response 51 of 151:

Jul 20 02:18 UTC 2001

A typically insightful article about the ongoing collapse of the music
industry:
http://www.salon.com/ent/music/feature/2001/07/19/industry_downturn/index.h
tml
"Napster's out the picture, but for the first time in a decade, album sales
are down -- and ticket sales are sagging too".

I hope this means the DIY/punk revolution I've been predicting will finally
happen.

response 53 of 151:

Jul 20 06:14 UTC 2001

Could it be the recording industry has finally pissed off Too Many
People?

response 55 of 151:

Jul 20 13:43 UTC 2001

Well, that suggests an interesting question.  Does anyone know if there are
figures on the "average artist's" sales trends?  Is Joe Guitarist getting hurt
by this, or just Dave Matthews and Lars Ulrich?  

(Or whoever that guy from Metallica is.  Just pretend I got the name right,
'k?)

response 57 of 151:

Jul 20 16:13 UTC 2001

Britney Spears is a typical bubblegum pop artist. After a while, even 
her most ardent fans will find that she has lost her flavor, and spit 
her out.

response 59 of 151:

Jul 20 22:43 UTC 2001

Touche.  Should have phrased that better.  How about "are obscure bands with
contracts hurting as much as the top names?"

response 61 of 151:

Jul 21 03:55 UTC 2001

The New York Times runs its own version of Salon's "Napster Diaspora"
story:
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/20/technology/20MUSI.html
 
Quote:  "Six of the alternative ((file trading)) services had 320,000
 to 1.1 million users each in May... Five of those services had little 
 traffic or did not even exist in February."  
  
And, file trading programs are the most commonly downloaded items 
at download.com.

So, now instead of fighting one file trading monster, Napster, the 
RIAA is now looking at fighting six of them.

This story ran on page 1 of the dead tree edition.

response 63 of 151:

Jul 24 03:52 UTC 2001

A crowing piece on www.mp3newswire.net:
    http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/topclones.html
"Napster clones crush Napster, take 6 of the top 10 downloads on Cnet"
 
Napster won't talk about how many users have downloaded their new, 
restricted, beta software directly from them.  From Cnet, Napster
downloads are roughly 1% of the Morpheus downloads.
 
"RIAA president Hillary Rosen cheered triumphantly - almost tauntingly
 - a week ago when Judge Patel ordered that Napster will remain
 shutdown until it could reach 100% perfection in its filtering
 endeavors. It seemed almost that Rosen was oblivious to what
 Napster's shutdown was unleashing and that the reversal of Judge
 Patel's order last Wednesday was the least of her problems."

response 65 of 151:

Jul 24 05:47 UTC 2001

Oh, the copyright/restricted usage situation is getting real bad.  At a 
recent librarians' conference, I was treated to the story of the Rocket 
e-book.  Originally, the physical readers were being sold as a loss 
leader: money would be made on selling content.  But the companies 
discovered that many reader-buyers were never buying content: they were 
using the readers to read free content from the web (Project Gutenberg 
texts, etc).

So the new models have been made with software that will only accept 
Rocket proprietary texts as readable.  And if you munge the reader 
software so that it will accept free texts, then whenever you hook up 
the reader to the web to search for or buy new product, the website 
will detect this and re-set the reader software.

Copyright owners have a legitimate interest in preventing illegitimate 
distribution.  But they've gone way beyond this, and challenged the 
hitherto unquestioned right of the purchaser to do whatever s/he wants 
with the purchased copy itself.  With much downloadable material, you 
can only use it on the computer you download it to.  You can't even 
transfer it to another computer you own, even if you erase it from the 
first computer at that time, which would be a fair restriction.

I think danr has the answer to falling sales: people are tired of 
getting gouged.  Every major arena concert in my area is followed by a 
sheaf of letters to the newspaper's arts section, complaining about too 
high prices for too little concert.

response 67 of 151:

Jul 24 17:23 UTC 2001

From the hometown of the American record industry:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-000060022jul23.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines
%2Dbusiness
   (sorry the URL is excessively long there)
The piece is fairly bleak about the early prospects for the major 
label download systems winning many customers.
 
Quotes:
>"All they're doing is having an electronic version of Tower Records," said
>Roger Noll, a Stanford University professor of economics. "I suspect that
>they're structured this way because they're so dominated by the record
>companies . . . [which are] very much afraid of a world where the unit of
>production is not the CD."
...
>The companies have revealed few details about their services, 
>but this much is clear: They won't be free, they won't offer a 
>comprehensive catalog of music,
>and they won't let subscribers transfer songs from their computers
>to their cars or living-room CD players.
...
>Dennis Mudd of Music Match said: "If you're going to have a
>service that's just like Napster except that it's got less content, 
>it's more expensive [and more restrictive] . . . you're going to lose."

response 69 of 151:

Jul 25 18:22 UTC 2001

That's a bad sign.  Up until now, restrictions on streaming webcasts 
used to be that they would remain streaming only (no downloads), and 
for webcast-only material that they wouldn't tell you in advance what 
you were going to hear next.

If radio broadcasting were invented today, the record firms would never 
allow it.  Going out ... over the airwaves?  And anybody with a cheap 
radio can, like, just listen to it without paying anything else?  
Unheard of?  Licensing, you say?  No licensing!  Just ... stop it!  Run 
for the hills!  Buy off Congress!

response 71 of 151:

Jul 25 20:42 UTC 2001

Given the recent decision that, unless they expressly signed over 
electronic rights to their work, freelance writers retain copyright on 
their work, the same would probably hold true for musical performances. 
Although my guess is that music companies, like print publishers, have 
been obtaining those rights as a matter of routine in recent years. That
 decision may slow Sony down a bit if it planned to offer music for
which  it does not have electronic rights.

response 73 of 151:

Jul 26 21:46 UTC 2001

Cnet:  "File Trading Pressure Mounts on ISPs"
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-6674297.html?tag=mn_hd
 
Sort of a repeat article, but maybe things are heating up again.
The copyright industry is trying to get ISPs to terminate customers who
run Gnutella or Napster-clones.  The Digital Millenium Copyright Act 
never envisioned a scenario where copyright infringements emanated from 
a user's home PC: the "notice and take down" scenario was designed for 
material on the ISP's machines -- web pages, for example -- and it 
is sharply limited to the 
copyright-contested material.   Nothing in the DMCA speaks to the issue
of copyrighted material not under direct control of the ISP, and nothing
in it talks about cutting off users from the net.
Some ISPs are bending to the will of the copyright industry and some aren't.
 
There's clear potential for abuse, and no semblance of due process, 
in what the copyright industry wants here.  The Church of Scientology,
just to pick a handy example, would love to be able to terminate the 
Internet access of its online critics.  The ISPs also realize
that file trading has driven all the money they have made selling 
high-speed connections, and they are wary of alienating their paying
customers.