The music industry is behaving like thugs – arguing for indefinite copyright extensions, suing their customers (always a great business plan), etc. The music fans, for their part, are taking whatever recorded music they want, with no thoughts whatsoever toward compensating the musicians.
(I'm going to avoid using the terms "piracy" and "sharing", because the first implies a similarity with something a bit more drastic than copying music, and the second implies that the sharer owns – or at least has the right to share – the music being shared.)
It's pretty clear that the recorded music business is going to change. We're moving from hunks of plastic (LPs, 8-tracks, cassette tapes, CDs) to streams of bits (MP3, etc.). This is a big change, because bits are much easier to copy than plastic.
There are a bunch of bogus claims floating around, which need to be addressed. First, the labels would have us believe that any change to their business model is bad for music. This is pretty clearly goofy. Digital music (streams of bits) are convenient, listeners like them, and Apple has shown that there's a viable business model there. The world has changed and the labels need to deal with it.
Second, various people claim that musicians should make their money from live performances (and merchandise) and not even bother trying to charge for recordings. This has a couple problems in my view. One is that some bands can't, or won't, tour – because they have day jobs (for now), or because it's one guy playing 17 tracks all by himself, or whatever. And if we take away recorded music (as a source of income), those bands will die off (or never get started). On top of that, even for bands that can make a living on concerts and t-shirts, the quality of the recorded music will suffer. If recordings are just advertising for concerts, there will be less incentive to make them really good. And I've already mentioned that I like recorded music.
Third, there's the argument that recording labels are evil bastards, and therefore one needn't or shouldn't pay for recorded music. Granted, some labels are behaving badly (see above), but I don't see how that justifies not paying for music. If you dislike the big corporate labels, then buy indie music.
Fourth, there are certainly some bands out there that make a great living selling concert tickets and t-shirts, while encouraging their fans to trade recordings. I have absolutely no problem with this – as long as we all realize that those bands have made a choice, and it's not the right choice for all bands.
There are a few possible outcomes of all this. One is that recorded music dies off. That would make me very sad, and I hope things don't go that way. (Perhaps this is selfish of me. So be it.)
Another is that the business model changes dramatically. (Note that iTunes is not a dramatic change. You're buying bits instead of plastic. And you're buying singles instead of albums, but that's not exactly new.) When I say dramatic change, I'm thinking of things like:
- some kind of government support (via a tax or ISP fee or whatever) – but who decides which musicians get the money?
- patrons – musicians are supported by wealthy people (or corporations)
- some sort of ad-supported model – ads embedded in the middle of songs? (ugh)
For some reason, random crap periodically shows up on my lawn. It's
not exactly a major street, so I suspect that the neighbors down the
cul de sac are dumping their junk (cheaper than paying someone to take
it away, and the Golden Rule is for losers anyway).
I've had (and this is just the stuff I remember): a matching sofa and loveseat, a coffee table (which I was amused to see hauled off on garbage day by the local garbage scavenger, perched on top of his shopping cart), three tires, and a bed frame. Invariably, this stuff gets left on my lawn, where it gets hit by the sprinklers before I have a chance to move it (not so good for the sofa fabric, but then again, it was probably kind of grubby to start with).
Anyway, here's the latest: a rusty old wheelbarrow. I'm going to try posting this one on the craigslist "free" category, and see if it goes away any faster.
[2008-may-01] Greg sends in a comment (slightly edited): d00d! awesome wheelbarrow... too bad I'm way out here in Boston and I can't come pick it up.
-
Bottom-posting
is passé.
Top-posting
is now trendy. You see this in email (where it's annoying, but what
can you do) and in blogs (where I can't decide if it's annoying or
not, but my RSS reader makes it irrelevant anyway).
-
The "accepted" pronunciation of Linux has changed, apparently a couple
times. I find it kind of amusing that people argue over this
(especially given that neither of the "accepted" pronunciations is
particularly close to the way Linus pronounces it). But it is kind of
fun to go prowling through old Linux FAQs:
- from 1993 Aug 23:
`li' is pronounced with a short (ee) sound: compare prInt, mInImal etc.
- from 1994 Jul 13:
When speaking English I pronounce it Lie-nucks (u as in bucket) --- this is an anglicised pronunciation based on the analogy with Linus' name, which in English is usually pronounced Lie-nus (u as in put).
(When I started using Linux, in 1995 or so, this was how all the geeks pronounced it.)
...
I think I can safely say that the pronunciation Linnucks (short i as in pit, short u as in bucket) is wrong in English, as it is not the original Swedish pronunciation, not a sensible direct anglicisation of it, and not based on the anglicised version of Linus' name. - from 1998 Dec 6:
Linus pronounces Linux approximately as Leenus, where the "ee" is pronounced as in "feet," but rather shorter ...
(At some point - in the late 90s maybe (?) - the geeks decided to switch over to the short i ("Linnucks") these days.)
- from 1993 Aug 23:
As a somewhat less frivolous note, the same issues apply to RSS feeds from news sites. A lot of what gets reported on BBC's "News Front Page" feed isn't particularly interesting (to me) – I couldn't care less about cricket scores. (And if I see one more article about Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, or OJ Simpson, I think I'll cry.) And there's quite a bit of overlap between, say, the BBC world news and the NYT world news. (Though in this case, it might be interesting to see both the BBC and the NYT version of the article.)
So I want something that merges multiple RSS feeds together, producing one feed with possibly multiple links per article (one to the BBC report, one to the NYT); and then I want something that filters out the uninteresting bits. I suppose some sort of Bayesian filtering (à la spam filters) might work, at least for the second part. I think I've seen research papers go by describing methods for automatically generating summaries of articles – that might be something else to look into. I also wonder if one of those "offshore personal assistant" services could do this kind of thing. Clipping services have been around forever (though my only experience was at a previous employer who subscribed to a clipping service which apparently just scanned for a few keywords and then blindly forwarded everything that matched – great for some applications, but I want something more sophisticated here).
There are some interesting issues here. I don't to just scan for keywords, positive or negative. If some celebutard gets arrested for drunk driving yet again, I really don't need to see it. On the other hand, if s/he does something spectacularly interesting (hey, it's theoretically possible), I suppose I'd want to know (to keep up with the pop culture references, if nothing else). More generally, it would be nifty to have some way of estimating how "new and different" something is (maybe easier for gadgets than for news articles?).