WSLer: Whoa. I don’t see anyone here arguing in support of music piracy. I certainly don’t support it. In fact, on the website I linked to above I just recommended a CD that you can find online if you want, but I explicitly told people to go out and buy it.
But you have to recognize that the music industry does not have clean hands in this regard. Even a libertarian-leaning person like me can disagree with that industry, because they don’t fight fair. Specifically, they spend a lot of money and effort buying politicians and getting legislation passed that benefits them.
For example, a couple of years ago their lawyers slipped a midnight rider into a farm appropriations bill which deprived artists of their performance rights. It was done this way so that there would be no debate on the issue and lawyers representing artists wouldn’t have a chance to mount a counter-offensive against the bill. That was sleazy, and it’s typical of the way they operate.
Another example is the current bill in congress, which was sponsored by Fritz Hollings. If it passes, every electronic device that can store digital data will be required to have an encryption chip in it, and it will be illegal to decode digital data back to analog in any device other than the output device.
The new Celine Dion CD is copy-protected. This is not mentioned anywhere on the CD package. If you buy this CD and put it in your iMac, you’re in trouble. Because the way they ‘protected’ the CD is to make it lock up any computer that tries to read it. On a PC, you can eject it. But on a Mac, I don’t believe you can. I’m not sure what you’d do in that case, but the record company has already issued a disclaimer (likely invalid) saying that they assume no responsibility for damage.
Not only that, but these copy-protection schemes will deprive consumers of their fair-use rights under the law. You won’t be able to burn a copy of your CD onto Mp3 to play in your walkman. You won’t be able to play the CD on your computer. You won’t be able to make an archival copy, or make a copy for your home jukebox (I have an MP3 jukebox for background music in the house, and all copy-protected CD’s are now useless for that).
The list goes on. The entertainment industry has greased congress so well that they managed to pass a whole bunch of laws which are going to damage all of us, they’ve managed to get copyright extensions on older works (in violation of the spirit of copyright laws), etc.
I’m not sure if you’re responding to what I said above, but it was meant in jest; I’ve heard this argument far too many times around here. (I think it’s pldennison who usually comes in and drops the science on that one.)
I don’t, however, think the market will bear the current price of CDs for very long. If the record companies can’t make an adequate profit if they lower the price, they’ll just have to figure out how to make them cheaper.
Mr. Frink:
Define “soon”. The idea of going to a store and buying music on a portable medium is firmly entrenched, and not just in the minds of the industry. When broadband 'net access becomes as common as the telephone, then maybe, but until then, people will want to buy cds.
Sam–the lousy quality of 128 bit MP3s is a bandwidth issue. Those in live music trading circles (Phish, Grateful Dead, etc.) have been trading in the .shn format for a while now, which is supposedly lossless from the original .wav. Unfortunately, those of us with dialup access are left out of the game if we’d like to get these files while we’re young, so I don’t know much about it. Oh, and if you’re ripping a disc to write to a disc, don’t rip to mp3–just rip them to wav, and write the CD from there. You shouldn’t lose anything.
Well, I may as well reiterate: WE DON’T NEED TO RIP SONGS OFF CDs! Who has a microphone attached to their computer? Very good! Who can use this microphone to record songs as they are played on the radio? Who can put these songs onto the P2P of their choice? I knew you could do it!
Well, with all the variety on radio these days there will be lots to choose from don’t you think? :rolleyes:
I can just imagine how good that must sound too, tune in a compressed fm singal on a Bose wave radio, record it in mono with that great microphone that came free with your computer, then sample it at 128 bits and send it on its way. I hope that is not the future.
I can’t believe some of you, supporting file sharing! I mean, pop/rock star mansions and limos don’t pay for themselves
I mean, think of all of the years we’ve been recording songs from tapes and CD’s onto blank tapes. Its completely destroyed the music industry. Poor, poor multimillionaire pop/rock stars and music industry officials.
Just a brief hijack – for any Dopers caught in this situation, reset the Mac, and hold down the mouse button as you do so. That will force the Mac to eject whatever disc is in the drive.
There are other methods available, depending on the specific model and configuration, but this is the easiest approach.
In my experience, the American consumer generally likes to pay extraordinarily high prices for inferior crap. Look for CD prices to go up as soon as the current recession is officially over.
Tris
“You could park a car in the shadow of his ass.” ~ Geena Davis, in Thelma and Louise ~
According to this article, the major record companies may be planning to drop CD soon in favor of hybrid SACD, which has a much better copy protection scheme. Now that would be cool, if the price of the SACDs will drop to, or below, current normal CD costs…
Re: The Celine Dion CD, and other Sony products that use the Key2Audio “copy-protection” scheme: you can also defeat it completely with a black magic marker. Not that any Dopers own Celine Dion CDs.
As it happens, Key2Audio isn’t as good as Sony thinks it is anyway. My copy of the Star Wars: Episode II soundtrack, which also uses the scheme and is supposed to prevent it from playing on any PC or Mac, plays just fine in my laptop using the RealOne player.
Heh heh, anyone want to start a pool on how long it will take someone to crack SACD’s copy protection once it comes to market?
High encryption really isn’t much of a barrier IMHO. If they introduce something that uses lots of encryption, then a P2P distributed computing app will appear on the scene to crack it.
Installing ecryption chips in new hardware really won’t do the trick either. ‘Grey’ manufacturing plants and the huge amount of legacy h/ware floating around will make that rather useless. Everyone will want to use old computers all of a sudden.
Caveat: I don’t know much about P2P, encryption or distributed computing except at the user level.
~atarian: Reader advisory. This message contains >0 spellling mistakes.
Um, SACD is in the market right now and has been for almost two years. So far as I know no one has cracked it, but since it is, at least right now, mostly an audiophile thing I doubt many people are working on it. Also, most SACDs in the market are reissues of older recordings, so they are available on regular CDs as well.
That being said, as far as I know the SACD encryption will not survive a D-A-D conversion process, so I doubt it will have much practical impact on the P2P issue.
Interesting. Thanks for the info Runner I guess that while we have the current CD protection level/no protected CDs, there is no incentive for people to crack SACD.
If and when it becomes more prevalent though, it will be cracked.
This quote from Heinlein gets bandied about on slashdot et al. a lot when these kinds of things are discussed but I think it’s such a good quote, it deserves another airing:
The “Music Industry” (RIAA or whatever) should do exactly what napster did, but do it better, and charge for it. I would pay a monthly fee, plus a reasonable charge per MP3, to have access to an immense liabrary of digital music.
Napster, at it peak, gave access to over 10 million files! Multiple files of stuff that was truly obscure were generally available. But there were definate problems - a particular file could be corrupted, or contain a virus. Most stuff was at 128kbs, or less. Many people had slooow connections, making it take forever to download a song. In the middle of a download, a person might turn off their computer and cut you off.
If the Music Industry could duplicate Napster, with high speed connections, a better search function, a choice of bit rate, and even more files available, they would have the “killer ap”.
As a working musician, I have to address a few points made. I don’t intend to defend the record companies, only the artists.
If the record companies go away, the artist is presented with a few problems. First, how do they earn a living? Because if they cannot, they must do something else to survive. Trust me when I say that a full-time “straight” job does not allow an artist much time to excel at his craft. We all need to earn a living though. So what is left is touring and t-shirts basically.
Touring is very expensive and, usually at least, partially subsidized by the record companies. Without the sponsorship and promotional backing, an artist is going have huge cost increases. That will be passed to the consumer in the form of higher ticket prices. Is everyone who wants to download free music up for that?
Now, what if the artist is relatively unknown? Everyone is in the beginning. How is it that they develop a following that is going to have 50,000 people waiting in each town across the USA to see them. Is the internet expected to provide all the promotion necessary to ensure this? What about the other 20 million bands on the internet that are trying to simultaneously promote themselves? People who say this will cut down on the bad artists are mistaken. Since everyone is basically at the same starting point, everyone gives it a shot. Total saturation. Does everyone really want to weed through 5000 bad mp3s to find a diamond? Obviously, the current system isn’t immune to this. There are plenty of undiscovered greats and plenty of awful acts that are signed. But a file-sharing only environment won’t help to get the cream to the top as efficiently as some would like to think.
I’m not the record industry’s biggest fan. I wish it had the integrity to treat artists fairly and save the contracts for people who have genuine talent. It is a business though, always has been. But they posess marketing and promotional power that your average artist just couldn’t come close to by themselves. Without this, it would be rare if an artist were able to promote themselves so succesfully that they could support a tour and continue to release more CD’s. It would still happen, just not nearly enough, IMHO.
I also must add that people need to realize when they download stuff that it does not always affect the artists in a positive way. And there are plenty of people that download music because of the simple fact that it is free. They have all the new releases and won’t buy any of it. I know too many people with full 100gig drives and stacks of burned cd’s that are not buying music. This problem has to be solved. I commend everyone that doesn’t do this but many do. When someone posts something saying " I only download stuff that I will buy" or “I only download stuff that isn’t available in an other way”, or “I only download stuff that I already own”, you are ok in my book and you are the minority from what I have seen.
As far as solutions… Shelbo has the right idea. The record companies need to offer something that is betterthan what current P2P has to offer. If they can do that and people will be willing to pay for it, they may survive. That is the only way I see artists being able to make a living.
MusicGuy: You certainly have some valid points, but there are reasonable answers to them. Let me take them one at a time:
Record companies are not the only path to income for musicians. Nor are we talking about the death of the record company. We’re talking about a fundamental re-structuring of the industry.
For example, one of the problems as I see it is that record labels tend to sign acts for multi-record deals. Sometimes so many records that they essentially own the artist for a long period of time.
That used to be the model in many other types of entertainment and publishing. Movie actors would be ‘contract’ players and be locked to studio for a long period of time.
Such arrangements give the record company a lot of power to control the market. If they refuse to release an artist’s works on MP3, then the entire MP3 industry will be left without access to that market. Couple that with the organization of record labels into consortiums like the RIAA, and you wind up with a near-monopoly on the marketplace of music. The result the same as with any other shortage - a black market appears. People want inexpensive music. People want Mp3’s. If a monopoly prevents access to those things, they’ll do it themselves.
Plus the cost of marketing, manufacture, and distribution. Sure, the record company provides a valid service. But other arrangements are possible. Musicians could have agents like other artists, and those agents can handle marketing and even up-front money for touring. Venture capital firms might underwrite a tour. A distribution company (the record label) might pay an advance for the album to cover tours. But the artist would be free to negotiate deals with web sites or other distributors to make their stuff available in other formats.
If there’s a need, the market will fill it. How do we find out which books are worth reading? Most people never see an an advertisement for a book. But in the book industry, mechanisms have developed to transmit that information to the consumer. For example, book reviewers are much more widely listened to and respected than are music reviewers. The system will adapt.
Maybe I’ll go to amazon.com and look at what the ten highest-rated new discs are, in the genre I’m interested in. Maybe new artists will start at the bottom on secondary MP3-only sales sites, and work their way up to the top tier like Amazon based on buzz and sales figures.
Here’s a perfect example: http://www.iFilm.com. Anyone can make short films, get them on ifilm, have them move up the ranks, have them get linked on a lot of sites like this one so they generate lots of hits for the hosting company. This gets them more promotion. One film called ‘405’ (http://www.405themovie.com) has been shown at premier film festivals and reviewed by Roger Ebert (favorably). It seems that people find the good stuff.
I think the converse is a much bigger problem - great acts that can’t find an audience because the record labels aren’t interested. Where else do they have to turn? The record labels are powerful enough to actually control the direction and trends of music. It has the power to eliminate certain forms of expression. It has gone through conservative eras where many of their older acts were dropped, ignored, or only supported with cheap production and no promotion.
I’d much rather see a widespread, dynamic, grassroots music culture that has the tools to reach a wide audience when something great emerges.
I agree. However, the record labels are not squeaky clean either. As I said earlier, they use government as a big hammer to get things the market won’t offer them. That makes them coercive. By using copy protection, they are depriving consumers of their legal fair use rights. Their questionable accounting has ripped off countless artists, as have their successful attempts to strip away the legal rights of artists.
Interesting thread, and thanks to everyone who posted. There’s some really good ideas and insight floating around here. I’d like to add my two cents.
I’m not sure where but I remember reading that high-profile bands on major labels only make about $1 for every CD they sell. In some cases, this could equate to quite a chink of change. But, really, is $250,000 (a cool million divided by four theoretical band members, minus some taxes . . .) even going to make a huge difference in these musicians lives? Granted, every little bit counts, but that money is merely an outfit or two, for some of these so-called “artists.”
The real money comes from touring, endorsements, and merchandise. Some of these bands should get off of their buts and tour for 150 days a year, like many smaller, hard-working bands who don’t get as much publicity. Need even more money? License a song to Pepsi! You’ve already sold your soul to RCA, why not spread it out a little bit?
Also, I would feel a much more sorry for these record companies, if some of them weren’t the same exact companies who manufactured blank CD-Rs. Really, Sony, if you’re going to throw a hissy fit about pirating, stop selling CDs labeled as “Perfect for Audio” or “80 minutes of music.”
For old timers you can remember that this same debate went on over cassette tapes. Sam Stone kinda mentions this. Cassettes were generally considered an inferior medium, but the oil shock back in what 1978 gave record companies an excuse to jack up record prices. Then a lot of us went out and bought cassette recorders because of the price differential.
I think prices will come down though. Flip side of the coin is that costs have probably come down as well. I mean, how much does it cost to burn a CD??? Distribution, recording costs, etc are all falling.
