6 ms·

Music Industry to Abandon Mass Suits

32 points by raju 18y ago

iamdave 18y ago
The problem that started illegal filesharing still exists: the music industry still hasn't developed an acceptable and effectual model of digital content delivery for end users.
- mynameishere 18y ago
  What are the options? The current .99/song method, $20/month stream-all-you-want, or possibly a per month fee for a universal licence. (Then, instead of suing downloaders, they could just force them to pay the fee--not too onerous.)
  - iamdave 18y ago
    I'd very quickly pay a monthly fee for a universal license, provided it's free of DRM and anything like it, lets me use it how I want and pretty much exhibit the common sense rights that come when you purchase something.
    - jmatt 18y ago
      So, after a month, when you've downloaded 10 terabytes worth of music you'd just cancel the subscription. I guess you may have to re-enable it everyone few years to update your collection... So yeah, I agree, if that were available I'd be the first to sign up and buy my array of hard drives. I think napster is the most viable existing service that provides a service close to what you are talking about. It has DRM to prevent these types of abuses. It's otherwise affordable. It's not like most people around here don't know how to take DRMed music and rip it...
      - iamdave 18y ago
        Being realistic, no. I'm not the kind that downloads gigs upon gigs of music. Honest and truly, I've only downloaded 3 albums at a time, and that's kept me full for a while.
      - paul9290 18y ago
        For me Im fine with having all music in the cloud. Why do i want to buy hard drives and manage a huge collection of mp3s? I use to but got tired of doing so...now with my iPhone I just stream the music I want to hear. SOme of these iphone apps and services cache the music so when i have no internet I listen to the cache.
        tphyahoo 18y ago
        This is very interesting for me, a non-iphone owner. Could you be more specific about the apps you use and the caching features? I'm interested in moving my music into the cloud as well. Thanks. Edit: were you referring to a theoretical service or a real one?
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    a per month fee for a universal license That's it, most likely. Sooner or later this will be the most viable strategy for making money on music. Even if the internet were turned off tomorrow, the continuing presence of rippable media (analog media, if nothing else), the easy availability of ripping tools, the fact that most people can't hear the difference between a really good recording and a merely average one, and the prevalence of terabyte hard drives with ever-falling prices means that sooner or later we will all have the recording industry's entire back catalog stored in our homes. It's just a question of how much time it will take, and whether the primary medium of transmission will be P2P downloading or face-to-face swapping of the contents of physical storage media. Ironically, perhaps the best way to prevent the music lover of the year 2020 from energetically acquiring his or her own private Universal Music Library is to give out reasonably priced universal licenses. Once I know that I don't have to own my own copy of (e.g.) the complete works of Yanni -- that, if I ever feel some strange desire to listen to them, or to force someone else to listen to them, I can always P2P them from NapTorrent 4.0 in three minutes without any additional cost, difficulty, or risk -- I won't actually have to own them. The cloud can take on that task.
    - quantumhobbit 18y ago
      The problem with a per month fee is that it creates no incentives to produce good music. In the old systems artists who produced music people wanted to hear were rewarded with record sales and crappy artists didn't get paid. With an all-you-can-eat model of music, especially for p2p distributed, how does the record label know whose music is worth more based on downloads. There will be little incentive to sign on new or indie groups and pay them while the consumers will likely download their music anyway, assuming it is covered by the all-you-can-eat license. New artist would be shut out of the system unless the had some sort of connection(corruption, manufactured pop group) to the record label. And the record labels wouldn't even have to pay current artists in proportion their success if that success can't be measured. Even if they measure success by torrent activity, there would be still little incentive to sign new groups. As always the little guy gets screwed. Maybe this could be arranged to work and even be better than the current system. But, I don't want to pay a monthly fee that goes to 90% of music that I don't like just to get the 10% I do like.
  - GavinB 18y ago
    The new Napster is $15 a month. I can listen my music on any computer and on my portable mp3 player. The artists and labels get paid based on which music I listen to. The DRM really isn't a big deal, because I can listen from anywhere with internet without even installing software. It's "Music As A Service" and it seems very fair and reasonable to me. To be honest, my only complaint with Napster is that Apple refuses to let their hardware be interoperable.
- Herring 18y ago
  The problem that started illegal filesharing still exists: bits can be copied -fixed
- cabalamat 18y ago
  > the music industry still hasn't developed an acceptable and effectual model of digital content delivery for end users They haven't developed one acceptable to them. One acceptable to users already exists, it's called P2P. Attempting to charge people for a copy of easily-copied digital information is unlikely to work as a business model because charging people involves friction and therefore any service that charges people money is likely to be less convenient than one that doesn't. What might work is pre-payment, where fans pay musicians (or other artists) to create a work. The difference is that they're not attempting to enforce payment at the time of delivery, which is futile given the existance of the massive copying machine known as the Internet. Pre-payment works as a form of copy prevention because you can't copy something before it exists.
  - newt0311 18y ago
    Check out the street performer protocol: http://www.schneier.com/paper-street-performer.html http://www.schneier.com/paper-street-performer.html I also heard of some companies trying to apply this to specific cases.
swombat 18y ago
It's about time! Soon enough to save the music industry? Probably not. But at least, many thousands of people who, 10 years from now, would be considered totally innocent and within their rights, won't have to go through this needless nightmare. On the downside, it sounds like they're planning to get the ISPs to do their dirty work for them, which no doubt the larger ISPs will willingly bend over to. Good bye net neutrality. The recording industry needs to go bust in a hurry. (and without bailouts)
kragen 18y ago
To summarize, their new strategy is to make allegations of copyright infringement, in response to which, ISPs will voluntarily cut off people's internet access, without the music industry having to prove any copyright infringement in court. Presumably if there were a free market in ISPs, this wouldn't work; the alleged copyright infringers would simply switch to ISPs that didn't have agreements in place with the music industry. So the strategy depends on either suing the ISPs (in violation of the DMCA safe harbor clause? There's no mention of a counter-notice provision) or internet service monopolies who can be bribed. If effective, this would grant a music industry association the power to unilaterally exclude people from participating in the public sphere: no access to Google, no access to Wikipedia, no emailing your lawyer, no blogging about how the music industry is corrupt. Given their remarkable lack of precision in filing lawsuits in the past, let alone their decades-long history of criminal conspiracies and abusive business practices, it seems irresponsible to allow this to happen. I hope you folks in the US can do something about it.
- rw 18y ago
  You said: Presumably if there were a free market in ISPs, this wouldn't work. You might have wanted to say "competitive market" or "perfectly competitive market", not "free market". A free market is one in which laissez-faire is the only rule, and monopolists and oligopolists are not a priori bad.
  - kragen 18y ago
    Yes, you're right; the market would merely have to be somewhat competitive, not some ahistorical wet dream of Hayek. Regardless of whether monopolists and oligopolists are good or bad in general, I was only trying to establish that in the presence of oligopoly, the RIAA's strategy would be very bad, and in the absence thereof, it would be ineffectual.
- quantumhobbit 18y ago
  Something tells me this will lead to an increase in stealing open wireless connections, and more advance pirates using aircrack on their neighbors WEP encrypted wireless. They will either do this preemptively or after losing their own connections. Expect to hear sob stories about how a grandmother can't look at pictures of her grandkids because a pirate used her open WiFi to download gangsta rap and the ISP shut her off.
fallentimes 18y ago
If only they'd abandon the Suits running the labels.
- Raphael 18y ago
  Casual Friday was so successful that it has expanded to last the whole week.
  - fallentimes 18y ago
    The term Suit goes far beyond attire. What other group of bumbling idiots would sue/lash out/isolate their customers & users while ignoring the latest & greatest technologies. Actually, they have a lot in common with the auto & publishing industries. I'll enjoy watching them crumble.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
AndrewWarner 18y ago
Not suing isn't a business solution. Meeting customers' needs is. Customers are asking for a way to conveniently listen to any music they want, where ever they are. Somewhere in that burning desire is a business model waiting to happen.

32 points by raju 18y ago

The problem that started illegal filesharing still exists: the music industry still hasn't developed an acceptable and effectual model of digital content delivery for end users.

mynameishere 18y ago
What are the options? The current .99/song method, $20/month stream-all-you-want, or possibly a per month fee for a universal licence. (Then, instead of suing downloaders, they could just force them to pay the fee--not too onerous.)
- iamdave 18y ago
  I'd very quickly pay a monthly fee for a universal license, provided it's free of DRM and anything like it, lets me use it how I want and pretty much exhibit the common sense rights that come when you purchase something.
  - jmatt 18y ago
    So, after a month, when you've downloaded 10 terabytes worth of music you'd just cancel the subscription. I guess you may have to re-enable it everyone few years to update your collection... So yeah, I agree, if that were available I'd be the first to sign up and buy my array of hard drives. I think napster is the most viable existing service that provides a service close to what you are talking about. It has DRM to prevent these types of abuses. It's otherwise affordable. It's not like most people around here don't know how to take DRMed music and rip it...
    - iamdave 18y ago
      Being realistic, no. I'm not the kind that downloads gigs upon gigs of music. Honest and truly, I've only downloaded 3 albums at a time, and that's kept me full for a while.
    - paul9290 18y ago
      For me Im fine with having all music in the cloud. Why do i want to buy hard drives and manage a huge collection of mp3s? I use to but got tired of doing so...now with my iPhone I just stream the music I want to hear. SOme of these iphone apps and services cache the music so when i have no internet I listen to the cache.
      - tphyahoo 18y ago
        This is very interesting for me, a non-iphone owner. Could you be more specific about the apps you use and the caching features? I'm interested in moving my music into the cloud as well. Thanks. Edit: were you referring to a theoretical service or a real one?
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  a per month fee for a universal license That's it, most likely. Sooner or later this will be the most viable strategy for making money on music. Even if the internet were turned off tomorrow, the continuing presence of rippable media (analog media, if nothing else), the easy availability of ripping tools, the fact that most people can't hear the difference between a really good recording and a merely average one, and the prevalence of terabyte hard drives with ever-falling prices means that sooner or later we will all have the recording industry's entire back catalog stored in our homes. It's just a question of how much time it will take, and whether the primary medium of transmission will be P2P downloading or face-to-face swapping of the contents of physical storage media. Ironically, perhaps the best way to prevent the music lover of the year 2020 from energetically acquiring his or her own private Universal Music Library is to give out reasonably priced universal licenses. Once I know that I don't have to own my own copy of (e.g.) the complete works of Yanni -- that, if I ever feel some strange desire to listen to them, or to force someone else to listen to them, I can always P2P them from NapTorrent 4.0 in three minutes without any additional cost, difficulty, or risk -- I won't actually have to own them. The cloud can take on that task.
  - quantumhobbit 18y ago
    The problem with a per month fee is that it creates no incentives to produce good music. In the old systems artists who produced music people wanted to hear were rewarded with record sales and crappy artists didn't get paid. With an all-you-can-eat model of music, especially for p2p distributed, how does the record label know whose music is worth more based on downloads. There will be little incentive to sign on new or indie groups and pay them while the consumers will likely download their music anyway, assuming it is covered by the all-you-can-eat license. New artist would be shut out of the system unless the had some sort of connection(corruption, manufactured pop group) to the record label. And the record labels wouldn't even have to pay current artists in proportion their success if that success can't be measured. Even if they measure success by torrent activity, there would be still little incentive to sign new groups. As always the little guy gets screwed. Maybe this could be arranged to work and even be better than the current system. But, I don't want to pay a monthly fee that goes to 90% of music that I don't like just to get the 10% I do like.
- GavinB 18y ago
  The new Napster is $15 a month. I can listen my music on any computer and on my portable mp3 player. The artists and labels get paid based on which music I listen to. The DRM really isn't a big deal, because I can listen from anywhere with internet without even installing software. It's "Music As A Service" and it seems very fair and reasonable to me. To be honest, my only complaint with Napster is that Apple refuses to let their hardware be interoperable.
Herring 18y ago
The problem that started illegal filesharing still exists: bits can be copied -fixed
cabalamat 18y ago
> the music industry still hasn't developed an acceptable and effectual model of digital content delivery for end users They haven't developed one acceptable to them. One acceptable to users already exists, it's called P2P. Attempting to charge people for a copy of easily-copied digital information is unlikely to work as a business model because charging people involves friction and therefore any service that charges people money is likely to be less convenient than one that doesn't. What might work is pre-payment, where fans pay musicians (or other artists) to create a work. The difference is that they're not attempting to enforce payment at the time of delivery, which is futile given the existance of the massive copying machine known as the Internet. Pre-payment works as a form of copy prevention because you can't copy something before it exists.
- newt0311 18y ago
  Check out the street performer protocol: http://www.schneier.com/paper-street-performer.html http://www.schneier.com/paper-street-performer.html I also heard of some companies trying to apply this to specific cases.

swombat 18y ago

It's about time! Soon enough to save the music industry? Probably not. But at least, many thousands of people who, 10 years from now, would be considered totally innocent and within their rights, won't have to go through this needless nightmare. On the downside, it sounds like they're planning to get the ISPs to do their dirty work for them, which no doubt the larger ISPs will willingly bend over to. Good bye net neutrality. The recording industry needs to go bust in a hurry. (and without bailouts)

kragen 18y ago

To summarize, their new strategy is to make allegations of copyright infringement, in response to which, ISPs will voluntarily cut off people's internet access, without the music industry having to prove any copyright infringement in court. Presumably if there were a free market in ISPs, this wouldn't work; the alleged copyright infringers would simply switch to ISPs that didn't have agreements in place with the music industry. So the strategy depends on either suing the ISPs (in violation of the DMCA safe harbor clause? There's no mention of a counter-notice provision) or internet service monopolies who can be bribed. If effective, this would grant a music industry association the power to unilaterally exclude people from participating in the public sphere: no access to Google, no access to Wikipedia, no emailing your lawyer, no blogging about how the music industry is corrupt. Given their remarkable lack of precision in filing lawsuits in the past, let alone their decades-long history of criminal conspiracies and abusive business practices, it seems irresponsible to allow this to happen. I hope you folks in the US can do something about it.

rw 18y ago
You said: Presumably if there were a free market in ISPs, this wouldn't work. You might have wanted to say "competitive market" or "perfectly competitive market", not "free market". A free market is one in which laissez-faire is the only rule, and monopolists and oligopolists are not a priori bad.
- kragen 18y ago
  Yes, you're right; the market would merely have to be somewhat competitive, not some ahistorical wet dream of Hayek. Regardless of whether monopolists and oligopolists are good or bad in general, I was only trying to establish that in the presence of oligopoly, the RIAA's strategy would be very bad, and in the absence thereof, it would be ineffectual.
quantumhobbit 18y ago
Something tells me this will lead to an increase in stealing open wireless connections, and more advance pirates using aircrack on their neighbors WEP encrypted wireless. They will either do this preemptively or after losing their own connections. Expect to hear sob stories about how a grandmother can't look at pictures of her grandkids because a pirate used her open WiFi to download gangsta rap and the ISP shut her off.

fallentimes 18y ago

If only they'd abandon the Suits running the labels.

Raphael 18y ago
Casual Friday was so successful that it has expanded to last the whole week.
- fallentimes 18y ago
  The term Suit goes far beyond attire. What other group of bumbling idiots would sue/lash out/isolate their customers & users while ignoring the latest & greatest technologies. Actually, they have a lot in common with the auto & publishing industries. I'll enjoy watching them crumble.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

AndrewWarner 18y ago

Not suing isn't a business solution. Meeting customers' needs is. Customers are asking for a way to conveniently listen to any music they want, where ever they are. Somewhere in that burning desire is a business model waiting to happen.