Category: Music

Just a follow-up to my last post:

Something I think I didn’t get across clearly enough was that I’m all for musicians making money from their work. It’s just that they don’t. They end up millions of dollars in debt after their first album, and are slaves to their contracts for the next 5 albums, just so they can pay the record company off. And that isn’t right, to me. If musicians ran the music industry, it would be a million times different, I think. And Jen raised another point: we’re paying end-user licenses on art. If I go online to look at a Hopper painting somewhere, I don’t have to pay money just to see it, and if I really wanted to, I could download it and make a nice (little) print-out of it, for pesonal desk-related use. No one in the poster-making industry is crying about that. The only difference between a scan of a peice of art and an MP3 is time. The only difference between music and say, a painting, is that music takes place over time, and it’s aural, not visual.

Something a friend of mine once said about people (in high-school) fighting over which one got to buy a painting of mine, and I didn’t know who to sell it to: He said, ‘It doesn’t matter who buys it. Art is in the creating, not the creation.’ I’ve always felt that was true. So treating songs as if they were sticks of bubble-gum instead of what they are (works of art) is why I think the record industry has screwed us (the music- ‘consuming’ public). I would buy all the CDs I could if they record companies didn’t make such huge profits from every single CD sale, and musicians got like 2 cents. I think the average CD (with liner notes) costs something like $1.50 to actually make and ship. And they turn around and sell it to stores (and you after that) for 15 bucks.

Which brings up another point. My Napster rage here is just another arm of my hating corporatization of everything. Corporations control what you listen to and buy. Sometimes I just hate feeling like a target market. Napster is my way of proving that I’m not.

The ruling was expected, but the judge gave Napster the responsibility for removing songs that were identified by the recording industry as copyrighted, even if the music companies did not know the exact names of all of the files in Napster’s system that contained the songs. From the IHT.

We don’t even know all the songs we own, but you better take ’em off… GOD, I hate the music industry. What’s worse is that Napster doesn’t even HAVE any songs… they make it seem like Napster is just distributing songs left and right… Like there’s MP3s on their servers or something. Jesus. Oh, and what about when tech-retarded reporters refer to Napster as a ‘website?’ That almost makes me laugh until I remember that these reporters are getting paid to write that BS. Isn’t a website defined as hypertext documents accessed over the http protocol? And isn’t Napster its own protocol? Stupid fucking press. Once the baby-boomers all die, I hope GenX and whoever else can succeed in tearing down these monopolies based on the distribution of information.. the music industry, the news ‘reporting’ corporations.. all of it. I’m starting to sound like Marx here, but damn. I’m just getting sick of this capitalist result of corporations controlling not only what we buy and what we eat, but what we know, who we know.. the whole damn thing. Down with capitalism! Ha. As I sit here about to go pick up my $4000 laptop computer that will help me earn my capitalist-pig dollars so I can pay for my capitalist-pig car and apartment. *sigh* Someday, I swear…

RIAA: New evidence shows Napster hurt CD sales

“Shipments of CD singles sank by 39 percent last year, according to data released by the Recording Industry Association of America.”

Duh.

“‘To be honest, it wasn’t a great music year,’ said Andreas Schmidt,”

Amen.

Once a song goes through the wash, it is important to note, it will always stay ”clean” — it never turns back into a standard MP3. Instead it will remain in a special, scrambled format which can be played only by the recipient, who would be in sole possession of the decoding key.

Here’s Napster’s new plan for staying around… I simply cannot wait for them to do this, so I can start the stopwatch to see how long it takes for a hacker to crack it. My guess would be a couple hours. They’re talking about using the Napster protocol to scramble files in different ways when you download a file. The file gets scrambled depending on what you’ve paid for: if you paid for the ability to burn CDs with the MP3s, the file you get is encrypted with the ability to do that. You have a ‘key’ that decrypts songs for your own use. If you don’t want to pay, you get the ability to listen to songs for a few hours or days… Which is what I’m assuming people will hack: the encryption mechanism that converts MP3s into scrambled Napster files. They’ll make it so you can convert them back into regular old-fashioned MP3s.

Things are getting a bit extreme with the whole Napster ordeal. The Belgian police are now raiding homes of Napster users. It isn’t like a nationwide raid, but they are tracking users “by the thousands.” This was all done at the request of the record labels. Sounds sketchy to me.

Eighty-eight percent of 117726 (at the time I checked) votes on MSNBC said Napster shouldn’t be shutdown. Not a scientific survey, but the numbers are overwhelming.

Napster is illegal. Napster can stay online only until the judge that originally ordered the injunction can get it to be more specific. Then, essentially, Napster is dead. I have an idea as to how they can make money and make the record labels reasonably happy: Sell Napster. And not in that stupid subscription service idea, either. I should be able to go down to CompUSA, pick up a box that says ‘Napster’ on it that includes the (final version) filesharing software, MP3-ripping and playing software, and maybe even a mail-in rebate for a deal on DSL. I should be able to walk to the register, pay $100 for it, and never have to worry about it again. That’s my idea. I think it would work.

Although I do have some things to say about why a subscription service would NOT work:

You see, when I pay for a magazine subscription, both I and the magazine publisher acknowledge that I will without fail get a magazine in the mail each and every month that I have paid for. This goes for beer of the month clubs, cheese of the month clubs, HBO, internet access; everything. Now, Napster would not work this way due to one simple fact: it is a peer-to-peer, individual-driven filesharing service. If the guy I’m getting a 2-hour long live Paul Van Dyk trance set from happens to decide I’m using too much of his bandwidth, or his computer freezes, or his power goes out, my download is nearly useless. Sure, the MP3 plays up until the download cut off, but shit, I’m paying monthly for this. I don’t want unreliable connections, slow connections, high pings and all that to get in the way of my download. But if it’s free, and a download breaks, then I don’t care, because I’m not paying for it. So the only way to make sure people are happy paying for Napster would be for Napster to make sure that downloads don’t break, and in its current state, that is impossible. Leaving subscription holders pissed off if every time they try to get a Britney Spears song, the only people they can get it from are on 28.8 modems. Just my 2 cents.

“We are pleased to offer the Napster community the opportunity to easily purchase music they discover on Napster,” said Napster’s chief operating officer Milton Olin.

It was unclear why anyone using Napster to download music for free would gravitate toward an online retailer who actually wants money for its products.

You’re kidding, right? It’s ‘unclear?’ It’s actually quite ridiculous to expect people to start paying for music, especially from within Napster.