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| Author |
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| 25 new of 165 responses total. |
jazz
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response 25 of 165:
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Mar 31 08:04 UTC 2002 |
Fondling bits is expressly forbidden by the CBDTPA.
The DataPlay maneuver will proabably go over about as well as consumer
copy-protected DAT; the industry really had to learn that it isn't quite
smart enough to predict the format consumers will choose, and if they were,
their meddling with rights management will delay it's entry to past the
critical few months where the format would have been chosen, anyways.
That's kind of a salvation to Napster users; hacker kids, like 'em
or hate 'em, are always going to be smarter about subverting data security
than professionals are about instituting it. Instituting is by nature a
harder job, and professionals are often more in business than obsessed.
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krj
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response 26 of 165:
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Mar 31 19:36 UTC 2002 |
The DataPlay people have a website at http://www.dataplay.com.
You can buy clothes and bags with their logo imprinted, and there is
a promise that blank media and recording/playback machines will
soon be available.
Some of the promotional material on their web site actively
touts the DataPlay resistance to file sharing, so I don't think
this site was intended to market to end users. :)
One of the aspects they are happiest about is that DataPlay discs
can be given away or sold with content "locked up" so the holder of
the disc cannot get it unless additional payment is made.
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jazz
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response 27 of 165:
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Mar 31 23:03 UTC 2002 |
How long d'ya think that'll take to reverse engineer?
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oval
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response 28 of 165:
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Apr 1 08:54 UTC 2002 |
so if my friend comes over and i play a cd for him, and he likes it and i let
him borrow it for a while, am i in trouble?
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gull
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response 29 of 165:
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Apr 1 17:01 UTC 2002 |
Re #17: Record companies don't seem to be part of a free market. Sales
of CDs have been falling for months now and the price has oddly
remained the same. The "unseen hand" doesn't seem to be doing its job.
Re #26: That sounds like the DIVX "pay for play" model. You'll note
that DIVX was extremely unsuccessful.
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mdw
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response 30 of 165:
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Apr 2 00:07 UTC 2002 |
Unless the DataPlay discs have some sort of per-disk uniquification
(using a long enough key), I don't think it will last very long.
There's already an active market in subverting satellite TV encryption
systems, which are apparently based on a shared symmetric key.
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krj
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response 31 of 165:
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Apr 2 21:24 UTC 2002 |
In the Napster legal case: Judge Patel has given Napster *TEN MONTHS*
for the discovery procedure, in which Napster gets to look in the
record companies' paperwork for evidence that they were abusing their
copyrights. This was reported by the L.A.Times. This drags the Napster
case out into January 2003, at least.
http://www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Music-X!ArticleDetail-5461
3,00.html
(warning, URL is wrapped)
-----
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-872765.html
"Small Webcasters Campaign for Survival"
This is a good article from Cnet, with some numbers. Quote:
> Negotiations over the actual rates for the new royalties proved
> bitter, ultimately winding up in front of the U.S. Copyright Office's
> arbitration panel. Record labels proposed a per-song rate that
> was about 100 times what the big Webcasters' trade association --
> led by companies such as America Online, MTV and RealNetworks --
> said was feasible. The arbitration panel's proposed rates
> split that difference.
...
> The fees, once passed, will add a large new expense to Webcasters'
> bottom line. To date, they've only had to pay the same songwriters'
> fees that regular radio stations pay -- about 4 percent of their
> revenues.
The rates are so unmanageable that everyone outside of the record business
agrees it kills all independent webcasting. Some large companies are joining
the effort to change the rules. Arbitron, the ratings firm, wrote to
Congress:
> ...a Webcaster that reached as many people as a big radio station
> in New York would have to pay more than $30 million a year in
> royalties alone. That would make it almost impossible to survive,
> Arbitron said.
Small webcasters and their fans are organizing to lobby
Congress to revise the rules, since they have no standing at this
point in the Copyright Office procedures.
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krj
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response 32 of 165:
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Apr 5 22:41 UTC 2002 |
The dead tree edition of USA Today has an overview story about
home copying in their business section today. Little new, but
a few interesting snippets:
"The public is almost evenly divided on whether Internet users have
the right to swap music from CDs online, according to a CNN/USA TODAY/
Gallup poll: 43% say it should be legal, 46% say illegal, with
11% undecided."
"((CD)) Sales this year are worse. Total units are down another 12%
vs. the first three months of 2001." (KRJ adds: Total units were
down 10% in 2001, but a big chunk of that represented the industry's
decision to wind down CD single production, which is why the
dollar value only went down 6% or so. If that 12% decline for
2002 to date is mostly album sales, then the companies are getting
walloped much worse than last year.)
Band manager Miles Copeland says banks are turning down
music companies for loans.
Pam Horowitz, president of NARM (music retailing trade group)
says: "Do we still have a competitively priced product?...
DVD sales have exploded, and it's a product where the price has
come down while the price of CDs has gone up. If our only response
as an industry is to stop copying of CDs, we may be missing a
consumer message."
A few other people in the article mention the usual argument that
consumers are buying less music because most of what the companies are
flogging right now is crap. (A big point of support for that position
came from a similar article in the Miami Herald about a week ago,
which reported again that rock concert attendance is also down.
A falloff in the business of live music indicates that the public's
attention is shifting away from music.)
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dbratman
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response 33 of 165:
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Apr 11 18:34 UTC 2002 |
Good column today by Jon Carroll on the morality of the proposed
restrictions.
It's at http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/carroll/ - click
on "04/11/2002 Jolly new threat to our freedoms"
Direct access at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
file=/chronicle/archive/2002/04/11/DD240137.DTL
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krj
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response 34 of 165:
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Apr 14 02:30 UTC 2002 |
April 6 Billboard, browsed at Borders, has a big lead story:
"Losses Mount for Music Industry Digital Services":
which seems to be mostly about Pressplay and Musicnet.
Apparently the losses are mounting to a point where the parent
corporations are getting concerned.
I wasn't willing to spend $7 to take it home with me, and Billboard
does not put the juicy business news on the web site. I forgot to
note if there was any clue as to the number of paying customers for
the official services.
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jaklumen
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response 35 of 165:
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Apr 14 04:10 UTC 2002 |
I've forgotten again-- these are the for-pay sites?
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krj
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response 36 of 165:
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Apr 15 12:56 UTC 2002 |
"Music-for-rent" would be a more accurate description. :)
-----
A Washington Post writer gets a beta-test version of actual
DataPlay hardware and pre-recorded music disc. The reviewer
thinks the technology might have some potential for replacing flash
memory in digital cameras, "but I can't figure out why anybody would
want to buy music this way. The CD works just fine as is."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42176-2002Apr13.html
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jaklumen
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response 37 of 165:
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Apr 16 08:59 UTC 2002 |
Interestingly enough, I think equalizing forces may be at work here.
I seem to have no problem getting big hits from the KaZaA et al
community. But every now and then, there is a song that millions of
users don't seem to be fond of and don't have online to share.
I was looking for Jazzie Redd's "I Am A Dope Fiend," which was a
little hip-hop tune back in the early 1990's (perhaps 1990-1991) and
was remade in 2000. Apparently, I will need to order the single or
the CD/album it comes from to get it.
Ironically, might that mean that hard-to-find music might actually get
more real sales?
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krj
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response 38 of 165:
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Apr 21 17:22 UTC 2002 |
Very nice overview article from the Chicago Tribune on the
consolidation in the radio business, and spillover effects into
the record industry and Internet radio.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0204140469apr14.story?coll=
chi-n
ews-hed
"Rocking radio's world"
Quotes:
> Since 1996, Arbitron surveys show that the
> average time spent listening to radio by consumers
> 12 and older has dropped 9 percent. In the
> last two years, listenership has dropped more than
> 7 percent, Arbitron says. The young
> especially are tuning out: Teen-age listeners are
> down 11 percent, and people between the ages
> of 18 and 24 have declined 10 percent.
...
> Playlists at stations across the country
> continue to shrink, with only about 20 songs a week
> played with any regularity, most from the best-funded
> major labels. Many commercial stations say
> they play only records approved by their audience
> through extensive market-testing, but this
> practice has led to a numbing sameness of programming,
> with many of the same records played
> in the same formats from Miami to Seattle. In one week
> recently, the 40 biggest modern-rock
> stations in the country opened a total of 16
> slots for new records, and the 45 biggest top-40
> stations added a total of 20. That means that
> even though more than 30,000 CDs are released
> annually, the vast majority of the songs played
> at these stations is the same week after week, a
> pool of a few dozen artists who are also seen
> extensively on video networks such as MTV and
> VH1.
The quotes from the Clear Channel execs, about how they are only there
to serve the public, are particularly nauseating.
The article also reports that (KRJ paraphrasing) the RIAA is starting
to wake up to the idea that destroying the fledgling Web radio business
would be a bad move, in terms of choking off promotional opportunities
for record companies.
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mcnally
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response 39 of 165:
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Apr 21 22:11 UTC 2002 |
Meanwhile the New York Times has an article this week about the band
Wilco ( http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/21/arts/music/21PARE.html )
and their new album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Deemed unsuitable by Reprise,
a part of the Time-Warner-AOL media megacorp, the album was rejected.
The band, unhappy with their label support anyway and unwilling to be
forced into the alt-country niche in which Reprise had successfully
promoted their 1996 album "Being There" fought for and obtained control
over the recordings.. They shopped the completed album around and
eventually placed it with Nonesuch, another part of the Time-Warner-AOL
media megacorp.. Go figure.
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orinoco
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response 40 of 165:
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Apr 22 04:06 UTC 2002 |
In fact, there was a cute line in the article -- unfortunately, I don't have
it with me -- about how all the music company mergers allowed them to play
one branch of Time-Warner against another. It sounds like they were basically
going and asking dad when mom had already said no. Funny that those mergers
might actually have made it possible for this album to come out.
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mcnally
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response 41 of 165:
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Apr 22 06:02 UTC 2002 |
I think it's more likely that the mega-mergers make it increasingly
difficult for such albums to be released by marginalizing or frequently
eliminating the smaller labels which will take chances on music that
doesn't exactly fit into a recognized format, but in this case it does
sound like the band benefitted from the fact that the acquired labels
still retain some degree of independence/individuality.
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orinoco
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response 42 of 165:
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Apr 22 15:50 UTC 2002 |
Well, right. That's why I thought it was so ... ironic? Am I allowed to call
this irony?
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krj
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response 43 of 165:
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Apr 23 19:14 UTC 2002 |
The Boston Globe has the usual piece on the distress of the
music business:
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/111/living/Burned_+.shtml
Nothing really new here except one pair of sales statistics:
> It's also notable *where* the people who still buy music are buying it.
> Chains like Tower and Virgin are down 8 to 9 percent, according to
> SoundScan, while mass merchants such as Wal-Mart and Target (that is,
> stores that sell many other products besides CDs) are up 6 percent.
> That has a negative impact on the selection of music in record
> stores, because obviously, those retailers focus on the faster-selling
> hit-making acts, rather than exposing a lot of new, lesser-known
> CDs that sell fewer copies and take up space.
Tower and Virgin seem to be at $19 for top-line releases that aren't
on sale. What do Wal-Mart and Target charge? I never go there.
But I smell a price revolt.
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mcnally
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response 44 of 165:
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Apr 23 19:57 UTC 2002 |
Also interesting, Salon has a piece today centered around the struggle of
Joshua (?) Byrd, a music professor at a small college, to get Sony to pay
royalties on two obscure albums he released in the 1960s (and on their much
more recent CD reissues.) He claims that despite the fact that his works
remain in print (suggesting that they must be selling to someone, though I
can't imagine who..) Sony pays him no royalties and won't even acknowledge
his requests for sales figures.
The story makes it seem that this is common practice in the music industry
but unless you've got as much money on the line as the Dixie Chicks did
when they sued Sony that it's rarely economically feasible to collect from
a stonewalling record company.
I apologize for not digging up the URL but I've got nine or ten different
batch MP3 encodes going right now (part of the Great Leap Backwards) and
my CPU is thrashing so badly that using Mozilla to find the article would
probably take 10 minutes of staring at half-rendered screens..
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anderyn
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response 45 of 165:
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Apr 24 00:03 UTC 2002 |
This response has been erased.
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senna
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response 46 of 165:
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Apr 24 01:13 UTC 2002 |
Large-scale outlets have always been cheaper than Tower, Virgin, and company.
Back when Tower existed in the downtown Ann Arbor area (which continues to
disintegrate, I might add, and I'm a lot younger than you folk who know what
it was like when it was *really* good), I'd usually browse, perhaps purchase
an item or two that was harder to find, and do my actual CD buying at a place
like Best Buy. Best Buy's cd selection actually used to be better and more
appealing, in my opinion. Anyway, I saw little point in actually spending
money there when the same stuff was considerably more affordable elsewhere.
I'm surprised this is even newsworthy. :)
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jaklumen
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response 47 of 165:
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Apr 24 01:59 UTC 2002 |
Of course large-scale outlets are cheaper than smaller stores. The
smaller stores usually find a niche getting more unusual recordings
and such. For example, a used tape and CD store earned most of its
money through orders of boxed sets.
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senna
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response 48 of 165:
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Apr 24 03:20 UTC 2002 |
Indeed. Tower and Virgin are not niche stores, though.
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krj
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response 49 of 165:
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Apr 24 18:06 UTC 2002 |
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/newsarticle.asp?nid=15817&afl=mnew
> "Retail Hopes Ride on Nelly, Korn"
>
> "Slumping industry puts faith in blockbuster summer releases"
>
> Record stores are looking to summer releases from
> the likes of Nelly, Korn and Eminem to help recover
> from a dismal first quarter of 2002, when album
> sales dropped nearly TEN PERCENT compared with last
> year. ((emphasis KRJ))
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