File Sharing is destroying the US Dance Industry

[irenegade7]

Why are some people on here supporting recording labels? These

spineless jelly fishes have been ripping off the general public for decades.

Seventeen dollars for a CD that cost $1 to produce. How many times have you

brought an album and if you get lucky there is two good songs on there?

File sharing helps no name dj'/musician's get a chance to shine. There

are so many people out there who have been suppress by record labels.

There is so much red tape with labels that as time progress more and

more DJ/musician's are going to say fuck you record company I'm doing my

shit myself............If you need an example exhibit A. Ice-Tea..fuck you

record companies .......Sony/BMG/RCA/Atlantic/ and all the rest, fuck you with a

big rubber dick............

[Rad_Z]

You also have to look at the overall picture of the world, and specifically, the US economy. For the past 2 years its been going downhill, ppl losing their retirement accounts and parents losing their children's future college funds, less jobs, stock martket shitty...etc...

So take that into consideration when doing your research over teh past 2 years... its not only the music industry, its almost every industry.

And one more thing...when file sharing wasnt available, i was a cheap fuck and i didn't buy a lot of electronic music CD's. Dont get me wrong, i bought a few, but most of the time they were crap and i was lucky to get 1 or 2 good tracks that i liked because there wasnt a way to preview an artist or his songs.

File sharing also opened me up to different DJ's that i didnt know about or wouldnt even think of seeing them. WHen your friend sends you a track by a new DJ, and you happen to like it, obviously you will be more open to see him live at a club/'concert or buy his CD now.

Rad_

[djwrecknyc]

the truth of the matter still stands that free distribution of music can not be good for an artist's MUSICAL career in the long run due to moderate record sales (...even if they rely more on performances for income.. but what are the guarantees in that?). this obviously doesn't affect consumers.

in retaliation against p2p services (ie napster) the industry has tried to go as far as cooperate with tech companies to develop "full proof" standards for digital music protection. these efforts have failed to pass because of the overwhelming market for mp3s and digital audio.

read up on the demise of the SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) proposal.

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/3157885.htm

[dialectics]

yes when the VCR came out the film industry made a big stink - and now they're making more money from videotape sales then from theater tickets (movie theaters take in most of their money from concessions). Technology is liberating for those with the eyes to see that the gates have come down.

the thing that you all have negated is that within filesharing lies an immense potential for profit which almost nobody has tapped. Think about it - you now have AUTOMATIC ways of finding out EVERY SINGLE consumer's PERSONAL taste. This is the stuff worth a billion million dollar consumer surveys and focus groups... this has been the wet dream of every marketer since the term was coined. All of a sudden I can predict with reasonable accuracy exactly what products a person is likely to purchase simply because i have access to their digital music library. nobody pays attention to ads now because they are both (a) ubiquitous and ( utterly unrelated to anything i'm remotely close to interested in. now this will change.

My research aims to free us from the music industry being about the few-to-many process of selling little plastic discs - and instead about a feedback loop between creative minds an open ears.

Artists still need to make money - this will never change. And artists should be paid for their work in creating something we love. But artists rarely make money from album sales. As someone mentioned before, a group is only paid from album sales once their debt to the record label is recouperated. This is something like $500,000, of which only one in eight albums make up. Record labels must have major hits in order to recoup the cost of the 7 albums that gross less then they've put out (for marketing and studio time). Thus record labels should be seen as investors, plain and simple, and they want a return on their investment. But I digress.

In reality, most bands make their money from touring and merchandise. That does not change because of filesharing - in fact it will only get better as more artists have more exposure because of the internet.

I envision a world where the production, distribution and consumption of music is so liquid that music becomes as ubiquitous as air - mp3 players the size of our finger are available for under $100. With some VST instruments and a good sequencer an amateur musician can belt out a dance track worth a million dollar studio. Music will follow you more then it does now - in your bedroom and in your office - it will change with you, alter itself to fit your mood, expanding itself without your intervention.

But there is this shared cultural experience that is truly american and truly youth culture that comes about because of consumer products being able to be replicated perfectly. there is something incredible about listening to the same song as your classmates, or knowing about that band before everyone else does. Like the t-shirt "I listened to n'sync when they were underground", haha. In that respect the way record labels will make money is not by selling little plastic discs but as information filters. There will be so much music out there that it will be impossible to sort through it all. Most people would gladly pay a small bit of money to know their music collection will always be fresh without their own intervention.

And since people still love to hold something in their hand, and in american culture purchasing is empowering (a la brad pitt's monologue in 12 monkeys: we used to be producers and consumers - but now the producers are machines so all we have left is consumption... or something to that effect). There will still be the option of going into a physical store and being surrounded by faces on discs that hold unlimited promise. But the experience will be more experimental - a colleage has developed an application for a sony clie wher you scan the bar code of a cd in a record store and it will stream a clip for you to listen to. And the way to ensure that people still buy your disc is to provide something more then the information lodged in the grooves. i see two means of profit:

1) give access ONLY to holders of the disc (ie through one-time use passwords) of special information about the band, ie a chance to buy tickets to a show early, or artwork or interviews or on-line chats with the band.

2) improve the quality of the audio. according to psychoacoustics experiments, humans should not be able to percieve audio above 20 kHz, meaning that the sampling rate of digital music must be above 40 kHz, with room to cover the transition region of the anti-aliasing filter. but when you listen to a cd its missing a certain warmth because the high harmonics of your instruments are clipped away. The situation is even worse when you're dealing with .mp3s - compression is achieved by knocking out high frequencies, tone masking (again based on psychoacoustic studies) and variable bit-rate coding (which does not affect quality). At this point it is practical to download an entire album as an .mp3 file (~~ 60-100 mb). It is somewhat practical to be able to download an entire album of compressed CD audio (4-500 mb using mkw lossless compression), even though it is not really all that gratifying in the immediate. So suppose we extrapolate the curve and say that in a few years we'll be able to download 100mb in a matter of a few seconds, thus able to download uncompressed CD audio without thinking. so up the ante: make little plastic discs that sound really really REALLY good. give me DVD audio - sampled at 192 khz, 6 channel stereo surround sound. give me booming bass and bright shimmering treble. give me audio that "knows" the room its being played in so it can tune itself to the acoustic properties of the room. immerse me in music and i will gladly pay for the experience. quality like this cannot be compressed in a way that would be easily downloadable.

filesharing is stealing, yeah, but it will never die - just like we will never get rid of the vcr. the question becomes how to we not sit there like babies and whine about how those script kiddies are stealing our business, but to profit from it - because technology will set you free.

I'll be getting off my soapbox now

have a lovely evening,

rob

[dialectics]

Originally posted by djwrecknyc

in retaliation against p2p services (ie napster) the industry has tried to go as far as cooperate with tech companies to develop "full proof" standards for digital music protection. these efforts have failed to pass because of the overwhelming market for mp3s and digital audio.

read up on the demise of the SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) proposal.

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/3157885.htm

They will NEVER be able to create a foolproof encryption system. The reason is that the fundamental problem of encryption:

Alice wants to send a message to Bob, and doesn't want Carol to read it

depends on the premise that Bob has some interest in keeping the message a secret. If music is to be played there must be some type of decryption method somewhere in my audio system to decode the protected data for my speakers to translate it into amplified vibrations of a cone. As compaq, professor felten, and a 14 year old scandinavian kid and the team from crypography.com that cracked the smart cards using heat signatures have demonstrated: all technology can be reverse-engineered.

All it takes is one enterprising high school kid with too much time, and whatever encryption scheme you've designed will soon have its secrets be posted online for all to see. the DMCA has made that posting illegal, but the damage will already have been done. and the DMCA says something to the effect of "if i put a bank vault in the middle of times square and have it sealed only by chewing gum, it is illegal to tell others that the vault is sealed with chewing gum".

the solution that microsoft has come up with is a "naughty list". if a security mechanism in your hardware discovers that its been tampered with, it will do two things:

1) disable itself

2) send a message to microsoft's database saying that you're not allowed to download digital content anymore.

i'd love to see how many friends they make from that one

night night,

rob