On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 03:02:00PM -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: > Mostly true, although Macrovision makes some form of copy protection that > can get embedded in the digital data stream which is supposed to survive > becoming analog. In other words, it screws up the audio. Nice. :-( > I don't think it's the band that's doing this. It's the labels that have > invested money in the band, and it's the big distribution companies. Yes, but label execs don't generally give two shits about the fans as long as sales are up. They *do* give a shit, out of necessity, about accommodating their top bands. So I think a letter-writing campaign to the bands in question is more likely to have an effect. > > BTW, the above was just an example. I agree with Mark K. I don't > > download any music that isn't free and legal. > > I think that most people that make music don't do too much of this. I yep... I download maybe a handful of songs a year, usually things that I don't even like enough to burn to CD; occasionally things that I'm curious about that I would buy if I could find the damn things. > download music legally, from mp3.com, or one of these days from iTunes for > $0.99/tune. Most of this p2p is a simple market driven reaction to the fact > that most CD's these days have only 1-2 tunes that make the money. Most of > the rest of the CD is filler. (Well, in Madonna's recent CD I think it's all > filler!) ;-) This is very true. There's a bunch of great pop songs that come on crap albums... "Genie in a Bottle" leaps to mind... > No one I know wants to pay $8.00/'good song', and then get the > other 10 songs for free? $0.99 for the songs a person like sounds like a > good deal. Yep. Pop music kind of wants to be a singles market, but the CD era killed most of the economic incentive for selling singles because there's barely any difference in the manufacturing / distribution cost of CDs regardless of length - only quantity really matters. BTW, it's now possible to set up cheap per-song paid downloads on your own website without a lot of cost overhead and without a time-based subscription service. Check these guys out, they've just launched and I'm very curious to see if they succeed: http://www.bitpass.com/learn/ not enough info posted about becoming an "earner", sadly. But I found out about it this morning when I used it to pay $0.25 to read an online comic. It was pretty quick to do. -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com Look! Up in the sky! It's CARDIO-POSITRONICMEGAPOODLE ORIGINATOR! (random hero from isometric.spaceninja.com)
