Throughout all of this I see the same basic statement repeated constantly, "The record labels haven't adapted to technological changes at all or fast enough.". I would contend that this is patently and demonstrably false, and I'll illustrate it in a moment, but what I want to know is this - what do YOU think is the answer that provides for the artist getting paid, and I'm not talking pie in the sky "do it like Radiohead did" because that won't work for 99% of bands. Unlike other posts, I'm going to filter out the nonsense rants because I want a productive discussion.
Here is how the labels have changed with technological changes:
Went from 8 Track to Cassette (this might seem minor to you, but I had a big collection of 8 tracks)
Went from Vinyl and Cassette to CD
Adopted online sales, Amazon spearheaded a lot of this
Adopted digital distribution once a method was available (iTunes)
Adopted listening stations at record outlets
Embraced social networking like MySpace and YouTube
Keep in mind how fast some of this stuff came up, 2 years ago no one was talking about YouTube and MySpace was pretty minor. You can't just follow every shiny ball that rolls by, you have to see what is going to shake out and make the best business decision you can.
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43 comments:
i think there should be places 100/100 income goes to the artists..
that was the motto of mp3.com pity they serve wma and sell albums now...
maybe its time to forget labels!
labels can serve all the product or lets say albums for free, artists can put a donate me button or they can garant a hard copy to buy in these downloading places..
there should be no block with listeners & artists
also these places should meet the fans with artists, they shouldnt worry about coverarts, vclips..that can be easily done with the lover of artists
and this new place should garant this specification to artists also..
you know shawn my english not so good :) but we start to build a place with these ethic..
at the moment we have 120 bands, the adress will be http://www.prognotfrog.com/records/
at the other site there are bands that they are really known in their country, they have no economical value outside of their country..introducing them to the world and enlarging the artist pool also would be nice
regards :)
Naha,
I'm glad you are thinking in some kind of creative direction.
What you have missed is the help labels are to the bands. Maybe you believe in all the "evil labels" nonsense, but the truth is that the bands themselves in most cases feel that they are getting helped.
Whether you sell you music or downloads it is still loads of paper work and administration that must be taken care of.
And...most bands I know - even younger one's in their 20's - really prefer to create an album with cover and all the usual stuff, rather than to just put up the songs as downloads.
Admin, taxes, promotion, copyrights and other things must be handled and these do cost money and also requires a person who know how economie should be handled. Some knowledge about the law and rules regarding taxes etc is definitly needed.
And a musician, professional or not, need good instruments and recording facilities and these are not free. Lots of money are spent on these things. So, some money in return for the music is greatly appreciated.
So, it's great that you are putting up a system for those who want to go that way, and if it proves succesful, then more will follow.
But - succesful or not - I certainly hope that you have understood that you can not, in any way, violate the copyrights of any recording whatosever.
No one, absolutely no one here are in any way against that others give their music away for free, or gets something for their music through a donationsystem (exept for the taxman, i believe you will have problem with this) as long as you do it in agreement with the bands, or copyright holders.
Mindawn let's anyone open an account and personally customize their system and load or remove whatever they want from their account and they get the full amount, no middle man if they don't want one. This was something else we addressed with Mindawn, the difficulty of getting on to a system as an independant artist.
Thing is Naha, while your blog might have good intentions, your forum is full of new and current releases (or was when I was there last), what really set me off was when an obvious Sylvan fan asked for links to 2 albums he didn't have by them, and I gave him a link to the bands web site, not mindawn, not my label, but to the artist directly and he jumped down my throat saying "When did this become about buying albums?" I think you need to do a little more firm policing on your own forum, because it's all just pirate stuff, and I hear you are referring people to Vadim if they want to get CD quality downloads, so your words betray themselves.
As long i enter prog not frog and see attack after attack posted against Shawn i don't really think they want to create a new market with artists on it who give away their stuff. It's more or less about the thought they have that every artist should give away their stuff for free even after an artist asks them to do not. And even after asking they simply continue to do so, imo to bad the RIAA can't take a look at that site.
friend all i can say;
its a problem of ethic and care..
and glad prog community has the most respected community to their artists..
if a person just gonna download and dont think to buy the album, then he will do this..i do care the ones who also support their artists..
blogs are Not spreading hate. their aim is clear to introduce albums that they like. i dont think that if you give some money to post an album in a blog. blog owner simply wont accept that.
You have your all rights to prevent albums that you own/that you sell. i cant say anything for this.
for usa rights its illegal. but if that case 99.9/100 people doing an illegal thing. for example melo bazar friend used file sharing programs for more than years. and she downloaded more than 1000 albums from our friends, when she is saying something about the care,artists etc..it becomes so funny when she is advising:buy albums etc..
at the other side you believe that 99/100 of the artists agree that sharing their works hurts them. unfortunately this is not true..
we sent many albums, and we observed the artists thanks to us for bringing them to attention.
so we believe there are artists who dont want to share their material, at the other side there are artists who is happy with sharing (even they are copyrighted albums)
in that case, i can understand if you only prevent your material to post to the blogs (and believe me, if i see any of the artists listed here, i will delete them before you delete them. promise!) but i cant understand if you also delete others material that you dont own.
its up to persons charachter, its a good ethic and respect for the product to buy the albums of artists that he/she like. but when it becomes a rule, it just becomes a stupid thing. because there is a collective and sharing value in music that makes it music.
I don't know crap about Melo, I just signed up there a week or so ago, if she use to pirate, she doesn't seem to do it now, that is someone who learned a lesson then.
You say you have people glad to have their works spread for free by you, you should post those permission slips, I think it will make a big difference for people looking at your site. Keep in mind there are people not on our front list who are part of our group, such as Musea Records, who have over 1,000 albums out, and I found many of them in your forum. They aren't out of print or unavailable. someone told me recently there was a bunch of Santana and Night Ranger on your forum, all that stuff is still available, so you should remove it.
We're not deleting other material, I've addressed this before, but I've seen a few things happening since we started our campaign on our material (our, being our whole group which is about 10,000 albums):
* We are definitely not the only ones doing this now, maybe people were encouraged by what they say happening and figured they really could make a difference.
* The hosting companies seem to be looking at the accounts of the people that have complaints on their uploads and just shutting them down entirely.
* The hosting companies are expiring material.
I've seen comments on sites going back to 7 months before we started of people complaining about deleted posts, we just happen to be the most visible and vocal about it currently.
friend pls take your 10 seconds and make queries at google: santana torrent , "night ranger" torrent.. pages with full of links! if you click "i'm feeling lucky" button you will see in first query, all the discography!
of course with a who.is query you can learn my host, and with a small mail you may force to remove content. but will this help the current situation? i am even not in first 1000 in these queries. before you came to the forum there were 200 active people, and after you..now probably 100 active people..i will be really glad if you or your organisation remove that type of links, but if there is someone to blame..its search engines or other things..not me not blogs.how a person can blame me,forum members etc if they reach to the results at first page of google? think of this like that: child porn is illegal, if google gives results for child porn..that creates problem for google..sharing of albums illegal in your country..but if google gives results in first page, its not my problem.
i think one of you first invented to come blogs. after than blogs became evils for you.but all i can say its maybe only 1/100 of sharing. and again i must add today many artists accepts and says blogs are good.
you have a good faith to believe if none of the bloggers share albums, music industry can earn more money. but unfortunately its a lost war. people shares, as you can see. not only in blogs but also in last.fm shoutboxes to forums..rateyourmusic.com to emails..p2p networks to websites..
its just a lost war.
at the other site, me and people like me are trying to create an inner ethic..a careing system.
do you see? you deleted this album 2 times, and fans uploaded 2 times. and there was a comment saying: "hey man, do you know where they sell this album? i fancy that i might wanna buy it someday..." do you see? while this album is not pool of the music industry, now it has potential one fan who would like to buy the album! (and i believe there are many more, who didnt signed to comments) i am so happy to distrubute my taste of music, and if this helped a little bit to band owners as income, as musicianship, as rising their fans.
at the other side,
take a look this post: http://prognotfrog.blogspot.com/2008/01/blog-post_14.html#comments
i made a comp. from his site, and i made a coverart in 1 minutes..you deleted the links 2 times, and people requested it 2 times..as you can agree, the important thing is inside, whatever you shape it, people wont fool..at the other side now this artist has some more fans, and i am really happy as a music lover for this situation.
i am sorry but industry goes crazy, in my country an isp added 80.000 albums as free. that means approximetely you can download free 10000 albums. http://www.ttnetmuzik.com/Sayfalar/AnaSayfa.aspx and their model is easy, the person you see in the page is a kind of ricky martin for my country, and he gets $750000 dollar for singing 5 tunes at new year eve. for users its "legal" to distrubute albums as wish as you like (without commerically) so those guyz added 10.000 albums to the pool :)
so if everybody does the same, and put all the things free, will this stop blogging? i guess not! it will be still need to some good narrators for good music
Shesh Naha, you're on our site so much from Eskisehir you're accounting for like 70% of our web travvid.
I'm sorry, but so far you haven't proposed anything at all, but I will contradict your statement that we can't make a dent, because we have made a dent, that's why so many blogs have shut down or gone private, or have become so paranoid they exlude almost everyone that tries to join. Between having our albums deleted and the blogs that have shut down for whatever reason, we're looking at about 50,000 albums that are no longer available for download. That makes a difference, a big one.
maybe you know how torrents or other sharing platforms work. now take a 1 mb file. and start seeding it.. lets say it divides to that 1mb to single pieces, aprrox 100k
first user seed it
second user get the first 100k one
third user get the second 100k one
forth user getting 200k from second user and third user at the same time.
fifth user is about to get 200k from forth user and 100k from the sixth user..
meanwhile in minutes its in the hands of 50.000 user in 1mb uploading time.. in other words you help with your hands for isp servers, rapid etc :)
Not sure what your point is other than to contradict your earlier points, but basically if we stop the pirate in the first place, then there is no seed for torrents. I looked for, and found, a torrent of one of our most popular albums recently on a torrent, but we've been so effective at removing pirate copies that it took 5 days to download, so I don't think people are willing to trade $15 for 5 days.
Also Naha, you should update your website about my post at melo regarding the implications of "sharing", it's a useful piece of information, a lot of people "sharing" in the US have stopped because of it.
The biggest deal with looking for a definitive solution for this problem, is that.... times nowaday go too fast. There's been progress, yes, but unfortunately, this progress in a way is already showing its age.
That's why companies always have to be, they need to be, on the roll; know what's hip, what's cool, and adapt to it. I think this refers not only to big artists and labels, but also small ones too.
In this sense, I think that nowadays, the closest 'best' solution so far has been the opening of mp3 downloads from iTunes, Amazon and the like. After many attempts at trying to shove and sell people music in a propietary and unpopular format, these juggernauts had no choice but to go with mp3. This, PK, is a huge turning point in the history of music sales and distribution.
As much as many say and think mp3 is a crap format, it's also (unfortunately) the most popular and widely used. Therefore, if you want to make money out of this business, you have to go with mp3, with what most people use. Not to say that other formats aren't good: they're just unpopular, barely supported by DAP devices (something that shouldn't be lowly regarded), and... truth be told, only a niche knows about them. :|
This is why DRM failed. This is why DRM'ed WMA/AAC and such have, in a way, failed. And this is also why OGG and FLAC have failed: no one outside a small group of people in the internet knows about it.
You cant, to this day, shove down people throats formats that aren't as friendly as mp3. Everyone knows what mp3 is, most digital devices nowaday support it, so.. yeah. That's it.
Current studies are showing that digital sales in such stores are slowly growing up. So I'm betting something must be up with this.
This is not to say that other projects, such as Minddawn, which support free and HQ formats are bad. They're just unpopular (and not only for the bands they promote ;)).
See what I'm getting at? If labels want to switch back the tides to them, they have to know what's up around and adapt to it as fast as they can. There is a huge world besides the real world (hello internet), and maybe some companies haven't realized about this yet. Or at least, they haven't grasped the idea quite enough.
---------
Another interesting point in all this big mumbo jumbo of distribution is localization. Localization for releases. As you might be aware of this, prog is hugely regarded in other countries outside Europe. As of now, and save for some exceptions, I am not willing to pay 120 pesos (roughly 30 U$S) importing a band's CD from Europe/US. That money roughly equals to a week and half's meals! And, honestly, I'm not gonna starve my ass for a CD. I'm much better off buying off one for less than 30 pesos from a local edition.
Economies vary from country to country, so you can't really expect people to pay three times or four times the prize of a CD-- just because the store only accepts Euro or American Dollar.
I'm not sure how the deal is between labels from different countries -they evidently handle different numbers- when it comes to distribution, but there must be a satisfactory reason for both sides... otherwise, you wouldn't still be seeing them releasing new stuff month after month.
This is just a thought, but finding a way to localize these digital stores would help too.
Otherwise, well you know what's already happening.
(Sorry for sounding a bit off, I'm trying to make myself clear as much as I can at 1AM. lol)
Cheers!
-Mariano
The whole thing is really pretty simple guys.I've bought thousands, and I mean thousands of prog CD's over the years from all sorts of vendors. I used to shell out LOTS of money for CD's by bands I had not heard of and it was only until the internet came of age that I was able to use it to discover new bands and buy their CD's without getting "burned". You all know what I mean too by "burned". Bad recording, shitty musicianship etc. Now, maybe I'm one that goes out and buys the albums that I liked after I downloaded them, but not everyone does that. So, to say that downloading helps the bands by exposing their music to people that had not heard it before (or wouldn't), the fact is that many more people that download DON'T buy it. What do you think the ratio is? For everyone that does download and buy, how many download but DON'T. There might be 1000 new Pendragon sales on a CD out there for Nick, but maybe he lost 10,000 potential buyers because they we're content on having a download. Fact is guys, we have to support the artists here and you have to take it to a logical conclusion. If you do download from whatever site and like the disc, go buy it. But the problem is not all your downloading, but your sharing. If we don't help curb this, it puts the quality of the music, bands and labels at risk. It is our responsibility to band together to help keep our music alive in everyway. I for one have deleted all filesharing programs from my computer and no longer download or share my stuff. I check out new releases by going to the bands website and the labels' sites. This gets me enough to make a solid buying decision, without the fear or getting a bomb title.
Nahavanda,
Why don't you simply stop putting up copyrighted material and start the business model you were talking about?
We are all very interested in seeing the result from that.
You talk about that you care so much. It should be very easy for you to care then about artists rights to decide about theor own work. Even when they decide that they want to sell the rights to a label. It is their decision.
Until you have proven that you care about these things I don't believe anything of your pretty talk.
And, please stop with your cheap way of taking other's messages out of context to justify yourself.
If you guys are so outraged about having your blogs shut down due to all the work you have put down, then it should be very easy for you to understand the rage amongst the musicians who put down very much more work with creating their music than you do to put it up at your blogs.
I think it's time that you prove your ideas about careing and other things, in action. Not words.
You can go on forever with your talk about ethics and other things.
Prove it by action.
"of course with a who.is query you can learn my host, and with a small mail you may force to remove content. but will this help the current situation? i am even not in first 1000 in these queries. before you came to the forum there were 200 active people, and after you..now probably 100 active people..i will be really glad if you or your organisation remove that type of links, but if there is someone to blame..its search engines or other things..not me not blogs.how a person can blame me,forum members etc if they reach to the results at first page of google?"
I find that you are contradicting yourself here. If you and your like did not put up copyrighted material these would not be found at the search engines.
You are talking about "inner ethics". To me, this would - on a personal level - simply be to not download. If people did not download for free there would be no torrents or blogs for this.
"As long i enter prog not frog and see attack after attack posted against Shawn i don't really think they want to create a new market with artists on it who give away their stuff. It's more or less about the thought they have that every artist should give away their stuff for free even after an artist asks them to do not. And even after asking they simply continue to do so, imo to bad the RIAA can't take a look at that site."
That comment was mine, just forgot to put my name under it.
Gert
Before thirty years one sat before the radio and took up, cartridges exchanged and overacted. Or one lent oneself the newest disks from to befriend and overacted themselves on cartridges. Then the CD with promises the CD's did not come becomes cheaper than LP's. was like that!!!!!! Now one has P2P or Blogs........ and if that is not any more exchanges one evenly the Terrabyt non removable disk under each other out..... Music is Culture and Culture cannot limited
I think you could try and expand your legal offering inside Mindawn system. Ogg format and flac format are ok but you should offer mp3 format too, at different bitrates, I'd say at least 160, 190, 224 and 320 kbps. If you do so, then you could see if and how much file sharing is impeding legal sellings *of the same identical formats*. Looking at I-Tunes, I have a suspect that file sharing is not so detrimental for legal online shops. But you should look at mp3s and forget cd format, because if cds sellings are down and mp3s sellings are up there will be an explanation, don't you think so? Probably more and more people is tired of cd format but not so tired of more flexible and portable formats, and I think you should give to people what people is asking for.
FLAC is already CD quality and can be transcoded to anything, so why offer a bunch of mp3 formats? People can buy the flac and convert to whatever works for them, besides, i don't like MP3 or the licensing timebomb that is in it.
"FLAC is already CD quality and can be transcoded to anything, so why offer a bunch of mp3 formats? People can buy the flac and convert to whatever works for them, besides, i don't like MP3 or the licensing timebomb that is in it."
PK, you oughta think of the consumer instead for yourself in that regard. Like I said before, not many know about FLAC, and certainly very little people is going to bother going through some walkthrough or a way around transcoding said format to MP3.
It's a matter of ease of use, and you, as a content distributor, should provide said service.
Could you please develop about this 'licensing timembob'?
If you spent any time on the Mindawn site you'd see we provide information and tools for working with the FLAC files and they account for 80% of our sales, so people don't seem to be having too much trouble. By offering a half a dozen formats, we'd cause more confusion.
Read up at www.mp3licensing.com you might notice that some audio software already only has a 'for fee' mp3 plug in and everything else is free. Basically at any time the guys that own the mp3 encoding license can pull a trigger and make not only the content and software providers pay a license, but the people who own the content.
two armies are facing. labels Vs listeners. Helen of Troy has been kidnapped. the music. listeners says "no one can stop free downloading. don't know how yu, labels, can face that. surely not closin our blogs who can distribute the 1% of the illegal downloading and tha give a cultural support for people who wants to be informed". labels says : "if you work as a musician and you don't live of fresh air an love, you want money, for your job. as a plumber, a phisician, a painter, a bitch. we, the labels, helps thw artist for all burocracy, organization so he can be free of all the practical aspects of his work. we consider you thieves and we will fight closing blogs, torrents and whatever else"
IMHO who download is a small small small thief. we know chinese piracy with pirates copies in huge numbers sold in whole europe by north africans... this is a real danger, these are the industrial buccaneers and NO ONE of you labels will really fight against them. I will NEVER sell an album i have, at least i can share it. i know, it's not fair, but i don't earn a cent. what i can suggest is : bloggers, give all informations you want, put a widget for sampling and let the music be listened but not downloaded. all hosting who earns like rapidshare and others. they are the only one who get money from downloading people. what if the give a precentage to minor labels ? you, labels, make a list of out of production works and allow people to share it. find an agreement with your artists to allow to share their oldest works. don't knw, you've got to find a common solution
"FLAC is already CD quality and can be transcoded to anything, so why offer a bunch of mp3 formats? People can buy the flac and convert to whatever works for them, besides, i don't like MP3 or the licensing timebomb that is in it."
You see, I think you're right when you say that flac should not be shared for free in blogs. That's directly against your business. But here you admit that mp3 is inferior under several aspects, so I don't understand why you say that bloggers shouldn't share illegal mp3s. What are they "stealing"? A crappy lossy format that you don't sell in any case! I mean that it's clear why the majors don't want mp3 shared for free: they are selling mp3s, but you don't want to sell them, so you might as well let them be as you do for radios or for the ogg previews on Mindawn (it's easy to record them in mp3 format directly from Sound Blaster, and I think you know it).
I'm sorry, but that is about the most idiotic argument I've ever seen. I'm against piracy period, regardless of bit rate or format. I've been against the MP3 file format for years and my software company made the first portable Ogg playing software. I'm also saying when you are posting 320k and FLAC files, you are further destroying your argument that it is just to 'check it out', you could do 96k to check it out.
Here's the interesting read of the day:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/state-of-digital-music-2007.ars
Too bad my last comment wasn't published, now I don't feel like writing :(
Cheers!
Esteban.
I don't see this article saying anything that hasn't already been discussed and certainly doesn't offer a solution.
"If you spent any time on the Mindawn site you'd see we provide information and tools for working with the FLAC files and they account for 80% of our sales, so people don't seem to be having too much trouble. By offering a half a dozen formats, we'd cause more confusion."
I was speaking more about the type of person that downloads mp3s from blogs, not your regular customers. Sorry for not being clear there.
Selling music in formats average people can't comprehend how they WORK is not a plausible solution for gathering 'their' attention (not talking about your regular customers here). Hell, most peole I know that download music from blogs ... it's good fortune they understand how Rapidshare works!
"Read up at www.mp3licensing.com you might notice that some audio software already only has a 'for fee' mp3 plug in and everything else is free. Basically at any time the guys that own the mp3 encoding license can pull a trigger and make not only the content and software providers pay a license, but the people who own the content."
There's something I don't quite understand here. Are you talking in the case you put an mp3 decoding plugin inside your player, or for using the codec itself to sell music in said format?
Do you've any idea or information regarding such 'surprise' pay ups?
There are a variety of things that they can charge a fee for, they are:
* Software to encode
* Software to decode
* Hardware that decodes (like ipods)
* Hardware to encode (fairly rare)
* Owning content in their format
They currently charge for everything but the last one. They didn't charge for any of it initially to get people hooked and then they pulled the trigger, so lots of companies had to pony up the money. They came up with MP3 Pro to combat the higher quality AAC and OGG formats that were out there, and they charge more for it.
They can at any time go after the consumer as well, I'm sure the only thing stopping them is figuring out how to collect and fear of making everyone go to another format. Remember what happened with the GIF file format some years ago? When Unisys suddenly tried to charge a license fee for it after not having done it since it began, everyone dropped the format and PNG was created and that and JPEG are what are used today mostly.
If that last article I posted wasn't productive enough, here's the one I posted yesterday, the one that didn't show up:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080121-debating-copyright-reform-time-for-compulsory-licenses.html
Cheers!
Never saw the original post, in reading this article I don't see anything of value being put forward. They are essentially proposing something like the napster montly subscription model but more extensive, and then say that those models don't really work very well and you can't compete with 'free'. So we're still at the same point.
Here's an idea that was actually knocked around a while ago. Manditory watermarking. Each MP3 file has a mandatory serial number and all traffic on any p2p network must have this unique number for each file. The user then pays a flat fee per month and then downloads or uploads any file they want to (up to a certain limit, for the sake of argument let's say 500 files per month) as long as that serial number is in place. If they download that much or less it's up to the user. The flat fees are then collected and divided up to the artists using this serial number as reference. The RIAA could be responsible enforcing these p2p sites/aplications/whatever to use this system. Unfortunately this idea fell apart due to some record labels wanting a bigger "cut", didn't like the idea of competition from non major label artists and a proposed collection system (SoundExchange) which was already in place for internet radio was/is corrupt and certainly won't give up their monopoly.
I remember reading about it, and there were some interesting points about it, but also some problems:
* SoundExchange - worthless shits and corrupt as hell.
* It's like running up a credit card, how are you going to collect from some guy in Uzbekistan when the bill comes due and who is going to do it? Unless you're going to collect from the ISP as though they are radio stations, in which case they'd pass the cost on to their customers by raising prices on everyone.
* It would probably take all of 2 days before the watermarking technology was beaten
It does show that people are at least thinking outside the box though.
* SoundExchange - worthless shits and corrupt as hell.
Amen brother! Still trying to collect my royalties they extorted out of the net radio stations the past couple of years but so far they have refused, telling me "it's not a significant amount anyways"
Well, these "insignificant amounts" they're not paying can certainly add up to a nice bonus to someone over at SoundExchange I'm sure!
Yes, I had a chat with them as a label owner, artist and internet broadcaster and you could either pay their per listner/per song rate or an alternative minimum, which at the time was about $250 a year. I said "Ok, I play Peter Gabriel, how much is he going to get?", after much back and forth they finally admitted that the $250 went to the cost of collecting the $250 and so nothing went to the artists. I'm sure you see the irony here.
As a label owner, I told them I don't want them collecting anything on my behalf because they were saying they were going to collect for everyone, whether they wanted them to or not.
It seems you have a few "pirates and thieves" inside the industry to deal with. Looks like they can really hurt your business.
Cheers,
Esteban.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/01/major-labels-al.html
"You can't change the attitudes and habits of what is now probably amounting to two generations who believe that music ought to be free on the internet," said Qtrax CEO Allan Klepfisz. "Those people are not going to be discouraged by Supreme Court decisions, they're not going to be discouraged by technological interference. Ultimately, what will discourage them is a demonstratively better service."
i think qtrax find a solution :o)
http://www.qtrax.com/
This is interesting, but they seem to be misleading a bit http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23121891-1702,00.html
Last.fm is also trying something similar they announced the other day. This isn't the first time that a service has tried to do ad supported audio either, and so far it hasn't worked, but at least the artists still get paid. I'm not sure why you seem to think this is the death of us (the post on your blog), it's another sales channel.
Naha,
You really don't get it.
No one here is interested in your blog as long as you do not put up anything aginst their will.
Normally people think that is fair.
You have been posting here several times and on one has been impolite or anything towards you. And, yet, you are running some kind of personal campaign against us.
You are persecuting some kind of mad vendetta against something that we have not done.
And you are fighting your stupid fight for your right to do whatever you want with others work.
I am no really tired of your stupid, unintelligent ignorance.
You might think that you are important, but you are not.
You are really a nobody.
It's so obvious when reading your silly lies about those who not agree with you.
Write your own music and give it away for free if you want.
As long as you do not steal our music we really don't care about you.
to the owner of the site: can you address the fact that you've not allowed people to post and engage in a discussion from the other viewpoint?
That's pretty laughable if you read the threads, obviously we are posting things by people that don't agree with us. We are filtering comments that are slanderous to other people and ones that don't add anything to the discussion that hasn't already been said (although some dups are going through).
"This isn't the first time that a service has tried to do ad supported audio either, and so far it hasn't worked, but at least the artists still get paid."
It worked fine for decades in radio broadcastings, so why shouldn't it work with legal free downloads in Internet?
The business in Internet is free music associated to advertisement, even Peter Gabriel is saying so.
"Adopted digital distribution once a method was available (iTunes)"
Oh, please. That was almost a decade too late and implented very poorly in terms of pricing structures, payment to artists and - not least - technical aspects (low quality rips + DRM = fail).
If a DRM-free, well-stocked, reasonably priced iTunes alternative had been out in 1999 or 2000, The Pirate Bay would be an obscure web site with a few thousand hits a day.
Bad decisions and cowardice (coupled with some goodl old-fashioned misdirected greed) on the part of the music industry (and now the film industry) have taught an entire generation how to get pirated files. Yes, it's wrong in all sorts of ways, but harping on about it isn't going to make it go away.
This situation we're in today was far from inevitable, but labels and artists who snoozed and seriously thought that closing down Napster would make file-sharing go away, caused this. It is of their making, a least as much as any other aspect you care to name. From spreading badwill by suing music fans to putting inconventient road blocks in the way of people who just want to enjoy music, they nourished piracy every step of the way.
If you sow the wind, you shall reap the storm.
Rethink, reinvent, remodel. It's the only way.
Mindawn has been DRM free and available for 5 years now. The solution isn't to make any more adaptations, the business model is make music/sell music, after that it is sue sue sue, personally I'd like to see a few of the big pirates get the death penalty and get executed, then you'd really see a big drop off of piracy.
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