Napster: the Day the Music Was Set Free 243
theodp writes "Before iTunes, Netflix, MySpace, Facebook, and the Kindle, 17-year-old Shawn Fanning and 18-year-old Sean Parker gave the world Napster. And it was very good. The Observer's Tom Lamont reports on VH1's soon-to-premiere Downloaded, a documentary that tells the story of the rise and fall of the file-sharing software that started the digital music revolution, and shares remembrances of how Napster rocked his world. 'I was 17,' writes Lamont, 'and the owner of an irregular music collection that numbered about 20 albums, most of them a real shame (OMC's How Bizarre, the Grease 2 soundtrack). One day I had unsupervised access to the family PC and, for reasons forgotten, an urge to hear the campy orchestral number from the film Austin Powers. I was a model Napster user: internet-equipped, impatient and mostly ignorant of the ethical and legal particulars of peer-to-peer file-sharing. I installed the software, searched Napster's vast list of MP3 files, and soon had Soul Bossa Nova plinking kilobyte by kilobyte on to my hard drive.' Sound familiar?"
Very good indeed (Score:4, Funny)
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Oops...that'll teach me to try to cite the Book of Genesis [kingjamesbibleonline.org] off the top of my head. Make that "And, behold, it was very good." :-)
LDS Bible translation? (Score:2)
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The official Bible translation for Latter-Day Saints is the KJV.
Small Joseph Smith Translations (JST) are put in the footnotes for reference, and larger translations are kept separately.
LDS Scriptures online (Genesis 1:31): http://www.lds.org/scriptures/ot/gen/1?lang=eng#31 [lds.org]
None of the footnotes there are JST footnotes.
Joseph Smith Translation: http://www.lds.org/scriptures/jst?lang=eng [lds.org]
No JST for Genesis 1.
See Also (Score:2)
Audiogalaxy
Now acquired by Dropbox :(
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Screw you, Metallica! (Score:5, Funny)
nc
Re:Screw you, Metallica! (Score:4, Insightful)
Between St. Anger and the Napster battle, those were very bad times for Metallica. Their reputation has never recovered since.
Re:Screw you, Metallica! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Screw you, Metallica! (Score:5, Informative)
There's different classes of Metallica fan, who are characterized by which album was the last album they listened to. For me it's the Black Album. To many people that album is shit that doesn't even exist. YMMV.
Re:Screw you, Metallica! (Score:4, Insightful)
But I do think it would have been better if they called it quits after Justice.
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they're way too pop and shit since that
Please tell me you're under thirteen.
Re:Screw you, Metallica! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even today they should be put in a torture chamber to force to recognize that the music boom of today was in good part thanks to that kind of file sharing.
On second tought, given how RIAA and similars had abused the system since them, that they recognize it is optional, but the torture chamber is a good idea anyway.
Re:Screw you, Metallica! (Score:4, Insightful)
They didn't have need to, really. The power of Napster's p2p model was to eliminate hosting costs - the amount of data Napster shifted would have cost a fortune by conventional means. But if you're running a business, that's not an issue. iTunes doesn't use p2p. The only thing that the industry should have learned from Napster was that customers really want convenience and speed.
Re:Screw you, Metallica! (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing that the industry should have learned from Napster was that customers really want convenience and speed.
Right, and perhaps just as important, that people didn't want a $16 CD of shitty filler to get the one song they heard on the radio. But the industry didn't learn those things. Instead they were dragged, kicked and screaming, into the iTunes model. Meanwhile file-sharing never died... it got better, and legitimate music purchasing has had to get better to compete with it. Everything has gotten easier, cheaper, more organized, with better quality and consistency. In every way, people won.
Now it's TV's turn. That industry refuses to look five years in the future, so they'll be forced, just as it was with music. People don't want all the garbage that comes with the one thing they like, and they won't tolerate the obscene bill and mandatory advertising.
Today you can spend $35 on a computer, add a free software plugin, and immediately call up any television show you want in HD, no commercials, on demand, for free. It's only going to get better and that industry is going to have to compete or die.
Buggy whip manufacturers have to evolve and it's seldom voluntary.
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Re:Screw you, Metallica! (Score:5, Interesting)
That version of the analogy doesn't really work either since a stolen widget is a stolen widget, where content piracy doesn't directly deprive anyone of anything material, or correlate predictably with lost sales.
But anyway, my point wasn't that content piracy is the new model. It's that piracy will force them to evolve. There will be money involved, just as there is with music now. Piracy is just a big ass lever that can help move industries.
If I had to guess, it would be that we'll head towards the Netflix model. Not specifically their core content now (older stuff), but what they're trying to do with programming like House of Cards. The Hulu model is a dead-end, in my opinion. It's some tiny fraction of TV content, with many of the downsides we hate in the traditional system, only made worse.
On the details I can only guess, though. On the fact that the existing model is totally untenable in the face of what's coming, I'm dead certain.
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Hulu never stood a chance. It's run by the same people who want to protect their non-Internet-TV businesses so they weren't going to let it do anything innovative. Meaning, nothing that could jeopardize the classic-TV-business in any way. Anything that wouldn't interfere with their current TV business in any manner that any executive could envision? Hulu was free to do that.
In other words, Hulu's legs and arms were chained to a wall and then the executives wondered why Netflix was outrunning them.
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We're a household of downloaders. We do it primarily for reasons of convenience these days, so that we can watch what we want to watch when we are in the mood to watch it, and not when some TV station scheduler thinks we might want to watch it.
To support the producers of the shows we like, we tend to buy them on DVD once they become available locally, or import them if the local (Australian) TV content licencers have their heads up their arse about buying the shows we watch.
We see this as a win-win. We watc
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Well, they did say "Holy shit! This is the way of the future, let's investigate this distribution option...", but they ended it with "... and try to hold it back as long as we can."
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Exactly. In an alternate universe, the music industry didn't sue Napster into submission (resulting in Gnutella and the P2P wave). Instead, the music industry bought Napster and turned it into the first major online music store. You were still allowed to share songs freely (under a certain bitrate - the equivalent of taping off the radio for free) but were also given the option to purchase reasonably priced DRM-free MP3s as well.*
* Hey, I said it was an alternate universe. This is one strange alternate
Napster on dial-up (Score:2)
I remember using Napster on dial-up (don't think broadband was available or at least not affordable or common). It basically took the same amount of time to download a song as it was long, i.e. 4 minutes to download a 4-minute song.
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Re:Napster on dial-up (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I had a sizeable collection of half-songs there for a while...
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Re:Napster on dial-up (Score:4, Insightful)
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Proper backup of Windows 98 is not possible. There is always a wipe-and-install.
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Re:Napster on dial-up (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in the day, you could just fire up a portscanner looking for netbios shares and gain trivial access to C drive on many computers. I used to do that quite often - then find the desktop folder and leave a text file there explaining the security flaw and urging the user to fix it.
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Did your message say “stop using Windows?” That would be the only way to fix their security flaw.
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I found that a 100MHz 486 was all that was required to play a MP3 smoothly, you must have used a crappy MP3 player and/or operating system.
I do remember it taking days to encode a MP3 on a 33MHz 386 with no math co-processor.
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Heh. I still have some of those downloaded MP3s from 1997! Before Napster, I remember using FTP search, hosting server, etc. on my dial-up modems (14.4k too!)!
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Today, I'm ashamed to say I pay $50+/mo and still have 1.5mbit/s DSL.
You should be. Teksavvy can give you 6Mbit/s for only $30/month. For $53/month you can get 25Mbps download speeds.
riaa's failure to adapt to the marketplace (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, I wish the MPAA would figure it out too. There are obviously lots of advantages to having media in digital form, and iTunes (and others) have shown people will pay for content as long as its drop-dead convenient - even without DRM.
I rip every DVD and Blu-Ray disk I buy, and I strip the DRM off any digital movie I buy, so I can have access to my media wherever I want... but the average consumer can't/won't go to the trouble to set up their own streaming setup. And much as I like Netflix, they're not a
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I have an Apple TV and stream Netflix, ITunes and MLB on it
Like most people I have to plans to buy a nas for a 10tb movie library to stream. There are other things to do other than watch movies all the time. And I would buy the DVD before buying a nas just to hold compressed blu ray rips
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Hell, a h.264 720p 4GB rip looks far better than DVD quality(and "good enough" in most cases), especially when the full 1080P source video wasn't made with the best cameras...
Re:riaa's failure to adapt to the marketplace (Score:5, Insightful)
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I rip every DVD and Blu-Ray disk I buy, and I strip the DRM off any digital movie I buy, so I can have access to my media wherever I want... but the average consumer can't/won't go to the trouble to set up their own streaming setup. And much as I like Netflix, they're not a one-stop shop yet. The MPAA is missing a huge opportunity for a new profit-making business here.
Buying and riping doesn't do any good. You're just agreeing to all the bullshit the MPAA does.
When the price is right, I have no problem buying a Blu-Ray and re-encoding it to add to my media library. Even if there was no copy protection at all, I'd do exactly the same thing. I don't want the MPAA to provide a "media library" for me, because it'd be unlikely that I would own anything that way. I'd much rather own something that once I buy it, nothing can be done to make so that I can't play it. If I could stream a wide variety of movies in Blu-Ray quality video and audio for less than $10/month
Re:riaa's failure to adapt to the marketplace (Score:5, Insightful)
This is my main conspiracy theory. The years that napster ran unchecked, glorious, glorious years, were the years that the RIAA recorded their greatest profits, level of profit that they have not equaled since. I think that unfettered access to music of all genres makes people better music consumers. I personally became excited about music as I had not been since my youth ( I am an old ) . I bought more cds, I went to more concerts. I have tapered off again because it is just harder to get things done, so I don't bother. The numbers say I am not alone.
I feel the real reason the music companies are terrified of electronic music distribution is twofold.
One, maintaining limited participation in music distribution to protect the status quo, it democratizes the process creating methods of distribution that a smart player could get involved and push the old fogeys out.
Two, electronic music distribution makes the tracking of music sales trivial, and the accurate assignment of funds to the correct copyright holders, and audit by same go from a difficult and arcane process to a simple exercise in database management. This is the last fucking thing the labels want. Since the beginning of the recording industry, the most powerful and profitable labels have gotten there by screwing the musicians. Hiding overseas profits, disguising sales and production runs, overstating promotional costs, accounting errors ( never in the favor of the artist, I assure you ) anything, actualy, to hide the actual profits from the musicians, and send it to the record companies' coke habits.
Try to watch a music documentary from the past 50 years. Find one where the label wasn't fucking the artist over. The labels don't want this to change, this is why they have to be dragged into digital music by their shorthairs, they need time to set up the structures to screw the artists out of their due. If you are ever wondering why packaged and cookie cutter artists seem to thrive, it is because they are more easily bilked out of the profits.
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The years that napster ran unchecked, glorious, glorious years, were the years that the RIAA recorded their greatest profits, level of profit that they have not equaled since.
Largely coincidental, IMO. The economy was booming, and the mainstream media still dominated the cultural narrative. Much of those profits were teenyboppers buying Britney Spears CDs and baby boomers trying to re-live their youth with some oldass rock bands. Napster widened the perspective of a lot of people, but in the big picture, it was small potatoes.
If the Internet sharing effect were real, you would expect that live concerts and memorabilia would be a booming business now. Instead music biz revenues h
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Ever buy a film you never saw, then considered it trash? Went to see a movie and was offended as the western turned out to be a Gay movie. (Brokeback) I felt like I paid to see a Goatse movie....
Oh come on, are you seriously saying that you'd heard nothing about Brokeback Mountain before you saw it? No one ever mentioned that it had gay cowboys in it?
You make it sound like someone put a hardcore gay porn film into a Disney box.
Re:riaa's failure to adapt to the marketplace (Score:5, Insightful)
They wouldn't be making any money. That's the point. They are no longer needed because artists can get their music directly to the fans, no physical reproduction or distribution necessary. They are also terrified of Amazon and Apple who could easily become the next big music labels and crush them.
In the UK we have one high street chain music retailer left, and half its stores just closed as it went into administration. Soon the only places selling physical music will be supermarkets, who are big enough to screw the BPI and all the music labels who are part of it.
We are seeing the desperate thrashing about of a wounded animal as it gets ripped apart.
Napster & Audiogalaxy (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing I loved about Napster was that there was loads of cover songs and live performances on there and it was so easy to use.
Then when it all came tumbling down thanks to Metallica et al, seeing all the replacements pop up all over the place. Kazaa, Limewire etc all full of viruses and dodgy bitrate files.
These days, it's not worth the hassle to go pirate music anymore so I just pay for Spotify Premium. It is probably closest in functionality to Napster and has a great selection of mainstream and random tracks.
National Medal of Technology for Fanning, Parker? (Score:5, Insightful)
Want to screw with the USPTO? Nominate Fanning and Parker for a National Medal of Technology and Innovation [uspto.gov], "the highest honor awarded by the president of the United States to America's leading innovators." Funny thing is, they probably deserve it!
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Early napster=trove of unreleased material (Score:5, Interesting)
What I liked best about the early Napster is that collectors shared a trove of unreleased and rare material. Demos, live cuts, b-sides, non-album tracks - almost anything I could think of, I'd type it in and download it. I got digital versions of stuff that would have taken me man-years to digitize from the originals I had (LPs, cassettes, etc), and stuff that would have cost bazillions to buy from dealers. Remember, back then in the late 90s, the current practice of adding rare tracks like b-sides to CD releases of LP records (which were usually about 40 minutes long, giving plenty of room for extra tracks on the CD) was just beginning, so a lot of this material was very, very rare. As Napster got more popular, all this stuff faded away quickly to be replaced by stuff you could buy in stores on CD. I've always thought that was one of the greatest tragedies of file sharing.
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If that was all you could find on Napster, it would have had a legitimate reason to exist and might still be around today.
First Chance (Score:5, Insightful)
Napster was the first and last chance that the music industry was GIVEN to embrace digital distribution, they instead chose to embrace the legal system. The result was that Napster (Not a P2P service but a centralized & controllable service) was shut down.
Who'd have thought that the largest market demand possible would cause someone to develop a product?
Then came P2P, which they are suing the operators of Search engines / Indexers.
The came distributed P2P so they are suing the users.
Next comes anonymous & encrypted P2P
Ah the beginning ten years later (Score:2)
Figures they'd think napster was the beginning. there were many ways to download music long before napster. napster was simply the first to get caught with legal troubles.
They were the beginning of something else (Score:2)
Yes, there were indeed ways to download music long before Napster. There were ways to "copyright infringe" music before computers. Let me break it down for you...
Before Napster, there were FTP sites you could browse. Today, you can google $SOME_ARTIST, $SOME_SONG, and "Parent Directory" and usually find what you want...but that was far from the norm in the days of AltaVista. Usenet browsing is similarly possible if you're able and willing to dig.
Before using the internet, we used our 4x CD burners to copy C
Napster was not “very good” (Score:3, Informative)
Napster totally sucked unless all you wanted to do was generate a high file count in your MP3 collection. You might as well just record the radio in that case. The rips were awful quality, the labels were often wrong, and the version of the song you got was often not the one you wanted.
The one exception might be that you could find rare live versions or alternate versions of a track in some cases that were previously harder to find. If that had been Napster's focus — sharing music that wasn't available on CD — then it would have had a reason to exist.
I think iTunes is better in every way. Yes, you have to pay, but it is a small amount and you get exactly what you wanted, you never have to pay again as you download for life to whatever devices you want, and in many cases today, almost all of what you pay goes directly to the artist. If you don't like a song enough to pay for it on iTunes, then listen to it on the radio or as part of a monthly subscription service of some kind. If you like a song enough to pay for it on iTunes, you'll have it forever.
Re:Napster was not “very good” (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you comparing a simple app written by a high school kid where people are the ones ripping the music, to one from the largest US corporation set up with cooperation of record labels?
Napster was the future (Score:3)
Napster was the future, 12 years ego.
If we had sane copyright durations (aka 28 years with possibility for an extension) then the music industry should have been forced to adopt the new technology and make music available more convenient, faster and cheaper. No, copyright is not to ensure a business practices through technological innovations and no, not to ensure profits.
If anything copyright durations should been shortened with each new technology, because the time-to-market gets faster and the costs are lower.
How many jobs does this insane copyright durations costs? How many new distribution technologies are killed because of lobbying of one stakeholder? How many innovations are not invented because of the not available public domain and not available fair use?
That's all we did in HS (Score:3)
Yes it does (Score:2)
Except for me its started running MS Personal Page server in 97 on dial up and WarFTP before Napster because popular.
As for buying my entertainment well I sure as hell do but i buy it at pawnshops. Yah I paid retail for 100's of DVD/Cd's I bought and got ripped off on price but then I said fuck it and for the last 6 years I've been hitting pawn shops and getting my dvd's for $2-4 and buy 5 get on free. I have around 700 dvd's/600 cd's
Fuck the artist and movies studios. Its about ME saving money.
Re:Sound familiar? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope .. not at all .. I have paid for every bit of music that I own, starting with LPs & singles, cassette tapes, CDs and even downloads. (Yeah I know I'll have to buy the White album again)
And I prefer music organized in an album .. with a theme .. and good liner notes .. and artwork!
Now get off MY lawn
People like you are more annoying than thieves because you love to march around, pound your chest and for no reason at all constantly have to announce to everyone how you dont steal. Youre as bad as people who do bad things and then find jesus because all they do is march around and shove stuff down the throats of anyone within earshot when in reality no one ever asked or even cares.
Because really now, what exactly was the point of coming and proving how righteous you are to a bunch of strangers? Is your ego so huge and your self esteem so low that you feel the need to just blindly push your self righteous bullshit on us?
Re:Sound familiar? (Score:5, Insightful)
On top of all that, he also is direcly funding the RIAA and MPAA finances so they can bribe more politicians and harm the free internet, yeah people like him are clearly guilty of funding terrorism.
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On top of all that, he also is direcly funding the RIAA and MPAA finances so they can bribe more politicians and harm the free internet, yeah people like him are clearly guilty of funding terrorism.
You are making a big assumption that I buy/bought my my music in the US. You do know that there are other places in the world don't you?
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If you bought music from musicians that are signed to a MAFIAA record label it doesn't matter what country you bought the music in. The chance that the MAFIAA isn't getting a cut of the regional licensing deal is practically zero.
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Do you have any idea how little money the RIAA has? No, you don't.
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Is your ego so huge and your self esteem so low that you feel the need to just blindly push your self righteous bullshit on us?
Nah it was because the article was subtitled from the get-off-my-lawn dept..
Oh and btw you seem to be a little humor impaired today. I bet you even took that "Yeah I know I'll have to buy the White album again" comment seriously.
Sheesh .. kids today. Now get off my lawn.
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No way — the most annoying person is the one like you whose guilt causes them to lambaste the innocent.
Sorry the guy reminded you that there are artists in your music collection who are going without health care because you decided they should work for you for free.
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Own? Guess again.
You paid for a medium and format specific license.
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Own? Guess again.
You paid for a medium and format specific license.
And I can take that medium and format specific license and along with the medium itself legally sell it.
Are you also going say that I don't own the books I bought either?
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Subtle difference. You own books. You own CDs. You don't own the music.
Yeah like when I say I own my car that I really mean that I own the rights to the designs by Honda.
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You can haul as many strangers around in your Honda as you want and charge them as much money as you can convince them to pay for the privilege. You can't legally charge anyone to listen to your CD and you certainly can't play it for a crowd of strangers even if they don't pay you a dime.
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You can't legally charge anyone to listen to your CD
Maybe you can't charge people to listen to it, but you can legally charge people to rent the CD from you. Once those people rent it, they can choose to listen to it if they want. The "license" printed on most media these days that implies you cannot rent it is not legally binding.
and you certainly can't play it for a crowd of strangers even if they don't pay you a dime.
I wish you'd tell that to all the idiots who drive by my house with their stereo cranked to "any occupants of this car will be deaf by next year". Also, if I grab random people off the street and ask them if the want to come to
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Maybe you can't charge people to listen to it, but you can legally charge people to rent the CD from you.
Not in the USA.
See 17 U.S.C. Â109(b)(1)(A) [copyright.gov]
Also, if I grab random people off the street and ask them if the want to come to my house to listen to the latest insert artist name here CD, it's perfectly legal. Even though once I get enough people, they are a crowd, and they are strangers, it's not a public performance.
The operative term here is "my house." Do it basically anywhere besides that and it is a public performance.
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In iTunes, what you are buying is essentially a lifetime proof-of-purchase. The tracks in iTunes that you have not bought show a price next to them, and the tracks that you have bought show a download button. You can also see all your purchases as a list and download any of them again. They download in the highest quality available today, even if you bought them at a lower quality.
It makes no sense today to buy a song unless you get that kind of proof-of-purchase. Just possessing a copy of the track is not
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No, that's not true. No one can own a work of music itself (if it were possible, we wouldn't need copyrights to simulate it). But a copy of a work -- i.e. a tangible object in which a instance of the work is fixed -- is easily ownable. And that's usually how it is done. When you buy a wax cylinder, or 8 track, or minidisc or whatever, there's no license. You just own it. And you can do whatever you want with it, so long as it's not illegal. Copyright doesn't give the copyright holder a right to prohibit oth
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Why?
Men In Black reference?
It was purely a MIB reference. Although I am interested in the latest anniversary release of Lawrence of Arabia.
On the the other hand .. Han shot first!
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Don't know how it will play on home video, but I saw the latest Lawrence last fall in the theatre. Looked pretty damned good to me. They had some before any cleanup, after the cleanup ~20 years ago, and current cleanup comparisons. Was pretty impressive.
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Why -- if you have the vinyl, you probably have a truer copy than anything digital
you can get today. I really don't believe that re-releases are remastered. It doesn't
make sense for the industry to do that and then release it on sub-par media (yes iTunes
@128k is sub-par.)
Whoosh .. you need to keep up with your pop culture references
Re:Sound familiar? (Score:5, Informative)
iTunes is 256 kbit/s AAC — when you factor in that iTunes doesn't skip, doesn't get scratched, today's iTunes music is higher-quality than CD. People make the mistake of assuming laboratory conditions. Instead, go into someone's home and take a CD off the shelf and it will be covered in scratches, the CD player will be making up bits to fill in the gaps, and it will likely skip at least once per hour.
And you may not know this, but it is Apple that generates the ISO MPEG-4 AAC audio file from their own master archive, which includes many songs and albums in lossless 24-bit 96kHz or even 192kHz audio — the actual audio from the studio masters. The actual mix that the producer made. Going forward, Apple will at some point release iPods, iPhones, and iPads that have 24-bit audio support (Macs have all supported 24-bit audio for many years now) and they will start releasing music in the actual studio master format, so you hear exactly what the producer made. There are frequencies in 96/192kHz audio that you hear with your internal organs, not your ears.
Vinyl is not a truer copy, unless you're listening to something that was recorded onto vinyl, which stopped in the 1950's. Since then, music has been recorded onto analog tape, digital tape, digital hard disks, and digital solid-state hard disks. For more than 10 years now, the typical studio master has a much, much larger soundscape than even CD can reproduce. Putting that soundscape on vinyl gives you an even smaller picture of it. And most vinyl recordings have too long of a running time, which reduces the audio quality considerably. And vinyl always has scratches, clicks and pops, that are not part of the original recording. It's not really the vinyl that people are nostalgic for, it's the old amps, which were made not to be accurate, but to be musical. We see some of this coming back with Beats headphones, which were not made to be accurate, but rather to be musical.
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Remastered is just code for "we fucked the dynamic range to make it louder"
Re:Sound familiar? (Score:5, Informative)
> Remastered is just code for "we fucked the dynamic range to make it louder"
That is not true of the “Mastered for iTunes” masters and remasters. The primary instruction from Apple in the Mastered for iTunes documentation is not to crush the dynamic range, because that can be done by Apple when they generate the AAC (or other future format) consumer audio file, or by the listener on the playback device via SoundCheck — but the dynamic range cannot be put back by Apple or the listener if it is fucked in the original master. A full dynamic range is the single most important reason to do a Mastered for iTunes remaster.
Apple's master library supports up to 32-bit 192kHz audio, which has a much larger soundscape than CD, and they look at it as an important cultural resource because in 10 or 20 years, iTunes may be the only one who has some of those masters, because of the temporary nature of many music artists, their record companies, most music retailers, and so on. So Apple basically pleads with audio producers to give them a timeless master: the highest-quality recording you have, with the full dynamic range of the recording intact. One that they can use today to generate AAC, but also use in a few years to generate a 24-bit 96kHz version for the consumer.
Essentially, Apple is asking music producers NOT to master their stuff. They're saying “give us what you were listening to in the studio and we'll give as much of that to the consumer as we can today, and even more tomorrow.” The post-processing of the mix gets done by Apple, same as with YouTube you can upload a 4K and they will make every kind of tiny, low-bandwidth version.
On CD, if you crush the dynamic range, you should louder than the next CD. But with an iPod with SoundCheck turned on, everything is the same loudness, and a crushed dynamic range comes through simply as a crushed dynamic range. So we are moving out of the loudness-above-all era of music. It will take some time because it is expensive to remaster and nobody in music has any money, but at least there is a way forward articulated by Apple via Mastered for iTunes.
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I'm pretty sure in that case, you at least own the physical equipment used to perform, record and produce that music... and that stuff doesn't exactly come free. So in a way... actually, you did kind of pay for it. Just not directly.
Re:IF..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Strangely enough I cut back on album purchases when Napster died since I had no way to find new stuff I like and nothing I like was ever on the radio. Thankfully YouTube finally replaced Napster for my sampling needs but there were a few years in between the two where I bought absolutely nothing music wise.
I'd say the RIAA out right blew their own leg off.
Re:IF..... (Score:4, Interesting)
This was similar to my experience. I bought about an album a month before Napster, while Napster was around I bought at least an album a week, and after it went away I dropped back to about two albums a year. I'm now back to buying the equivalent of about an album every other month through iTunes.
So, a decade later and I'm still spending a lot less money with them than I was when Napster was around. Multiply that by everyone else who acted in similar ways, and it's not so hard to determine the real reason for their declining income.
Re: (Score:2)
You weren't going to buy anyway. Nobody lost anything because you didn't participate.
If you want to listen to a guy play guitar but not put money in the guitar case, that is your right. Doesn't make you a better person than someone who listens and drops some money in, though. Especially not if you are in the United States, which lacks even a public health care system. So what you are saying is that music should be free and artists should go without health care.
If you want to go to a pot luck dinner and not
IF we would all put our money where our mouth is.. (Score:2)
Not the GP, but my CD collection went up from a handful to 220ish CD's during the Napster era.
Through napster I discovered music and artists I didn't even knew existed. I would then go to the local Circuit City and would buy their CDs (sometimes their whole discography) since I had got a taste and I liked it. I wanted more and I wanted it all at the highest quality.
When Napster was shut down I refused to send a penny to the RIAA and its labels. A Nine Inch Nails album - Ghosts (which Trent released as an [nin.com]
Re: (Score:2)
As I understand it, the recording industry has never been more profitable. Yes, they screwed themselves over for the long run, but they don't notice it
Re:Not exactly the first (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Sneakernet worked best for me . . .
seriously (Score:3)
I used to get them from DCC bots on IRC back in the early days. It was so well managed there was even a search script that worked across all the bots.
Re: (Score:2)
Mix tapes. Recorded from the radio.
Re: (Score:3)
But still enough of a hypocrite to actively participate in something yourself that you apparently *DID* know was wrong? Hmmm. Okay... good to know.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow. Frank Zappa is a “right-wing zealot” because he expected a listener to chip in along with the other listeners to cover the cost of the writing and production and performance of the music? That is amazing!
If you go to a pot luck dinner empty-handed and somebody calls you on it, I guess they are also a “right-wing zealot?”
If you get a drink at a bar and the bartender expects a tip — fucking “right-wing zealot!”
It's good to know there are people like you out there
Re: (Score:3)
Sony didn't try to ban the VCR. Sony invented the VCR.
They turned into "the bad guys" when they became a movie/music company later. At the time, it was Sony vs. the TV networks.
Hilariously, they were the same company that tried to prevent the rise in the CD-R by refusing to allow any of their DVD/CD players to play burned media until well after it was a common practice. This seriously impacted their audio equipment sales and policies like this probably resulted in the company being so financially screwed
Re:Napster put music in a cage. (Score:4, Insightful)
DAT and MP3/MP4 are the best examples of Sony fucking it up.
In order to “protect content” they ruined DAT by disallowing digital-to-digital copies, which were necessary since DAT tape is fragile, and therefore a DAT recording would break and be gone forever because it was unprotected by backups. Considering that most DAT users were musicians and audio producers, they destroyed a lot of content, not protected it.
And they pushed their crazy “protected” ATRAC format and Mini-Disc instead of MP3/MP4. Brutal mistake when consumers were already buying “unprotected” CD audio.
No need to worry about Sony since they are going out of business any moment now.
Re: (Score:3)
I know you meant well, but your post is fact-free.
Nobody tried to ban the player piano — the issue was that the player piano makers did not want to pay artists for the scrolls. They expected to make money off the music without kicking anything back to the people who made it. Many songwriters had the equivalent of a platinum album on piano roll and were fucking homeless.
Sony did not try to ban the VCR. They tried to stop the manufacture of VHS VCR's because they were too much of a copy of Sony's Betama
Re: (Score:3)
Easy world-wide distribution of digital media was the intended link; perhaps not so clear upon re-reading. ::-)
Re: (Score:2)
My husband's best man started signing this during our vows at our wedding. 12 years on and I haven't forgotten (or possibly forgiven).