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What's Napster?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Solaris, Jun 1, 2010.

  1. mrwoliachi

    mrwoliachi
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    I get my music in one of three ways

    1. For old classical/jazz/world music I'll check my library system and most of the time it's available for check out; I'll then upload it to my iTunes

    2. For newer indie/pop/techno/Pitchfork whatever I'll scan the blogs and messageboards and if that doesn't work then I'll search google using different search terms like blogspot,rapidshare,mediafire,etc.

    3. If it's out of left field and/or recommended by someone who knows a lot about music I'll get it from them or just use torrents. I'm not too keen on torrents though because I don't really upload and I'd rather download from rapidshare where there's no way of really getting caught.
     
  2. Lakeshow

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    Back in the day, I had a couple friends that got onto Napster within a few months of it opening up. It was awesome except for the whole 56k thing. 12-20 min for a song made it a pain in the ass to download most songs.

    Once I got broadband, Kazaa was just getting big so I switched to that, followed by Limewire.

    Limewire became a jungle of horrible quality mp3s and tons of corrupted tracks that were planted to just replay a verse or chorus. I stuck with Limewire, mainly because I didn't want to go to bittorrent.

    That is until I found a couple message boards that I've used for about 5-6 years now. Rock, rap, classical, foreign, techno, movies, e-books, anything you can think of they have. Definitely the easiest places to use with people just putting up rapidshare, megaupload and mediafire links.

    In terms of buying music, the only time I'll do so is with relatively unknown groups or artists that I can't find on anything, including bittorent. In these cases, I'll use iTunes.

    I do try and support the artists I enjoy by going to concerts and buying some merchandise and I've been to Coachella and Ring the Bells a couple times each.
     
  3. DrFrylock

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    I am somewhat disappointed in the present and pessimistic about the future.

    I am a firm believer that you should be able to choose whatever business model you want for things you create. Potential customers get a Hobson's choice: take it at the price you offer, or leave it. If too many leave it, too bad - change your model or go out of business.

    The thing that has changed in the creative industry that has almost never before been true is that potential customers have three choices now: take it, leave it, or take it anyway without paying. I think Option #3 is a game-changer, and not necessarily for the better, in the long run.

    There is a groundswell movement afoot that basically asserts things like this:

    • Supply-and-demand economics states that when supply goes to infinity (as it does with digital things), price goes to zero.
    • You can try to charge for digital things but you will have to compete with others giving away the same exact thing for free, even if it's something you created.
    • The act of copying a digital thing is an act of creation. That is, the fact that you can copy an MP3 file means you can make a song, just like Toyota makes a car. (This one, in particular, bothers me tremendously: while it is strictly true, is a fundamental redefinition of the concept of 'creation' for creative works that I'm wholly uncomfortable with).
    • Copyright is an abomination. As a monopoly on an item, it is fundamentally preventing the free market from giving consumers what they want at the lowest possible price. It should be eliminated.
    • Copyright should only exist if it does what the Constitution says, which is to "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." Since there are some studies that show that art is still created in environments without (strong) copyright, it is therefore constitutionally unnecessary and can be done away with.
    • People sometimes make and give away creative works. They also sometimes create works in environments with no copyright or weak copyright. Therefore copyright is unnecessary.
    • Even if you're not going to get rid of copyright entirely, it lasts entirely too long and should be shortened. Alternatively, the terms have been so abusively long that the only reasonable choice is to eliminate it entirely.
    • It is impossible to create working DRM or change public perceptions on the issue, and any resources thrown at either solution are foolishly wasted.
    • You can make money by giving away digital goods to help you sell more associated real goods, therefore it's a simple matter of changing your strategy to this.
    • You can make money by giving away digital goods because some people will buy them anyway, even if you give them away, therefore it's a simple matter of changing your strategy to this.
    • The way to make money now is to establish personal relationships with your fans, who will give you money because it makes them feel good. If you don't want to go to the trouble, you don't deserve to make any money.
    • Nearly no creators ever made money from digital goods anyway, they made it by doing something else (touring, lecture circuit) so the only people hurt by this are Giant Media Conglomerates, who are all evil and useless and can be done away with.
    • Sometimes a Giant Media Conglomerate publishes a low-quality work. Therefore, Giant Media Conglomerates do not provide a guarantee of quality, and thus we don't need them for anything.
    • Sometimes people abuse copyright law, and therefore it's a problem and needs to be abolished.
    • Since all creative works have some roots in other creative works, it is illogical to 'lock up' some works. All of this 'culture' collectively belongs to all of us.

    Although there are "new business models" being tried out here and there, this problem and an exhaustive list of solutions are well-known. It is called the Free Rider Problem; alternatively, it is the problem of how to ensure sufficient production of public goods. The known solutions to this problem are listed here. They include:

    • Assurance Contracts, Coasian Models: Basically different ways of funding the creation of a new creative work in advance, rather than taking risk up front and trying to recoup costs later (since people can get it for free once it's made). So, you say "I won't write this book/make this record/whatever until I have a total pledge of $10,000." This has worked for a few artists. Alternatively, you release Chapter 1 of your book but hold the remainder for ransom.
    • Government provision, subsidies: You tax everybody and let the government pay for (part of) the creation of new work.
    • Joint products: You bundle the creative work with something scarce/tangible and sell the scarce good at a higher price. For example, you give away your music but sell T-shirts with your band's logo on it. This works as long as you have a monopoly on the T-shirts with your band's logo: since you are subsidizing the nonzero cost of making the music, somebody else who can come in and undercut you on the T-shirts. You can also leverage natural monopolies: "official" band T-shirts, autographed T-shirts, etc. One special case of this is to give away your creative work for free and "sell" good feelings or escape from guilt (i.e., a tipping model).
    • Privileged group: Find people for whom the creative work is most valuable and let them pay disproportionately for it, since they need it more badly than others.
    • Merging free riders: Pay all the pirates off (doesn't work when you have large numbers of them).
    • Influence public opinion: Try to convince people to not be pirates.
    • Turn public goods into club goods: This is basically "use a copyright system."

    That's it. Those (and variants on those themes) are your options. Every option has been available to creators for several hundred years, but the last option is weakened substantially by the Internet, so we're down by one. All the arguments above basically boil down to "it's no big deal to lose the 'club goods' option (in this case, copyright), because..."

    • It's not efficient.
    • It disproportionately and unfairly benefits only some creators (particularly successful ones).
    • The additional efficiency (through reduced 'friction') provided by the Internet more than makes up for any benefits we might be losing in a weakened club goods option.
    • The other ones can pick up the slack.

    My main concern is that "efficiency" here really means the Wal-Mart future: a gigantic amount of low-quality crap, but at least it's cheap. I understand that this is the epitome of the successful free market, and I should feel waves of warm fuzzy Libertarian feelings rushing over me whenever I walk into Sam Walton's paradise-like shops.

    For some reason, I don't.
     
  4. lostalldoubt86

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    If you look back in history, they thought records, tapes, and CDs were going to ruin the music industry. Music will always make money.
     
  5. MoreCowbell

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    I love-love-love-love Spotify. Solaris even missed a few of its more wonderful features.
    • if you have a compatible phone (IPhone, anything w/ Google Android, a few others), you can play music from Spotify anywhere w/ ~$14.50 (it's ten pounds, I lack a pound-sign key) premium membership.
      If you buy the premium membership, you can play music offline

    My only complaint is that its radio feature needs serious improvement. If they could incorporate a Pandora-like prediction/variety feature into it, it would be damn near perfect.

    The fact that it is going to disappear when I move back stateside thoroughly depresses me. Rumor is it's looking at a summer-2010 launch in the US.


    Not the same. I'm not sure one or the other is better; as built right now, they're compliments.

    Pandora functions like a very smart, mind-reading radio station. Good if you want variety, not so good for listening to the new The Black Keys album in its entirety.
    Spotify functions like an ITunes library that has hundreds of thousands of available songs. Good for albums, less good for casual listening.

    There are other differences (no limits on a premium Spotify account, up/down votes in Pandora, etc.) but that's the major one. They're not the same service.

    The ideal would be a product or service that had BOTH of these things.
     
  6. Stealth

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    I was listening to the "Skull Cave" presented by Stephen Walker on independent radio station 3RRR in Melbourne and he quoted a statistic something along the lines of ....

    3% of music released makes up 90% of sales and that 90% of albums released sell less than 5000 copies.

    You can listen to 3RRR via internet streaming and I can highly recommend that you check it out.

    The 3RRR program guide http://www.rrr.org.au/programs/program-guide/

    Live streaming http://www.rrr.org.au/programs/streaming/

    By the way , I have nothing at stake here and my recommendation is of no benefit to me whatsoever.
    I just think 3RRR is one of the great things about Melbourne and one of the few radio stations in Australia where non commercial , non "top 100" music is played.
     
  7. MoreCowbell

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    It's important to remember: most people still don't download songs. The majority of music is still bought in CD form. All of us arguing about the matter here are still probably way more technologically proficient than the average music customer, and probably way more likely to use digital methods to obtain songs.

    And that's considering that digital music has been available for over a decade. It's no longer the "new" thing. Yet people are still buying physical copies.


    Music is definitely trending towards digital consumption, but people speaking of the death of the physical product are sort of like Open Source advocates talking about how soon the world will be all Open Source because "IT'S THE FUTURE!!!", ignoring the fact that the overwhelming majority still use programs like MS Office. These debates suffer from an insulation effect: everyone assumes that because we (mostly literate, educated, Internet-active youths) use services like Spotify, Pandora, etc. and download torrents, everyone must do so.

    The overwhelming majority of people don't even know what a torrent is, and have never even heard of Pandora. Physical sales are still way more than digital sales. Even if it is the way of the future, the album and brick-an-mortar sales are not going anywhere anytime soon. Frankly, consumers as a whole aren't ready. If music is going digital, we're talking years and maybe decades, not months.
     
  8. Rush-O-Matic

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    I record from the radio onto cassette tapes in my boom box. Sometimes I even get them from FM stations.
     
  9. Obviously5Believer

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    I actually do listen to a good majority of music on vinyl which is great because people are either giving it away for free or for very little money. I love the $1-2 bargain bins at record shops so I can get 8-12 albums for the price of one CD. And yes, I also have a tape deck and make copies of the records I don't want to wear out. 100% analog bitch....I'm so fucking hip I can't even stand it.

    But other than giant discs of grooved plastic, I haven't bought music in years. FUCK iTunes and the 128 kbps bitrate that they have everything encoded in. For anyone who seriously cares about audio quality this is not acceptable. If I couldn't download for free, I'd still buy CD's because you are getting music that YOU OWN FOREVER. When you buy music from iTunes, it's like Apple owns it and you are just borrowing it. I'll take uncompressed audio on a physical format that I can rip to my computer at any bitrate I choose, thank you very much. Not to mention you are getting the physical cover art, liner notes etc. which I enjoy looking at...part of the reason I love those big LPs so much.
     
  10. lust4life

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    I haven't bought a CD since getting my iPod a few years ago. Anything I purchase these days is from iTunes, but I really don't purchase a whole lot. I've been stuck in a musical rut since the 90s for the most part. It's typically either single song purchases or genre compilations (Bossa Nova, Zydeco, surf guitar), but there are some artists whose entire new releases I'll purchase, e.g., Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan.

    I'm sure there are many benefits to the other manners of music downloading y'all are talking about, but I just too lazy to deal with it for the amount of downloading I do, which is probably why I'm in this musical rut.
     
  11. seelivemusic

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    I've actually come across Grateful Dead cds "bootlegs" that were old "DeadAhead" radio shows. Nothing like cranking Jerry Garcia and then having some hippie announcer start talking about how great the jam was.

    I get almost all my music from torrent sites and they are usually audience recorded shows. I have not bought a new cd in a couple of years.
     
  12. Ton80

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    Same here. I am an unabashed fan of the Dave Matthews Band, and their music is fully 65 - 70 percent of my entire catalog. If they officially release a new studio album, I'm pre-ordering the hard copy of that shit and putting it right into the actual stereo system as soon as I get home. For official show releases, I'll usually dowload those as 128k mp3s (none of my stereo systems are good enough for me to hear a difference between that and 256k, and it all ends up in itunes anyway.) for $8.99 through their website.

    But most of my shows I download in lossless format (usually a .flac) from torrent sites that only host DMB shows legally recorded and made available by tapers. At this point, the taping equipment has gotten so good that these recordings sound almost as good as an official release. I haven't used any other torrent software since I left school back in 2002.

    For everything else, I just buy whatever song I want for $1.29 on itunes. Fuck the hassle, I'd rather pay the money for the convenience and security.
     
  13. Denver

    Denver
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    Not quite.

    Wikipedia
    No more DRM, you do own the songs. Unless you're talking about not having a physical copy, which is easily remedied by either burning it or making general backups of your library. That is not at all like "Apple owns it and you are borrowing it." And at 256 kbits/s AAC (which I understand to be better than 256 kbit/s MP3, but I don't know for sure), it's pretty damn good sound quality. Not perfect, but very very few people have good enough ears and nice enough stereo equipment to tell the difference.
     
  14. Bread Mustache

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    A group of friends of mine from high school, who are in bands, have done a kind of hybrid thing. First, they all formed together as their own record label. I use that term loosely since it is only a group of like 5 or 6 bands with no intention of signing anyone else like a typical label would. Then when they release music, they release it on vinyl with a free digital copy included. It's the best of both worlds since, like another poster said above, Having large gate-fold artwork on a heavy vinyl record just feels better than having a condensed version in a shitty CD jewel case. Then you can listen to that at home while carrying around the free digital copy on your phone/ipod without any of the hassle of converting anything. It's a good model and they've been doing pretty well for themselves.