5 ms·

Nine Inch Nails seem to be one of the few bands who are able to look into the future. They offer most(all?) of their music for free to download and make their m

by dekz 15y ago

Nine Inch Nails seem to be one of the few bands who are able to look into the future. They offer most(all?) of their music for free to download and make their money touring and selling other merchandise.

epicureanideal 15y ago
In a future with rampant piracy, what I see is a whole lot less music and software. We won't even notice. It's not like we'll wake up and suddenly apps will be gone. We probably won't even be able to measure a decrease year-over-year in app production. What we'll never notice is that twice as many apps or ten times as many apps would have been created, or would have had much better quality, if the creators had been properly incentivized.
- earbitscom 15y ago
  Amen.
- dekz 15y ago
  I agree with your assertion of a decrease in apps and music in time, but for complete different reasons. There are numerous songs and apps out there which aren't even worth the cost of listing them. Hopefully in time we'll see a lot less fart apps for $5 and the umpteenth song about a weekday from people who see it as a quick way to make cash and not something they have a passion for. If both of these industries were about passion and not money then piracy wouldn't be such an issue.
  - epicureanideal 15y ago
    Why can't we let people have passion for software or music and also make money at it? Should I need to pursue software development in my 2 free hours at night after coming home from flipping burgers because only jobs that involve production of physical goods that can't yet be copied still pay the bills? How can anyone afford the time to become a professional in this kind of future? Even if someone had the "passion" to give up everything else in their life, I don't think they should have to. Just thinking about it is depressing. The parasites will walk around happily listening to their free music in their makerbot printed mp3 player (from pirated plans) and collect their social security checks from the government, while software developers and musicians slave away in $200 basement apartments 10 hours per day, and are looked down upon by everybody around them for not being successful by doing something profitable. That's where I see this going.
    - dekz 15y ago
      I think you misunderstood what I was arguing. I am not against someone making _good_ software for money. One only needs to take a look at Humble Bundle that prominently show people will pay for software. 148,194 people have paid a total of $690,575 for a package that is delivered in the way a user wants: No DRM, download straight from the website, heck even integrate with Steam. There is nothing stopping those 148,194 people from going and pirating those games, but they haven't because people will pay for a product. Positive some of those people won't even play the games but donated just to support the idea. (I am one of those).
    - EdiX 15y ago
      > The parasites will walk around happily listening to their free music in their makerbot printed mp3 player (from pirated plans) and collect their social security checks from the government, while software developers and musicians slave away in $200 basement apartments 10 hours per day Piracy stopped them from collecting the social security check and live the wealthy life of the unemployed pirate.
    - __david__ 15y ago
      > Should I need to pursue software development in my 2 free hours at night after coming home from flipping burgers because only jobs that involve production of physical goods that can't yet be copied still pay the bills? And yet there are many people that actually do this already, otherwise how would you be booting your linux box? I know I program in my spare time... > Just thinking about it is depressing. The parasites will walk around happily listening to their free music in their makerbot printed mp3 player (from pirated plans) I don't know, that sounds kind of cool--everything would be different, that's for sure. I think there will always room for really good programmers. Also, never bet against people trying to find a market somewhere--there's always one somewhere, it just might not look like the ones we have now. Don't fight the future, embrace it (or starve).
- krig 15y ago
  I think you are absolutely wrong about this. You might be correct when it comes to mid- to low level professional music/software. But the threshold to producing and releasing music and software is getting lower all the time. These days, kids can go online and find tons and tons of instructional material and peer support for learning to play musical instruments or make software. They can noodle around at home with amazingly cheap equipment, record using the best recording software in the world at levels of fidelity only dreamt of a few years ago, and release it to the public without paying a single dime. I think we'll see amateur music and free/open software quickly fill the gap left by professional musicians. And people will keep finding ways of financing their love (playing music). In fact, I don't know many of my favorite musicians today who make a living from their music. They all work day jobs. Music is their passion. If anything, they lose money from releasing albums.
  - cageface 15y ago
    If you only reward amateurs then amateur content is all you will get. Some skills take decades to master. The world you describe will never produce a Mozart.
    - krig 15y ago
      I'm not describing the world that I want. I'm describing what I think is what is happening. At the same time, I don't think you can say that we'll only get Rebecca Black in the future, you can't know that. Mozart had a lot of factors playing into his level of success (timing, the right parents, innate skill, etc). At the same time, Mozart lived before albums or musical copyright, and worked under the patronage system. It's possible we'll see a return of that as well, if the current model completely breaks down.
      - sireat 15y ago
        14-year old Mozart would be at home with todays file sharers and sheet transcribers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri)
    - 15y ago
- fpgeek 15y ago
  In a future with draconian copyright enforcement, what I see is a whole lot less music and software. We won't even notice. It's not like we'll wake up and suddenly apps will be gone. We probably won't even be able to measure a decrease year-over-year in app production. What we'll never notice is that twice as many apps or ten times as many apps would have been created, or would have had much better quality, if we had a more reasonable legal framework and creators weren't terrified of being sued because their creation was "too similar" to something else or transformed or remixed previous work or used/re-implemented an API without permission or ...
  - davidw 15y ago
    What a lot of people seem to lose sight of is that IP is supposed to be a compromise - somewhere between producers and consumers. It gives producers temporary property rights on something that is not naturally rivalrous or excludable in order to give them an incentive to produce said goods. These days, that compromise is, in some ways, probably tilted too far towards producers (or some categories of producers at least), but with no intellectual property at all, that would tilt things too far the other way.
- baddox 15y ago
  Many people seem to be attacking your statement for being counter-intuitive. I will attack it for going against the observed reality of the past 10-15 years. In that time, piracy has grown significantly. Yet in that time, I guarantee you the rate of software development has increased dramatically by any metric you want to look at. I can't say the same thing for music, because I don't know how you would measure how much music is bring released, but anecdotally I will say that I have discovered a lot of music with a very small fan base through the Internet and small regional labels. Also, with software we can empirically look at the history of IP law and see that a huge amount of software that is fundamental even today was created before any sort of software patents were awarded (and presumably, before those people ever even considered monetizing software through government-protected monopoly on distribution). I think it requires a naive and backwards view of human psychology to assume that money is the sole or primary incentive to create quality music or software. In fact, I surmise that anyone capable of producing top notch content would discover a way to do so without current IP protection laws.
  - davidw 15y ago
    > I will say that I have discovered a lot of music with a very small fan base through the Internet and small regional labels. Meaning that they probably have day jobs and don't produce as much music as they could if they were able to work at it full time. This may or may not have anything to do with piracy, but I think the point of fewer digital goods being produced is one to consider.
    - fpgeek 15y ago
      But these particular musicians making as much or more music is only part of the puzzle. The same digital technology that makes piracy easier is what made it possible for baddox to find them in the first place. It is hard to imagine solutions to the problem of music piracy that wouldn't also make it harder to find these musicians. After all, music piracy has become easy because music is easy to copy and distribute... which is also why it has become easier to find the niche musicians you like. Suppose you're right (though I don't think you are) and we successfully clamp down on music piracy so that these musicians can more easily monetize their small fan bases and spend more time making music. Does baddox care about this music if, in this alternate world, he never discovers them?
- hxa7241 15y ago
  That is pure myth. Do we not already have 'rampant piracy', as the music/tv/film/etc industry would say -- indeed, we have had it for 10 years. And what is the result? Well, it pretty much looks like we have more of everything than we ever had before! Has there been a great 'dying off of culture'? Do you have less good stuff to enjoy -- music, film, tv, software -- than in 1995 or before? Is anyone going to say that?! It seems ridiculous. And this is more true of software than anything else, and there is a good reason. The most important ingredient of software production is not 'incentivization', not money. It is other software, other information. That is because it is leveraged unlimitedly by being copyable: a single sum of money can support a single piece of development effort, but a single piece of information can support any number of development projects. The more completely you have and enforce copyright, the more you destroy that leverage.
mkramlich 15y ago
They also were famous without and long before the whole Internet MP3 craze. They already had a fanbase.
gurkendoktor 15y ago
I buy lots of electronic music where I would neither bother to see a live show, nor wear their merchandise. What are those bands supposed to do? Be more controversial to make t-shirts attractive? Change their business model by becoming rock bands? It's like saying that authors can still make money through public readings when pirated ebooks are everywhere, <cue famous example here>. Or that games can just have unpiratable multiplayer. That's all true, but it kills off whole genres.
- dekz 15y ago
  Honest question, do you buy via physical mediums or online distribution?
  - gurkendoktor 15y ago
    I stopped buying physical media since I've started traveling, but I am still putting them on my wish lists for when I'm home and people want to spend money. So practically both.
- william42 15y ago
  Would you bother to donate? Or are you only willing to give money to musicians in the form of buying music?
  - gurkendoktor 15y ago
    I have donated to software projects before, but it's so annoying to keep track of it. I honestly couldn't tell you if I have donated to Adium, Colloquy, or both. I don't think donations can ever achieve the fairness and efficiency of buying songs. To clarify on the fairness, buying software and music almost feels like a donation already. And I have been surrounded by anecdotal evidence in my youth who happily cracked "silly" casual shareware games, which just felt awkward to pay for, then played them for months. Yet when their favorite brand's AAA game was released, they bought it, played it for three days, then proudly put the box on top of their shelf and claimed that they do buy software -- but only when it's worth it. I can easily see the same thing happening for higher-profile vs lower-profile bands.

by dekz 15y ago

epicureanideal 15y ago

In a future with rampant piracy, what I see is a whole lot less music and software. We won't even notice. It's not like we'll wake up and suddenly apps will be gone. We probably won't even be able to measure a decrease year-over-year in app production. What we'll never notice is that twice as many apps or ten times as many apps would have been created, or would have had much better quality, if the creators had been properly incentivized.

earbitscom 15y ago
Amen.
dekz 15y ago
I agree with your assertion of a decrease in apps and music in time, but for complete different reasons. There are numerous songs and apps out there which aren't even worth the cost of listing them. Hopefully in time we'll see a lot less fart apps for $5 and the umpteenth song about a weekday from people who see it as a quick way to make cash and not something they have a passion for. If both of these industries were about passion and not money then piracy wouldn't be such an issue.
- epicureanideal 15y ago
  Why can't we let people have passion for software or music and also make money at it? Should I need to pursue software development in my 2 free hours at night after coming home from flipping burgers because only jobs that involve production of physical goods that can't yet be copied still pay the bills? How can anyone afford the time to become a professional in this kind of future? Even if someone had the "passion" to give up everything else in their life, I don't think they should have to. Just thinking about it is depressing. The parasites will walk around happily listening to their free music in their makerbot printed mp3 player (from pirated plans) and collect their social security checks from the government, while software developers and musicians slave away in $200 basement apartments 10 hours per day, and are looked down upon by everybody around them for not being successful by doing something profitable. That's where I see this going.
  - dekz 15y ago
    I think you misunderstood what I was arguing. I am not against someone making _good_ software for money. One only needs to take a look at Humble Bundle that prominently show people will pay for software. 148,194 people have paid a total of $690,575 for a package that is delivered in the way a user wants: No DRM, download straight from the website, heck even integrate with Steam. There is nothing stopping those 148,194 people from going and pirating those games, but they haven't because people will pay for a product. Positive some of those people won't even play the games but donated just to support the idea. (I am one of those).
  - EdiX 15y ago
    > The parasites will walk around happily listening to their free music in their makerbot printed mp3 player (from pirated plans) and collect their social security checks from the government, while software developers and musicians slave away in $200 basement apartments 10 hours per day Piracy stopped them from collecting the social security check and live the wealthy life of the unemployed pirate.
  - __david__ 15y ago
    > Should I need to pursue software development in my 2 free hours at night after coming home from flipping burgers because only jobs that involve production of physical goods that can't yet be copied still pay the bills? And yet there are many people that actually do this already, otherwise how would you be booting your linux box? I know I program in my spare time... > Just thinking about it is depressing. The parasites will walk around happily listening to their free music in their makerbot printed mp3 player (from pirated plans) I don't know, that sounds kind of cool--everything would be different, that's for sure. I think there will always room for really good programmers. Also, never bet against people trying to find a market somewhere--there's always one somewhere, it just might not look like the ones we have now. Don't fight the future, embrace it (or starve).
krig 15y ago
I think you are absolutely wrong about this. You might be correct when it comes to mid- to low level professional music/software. But the threshold to producing and releasing music and software is getting lower all the time. These days, kids can go online and find tons and tons of instructional material and peer support for learning to play musical instruments or make software. They can noodle around at home with amazingly cheap equipment, record using the best recording software in the world at levels of fidelity only dreamt of a few years ago, and release it to the public without paying a single dime. I think we'll see amateur music and free/open software quickly fill the gap left by professional musicians. And people will keep finding ways of financing their love (playing music). In fact, I don't know many of my favorite musicians today who make a living from their music. They all work day jobs. Music is their passion. If anything, they lose money from releasing albums.
- cageface 15y ago
  If you only reward amateurs then amateur content is all you will get. Some skills take decades to master. The world you describe will never produce a Mozart.
  - krig 15y ago
    I'm not describing the world that I want. I'm describing what I think is what is happening. At the same time, I don't think you can say that we'll only get Rebecca Black in the future, you can't know that. Mozart had a lot of factors playing into his level of success (timing, the right parents, innate skill, etc). At the same time, Mozart lived before albums or musical copyright, and worked under the patronage system. It's possible we'll see a return of that as well, if the current model completely breaks down.
    - sireat 15y ago
      14-year old Mozart would be at home with todays file sharers and sheet transcribers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri)
  - 15y ago
fpgeek 15y ago
In a future with draconian copyright enforcement, what I see is a whole lot less music and software. We won't even notice. It's not like we'll wake up and suddenly apps will be gone. We probably won't even be able to measure a decrease year-over-year in app production. What we'll never notice is that twice as many apps or ten times as many apps would have been created, or would have had much better quality, if we had a more reasonable legal framework and creators weren't terrified of being sued because their creation was "too similar" to something else or transformed or remixed previous work or used/re-implemented an API without permission or ...
- davidw 15y ago
  What a lot of people seem to lose sight of is that IP is supposed to be a compromise - somewhere between producers and consumers. It gives producers temporary property rights on something that is not naturally rivalrous or excludable in order to give them an incentive to produce said goods. These days, that compromise is, in some ways, probably tilted too far towards producers (or some categories of producers at least), but with no intellectual property at all, that would tilt things too far the other way.
baddox 15y ago
Many people seem to be attacking your statement for being counter-intuitive. I will attack it for going against the observed reality of the past 10-15 years. In that time, piracy has grown significantly. Yet in that time, I guarantee you the rate of software development has increased dramatically by any metric you want to look at. I can't say the same thing for music, because I don't know how you would measure how much music is bring released, but anecdotally I will say that I have discovered a lot of music with a very small fan base through the Internet and small regional labels. Also, with software we can empirically look at the history of IP law and see that a huge amount of software that is fundamental even today was created before any sort of software patents were awarded (and presumably, before those people ever even considered monetizing software through government-protected monopoly on distribution). I think it requires a naive and backwards view of human psychology to assume that money is the sole or primary incentive to create quality music or software. In fact, I surmise that anyone capable of producing top notch content would discover a way to do so without current IP protection laws.
- davidw 15y ago
  > I will say that I have discovered a lot of music with a very small fan base through the Internet and small regional labels. Meaning that they probably have day jobs and don't produce as much music as they could if they were able to work at it full time. This may or may not have anything to do with piracy, but I think the point of fewer digital goods being produced is one to consider.
  - fpgeek 15y ago
    But these particular musicians making as much or more music is only part of the puzzle. The same digital technology that makes piracy easier is what made it possible for baddox to find them in the first place. It is hard to imagine solutions to the problem of music piracy that wouldn't also make it harder to find these musicians. After all, music piracy has become easy because music is easy to copy and distribute... which is also why it has become easier to find the niche musicians you like. Suppose you're right (though I don't think you are) and we successfully clamp down on music piracy so that these musicians can more easily monetize their small fan bases and spend more time making music. Does baddox care about this music if, in this alternate world, he never discovers them?
hxa7241 15y ago
That is pure myth. Do we not already have 'rampant piracy', as the music/tv/film/etc industry would say -- indeed, we have had it for 10 years. And what is the result? Well, it pretty much looks like we have more of everything than we ever had before! Has there been a great 'dying off of culture'? Do you have less good stuff to enjoy -- music, film, tv, software -- than in 1995 or before? Is anyone going to say that?! It seems ridiculous. And this is more true of software than anything else, and there is a good reason. The most important ingredient of software production is not 'incentivization', not money. It is other software, other information. That is because it is leveraged unlimitedly by being copyable: a single sum of money can support a single piece of development effort, but a single piece of information can support any number of development projects. The more completely you have and enforce copyright, the more you destroy that leverage.

mkramlich 15y ago

They also were famous without and long before the whole Internet MP3 craze. They already had a fanbase.

gurkendoktor 15y ago

I buy lots of electronic music where I would neither bother to see a live show, nor wear their merchandise. What are those bands supposed to do? Be more controversial to make t-shirts attractive? Change their business model by becoming rock bands? It's like saying that authors can still make money through public readings when pirated ebooks are everywhere, <cue famous example here>. Or that games can just have unpiratable multiplayer. That's all true, but it kills off whole genres.

dekz 15y ago
Honest question, do you buy via physical mediums or online distribution?
- gurkendoktor 15y ago
  I stopped buying physical media since I've started traveling, but I am still putting them on my wish lists for when I'm home and people want to spend money. So practically both.
william42 15y ago
Would you bother to donate? Or are you only willing to give money to musicians in the form of buying music?
- gurkendoktor 15y ago
  I have donated to software projects before, but it's so annoying to keep track of it. I honestly couldn't tell you if I have donated to Adium, Colloquy, or both. I don't think donations can ever achieve the fairness and efficiency of buying songs. To clarify on the fairness, buying software and music almost feels like a donation already. And I have been surrounded by anecdotal evidence in my youth who happily cracked "silly" casual shareware games, which just felt awkward to pay for, then played them for months. Yet when their favorite brand's AAA game was released, they bought it, played it for three days, then proudly put the box on top of their shelf and claimed that they do buy software -- but only when it's worth it. I can easily see the same thing happening for higher-profile vs lower-profile bands.