[Sunday Business Post] Irish music industry hit by downloading (5 Viewers)

[CitySickness]

Here's how the future looks for the songwriters some of you "aren't hurting" by digital downloading.

The future that comes about because so many artists believed that the likes of the RIAA represented their best interests?

 

[CitySickness]

 

[Pantone247]

you're still angry with the RIAA?

And all because ITCGaramond - The Musical bombed... tsk, tsk,

 

[egg_]

Here's how the future looks for the songwriters some of you "aren't hurting" by digital downloading.

That's the legal shit dude. Also that's America, where any attempt to prevent the big guy fucking over the little guy is considered unpatriotic

(sorry janes)

 

[CitySickness]

you're still angry with the RIAA?

And all because ITCGaramond - The Musical bombed... tsk, tsk,

 

[theoootini]

currently reading that free culture book that nailer boyame(?) linked to earlier in this thread. it's quite good, and frames this argument well. you can download it here if you haven't already: http://www.free-culture.cc/

Lessing is not too fond of the RIAA...

 

[broken arm]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF7cHmyEJ-c

 

[Pantone247]

*sigh*

I wish I had posted "Gill Sans The Musical"

 

[CitySickness]

*sigh*

I wish I had posted "Gill Sans The Musical"

 

[Pantone247]

Gill Sans The Musical - O.S.T.

1. Overture
2. The Saucy Vicar
3. Where Have All The Serifs Gone?
4. Theme From The Orgy
5. Who Will Kern My Font
6. Jesus Eric, She's Your Sister
7. How Much Is That Doggy In The Window
8. I Would Never Have Sold You That Doggy If I Knew You Were Going To Have Sex With It
9. I Would Never Have Sold You That Doggy If I Knew You Were Going To Have Sex With It (Reprise)
10. I Love A Lower Case G
11. Don't Leave Eric Alone With The Kids
12. Lets Pretend It Never Happened
13. Overture

 

[7 - No tomorrow]

What's the official line on Thumped regarding sharing of albums via Rapidshare and the like on the board?

 

[pete]

http://www.ireland.com/blogs/ontherecord/2008/02/29/one-step-closer-to-a-law-against-music-piracy/

 

[pete]

Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor has become the latest recording artist to bypass the traditional music distribution machine by releasing a 36-track album over the internet.

The album, titled Ghosts I-IV, is available on the band's official website for prices that range from free to $300 depending on the package. Reznor is giving away the first nine cuts, as 320 kbps MP3 files, along with a 40-page PDF book that covers the entire album. For $5, fans can get the remaining 27 songs and have the option of getting the files in lossless formats including FLAC.

Less than 24 hours after the album became available, the band's website had slowed to a crawl. At time of writing, attempts to download the free package were greeted with an error message indicating the URL was not available. A download of the $5 offering initiated, but at a speed of just 10 kbps, we weren't optimistic we'd be hearing the new tunes anytime soon. (Administrators are racing to add more servers "to accommodate the unexpected demand," according to a note on the site.)

Even still, you've got to admire Reznor for trying to figure out a viable way to stick it to the man. Unlike the much-ballyhooed online release a few months ago of the most recent Radiohead ablum, the Nine Inch Nails experiment is a lot easier to take seriously. That's because Reznor has made the album available in both lossless and high-bit rate formats. Radiohead's In Rainbows, by contrast, came as only a 160 kbps MP3, which hardly seemed worth the time it took to download it.

Oh, and the album is no longer available as an online download. Radiohead singer Thom Yorke later dismissed a net-only album paradigm, saying people want to buy a tangible object rather than a download. Makes you wonder why Britain's favorite navel gazers bothered in the first place.

Additional packages of the new Nine Inch Nails album that include audio CDs, CDs and DVDs and an autographed "ultra-delux" limited edition set that also comes with vinyl LPs are are priced at $10, $75 and $300 respectively. And just in case this net distribution thing doesn't take off, Ghosts I-IV is also available as a regular CD in retail stores.

Reznor, who split with his record label last year, is decidedly more committed to the net as a distribution platform, even if it doesn't always work the way he had hoped. He has openly embraced music downloading on BitTorrent and has gone so far as planting USB storage devices filled with his songs in restrooms during concerts.

More recently, he produced and helped finance industrial rap artist Saul Williams's The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust, which was also sold as an online download. In that case, however, the entire album was made available for free as 320 kbps mp3 files, or users could pay $5 to have the option of a lossless format.

To Reznor's chagrin, only 18 per cent of people who downloaded it chose the paid option/

The problem then was there wasn't enough of an incentive to spring for the $5 package, given that most people can't hear the difference between an extremely high-bit rate MP3 and a lossless format. By offering a significant amount of additional content in exchange for a mere $5, as he's doing this time around, this latest experiment to cut out the record labels stands the best chance yet.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/03/nine_inch_nails_album_released_online/

 

[Mormon Nailer]

Nine Inch Nails puts CD online for free, for mash-ups

Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor has been looking for alternatives to the traditional album-release model for years now. Last October, when the band worked out of its obligations to the record business, Reznor declared on the NIN Web site, "I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate."
Today, he launched that direct relationship. In a surprise move, the band put out its new work, called "Ghosts I-IV," online.
The album is a four-part, 36-track behemoth, but you don't have to buy the full thing -- in keeping with the entrepreneurial, let's-try-a-bunch-of-things spirit that Radiohead brought to the industry with its release last year of "In Rainbows," NIN is offering "Ghosts" in a number of different ways.

• Act now and you can download the first nine tracks -- which comprise "Ghosts I" -- for free from the band's site. But that site is being hammered under traffic today, so fortunately there's another option. NIN has also uploaded "Ghosts I" to various peer-to-peer BitTorrent trackers -- including The Pirate Bay, one of the most-hated sites in all the entertainment business. In the release notes, the group writes: Now that we're no longer constrained by a record label, we've decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.
• If you'd like the full album, not just the first nine tracks, you can get that, too. NIN is selling the digital version -- in a variety of formats, including 320 kbps MP3s, and "losslessly compressed" FLAC or Apple files -- on its Web site, as well as on iTunes and Amazon, for $5. The site, again, isn't doing too well under the traffic right now, so hold off for a bit.
• You thought that was it, didn't you? Well, it ain't. So you say you want CDs, not digital downloads? NIN's got you covered there -- you can buy a two-CD set of the full album, "Ghosts I-IV," for $10 from the band's site. (When was the last time you got a new, multi-CD album for $10?) You get free downloads with your CD purchase. But even that's not all. Say you're a huge NIN fan. Well, just like Radiohead released a super-version of "In Rainbows," NIN has a $75 "deluxe edition" featuring two CDs, a data DVD will all songs in "multi-track" format, and a Blu-Ray disc with the music in "high-definition 96/24 stereo."
  And for $300, you can buy the "ultra-deluxe" limited edition which includes everything in the deluxe package, plus "an exclusive four-LP 180 gram vinyl set in a fabric slipcase, and two exclusive limited edition Giclee prints in a luxurious package." This edition is limited to 2,500 copies, numbered and signed by Reznor.
• But wait. There is, of course, more! The best news of all is that the album is unconstrained by any copy-protection schemes. In fact, the group encourages copying -- "Ghosts" is being put out under a Creative Commons license. The license allows people to share the album and remix it for non-commercial uses, as long as they credit NIN.

When a band does this kind of thing, music industry-watchers always ask, Hey, will this work? Meaning, Is this going to make the band rich? Is this going to be as remunerative as selling albums the old way? The truth is we don't yet know; the Radiohead experiment was in some ways sui generis, because what's true for Radiohead -- and, likely, NIN -- isn't true for the rest of the business.
But here's what we know for sure. Whether or not this model good for the band, it's certainly better for the fans. How do you get the new NIN album? Any way you wish.




http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/03/03/nin_ghosts/index.html

 

[Mormon Nailer]

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/25/1952222&from=rss

 

[broken arm]

the things you can do when you have loads of money.....

eat the rich (bands).

 

[Mormon Nailer]

I must say I like the idea of the album being released under a creative Commons licence.

 

[Mormon Nailer]

and speaking of which anyone else read about that Lessing dude planning to run for the house of Representatives?

 

[Scientician 0.8]

Yes, I read that in the Economist.
I emailed him once for college, he emailed me back. Seems like a nice enough chap.

 

[pete]

The main reason why I have trouble with the "property" part isn't just the fact that it leads people to try to pretend it's just like tangible property, but because it automatically biases how people think about the concept. As I've written before, the very purpose of "property" and "property rights" was to better manage allocation of scarce resources. If there's no scarce resource at all, then the whole concept of property no longer makes sense. If a resource is infinite, it no longer matters who owns it, because anyone can own it and it doesn't diminish the ownership of anyone else. So, the entire rationale for "property rights" disappears.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080306/003240458.shtml

interesting.