Listen.com: Burning for You

Why spend 99 cents a song if you can download them for free on file sharing programs?

 

LOL. They make millions of dollars, and they are made that they are losing out on a little more money. All they care about is money.

 

I would be very surprised if this makes even the slightest dent in music piracy. I think the average CD would have around 11-12 tracks on it. This means that these CDs are still going to cost over $10 and probably run you a bit more with shipping. It is nice to be able to make CDs of just the songs you want, but I don't think it will have the effect they are hoping for.

 

Good point Raven. I just don't get why anyone would pay to download songs that they can download for free elsewhere.

 

Maybe they want legal music?

 

I woudn't pay. The thing is that most of the songs that I download are of bands that I only like 1 or 2 of their songs. I buy all of my favorite bands cds, like POD.

 

In the mid-1970's I bought Who's Next on 8-track.

In the late-1970's I bought the album.

In the early 1980's I bought the cassette.

In the 1990's I bought the CD.

I have paid The Who and their record company 4 times for the same music. Each time, the market changes so that the medium is obsolete or gives me such a crappy product (like the scratch-attracting CD), I'm expected to buy the same intellectual content on a different medium or another of the same (that's probably even less in quality--is it just me or have CDs declined in durability over the last few years?).

I've had enough. As an enlightened consumer, I feel obligated to download music I've paid for in a previous iteration and store it in a way (on my PC) that can be migrated across time and media. I don't pay for the damn album or tape or CD. I pay for "Won't Get Fooled Again" and I won't get fooled again by the damn music companies.

I have over 300 albums and am in the process of downloading as much as I can. I don't download music I've not paid for on some other medium. If this makes me a crook or unethical, so be it. (I'm also not paying any amount to download music I already own.)

Come and get me you greedy bastards!

 

So when you go to work...are you there for fun, or is it all about the money? This music is what these guys do for a living. You may be ok with taking it at will, and that's your perrogative...but it's certainly poor form to bash other people for wanting to pay for what they take.

 

A significant problem with this service is that you would be paying close to the same price as CD without the same sonic quality as traditional CD's. It would also be useful if they work a listen before you buy concept into the system. I think it is still a step in the right direction.

 

This argument over file sharing is very simple.

In the absence of the threat of punishment, some people think it is ok to steal. If you knew you couldn't get caught, would you steal money from a grocery store, because Safeway "makes millions"?

A person's true character comes to the surface in situations like this.

 

I'd pay $0.99 per single that I download if I could listen to the song online first.

rimrocker,

I'm not sure how old you are (although the 8-track reference gives me a clue... hehe), but I'm sure that in the 70's somebody bought a car, in the 80's they had to buy another car, and etc., etc. I'm sure in the 70's someone bought a tv, in the 80's they bought a bigger screen tv, in the 90's a flat screen tv, and in the 00's, they'll probably buy a plasma. Damn, it seems like every year they "needed" to buy something new so they could do the same thing. I'm sure they're going to go and steal a tv or a car because of this. Now, admittedly, many people buy new things because the old ones fail, but still the point is, many others buy the "new thing" because it's... the "new thing".

There's no "need" to do anything. LP's still play and turntables can still be bought. Cassettes still play and cassette players still can be bought.

As for the "come and get me"... the RIAA has already started that. They've started targetting individual users on file swapping networks. I don't like the bastards, but if they're anything, they're persistent.

TheReasonSF3,

You're so off the radar, there'd be no point in firing at you, so I'll just pass for now. Get educated as to what's actually happening, then let's have a discussion. Here's a hint : not everyone or every group that gets burned by the theft of music is a millionaire.

 

"reason", check out this article to see how much money many acts actually make.

http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/print.html

(I think someone on this board posted the link in another thread.)

You also mentioned that you only download from bands where you only like one or two of there songs. It seems like .99 is a resonable price to pay for that one song that you like.

 

But they don't even *make* most albums on LP or cassette anymore (or if they do, it's a hefty import price tag)! I was a vinyl junkie in the late eightes and early nineties, but it was impossible to keep it up. The record industry are the kings of built-in obsolescence; plus, they've overcharged us for years for products which cost bugger all to make.

I see Love's point. I've read that article before, and it's true, artists get screwed by the record companies, and us downloading music is hurting those artists indirectly. But since I've spent the gross national product of Belize on overpriced music in my lifetime, I'm kinda over paying any more. I've bought Elvis Costello's catalogue *three times*. I've bought the Beatles catalogue twice. I've bought import singles and collectables with one unreleased track and all that other bullsh!t. I bet I've contributed more money to worthy artists than the *vast* majority of listeners and music buyers out there. Listen: you come to my town on tour, and I'll go to your shows and buy your merchandise. There's my compromise: I get something, the artists get something, and the record companies get shafted. Hooray!

 

dimsie,

I understand where you guys are coming from. I have a CD collection that stopped at about 300-500 CD's several years ago. When I noticed that most albums I bought only contained one or two songs I thought were worth buying, I stopped buying CD's. I didn't want to spend half the price of an entire album to just buy the singles (even more outrageously priced). At that point, I just said "I've had it". I stopped buying CD's. I think in the last 4 or so years I've probably bought 3 or 4 CD's. It's a novelty I can live without. I don't need to listen to music to survive. I can understand others that get enjoyment out of it, but I'm not willing to "take from others" because I'm pissed at the recording industry and how I've been screwed by their pricing.

Regarding your statement about no one really making LP's anymore - this is true. I was simply stating that those old LP's and cassettes everyone has can still be played in cassette players and turntables today. Why do you have to go buy the CD version? Is it because these versions sound better or are more readily traversed using the skip, fast foward, etc. functionality? If so, then I don't see the reason to complain about it. If those features aren't important to you, then it's the same music. Keep playing your old LP's and cassettes.

Time marches on and so does technology. We pay more as we go for practically the same things - cars, televisions, bikes, computers, etc. Heck, computers and their operating systems go obsolete far faster than music playing technology.

Sure nowadays you have to buy CD's to get most of your music fix, but then that's the obsolescence of the technology used to play them. Now if you were to complain that you're pissed LP's can't be played on CD players, I suppose that's another argument...

 

Two different things. I cannot liberate the car from the car or the TV from the TV. I can create a digital copy of the music that is free from the CD, LP, Cassette, or even (sigh) 8-track. I don't buy the car or the TV for the intellectual content, I buy them because they are a car and a TV. I buy CDs not because they are CDs, but because of the music that is encoded--the intellectual property. (The other major difference is that the TV and car are probably under patents, while the music is under copyrights.) If I control the intellectual property after I purchase it and can migrate it across time and media, I am useless to the music industry. Here's a quote from a column on the issue:

"A senior executive with a major record company in Los Angeles, who asked not to be named, said: "Everything that we have ever released to date on CD is dead, because these recordings can be digitally cloned, all medium and long-term value for them has disappeared. We need a radical rethink in our strategies if we are to protect out interest in the future."

What he's complaining about is that he can no longer wait for the new technology to come out so he can sell me the same thing in a different format. Since I doubt I will buy many new CDs, and certainly not Celine Dion or Nsync or Britney Spears, I'm lost to the record companies as a consumer source of revenue.

Here's a portion of a National Research Council report titled The Digital Dillema: Intellectual Property in the Information Age

"Information in digital form is largely liberated from the medium that carries it. When information is sent across networks, there is no need to ship a physical substrate; the information alone flows to the recipient. The liberation of content is also evident when bits are copied across media (disk to tape to CD to floppy) with the greatest of ease. The choice of media may have consequences for the amount of storage or speed of access, but the content of the information and its properties (e.g., the ability to make exact copies) are preserved perfectly across a variety of media.

Information in traditional analog forms (movies, paintings, sculpture) is, by contrast, far more tightly bound to the underlying physical media. It is not easily transported without the underlying medium, nor is it so easily extracted for copying (consider copying a sculpture). The point, of course, is comparative: Bits still need to be stored someplace, and even a sculpture can be copied, but the difference is so large--several orders of magnitude and constantly increasing with advancing technology--that the experience from the individual's viewpoint is qualitatively different.

The liberation of content from the medium has unsettling consequences for the protection of IP in digital form. Until very recently, intellectual works have been produced and distributed largely as analog works embedded in a physical artifact (e.g., printed books, movies on video tape). IP law and practice have been worked out in the context of such artifacts, and much of our comfort with IP law is based on the familiar properties of information closely bound to a physical substrate. Digital information changes those properties in substantial ways. "

Maybe I'm biased, but I can't see the record companies winning on the argument that intellectual content is wedded to media. Also, I can't see any workable system where you can figure out who legitimately owns what intellectual property.

 

rimrocker,

You're failing to understand what I'm saying. The rest of your statements in the previous posts are off on a tangent. Let's put it simply :

You have LP's.
Record players are still available.
Why did you have to buy CD's?
Why and how did the recording industry force you to buy CD's?