Oh and I’ve made a page so you can read these things without the hassle of scrolling through the avalanche of updates.
www.bleekster.com
The first one goes to the Music industry. Over the past few years, a sort of Information ‘war’ has waged between the Online community of music ‘pirates’ and the record industry, namely the asshole record companies, RIAA and the gang. (For information on the RIAA, take a visit to it’s Wikipedia page) I’ll give you a quick summary, basically it all began with Napster, a Peer to Peer program which allowed users to share content, later on in the picture, the content became illegal, users would upload their favourite songs at high or low bitrates for others to grab and listen to. All free of charge of course.
Record companies over time worked out their loss of sales was due to Napster and now other Peer to Peer programs, such as Limewire (Ex-user, here) Morpheus and more notoriously, Kazaa (Ex-user, here) those 3 programs were the sheriff’s around town, holding much of the community together with new and advance albums of popular and upcoming artists. These record companies, losing profits at an astronomical rate, decide to use the law to gain an advantage and low and behold, like all Americans these days (According to the news we receive in Australia) began to sue, uploaders, owners of software, downloaders and anyone else that could or did have connections to offenders.
This all has been going on for the space of a few years now, and is growing, along with technology. In 2001 a new piece of software, which was free, came into play. BitTorrent. Created by Bram Cohen it allowed users to upload massive file sizes and not kill bandwidth (Download, upload limits) in small portions to ANY other user the would have picked up the torrent file and as said before, with growing technology, websites and clients began popping up here and around to where it is today.
Whining Record companies and struggling artists. So the record companies say in their copy paste statements released to the media.
The thing that really gets on my nerves is that we don’t know if the Record companies are actually being truthful, they say ‘Our profits are declining rapidly every day because of these people’ but what if actually, NO-ONE wants to buy your artists records? Or not many people are interested in your artists records because they might have found something else on another label? The companies leave the public in the dark about these things, all they say is that ‘We are losing money because of File-sharers’
Whilst it could be possible that no-one wants to listen to Sony BMG’s latest pop craze, the other factor is the ridiculous prices of a CD. Trent Reznor, front man to the popular Metal (?) band Nine Inch Nails recently gave his record company the bird and told them to burn the prices on his latest release ‘Year Zero’ because it was far too expensive, and unfortunately, where did he see these prices? Right here…In Australia. The CD was retailing for $34.99. His record companies response? I’ll just quote the Sydney Morning Heralds Q & A with the man himself.
Well, in Brisbane I end up meeting and greeting some record label people, who are pleasant enough, and one of them is a sales guy, so I say “Why is this the case?” He goes “Because your packaging is a lot more expensive”. I know how much the packaging costs — it costs me, not them, it costs me 83 cents more to have a CD with the colour-changing ink on it. I’m taking the hit on that, not them. So I said “Well, it doesn’t cost $10 more”. “Ah, well, you’re right, it doesn’t. Basically it’s because we know you’ve got a core audience that’s gonna buy whatever we put out, so we can charge more for that. It’s the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy it. True fans will pay whatever”. And I just said “That’s the most insulting thing I’ve heard. I’ve garnered a core audience that you feel it’s OK to rip off? F— you’. That’s also why you don’t see any label people here, ‘cos I said ‘F— you people. Stay out of my f—ing show. If you wanna come, pay the ticket like anyone else. F— you guys”. They’re thieves. I don’t blame people for stealing music if this is the kind of s— that they pull off.
Thank You Mister Reznor.
Back onto the subject of File sharing using clients, there are paid and legal alternatives, such as iTunes…Great idea! Well done Apple, one small thing, I’m tired of wasting money on DRM (Digital Rights Management, basically, you have to log in every time you play the track at another location, and you only have 5 locations which you can log in at) protected tracks with pathetic audio quality (That might be the Audiophile in me) before I continue on, when I say pathetic audio quality, I mean parts of a track which might not be able to heard at a measly 128kbps, but can make a track sound even better when it’s a 320kbps file. This happens with me, the preview on iTunes for Groove Armada’s album ‘Soundboy Rock’ and the actual purchase of the album, the difference in quality and sound between the two shames iTunes attempts at releasing good stuff.
Although it isn’t too bad now, with big name company EMI and Apple announcing a joint venture to heighten the audio quality and abolish the DRM management schemes on the ENTIRE EMI catalog, I applaud their moves to try and make the digital music world a better place. Well done EMI.
Unfortunately, labels aren’t doing enough and the smaller ones continue to try and make a decent dollar and they just slide down the drain taking the artists and their releases with them. It’s hard to really balance what’s good. Pissing off the Record companies so they wake up and smell the daisies, or whether to help support them and their smaller brethren. In the end it really is up to the user to make the choice.
I have.
-Bleek
Linear Mode
