that bad... (Score:2)
Crossfading? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I'm not so impatient that I can't cope with the gap between songs, but I hate - hate - when an album who's songs were meant to flow from one to the next is ruined by stupid cross fading. I suppose it wouldn't be a problem for people who like to listen to the "string of singles" types of playlists, but if you like to listen to whole albums, cross fading is evil.
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Ban FM? (Score:2)
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You'll have to pry my analog ears from cold dead hands...erm...head!
As for your suggestion in a serious light - you know they'd do it if they could. Anything to get a "captive paying audience" rather than change their business model.
My Story (Score:4, Interesting)
A few days ago I tried www.live365.com, which I havnt used in years. It is great! If it remains open I believe I will subscribe to it (to get CD-quality no-ad radio, that I can play in my HIFI-system at home). I also think I will start buying CDs with those artists I discover at live365. Really. No promises, no threats. I just think live365 may help me find CDs to buy. If they close it I doubt I will discover those artists.
Seems like an OK compromise--wait don't shoot!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Live venues are striking back (Score:2)
So record companies are eventually going to:
Kill radio
Kill internet broadcast
Kill sharing
Force everyone to live venues;
Which are already screwing them harder than the record c
the consumer is NOT the customer! (Score:2)
remember that the customer of the radio station is the advertisers, not the listeners who are merely "bait" to get the advertisers hooked into giving the station money.
... excepting when the listener is paying a subscription; sadly, especially in the case of TV, the consumer/listener often still has to suffer advertising.
you know.. (Score:2)
You know, I've always hated it when they did that. It completely messed up my radio recordings... -oh.
There was once a show on a Dutch channel (Kink FM), which would consist of 2 hours back to back music, which you could record to tape. The songlists would come out in a magazine that same week. After a few shows, it was cancelled. I wonder why.
B.
This wont work (Score:3, Insightful)
In order to qualify for the cap. . . (Score:2)
Way to go, RIAA members! Alienating customers on a daily basis. Bravo!
why now? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Infeasible vs. Undesireable (Score:3, Interesting)
And then you won't have to pay as much in royalty fees as you will be paying in bandwidth costs. Result, you still won't be able to afford to do business against the Big Boys.
The only thing I can hope for in the light of these royalty demands is that it will bring the radio drama back. Learn the foley arts, write some original scripts, and get some perfomers. Just make sure you use no music to set mood.
Unfortunately, regurgitating news and political opinions (is there a difference anymore?) is a lot easier, and thus more likely.
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Re:Ummmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want music, you can just stream rip the Freeview music channels, the hits, TMF, and E4 (weekend morning only for E4). Full of music videos but here is the deal while the video itself is not suitable for stream ripping, as it is overlayed with channel graphics and other stuff, the audio is and you get a nice DMR free 192kbps MP2 file with no fades when you demux it from the video. It is dead easy to cookie cutter out the tracks if you are so enclined.
It would take at least a decade to force out the existing DRM free TV and radio.
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To encrypt a music channel you'd have to force 70 million people to buy new freeview decoders (by 2012 everyone will have at least one as the analogue signal will start disappearing). Not gonna happen.
Not only that... (Score:3, Informative)
Not only that, but some DAB radios (e.g. http://www.pure-digital.com/Products/Product.asp?P roduct=VL-60767 [pure-digital.com]) already come with an SD card slot so you can record the transmission. (It apparently also has a USB connector but I don't know if that can be used to transfer music.)
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But it is usually just easier to use one of these [wikipedia.org].
Re:Ummmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I use one of these [bbc.co.uk]. Same form factor and user interface, but with the global choice of stations that internet radio has over standard AM/FM broadcast. There are some very good Jazz stations with good bitrates in Switzerland and France that I listen to a lot, AFAIK there is nothing of the sort locally since Jazz FM became Smooth FM.
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Something like one of the channels at di.fm.
For the kind of listening I do with the radio (casual, background stuff) the quality is really quite incredible.
If you use Linux the FAAD GStreamer plugin decodes it.
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Analog hole to recordering Audio (Score:2)
Anyway, from the main info page, "Given that the analog hole will always exist as far as I can imagine in such scenarios, is this even possible"
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