Posts by Rob Stowell
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answer me this, if creative types can't control the distribution of their works and no magical business model appears after 10 years of piracy to establish a reliable income flow to keep the producers producing, what do you think is going to happen?
how do you see the future of art creation?
will their be long term developing artists or simply one off hobbists?Noone here I think is against musicians who create original work making money from that. I just can't see any way to put this particular horse back in the stable.
Still, I'm not sure, but I'd wager most professional musicians don't make their money from recording. And I think there are already viable alternatives (just some: emusic, the radiohead approach, the madonna deal), for all that the majors don't like them.
You are certainly right, tho rob, that things are going to change. And it might mean a period when very little gets recorded. I don't think so, however- because it's now so cheap to record stuff. I don't buy the "music is free hey it's nirvana!" line, but I'm also sceptical of your "this is the end, the final end" feeling.
will it hurt the incomes of many musicians? Probably. Will music stop? Of course not. Music has always been based on copying anyway... (all those covers bands have probably been technically "pirating" their income since forever.)
Vis-a-vis the technological approaches you mention: as people keep saying: they all offer the consumer less. And that's not a good selling point. The essential problem- and you'll remember the industry thought back in the 80s that cds would be the death of them!- as soon as one digital copy exists in the wrong hands- it's all over.
I don't think that can be stopped; you simply think that we haven't yet found the right mechanism.
(__In the coming recession- after the yuan becomes the dominant world currency :-) there will be no piracy laws anyway, but you will probably get shot for failing to follow them...__)
Maybe one of the big pushes of piracy is the ipod/personal music player, which itself is interesting: music is generally a public sound, and we want to share it. With the personal players, in a sense copying it becomes the means of sharing- rather than blasting your mate with the stereo, you dump it on his mp3 player. In that sense, the social nature of music is itself changing: recording a massive band sound can also be done by one spotty youf with a guitar or keyboard and a laptop- not even the need to assemble an array of musicians...
The sort of device you're describing above has to be fantastically crippled- they are giving it away for a reason. I can see the model where, perhaps, if you gave away the technology- and that's not so ridiculous, technology is still coming down in price- you might capture people for a while. But they'd soon throw it away if the content providied wasn't constantly what they wanted. And they wouldn't give up their ipods in the meantime. -
Great article- seldom has it been put so succinctly: living beyond one's means- nation or individual- ends sometime and ends badly. I wonder where Mr Soros has been putting his billions!
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Ooops. Traffic, traffic, while supervising the tooth-brushing. Here is the next page of the arstechinca article...
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Read the next page about emusic....
Digital sales up 45% in 07. Pretty interesting, and not exactly the death of sales. -
drm doesn't work, rob, because bits that are streamed into a device that turns them into sound and/or pictures can be streamed into some other device that captures them and presto, there's a digital copy. I don't think there's a techncal way around it.
You've cited the dvd model: if that's safe, give me peril...
But you're right in a braoder sense- what is going to happen may well not be good. Or good for some, not so good for others. Or disasterous, musicians dying in the gutters.... or tremendous and amazing, new and incredible music springing up everywhere. I dunno, I think there will be some of all the above, and more... What seems most unlikely is that things won't change much.
For what it's worth, I like the emusic model. If they had a bigger and better back catalogue, I'd be theirs for life. As it is, some monthes I've forgotten to dl anything for my US$9.99. Other times, I get the full 30 songs, a song a day for the month, not bad.
And yeah, I know it's all out there for free. But that's for the movies and television, heh.
The flipside is how inexpensive (not easy, ever!) it is now to record, mix, mangle and put out music. -
Just watched "Steal this film 2" - a good summary of the state of piracy.
I don't think any us of know the "right" answer to the question: how will musicians and those in associated industries earn a living in 2020?
But the digital age and internet have changed things- there's simply no way to re-invent the past. That's what DMR seems to be trying to do, and that's why I'm happy to see it die. From a digital point of view, it just doesn't "get" reality.
I'm pretty confident there ARE business models that will work, tho. Music ain't going away.
And there are remarkable benefits for new artists, as well the drawbacks.
Living in a time of change is painful and exhilarating. But more exhilarating for some, more painful for others. Hope you are ok, Rob! -
This New Yorker review of Spoon made me curious. Are they worth a look-in?
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Fotherington-Thomas lives at the bottom of my mate's garden. poor fule. he never made it in advertising.
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Hi- just quietly to the wannabe geek:) is it a viable option to put ubuntu on a memory stick, and boot and run the os from that?
I don't want to have a dual boot, but a very light-on-the batteries word-processor and browser only option for the laptop- that I could simply put on a pendrive and use whenever- seems very attractive indeed. -
With regard to "ice ages", the onset might not be gradual, over thousands of years. This article by Elizabeth Kolbert (pdf) in the New Yorker cites ice-core drilling in Greenland that has produced evidence that on the way into an ice age (and possibly also coming out) temperatures might swing very erratically- as much as 8 degrees in a single year.
I don't think there's any consensus as to the mechanism that triggers ice ages, or the inter-galacial "thaws". There are quite a few theories. But there's an awful lot we don't know about global climate.
Two things we do know: human activity has changed the world quite radically, in the last century- which makes prediction even more difficult. And at more than 12000 years, "ours" (the time of the humans!) is already a longish inter-galacial period, in relation to the pattern over the last two million years or so.